Another review

Posted on by March 13, 2021
4

.
Another excellent, albeit short, review for The Last Stormlord over at AsIf from Tehani Wessely, in which she says among other things:

As usual, Larke creates an intriguing cast of characters and a fascinating story that evolves and develops gradually, weaving a spell that envelops the reader and makes the book almost impossible to put down. My biggest problem is now the long wait for book two, but I have no doubt the wait will be well worth it!

She also comments that:
Glenda Larke is a skilful worldbuilder and in this new series she creates a remarkable desert land where water is treasured and the waterless are the outcasts of society.

If you are a real sff fan and read widely, but haven’t read my book yet, you are probably wondering if The Last Stormlord avoids being a Dune lookalike. I hope it does, even though it has dunes and sand and water saving procedures. I certainly worked hard at making it a different kind of world.

(And so, re reviews, I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop…)

In the meantime I am still dealing with two copyedits and slowly going crazy.

Holes in my roof

Posted on by March 13, 2021
6

A couple of weeks back, a gale blew part of our roof off. So we called in someone to fix it, which they did. At the same time we asked them to clear all the leaves. Which they did too.

Yesterday it rained, heavily. The roof they mended was fine, no leaks. But the roof over our lounge/dining area leaked horribly, the wall became a waterfall, and our lounge a swimming pool. (Have you ever smelled wet carpet? It has to be one of the most grungy smells on earth.)

We figure it was all the leaves that had been plugging the holes, and to remove them was obviously A Very Bad Idea. The moral of the story is never get your roof cleaned.

The truth is, of course, we need a new roof. Truth number two is that until one of my books hits the NY Times best seller list, we can’t afford it.

Excuse me now, I have to go and plug some holes with a handful of leaves…

Here’s an article all booklovers should read

Posted on by March 13, 2021
3
Via Bibliobibuli (that wonderful source of all things literary).

A Guardian article from Alison Flood with some comments by Kim Stanley Robsinson, who will be the Guest of Honour at Aussicon4 in Melbourne next year (the SF Worldcon); here’s some extracts to whet that appetite…

The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards and author of the bestselling Mars trilogy, Robinson attacked the Booker for rewarding “what usually turn out to be historical novels”…

—-

He believes this year’s prize should go to Adam Roberts’s science fiction comedy, Yellow Blue Tibia, which didn’t even make the longlist. In 2005, when John Banville took the Booker for The Sea, he believes that Geoff Ryman’s Air should have won; in 2004 – when Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty won – it should have gone to Gwyneth Jones’s Life, and in 1997, the year of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Signs of Life by M John Harrison should have triumphed…

—-

Authors including Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter, Ian McDonald and Justina Robson are writing “the best British literature of our time,” he said, listing over 30 names.

—–

According to Mullan (a Booker judge) there was “essentially no” science fiction submitted for this year’s Booker prize, apart from Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, set in a dystopian future, which failed to make the longlist. “We as judges depend a great deal on what publishers submit,” he said.

And here’s some more from Mullan:

… professor of English at University College London, said that he “was not aware of science fiction,” arguing that science fiction has become a “self-enclosed world”.

“When I was 18 it was a genre as accepted as other genres,” he said, but now “it is in a special room in book shops, bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other.”

.

Whither goest thou, publishing?

Posted on by March 13, 2021
1

;
Interesting article on the publishing industry in US here, by Daniel Menaker, who was Senior Vice President and the Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House. In other words, he wore two hats and saw the business from two different angles. If you are a writer, or thinking of a career as an agent or in the publishing business, best to read and think about it. I imagine it’s not so very different in other parts of the world.

Some random snippets to whet your appetite (in bold):

About 60 percent of all publishing employers “experienced layoffs,” …

…electronic-book-text digitization begins in earnest. That will happen in a financially and organizationally seismic way very quickly, I think…

Most trade books do not succeed, financially. Three out of four fail to earn back their advances. Or four out of five or six out of seven, depending on what source you consult.

I’ve always suspected that salespeople’s and (the bookshop/retail) buyer’s biases and preferences play a greater part in a book’s fortunes than most editorial people want to allow themselves to understand.

Genuine literary discernment is often a liability in editors.

Financial success in front-list publishing is very often random, but the media conglomerates that run most publishing houses act as if it were not.

…most of the really profitable books for most publishers still come from the mid-list — and the above media conglomerates have failed to see this because of the blockbuster factor

Review coverage means far less than it used to —

The shrift given to actual close and considered editing almost has to be short and is growing shorter,

Many of the most important decisions made in publishing are made outside the author’s and agent’s specific knowledge.

…the books for which the company has paid the highest advances will be the lead titles, regardless of their quality (because most readers don’t want quality)

Writers: be afraid. Be very afraid.

My reaction: I am so glad I write genre.

.

Copy edit mayhem…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
3

Oo, I love this. Messing around with a copy edit is fun. Together with the final proof reading, it’s the cherry on the cake, the final polish, it’s where you start to feel just a teensy-weensy bit proud of this monster (180,000 words!) that you have birthed.

This time around it is really, really interesting as well. I have two copy edits for the same book, from different publishers. Mostly they find the same basic errors (e.g. typos, grammatical hiccups and similar) but the rest is … interesting. The things they think would make a better book are simply different.

Of course, at the end of the day it is my name on the cover, and I make the final decisions. This is fun. But don’t expect too much eloquence from me for a few days…

One surefire way to know who WON”T EVER get published…

Posted on by March 13, 2021
6

.
…at least in any respectable paid format.

The other day a screenwriter, Josh Olsen, went to town about professional writers being asked by strangers to read and comment on their work. Today Scalzi weighs in on the same subject matter. The gist of both articles: professionals rarely have time to work for free, and when they do, they choose the people to do it for, like friends or family. They don’t do it for everyone who walks up and asks. They also listed a whole lot of other equally valid reasons for not touching a stranger’s MS – or even a friend of a friend’s MS – with as much as a glancing eye.

To me, the really jaw-dropping thing was the nature of some of the comments under Olsen’s article. There was a significant number of invective and hate-filled replies in the comment section, sort of: “Who do you think you are, you piece of crap, who won’t help us beginning writers?” – only the language was usually a great deal more vulgarly unoriginal. Whether John Scalzi gets similar replies, I don’t know; he certainly will deal with them promptly anyway by turfing them out of his blog’s comments section.

My statement – and I am 100% certain about this, (barring miraculous born-again conversions of these invective-laden and whining unpublished writers) – is that not one of them will ever be published in any respectable paid way.

Why not?

Two reasons.

Firstly, in order to be a publishable writer, you have to understand language and the way in which it works. You have, for a start, to be able to read. And none of these people can, or at least they can’t read well enough to comprehend what they read. They didn’t “get” what Josh said. And yet he said it clearly enough. He gave reasons enough. Even if you removed the swear words, there was nothing ambiguous about it. (I am always astonished – and it has happened several times – to discover a would-be published writer who doesn’t read, and still expects to be a competent writer. How do you understand how to use written language if you don’t read?)

Secondly, to be a publishable writer, you have to be able to learn. And to learn, you have to able to do two things: practice, and listen to advice/lessons. And those astonishingly obtuse commentators don’t want to. They were given good advice and they not only rejected it, but got angry and mind-bogglingly rude. They are the kind of people who won’t listen if someone does try to help them. Instead, they resorted to anger and invective. They don’t want commentary or criticism, they want praise. That’s not the way to learn, and without opening up their minds to learning, they will never improve, even if they do practice. (I suspect they might also be people who don’t think practice is involved either.)

Not one of them will ever be published, barring the miracle mentioned above. They’ll never be good enough.
.

The Condescending Review

Posted on by March 13, 2021
Reply

Today is my day to post over at sfnovelists. It’s the same post as below, but I am turning the comments off here. If you have a comment, then please leave it over there. Thanks!

______________________________

Every now and then you get a reviewer who doesn’t read fantasy or science fiction reviewing a sff book. The result is often just awful. And here is a superb example: the Sept 8th review by Michael Agger of Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

For a start, such reviewers frequently assume the book that they are reviewing is typical, as if one book can represent the whole. So anything they don’t like in the book is extrapolated to be “the genre”.

Secondly, such reviewers often seem to think that the magic of fantasy is something best left behind in childhood and that readers who indulge in it are somehow childish or immature or uncritical – that they are somehow lacking as readers. (Unless of course, they are reading a book by a respectable award-winning author who writes “magical realism”. That’s ok. In fact it indicates high literary taste.)

Thirdly, they assume an adult fantasy involving magic can have nothing to offer a real grown-up person. The themes of such books must be childish and irrelevant to adult readers and to our everyday world. Fantasy is, in fact, escapist commercial twaddle of no relevance – on an even lower level in their estimation than “real world” commercial fiction. Fantasy for adult readers is regarded as something akin to Harry Potter with sex and drugs. (Actually I am not sure why escapist commercial fiction is considered beneath contempt anyway . Don’t we all need to escape sometimes? Commercial film is not subjected to the same contempt…but that’s another subject.)

Here is some of what Michael Aggers had to say about “The Magicians” (which I have not read.)

Fantasy novels involve magic and are a little bit like magic themselves. To work, they require of readers a willingness to be fooled, to be gulled into a world of walking trees and talking lions. They affect us most powerfully as teenagers, but then most of us move on to sterner, staider stuff. … Lev Grossman’s third novel is a homage to that early wonderment. … The Narnia books and the Harry Potter series captivate the young by putting young people in a world where adults are a distant, unsteady presence. “The Magicians” is a jarring attempt to go where those novels do not: into drugs, disappointment, anomie, the place and time when magic leaks out of your life. Perhaps a fantasy novel meant for adults can’t help being a strange mess of effects. It’s similar to inviting everyone to a rave for your 40th-birthday party. Sounds like fun, but aren’t we a little old for this?

What I would like to say to Mr Aggers is this: if he doesn’t know – at least vaguely – what is out there in genre fiction, then he shouldn’t talk about it.

What do you think?