Protect Yourself from Ransomware (Tech Tuesday)

Welcome to Tech Tuesday, my new occasional column covering the nuts and bolts of writing, publishing, and keeping your tools sharp. There’s likely to be what my redoubtable co-op partner Angela Kulig calls “Finnish,” but I’ll try to keep it accessible.

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You’re working away one evening, when your computer locks up and shows you something like this:

Bad news. Really bad news.
Image source: fbi.gov

Unfortunately, it’s not the plot of a bad cyberpunk novel. It recently happened to an acquaintance. Last year, I wrote about Three Ways to Crash-Proof Your Writing, and the tips are still useful. But you might need a little more caution when it comes to ransomware.

What’s Happening In There?
In short, a PC infested with ransomware establishes a connection with its operator. The PC might run normally for a while after getting infested, but at some point the ransomware begins encrypting data files with common extensions like .doc, .psd, .jpg, .zip, and so forth. When it’s done, it displays a ransom note like the one shown above. Operators usually demand Bitcoin payments, because they can’t be traced. Some ransomware allows you to decrypt a single file, thus proving they have the key, and usually give you a few days to get the Bitcoin you need to pay up. If you wait too long, the ransom goes up or the operator destroys the key (which means you're permanently hosed). Scary crap.

Unfortunately, Dropbox is not a failsafe. Ransomware encrypts everything on your hard drive, and if you have Dropbox mirrored, it nails your files there as well.

George R. R. Martin famously does his writing on an air-gapped (i.e. no network connection) PC, running WordStar on MS-DOG [sic]. While he uses WordStar for its simplicity, he also has little to fear from most stripes of malware. Such a setup works well in the traditional publishing realm, where they still prefer to start from paper drafts, but it’s not a bad idea for indies. One might balk at the expense of a second computer—but the typical ransom these days is $500, and you can get a netbook for half that. It’s not bad insurance. Remember, if you’re trying to make money at writing, this is a business. Ransomware is one more disaster to plan for.

Let’s assume that, because you have no room or money for an air-gapped computer, or need to have a browser handy for research, that’s out of the question. What else can you do? Read on…

GROW
Right now (May 2016), the most effective way to avoid ransomware is to GROW (Get Rid Of Windows). Move to MacOS, Linux, or OpenBSD if you possibly can. This is likely a temporary advantage, but it may be a couple of years before ransomware goes beyond Windows. And if the techie press breathlessly reports every minor instance of MacOS malware found in the wild, they’ll be so beside themselves over MacOS ransomware that we’ll never hear the end of it. In other words, it won’t sneak up on us. Actually, I expect iOS malware first, because iDevices are so popular.

As a possible workaround, install a virtualization tool such as VirtualBox, VMware, or Parallels and run a separate operating system inside the virtualizer for Internet access. This isn’t foolproof—ransomware can encrypt virtual drives at a stroke, if you make a mistake—but it’s a little safer.

Stay Up to Date
That should go without saying, but it’s so easy to skip those updates in the middle of a project. Sometimes, there’s good reason for that; updates have been known to hose a working PC. If you’re doing your backups, though, you should be able to revert when needed. Don’t forget to check the backups, on occasion, to make sure important data is still good.

Don’t let your virus/malware protection slide, either. Keep them updated.

Avoid Common Attack Vectors
Currently, there are several common, well-known ways malware (including ransomware) can infest your system:

• Dodgy attachments in spam
• Compromised ad servers
• Websites with infectious Javascript or Flash

Thus, installing ad-blockers and Flash blockers in your browser(s) can offer protection from so-called “drive-by” attacks. Turning off Javascript, once a common trick to speed up browsing and stop useless visual effects, is making a comeback as well. Try it with your favorite websites and see if you can live without it. You can certainly live without it trying to download garbage onto your computer.

Spammers will never go away, even if there’s a special place in Hell for them. They are paying more attention to grammar these days, so you can’t always catch them out by stilted language anymore. Some spam is really phishing, attempting to get you to click a link or open an attachment that Does Not End Well For You. If you’re not expecting that payroll statement from someone you’ve never heard of, don’t open it. If your bank sends you a report about fraudulent activity about your account… it’s not really your bank. A real bank fraud department will call you, verify your identity, then go over a few transactions. (I’ve been there.) In short, don’t open attachments you aren’t expecting.

Pull a Dirty Trick
Since ransomware only encrypts files with known extensions, consider renaming crucial backup files. Instead of GreatAmericanNovel.zip, rename it with a random extension like GreatAmericanNovel.e7b. If you have a thousand photos you don’t want to lose, copy them somewhere else now. Anything your computer can’t access directly, as if it’s on your hard drive, is safe. To be honest, I’m not sure how Google Drive works with saving local copies on a computer; I do know you have to start the Drive app to get the latest onto a tablet or phone, though.

In short, the goal is keeping your computer clean. Failing that, you want to recover with as little hassle as possible. Anticipate the disaster, have a plan, and execute.

References
If you want to dig a little deeper, here’s a couple of links that might be useful:

• Sophos: The Current State of Ransomware
• HEAT Software: How Do You Protect Your System from Ransomware?

Your Turn
Have you been clobbered by ransomware? Do you have some prevention or recovery tips? The comment section is open.

Writing Wibbles: Three Steps to Crash-Proof Your Writing

Yvette Kate Willemse recently blogged about losing writing. From misplacing files to pressing the wrong button to using cast-off laptops that crashed or overheated then crashed, to Word corrupting yet another file (which is the biggest reason I won’t use Word for anything I care about), she’s seen it all.

In the previous millennium, I would lose work—mostly due to Word either crashing or randomly corrupting files. Sometimes, the computer would just hang for no good reason, or the power would drop just long enough. Back then, it was just part of life. As I’ve grown older, though, I’ve grown intolerant to losing work to a computer or power glitch. Fortunately, it’s simple nowadays to prevent that from happening. Computers and their operating systems (some of them, anyway) are far more stable than they used to be, and now there are ways to recover from the rest of the problems.

The question you need to ask yourself is, how important is this? Whether you’re writing for traditional publication or going the indie route, you’re expecting (or at least hoping) to get paid for it. If you’ve sold a story, publishers take a dim view to “the computer ate my manuscript.” If you’re indie-publishing, you don’t want to scramble around looking for a draft—any draft—of that novel you’re about to upload.

So here’s the three steps I use to crash-proof my writing. I know I’m going to get some flak for Step One, but (as I’ve said before) this is what has worked for me.

Step 1: Never Trust Your Work to Anything from Microsoft or Adobe

Yes, I’m serious. Okay, Windows 7 (and later versions, I presume) are a lot more stable than they used to be. But I cringe every time I hear about a writer using Word (pronounced “weird”)… because usually something bad has happened. I want to think Word has solved some of the file-corruption problems since the 6.0 days (i.e. the previous millennium). Still, trusting a 400-page novel to Word, in my opinion, is just asking for trouble.

As for Adobe (pronounced “a doobie”), it’s all in the cloud now. The Cloud sounds great on paper (or pixels)—it takes care of updates for you, your files are stored on a server that’s maintained by professionals, and all you need is an always-on Internet connection. Unless the DRM goes sour and locks you out, like what happened for a couple days last year. Or you’re in a hotel room with crappy wifi that everyone is pounding on at once. Or your own network connection has bought the farm for whatever reason. Then that cloud is just smoke.

Fortunately, there are alternatives, and they often work better, and most of them are free. The one not-free option, Scrivener, is pretty cheap and It Just Works for the way I write fiction. If you prefer a word processor, both OpenOffice and its clone LibreOffice are free; I’ve done work things with OpenOffice after Word simply refused to do what I wanted, and it worked better and easier. So what if the free Office apps are a little ugly around the edges? The middle, where your words go, is pretty much the same either way. If you want a cloud-y thing, Google Drive is pretty reliable and has the option of local storage for when you’re not connected. Best of both worlds.

If you need a Photoshop-like product for some reason, take a look at GIMP. Again, it’s kind of ugly, and it works different from Photoshop, but once you figure out the differences you don’t have to worry about network outages, cloud outages, DRM, or subscriptions.

Step 2: Backup, Backup, Backup

I said “backup” three times, because there’s three kinds of backup you need to consider.

Backup #1 is power. If you have a desktop system, put it on a UPS (uninterruptible power supply). They aren’t terribly expensive—$50 or so—and they’ll keep you safely writing through the majority of power glitches. When you have a big outage, a UPS gives you plenty of time to save everything, tell all your social network friends what’s happening, and shut down. Put a small UPS on your home network box (cable modem/DSL modem) as well. Some cable boxes (like ARRIS Telephony Modems or Telephony Gateways) might have internal batteries to keep the phone lines running; they’ll shut down the data fairly quickly, though. So if you depend on a network connection, you’ll want to put it on a UPS as well. As for laptops, make sure to run that battery down every month or so and recharge it. Replace it when it can’t run for more than an hour.

Backup #2 is an external hard drive. Both MacOS X and that Microsoft thing (since Windows 7, anyway) have backup built-in. Just connect an external hard drive and remember to turn it on every once in a while. If you balk at the price—and I just spent $100 US for a 3TB drive—consider the potential cost of losing a 10,000 word short story. At 5¢/word, that’s $500. In other words, you want the money spent on a backup drive to be… well, not exactly wasted. The MacOS backup system, Time Machine, lets you pull versions of whatever backed-up project you want out of the backup. So if you’ve made changes, and realize you want to take them back, you can return to that earlier version and start over.

Backup #3 used to be called “offsite backup,” but nowadays everyone calls it “cloud storage.” To an older guy, who has good reason to not trust that network connection to always be on, the cloud might not be the place to put working files but it’s surely righteous for backups. Before the proliferation of free cloud storage, the simplest method for offsite backup was to take the advice of a certain 70’s song: “send it off in a letter to yourself,” aka emailing yourself a copy of the MSS. Nowadays, whether you use Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, or something else, put your current work in progress in the local folder. Then you’ll know it’s getting backed up, and you can pull a copy no matter where you are. Scrivener also has a clever “Sync with External Folder” feature that exposes projects as a collection of RTF files in a different folder—including folders tied to a cloud service. With the latest Macs, the built-in Pages app can save to iCloud as well as local storage.

Step 3: Disaster Recovery Plan

Any business that wants to stay in business these days has a disaster recovery plan—a way to get back to business no matter what happens. Remember, if you’re planning to sell your work (whether directly or to a publisher), you have a business.

The most common disasters are fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes. For you, the writer toiling away at your masterpiece, add “computer falls over” to the list. It’s all well and good to have decent software and a regular backup regimen, but how quickly can you get back to writing after a fire, even if that fire was only inside the case of your PC? Or for that matter, a virtual fire caused by some infestation of malware?

If you have a day job, be careful about bringing that work laptop home with you at night and using it until you can repair or replace your primary writing workstation. Most companies have a clause about using their equipment that translates to “if you use our stuff to do it, it’s ours.” Most non-evil companies aren’t interested in grabbing rights to a work of fiction, though. Still, consider that as a last resort. It usually isn’t difficult to find a cheap or free used computer that will hold together for a few weeks.

Using the “Sync with External Folder” feature in Scrivener might get you back on track immediately, even if all you have is a tablet or old laptop. There are plenty of text editing programs out there that can work with RTF: WordPad on Windows; TextEdit on Macs; AbiWord or TED on Linux. Unfortunately, the selection for programs that run on tablet operating systems, and can edit RTF files in Dropbox, are pretty thin. I bought a program called Textilus for my iPad, and it does a fine job of editing sync’ed projects when I’m away from home. On the Android side, OfficeSuite Pro (free on Kindle Fire via Amazon’s “Underground” program) works. In the comments, Katherine Hajar mentions AndrOpen Office, an Android port of OpenOffice. If anyone has other suggestions, share them in the comments.

The thing is, you need to memorize that Dropbox (or other cloud service) password if you want to use it on some other computer at the drop of a hat. I can imagine very few things more frustrating than having everything on The Cloud but not being able to remember your password!

The End

If all this is too confusing, Google Drive is probably the way to go. It runs on anything with a recent browser and an Internet connection, and lets you share your work with other people if necessary. Worst case, you can pop into a library or hotel lobby and use the public computers to get work done. Best case, nothing bad happens and your backup plans are a tiny inconvenience.

Writing Wibbles: Is B&N Flirting with Vanity Publishing? Yes. (UPDATED)

We—that is, those of us at Green Envy Press—are making the push into print this year. This came about a year after what I had planned, but we’ll have some very nice-looking books indeed. Since most of our eBook income is from Amazon, using Amazon’s CreateSpace service was the first and obvious choice. But being an indie author is about anything but the obvious choice, so we started poking around. I remembered hearing that B&N’s Nook Press had set up a print on demand (PoD) service, and I thought, “hey, that’s a no-brainer… maybe people can order books in the store for pickup.”

Well… no. In their own words:

Well, crud. Seems like they’re missing out on a really good opportunity to skewer Amazon here. Amazon can’t say “hey, order this book and have it shipped for free to your nearest brick-and-mortar for pickup… and while you’re there, check out the thousands of titles” etc. And while Amazon can’t, B&N simply won’t.

Okay, maybe there’s some stuff happening behind the scenes, something beyond the usual hidebound “we ain’t never done that way before” you see in lots of old-guard businesses. Maybe their suppliers (aka big publishers) are leaning on them to stifle competition, they way they tried (and failed) with Amazon. Or maybe they consider it too big of an expense or something… who knows? If they wanted to limit this to “serious” authors, they could easily require an ISBN.

But I got an email from B&N recently that, in combination with the above, got my alarm bells ringing. I guess it wasn’t enough to have a PoD service that they won’t help you sell, now they have author services as well:

Now those prices are in line with what I’ve seen from freelancers, but the whole thing smacks of a vanity publishing setup, especially if you scroll down to see their “packages.”

I emailed B&N to ask them about these issues; their auto-responder said “we’ll get back to you in 24 to 48 hours,” and that was a week ago Tuesday. If they do respond, I’ll update this post.

UPDATE: OMG. B&N still hasn’t responded, but Katherine Hajer pointed me to an article at Nate Hoffelder’s Ink, Bits, & Pixels. It’s worse. Much worse. They’re using the well-known scam factory Author Solutions, and trying to hide it. No wonder they ignored my request for info.

Other reading at:
David Gaughran’s Let’s Get Digital
The Passive Voice

So… thanks, but no thanks. We’ll stick with CreateSpace for now to test the waters, and maybe move to Lightning Source or another printer later if the sales warrant it.

Everything from here on out is speculation and opinion from yours truly, so adjust your filters accordingly:

Amazon may not have created indie publishing, but (like Apple with computers) they made it work for a lot of people. And yes, CreateSpace offers author services, but they also provide you with a marketplace to sell your books. I guess the point is, Amazon is trying to make money with indies, while B&N and vanity presses try to make money from indies. One treats you as a partner (however junior), and the other as an income source. I hasten to point out that there are plenty companies with a similar outlook to Amazon’s (Smashwords being one of the most obvious), but there’s one company that most of us think of first, at least in the Western Hemisphere.

Too bad, B&N. You coulda been a contender. Your brick and mortar stores give you an advantage that Amazon (or even Apple, who isn’t likely to start selling fiction in their stores any time soon) can’t easily match. You just needed the will to buck the system, instead of crawling into bed with the scummiest of scammers. You could have built a solid business with indies, but instead you treat us as marks to suck dry.

Writing Wibbles: Chomp?

So, there’s an interesting blog post out there.

Nora Roberts tells her critics: Bite Me.

Wow. Just wow. Apparently, someone left some silly (but rude) comments on her Facebook pages, and as they say around here, she “didn’t cotton to that.”

The reader is not my employer, my teacher, my mother. This is not my hobby, this is my profession, and in this profession I have an editor. I welcome her constructive criticism. I have an agent. I welcome hers. Readers, having those opinions that will vary dramatically from one to another? Not welcome. Not asked for. Not accepted. 

Because you use a sink do you get in the plumber’s face and advise him how to fix it? … If the plumber isn’t doing the job to your standards, find another plumber. …

A book doesn’t come with a suggestion box, and the writer is not obliged to sculpt a story to your specific needs. 

Readers read. Writers write. Readers can voice their opinions in appropriate areas, to their friends, to their bookclub and so on. But those who insist on coming into my spaces with their negativity are going to be called out for it.

A friend of mine on Twitter pointed to the blog post and said in effect, “Nora Roberts is the only woman writer who can get away with that… any other woman would have a shitstorm on her hands.”

Well hey, I’m a guy. I might as well use that male privilege thing for a good purpose for a change, right? So I’ll just say: I can see where she’s coming from. Even if I wasn’t writing my own stories, I’d get it. I’ve had people who know less than I do about something try to tell me how to get it done, whether it be fixing a pipe or running wires or what have you. There’s nothing that irks me more than someone who can’t, or doesn’t want to, do something but feels free to tell you how UR DOIN IT W0RNG.

But reviews? Reviews on review sites (or in the reviews section of a book page) are pretty much sacrosanct, and I think Ms. Roberts agrees in the last paragraph I quoted. Not everyone will like a story, and that’s okay. If everyone liked the same kind of story, then only one kind of story would ever get written. Reviews are (or should be) for other readers, to help them decide whether a particular story is going to suit. The common wisdom is “don’t respond to reviews at all,” and some writers don’t even read their reviews.

On the other hand, a writer’s blog (or Facebook page) is a place for writers and readers to meet and discuss. That “don’t respond to reviews” thing doesn’t apply on those spaces. Someone wants to get snippy with Nora Roberts in her space, and she has every right to respond.


There are other spaces where readers and writers can get together. I’ve actually had the most interaction with general readers (i.e. non-writers) in the forum on my Amazon author page. I certainly wouldn’t mind some (polite) back and forth here on the ol’ blawg, but I’ll take what I can get.

Where do you like best to interact with writers and readers? Floor’s open…

Writing Wibbles: New Serial on the Way!

With Lost in Nightwalk done, I’ve turned to cleaning up Blink’s newest adventure. For a lark, I collected his earlier stories, and most of the other Skyscraper City stories, into an eBook for my mailing list members. (Not a member? Sign up quick!) Here’s a little blurb…

At age 13, Stevie Winkler is the youngest known super. Being able to teleport is cool, but keeping it a secret sucks. Professor Zero and some of Skyscraper City’s most famous superheroes are training him, but Blink finds the line between hero and villain isn’t always clear.

Blink has three goals as a teenage superhero: survive, keep Mom from finding out… and maybe get a girlfriend.

I’ve finished writing this adventure, and it’s going to run 20 episodes. This is a departure for me—before, I’d write the first few episodes and turn it loose. I was having so much trouble with the middle, though, that I thought I’d better finish the whole thing first.

Each episode will drop on Monday morning at 7am Eastern time (noon GMT). Having the entire thing done means I can focus on the next part. Update: if you want to catch up on Blink’s earlier adventures before this one starts:

Blink
Blink’s First Adventure

Comments on each episode are encouraged! Remember to check in each Monday to get the latest.

I want to thank Icy Sedgwick and Tony Noland, whose superhero stories inspired me to write my own. And special thanks to Catherine Russell, who beta-read this adventure and caught some issues. And +Angela Kulig, of course, for the cover art.

Writing Wibbles: the Bloom Comes Off the Unlimited Rose

Back in July, I wrote about the new (at the time) Kindle Unlimited (KU) program. I said in part:

The per-borrow payout has been a [little] over $2 for months, now, slightly more than the royalty on a $3 eBook purchase. Amazon has offered a 30-day free trial, so I expect that August is going to push down that payout quite a bit (my guess: it will be around 50¢) despite Amazon increasing the fund by 66%. For some authors, the increased borrows will more than offset the depressed per-borrow payout. Others will hate it—perhaps enough to yank their books out of Select.

Amazon is walking a tightrope. At current payout levels, an average of four borrows per member per month (about one per week) will nearly wipe out the monthly subscription fee. But if the payout drops too far, authors will pull their most popular books, making the service much less attractive.

It’s interesting to see what I got wrong, and what little I got right. First off, the per-borrow payout never dropped to 50¢. It has gone down significantly, averaging $1.60 over the first few months, a bit lower more recently, and that has caused a lot of grief in some quarters. It didn’t affect me all that much personally—I only have one book in Select, Oddities, and it would get a borrow or two every other month. That changed little; November was the first month I got any borrows since KU started, but I got two. Woohoo. I also said things would be a little more clear by the end of September… it took a couple more months than that.

Okay, now to the last part, the part I got right: Amazon is walking a tightrope, and it’s wobbling. For some writers, including some top indie sellers, KU has been a disaster. The Bookseller blog, engaging in a little hyperbole, wonders if the honeymoon is over. H. M. Ward, a highly-popular romance writer, yanked her books out of KU saying, “I… lost approx 75% of my income [counting bonuses] … The number of borrows was higher than sales. They didn’t complement each other, as expected.” Top borrowees like Ward got “All-Star” bonuses on top of the monthly pot, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the plunge in sales. (The Bookseller claims that Howey “expected to pull most of his work out of [KU]” but did not furnish a link. You toss a potential bomb like that, you ought to cite it.) Anyway, there’s a lot of good info in this very long article. If you feel the urge to TL;DR out of it, skip to the bottom for some meaty stuff.

Meanwhile, I’ve been seeing reports on the KDP forums about “writers” who throw together what amount to sales pamphlets, upload them by the dozens, then borrow them through sock-puppet accounts. At $1.40 per borrow, they need only borrow eight of these junk “books” to recoup their KU subscription fee, and they often have fifty or more books on offer. And who knows how many sock puppet accounts they have going? Some forum members estimate that the scammers are pulling down the per-borrow payout by 30¢ or more.

I don’t see a viable way forward for KU, defined as something Amazon, top authors, and subscribers can agree upon. If Amazon adjusts the pot enough to bring the payout back up to $2 per borrow, they stand to lose money as avid readers grab one book after another. But if they don’t, and the most popular authors continue to jump ship, KU subscribers will drop out as well. Some of the “name” authors suggest changing KU so members subscribe to authors, which translates to auto-purchasing books as they come out. I can see where mischief could be made there, though.

On the other hand, authors with $1 or $2 books, or first-of-series titles that they might otherwise try to make free, could still benefit from KU. A $2 book (like Oddities) under the current system earns about 70¢ per purchase—and around twice that per borrow. Instead of making the first book of a series free, put it in KU and encourage people to check it out. The author still gets a payday, and a potential new fan who buys the other books.

The question is still the same: come spring, will there be enough books in KU—and the right kinds of books—to keep enough people interested in subscribing? Floor’s open, tell me what you think!

Writing Wibbles: Search Engine 101 for Authors

Monday night, I saw this tweet:

Being the diplomatic soul that I am, I responded “I call BS” before even reading the article. Then, I thought I should expand on that statement. Which meant I had to read the article.

In summary: Stephan Eirik Clark (the author) wrote a literary novel he called Sweetness #9. In the article (written in March), he complained about the search engine first not finding his novel at all in the early pre-order phase, then burying it under Sweet Valley High and artificial sweetener products. (Or maybe writing the article was a clever way to boost his book—Salon will always run a “bash Amazon” article, and click-throughs and sales are always good ways to push a page up Amazon's search rankings.)

Clark goes on to quote a New Yorker article by George Packer, in which he claims that publishers can pay Amazon to push books up the search rankings. Oh, the horror!

Um, wait a minute. Actually, I’ll wait an hour or so. Go to your nearest bookstore. Check out those tables at the front. Why are those books there, and not the ones you might want to see? If you answered “the publishers paid the bookstore for favorable placement,” you get a gold star!

But hey, I’ve not paid Amazon a dime for search engine placement. And yet, if you type “Accidental Sorcerers” into Amazon’s search, guess what comes up #1? (and #2 through #5?) Someone else’s book, The Accidental Sorcerer, appears a little farther down.

One of the things that +Angela Kulig taught me, early on when I joined the co-op, is that titles matter. If you pick a generic title, your book will flounder in a sea of other books (and in the case of Amazon, other products) with similar names. Just like in poor Mr. Clark’s case. A little closer to home, I once titled a book in progress Chasing a Rainbow. Angela suggested I search that title on Goodreads. Ouch. We came up with the replacement title, The Crossover, only after much banging of heads on tables (at least on my part) late at night. There are other titles that show up in a search for that, and mine still doesn't make the first page.

So, in a nutshell, this is Search 101 for authors: pick a title that’s as unique as possible. If you have a generic-sounding title like “Sweetness,” you need a lot of sales to get your ranking pushed to the top. Or your publisher can pay the online bookstore for placement, just like they do for brick-and-mortar stores. One is a little more work, but cheaper and more effective. Or, just bash Amazon and let Salon do the rest. Doesn’t matter if you prove yourself clueless in the process, eh?

Lost in Nightwalk COVER REVEAL!

The story is with the editor now, and I don’t have an exact publication date set just yet, but I’m still hoping to launch by month’s end. Here’s the blurb:

Lord Darin is pursuing Sura. The Web is pursuing Bailar and Mik. Still, they continue teaching combat magic to sorcerers in Koyr and the Northern Reach.

Training for conflict in the Goblin fastness, soldiers and mages start using Nightwalk, the vast maze under Ak’Koyr, for war games. Fleeing an assassination attempt, they find themselves lost. Now the problem isn’t Lord Darin or The Web—it’s getting out.

Okay, how about a look at the gorgeous cover?

Meanwhile, Beyond the Sea of Storms (Book 6) has been drafted, so at least one of them survives Nightwalk. Or maybe it’s a reluctant Charn or Isa who pick up the mantle…

I Write Escapism, and I’m Okay With It

Source: openclipart.org

From Wikipedia: “Escapist fiction is fiction which provides a psychological escape from thoughts of everyday life … The term is not used favorably.”

I don’t hear it as often as I used to, which may reflect the decline in reading overall—or maybe it’s because those who used it most have gone to the Great Library in the Sky. The description does seem to have a sneering quality to it, that implication of not reading the “right” kind of fiction—usually published in the 19^th century at the latest, because surely nobody born after 1820 has had anything worthwhile to say, right?

What brought this to mind was a recent The New Yorker article called The Percy Jackson Problem. A literary-minded mom writes about Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson novels, which her son incidentally loves to pieces. If you’re like me, and haven’t read them, they’re about an adolescent demigod, the son of Poseidon and a human mother. There’s this tension between “well, at least he’s reading,” and “but he’s not reading the claaaaaaaaaassics” oozing all through the article. Still, she at least implies that he knows more about Greek mythology at this point than she does. I’m intrigued, and will have to check them out myself now.

I remember those pre-junior high years as a near-dystopia, not that it got much better afterwards. Books were my escape from that life, and even back then I knew I wanted to write my own stories someday. I read a lot of different things, but none of them were “classics” nor titles that literary types of the day would have approved (with the possible exception of Rabbit Hill). One series I remember was The Boxcar Children, the stories of four orphaned kids who moved into an abandoned boxcar. I’ve forgotten the title of another story, but it was about a brother/sister duo who rowed out to an island on a lake and got stranded there. And of course The Hardy Boys, about two brothers who solve mysteries. (Ironic that, since I was such a timid child.) I suppose you could classify the first two as survivalist tales, but without the boxcar full of weaponry or tinfoil-hat politics.at, since I was such a timid child.) My White Pickups books, from that angle, are an adult version of those older stories—abandoned or stranded, people fight to survive and somehow beat the odds.

In junior high, the local librarian pointed me to the sci-fi section, and I was hooked. Who needs a boxcar in the woods when you have a fracking spaceship, am I right? Thus began a stretch of years when, like Cody in White Pickups, “the only books I ever picked up [had] a spaceship on the cover.” I’m not sure who it was that pointed me to Lord of the Rings in high school, but fantasy became an ever-increasing part of my reading mix. Who needs a spaceship? Just zap yourself to another world, and defeat that overwhelming evil with determination and heart!

I read a lot, and I needed stories that would take me Elsewhere for a while. Things did get better in college, but the habit was set. I got into Dungeons and Dragons, and that was addictive—acting out a story on the fly, where your own decisions and reactions affected how it ended. As you might imagine, that pulled me even farther into the fantasy realm. In our D&D group, we passed around our own book collections. I discovered The Sword of Shannara, Dragonriders of Pern, and the collaborative Thieves’ World anthologies came out around then. I spent the summer of 1980 in Biloxi MS and points south (i.e. the Gulf itself, working offshore helping cooks feed hungry drilling platform workers). I took a sheaf of scrap computer paper with me for my off-time, and wrote the first novel I actually finished, The War of the Seventh Trumpet. I never gave serious thought to finding a publisher, because even in the 1980s that kind of fantasy was already getting formulaic. (Not to mention it’s a typical first effort, pretty awful.) While I won’t ever publish that one without some extensive rewrites, it became background material for other Termag stories.

Thirty years later, here we are. I’ve published four Accidental Sorcerers stories, with the fifth (Lost in Nightwalk) coming out later this month and the sixth (Beyond the Sea of Storms) drafted. A sorcerer and his two love-struck apprentices travel Termag and have lots of adventures.

It’s escapist fiction, and I’m okay with that.

Sometimes—or all too often—you just need to get away from everyday circumstances. Fly that spaceship to Antares and fight the Vegans (aliens from Vega, that is… seems like they’re always hostile). Or follow Bailar, Sura, and Mik around Termag and see what kind of scrape they get embroiled in this time. Or stay out of those talking pickup trucks and try to make a better world for yourself, and the other four dozen people around you.

In the Victorian era, they had what they called “improving” literature. The “right” kind of books, written by the “right” kind of people. Maybe it was about building character, a phrase used only by people who aren’t doing the work (or reading those kind of books). Reading escapist fiction lets you try on a different person—that timid boy I was could become a survivalist, or even a hero, if only for a little while. Did I grow out of that timidity, or was I “improved” by escapism?

And now, I have another escape—I mean a new book—to get ready. Until then…

Writing Wibbles

I always feel like
somebody's watching me
(And I have no privacy)
—Rockwell

I had a couple of things to share this week—an interview with the creator of the #amwriting hashtag was at the top of the list—but something else reared its ugly adobe head, and vaulted to the top of the list.

Nate Hoffeider at The Digital Reader broke the story a little over a week ago. Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) version 4 “[seems] to be sending an awful lot of data to Adobe’s servers.” Most EPUB-based eBook readers on the market use some version of ADE, although I’m not sure whether any are using ADE4 just yet. Older versions are less intrusive.

How intrusive is this? Let me quote Mr. Hoffeider here:

Adobe is gathering data on the ebooks that have been opened, which pages were read, and in what order. All of this data, including the title, publisher, and other metadata for the book is being sent to Adobe’s server in clear text. …

Adobe isn’t just tracking what users are doing in DE4; this app was also scanning my computer, gathering the metadata from all of the ebooks sitting on my hard disk, and uploading that data to Adobe’s servers. …

And just to be clear, this includes not just ebooks I opened in DE4, but also ebooks I store in calibre and every Epub ebook I happen to have sitting on my hard disk.

(emphasis mine)

The Passive Guy, a lawyer who writes on self-publishing issues, has an excellent summary and links, both in the article and from readers in the comments.

Much of the outrage in the tech side of the community focuses on Adobe’s use of plain text. That is a little disturbing, yes—it means anyone who can put a packet sniffer anywhere along the path between you and Adobe can see all this data. But for me, it’s what the people owning the servers are doing that’s more important. Scraping your hard drive for eBooks makes ADE4 spyware, in my opinion.

When pressed for an explanation, Adobe finally said (in the typical corporate lawyer speak of any company caught with their hands in your pockets) that it’s part of their DRM, and they gave themselves permission to do it through their “privacy” policy.

Now I can already hear the Kindle haters shouting “Amazon does it, too!” Well, yes, Amazon does send some information back to the mothership, but there are (as I see it) three important differences:

1. Amazon is pretty up-front about what their Whispersync feature does, and it gives back by letting you sync your books across devices. Adobe gives you nothing (or maybe they use the info to target advertising at you, who knows?). You can also turn it off at any time.
2. Whispersync isn’t a DRM mechanism, at least primarily. It works just as well with non-DRM books sold through the Kindle store.
3. Amazon doesn’t presume to scrape your hard drive, looking for any MOBI or AZW files you might happen to have, just because they feel like it.

To Panic or not to Panic (probably not)

Since I handle all eBook formatting for Green Envy Press, and I work in EPUB format, I’m pretty sensitive to the idea of some corporation scraping my hard drive and looking over works in progress. Fortunately, I don’t use Adobe software in any part of my production toolchain.

But this is the problem: if people with access (legal or otherwise) to Adobe’s servers were to target a publisher’s typesetting department, they could get advance notice of upcoming titles or other intelligence. Or they could target individuals for blackmail purposes. I find it quite likely that Adobe’s legal department will use this info to shake down unfortunates who land in some kind of piracy profile (whether they’re actually pirating eBooks or not)—or sell the info to large publishers, so they can do the shaking down. I also expect Adobe to “share collected information with our third-party partners” (i.e. sell information about your reading habits to anyone who wants to spam you to death).

On the other hand, this affects only a small but growing number of individuals—those who have been suckered into installing ADE4 on their computers. I don’t know whether any eBook readers use ADE4, or will load that Trojan Horse in a near-future update. Obviously, people in the Kindle ecosystem are immune (beyond the Whispersync issues I mentioned earlier). Apple’s iBooks ecosystem is also Adobe-free, or so I’ve read. Earlier versions of ADE are not nearly as intrusive, so you’re safe in that case as well.

Fortunately, and I’ve said this before, eBook DRM is ridiculously easy to disable. Buy your eBooks from any authorized retailer, strip the DRM, and use Calibre or a third-party eReader to read on your computer. Or buy from those of us who make sure the “use DRM” selection is turned off when we publish.

And then, there’s the technical fix: block the IP addresses assigned to Adobe’s servers at your router. Whether you use DSL, cable, or fiber to get your Internet fix, your router has a fairly simple way to set this up. Look for something like “outgoing filters” and add the addresses shown in the image below. Here’s what I’ve added to my DSL router, just in case:

That won’t stop ADE4 from getting all chatty if you take your laptop outside the house, but it’s a start.

---

If you haven’t tried my eBooks—DRM-free, available for both Kindle and the rest of the world, and priced to move—why not check them out? The Crossover is free, and the rest are cheaper than a large latte. And unlike a latte, you can enjoy them again and again.

Writing Wibbles

I finally updated the progress bar(s) over the weekend. Beyond the Sea of Storms is the working title for the sixth Accidental Sorcerers story, and I have two months to finish the first draft to stay on schedule. I have a vague idea of what I want to do for the seventh book, but I haven’t started anything yet. Oh well, I have a week of vacation next week, too close to the inlaws to be completely relaxing, but I should have a couple days free to write.

Meanwhile, Lost in Nightwalk is off to the beta readers. I have two old and two new folks working on it, and I’m interested to see how it goes. I will soon have Marginalia and The Magic App Store sent off to interested parties. I envision them as the anchor stories in a Termag-based anthology.

Tag! I’m it!

I was tagged by +Philip Overby for the Not-so-Accidental Blog Tourist hop (huh huh, he said “accidental”). You know the drill by now: answer some questions, tag some new victims, will the circle be unbroken by and by…

1. What are you working on now?

There’s that little cluster of progress bars up and to the right, that lists my active projects and how far along I am. ;-) But seriously, the important thing right now is Beyond the Sea of Storms. I’ve also written a couple pieces that will end up in #FridayFlash this week and next. About dang time, it’s been two months since my last flash.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I don’t know of too many Fantasy books where the main characters are citizens of a matriarchy (one that isn’t a “yeah we got a queen but the guys run things anyway” variety). It’s lots of fun figuring out all the implications, and sharing them with readers. Culture shock! And the women (or girls) aren’t sitting around waiting for the guys to rescue them. A recent reviewer said “my daughter and I love reading these,” and that put a smile on my face.

3. Why do I write what I do?

The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the stories that clamor for attention are the ones that get written. I wrote White Pickups and Pickups and Pestilence because they would not leave me alone (and kept growing) until I finally finished them. In the case of our Accidental Sorcerers, one thing tends to lead to another, and the stories just flow.

There are other things I want to write—some more stories in The Crossover line, some short stories, a new and completely different series—but the stories that sit back and wait their turn aren’t the ones getting any keyboard time.

4. How does my writing process work?

For certain values of “work,” I assume.

I have to grab odd moments to write—lunch time at work, and home after Mason goes to bed, are the two primary blocks of time I have. I don’t write linearly, and I use only the barest sketch of an outline. I keep most of the story line in my head, where I can play with it pretty much anywhere (often while commuting).

When I actually begin writing a story, I start with pivotal scenes, then figure out how the characters get from Point A to Point B to Point C. I’m one of those blasphemous “edit as you go” people, a habit begun I don’t know how long ago, and it works for me. Maybe when I get out the old typewriter to see what stories want letters to physically hit the paper, I’ll change my ways.

After I finish a draft, I let it sit for a month. Then I self-edit and send to beta readers. I apply the feedback, then off to the editor. Finally, format and launch!

OK… who’s next?

Well, +Angela Kulig is a little reluctant, but if y’all raise a clamor, she might be talked into it. Might as well add +Tony Noland and +Loni Flowers to the list too… and if you want to do it, jump right in!

Guest Post: Loni Flowers, “Witness to My Heart”

Since the writing brain just got back from vacation, about a week late, there isn’t much for me to wibble about this week. Fortunately, my friend Loni Flowers has a new romance novel out, and I invited her to talk about it! So take it away, Loni…

• • •

It’s my first time here at FAR Manor, and I must say, it’s an honor!

Larry was extremely nice and invited me to tell you a little about myself and my new book, Witness to My Heart, that just hit cyberspace yesterday. I tell ya, I’m so stinking excited about it, I can hardly stand to be around myself!!

This will be my third published novel, and I have to say that after a year and half of working on it, I’m actually excited to be finished and on to the next project. I’m still shocked I’ve managed to write three full length novels. I was never a reader growing up. I hated English class, too. If I could reverse the hands of time, I would have tried harder, actually gone to the library and picked out a “good” book, and picked a completely different career path. But since that isn’t possible, I’m thankful for a friend who convinced me to read Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (before it was popular).

I know, I know.

You’re probably moaning and groaning about that decision, but say what you will… it opened my eyes and had me obsessed with books… any book, no matter what it is, if it has the ability to engage readers… awesome! From that series I moved on to Harry Potter and learned the true meaning of what “sick days” should be used for when you finally make it to the last book in the series! (Shhhhh don’t tell my boss!) As you can guess, the rest is history. Reading sparked a creative side in me I didn’t know I had and before I knew it, I was writing my first novel at the age of 30… while working a 40 hour professional job, managing 2 kids, 2 dogs and a husband. I still can’t believe I did it.

But enough about how I got started… and let’s get you to the details of Witness to My Heart! This book was a challenge for me. Though it’s a contemporary romance, I mixed elements of suspense and mystery into it. It is a different mood than my other books, but it was so fun to challenge myself.

Here, have a peek at the synopsis:

Keep a low profile. That's what Abigale Peterson was supposed to do, especially when the person she was being protected from was one of the world's worst crime lords. After seven years in the Witness Protection Program, she felt no safer now than she did when she was seventeen. Revenge was rarely forgotten when it came to a professional criminal like Zerilli.

Low profiles meant no social life and definitely no love life.

Paranoia and lies became daily habits, going against everything Abigale believed in, but they kept her safe. They kept everyone safe.

Until a house fire puts her out of that safety and into the arms of a stranger. Max Smith is sexy, smart, and has major attitude. He’s the only one who seems to get her. He calms her fears and comforts her from her nightmares. But he also sees right through her lies.

Before Abigale can stop, she’s in too deep; confiding too much and breaking the one rule she promised herself to uphold: Never fall in love.

If you’re intrigued, I have an exclusive link (not released to the public yet) that will let you read the first 3 chapters.

Now if you are truly intrigued, be sure to grab a copy today… and if you’re interested in winning a few things, I have a big giveaway going on over on my website, http://www.loniflowers.com/

Good luck, if you enter.

Thank for taking a moment out of your day to read a little about me and my latest obsession. And Larry, thank you so much for having me over!!

• • •

Aha, now I know why we get along so well: I was another one of those people who hated English classes (although the College English class I took as a senior definitely did not suck), and I avoided literature classes like the plague. I was an avid reader, though, but Fantasy and SF were not on the curriculum in those days. Ah well, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, right?

Maybe you want to go grab a copy of Lori’s new book, right? Here’s some links that might help with that:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Witness-my-Heart-Loni-Flowers-ebook/dp/B00MLN4IFW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1407873663&sr=8-3&keywords=loni+flowers

B&N (Nook): http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/witness-to-my-heart-loni-flowers/1120108466?ean=2940150704220

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/461981

If you want to add it to Goodreads, here’s the book page: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22056608-witness-to-my-heart

And, you can link up with Lori on Facebook or Twitter.

Happy reading!

Writing Wibbles

Lots of ground to cover this week, so I’ll get right on it…

• • •

First off, Angela Kulig’s mini-anthology Coffin Nails is free through Wednesday! Go get it.

• • •

Kindle Unlimited… I’m hearing a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over a new lending service. Seems like we get this every time Amazon tries something new, huh? (Tip: instead of spending $10/month, go down to your local library and get set up for borrowing eBooks. It’s free and the selection is wider.)

My take: The per-borrow payout has been a over $2 for months, now, slightly more than the royalty on a $3 eBook purchase. Amazon has offered a 30-day free trial, so I expect that August is going to push down that payout quite a bit (my guess: it will be around 50¢) despite Amazon increasing the fund by 66%. For some authors, the increased borrows will more than offset the depressed per-borrow payout. Others will hate it—perhaps enough to yank their books out of Select.

Amazon is walking a tightrope. At current payout levels, an average of four borrows per member per month (about one per week) will nearly wipe out the monthly subscription fee. But if the payout drops too far, authors will pull their most popular books, making the service much less attractive.

I’d recommend taking Green Day’s advice: wake me up when September ends. The free trials will peter out, Amazon will adjust the lending fund, and I expect that things will right themselves by November.

• • •

I’ve been tagged in the Meet my Main Character blog tour by my Twitter bud and co-op partner, Tony Noland!

Here are the rules:

The taggee must write a post answering the same seven questions about their MC (main character). Then the taggee becomes the tagger and chooses five other authors.

Since I have an ongoing series, this is both a WIP and a published work. It has not one MC, but three. I thought it would be more fun to let them answer the questions.

1. What is the name of your main character? Is he a fictional or a historical person?

Sura: What is this “he” about?

Mik: I think this world uses “he” as a generic pronoun, Sura.

Bailar: Mik is right. No offense was meant. Now, let me introduce us. I am Bailar the Blue, once Sorcerer of Exidy, although we haven’t seen home in over a year now. These are my apprentices: Sura sam Bailar, also my daughter, and Mik sim Mikhile, whom I named Mik Dragonrider. Sura and Mik are 14 and 15, respectively, as of our latest adventure. I suppose you would consider us fictional, although we feel quite real to ourselves.

2. When and where is the story set?

Bailar: We have roamed a great deal of Termag, the name of our world, so far. The three of us are citizens of the Stolevan Matriarchy, and we hope to return there some day. We’ve seen great cities, little upriver villages, and the ruins of ancient sites that will soon be resettled.

3. What should we know about him?

Sura: There’s that “him” again, but no matter. As an infant, I was abandoned on my father’s doorstep. It’s unheard of for Matriarchy women to abandon their daughters, but he raised me as his own. I learned of my true parentage in The Sorcerer’s Daughter. Without a mother, I’m legally the head of our household. Still, I defer to Father on certain matters.

Mik: I grew up in Lacota, one of those upriver villages the mentor mentioned. Two winters ago, I awakened an ice dragon when invaders from Westmarch were set to overrun my home. I had no training in sorcery, but the spell was in a child’s rhyme. It drove away the invaders, but I didn’t know I was supposed to dispell it afterwards. So it flew me to Exidy, and I became an apprentice.

Bailar: There is a fairly complete history of my life elsewhere. To that I would add, I have my hands full these days. Not only with all our adventures, but keeping the apprentices focused on their studies. Sura and Mik are good people, and excellent apprentices, but Nature tempts them. The skirmishes we’ve been in have given them a taste for mayhem as well, and that sometimes troubles me.

4. What is the main conflict? What messes up his life?

Sura: Patriarchies.

Mik: The mentor scrying when Sura and I are alone together.

Bailar: You need to whisper more softly, Mik.

Sura: That was second on my list.

Bailar: And that is why I scry. But my apprentices downplay our adventures. Each of the stories to date has a primary conflict, or perhaps a series of them. We have faced rogue mages, pirates on rivers and high seas, lovestruck suitors, and creatures thought extinct. We need not go looking for trouble, it finds us easily enough.

5. What is his personal goal?

Sura: His again. I give up. Let’s go, Mik. Father can finish this.

Bailar: Keeping the apprentices focused on earning their sashes, and keeping them safe. Although, sometimes, they end up rescuing me. Serving the Conclave, seeing new things. You know, I dreamed of adventure when I myself was an apprentice. As painful as it can be at times, I do enjoy this life.

6. Is there a working title for this novel and can we read more about it?

Bailar: Of course! First, I shall link to the first four stories already published.

Accidental Sorcerers
Water and Chaos
The Sorcerer's Daughter
Into the Icebound

The next story, Lost in Nightwalk, is about our harrowing experience in Koyr, which was supposed to be a safe haven. There will be excerpts soon enough, I believe.

7. When can we expect the book to be published?

Bailar: The first draft is complete, and the finished book should be available before the next solstice. Now, let me check on the apprentices before they get into too much mischief…

---

And… they’re gone. I guess I need to tag the next five victims. A lot of my Twitter friends are already tagged, so I’ll dip into the Google+ pool as well:

• +R.J. Blain 
• +Brooke Johnson 
• Craig WF Smith
• Scott Whitmore
• +Matthew Graybosch 

Writing Wibbles

If you haven’t seen the progress bars to the right of this text, check it out. Especially check out that top one, for Lost in Nightwalk. Yup, I wrapped it up Monday night! I wrote a little shell script, with some embedded awk, to generate that set of bars. It reads a text file and spits out the HTML, which I paste into the sidebar.

With that safely marinating for now, I finally get to breathe easy. There was an entire week that I didn’t touch it, but I got unstuck in time for the three-day weekend and made the most of it.

You know what that means, right? On to the next thing! Besides the stories listed in the sidebar, I have a couple others going. I’ll add them once I send Magic App Store and Marginalia to beta readers (at which point, I’ll remove them from the list). Speaking of which, I have two readers lined up for the former, and would like to get one or two more. I need three or four for the latter. Any volunteers? They’re short stores, 18K and 15K respectively, so they won’t take long.

Oh, and I’ve entered the Fantasy Cover Wars round for this month on Masquerade Crew. Follow the link and vote for Into the Icebound and one of the others, and remember to do it every day this month! As you might remember, The Sorcerer’s Daughter did very well in March—won by a commanding margin, in fact—so I’m hoping for a similar outcome this time.

If it’s reviews you’re looking for, it recently got 5 Smiling Frodos on Frodo’s Blog of Randomness!

I owe some people some book reviews, so I ’m off to write those. Until next time…

Writing Wibbles

When I released the first three Accidental Sorcerers novellas, I had a good start on the next story in the series. That wasn’t the case for Into the Icebound—I only had about 3000 words down for the sequel (working title Lost in Nightwalk). After sending four of these stories into the eBook stores, I now have a pretty good idea how long it takes to get a first draft knocked into shape. If I want to keep my “roughly six months” schedule, I’ll need to have the first draft done by mid-July.

Scrivener is a great tool for this kind of thing. Select “Show Project Targets” in the Project menu, and you get a little window with the basic stuff you need:

Scrivener’s Project Targets

The “Options…” button lets you set the deadline date, and what days of the week you intend to write (I set it to take Sundays off). Clicking on the rightmost number under the top progress bar lets you set the target manuscript size. You can adjust it later if you need. I set a somewhat optimistic target of 40,000 words, as you can see, although I now think 32,000 is going to be closer to the actual word count.

It’s pretty simple, really. Tell it how big, how often, and how soon, and it gives you a daily word count target (the “Session Target”). It has moved around some, as I’d write over 1000 words some nights and not at all on others, but right now it’s pretty close to the 850 words/day target I started with… which means that, averaged out over the last month or so, I’ve stayed pretty much on target.

• • •

Salon Doubles Down

There’s a disturbing trend these days. Some organizations will say or print something that’s rather detached from reality, and people will call them on it. Instead of doing some research, or anything that might lead them to have to say, “dang, we really hosed our credibility running that tripe,” they dig in. In some circles, it’s called doubling down on the stupid.

Enter Salon. Andrew Leonard kicked off the month of June with your basic publishing industry press release stenography (because committing journalism is a misdemeanor or something), called Amazon’s scorched-earch campaign. He threw around inflammatory phrases like “monopoly power,” “heavy-handed tactics,” and (the worst insult of all) comparing Amazon to Walmart. Of course, he provided no evidence that Amazon has a monopoly on anything, nor that what they’re doing is disproportionate, nor that they’re sending thousands of publishing jobs to China.

So indies, from Hugh Howey and J.A. Konrath all the way down to me, called them on it, providing counter-arguments with evidence. In some alternate universe, a senior editor at Salon acquired clue, pulled the article, and ran a more balanced piece that used actual data and provided links. In this universe… Salon doubled down on the stupid. This time, it was Laura Miller and Amazon is not your friend: Why self-published authors should side with Hachette. (This disturbing lack of title caps seems to be a thing with Salon. But I suppose if you're not doing actual journalism, it doesn’t matter.)

In this article, the points are:

• The only people defending Amazon are indies.
• Many indies are angry with traditional publishers because the authors failed to get in (or are former midlisters who got screwed over and dumped).
• Self-published authors really, really, really hate traditional publishing (actual quote here).
• High prices for tradpub eBooks help indies by allowing us to compete on price.
• A publishing contract is a business deal.
• Most indie works are dreck, slush pile, etc.
• Tradpub books are higher quality, and so deserve a higher markup.
• Amazon might screw us over in some unspecified future.

OK, the fourth and fifth points are good ones. Stopped clocks, blind squirrels, etc. The rest is once again long on flamebait, short on evidence. Now I remember why I quit reading Salon around 2006.

C’mon, tradpub supporters. Is this the best you can do? Really? Regurgitate the same tropes from 2010 and pretend nothing has changed? If anything, traditional publishers have been squeezing their authors even harder since eBooks started booming. With almost zero production costs, eBooks give publishers more profit… and lower royalties to authors. Don’t take my word for it, Lagardère (Hachette’s parent company) put it on their slides in their shareholder presentation. Hugh Howey has them on his blog.

As far as tradpub books being higher quality goes, just saying “50 Shades of Grey” would be too easy. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at a book published 50 years ago, and one published now, and see how production quality has deteriorated. Typesetters have been replaced with Microsoft Word. Copyediting isn’t nearly as rigorous as it once was, and your typical tradpub book has plenty of typos and errors to go around. One of the hardcover editions of Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas books had an entire line missing from the bottom of the first page! If they’d let that get by with Dean Koontz, what chance do midlisters have of getting a quality production run?

Finally, the notion that Amazon might stop giving indies decent terms—when the worst-case the detractors suggest might happen is still a better deal than authors get from traditional publishers—is laughable at best.

If publishers had some regard for authors and readers, beyond squeezing as much money as possible out of each, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

“Into the Icebound” — setting sail May 29!

The fourth Accidental Sorcerers book is just about ready to depart!

Sura, Mik, and Bailar set sail for the Northern Reach, with Lord Darin in pursuit. Their journey is anything but smooth, with storms, raiders, and the prince of Westmarch standing in the way. Joining an expedition to the ruins of Isenbund, Bailar disappears in the night. Now, Mik and Sura must help rescue their mentor from a legendary foe thought long extinct.

The book’s about ready (just have to go through the checklist), and OMG just look at the cover…

May 29, folks! Add it on Goodreads, tell your friends, all that good stuff… and re-download the first first two during the first week of June, because I’m going back and re-formatting them to reflect all the stuff I’ve learned since.

Guest Post: Icy Sedgwick

We pause in the headlong rush of #AtoZchallenge posts for a guest post. Icy Sedgwick has a new book out, The Necromancer’s Apprentice, featuring… mummies! Icy writes the best mummy stories, and she’s ready to share her thoughts about her favorite monsters…

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It sometimes feels like horror monsters have been reduced to vampires, werewolves, zombies, demons and, at a push, ghosts. You just need to look at the classic Universal horrors of the 1930s, or the Hammer cycle of the late 1950s and early 1960s, to realise there any many more monsters to choose from. Personally, my favourite will always be the mummy. Look at Boris Karloff’s charismatic portrayal of Im-Ho-Tep in The Mummy (1932), in which the undead priest was a far more attractive romantic lead than the pathetic ‘hero’. Christopher Lee turned his Kharis into a formidable powerhouse in The Mummy of 1958. Even Arnold Loos’ mummy in The Mummy (1999) was an awesome prospect, simply because he wanted his old love back.

I love mummies for three reasons. Unlike vampires, who are the aristocracy of the horror world, or zombies who are sometimes coded as the working class, mummies are quite classless – not all mummies were royalty, after all. Mummies belong to another world, and another time, and their exoticism adds to their appeal. Furthermore, they don’t necessarily have to suffer the same limitations as other monsters. Aside from cats, Loos’ Imhotep fears nothing, and is all powerful. He isn’t restricted by time of day, or the time of the month. Finally, mummies actually exist. Granted, they’re not rampaging around a city near you, but it’s possible to visit a museum and see one for yourself. The mummy, even in its inert state, represents something more tangible than that of the vampire.

It was my love of mummies that led me to include them in The Necromancer’s Apprentice. I’ve written several flash stories about mummies in the past, and they were part of the story from the very beginning – it was after watching The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that I thought “Wouldn’t it be cool to replace the sorcerer with a necromancer, and the brooms with mummies?” They have an interesting relationship with the dead anyway, being inert until life is returned to them, yet they possess an element of consciousness that is denied to the zombie.

The mummies in the novella aren’t necessarily ‘traditional’ – the mummies are those of the royal family, and they’re kept in the House of the Long Dead, where the necromancer general acts as an intermediary should anyone need to consult with them post mortem. They appear in the story because the Crown Prince has decided he wants to include them in his Coronation parade, and so they need to be resurrected for this purpose. The job is such a big one that the necromancer general needs an assistant, and so she hires Jyx, a magickal protégée from the Academy to act as her apprentice. Of course, things don’t go according to plan but if they did it would have been a much shorter book.

I’m never sure exactly when or why mummies became viewed as monstrous, and while they are in The Necromancer’s Apprentice (although not through any fault of their own), I’ll still always have a soft spot for bandaged marauders.

What about you? What are your favourite monsters?

Bio

Icy Sedgwick was born in the North East of England, and lives and works in Newcastle. She has been writing with a view to doing so professionally for over ten years, and has had several stories included in anthologies, including Short Stack and Bloody Parchment: The Root Cellar & Other Stories.

She spends her non-writing time working on a PhD in Film Studies, considering the use of set design in contemporary horror. Icy had her first book, a pulp Western named The Guns of Retribution, published in 2011, and her horror fantasy, The Necromancer’s Apprentice, was released in March 2014.

Links

Website: http://www.icysedgwick.com

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Necromancers-Apprentice-Icy-Sedgwick/dp/0615964893/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/icypop

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/miss.icy.sedgwick

Google +: http://plus.google.com/+IcySedgwick/about

The Writing Process Blog Hop

Instead of writing wibbles today, I joined a blog hop! +Patricia Lynne invited me, and I’ll talk a little about her (or repeat what she wanted me to say) first:

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Patricia Lynne is a Young Adult writer who never thought writing would become so integral to her life. What started out as a fun way to kill time has turned into an obsession with story ideas crowding her brain at inconvenient times. When she's not writing, she's knitting (you don't have to be a granny to knit!) or making jewelry. More morbid obsessions include reading serial killer profilers. Currently, she lives with her hubby in Upper Michigan, loves to dye her hair the colors of the rainbow, and hopes to have what resembles a petting zoo one day.

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Process? Me? Well, I actually have a pretty strict process, but it begins after the first draft. Still, let’s see what I can come up with. There are four questions to answer, which helps.

1) What are you working on?

I usually have three or four projects going at once, in different stages of completion. The fourth Accidental Sorcerers story, Into the Icebound, went to beta readers over the weekend. The next one, tentatively called The Halls of Nightwalk, is an incomplete draft.

Then there’s a zombie novella, and a collaboration with +Angela Kulig that we’ll probably get started on next month, and a dozen or so other things I’d like to get started this year. Dayjobs can be so pesky.

2) How does your work differ from others in its genre?

I’m writing Accidental Sorcerers as a series of novellas, 30K to 40K words each. Most fantasy tends to runs 2–3 times that long. But in the end, there will be about eight stories, so the overall word count should be fairly similar to an epic trilogy.

The other distinction is that the dominant race on Termag (their world) is red rather than white, and the main characters are citizens of a matriarchy.

3) Why do you write what you do?

I tend to write whichever story is most insistent to get out. I’ve had characters bouncing around the inside of my head, driving me to distraction until I finally give up and get their stories written.

4) How does your writing process work?

I’m mostly a pantser, but I've lately begun to at least set up a skeleton if not a formal outline before I start writing. But I’m definitely not a linear writer. If I want to motivate myself to get started with a story, I’ll start with a pivotal scene and work my way out from there. I did that quite a bit with White Pickups; I wrote pieces of the story here and there and worried about how to connect them later. It all worked out pretty well.

After I have the first draft done, I pretty much live in a checklist until I fire the Launch Cannon. There’s a lot going on, with lots of different people I have to wrangle, and it’s easy to forget any part of it. Writing, not so much—I keep filling in holes until I have a complete story.

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So that’s it in a nutshell. Let me know if you want to participate next week, and I’ll shoot you a pic and bio.

Writing Wibbles: Interview with Helen Howell

It is my great pleasure to, once again, have Helen Howell here to talk about her new novella!



Easy one first: tell us a little about Mind Noise. Where did the idea come from?

Mind Noise is about a boy who can hear peoples' thoughts and this tends to alienate him from others. Then one day an old man appears who is able to communicate with him through thought. The old man offers to help him control this gift he has, but the question is, is the old man who he seems to be? And should the boy trust him?

The idea for Mind Noise came from a thought, that led to these questions. What would it be like to hear other people's thoughts? How would one cope with hearing things that perhaps they just didn't want to know? How would you use the information you heard? and how that then affects your life.

I think too, adolescence is a difficult time for either boys or girls to have to cope with, and an extra element like being able to hear other's thoughts, proved to be an interesting subject for me, because one could take it in so many ways. But then I decided to add the old man into the equation and to look at how he had arrived at where he was, and what motivated him. Him befriending the boy was a perfect scenario to build the story on, and adding Catherine into the equation added another interesting element. The boy now has to work out who to trust.

What's the most substantial difference(s) between the (now-defunct) serial version of Mind Noise and the published version?

The story in itself is basically the same, but the rewrite for the published Novella has more background building of the characters and the situations that occur. You get a better feel for the characters and what motivates them into doing what they do. If you like, we get to see the story behind the story.


Once upon a time, you were an exhibitionist (watercolors, not the other kind). Have you ever been tempted to write a story about someone falling into a watercolor and ending up somewhere else?

Funny you should ask that, the simple answer is No. But I have often thought about writing a story about a character in a book becoming obsessed with the writer. ^_^


You have two other books out. Tell us a little about them.

The first book I ever wrote and self published in 2012, was Jumping at Shadows. This is a fantasy fiction for 9 yrs upwards to adults who like mid grade fantasy. It is a story about a girl called Belle who discovers the secret of a family heirloom. When She and her friend Rosy use this heirloom they are propelled into a world of the shadows—the same shadows that have been haunting Belle all her life. Soon Belle realises that the future rests in her hands, and only she can keep the magic of her ancestors from falling into the clutches of a dangerous mad man.

I spent a long time writing this book and re-editing it, it was the first long fantasy fiction I ever wrote and I'm still proud of it. You can get e-books from both Smashwords and Amazon.

My second book, like Mind Noise, was published by Crooked Cat Publishing and is called I Know You Know. It's a story about a tarot reader who sees in the cards of a client that he's a serial killer and the client suspects she knows. Here's the blurb:

The darkest cards in the tarot deck reveal the darkest side of the man sitting opposite Janice—Mr. Edgar Kipp.

She feigns an inability to read for him, but will he believe her?

His parting words indicate that he knows she knows he's a serial killer. And he plans to return. The voice of her dead grandmother urges her to be careful, warning Janice she might be seeing her own future in those foreboding cards. But Janice doesn't want to listen. Gran's dead. How can she possibly help her?

I enjoyed writing this story, as I myself read the tarot cards and I know they can give you insight into certain aspects of peoples lives. I had this notion that to take it one step further, and put the tarot reader in jeopardy from her client because of what she knows, would make for a thrilling story. The story allows you to understand where Janice came from and how she develops her abilities and it also gives you a look into the dark world of Mr. Edgar Kipp.

The book is available from Amazon as a paperback or e-book.


OK, last one: what did you want me to ask that I didn't? What's the answer?

How do I feel about having my work published?

I think the honest answer to this is that I'm happy my work has reached a wider audience. I write because I love to write but if most of us writers are honest, we write to be read too. When someone not only reads what you have written but likes it too, well that's like a box of chocolates being given as a gift. The sheer pleasure of knowing that your work is liked by some is the motivation needed to carry on writing. Because writing is a lonely business and once you release your work into the public, then there are those anxious moments as to whether it will be well received or not.

Thanks for having me over.

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My pleasure, Helen! Now let’s let everyone know where to get Mind Noise and your other books, eh?


Links to Mind Noise:

Amazon:
US: http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Noise-Helen-Howell-ebook/dp/B00HXX4RY2
UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Noise-Helen-A-Howell-ebook/dp/B00HXX4RY2

Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/399499



Links to I Know You Know:

Amazon:
US: http://www.amazon.com/I-Know-You-Helen-Howell-ebook/dp/B00BH59NAU
UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/I-Know-You-Helen-Howell-ebook/dp/B00BH59NAU

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/286746


Links to Jumping at Shadows:

Amazon:
US: http://www.amazon.com/Jumping-At-Shadows-Helen-Howell-ebook/dp/B008TJKXQ0
UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jumping-At-Shadows-Helen-Howell-ebook/dp/B008TJKXQ0

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/204743