Pixel Scroll 2/5/16 The Rough Guide To Neveryon-Neveryon Land

(1) KILL YOUR DARLINGS. Jason Cordova of Mad Genius Club thinks after a month of writing, you need “NaDecEdMo!”

Why is that, though? Why do we get to have a NaNoWriMo and not a NaDecEdMo? Because NOBODY wants to be that butthead who is celebrating an author who is gutting their baby.

That’s what editing is, in a nutshell. It’s taking out that precious baby of yours and changing it, ruthlessly making it better. It’s a rough, rough time for an author when this is going on. The author is feeling insecure about their novel as is, and now they have to look at it with a critical eye. That cute scene that you really liked but now doesn’t really fit into the story as much? Gutted like a day old fish on Market Street.

(2) SALE. Francis Hamit of Brass Cannon Books is running an experiment – and you can save.

A consultant has told us selling e-books for 99 cents each will inspire those customers who like them to then buy the print edition to have forever. . What the heck! We’ll try it. All fiction e-books and mini-memoir are now going for 99 cents each in e-book form for a limited time only. Starting February 5th, 2016.

(3) PLYING THE KEYBOARD. Nancy Kress asked her Facebook followers

Since I am always behind the curve on everything, I have just become aware that nowadays people put one space after a period in manuscripts instead of two spaces. Is this widespread? Do I need to learn to do this? I’ve been doing it the other way for 40 years; old habits die hard.

(4) BY THE NUMBERS. Natalie Luhrs of Pretty Terrible looks for statistical evidence of bias in “A Brief Analysis of the Locus Recommended Reading List, 2011-2015”.

I want to preface this by saying that I believe that the Locus staff works very hard on this list and intends for it to be as comprehensive as they can make it. I know how hard it can be to stay on top of the flood of fiction and other affiliated works that are produced each year.

But I also believe that Locus has a responsibility to think about their biases so that lists of these type don’t inadvertently perpetuate structural inequalities–as our field’s magazine of record, this Reading List is published around the same time that Hugo nominations open and while qualified members of SFWA are filling out their Nebula nomination ballots.

One of her many graphs shows —

…The majority of the authors or editors of the works included on the Locus list are male–over 50% each year. Female authors or editors come in second in the 35-40% range. Mixed gender collaborations are next, followed by non-binary authors and editors….

(5) A NEWS STORY ABOUT NO NEWS. Bleeding Cool gives a status on some aging litigation in “Disney Pursuing Stan Lee Media For Half a Million, Finds Bank Accounts Emptied”.

With Hillary Clinton running for President, her association with convicted drug dealer and fraudster Peter F Paul and Stan Lee Media may well hit the headlines again.

Paul run the (then) largest political fundraiser ever for her Senatorial campaign and tried to get Bill Clinton onto the board of his company Stan Lee Media. The company was set up to exploit Stan Lee‘s name after he left Marvel Comics, to benefit from his new creations for comics, TV and films.

It all went sour rather. And Stan Lee Media – a company no longer associated with Stan Lee – has spent the last ten years trying to claim rights to all Stan Lee’s creations from Marvel – and now Disney. Despite six courts saying they have no claim.

Stan Lee Media have claimed that Lee transferred all his creative rights to the company in exchange for a large sum of money, and that includes Spider-Man, The Avengers, the Hulk. X-Men, Thor and the like. Unfortunately the courts really don’t see it that way. And Disney was awarded almost half a million in costs.

ScreenRant continues, adding its two bits:

The ongoing issue has come up again largely because of old political connections involving Stan Lee Media co-founder Peter F. Paul, a businessman and former convicted drug-dealer notorious for a series of allegedly illegal international political dealings. Paul fled the country during the initial SLMI investigation for Sao Paulo, which became a mini-scandal in United States politics when it was uncovered that Paul had been a major financial backer of Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate Campaign and had even lobbied for former president Bill Clinton to join Stan Lee Media’s board of directors. Paul at one point produced videos supposedly showing Stan Lee himself participating in campaign-finance calls with the Clintons as proof of his (Lee’s) complicity in the company’s bad dealings (Lee counter-sued over the matter). However, it didn’t stop Paul from being convicted to a ten year prison term in 2009 for fraud.

(6) MESKYS’ GUIDE DOG PASSES AWAY. It’s as if the beginning of the New Year also signaled the opening of the floodgates of misery, with one sad loss after another.

Ed Meskys, a blind sf fan, reports, “This morning I lost Gyro (public name ‘Killer Dog’) my guide dog with 9 years of service, just weeks past his age of 11…. He had been welcome at many conventions, SF and [National Federation of the Blind]. He will be my last dog guide as I am weeks short of 80, cannot bend to pick up after a dog, and have trouble with stairs….”

(7) NIRASAWA OBIT. Kaiju designer Yasushi Nirasawa , (1963–2016) died February 2. The Japanese illustrator, character designer, and model maker was known for his work Kamen Rider Blade, Kamen Rider Kabuto, and Kamen Rider Den-O and the creatures in the GARO series.

(8) MITCHELL OBIT. Edgar Mitchell, who 45 years ago became the sixth man to walk on the moon, died February 4, on the eve of his lunar landing anniversary. He was 85.

(9) TODAY IN HISTORY

  • February 5, 1953 – Walt Disney’s Peter Pan premiered.

(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born February 5, 1914 – William S. Burroughs.

(11) SCIENCE SHOWS CANADIANS ARE NICER. Oliver Keyes says “When life gives you lemons, make science”.

Ever since my writeup on leaving R my blog has been getting a lot more traffic than usual and many more comments. Usually this would be fine except the topic means that a lot of those comments are blathering about whiny SJW babies or actual death threats. 28 at the last count.

But, sure, it’s the social justice people who are oversensitive and fly off the handle…

This isn’t a formal study so my definition of arsehole can be basically whatever I want it to be. I settled for any comment which exhibited one of the following traits:

  1. Accused me of lying about everything that had happened to get some benefit that apparently comes alongside threats, harassment and weird emails. Nobody has explained to me what this benefit is but I eagerly await my cheque in the mail from the nefarious SJW cabal apparently causing me to make shit up;
  2. Contained threats, goading-towards-suicides, or generally obscene and targeted harassment;
  3. Used terms like “SJW” or “pissbaby” or “whinging” or really anything else that indicated the author had, at best, a tenuous grasp on how the world works;
  4. Was premised on the idea that I was “oversensitive” or “overreacting” which is pretty rich coming from people whose idea of acceptability includes insulting people they’ve never met on somebody else’s website.

So I took this definition and hand-coded the comments and grabbed the data. We ended up with 107 users, of whom a mere 40 weren’t arseholes, producing 183 comments in total. Then I worked out their referring site and geolocated their IP address, et voila.

(12) RABID PUPPIES. Vox Day posted his picks in the Best Fanzine category.

This appears to be one of those increasingly misnamed and outdated categories, but based on the previous nominees, it has apparently become the functional equivalent of “best SF-related site”. Using that as a guideline while keeping the eligibility rules in mind, here are the preliminary recommendations for Best Fanzine:

Black Gate succumbed to the genetic fallacy in turning down last year’s nomination; regardless of whether John O’Neill will do the same or not again this year, it remained the best SF-related site in 2015.

People I respect have suggested I publicly demand that Vox Day remove File770 from the Rabid Puppies slate. Then having done so, if Day fails to comply and I ultimately receive a Hugo nomination, they feel I can accept it with a clear conscience.

If I understand Steve Davidson correctly, he wants everyone to make a public statement repudiating slates. I don’t think people are unclear on how I feel about slates, thus it really becomes a question whether — by modeling that behavior — I want to encourage Steve to go around hammering people who don’t post the equivalent of an oath. I don’t.

Consider this point. I have been planning to nominate Black Gate because I’ve been reading it since last year’s Hugo contretemps brought it to my attention, and think they do a terrific job. What if they don’t make a public declaration? Should I leave them off my ballot? And thereby fail to do what I tell every other Hugo voter to do, nominate the stuff they think is the best?

I’m not voting for Black Gate because of a slate, and I don’t intend to be prevented from voting for it by a factor that has nothing to do with what I think about the quality of its work. That’s also why I’m choosing not to follow the advice I received about handling File 770’s apperance on the slate, though the advice is well intended.

(13) NUCLEAR TOY. In 1951, A.C. Gilbert, inventor of the Erector Set, released the U-238 Atomic Energy Laboratory.  Using real radioactive materials, one could witness mist trails created by particles of ionizing radiation.

The set included four Uranium bearing ore samples, and originally sold for $49.50.  That would be $400 in today’s dollars.

Gilbert atomic science set COMP

[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, and James H. Burns for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]

295 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 2/5/16 The Rough Guide To Neveryon-Neveryon Land

  1. Oh cripes.
    Soup is inherently better than stew.
    Pancakes should be savory not sweet. Maple syrup is an abomination.

    I can think of more?

  2. @JJ: Just say “bad self-published authors”. People may then interpret it as bad behavior, bad writing, or both. We’ll know you’re not talking about people like Oor Wombat, and the perps won’t know they’re being insulted because Dunning-Kruger.

    I knew who you were talking about, because I know the sorts of people who churn out crap for money, try to game the algorithms, post inflated reviews of their buddies’ work on Amazon and Goodreads, split one book into many, etc. I never for a moment thought you were talking about Wombat, Laura, Simon, et al. Who are, in any case, perfectly able to stand up for themselves and could elegantly smack down anyone who needs it (or snub them tastefully).

    Thanks to… I think it was Hal’s Buddy? who pointed out all us oldies hit the space bar with our right thumbs because we had to have the left available for carriage return! (Also, 90% of us are right-handed)

    You kids today will never realize the astounding joy we felt upon getting word processors and being able to add words or paragraphs here and there without retyping a whole page.
    Or for those of us who were ahead of the curve on having word processing instead of typewriters, being able to fudge the margins ever so slightly to make your college reports come out the proper number of pages before professors caught onto that sort of thing. Even having a 10 point vs. 12 point font available and adjusting the margins by 1/10th of an inch could make the difference. Having Luddite teachers who were impressed by spellcheck, no correction fluid, and right justification saved me a lot of editing back then. 🙂

    I learned to type in… hoo, 1979? and we had a 1 key on our Selectrics. The teacher did say that some old typewriters didn’t, but we’d probably never have to worry about it, just type lowercase L on the off chance we were suddenly forced to use grandma’s manual beastie. Heck, I remember mom’s old manual even had a 1 and she was quite happy about it; she’d hated the ones that didn’t, esp, when typing up accounting invoices and such (turn shift lock off, move hand away from number row, type “l”, reverse process for all other numbers). She always said typewriters were complex enough and already had enough keys that it seemed stupid not to have a 1 key there too.
    And boy, did she ever love word processing after learning to type manual!
    Sudden flashback: typewriter eraser crumbs!

  3. I’m sorry, but those books are riddled with factual errors.

    Looking at the linked discussion, I’m not seeing them claiming that the book is riddled with errors so much as saying that things aren’t explained as well as they could be. And in some cases, what they are claiming the book said isn’t actually what is in the book, so their “fact-checking” may not be quite as good as what you seem to think it is. Granted, some of the statements they are claiming were made by Cushman may have been in the initial edition, but in my copy, there is nothing like any of the errors that are claimed the book has. For example, the picture of the merged Arena has a disclaimer in the caption stating it may be fan art. The criticisms of Cushman’s analysis of the Nielsen ratings are simply incorrect, as he does address the things they say he does not, and so on.

  4. @CKCharles:

    Oh cripes.
    Soup is inherently better than stew.
    Pancakes should be savory not sweet. Maple syrup is an abomination.

    I can think of more?

    Every one of these is wrong, but it’s a valiant effort. I’ll add…

    Which is better, Star Wars or DC?
    Who could beat, Hulk or Lizzie Bennett?
    David Bowie’s real legacy is as an actor rather than a musician amirite?

  5. My parents had (and still have in their basement somewhere, I suspect) a typewriter dating from the 1950s. It definitely had a 1 key.

    (13) This reminds me of a couple of TV skits by German comedian Loriot a.k.a. Vicco von Bülow which include a toy called a “Build your own nuclear reactor kit” as a sort of running gag. The toy reactor eventually experiences a meltdown shortly after being unpacked on Christmas Eve and blows a hole into the floor of the apartment of the unlucky recipients. The skits date from 1978, i.e. a time when nuclear power was already controversial in Germany and the idea of a nuclear toy was completely absurd. Now I wonder whether Loriot ever came across one of those Gilbert sets, even though I strongly suspect they were never available over here.

    The skits featuring the “Build your own nuclear reactor” toy can be found on YouTube BTW, though I suspect they don’t make a whole lot of sense, if you don’t speak German.

  6. Okay, so #1 Nutella and bananas is clearly sweet.
    (Also, the best thing for pancakes is my mom’s canned rhubarb (which I think came up earlier in a discussion about “real” pie) and if you disagree you are wrong, because rhubarb is the best.)

    @Jim Henley: no, no. We will not be diverted into irrelevancies.

  7. Maple syup is the elixir of life. Especially boiled until thick, poured over snow, and served with a dill pickle spear. Yes you read that right.

  8. lurkertype: Just say “bad self-published authors”. People may then interpret it as bad behavior, bad writing, or both. We’ll know you’re not talking about people like Oor Wombat, and the perps won’t know they’re being insulted because Dunning-Kruger.

    But I don’t think that would be accurate. I don’t think it’s correct to assume that the writing of the self-published authors who engage in this sort of aggressive self-promotion is necessarily “bad” — and I don’t think that engaging in this sort of self-promotion is necessarily “bad”.

    As Aaron pointed out earlier, asking people to be good judges of whether their own writing is “Hugo-worthy” is an utterly unrealistic expectation. I reckon Oor Wombat would not make that claim of her own work — and yet many of us would disagree.

    Look, self-published authors are going to promote themselves in any way they deem appropriate and potentially effective. That’s fine.

    The problem, I think, rests inherently with GoodReads, which has positioned itself as a promotional tool for authors, rather than as a reference tool for readers.

    And I’m cool with that. I know that GoodReads lists are not going to provide me the sort of recommendations I can use — which is why I use the recommendations of Filers, and of bloggers whose judgment I’ve come to trust, for my reading recommendations.

    And I just need to be more careful, and thoughtful, of how I refer to self-published authors, when what I am really referring to are venues where author self-promotion runs unbridled.

  9. The Filers (say) putting the “slated” File 770 (say) above No Award despite it being “on a slate” might still not be enough to defeat Noah if other groups do the opposite (and many rank other nominees higher than File 770). Just food for thought, really.

    If File 770 makes it as a finalist, I doubt it will finish below No Award. I just don’t think the numbers are there, even with RP + SP + those who NA everything on an RP/SP slate. I think that third category is going to be rather small this year since Mr. Xanadu is mushing up the usual Castalia picks with nominees that can be found in other “best of the year” lists anyway. The voters showed that they could see past that tactic with Guardians of the Galaxy last year.

  10. The passion people display for the serial (or Oxford) comma vs. the standard (or Cambridge) comma is another thing I’ll never understand. I use the Oxford comma because I’m an American, and it’s generally taught in American schools, while, as I understand it, the Cambridge comma is generally taught in UK schools. I don’t think either one is morally superior, though. For every example I’ve ever seen of the standard comma being misleading, I’ve been able to compose an equally misleading near-equivalent using the serial comma. And vice versa!

    “This book is dedicated to my mother, Ayn Rand, and God.”

    “Ayn Rand is your mother? Boy that Oxford comma sure is a horrible thing if it can allow an ambiguity like that!”

    (This bit of dialog is intended as a joke, in case anyone is unclear on the concept.)

    So, yes, I do use the Oxford comma, but, like bacon, sometimes people’s fervor about the topic makes me wish I didn’t. 🙂

  11. The computer that I had at home as a teenager was a Commodore 128 (many hours of F-19 Stealth Fighter and some AH-64 Apache game). I used it for some school/university work. One of it’s oddities was that +spacebar didn’t produce a space. To this day, it takes conscious effort to _not_ lift my finger off the if I am doing a short sequence of capitals with a space in the middle!

    My first year of high school (1981), everyone had to take one of Typing or Tech Drawing. My father wisely encouraged me to do typing, knowing I would be using a computer in the future. What’s more, I listened!
    I wasn’t very good, but it has stood me in good stead. Being only boy in the class was an unexpected bonus!

  12. Oh, and there was an Amazing Race challenge a few seasons back where they had to type something on typewriters that really were so old that they didn’t have a 1 key. Took them a while to figure out the L trick.

  13. CK Charles: And NO condiments on hot dogs!

    Re typing: I never took typing in school, being of the generation when women were being advised not to do so lest they be stuck forever in the secretarial pool. My typing is entirely self-taught, and since there was no earthly reason to put more than 1 space after a period, I never picked up the habit.

    I do, however, have another odd habit which AFAIK is idiosyncratic. When I was much younger than high school, my parents let me play around with their old manual typewriter, and tried to teach me touch-typing. But my young pinkies weren’t strong enough to fully depress the keys on a manual typewriter, so I learned to use my ring fingers for the “pinkie” keys, a habit which still persists even though I’ve been typing on computer keyboards for over half my life. I type a fairly steady 40 WPM with remarkably few errors, although much of the latter is due to the Backspace key!

  14. I do love the title for this Scroll but now I have Enter Sandman running round my head incessantly.

  15. @Lee: “Have you considered getting a font editor? Then you could fix things like the colon height and the kerning issues once and for all, and be able to trust the font thereafter.”

    Considered, yes. Seriously, no.

    There is a nonzero cost of time and money involved in getting and learning to use such software, and my impression is that (a) that time would not be billable, whereas the current routine is, and (b) neither of those costs is trivial. If that impression is incorrect, though…

    @JJ: “I don’t actually have a problem with self-published authors. I’m not “taking a dig at them” here.”

    That sounded nice, right up to the point where you said:

    What I am “taking a dig” at is the propensity of self-published authors to take anything they can and turn it into a marketing tool for themselves and their works. Again, I absolutely understand why they’re doing this.

    That is absolutely “taking a dig at self-published authors.” You have taken the activities of a relative few and tarred all self-pub writers with the same brush by saying they all do it. That’s a baseless insult, and one for which you should apologize.

    I don’t think anyone is defending the behavior of the louts who do what you describe, but pretending they are a representative sample of self-pubbers is akin to saying that MRAs are representative of men, or that all Muslims are terrorists. It’s offensive, and frankly I had thought you were above that.

    And, from a later comment:

    I don’t think it’s correct to assume that the writing of the self-published authors who engage in this sort of aggressive self-promotion is necessarily “bad” — and I don’t think that engaging in this sort of self-promotion is necessarily “bad”.

    So why did you “take a dig” at their “propensity” to do so?

    The problem, I think, rests inherently with GoodReads, which has positioned itself as a promotional tool for authors, rather than as a reference tool for readers.

    [citation needed]

    You have now shifted your position from blaming Those Evil Self-Pubbers for exploiting Goodreads to blaming Goodreads for getting abused. Your brush is still offensively oversized.

    And I just need to be more careful, and thoughtful, of how I refer to self-published authors. when what I am really referring to are venues where author self-promotion runs unbridled.

    FTFY.

  16. It’s not an ‘oath’ – there’s nothing and no one to give an oath to.
    It’s not a blacklist – you can’t be disenfranchised by participating or not participating.

    Stalinist? Heh heh. Would that it were and my last name was really Dzhugashvilli. All I’d have had to do was give a nod to Beria (not even a word, just a nod) and this whole thing would have been over three years ago.

  17. Rev. Bob: I’m on my way out, and I don’t have time to do justice to a response right now, so I will come back to this later. But I will point out that you are claiming that I am saying these things about all self-published authors, when that is not at all how I worded it.

    What I have done is make observations about what I see happening at Goodreads, pointing out why it’s fine for authors to do what they’re doing, but why it’s not helpful for readers like me. I don’t think that is “taking a dig”. (I was quoting someone else there.) I think you are assuming that I am making value judgments about these authors, when I am not doing so.

    You’re calling these people “louts”. I don’t think that they are. I think they are merely doing whatever they can to promote themselves and their books, in whatever venues are available to them.

    And nowhere did I “pretend they are a representative sample of self-pubbers”. They are simply the people I see doing this on GoodReads, and I did not presume to say what percentage of all self-pubbed authors they might be.

    Yes, I suppose I could preface every sentence with “I’m not saying that they all do this…” — but really, is that necessary? Isn’t it a given? Isn’t that just as much a given as when I express my opinion here, it is my opinion, and I shouldn’t have to preface every single thing I say with “This is just my opinion…”?

  18. lurkertype

    When I was at Rice, working in the library, I needed a working typewriter (as opposed to the one that was there when I came), and they showed me to a small group of machines that I might choose from, all used. The one that came closest to working was a British machine of some sort — it had the Pound sign — and it was unique among typewriters I’ve seen in not having a ‘one’ OR a ‘zero’ key. I don’t recall doing it, but if I’d had to type a dollar sign, I’d have adapting the venerable exclamation point kludge taught me in typing class around 1970 of holding the space bar down while typing an apostrophe and a period, only with an S and an I. (Speaking of apostrophes, the one on that typewriter wasn’t over the 8, either. It had a keyboard layout I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since.)

    For me, the joy of word processors was not having to retype an entire paper or letter for a professor each time he wanted to change a line. One in particular edited ‘on the typist,’ asking for one complete draft after another, apparently unable to contemplate his words until he saw them in finished form, after which he could think of new changes to try. I would have hated working for him without a word processor. I did anyway. He was a jerk.

    I used to type audiological papers for a friend on my mom’s little portable (which had Spanish characters that she’d had put on in college), filling in the special symbols by hand with a #2 Rapidograph. After I typed the last one, I gave him a bonus one where I analyzed his papers in the same way, pointing out his use of a secret language he made up with little characters all his own, which he told me he shared with his professor.

    Lee

    One of my bosses at University of Houston had managed to avoid the entire secretarial track in her career by the simple expedient of being born with one hand. I can’t recommend this method to others, because by the time I might tell them that, it’s already too late.

  19. JJ — Maybe you should try the experiment of prefixing every statement you make here that mentions a group of people with an explicit quantifier: “all men are mortal”, “most hobbits like to eat”, “many orcs serve Sauron”, “some elves stop by the shop Wednesday evenings”, “at least one troll sends me hate-mail”. Just to see. I know it seems clunky, but think of it as an exercise, like writing without using the letter “e”, or inserting acrostics.

  20. @JJ: “But I will point out that you are claiming that I am saying these things about all self-published authors, when that is not at all how I worded it.”

    When you say “self-published authors” with no qualifiers, you are by default talking about the entire group. That’s how the language works. Your precipitating comment:

    Anyone can add anything to a list, regardless of whether it’s eligible (published in the correct year, belongs to the appropriate genre) — and once the self-pubbed authors find a list and start adding all their works to it and upvoting each other, whatever usefulness it might have had goes right out the window.

    “The self-pubbed authors.” No qualifiers. No limitations. By definition, that means all of ’em. People read that as an indictment of all self-published authors because that is what those words mean.

    If you don’t mean “all,” look into acquiring the habit of saying one form or another of “some.”

    Yes, I suppose I could preface every sentence with “I’m not saying that they all do this…” — but really, is that necessary? Isn’t it a given?

    Let me see if I can illustrate this in a way you might more readily “get”…

    Arabs are terrorists.

    Yes, I suppose I could preface that sentence with “I’m not saying that they all are…” — but really, is that necessary? Isn’t it a given?

    No, it isn’t. The language doesn’t work that way.

    That statement assigns a description to, if not every last member of the group “Arabs,” then at least the overwhelming majority of them. It is a claim that the trait is so commonplace in the named group that group members without it are rare and noteworthy exceptions. Your use of “self-pubbed authors” follows the same model; you depicted everyone who publishes their own work as being shitty people who do shitty things to promote themselves.

    You did wrong. Own the mistake and fucking apologize for insulting hundreds of thousands of innocent indie authors who would never think of stooping to such slimy measures to sell an extra couple of books.

  21. I see we’re on another mission to extract an apology out of someone. That’s becoming one of the defining traits of File 770. And when I say “we,” obviously I mean every single person here with no exceptions. Because that’s how the language works. There’s no such thing as assuming that people are generally reasonable. Everything we say should be interpreted to have the most extreme meaning possible. JJ insulted every single self-published author, just like Irene Gallo called every person sympathetic to the puppies a Nazi.

  22. JJ: Instead of “self-pubbed authors,” one could say something like “once the aggressive self-promoters” or “aggressive authors.” Then your focus on the specific behavior is clear.

  23. I understood exactly what JJ meant in his first comment about Goodreads and did not see it as an attack on all self published authors. But it might help that I have seen my fill of it going on at Goodreads.

    And I have a lower opinion of it then JJ. Because I see it as an insult to their potential readers. That we are too stupid to see the manipulation and can be lead around by our noses. So as a publicity tool it sucks since the only thing it does is kill any interest I might have in reading any of their works.

  24. @Jim:

    Just about any qualifier would’ve been better than tarring the whole group by not using one at all.

    @rcade:

    Consider that I work for what is essentially a small press* and moonlight as an indie editor. It kind of stands to reason that I’m conversant with the self-pub scene; I’m part of it. I know authors who put a lot of effort into making their self-published work as good as it can possibly be. At least one of those authors is a Filer. (I also know authors who crank out crap because they know a few people will buy it. I understand their perspective, but strongly disagree with it.) When someone insults my friends, I notice.

    Sometimes it’s a fair cop; indie fiction has a largely-earned reputation for sub-par quality, especially in certain genres. This persists despite a growing number of exceptions (works and creators), some of which have high profiles (ditto). I can’t fault someone for noticing the trend. I’ve ranted about it myself, and it’s a significant enough problem that Amazon is taking steps to address it in the Kindle store… but I digress.

    In this case, though, JJ took the actions of a few bad apples and used them to smear the whole group. That’s not fair, it is wrong, and it does merit an apology. “The self-pubbed authors” are crapping on GR lists in the same way that “the environmentalists” are chaining themselves to trees – a small, vocal group is guilty of it, but many more think those obnoxious people make the rest of them look bad.

    Snark all you like, but the truth is the truth. JJ’s assertion is of the same caliber as the Puppy article of faith that the Hugos have been rigged for the last however-many-they-say-this-week years. It’s a whopper of an untruth**, and it’s insulting. The proper course of action when one inadvertently insults someone is to apologize. That’s all I’m saying: he insulted a whole bunch of people who don’t deserve it, and he should acknowledge his error rather than blame those who read it for not understanding him correctly.

    * Generally speaking, print runs on RPG supplements are pretty damn low.
    ** The vast majority of self-pub authors aren’t even on Goodreads, let alone actively abusing its tools for shady marketing purposes.

  25. @Aaron

    Thank you for responding to the comments about These Are the Voyages. I slogged through 9 pages of comments on that BBS and found only that they didn’t like his analysis of the Nielsen data. I’m no data analyst and felt he was overreaching in some statements, but he was still the first author to actually research and provide this data. Also, he demonstrated what I felt was his central point, that ratings ALONE do not explain why ST TOS was cancelled. Old people like me remember years of defensives execs claiming that the cancellation wasn’t their fault because of poor ratings.

    This point also ignores what I felt were the greatest strengths of the book, the interviews, over decades. The interviews with people not normally interviewed, like the lighting guy. Placing the show in context by providing information about the TV shows, movies, songs and news stories of the day. I am nominating it for Best Related Work.

    Re spacing, I type very fast and hit the space bar twice because that’s how I learned. The fastest most accurate typists were the generation before me that learned on a manual typywriter. I learned on an electric typewriter but correction meant retyping the letter from scratch.

    On spacing, this tablet inserts two spaces between each word if I use the auto correct, so my OCD prevents me from using it…

  26. When someone insults my friends, I notice.

    And when no one insults your friends, you also notice. Unless your friends are ruining GoodReads or another service with excessive self-promotion and cross-networking, you can safely exclude them from JJ’s generalization. That’s how a reasonable person would have interpreted his comment. You’ve shot past reasonable, particularly in demanding that he “fucking apologize.” Directing profanity at somebody when you are seeking an apology for discourteousness is fucking hilarious.

    Self-published authors make Twitter suck for me. I have the word “author” in my profile so I get follows from their bots more than I do actual humans, and if I make the mistake of following one I get a direct message auto-response promoting their book. They’re only engaging me to pimp themselves, and that gets old. I assume when I get a follow from an author on Twitter it’s a self-promotion bot, and I bet people falsely think that of me too.

    At this point, per your position I should indicate that I am not talking about all self-published authors.

    But you just called self-published authors your “friends” when you didn’t mean every single one of them is your personal friend, so it’s obvious you know how a generalization works.

    I think you could’ve challenged his generalization without reading it so broadly as to take personal offense on behalf of your friends.

  27. @rcade: “But you just called self-published authors your “friends” when you didn’t mean every single one of them is your personal friend, so it’s obvious you know how a generalization works.”

    (sigh) No, I did no such thing. I could dissect my paragraph in detail, maybe talk a little about how subsets work, but you have just convinced me that the exercise would be futile. Maybe a quick substitution, though…

    Unless your friends are ruining GoodReads or another service with excessive self-promotion and cross-networking, you can safely exclude them from JJ’s generalization.

    “Unless your Catholic friends are actually abducting kids, you can safely exclude them from that ‘once the Catholics find a playground full of kids and start forcing them into their vans’ generalization.”

    Right. Suuuuure you can. Because that “I’m only talking about the specific people who actually do that, and not the much larger group to which they belong” language is totally in there. I’m sure you’ll be delighted to point it out.

    It’s bullshit, and you know it’s bullshit.

    Hell, I’ll grant that maybe JJ didn’t mean to insult every self-published author on the planet with his poor choice of words. Maybe it was just a brain fart, a simple mistake. Such things happen. That doesn’t make it any better. The proper course is still to own up to the mistake and apologize for it.

    Case in point: In “Weird Al” Yankovic’s recent “Word Crimes” song, he used the term “spastic” without realizing that it’s an offensive slur. People confronted him about it, and he apologized. It didn’t take much: “I didn’t know. Deeply sorry.” He acknowledged the mistake, took responsibility, and apologized, all in one tweet. He didn’t try to shift the blame to the people he offended or make excuses to weasel out of it.

    Oh, and FYI – I know self-published authors who abhor Twitter bots for exactly the reason you describe. I feel the same way; I am far less likely to follow someone who uses a bot.

  28. @Rev Bob

    Snark all you like, but the truth is the truth. JJ’s assertion is of the same caliber as the Puppy article of faith that the Hugos have been rigged for the last however-many-they-say-this-week years. It’s a whopper of an untruth**, and it’s insulting. The proper course of action when one inadvertently insults someone is to apologize. That’s all I’m saying: he insulted a whole bunch of people who don’t deserve it, and he should acknowledge his error rather than blame those who read it for not understanding him correctly.

    This. I feel like we are being hypocrites if we do the same thing the puppy leaders do just to different groups. And once you’ve done something wrong and had it pointed out apologize.

    Try changing “self-published author” with “women” or “blacks” and keep in mind this group is still struggling to be taken seriously as authors. Would you still say leave off the qualifier in the comment your about to post? If you knew friends of yours from that group were going to read it would you word it differently? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you’d take out the entire section.

    JJ insists on reading my comments as written because they “can’t read my mind”. Well I can’t read JJ’s mind. Do they mean all self-published authors or just some. Since typing some or any qualifier is not worth it to JJ it looks like disdain for fellow filers and lurkers who are self-published authors to me since this is a frequent accusation thrown at self-published authors as a group to discredit them. I’d normally give JJ benefit of the doubt of this but they have made it clear that they are knowledgeable in this area.

    JJ could have said: Many Goodreads list have a problem with a lack of moderation, some members not reading the list criteria only the title and getting carried away with favorite books, some authors over promoting, so books added don’t meet the list requirements. Because of this I find GR lists useless. I haven’t looked at the Hugo list mentioned so I don’t know if this particular list has these problems or not.

    I believe the above accurately describes the problem JJ has with the list on GR including information he left off which is readers who ignore criteria. Yes list for 2016 where readers have added books from 2011, 2012, 1995… This one annoys me more than the over-promoting author. Unlike the over-promoting author I can’t drop a helpful GR message with links to articles about “using GR as an author”.

  29. @Rev. Bob: You already got your apology:

    I am happy to consider that when I refer to self-published authors, I need to take more care in how I say it.

    If I have offended any of the wonderful Filers here who self-publish, with the way I worded my complaints about the way the Goodreads lists are manipulated for promotional purposes, I wholeheartedly apologize, without reservation.

    How could that possibly not have been enough for you?

  30. lurkertype: “You kids today will never realize the astounding joy we felt upon getting word processors and being able to add words or paragraphs here and there without retyping a whole page.”

    You have just bodily flung me down Memory Lane.

    I typed my dad’s manuscripts for $0.50/page as a teenager–and a mistake halway down the page (or more) that couldn’t easily be corrected by white-out meant a lot of wasted work and a lower hourly pay scale, so accuracy was important. When I went to college, I got a job typing students’ final papers for them, for $1/page.

    I wrote my first 3 romance novels (two of which I sold) by hand in notebooks, since rewriting them by typewriter was much too cumbersome. (I am much more of a rewriter than a writer.) Especially because, while writing those books, my typewriter was an old manual one, not electric, so typing was not easy–I could type 8-10 pages a day before my fingers gave out, sore from how hard I had to hit the keys.

    Even after word processors made writing physically and logistically much easier, we were still printing MSs for years, so we still did a lot of pasting and clipping on the revised versions, if an editor just wanted half a page here or a paragraph there revised. (Printing was slow, ink was expensive, and if you had to reprint an entire MS for just a few revisions, add in paper and shipping costs and it seemed too expensive to do if only a few minor changes had been requested.)

    Life is SO MUCH EASIER now that we not only work on computers, but also send attached files to editors instead of printed MSs. (Particularly true of huge novels where the MSs as 800-1000-1400 pages. Among other things, I used to have to send 2-3 print copies (editor, agent, subagent) and check every copy, page by page, to make sure it all printed, since printers hiccuped and missed pages now and then. This is take a full day.)

  31. Sometimes, I do think people should believe a bit better of each other. And instead of insisiting you said ask Did you mean this when you wroye that?

    It would stop people from getting defensive, locking themselves to their arguments and make it easier to correct themselves. I really think there is too much unecessary confrontation.

    Just sayin’.

  32. Rev. Bob: Googling “freeware font editor” produced quite a few results. I can’t speak to ease of use or whether any of them would actually meet your needs, but my partner (who works with fonts a lot) suggested that FontForge would be a place to start looking.

    Kip: You were at UofH? When was that? (bemused by the smallness of worlds)

  33. The thing to keep in mind about self-published authors these days, in the year 2016, is that talking about “self-published authors” is like talking about “people who live in democracies” or “people who eat meat.” It’s a huge and very varied population (though, okay, not as huge as the two examples I just gave).

    Annoying self-published writers who make pests of themselves online create an overwhelming (and negative) impression of self-published writers because they are very, very visible. I encounter them often even in the relative safety of my FB page, where strangers friend me and then (agh!) sometimes turn out to be aggressively self-promoting self-pubs rather than mere trolls or perverts, and they lob me requests for endorsements, urge my FB friends to buy their book, leave posts indicating that reading their book will soothe or solve whatever world news or annoying personal incident I post about that day, etc., etc.

    I can’t stand these people. NO ONE can stand these people. I unfriend them when I spot them on FB, mute them when I spot them on Twitter, and run off screaming for dear life when I meet them in person.

    But that’s only one type of self-pub. Unfortunately, it just happens to be a very (VERY) visible type.

    I know a LOT of self-publishing writers. Sometimes they’re traditionally published writers going “hybrid” (i.e. now doing self-pub, too, alongside their traditional careers). Sometimes they’re traditionally published writers leaving tradpub completely and going indie full-time (I did an article for NINK about this maybe 18 months ago, and the list I had at the time included a number of NYT bestsellers who’d decided they were tired of dealing with publishers), though portions of their backlists will remain under publisher control for years or decades to come. Sometimes they’re writers who’ve never written for (sometimes, never even submitted to) a traditional publisher, they started out as indie and kept going. Sometimes they’re indies whose success means that publishers have courted them and made deals; this is still not the norm, NOT because there aren’t many successful indies (there are, in fact, quite a LOT of them), but for multiple other reasons (ex.successful indies often decline to surrender rights for terms and percentages they don’t like, and publishers often aren’t willing to negotiate).

    I know indies making modest income, making an income similar to a salaried professional, making six-figures per year, and making seven figures per year. There are LOT of writers doing extremely well in indie, but going indie (or starting out in indie and doing well) didn’t change their personalities so much that they’re inclined to start talking about their writing income in public forums, so it’s a whole economy that’s not that well known to readers–or even to publishers, since none of the traditional venues that examine book sales include indie sales. It’s a shadow economy. (However, Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings is analyzing it, if anyone’s interested.)

    So when someone says “self-published writer,” that’s a very, very broad, general phrase.

  34. @Hampus Eckerman instead of insisiting you said ask Did you mean this when you wroye that?

    Yes but… LOL. I did start out asking if “thought about” which to my mind was asking but wasn’t taken as asking and I did apologize for not being clearer and reworded things.

    So I think it’s a both sides thing. Following your advice and also taking a few moments to look at what one wrote and consider the other side rather than jumping to defensive mode might make the world a nicer place.

    @Laura
    Thanks. Very helpful. I love Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings and the various controversies each time it’s published. Do you self-pub some of your backlist or am I misremembering?

  35. When you say “self-published authors” with no qualifiers, you are by default talking about the entire group. That’s how the language works.

    No, it’s not. It’s one way it can work.

    If I talk about how every morning, the birds set up a cheeping outside my window that makes me rise with murder in my heart,* I am not by default talking about all the birds in the world unless I add qualifiers.

    When my daughter brings in the mail after school, she is not bringing in all the mail in the world because she neglected qualifiers.

    We often imply or infer qualifiers even when they’re not directly stated. I think in the two statements above, we understand the qualifiers even though they’re not there. In JJ’s comments, I think it’s also possible to understand qualifiers, which does not meant it’s a requirement. But to say that without expressed qualifiers, one is by default talking about the entire set is not how the language works. It’s one of the ways it can work.

    Yes, on the one side of the equation, you can say “Imagine if you said the same thing about ‘blacks’ or ‘jews’ or ‘gays.'”

    And on the other, you have the #NotAllMen folks, who insist that every time you mention men doing or saying bad things to women, you must go on to absolve them of the charge, because they have translated “men do this” to “all men do this,” either because they’re so focused on themselves they can’t see straight or they’re deliberately trying to derail the conversation.

    “Some” is a qualifier that can be added. “All” is one as well. Neither is required to be assumed.

    There is a scale to this, of course, where at one end we have a clear interest in avoiding sexism or racism and so forth, and on the other end shouldn’t need to construct casual speech in such a way as to avoid offending MRAs.

    Where JJ’s comments fall on that scale will register differently with different people, as we have seen. JJ’s already said they have to think about how to make such comments in the future, which is probably laudable.

    My gripe is in insisting that casual English has one interpretation, that there’s one way the language works. You can cite examples where it works that way, but it doesn’t erase the instances where it doesn’t.

    *no worries; they don’t. There are some goddamn frogs and crickets on the summer nights, though…

  36. Do you self-pub some of your backlist or am I misremembering?

    I do. I’m not happy with the results for far, so I’m changing some things. And I still have 4-5 old books I need to edit, format, package and post.

    Then I would really like to move on to self-publishing new/original material. I am happy writing for DAW Books and hope to continue writing for them for years, but my goal is to become a true hybrid author, balancing my time between traditional and indie publishing, increasing my revenue sources, and experimenting with new possibilities.

    I don’t believe traditional publishing will disappear, but I do think that the more technology changes and distribution channels increase, the more the indie market will continue expanding.

    Additionally, in my own case, DAW Books is the first/only publishing house, in a long and tough writing career, where I have indeed been happy. Every publisher I dealt with before DAW treated me as (at the “good” end of the spectrum) a necessary nuisance or (at the other end) a crack whore. And my books were typically treated (at the “good” end of the spectrum) as hole-filler for the publishing schedule or (at the other end) as street garbage.

    I tried twice to quit writing in the 20 years before I signed with DAW, and it was specifically because I didn’t want to go through the rest of my life being treated the way publishers kept treating me, rather than because I was tired of writing. (Not being tired of writing was why I wound up coming back after a year or so, each time.)

    So if I were not currently with DAW, I’d probably be an “indie all the way!” advocate (for my books, at least), because the thriving indie market is the answer to what I (and thousands of other writers) endured for years from publishing houses. Self-publishing is a way to reach the broad reader market without being robbed of our rights while being treated like crack whores and seeing our work published with all the engagement and skill you’d normally expect from a plank of wood.

    (It should be noted that Doug Preston’s Authors United is mostly comprised of writers who, like Doug, have been treated very well by the traditional publishing system, who have benefited substantially from it, and who are either unaware or unconcerned that most of us have been treated very, very badly by that same system and are very, very glad to have other options available to us now for reaching readers and earning income from our writing.)

  37. P.S. If you have no idea what I mean by “Doug Preston’s Authors United,” good for you! It has become almost as tedious as the Puppies, though less toxic.

    Anyhow, very short version: Longtime NYT bestseller Douglas Preston is de facto spokesperson for writers who want to protect the traditional publishing system and who think Amazon is a danger to readers and writers. They’ve published public letters to that effect, including one to the DoJ in which they urged an anti-trust investigation of Amazon. (The DoJ letter contained the exact same claims and fabrications already refuted and disproved multiple times. )

  38. @Laura
    I believe the first books I read by you were your self-published ones. I’d “met” you on PG and Scalzi and a few other places & knew who your dad was and thought I should pick up something by you. The self-pub was priced right and I gobbled those up and have been working my way through everything else since. DAW does nice appropriate covers for the books I’ve read and a number of their authors thank editors in the end of the books which I take as a good sign of being helpful.

    Unfortunately I knew who you were talking about. Authors United is a bit biased IMHO but I might think like them if I’d lived their lives. I’d like to think not but its hard to walk in someone else’s shoes when you know they are wrong, wrong, wrong.

    I do wish Amazon would get a real competitor. One who could create a stable, searchable, store with a nice GUI for authors/artists, publishers, and consumers. No one else seems to be able to create stable, searchable, usable store. I really thought by now we’d have 3-4 competitors given the billions of dollars spent on books, comics, music, art, games every year.

  39. I really thought by now we’d have 3-4 competitors given the billions of dollars spent on books, comics, music, art, games every year.

    It’s likely that competitors will rise from areas other than books, so that they can build an audience before being in such direct competition with Amazon. And once they look like a growing success, like Comixology, Amazon will buy them.

  40. Lee

    We moved to Houston in ’83, and soon after, I started working at the U of H main campus, in the physics department. It was ’85 when we left, and for the last six months of that I’d been working the interlibrary loan department in the library at Rice, where I relocated when it became apparent no raises were in the cards for a while, so till ’84 or ’85.

    There were three awful orange work chairs in the physics department, and if I ever managed to get one adjusted to where it was tolerable and stable, they’d switch and I couldn’t find my chair again. Then the Controller said there was a little money left in the budget, and I asked for a chair. Some time later, they said I could go pick a chair from the catalog. The catalog had every possible combination of features in the world, colors, styles, adjustments, number of wheels… it was a vast, overwhelming, overlapping kaleidoscope of chair possibilities. The chair universe. Despite blurring over repeatedly, I finally chose and ordered a chair. Months later, I changed jobs and went to Rice. The day before I left, the chair arrived. I think I ran into my replacement one time, and she said she really liked that chair. I could be imagining that.

  41. @Kurt Busiek
    Is there an area Amazon isn’t the first place consumers in America go to buy anything in?

    I had mixed feelings when Comixology was bought by Amazon. Sad mostly that another good independent was taken over. A little happy that a number of my graphic novels could now be read on Comixology.

    I had high expectations for B&N, Kobo, iBooks, Google is the search engine experts, heck Shmaswords has had years to upgrade its interface for real. I know database and front end design are hard but not impossible. Amazon has done it so we know it’s possible.

    Google has the backend expertise they just needed to hire GUI experts and a few people with a clue about book sales – maybe Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Although the two might have required a mega dollars up front to take on the consulting job knowing they’d be ignored if they asked for less and to make it worth their time.

    ETA: $$$ to be less ridiculous

  42. Kip: Okay, you slightly overlap my partner’s arrival in Houston, and were probably gone by the time he was taking classes at UofH as a retread.

  43. Is there an area Amazon isn’t the first place consumers in America go to buy anything in?

    Maybe. There was a time I could say “digital comics!”

    If there are others, well, if an e-retailer grows in that area, the money, she will be offered.

  44. Rev. Bob, I don’t agree at all with your statement: When you say “self-published authors” with no qualifiers, you are by default talking about the entire group. That’s how the language works.

    As Kurt Busiek pointed out: We often imply or infer qualifiers even when they’re not directly stated. I think in the two statements above, we understand the qualifiers even though they’re not there. In JJ’s comments, I think it’s also possible to understand qualifiers, which does not meant it’s a requirement. But to say that without expressed qualifiers, one is by default talking about the entire set is not how the language works. It’s one of the ways it can work.

    When Puppies got so angry at Irene Gallo, insisting that they were all smeared by what she said, most people here seemed to recognize that her statement referred to those who had behaved in that way, and not all Puppies.

    I personally find the #NotAllPuppies sort of nitpicking extremely tiresome, so when someone makes a statement, unless they say “all”, I am not going to assume that they actually mean “all”. As Hampus so beautifully said, if I suspect that they do mean “all”, then I am going to ask if that’s what they really meant, rather than insist to them that it clearly must be what they meant. I would like to ask for the same consideration from you and the other people here.

    You are demanding that I apologize further than I already have, for the way that you have chosen to interpret my words, not for what I actually said.

    I will reiterate the apology I made earlier:

    I am happy to consider that when I refer to self-published authors, I need to take more care in how I say it.

    If I have offended any of the wonderful Filers here (or authors anywhere) who self-publish, with the way I worded my complaints about the way the Goodreads lists are manipulated for promotional purposes, I wholeheartedly apologize, without reservation.

  45. @Hampus Eckerman
    But, but, it’s always about me isn’t it? ROTFL I guess I need to take that “don’t be so defensive” advice myself.

    @Kurt Busiek
    If you come across a great eretailer of any product which meets my simple requirements please share so I can help them grow. I love Amazon but I also love having choices.

    What I’m reading now: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street I’m about 40% of the way through. I can see what others like but it’s not doing much for me so far. I meant to ask about trigger warnings. Should I be expecting anything that falls on my usual complaint list? Violence/abuse towards women, children, POC, animals, self-abuse…

  46. The Watchmaker of Filigree Street I’m about 40% of the way through. I can see what others like but it’s not doing much for me so far. I meant to ask about trigger warnings. Should I be expecting anything that falls on my usual complaint list? Violence/abuse towards women, children, POC, animals, self-abuse…

    I don’t think so. I think if you’re 40% through you’ve got a good sense of the book. Could be I’m misremembering something, but I don’t think so.

    To be fair, there is some violence coming, and since there are women, children and POC in the story, it involves them. But it isn’t “violence against” type violence, it’s more action-adventure violence with a diverse cast.

    Again, as I recall.

  47. Tasha Turner: What I’m reading now: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street I’m about 40% of the way through. I can see what others like but it’s not doing much for me so far. I meant to ask about trigger warnings. Should I be expecting anything that falls on my usual complaint list?

    I don’t know if it will feel this way to you, but because of my past real-life experience, the more I read, the more uneasy and disturbed I became. It’s not the usual suspects you list above. The only real Trigger Warning I could give is “pbafpvrapryrff, znavchyngvir fbpvbcngu”. V guvax vg’f n Ubeebe Fgbel jvgu n Pncvgny U.

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