164 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/11/16 Pixels For Nothin’ And Your Scrolls For Free”

1. I think one of our regular commenters here has links with Edwin Drood…

2. I just got all three volumes of These Are the Voyages. These look very good, and I’m probably going to get onto them once I am finished with my current reads. The third volume in the series is definitely Hugo-eligible, and using the “series” rule, the entire three-volume set would be as well.

3. I have felt that, once the pressure is off for GRRM regarding the show, he can finally take his time and admit to the book fans that it will take him 3 or 4 (or more) books to finish his story.

   I would love to see him take his time on more Dunk and Egg as well. The novellas he has provided since for the various anthologies are clearly rushed by his standards, and it shows.

4. @Bruce A

   I believe I remember reading on David Gerrold’s Facebook page that the first draft of the next Chtorr book is finished. I think it’s called A Method for Madness? I thought he had sent it out to beta readers (one of whom I also follow, and who said it was excellent).

5. Dann:

   Vasicek is also a big boy. If he snarks about GRRM (who has earned a lot of goodwill in our community this year), we will also snark a bit.

   I have absolutely no idea of how Vasiceks writing is, but I DO wish that he had GRRMs success, earned by writing on the same level of GRRM at his best. Because if there is something that would make me happy, it would be more authors on GRRMs level.

6. IanP: Stross seems unlikely to finish the Eschaton series having plotted himself into a corner.

   At the Space Opera panel I attended at Sasquan, Stross stated that he chose to deliberately abandon that series because of inconsistencies and problems with the physical worldbuilding.

7. @ULTRAGOTHA,

   If you haven’t done so recently, you might want to read Rosemary Kirstein’s blog for the past few months.

8. I’ve just run into a bizarre example of inadequate editing in a little popular astronomy book, “How To Read the Solar System” by Chris North and Paul Abel, apparently hosts of a BBC tv astronomy program. Publisher is Pegasus Books. According to these guys, Copernicus was born in 1479, and his big book was brought to him on his deathbed in 1643. A couple of pages later, we learn that Tycho Brahe was born in 1546 and decided to dedicate himself to astronomy when his father died in 1671. I hope the authors are better at astronomy than they are at history. There was a comment a few pages earlier to the effect that the Dark Ages ended with the Renaissance that made me think of a recent File770 discussion.

9. My recollection is Stross concluded FTL violates causality. This left the story outside the bounds of hard sf and he abandoned the series accordingly. I think there’s a few posts about it on his blog.

10. Congratulations to Irene Gallo on winning the 2016 Richard Gangel Art Director Award. I’m quite certain that we will all need earplugs and white noise generators to drown out the howls of the Rabid Puppies. 😉

11. I would be perfectly happy if GRRM stopped writing on ASOIAF and instead wrote that sequel to Fevre Dream that he has mentioned. Nothing would please me more.

    Regarding Vasicek… he’s an incredibly expensive author! o.O I was thinking of checking him out, but 4 £ for 80 pages! A GRRM length novel would cost 40 £ at that price. Also think there is something wrong with the pricing as the other parts cost 999 £ each…

12. Not really science fiction, but something like this would certainly have seemed to be in that realm only a few years ago:

13. Dann

    Wishing Vasicek the kind of readership that GRRM has would be doing Vasicek no favors unless Vasicek writes as well as GRRM does. Do you think he’s that good?

    Last year’s Hugos showed what comes of having large numbers of people read stories that are playing out of their league.

14. IanP on January 12, 2016 at 1:15 pm said:
    According to Burn Notice books are useful for more than insulation:

    Michael Westen: [narration] There are a couple of ways to make a car bullet resistant. $60,000 dollars worth of titanium siding will do the job. Or you can pick up a couple extra copies of the Yellow Pages from your local phone company. Most non-armor-piercing bullets will only penetrate a phone book to the depth of an inch or two. Behind a layer of steal, it’s more like a 1/4 of an inch.

    Filers may wish to use copies of Seeds of Change from Hampus’s drift store instead…

    The Mythbusters tested phone books as car armour before. It worked pretty good when done strategically:

15. Seems like it is Amazon.co.uk who don’t care about how they price Kindle editions that they don’t sell. The cost of Vasiceks books are much more reasonable at US Amazon.

16. Christian Brunschen I follow Kirstein’s blog. One reason why I am hopeful book five won’t take toooo much longer.

17. @ Hampus: It looks like the Kindle version of Vasicek’s novella (?) is free though. You can read those on computers and tablets and so on, if you don’t have a Kindle.

18. Cat:

    “Last year’s Hugos showed what comes of having large numbers of people read stories that are playing out of their league.”

    There was this discussion about Monteleones Seeds of Change on the other page, so I did a search on the poor man and found this little text:

    “Laser Books issued Seeds of Change in vast quantities in a free promotional “collector’s edition” that was shipped by the carton to anyone who asked. Small regional SF conventions were sent enough to give several copies each to everyone in attendance. Come Sunday morning, copies would be scattered like popcorn on the consuite floor. This unwanted manna provoked a great deal of derisory comment, as did the book itself. Normally, weak first novels vanish without a trace, or are never published at all. Young Thomas Monteleone suffered the mortification of having his first novel publicly mocked and scrutinized in detail, in a blaze of publicity. (Demonstrating considerable strength of character, he continued to write, and has gone on to become a respected author of supernatural thrillers.)”

    Poor guy. At least he managed to rally and now has won the Bram Stoker award four times. Which gives a little hope for everyone.

19. Joe Vasicek has a certain amount of my goodwill for being reasonable to talk to (so long as you stick to fandom stuff and not political stuff, although ymmv – I just run in the other direction whenever I see the term “cultural marxism”) which is positively refreshing from a Puppy-sympathetic author. I feel like I had quite a decent conversation for a change. I think reading the work he has available for free is sort of the rock bottom minimum I could do, even if he is being obnoxious about GRRM. 🙂 Hope its good!

20. “It looks like the Kindle version of Vasicek’s novella (?) is free though. You can read those on computers and tablets and so on, if you don’t have a Kindle.”

    Yes, true! Will download first part.

21. It does not seem to be circulating on the fannish newswires yet that a second lawsuit has been filed against Connor Cochran, this time by Sandbox LLC, which was part of the joint venture behind the Last Unicorn tour.

22. I get a little squeamish about anything that seems to imply “Your work method is bad, or at least mine is better/morally superior/more accountable/whatever.”

    I’ll cheerfully put my work ethic up against most other writers in terms of the butt and the chair and the meeting of deadlines–but it’s MY work and MY method. And just because I work the way I do doesn’t mean it would work for anyone else, or that my output is better. I work systematically, if occasionally erratically on any given project not currently on deadline, in a way that works for me. I know how long something takes–but only how long it takes ME, not how long it would take anyone else.

    If GRRM worked the exact same schedule I do, he might produce nothing of any value to anyone. If I worked under his level of pressure, my acid reflux might eat a hole through my sternum. But we’ll never know.

    Authors are not magical unicorns, but it’s still an art, and if you subject us to extreme pressure, you don’t always get diamonds. Sometimes it’s just flat coal. I just can’t judge GRRM’s delivery issues because I doubt I’ll ever walk a mile in really tight diamond shoes.

23. RedWombat said:

    I get a little squeamish about anything that seems to imply “Your work method is bad, or at least mine is better/morally superior/more accountable/whatever.

    Totally agree, unless it’s advice being given to someone who explicitly asked for it and is saying, “I’ve got all these great ideas, but I never seem to be able to turn them into a book/story/podcast/whatever,” and it turns out that they write once a month for about two hours and are convinced that’s not the problem, though, it’s that they don’t have Final Draft Pro. 🙂

24. Re (1)

    I think this is well merited – if anything has made Tor, and also Orbit, stand out in the last little just physically on the shelves it’s that their covers are often tasteful, and not my childhood memories of sci-fi novels with covers that would make the editors of Heavy Metal blush. I am reflecting on the fact that one of the things of going primarily e-reader is that I simply see the covers of books so much less often. I kind of miss the covers, even if I kind of prefer not having the plot synopsis on the back cover and thus getting to go in completely blind.

    I suspect that in the reaction to Gallo’s win, we’ll see some of the reasons why hopes for reconciliation re: the Puppies might be premature. But I’ll wait on the reactions.

    re (10)

    Why is Vasicek criticizing Martin? Reading the Puppies material last spring I get the feeling that sales and monetary success were the sole feature of judging literature, making Correia’s superior to all this horrible lit fic no-one read. By his own standards, isn’t Vasciek being some horrible Marxist by criticizing GRRM, someone the market has awarded with money and sales?

25. An interesting note, possibly an ironic one, with regard to George’s success with the Westeros books: A Game of Thrones was a pretty desperate bid to save a career that had crashed and burned. He was, like a lot of of authors, suffering from the fallout of bookseller consolidation and the deeply stupid ordering algorithms used by the big chains. (For younger readers: the way this worked was that orders on any author’s new book would be essentially the average of sales of their last few. One clunker would be an ongoing drag on your prospects with that chain. This is still a problem but they’ve gotten a bit smarter about it; the method is also why there was a big boom in not-at-all-secret pen names, so that sales of one sort of book wouldn’t harm sales of other sorts by the same author.)

    Various of his books had done badly, and he was having a difficult time placing anything new. He felt like it might be time to simply give up on professionally writing fiction to focus on TV, editing, and whatever else. But he wanted to keep writing, and did this thing, very different from anything he’d written before, for one last shot at it.

    And it turned into an ongoing epic hit, of course. But…okay, I don’t know if anyone on the publisher’s end envisioned this sort of success, but certainly George didn’t.

    The lesson isn’t really anything new: all plans are contingent, do each step well because you simply can’t know in advance.

26. @Ken Marable

    – written 5 novellas
    – written 5 other books including a reference book, and 2 other novels
    – written 5 television episodes including creating and developing the pilot for a TV series
    – edited 14 (!!) Wild Cards volumes, plus written plenty of those stories
    – edited another 8 anthologies
    – been an actively involved producer on some TV show or something
    – run his own movie theater

    Holy crap. THIS. There’s a substantial portion of my circle who *only* see GRRM as the “Game of Thrones guy”, and this leads
    to unrealistic, as well as frankly unkind expectations.

    @TheYoungPretender

    Reading the Puppies material last spring I get the feeling that sales and monetary success were the sole feature of judging literature,

    That argument went out the window, or suddenly developed a whole lot of qualifiers that weren’t there previously, once The Dread Sk’lzee’s contract was announced

27. Re: writing method

    Writing during the week is a lost cause for me. I need a certain degree of isolation to be able to write creatively, and I usually can’t get that during the week – there’s always something calling for my attention. Even last night, I was doing some quiet editing at one in the morning when I had to drop everything and deal with a family issue (which should have taken a few minutes) for the next three hours.

    I try to make up for that on weekends. If I line everything up right, I can steal a weekend night for myself. I try to write a full chapter on the first night and touch it up some on the following night, to the tune of about 5,000 words. That’ll take me a few hours, but once I get in the zone, the time flies by. I can then splice the new material into an ebook template, toss it onto my iPad, and splash a lot of yellow notes onto it whenever I have a little spare time. Then, next time I have an hour or so available on the computer, I can zip through the screenshots (one for each edit) and clean up the rough text.

    It’s not a fast process, but it’s greater than zero. Sometimes, that’s the best you can hope for.

28. Watts –

    Man, the particular kind of cheerleading for self-publishing I see among Puppies (and some others) is one of the things that gives me pause about going with a tiny press for my debut novel. I’d like to be able to have it out this calendar year, which would never happen through traditional publishing even if everything went smashingly well (starting with the part about, you know, getting a traditional publisher to buy the thing). But I’d also like at least a dim hope of having it taken seriously, and a lot of what I see from the indie cheerleaders… well, isn’t serious.

    Eh, the Puppy stuff isn’t indicative of the mood of indie cheerleading for books, it’s a niche corner of the internet. There’s some occasionally good advice on MGC when it isn’t pushing a political message over substance (lol) because they’ve put out books in non-traditional ways and know the pitfalls a person can fall into, and when not blaming SJWs or whatever they point out some good beginner things to avoid and they update frequently.

    As far as indie publishing cheerleading goes Amazon emails out a newsletter for Kindle authors, Mark Coker with Smashwords put out some good info and puts out some good articles about it, and there’s a bunch of great blogs like indiesunlimited.com. It’s a business that makes money, so people do take it seriously, however like any business the amount of effort put in is related to how serious you might be taken. Either way, the Puppy stuff isn’t really reflective, other than some of the BS spouted can reflect poorly. But really any indie author putting out an MS paint covered book that’s badly formatted and edited worse does more damage to indie publishing than a couple self published bloggers pulling a publicity stunt in bad taste ever could.

29. Regarding Seeds of Change … waaaaaaaay back in 1975 when it was published I seem to recall that someone described as being edited by dull meat clever. Ah, Roger Elwood …..

30. “Regarding Seeds of Change … waaaaaaaay back in 1975 when it was published I seem to recall that someone described as being edited by dull meat clever. Ah, Roger Elwood …..”

    Elwood would have known. He edited Monster Tales where Monteleones first short stories were published, so he must have known what quality Monteleone was capable of.

31. Metafilter recently had a post on George Martin delay of the GoT last book. Both Stross and Scalzi showed up in the comments saying that their rate of writing is roughly equivalent to GM’s rate. Their user names are cstross and jscalzi.
    
    Metafilter

32. @Watts: Like others have said, nobody worth paying attention to will look down on you for self-publishing just because of the Puppies. Think of yourself as doing some of the same stuff as Ursula Vernon and carry on (as she would say) with your own bad self. 🙂

33. A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post, Slow Words: A Manifesto for the Unprofessional Writer, giving my own take on writers’ habits and goalposts.

    I drew a distinction between “professional” and “successful” writing. Takeaway quote: “To be a successful writer, you only have to do one thing: Write a good story. That’s it. That’s all you have to do.“

34. I just want to heartily congratulate Irene Gallo; it’s a very prestigious award and she thoroughly deserved it. I’m sure VD is now hard at work trying to claim that it was all because of his master plan…

35. Hampus Eckeman wrote: “Elwood would have known. He edited Monster Tales where Monteleones first short stories were published, so he must have known what quality Monteleone was capable of.”

    Not necessarily. One observation made by a number of people during the period when Elwood was churning out dozens of anthologies over a few years was that while the occasional excellent story appeared, it seemed to happen more by accident than by editorial design. Elwood was enough of a salesman to garner lots of contracts for anthologies, and had a well-organized system for putting them together, but his editorial taste and skill was… not as good as other, less prolific editors in the field.

    (Terry Carr, Robert Silverberg, and Damon Knight all leap to mind. Elwood’s anthologies were, for the most part, pretty forgettable.)

36. Authors are not magical unicorns

    That’s like saying Santa clause isn’t real. I thought once I became an author I’d become a magical unicorn. All my dreams down the drain. LOL I’m picturing a bunch of my favorite authors faces pasted on unicorns doing cover poses (Jim C. Hine’s style) while farting rainbows.

    Isn’t it some kind of literary tradition to pick on authors who are famous/sell more books than you? Or to pick on authors who aren’t as famous/selling as well?

    I’ve heard there are a couple things required to be a successful published author:
    1. Write good stuff and publish it (indie, hybrid, traditional publishing)
    2. Define successful for you & reach this goal (possibly exceed it)

37. @John Seavey – Oh, well, yeah. But once you get anywhere near the doing-it-for-a-living level, I figure we’re all doing the best we know how–or at least that it’s not my place to say otherwise!

38. @snowcrash

    And I suppose Ancillary hitting the bestseller list lead to a great deal of “we have always been at war with Eastasia!” as well…

39. The hell with “Game of Thrones”. When is GRRM going to return to Haviland Tuff, last seen in Tuff Voyaging??? He even says here that he’d like to 🙂
    http://grrm.livejournal.com/311788.html

40. I would take a sequel to Fevre Dream in a heartbeat over more ASOIAF. Pretty sure everyone’s gonna die in the end. Maybe Tyrion will live. It’ll be bloody.

    (I wouldn’t even mind a sequel to Armageddon Rag.)

41. I loved the first four volumes of ASOIAF and was excited for the fifth. But after reading it, I reluctantly concluded the story has gotten away from him. And we don’t unpublish books, so there’s no taking it back. At this point I feel like the saga has a better chance of concluding successfully as a TV show than a set of novels.

    And I’m at peace with that. I mean, we all do what we can do, and for most of four pretty thick books, what GRRM could do was very good indeed. If we never got books six and seven and the fate of these characters passed into fodder for endless discussion and fanfic, that doesn’t seem like the worst possible world.

42. Just delurking to say thank you to all who recommended The Long Way to A Small Angry Planet. I finished it this afternoon and it’s fabulous. I enjoyed the way Chambers plays with narrative conventions, setting up situations that would usually end in conflict or danger to the crew and then letting them pass without drama. The exposure of a big lie results in nothing more than tears and a couple of mentions of a grumpy captain. The early flight of the killer bugs on Cricket doesn’t lead to anyone being caught in the open or endangered in any way, it means a chance to eat and drink and hang out with friends. This could be frustrating if you’re expecting lots of plot, but I found the kindness and naturalism refreshing.
    Becky Chambers is definitely going on my Campbell list.

43. Also writing is much more than word count. I recall J. K. Rowling saying shortly after Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out that if she’d had more time to deliver it, it would probably have been at least 100 pages shorter.

    Now I want a time machine for the express purpose of talking Rowling’s editors into extending her due date.

    Ultragotha:

    There’s an interview out there from 2014 that says she does plan now to finish the series when her other series is complete

    I will believe that when I see it. Dawn has dangled hope in front of her fans before with nothing to show for it.

44. From what I recall from conventions and blog posts, Charlie Stross’ plan for the third Eschaton book was going to be a full-on time war between the Eschaton and the Unborn God, so that the narrative would resemble the form of his novella “Palimpsest” with causality enthusiastically hurled out the window as the two godlike entities sought to destroy each other along their respective timelines, and the narrative only hanging on by the skin of its figurative teeth.

    But he made a continuity error in Iron Sunrise setting up the third book, and couldn’t figure a way around it. I’ve never been able to spot where the mistake is, myself, so I have to take his word for it. And enough time has passed that he probably wouldn’t be able to get his publisher interested in the third book, anyway. So….

    Of course, the fact that we all disagree on what the story is here is surely indicative that the Unborn God and the Eschaton are already will have been interfering with the timelines.

45. @Cat: LOL at your mic drop on the first page of comments, thanks.

    @Kyra: Okay, I’ve read enough good stuff about Wexler’s series, and now your mini-review of the latest one may be the tipping point; I’m shifting it from the “of interest” list to the “I should really buy this” list (not the real list names). IIRC, he has a novella (or shorter) in this world with a gay (bi?) man in it as well, so, something for everyone! 😉

    @Meredith: The setup for Witches of Lychford sounds quite amusing. I haven’t read Cornell before, though I know this has been mentioned here before. These novellas are pricey in print, but reasonable at $2.99 in ebook. So, as it says in a comic I read, “Ta very much.” (Hey, the comic’s written by a Brit; I learn English English only the best ways.) I shall check out Cornell’s novella.

    @Christian Brunschen: Very cool, except for the fact that it turns out to be an Intel ad. Still, thanks for posting the video, as it is quite nifty. 🙂

    (1) GALLO WINS ART DIRECTOR AWARD. Congrats to her! She seems to go from strength to strength. 😀

46. @Wildcat
    Regarding the ‘facepuppy’, would it be something like this?

47. Re: “facepuppy’”

    I would suggest that no one lookup the DC… let’s call him *character* called Dogwelder.

48. NelC on January 12, 2016 at 11:01 pm said: Of course, the fact that we all disagree on what the story is here is surely indicative that the Unborn God and the Eschaton are already will have been interfering with the timelines.

    Seems to me the logical answer is that he did write the book, but the events in it caused it to retroactively never have existed…

49. @snowcrash: Now I don’t know which has done more associative damage to puppies, SP/RP or Dogwelder. (I googled. Curiosity killed the pup.)

    @Tony Cullen: A perfect example of facepuppy! 😀

50. Vasicek’s article is a bit like a Single A ballplayer giving hitting tips to Bryce Harper.

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