BOOK LAUNCH – MARCH 11, 2023
Together with Benny the Antichrist
That’s about it for now. Going to Blog about them later.
BENNY THE ANTICHRIST
BOOK LAUNCH – MARCH 11, 2023,
MANITOBA WRITERS GUILD BOARDROOM
ARTSPACE BUILDING
Thinking About Audiobooks – Part One
Well, I don’t really listen to audiobooks. Maybe I should. I listened to my friend Julie’s 12 episode Calamity Jane western audio podcast and that was pretty good. So maybe I should give it a shot.
Because Audiobooks are exploding all over the place these days. I’d heard about it the last couple of years, but I hadn’t quite realized how much.
So is this meaningful? Well, I looked up the statistics. And there’s a tangled knot of information. But here’s how I break it down. The US book industry (I’m assuming that includes Canada) is worth about 30 billion dollars in 2019-2020, the last year before Covid. Now of that, the big five book publishers, Penguin-Random House, Hachette, Harper-Collins, McMillan and Simon-Schuster, the guys you find dominating bookstores, represent about 10 billion dollars in sales during this period. There’s maybe another seven billion represented by the big five Educational publishers, the guys who do school textbooks and stuff. The rest, I assume divides up among the small and medium publishers, specialty houses, etc., the small fry.
Drunk Slutty Elf and Other Stories
Hey! My latest collection of short stories. Released October 14, 2022. This actually very belated. I should have posted this months ago, and posted it on Facebook months ago. I am so bad at this self promotion thing it’s unreal. I think I’m way too self effacing. I retained Paul Carpentier to copy edit for me, and he couldn’t stop talking about how funny it was, both at World Fantasy and afterwards – I almost wanted to run away and hide. There’s something in me that just doesn’t know what to do with praise, that won’t believe it, that suspects or expects an attack or something. I really have to overcome that.
Anyway: The story behind Drunk Slutty Elf? What can I say? My latest book, but for Drunk Slutty Elf and Zombies, the follow up, which is done and just waiting on the cover. I have some hopes for this duo, and I plan on pushing them for all they’re worth.
2022 – Writing Year in Review
Well, here’s the roundup for another year of smashing my head against the wall. So how’s the writing career. At the very least, I can say that I worked hard. Perhaps not every target was hit, or every possible mission was pursued, but I put the hours in.
Opened up with a project, Twilight of Echelon, for At Bay Press, a collaborative effort with Robert Pasternak, an artist, and three other writers. My part of it was about thirty-five, inter-related short stories and about 40,000 words. I’m not sure what the other writers have been up to. It’s still in the editing phase, and I think the release date is October, 2023. The money is zilch, but At Bay Press is a pretty reputable publisher, I’ve always wanted to work with Pasternak and other writers. So… one of those things you do.
I finally went back and re-did my old Doctor Who books. Basically, they’re explorations of Doctor Who fan films, reviews of the history of the genre, the very best examples, along with explorations of fandom, changing culture, technology and buried parts of the show’s history. Possibly a stupid topic, but it was what got me into self publishing in the first place. For years, I’ve been quietly researching and updating as new films were created, lost films were rediscovered, as the show and technology continued to evolve. It was time to sit down, do some serious revisions, updating, fix up old problems, cover new ground. The duology became a trilogy, and I think I wrote perhaps 100,000 new words give or take.
No novels this year. I did knock off a few short stories here and there. Total probably comes to about 30,000 words. I slipped some into new short story collections. Maybe reserving one for an upcoming collection. One thing that was significant was that I started sending stories out to markets again. Collected rejections, but did get a personal rejection from Analogue. At least I think it was personal, maybe they just have an upper tier of form rejections. Not sending out to many magazines though. Frankly, I’m not really interested in floundering around with the middle and bottom level markets and fringe anthologies. I don’t really give a damn about that. I suppose there’s some ‘validation’ from getting published in some mid-tier anthology or small press market. But I already know I’m a good writer, there’s no one I care about impressing. Does that sound like a swelled head? Trust me, I can show you my sales records, that’s a good reason for humility.
Finally, I had a completely non-commercial project – an alternate history chronicle of the Peter Cushing Doctor Who movies. My idea was to extend the franchise from two movies, to a handful lasting into the seventies. It was fun to do deep research, and to tell stories and sub-stories about the vagaries of B-movie films and opportunistic film making, to explore how stories evolve and shape themselves for different mediums and audiences. I think that ran 80,000 words, totally non-commercial, but entirely therapeutic. I suppose it was a waste of time, it didn’t advance my writing career one bit. Nobody read it. It was completely non-commercial. But you know what? I don’t’ care. I’m always chasing the brass ring, and it’s always out of reach. Sometimes, it’s you just have to do something that makes you happy. And I really needed to do something that made me happy.
No novel projects this year. But it adds up, that’s somewhere around 250,000 words ballpark. Somewhere between 220,000 and 280,000. I think that’s a pretty reasonable rate of work, and even if a big chunk wasn’t conventionally useful, I don’t think any writing is ever truly wasted. You learn by doing, you get better by doing.
Overall – I released five of my own books this year:
A Pirate’s History of Doctor Who
Another Pirate’s History of Doctor Who
The Last Pirate’s History of Doctor Who
Drunk Slutty Elf and Other Stories
Drunk Slutty Elf and Zombies
WORLD FANTASY NEW ORLEANS, REVIEW AND RUMINATION
Well, World Fantasy Convention 2022 in New Orleans is over, and as usual, it is followed by my ongoing existential crisis.
Overall, the big positive of the experience was that it was New Orleans. Storied, marvellous New Orleans, capital of French North America, traded back and forth between the Spanish, French, British and the Americans, birthplace of Jazz and blues, center of Cajun and creole culture, gateway to the Mississippi and entrance to the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, the ultimate crossroads, alluring, magical, historical, every bit of it steeped in romance. There are other remarkable cities in North America, but there’s none quite like New Orleans.
I’ve wanted to see it my whole life. I remember being heartbroken by Hurricane Katrina, horrified by the devastation, but heartbroken by the idea that something unique and marvellous might be destroyed forever, that I’d never get to see it.
My brother, in a moment of insight, tells me I’m A to B. That my trajectory is a straight line, I am purpose driven as an arrow, launching relentlessly towards a target. I am object oriented. I couldn’t just go to New Orleans. I needed a purpose.
And the World Fantasy Convention gave that to me – a reason to be there.
I took advantage of it, arriving several days early to play tourist and go sightseeing, delighting in buying overpriced merch, because this was New Orleans tourist junk. I took the tourist tours on double decker buses and ghost walks, spent Halloween night on Bourbon Street, rode the streetcars to the ends of their line, took a ferry. I wandered all over the French Quarter, Algiers Point, the Waterfront and Riverwalk, Garden District, Business district, visited the Graveyards. Ate in restaurants. Made and hung out with friends. There was music and musicians everywhere, on streets, in restaurants, everyone playing. I love the way people spoke, the cheerful rush of words, the playfulness of the banter.
Goodbye Whittaker
Well, The Power of the Doctor aired this week, officially bringing the Jody Whittaker/Chis Chibnall era to an end. The five year reign of Jody Whittaker, through three foreshortened seasons and a handful of specials is over and done with. So it goes. What a waste of time and money.
I don’t suppose this matters to anyone. The Misogyny brigade will cheer. The feminist brigade will gnash their teeth.
But honestly, I ended up watching Legends of the Sea Devils three times over a few months, and it broke me. I’ve rewatched Flux, Whittaker’s third series. I rewatched her Dalek specials. I’ve been rewatching episodes from the first and second series.
And you know what? It’s just terrible. Half assed, appalling writing, trite and cliched. Endless dropped threads, subplots that get abandoned. Even the episodes we’re supposed to like because they’re ‘good for us’ are sub-par and trading on their virtue. Once in a while something good or interesting comes along, a notion, an idea, a bit of characterization. But it’s immediately ganged up on and beaten to death by the mediocre elements.
But watching it all over again made me realize something.
Whittaker herself? She was terrible. She was absolutely terrible.
Maybe she’s a really good actress in other movies or television series. But she’s not here. Her performance is flat, wooden, preening. It’s a terrible, inconsistent performance without a scintilla of life or charisma.
And before you call me a misogynist pig, I’ve actually written books about Women playing the Doctor and succeeding. The Pirate Histories of Doctor Who. Barbara Benedetti played the Doctor through four stories from 1984 to 1988, and the Seattle actress was flat out brilliant. Sharon Horton played the Doctor in two stories, one of which was a three part serial in the 1990s, and she did it well. Lily Daniel played the Doctor through two episodes of the Ginger Chronicles a decade ago. Krystal Moore played the Doctor in Doctor Who – Velocity, through nine short episodes, right now.
They all brought different interpretations to the Doctor – confidence, resilience, flamboyance, cleverness, compassion. But they all had one thing in common: They were better Doctors than Whittaker.
And now I have Audio Books!
So here’s what happened.
I finally get around to doing print books. Yay, I suppose.
But actually, I do print editions of my LEXX series. And I’m really happy about that. LEXX has been a really long drawn out project for me, almost twenty-five years, with a lot of work, a lot of money, a lot of ups and downs.
In the end, I poured it all into writing the book I wanted to write, the way I wanted to write it. And eventually, starting in 2017, I started releasing the series as ebooks, finishing in 2021. And now in 2022, I’d done print editions.
I was happy. After all these years, all this work, I had a sense of closure, of finality. With print books, I’d taken it as far as it could go, polished it as much as I could. I had something physical that I could autograph and ship to Brian, Paul, Jeff and other people, “Here’s my tribute to your good work, have a nice life.”
It was done, I had closure and completion, and I could finally let it go, lay down the burden.
So I post on the Facebook LEXX groups that I’ve done print books, they’re all out. That’s right. For anyone who is still a fan of LEXX after 20 years, and somehow can’t get enough about LEXX through wikipedia and other Wiki’s, etc. etc., there is now an actual series of trade paperbacks chronicling the rise and fall of both Salter Street Films and the LEXX series, in excruciating detail.
Some dick write back.
“Print books are okay, I suppose. But I don’t like to read. I’d rather have an audiobook. Could you do an audiobook?”
…
…
Okay, so now I have PRINT books!
“Why don’t you have print books?” Fran Bitney, a friend of mine, asked me.
I like Fran, she’s one of the local Keycon people. Very nice, very sweet person. Her mother is a poet. We’re on speaking terms, we have friends in common, no animosity, friendly enough. So when I say friend, that’s basically the category of people who don’t throw rocks and sticks at me when they’re sure I’m out of range.
Look, I take what I can get.
Anyway, Fran asked the question.
I’ve been doing eBooks. Been really fine doing eBooks. Been happy doing eBooks.
I have avoided doing print books.
Theoretically you can. There’s presses like Friesen that do small print runs. If you want to pay for a hundred or a couple of hundred and try and sell them, go ahead.
There’s Print On Demand (POD), and that’s getting better and better. There’s companies that do POD – Ingram Spark, Lulu.com, Amazon, Draft2Digital, probably others. There’s even POD machines in bookstores, McNally Robinson, the local independent bookseller had one.
I haven’t really been interested. The possibility is there, but so what?
Basically, if you’re self publishing 98% of your sales will be eBooks. That’s just how it is. You don’t get to be in bookstores, where print books are sold. You don’t get to have the commercial infrastructure of major or medium presses and publishers with their infrastructure to push print books. Print books are expensive, that’s asking people to take a big chance.
What’s Up With This Self Publishing Crap?
Den, what’s up with all this self publishing crap you’re doing? A question that absolutely no one has asked me, and no one cares about. But I’m going to explain myself anyway.
So here’s the deal. It was 2017, my father had just died, my first novel ‘The Mermaid’s Tale.’ had been released by Five Rivers Publishing, they were going to do an audiobook, and I had a contract to do a second novel, ‘The Luck.’ My pseudo-career as a writer was finally taking off.
Yay me.
I’ve been trying to be a writer since my grandfather died, over twenty years ago. Hell, I’ve been trying to be a writer since I was a teenager, since before I was a teenager, but it was after grandfather died that I decided to get serious about it.
I started writing and sending out lots of short stories. I joined a writers group and worked alongside some people who went on to be pretty big names. Slowly, I was selling stories here and there, even getting reviews in an age when those were almost impossible to come by, getting honourable mentions in Years Best anthologies, doing chapbooks, studying marketing and just focussing on getting my stuff out there – I subscribed to Locus, Science Fiction Chronicle, Scavenger’s Newsletter, Rising Star, the zine markets you name it. I wrote a novel, started looking for an agent, wrote another novel, sent it out, went to conventions, won a writing grant, even got tagged for a nonfiction book.
I gave it a pretty good shot, and it looked like I was getting somewhere, might even break through. Or that’s what I heard, later on.
But you know how things go; life comes around and kicks you in the nuts. Boss went crazy, relocation, burnout, flirting with bankruptcy, shit happens. There was a lot of shit, it’s tedious and not worth getting into. To make it as a writer, it’s a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are luck and connections, either of those will guarantee you. Below that is talent and hard work. Beneath that, you need a certain income and stability. Anyway, the bottom of my period was wobbly, so I kind of fell out of the game.
But I never stopped writing. Not necessarily novels or commercial work, but writing nevertheless, for me, for others, for Bill Hillman or Chris Nigro, on alt history, for web sites, for anywhere, or just random stuff. For me, writing is somewhere between a pathology and a therapy.