Tag: trouble

Pop-Up Targets, Unexploded Land Mines, and Snakes in Cans

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These are things that can disrupt your day, ranked in order of ascending troublesomeness.

A Pop-Up Target is something unexpected that requires immediate action, but which you have the resources and ability to deal with promptly. A suddenly necessary payment at a time when the bank account is flush, for example, or an unanticipated piece of time-critical paperwork. The target jumps up, you deal with it, and you move on, slightly more adrenaline-charged than you were before.

Adventures in the Writing Life Version:  The FedEx delivery man shows up on your doorstep Thursday afternoon with a package containing a stack of unpleasantly familiar paper and a cover letter:  Dear Author–here’s the copyedited MS for your next novel.  Please go over the copyedits and get them back to us by this coming Monday.

What you do:  Cancel your social engagements for the next 48 hours.  After a few seconds’ more thought, cancel the rest of your life for the next 48 hours.  Check your local FedEx pickup to see what’s the absolute latest you can hand over the MS and still expect it to show up in New York on Monday.  Check your bank account to see if you can afford that much money.  (If both your budget and the publisher’s schedule really are that tight, phone your editor.  Ask if you can FedEx the MS back to them on their dime, because otherwise it’s coming back to them by Priority Mail.)  Buckle down and get to work on going over the copyedits, and be grateful that you aren’t having to deal with a Copyedit From Hell.

An Unexploded Land Mine is something that you thought that you’d already dealt with, or that you were supposed to deal with and forgot, or that somebody else completely neglected to inform you about back when it should have been dealt with. Some land mines are relatively mild; others can blow you sky-high. What they have in common is that “I should have known about this one, dammit!” quality that adds a touch of frustration and outrage to the whole deal.

Adventures in the Writing Life version:  “What do you mean, I didn’t send you back the signed contracts!” Or, “No, you didn’t tell me you wanted a map for the front of the book and a glossary in the back!” Or, “I thought you were going to handle asking for blurbs, and now you’re telling me that I have to do it?”

What you do:  Send back the signed contracts with a profuse apology for your absent-mindedness, and promise never to be so flaky again.  Grit your teeth and draw the damned map and make up the damned glossary.  Take a deep breath and make a list of writers you know who might be willing to come up with a back-cover blurb for you, then start writing letters.

And then there’s the Snake in a Can. Like the trick jar labeled “peanuts” with the spring-loaded snake inside, these show up completely unexpectedly and leap right out into your face. Also, sometimes the snake is real. A heavy-duty snake has the ability to disrupt your whole life for days, if not weeks, if you can’t manage to stuff it back into the can.

Adventures in the Writing Life Version:  Your publisher goes bankrupt without warning.  Your agent, with whom you have a warm personal relationship and who has been a prime force in building your career, gets hit by a truck while crossing the street in midtown Manhattan.  The company for which you’ve happily written three potboiler tie-in novels and with whom you’re under contract for a fourth suddenly lets go all their in-house publishing staff (including the editor of your novel in progress, with whom you’ve had an excellent relationship) and replaces them with people you’ve never even heard of.

What you do:  Don’t keep all your writing eggs in one basket.  Maintain good relationships with everyone in your field, to the extent that it’s possible, so that if you’re suddenly swimming for your life in a rising flood you have people who might throw you a lifeline from the shore.  Resign yourself to the fact that sometimes bad stuff is going to happen that isn’t your fault, and that you can’t do anything about, and that is going to mess up your life more than it messes up the lives of the people actually responsible — but don’t let yourself dwell on it for too long, because dwelling on it only uses up time and energy that you could be spending on writing something better for people who will respect you more.

Two from the Guardian

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Today’s “Go look over there!” links, both from the Guardian online:

First, we have the plagiarism scandal du jour:  The poet David R. Morgan got caught lifting other poets’ poetry and publishing it as his own:  American poet Charles O Hartman realised Morgan’s poem “Dead Wife Singing” was almost identical to his own, three-decades-old “A Little Song”.

Keep an eye on this one, folks; there’s no telling who else he may have stolen from.

Then, on a less dispiriting note, a column on overdone or imprecise metaphors:  “A catalyst is something that speeds up a chemical reaction but is itself unchanged at the end of the reaction. Someone who sparks a revolution by setting themselves on fire shouldn’t be described as a catalyst.”

Another One from the Department of Bad Ideas

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What do I think about the recently announced Kindle Worlds development?

I think it’s a really bad idea, from the point of view of just about everybody but Amazon.

John Scalzi, unsurprisingly, lays out why it’s a bad idea considered from the viewpoint of professional writers in general.  (Short version:  Alloy Entertainment and Amazon between them take all rights, and there’s no up-front advance to sweeten the grab.)

The blog Letters from Titan covers some of the troubling issues raised from the fanfic community’s point of view.  (Short version:  Conflict with the community’s traditional gift economy; potential for attempts at corporate control; restricted subject matter by comparison with the anything-goes world of unauthorized fanfic.)

My own opinion?  Kindle Worlds isn’t going to give the world more high-quality fanfic; it’s going to give the world more lousy media tie-ins.  And I say this as someone who has in her time written original fiction, tie-in fiction, licensed-property fiction (I was one-half of Victor Appleton not once, but twice!), and, yes, fanfiction.

Not Really a Day for Writing

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Actually, that’s not true.  If you’re doing this thing for a living, every day is a day for writing, no matter how bad the world gets.

But some days, current events don’t leave much room for chitchat and casual banter.

Stay safe, people, wherever you are.

Things It Doesn’t Help to Complain to the Author About:

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The cover art for their book.  You may hate it with a passion; you may think that it misrepresents both the plot and the theme of the book in the worst way possible; you may feel that it reeks of sexism, racism, classism, and other -isms as yet unknown to social science.  Complaining to the author will not do any good, because in the hierarchy of people who have a say in a book’s cover art, the author ranks somewhere just barely above the office cleaning crew and the folks in the mail room.  With the rare exception of publishing’s 800-pound gorillas, the author’s traditional role in the selection of cover art is limited to bitching about it afterward.

Problems with the printing and typography of their book.  If your copy of the book has Chapter 27 replaced by an equivalent number of pages from Love’s Tacky Splendor, that isn’t the author’s fault.  Bad stuff can happen to good books when they go to the printer, and somewhere out there is a printing of Love’s Tacky Splendor that has Chapter 27 replaced by a chunk of impeccably-researched hard science fiction.  Those readers — and that author — aren’t going to be pleased about this either.

Problems with the sales and availability of their book.  The author’s control of these issues is approximately zero point zilch.  Finding out that there are no copies of their book to be found anywhere in the entire state of North Dakota is not going to make them any happier.

In all of these cases, as it happens, the appropriate entity to direct your complaints to is the publisher.

Blizzard Warning

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To everybody in the path of the storm:

Stay inside; stay warm; stay safe.   Friday and Saturday look like good days for cuddling up next to your computer and working on your novel.  Whatever you were thinking of driving to will still be there on Monday.

(And if circumstances force you out onto the road anyway, make sure you’ve got a warm blanket or a sleeping bag in the car with you, just in case.  Some bottled water and a couple of energy bars probably wouldn’t hurt, either.  Making Light has a bunch of useful links. )

Tell It to the (Space) Marines

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This story is all over the science fiction and fantasy segments of the internet this morning, but just in case you’ve missed it, a few links:

Games Workshop, owners of the Warhammer 40K gaming franchise, slap down a self-published Amazon author in the name of asserting their trademark on the term “space marines.”

The estimable John Scalzi weighs in on the topic, as do many commenters.

I particularly like the person who provided a link to a Wikipedia list of actual space marines.  I have no idea how many, if any, cosmonauts were the then-USSR’s equivalent of marines, but I’ll bet that somebody on the internet does.

Over at Making Light, they’re on it as well.

And why did Games Workshop choose to go after a self-published author, and not, say, the Heinlein estate or any of the other fairly large gorillas who have used the term and the concept of “space marines” in their science fiction since the late nineteen-thirties at least?  For the same reason that school administrators, when they decide to implement a “zero tolerance” drug policy, go after the honor student who gives her best friend a Canadian Tylenol for cramps, rather than the apprentice hoodlums selling coke and steroids to the football team out in the school parking lot — they can get the desired result (the appearance of vigorously carrying out policy) without the fear of serious repercussions (in the form of lawsuits or busted kneecaps.)

This Sort of Thing Has Just Got to Stop

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 13 Comments

It’s one thing for companies to insist on ownership of patents for things developed in their labs on their time.  At least the inventors sometimes get internal recognition, not to mention resumé cred.

But now we have a school board in Prince George’s County, Maryland, that wants to assert ownership of the copyrights not just for things like lesson plans and computer apps created by teachers in the system using district-provided iPads and other tools, but also for material written or developed by students as part of a classroom assignment.

And that is just plain wrong.  Wrong wrong wrong with a side order of extremely bad and heinous.  And did I mention, just plain wrong?

Not that I feel strongly on the subject, or anything like that.

The Wind and the Rain

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The East Coast is having a wild ride tonight . . . stay safe, everybody.

Disaster Prep

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It looks like Hurricane Sandy is going to hit the East Coast like a fist.  Even here in far northern New Hampshire, with an entire mountain range between us and the shoreline, the local public works guys are pre-positioning road barriers and suchlike in case of flooding from heavy rain.  (When you have local landmarks with names like Roaring Brook, it’s not hard to guess what lots of rain coming down on the tops of the local mountains can do to the land at the bottom.)  And everybody in Vermont is hoping that this storm doesn’t decide to pull an Irene and come ramping and stamping up the Connecticut River Valley, because some places over there haven’t yet recovered from the last set of floods.  And all of our friends on the coast, from Boston down to Baltimore, are white-knuckling it while they wait to find out just where Sandy’s punch is going to strike hardest.

If you’re in any of the likely-to-be-affected areas, don’t forget to secure your writing while you’re bringing the lawn chairs inside and laying in a supply of bottled water and batteries.  Nobody wants to be left in the position of having to either rewrite an entire book from the beginning or toss it out as an impossible job.

There are a number of different ways to make certain your work-in-progress stays safe.  Offsite backup to the cloud, via services like Dropbox or Google Drive, is a good starting point.  (If you don’t like or trust cloud computing, you can always e-mail a copy of the current WIP to a trusted friend.)  A flash drive or portable hard drive that you can shove into your pocket or your laptop case on the way out the door is also a good idea — that way, if you end up crashing for a week with Great-Aunt Eunice who lives in a big house on high ground with no internet and a dozen cats, you can still keep on working as long as you’ve got power.

As for the storm itself — you’re a writer.  Observe, and take copious mental notes.  It’s what we do.