Pixel Scroll 9/17 Second pixel to the left and straight on till Worldcon

(1) Curbed LA is not alone in thinking “The New Look of the Petersen Automotive Museum is Really Really Bad”.

petersen automotive museum

Shawn Crosby hit the nail on the head – “It looks as if the Petersen had skinned Disney Concert Hall Buffalo Bill style and is wearing its bloody outsides like a dress.”

(2) A critical headline also provides the first clue that Io9’s Germain Lussier is down on another project — “The Latest Stephen King Book To Become a Fatally Disappointing TV Show Is…”

The Mist is about how a group of citizens react when—you guessed it—a mysterious mist takes over their town, filled with horrible monsters. Both the movie and novella mostly take place in a isolated supermarket but the TV show will only use that as inspiration, and will have a larger scope.

(3) Anne and Wil Wheaton are hosting “Fancy Dinner: Burgers, Beer, and a Book” on October 20 from 6:30-9 p.m. at Crossings restaurant in South Pasadena. Admission is $100 per person. Click on the link for menu and other details.

At the end of the evening, you will get your own, autographed, advance copy of our book “A Guide To Being A Dog by Seamus Wheaton.” Proceeds from this event will be donated by Crossings to the Pasadena Humane Society to support our participation in the Wiggle Waggle Walk.

(4) This is a good example of what people look to SFWA for — Jennifer Brozek discusses “How Do You Ask For A Blurb?” on the SFWA Blog.

How do you ask for these blurbs without making a nuisance of yourself? You do your research. Many professional authors have “blurb and review” policies in place on their websites, mostly out of self-defense. An author can read only so many books when they are not writing or doing their own story research. Some of these policies may be “No. I will not blurb your book.” Some of them may be “Talk to my agent.” Whatever the posted blurb policy is… follow it. That’s the polite and correct thing to do.

If you have an agent, you can talk to them about talking to the agent of the author you’d like a blurb from. Your agent should have a decent handle on who can be approached and who should be avoided. If you don’t have an agent, you need to do things the old fashioned way: ask.

(5) Steve Davidson harkens back to his Crotchety Old Fan days with “The Things Robert Heinlein Taught Me” at Amazing Stories

What this little episode did remind me of is the fact that, in many ways, Bob served as a surrogate grandfather for me.  Both of mine passed before I’d been on this planet five years, and as anyone who has read Time Enough For Love can tell you, a rascally, unrepentant and self-assured grandfather is a must have in the proper development of the creatures we euphemistically call little boys.

And of course it then occurred to me that there were quite a few humorous (and not so humorous) lessons to be had from all of Heinlein’s books and, lacking the kind of social restraint that would undoubtedly have been passed on to me by a real-life grandfather, I have decided to share some of them with you.

(6) “The Cold Publishing Equations: Books Sold + Marketability + Love” is Kameron Hurley’s latest autobiographical post based on her royalty statements.

Being above average is important, because being average sucks —

The average book sells 3000 copies in its lifetime (Publishers Weekly, 2006).

Yes. It’s not missing a zero.

Take a breath and read that again.

But wait, there’s more!

The average traditionally published book which sells  3,000 in its entire lifetime in print only sells about 250-300 copies its first year.

But I’m going indie! you say. My odds are better!

No, grasshopper. Your odds are worse.

(7) Wallpaper Direct has a fun infographic about Doctor Who villains through time.

The role of The Doctor has been assumed by 12 respected actors, each bringing their own quirks and characteristics to the programme. Along with his Mark I Type 40 TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), the time travelling rogue has blasted his way across space, but not without gaining some enemies in the process.

From the Daleks to the Cybermen, we take a look at the most notable enemies from the Dr. Who franchise.

And they’d be thrilled to see you some wall covering from their Dr. Who Wall Mural collection.

collection925_main_

Officially licensed wallpaper murals based on the latest BBC series with Doctor Who starring Matt Smith as the Time Lord – from the company Black Dog Murals. The mural is easy to hang – paste the wall product and each is supplied in a box, with full hanging instructions. Please read the hanging instructions carefully. The mural is supplied in pre-cut lengths. The lengths are sometimes reverse rolled due to the manufacturing process. If you are in any doubt regarding direction of pattern please refer to website.

(8) Steve Davidson is back with another installment of what’s eligible for the Retro Hugos that will be voted on by next year’s Worldcon members – Part 4 – Media, specifically, the Long Form category.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, is well served in 1940.  Not necessarily because there were a lot of worthy films, but only in comparison to Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, which has to settle for serial episodes and cartoons.  Television shows were still almost a decade away.

However, when it comes to film there are a few interesting contenders, and, fortunately, the vast majority of eligible works are known and viewable, thanks largely to the Internet Archive, Youtube and copyright law.

I’m looking forward to short form, where there should be a trove of radio shows and phonograph records, too.

(9) Steven H Silver saw this today on Jeopardy!

Category:  “E” Readers

Daily Double Answer: This novel by Sinclair Lewis caused and uproar for its satiric indictment of fundamentalist religion

Question from returning champ: What is Ender’s Game?

Lost $2000.

(10) Francis Hamit’s new book Security Matters: Essays On Industrial Security is available in a Kindle edition from Amazon. Says Francis:

It’s hard reality actually from the security industry; the experiences that inform some of my fiction.  There are some dramatic moments and instances recounted and the writing is some of my best. If it were a poetry book you’d at least look at the sample.

The volume is edited by Leigh Strother-Vien and Gavin Claypool.

A collection of “Security Counterpoint” columns that originally appeared in Security Technology & Design Magazine between 1993 and 2001 about problems and concerns that are still relevant today. Francis Hamit spent 21 years in that industry in operational, sales and consulting positions.

(11) A tough day for the let’s-you-and-him-fight crowd – because John Scalzi begins “How Many Books You Should Write In a Year” with this preamble:

Folks have pointed me toward this Huffington Post piece, begging self-published authors not to write four books a year, because the author (Lorraine Devon Wilke) maintains that no mere human can write four books a year and have them be any good. This has apparently earned her the wrath of a number of people, including writer Larry Correia, who snarks apart the piece here and whose position is that a) the premise of the article is crap, and b) authors should get paid, and if four books a year gets you paid, then rock on with your bad self. I suspect people may be wanting to have me comment on the piece so I can take punches at either or both Wilke or Correia, and are waiting, popcorn at ready.

If so, you may be disappointed. With regard to Correia’s piece, Larry and I disagree on a number of issues unrelated to writing craft, but we align fairly well here, and to the extent that I’m accurately condensing his points here, we don’t really disagree.

(12) “Here’s how the first humans will live on Mars –and why traveling the 140 million miles to get there will be the easy part” – despite the headline, it’s not a story about The Martian. It’s a pointer to an eye-grabbing infographic based on TED speaker and technologist Stephen Petranek’s book on How We’ll Live on Mars.

[Thanks to Mark, Francis Hamit, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Iphinome.]

177 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/17 Second pixel to the left and straight on till Worldcon

  1. (8) It may not be YouTube linked from Davidson’s page, but The Thief of Bagdad would, in my opinion, repay one’s discerning attention. It’s a good one, is that.

    It makes little sense, to me, to nominate individual episodes of serials like Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe or The Mysterious Dr. Satan for DP(SF) – the whole serial really needs consideration for Long Form, there. I’m still ploughing through old episodes of The Shadow and radio plays from Columbia Workshop when it comes to 1941 DP(SF) nominees – radio (and other audio?) seems like the way to go, there.

  2. Rick K.: The most common off-color comment when the EMP appeared in Seattle had to do with the aftermath of a dinosaur eating a paint factory.

    Pooping Rainbows: A Pervert’s Guide to Architecture at the End of the 20th Century.

    Though why we supreme beings from the 48th Century care about the primitives of the 20th Century is beyond me.

  3. Cora Buhlert on September 17, 2015 at 7:39 pm said:
    Museum buildings tend to be really ugly these days and often unusable, too. Almost as if the architects don’t get that the museum is merely intended to display the art, but that the building isn’t actually supposed to be a sculpture itself.

    Architecture is itself an art (according to architects anyway) and museums often commission arty designs because of the synergy (it’s art inside and out!) and because an unusual building will make the museum stand out.
    Also, people kept telling Frank Lloyd Wright the same thing about his design for the Guggenheim in New York and look how that turned out.

  4. @junego

    Mine decided to ruin my life at sixteen, although I’m very grateful that my unorthodox education probably lead to it only being sixteen rather than earlier. I’m still working on getting my life back again ten years later, but I’m a lot better at handling it than I was. Before it really kicked off I’d always been very flexible and I’d always had some weird physical quirks (like excessive bruising, difficulty with fine motor, stuff like that) but a lot of it got put down to me being stubborn and dramatic, which, y’know, if the shoe fits… 🙂 It wasn’t anyone’s fault but it would have been nice to have known and been able to plan and prepare. I would have used my early teenage years quite differently.

  5. @hypnotosov: yes… but remember the quote attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright: “A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”

    (Though, if the Petersen Automotive Museum isn’t actually knocking over pedestrians and melting cars, it’s doing better than some modern buildings.)

  6. KPF (Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates) are the architects. Most of their projects aren’t so Gehry-esque.

  7. I’m another who really likes the EMP. And I get to see it again soon!

    I’ve loved the EMP since I found out about it last year, 1957, when something called a “printed web page” fell out of that wormhole in my basement.

  8. Another Jeopardy story is that someone got Alex to say, “Turd Ferguson” as part of their Final Jeopardy question. Not sure if they didn’t know the question or they knew they were going to lose and so they went with it.

    Turd Ferguson was a Norm MacDonald joke when he would appear as Burt Reynolds on the SNL version of Jeopardy.

    Apparently, the British expeditionary army has just conquered the Dutch Indies, but I’m sure I won’t hear of it for months.

  9. I like my daughter’s perspective on this; it’s most probably a horse, it could be a zebra, but it’s never a unicorn.

    It did, however, help that she diagnosed tetanus in an elderly chap because it’s really not a fun experience; the fact that it’s rare is no consolation to the person dying of it…

  10. The Kameron Hurley article has belatedly reminded me that she’s got a really good 2015 story available – Elephants and Corpses – featuring a body-jumping mercenary and his corpse-acquiring assistant.

    Bodies are only beautiful when they aren’t yours. It’s why Nev had fallen in love with bodies in the first place. When you spent time with the dead you could be anyone you wanted to be. They didn’t know any better. They didn’t want to have long conversations about it. They were vehicles. Transport. Tools. They were yours in a way that no living thing ever could be.

  11. By the standards of modern “arty” architecture, that museum is actually remarkably inoffensive. Certainly better than all of the Brutalist concrete obscenities that were popular in the late 20th century,

  12. I’m another fan of Gehry’s architecture. It was interesting to discover he had to set up an entire computational design business (now part of Trimble) to handle the actual construction of his buildings – and the software it’s developed has advanced the state of the art considerably…

    (In 5520 we are all living in homes that configure themselves around us, changing to meet our moods and our timetables. I am in an immersive work pod at the moment, but soon it will fade away and leave me walking into a kitchen.)

  13. For me, the worst offender, museum architechture-wise, is probably the Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria, which looks like nothing so much as a sea urchin or marital aid plunked down right in the middle of lovely old buildings with red tile roofs.

  14. Certainly better than all of the Brutalist concrete obscenities that were popular in the late 20th century,

    I hated brutalism when I was a kid but I’ve softened on it a little bit — kind of how I feel about googie. I didn’t like it until they started tearing it down to put up stuff that was even uglier.

    I adore the EMP and if they had apartments I would live there, except I know I couldn’t afford it. It’s a building that doesn’t make any rational sense. It’s the building equivalent of a psychedelic pop song. The interior feels like being inside the giant belly of a mutant space whale. The exterior looks fantastic in closeup, as a backdrop for tourist pictures, and isn’t that its primary purpose?

    The Seattle high-profile building I don’t like is the new downtown library. It has some cool design ideas, and if it were anything but a library I’d be more forgiving. But I want a library to be womblike and comforting, like curling up with hot chocolate and my favorite book on a rainy day. The downtown Koolhaas structure is all… thrusty. Aggressive. Cold.

    The interior feels not only like it’s designed for the post-paper-books world, it feels downright hostile to paper books, as if it was designed on purpose to make them look fusty and sad. And it’s full of weirdly hostile little details, too. The first floor has a large area covered by a wooden floor with words carved into it — it LOOKS cool, but it’s weird and off-putting to walk or stand on. The upper floors use these insanely hot colors as a design element, like a glowing escalator in the greenish-yellow of radioactive snot, or whole rooms pulsing in a lurid tomato-red. It makes me feel like I’ve got a hangover. Not just any hangover. A Jagermeister-and-Red Bull hangover.

    And it’s not very functional, either — at least, the auditorium isn’t. The seats are somehow contrived so that there is nowhere comfortable to put one’s feet. And, once, I was in there for an author event and the space filled up with car exhaust because for some unholy reason the parking garage vented straight into that room.

    Anyway, I don’t instantly love the museum pictured above, but it looks better than the gray box behind it.

  15. Oh dear. I googled Bendie and the first listing is for a 10-function (?) vibrator. Pretty sure that isn’t a health condition.

    And E-D gets me many pages on Erectile mishaps.

  16. Brutalism – no.
    Googie – hell yeah.
    Moderne – please sir I want some more.
    Art Deco – that too.

  17. Joe H.: For me, the worst offender, museum architechture-wise, is probably the Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria, which looks like nothing so much as a sea urchin or marital aid plunked down right in the middle of lovely old buildings with red tile roofs.

    To me, it looks like an alien heart ready for transplant. The nighttime pictures give it a completely different appearance.

    I like it. I think it’s cool.

  18. Meredith on September 18, 2015 at 5:05 am said:
    @junego

    Mine decided to ruin my life at sixteen, although I’m very grateful that my unorthodox education probably lead to it only being sixteen rather than earlier. I’m still working on getting my life back again ten years later, but I’m a lot better at handling it than I was. Before it really kicked off I’d always been very flexible and I’d always had some weird physical quirks (like excessive bruising, difficulty with fine motor, stuff like that) but a lot of it got put down to me being stubborn and dramatic, which, y’know, if the shoe fits… 🙂 It wasn’t anyone’s fault but it would have been nice to have known and been able to plan and prepare. I would have used my early teenage years quite differently.

    Serious bummer that you got the bad so young. Adjusting is hard, but glad you’re doing better. I still give myself occassional pity parties :^] I would have avoided a lot of things if I’d known, like doing contortions to freak people out and thereby overstretching my weak ligaments!

    Some of my weirdities are difficulty building up calluses and then having the calussed skin peel off down to blood a week or so after the stimulus stops and other strange skin foibles.

    I remember you mentioning that you have to keep a high salt diet. Is that because of syncope/orthostatic intolerance? I have had bouts of that off and on.

    I read that, depending on which type E-D you have, the genetic mutations may be different for people with similar symptoms. Hypermobility and strange skin stuff seems to be the most common denominators. The strain in my family seems to be recessive (it only affects 1 or 2 every generation and skips gens), and relatively mild until later in life. Do you have other family with the problem?

  19. Federation Square in Melbourne is epic in its ugliness, and looks more out of place in its neighborhood than nearly anything else I’ve had the misfortune to run across.

  20. The interesting horse/zebra thing that was presented to us in cognitive studies (although it seems not be supported by current biological thinking) was the claim that from an evolutionary perspective there is no such category as “zebra” that does not also contain “horses”. (The claim being that one species of zebra was more closely related to horses than to other zebras.) I note that the evolutionary tree presented at that pinnacle of unimpeachable knowledge that is Wikipedia solidly disagrees with this claim, thereby making it an interesting concept for category understanding but perhaps also for the persistence of factoids that are more useful than true.

    On the Kameron Hurley article: I am immensely grateful for authors who are both willing and able to talk hard numbers about the business end of books. One of the most frustrating things about being a new author is all of the people who ask you, “So how’s the book doing?” You end up snarling, “How the hell should I know?” a lot. Finally, a year later, you find out how it was doing half a year ago…and then you still don’t know anything because you don’t know what to compare the numbers to. And while book sales aren’t a zero sum game, and there’s no point or benefit to making comparisons to specific other books, sometimes it *is* comforting to be able to know in your heart of hearts: “This other book that people love? I’m doing as well as it is. So maybe I’m not a complete failure after all.” As a new author, I’ve spent entirely too much emotional energy worrying that, at some point, my publisher will say, “Well, we took a chance on you but it didn’t pan out. Sorry.” (Note: I have plenty of evidence that they’re thinking no such thing, but we aren’t talking about rational reactions here.)

  21. Mark on September 18, 2015 at 7:12 am said:
    The Kameron Hurley article has belatedly reminded me that she’s got a really good 2015 story available – Elephants and Corpses – featuring a body-jumping mercenary and his corpse-acquiring assistant.

    Great! I forgot I’d read that this year. Thx for the reminder. Goes on my tentative list . Does anyone know the wordcount? Short or Novelette?

  22. Mark on September 18, 2015 at 12:45 am said:

    (6) and (11) As a data point for the 4 books problem, Hurley mentions that she delivered 3 books this year. I think the writer of the article being fisked into the ground has been a bit poorly served, though. She appears to have been (over)reacting to someone claiming that the only way to make it big was to churn out something approaching the controversial 4 books a year, and her article was a bad approach to pushing back against it.

    I think I read the original article from a self-published author. She had written that she needed to write at least 4 works in order to keep her Amazon ranking up. She found if she wrote less, her ranking went down and her income went down because she would not get new readers who seem to go purely by the Amazon rankings.

  23. cmm on September 18, 2015 at 8:04 am said:
    Oh dear. I googled Bendie and the first listing is for a 10-function (?) vibrator. Pretty sure that isn’t a health condition.

    And E-D gets me many pages on Erectile mishaps.

    Ooooooh, cool! THAT kinda Bendie could be fun.

    Sorry for the jargon. E-D = Ehlers-Danlos. It’s a genetic disease affecting connective tissue. There are several general types because you have several types of connective tissue and different genes/switches control them. Some types are usually fatal at a young age because it involves the CT in things like artery walls or organs. The most common type affects the CT in joints…ligaments and tendons mostly. All types seem to affect skin to varying degrees.

    And here in 2141 we still haven’t cured the common cold.

  24. @Steven H Silver

    Thx. I don’t have Word on my iPad and I haven’t figured out how (or if) to do word counts on the little text program I do have.

  25. In 3423 all architecture is derived from protoplasm and Frank Gehry is our ghod.

    I’m just chiming in to say I too love the EMP. It fits its site beautifully and adds swoops of structure and color to what would otherwise be an uninteresting corner of the Seattle Center.

  26. Hugo 2016 stuff:

    Campbell nominee?
    Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
    I couldn’t find any other published SFF by her (although she has a number of non-fiction articles in print) and I think she has real promise. I don’t think this book is quite Hugo level, but it’s close enough to be impressive.

  27. Cheryl S: I’m a fan of the EMP, too. It just so happens that what I’ve seen of the new Petersen sets off too many visual associations that are negative. For one example, I look at that picture and I think of razor wire, that is sometimes wrapped at the top of security fences. For another, I look at that exposed metal and I think about something that will rapidly rust (not that the building actually will). Etc.

  28. Heather Rose Jones on September 18, 2015 at 8:53 am said:
    The interesting horse/zebra thing that was presented to us in cognitive studies (although it seems not be supported by current biological thinking) was the claim that from an evolutionary perspective there is no such category as “zebra” that does not also contain “horses”. (The claim being that one species of zebra was more closely related to horses than to other zebras.) I note that the evolutionary tree presented at that pinnacle of unimpeachable knowledge that is Wikipedia solidly disagrees with this claim, thereby making it an interesting concept for category understanding but perhaps also for the persistence of factoids that are more useful than true.

    Wikipedia is essentially correct*, there are still some holdouts in academia (aren´t there always?) who believe zebras are polyphyletic (ie they are different species of horse that just happened to evolve black-white striping) but the consensus is definitely on a single clade.
    This has been fairly uncontroversial for a long time, but DNA analysis was the final nail in the coffin.

    * It’s always funny to me that people will quote any half-remembered thing from decades ago as simple fact, whereas Wikipedia always comes with a qualifier 🙂

  29. I know someone who has both Ehlers-Danlos and Hermansky-Pudlak (a form of albinism). Zebra squared, as it were.

  30. Mark on September 18, 2015 at 7:12 am said:
    The Kameron Hurley article has belatedly reminded me that she’s got a really good 2015 story available – Elephants and Corpses – featuring a body-jumping mercenary and his corpse-acquiring assistant.

    Thanks for pointing to that story, I hadn’t seen it before and I loved it.

  31. Thanks for the nice shout-out to Jenn’s piece. It is indeed the sort of stuff SFWA does on a regular basis, at least when it’s on the right path. 😉

    GODSTALK!

  32. Bad architecture: the current building boom in the City has provided Londoners with many amusing new buildings. The Gherkin has been joined by a Shard, a Cheesegrater, a Walky-Talky (which doubles as a Death Ray), and many more under construction…

    (In 7315, that’s no longer a problem, as we now all live in Soleri archologies, built by loving communes of our architectural masters. I must take my leave now, as my secret Lego stash has been discovered and I must flee into the suburbs and find the Gheryite rebellion…)

  33. Meredith on September 17, 2015 at 8:04 pm said:
    (People with my thing have taken on zebras as a nickname and symbol, because of that doctors training saying that goes something like: If it sounds like a horse, it probably isn’t a zebra – intended to stop young doctor’s from getting all excitable about diagnosing rare things. Not so helpful when you have the rare thing. At any rate: Bendies are Zebras.)

    I spent an interesting half-hour or so in the ER insisting to the nice young doctor that, no, it was not pneumonia – which I’ve had, because I wasn’t sick, just not breathing right.
    The antibiotics didn’t do me any harm, of course, but luckily I was still there being a nuisance about it when the rest of the little pulmonary blood clots settled in.
    If I had been a nice, tractable patient, I’d probably be dead.
    Having been stubborn, though, meant I was still in the ER when my breathing became really problematic, rather than driving home with a bottle of pills.
    Basically, complain away.
    (And complain twice as much if you are over forty and a woman, because half the time they aren’t hearing you.)

  34. I think that the architects who put together the exceedingly Brutalist Barbican were skilful in their use of water and greenery to counterpoint the brutalism; it is possible to sit in the small gardens within the main lake, and on warm summer days it’s a good spot for a g&t.

    There seems to have been a shortage of warm summer days this year, at least in London, but this may be my misperception; perhaps it’s just another indication of my impending dotage. That and an excuse to find somewhere where it’s indisputably hot and sunny and go there…

    Also, doctors: don’t be fobbed off, and yes, it is possible that the apparent teenage girl treating you is 29, and knows what she’s doing…

  35. @McJulie —

    I used to work next to the new Seattle library so was a frequent visitor. Once I got used to it I realized that the building is deceptively functional: if you take the really long escalator up to the top, then you can walk down the spiral and collect books along the way. There is enough room to house the collection. There are lots of seats and desks, and the computers are always fully utilized. But the Design Concept is always in your face going “I am Rem Koolhaas. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

    At the other extreme, the Indianapolis-Marion Country Public Library opened a new building which is really nice: wood furniture, rich carpet, a beautiful foyer which they rent out for weddings and events. It’s very welcoming, and the sort of place where you want to spend the whole day. They clearly spared no expense.

    Which is the problem. It ran so far over budget that the library lost its independent taxing authority. Then they started cutting hours system-wide and laying off librarians so that they could afford to service the debt. One big Charlie Foxtrot, as they say.

    I’m not saying that these are the only choices (no false dichotomy here), but I do know that the SPL paid a lot of attention to budget constraints during the whole process. They were responsible stewards of public monies (unlike, say, the school board).

    The head of the IMCPL at the time was a piece of work. He changed the job title from Director to CEO, imposed a rigid top-down management structure, and generally left the library system a wreck. But a wreck housed in a wonderful building.

    Here in 668, the Kingdom of Silla has unified the bulk of the Korean Peninsula, though under the sway of the Chinese. That wonderful Korean celadon pottery is still way in the future.

  36. For another, I look at that exposed metal and I think about something that will rapidly rust (not that the building actually will).

    This. I’m emotionally certain it will rust.*

    Kameron Hurley’s article on publishing reminds me of how convoluted publishing is. Numbers are shared by various people of how many books are sold in a year/over a lifetime. Numbers by trad published authors who are getting published show one reality. Self-published who are making a living/decent hobby show another reality. Trad published authors knowledge of how their books are selling is 6-12 months out-of-date and third hand (retailer to publisher to agent to author or retailer to publisher to author). Self-published authors are usually 30-90 days out-of-date and secondhand (retailer to author or retailer to distributor to author… hmm did I leave distributor out of trad route?). Both sides rarely share their figures without taking digs at the other or comparing apples to oranges IMHO (books sold by one is different from income made by the other per book). Of course we are talking outliers on both sides as being published and/or making a living/decent 2nd job with writing is a small portion of writers. Comparing outliers to those not making it/getting published to those making it is apples to oranges. Of course I’m a true nobody and shouldn’t be listened to. I’m not technically published. Of two publishing houses I gave advice to/helped start one has gone under and the other is a struggling nobody’s heard of.

    *in 7498 emotions are still separate from facts. Humans will be humans.

  37. @Source Decay

    Pooping Rainbows: A Pervert’s Guide to Architecture at the End of the 20th Century.

    I would buy that book in a minute. Maybe you should shop the concept around?

    In 8621, the shell of the EMP is largely intact thanks to the quality of materials and finishes. It is generally covered by snow due to climate instability induced by the hot air generated during the Kerpupple but periodically the wind uncovers a disturbing shape in a vivid color not found in nature. The local sophonts, a race of uplifted sea otters, explore the ruins when exposed and puzzle over their origins.

  38. Belatedly: Meredith, we need some kind of I Was A Teenage Gimp special interest group. (My porphyria hit when I was 15.)

  39. I am the first person in the year of our Lord 1306 to have Internet and I’m wasting it leaving silly comments on a site that won’t exist for 700 years.

  40. Since pretty much everything I know about Seattle comes from having watched Jessica Alba in Dark Angel, I had to look up “EMP in Seattle” to verify that y’all were not talking about an unusually gaudy-looking electromagnetic pulse.

  41. Alain on September 18, 2015 at 10:18 am said:
    Hmmm I think I lost a post in the ether. Right lets give it another shot.

    @ junego It hadn’t occurred to me but Becky Chambers is a great nomination for the Campbell. She’s only had a short story published in addition to her novel.
    Its a very quick read but can be found here: http://www.pornokitsch.com/2014/12/fiction-chrysalis-by-becky-chambers.html As a parent it hit right on target.

    Good story, definitely had a punch. It hit grandma’s target, too. I missed it on her website, thought it was another non-fiction article.

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