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Thank you, Mr. Nimoy. Your portrayal of a Mixed Race Person Had a Big Impact On Me.

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

It’s not often that I am struck by the passing of a celebrity. I don’t often feel I need to weigh in. I certainly don’t feel like I had any special connection to that person. Certainly when celebrities that are in the common consciousness who are my age pass, I feel the shiver of mortality, but that’s usually it.

But the news today that Leonard Nimoy had passed had an impact.

I wasn’t a devoted trekker, or trekkie, or what have you. But Spock was one of the first times I saw a living example of a pro-science, pro-rational point of view in a character on a screen who wasn’t the evil scientist.

It was the first time in my life I’d seen a protagonist, a hero, be like that. Spock had a huge impact on my nascent scientific world view, giving me permission to explore a scientific worldview. It took a long time for me to go all in on that, but he was the first that made if feel it was safe.

I’m probably not alone in geek-dom there.

But where Spock really hit me in the feels was when I encountered more about him in occasional re-runs and some of the books.

Spock was half human and half Vulcan. Humans took one look at him and ‘saw’ Vulcan, and coded as such. And Vulcans ‘knew’ he wasn’t really Vulcan because of his invisible human-ness.

Spock was bi-racial. But he didn’t look like a half-human half Vulcan. He coded as Vulcan.
For someone who looked white, but was bi-racial, that had a huge impact on me. Spock was the closest thing I had ever seen in my life, even to this day, to a role model. As a kid, it blew my mind. There was Spock and that was it as far as ‘light not white’ me.

Spock struggling with trying to be accepted by Vulcans and humans, both sides of which kind of pushed him away a bit. That hit me in all the feels. Spock finding his own path, being just awesome as himself. Crewing with a bunch of people who all looked different than him and being down with it. Putting up with being teased for being too rational with calm and equanimity.

Yeah it was all fiction. Cardboard props and bullshit.

But telling a story about a possible path helps.

When I was a kid I was smart enough to be clever. And as John Scalzi famously noted, the failure mode of clever is ‘asshole.’ I fell into some of that. Wanting to be the Dr. House mode of smart, dismissive of stupidity and willing to push through solutions because of your own smarts. And I apologize to all those I hurt while trying to be clever.

As I got older, I realized I wanted to be more like Spock. Smart, but hard-working smart and with genuine warmth. Yes, he’s cold rational. But he’s not rational in the ‘toss you out the airlock’ way. He’s rational in the ‘dies to save the crew even though they’re not as smart as him’ way. He used his intelligence as a tool to try and create a universe that they could all be in. He made friends out of a diverse crew on the bridge. He was even close friends with the womanizing asshole of a captain that ran the ship and who had to often bail out of trouble, because even Kirk had good qualities and challenged Spock to broaden his experiences and grow as thinking creature, to see other modes and solutions, adding to his abilities.

He chose not to reject either side of his identity, but embrace them and synthesize something new out of them (yeah, I know not all the media were perfect about handling this aspect, but seeing it exist at all, when people like myself were/still are invisible, was water in the desert for me).

So, thank you Leonard Nimoy for playing Spock. And for bringing that person to life. Thank you for a great life lived, and continuing to engaged with all the people that loved this thing.
I will do my best to live long and prosper, and to try and always be a friend. There are worse things to try and live up to.

Addendum: I was pointed out this amazing article where Mr. Nimoy writes a letter to a dispirited bi-racial woman in the 1960s who was struggling, and found common ground with Spock.

Now I have double the feels knowing that he was aware of this and wrote letters like this.

How All Her Children Fought Came To Be a Film: Sometimes It Pays To Take a Chance

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Sometimes it pays to just take a chance.

About two and a half years ago an odd email dropped into my inbox out of nowhere. It seemed to be a quickly written email from someone in Ireland. The writer, Liam, said he was asking if I had any stories that I thought might be worth filming. In particular, he was trying to find something under fifteen minutes long that he, and a crew of others from his village in Ireland, could enter into a film competition. And they needed it, like, yesterday.

I decided to follow up, and asked more questions, instead of just moving on. And I was glad I did. Despite the hastiness of the initial email, Liam went on to explain further that he and his crew had entered several weekend film competitions and won them. They were looking for a script they could film over a weekend for a ‘make a film in a weekend’ competition coming up, but they couldn’t use their current script.

I thought All Her Children Fought could be filmed, so I sent the story along, and Liam loved it.

I spent a week turning it into a script that I sent to Liam.

And then things went quiet for a long while. Past the time I thought they were going to try to film for that weekend.

They got back into touch. They hadn’t been able to get things ready to use my script in time, they’d gone with another. But they were still super excited about my script and wanted to film it. Only, they said they wanted to level up from their regional wins and do something even better. They wanted to hire a director and audition actors and get really serious.

A friend of mine joked that this was when the request for me to invest money would come, but pretty soon Liam and the Snugboro team were sending me clips of directors they were looking at, along with actors they were thinking of using. I suddenly realized this was going to really happen.

The director had done some adverts, and been to film school. Pretty soon they got their hands on my script and we had some back and forth edits. The director had some tweaks, all of which punched things up (the cat and the end shot, which really boosted the whole thing, came from that pass and weren’t in my original, but I loved them).

Knowing that I was working with a team that didn’t have a Hollywood budget, I’d tried to take things that would require special effects and get them off screen. I suggested using fans to blow leaves across the field for the ship taking off at the end. But someone on the team knew a computer graphics guy, and soon I was getting mpegs of test imagery for the ship to see what I thought, as they were going to include that as the penultimate shot. It was going to look totally SF-nal! That blew me away.

When I got the DVD in the mail it wouldn’t work on my player, but I was able to get my Xbox 360 to show the movie. I was nervous. No doubt. But the quality of the filming and acting were far beyond anything I hoped for.

And then, seeing words I wrote played out in front of me, it really gut punched me. Here was something I’d dreamed, and they’d done such an amazing job of nailing what I was trying to do. And even taken it up a level. Of course, having been so involved in seeing the actors chosen, the drafts of the script, my own mind’s eye for what happened in it, and the fact that I was so close to the project, meant I had no idea if what I was seeing had the same effect on anyone else.

So I, very nervously, did a screening in Bluffton at the local movie theater early one Saturday. Fifty or so people in town and from the college came out to see it, and it seemed to have an effect. I also screened it for people at Blue Heaven, the writing workshop, right after it came out, to see what my peers thought.

So now, I get to share it with everyone, as Liam has allowed me to upload it to YouTube and pass it around. I loved the chance to write a script. I loved the opportunity to see something of mine transferred to a whole new medium.

And here’s the film again:

Details about the film:

Based on the short story by Tobias Buckell (http://www.TobiasBuckell.com). Script by Tobias S. Buckell, Cathal Feeney, and Patrick Ryan.
Produced by Liam Grant (Snugboro Films: http://snugborofilms.com) and directed by Patrick Ryan, who has a number of award winning short films to his credit. The film was shortlisted for showing at the Belfast Film Festival in April 2013 and the Tokyo Short Shorts Festival May/June 2013.
When every pound to orbit counts, who will fight for our future in deep space?

All Her Children Fought: A 15 Minute Short Film, Based on My Short Story, Can Now Be Viewed on YouTube

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

About two years ago I may have posted some stills about a short, fifteen minute film made out of one of my short stories. I’m delighted that the producer of the film sent me news that I could upload it to YouTube and share it however I wished. So I’ve done just that, and am posting it on my website here as well to share with all.


Details about the film:

Based on the short story by Tobias Buckell (http://www.TobiasBuckell.com). Script by Tobias S. Buckell, Cathal Feeney, and Patrick Ryan.
Produced by Liam Grant (Snugboro Films: http://snugborofilms.com) and directed by Patrick Ryan, who has a number of award winning short films to his credit. The film was shortlisted for showing at the Belfast Film Festival in April 2013 and the Tokyo Short Shorts Festival May/June 2013.
When every pound to orbit counts, who will fight for our future in deep space?

I’ll be following up in a little bit with a post about how this all came about.

Paneling While Light, But Not White

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I just got back from London, and would love to be uploading pictures and talking about two weeks spent in Europe, but I’m catching up on bills and getting into the swing of work. And my kids start Kindergarten. And the dogs need picked up. So I’ll be a little late.

However, a few people have pinged me about a couple of blog posts that reacted to the panel “Imagining Fantasy Lands: The Status Quo Does Not Need Worldbuilding.”

London Worldcon had a fascinating vein of programming with an openness to discussion about diversity, challenging status quo, and world viewpoints. Noticeably more so than past Worldcons. It’s a far cry from the first time I attended a worldcon, and there was just a sole obligatory ‘race in SF’ panel and that was the one (maybe only, outside corridor meet ups) place to find this discussion.

This panel was another one of London Worldcon’s varied pieces of interesting programming. It featured Mary Anne Mohanraj, me, Kate Elliott, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Victoria Donnelly, and Ellen Kushner. The panel description goes thusly:

Fantasy world-building sometimes comes under fire for its pedantic attention to detail at the expense of pacing or prose style. Do descriptive passages clog up the narrative needlessly, when reader imagination should be filling in the gaps? Where does that leave the landscapes and cultures that are less well represented in the Western genre: can world-building be a tool in subverting reader expectations that would otherwise default to pseudo-medieval Euro-esque? If fantasy is about defamiliarising the familiar, how important is material culture – buildings, furnishings, tools, the organisation of social and commercial space – in creating a fantasy world?

Two people in the audience were a bit taken aback. Blogger Not By Its Cover (I’m not sure of their name) was upset when I demurred talking about being ‘light but not white’ for the panel and was pressed by panelists to keep on the subject:

He repeatedly said in his response that he doesn’t usually like to talk about his experiences of race, that people outside the Caribbean find his presence in discussions of race disturbing and confusing, that he doesn’t have the energy to deal with that, and that he does not want to be an educator. What enraged me was that, in response to his saying this, a couple of his fellow panelists exclaimed that he absolutely should participate in discussions of race precisely because people found it so problematic and that even if he didn’t wish to participate…

Kate Nepveu also noticed this and commented on it in her panel notes.

So on this panel, I talked about the fact that looking white but not identifying as such due to my bi-racial background complicated discussions. I’m happy to engage in this in some situations and in certain contexts where I known I don’t have an audience that’s still struggling with race 101 level stuff, but for the panel itself I didn’t come prepared and wasn’t expecting to become a focus of the panel. Partly because I came a bit more prepared to talk about what went into creating a fantasy world and how it’s done more deeply, and because I wanted to interrogate and poke at pseudo-medieval constructs.

So, the panel swerved to a bit more of ‘how we authors’ try to deepen work and use our backgrounds to do it. Panels swerve quite often, but I was unprepared for this and tried to demur. I was tired, as I’d just come out of three weeks of travel (promoting Hurricane Fever, teaching a workshop, then a week in Spain, and finally London Worldcon). My ability to switch tracks wasn’t there, I was very exhausted. I was also trying to monitor the panel’s conversational flow and make sure the sole non-writer on the panel, our archeologist Victoria Donnelly, who was making her first appearance at a science fiction panel, was not overrun by us authors and our opinions (even though I was sure Mary Anne wouldn’t do that, I wanted to make sure, as I thought Victoria had a very interesting background we could gain a lot from).

So I demurred, and the panel thought that I might have interested things to say and they…
…keep in mind Mary Anne and Kate and have known me a while…
…pulled a bit at me.

On the panel itself the fact that the audience felt my reticence and responded was not surprising. I didn’t want to talk about the complications of being light not white as a working writer right there because sometimes I have to carefully consider the impacts of my words.

And I was tired. So I was worried about making mistakes.

But we muddle our way through. I wasn’t upset with Mary Anne or any of my panelists at the time, just momentarily trying to change the entire set of ‘stories’ and conversations I had arrived with loaded into my mental ready-state.

So why was I reticent?

It’s that if I get up and talk about my struggles, in some cases I can easily negate the even harder struggles others have. Look, I look and ‘read’ white to most people (including non-whites). I therefore complicate discussions about diversity due to living in a culture that takes race as binary. Look, I see the president of the US and see a bi-racial dude from a mixed family background. Most Americans are all like ‘dude’s black.’ And so are a lot of non-white Americans.

So I roll up and talk about how it’s personally annoying when people of all kinds don’t want to recognize me as bi-racial and that’s sometimes problematic. Here are writers struggling far more than I have who come from a legacy and background of far more vicious racism than can be even sometimes explained. So what if I’m left off most lists of diverse SF writers. Boo hoo, right? (And this has mostly been on my mind because I’ve been told by some that I’ve been taken out of articles or such for not being ‘properly diverse’ and just as someone who wants to be part of the tribe of diverse SF/F authors doing amazing things it pains to be excluded on a personal level, but on a larger societal level, shit, injustices against the people of diversity is vastly larger) People read me different than I read myself, I’ve been dealing with that for 35 years. It’s cool. But trying to talk about the complexities of it mean I can inadvertently suppress other narratives, right? I don’t get the *right* to say who gets on a list of diverse writers or how I’m considered at large, I can only keep conversing and trying to add to diversity and talk up good things. So when someone suddenly asks about the complicated nature of how I’m perceived or received in genre, or what my struggle has been, I freeze.

But even as that happens, I also get annoyed with narratives that try to require me to fit into a certain ‘type’ of diversity. It seems the white power structures like immigrant narratives and magical realism from brown-identifying folk. Man, is that ever true, and even allies can fit into this. There’s been a heavy pressure on me to drop doing the action and to write about magical immigrants. I’ve been offered book deals and better money, and it’s funny, I’ve had three editors in the last ten years point blank sketch out the outline of the same novel: immigrant from the Caribbean arrives in the US and does something magically realist.

So, you know, it’s complicated.

I’m writing Caribbean Space Opera and have had historically black media *and* white editors tell me they’ll pay attention when I do a magical realist book and I want to keep doing what I’m doing and I’m slowly building this wide audience of people who are digging diverse characters in high octane adventures. Do I want to appear not grateful to make a living doing what I’m doing in public? No. I’m building something, and I’m trying to make sure I spend less time annoyed with people who don’t get what I’m up to and more time sharing excitement with those who totally get it!

So let’s end this positively. I’m all good. The panel was fascinating and was a sign of a fantastic convention (for me at least, I didn’t get to a ton of panels). I was delighted to be up there with amazing minds. And I’m impressed that the audience felt defensive on my part and thank them, but I bear no ill-will or negative feelings towards any of the panelists.

I Would Like To Talk To You About Me, Dialect, and Caribbean Stories

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I realize I’ve never talked that often about including dialect in my own fiction right here on this blog. Certainly in panels, and in interviews, and in passing. But I’ve never sat down and done a big post about it.

It was one of the hardest things about writing my first novel, Crystal Rain.

 

Me and my dialect

 

In 2004, when working on the first draft, ten years ago now, I was nine years away from living daily on the islands. The words were all still with me. A mix of dialect picked up from Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the US Virgin Islands. And also a friend from Anguilla.

Mind you, as much as dialect was always around me, I was a semi-participant. I am a confusing individual. My father is Grenadian, my mother, British. I lived, for many of my years, aboard a boat. So even when growing up in the Caribbean, I often was isolated.

In Grenada, with some friends I would have an accent. With my mom, on the boat, I had an accent as well: received pronunciation, with some New Zealand (my mom grew up in England and New Zealand). With some friends I had that accent. To be honest, from learning how to speak to age 9, I never thought too much about it.

Hanging out with friends in the BVI I would slip into the dialect around me. That was usually happily accepted by my friends, but people would occasionally report back to mother (I saw your son today, I couldn’t understand a word he was saying) or upbraid me for not ‘speaking correctly.’ On the other side, some people in the BVI would give me grief for trying to talk like them.

When I moved to the USVI, I began to switch over to a somewhat mid-Atlantic American accent (I still struggle to pronounce France or aunt with a hard ‘aaaa’). Some friends would get the brunt of my Tortola-learned accent. But no matter what I spoke, many friends had dialects.

In the meantime, I was also learning Spanish pronunciation as well, from my neighbors.
Even to my friends in the USVI, I know that even when I had a slight accent they weren’t hearing it, but my college room mate was doing home work while I was on the phone to a friend back in the islands once, and by the end of the call he had stopped working and started staring at me. “Okay, now I really believe that’s where you came from,” he told me.

So in my head, I don’t know what I should sound like. But in 2004, I knew what I missed hearing: dialect. And I knew what I wanted to try to put to paper. Particularly as each year put me further and further away from the islands I missed and grew up in.

 

Writing dialect

 

But I had a few examples that inspired me. Literary fiction, Dickens and Twain, and a little bit of James Herriot.

I was told, in workshops and when reading books about how to write, over and over again that dialect was to be avoided.

But Dickens and Twain and a little bit of James Herriot, no?

In the Caribbean, I wasn’t given a lot of Caribbean dialect. Teachers there gave me canon, mainly.

But Dickens and Twain and a little bit of James Herriot, no?

And what about Clockwork Orange?

And what about…

I read an article where Dante was asked why he wrote in Italian instead of Latin. This when Italian was still called a dialect, a lower version of Latin. And he had a defense. And so did Chaucer for writing in English. And the more I delved into my English major, the more it seemed that, well, language is a big world.

People still used Shakespeare, which read differently to us now. That involved an old dialect that required me to work hard to get through it.

 

Writing Crystal Rain

 

As I wrote Crystal Rain, I did my best to bring in some of the rhythms and sound I grew up with. I knew in some ways I was trying to reinvent the wheel, and in some ways failing. Art is so imperfect, and filled with tough choices.

I tested out whole lengthy sections using spellings that replicated what I’d heard for dialect, phonetic spelling, new combinations. And I tested out ways where I used the words as they were, kind of, intended without the accent in the spelling. I tinkered, and tested, and played, and eventually settled on a system very similar to what Shakirah of Get Write covers here:

I attended a workshop were one facilitator was adamant that we should never “bastardise the English”, that is, spell the word how it is pronounced. She didn’t believe that we should use “tuh” for to, “yuh” for you, “de” for the, etc etc. She believed that if it sounded the same in Standard English, there was no need to change the spelling. Another facilitator was an advocate for writing dialect as it is spoken, because he believed that was the only way to make a true representation of the language, for example, “wunna” for you all, “wha” instead of what.
They both made good points.
I personally find it difficult to read full blocks of dialect, simply because there is no standard spelling, and we are taught to read in Standard English. I find it difficult to read newspaper columns written in full dialect like Cou-Cou and Flying Fish – it gives me a headache.
So, I made a compromise between the two. I rarely change the spelling of words that sound the same in Standard English, for example “de” for the, but then I also try to capture the rhythm of the language in how my sentences are structured. So a Barbadian person would read it and naturally hear the accent, and a foreigner would hopefully be able to hear that voice as well, but still be able to easily read the language.

That last paragraph is basically my approach. Trying to create something that allows both my readerships to plug in, with my Caribbean readers ‘getting’ an accent that I’m hinting at.
I don’t always succeed for either side, I’ve had some Caribbean readers feel I missed the mark. I’ve had non-Caribbean readers complain I make things too hard (they should see the drafts I first created).

I came to this decision after almost two years of playing with drafts of Crystal Rain, and folded it into my general approach. But let me tell you, it was not made lightly or easily, nor am I fully convinced I got it perfect. It was the best, and is the best, that I can do. It works with me, my fiction, and the stories I’m trying to tell. It’s one way of doing it.

In some ways, I know using any dialect lost me readers. I know it’s made it harder to sell books (I know this particularly for translation sales, I’ve had some very honest discussions with people who’ve read the books overseas but say they can’t buy them to translate because of the dialect). I know in some ways, I’m not quite capturing the Caribbean just so. It’s an imperfect piece of art…

…but it’s *my* imperfect piece of art. I made all the decisions in Crystal Rain, for better or worse. I made the calls. I bear all the responsibility. And even though it was hard to sell, I’ve made a career on the books and my mission of adventure and characters from varying backgrounds. I wanted to see a book *just like this* exist, and now it does. And the proudest moments of my life have been reading these books on Caribbean soil to Caribbean readers, and talking to readers of diverse backgrounds who saw what I was doing and got in the game.

 

On Being Invoked

 

It became important to write all this because recently my name was invoked in an article titled ‘Authentic Voice, or Clarity?’ at The Abyss & Apex.

…1) the author they acquired a story from, Celeste Baker, is someone I’ve read before and so recognized the name. She has two previous Caribbean stories with fantastic elements in them.

The first one is from the Caribbean Literary magazine Calabash, based out of NYC, Jumbie from Bordeaux (and if you’re from the Caribbean you can see the fantastic right in the title). A snippet:

I strut off to find everybody, hands in me pockets like a big man. Plantation quiet quiet. Even though I don’t like to get up, I like de morning cause de air smell like it just bathe. We high up from de sea but when de morning breeze blow it bring de sea smell.

More recently, Celeste also published a story that I linked to on twitter called Single Entry in Moko Magazine:

Carnival time come, and I a single entry. I not in any troup or nothing. I just parading in me costume, all by meself. Everybody asking me what song dat is and where me music coming from. I tell dem I write de song, which is true, and it coming from a iPod and dese little speakers ringing me North and South Poles, which not true. I projecting de song from me core, but dey ain’t need to know dat.

So, I hope a few more people read Celeste’s stories and get to see what she’s doing with dialect there. I really dug it, I hope she continues writing more and that she contributes more to our field.

My next reaction is to this phrase in the editorial:

We looked to Grenadian author Tobias S. Buckell (Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose) as an example of an author who used authentic island patois without overwhelming the story to the point where he alienated a large portion of his non-Caribbean readers.

2) I am *an* example. That’s it. *An.* And an imperfect one at that. I hope I’ve made that clear via my history, my explanations above, and showing you my compromises.
Because the way I do it is not the only way, nor is it the right way, or the best way, or more commercial way. It’s just my middling negotiation with my art and my career and my own path.

If there’s one thing I hope to get out of this, is that I don’t want to see myself invoked as the ‘safe’ or ‘smart’ or ‘best’ way to be any kind of Caribbean writer. I’m *one* path and that’s it. It was only because other people took risks and departed from the usual paths that I had the courage to do what I did. I hope to show the same. If I’m held up like this, it subverts that.
Please do not hold me up in this way. For one, it is dangerous to other writers seeking to find their voices. It’s dangerous to me, as you sell me out as a brick in the wall. And it adds to a potentially dangerous view that there is a proper way to do dialect at all. I’m one way, and I’m always flattered and humbled when I’m held up as an example. But only that. *An* example.

Please, please do not ever use me as an excuse to change dialect or the way someone speaks. I’m a suggestion. A possibility. A way.

And that is it. That is all I can say for myself.

 

Is dialect too much for science fiction readers?

 


My first reaction is always back to Junot Diaz:

“Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking over.”

But also, are science fiction readers now fragile, trembling people with such delicate sensitivities that some dialect is going to ruin them? Mainstream readers are completely able to handle this. As assistant editor Tonya Liburd, herself of Trini background, ably points out, mainstream readers today currently are able to handle Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.

Here’s Trainspotting, which is written in Scottish dialect:

That’s entirely a valid choice. And in now way does it invalidate the novel in question, nor has it hurt the novel’s accessibility or readership.

So if mainstream readers can read that, are science fiction readers somehow less courageous? Less literate?

To be honest, I think that’s a bit unfair to science fiction readers. Probably, it would be best to let them decide.

 

Back to this editorial

 

So back to this Abyss and Apex article, which people keep asking me about.

The assistant editor, Tonya, who is Caribbean, has editorialized her experience of trying to birth a story from a writer of Caribbean and trying to navigate Wendy’s confusion with the accent. There are some interesting exchanges in the narrative here:

I found myself completely code-switching when I had to talk to Wendy while reading the submitted story for inconsistencies and nitpicks. But we got it done. And then this controversy arose.
I talked to Wendy about the point well made with Shakirah Bourne’s GetWrite article “On Dialect – How Caribbean people supposed tuh talk in a story, eh?”
Wendy then promptly mentioned the example of George MacDonald, which she goes into detail in her section, above.

So the chief editor put on the brakes with this example of a Scottish novel from 1900, 114 years ago, to demonstrate that making the dialect ‘more accessible’ helped the novel sell more copies than when it first came out.

This is a horrible example, because this happened 114 years ago. At the height of a time when dialects were looked down upon, nay, even suppressed. But the more recent example of Trainspotting is ignored when Tonya points to an article that references it.

That’s… pretty awkward.

Tonya didn’t initially want to be included in the editorial. Again, the awkwardness comes across here:

She started talking about a judicious use of spice in food as an analogy for accents; I said, “But then spice is seen as an ethnic thing isn’t it?” So again…
Then Wendy got frustrated. “I’m feeling like a failure (about handling accents and racial issues).”
I said, “Yer not a failure! Why are you feeling like that?”
“Because I don’t seem to be quite getting the cultural context of what you’re saying.”

So, I wasn’t a fly on the wall when this happened. But if Tonya is representing this exchange fairly, it’s another extremely awkward moment. Because I believe the focus is all wrong. This isn’t about Wendy. This is about the story, and the dialect. Can it work, is it worth the (possible, but I think entirely surmountable based on Trainspotting’s success) ‘challenge’ of the dialect? Are they committed to publishing the piece, yes or no? Instead, Wendy is upset because she feels like a ‘failure’ but that’s not the point of all this.

Some people refer to this as White Womens Tears phenomena, when a white woman gets uncomfortable and begins to get upset about a tricky situation (or outright racism).
Please do not read this as me calling Wendy racist. I’ve only met her a few times and barely know her. The Abyss and Apex folk, as far as I can tell, have been cool cats about building up some careers of writers of color and international voices. However, the tactic of getting frustrated and making it all about your pain, and your feelings when trying to get through a complicated conversation like the above: that’s not fair to the work or the person of color trying to educate you.

But to be honest, I wouldn’t have fixated on it, if it weren’t for Wendy’s introduction:

Would you accuse me, a woman with the maiden name of Campbell, of “racism” because she found the thick, authentic Scottish accents in the original novel obscured the story? Then let’s not complain that a reviewer felt that over-using phonetic dialect in a story was, in her opinion, a flaw.

So, there are two things being conflated here. Wendy is trying to pre-empt accusations of being a racist for asking the story have the dialect watered down, and she’s trying to defend a reviewer at Strange Horizons who was recently taken to task for being dismissive of dialect.
So now we’re looking at a mess of an editorial that really isn’t an editorial, really, but a defense against being called racist and a defense of that other review.

Make of that what you will. Mostly I feel very awkward for Tonya getting caught in the middle and being asked to change the story. She seems to have tried to do her best in an awkward situation. I’d hate to see Tonya take heat, as far as I know she’s the only Caribbean assistant editor in the field. I also am curious to see how the author felt about all this, and whether this was a positive experience or as awkward as it looked. The power differential for both Tonya and the author is unbalanced, as the author is trying to get published and make the sale, and Tonya trying to be an assistant editor.

Mostly I see a train wreck that could have been avoided by focusing on making the story be the best it could be, and not focusing on whether it was ‘accessible.’ Abyss and Apex, after all, publishes poetry, which is often not ‘accessible’ and requires work to be read. Sometimes art is a little challenging. And that’s okay. We don’t need to buff out the diamond’s edges for it to be worth something. We need to cut it to let it shine.

I Have a Strange Relationship With Text: How Reading with ADHD and Dyslexia Works For Me

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I read weird.

I’m not sure when I realized I had a different experience with text than others. You internalize your own way of interacting with the world so much that you’re often not aware of the water you’re swimming in as a fish. And due to some unique experiences in my childhood, I certainly wasn’t aware how different my relationship with text was.

I do remember hints.

In first, or second grade, I think I remember looking around as we were asked to read parts of a text book out loud for the teacher. For many students, it was an embarrassing and painful experience. I don’t know how they modeled reading, or where they were in ability, but for me it was the first moment where I suddenly felt I was living in a completely different reality.

Some students read perfectly normally, at a slow but expected pace. I squirmed when listening to others who stumbled, halted, struggled to read the word out loud. Not so much out of judgement (though our memories are often tinged to make us the heroes, so maybe I did), but mainly I remember out of a desire for them to hurry it up because I could anticipate words or had already read the text in the book quickly and didn’t understand why we had to sit around and listen to someone else slowly deliver the same information. The more it happened, though, the more I started to suspect that people around me weren’t orating, but actually deciphering the words as they were speaking.

Which to me was alien. So alien that I still doubted what I saw. Was it physically possible to read that slowly? Maybe, I struggled with Shakespeare, some of which my mother had in our small library on the boat, and I could only grasp when I looked at each word.

And trying to verbalize all that? You sound so arrogant and like such a dick. Or at least I often did. I learned quickly to never, ever, talk about this. In those grades. Being bookish and socially awkward was already a bit strike against me. Talking about how slow a reader was? I quickly learned I was the odd one out and to shut the fuck up about it.

But, I didn’t read letters. Sometimes not even words. No. Letters are dangerous. They still are. Letters were slippery little fuckers with variable states of possibilities. Because the idiot who invented the alphabet, that little shit, made some letters look pretty damn similar to others. b,d,p. Round bits with a stick.

Somehow, between my learning to read and my hunger to read, it never occurred to me to ask or complain about this. The way letters could often flip on me. I assumed every one else had the problem as well, and they got on with reading big books just fine. My mother told me ‘a book is like a movie in your head as you read’ and my response was ‘we don’t have movies on the boat, that’s awesome; let’s do that! Let’s read all the things!’

I developed some quick, unconscious coping mechanisms to get around the slippery letter issue. One: assume all possibilities at the same time and allow context to inform. Two: read quickly and do not dwell on letter shapes, but on series of words and word structures. That word might mean duck, puck, buck. You don’t know until you add the next word or so. Okay, it’s a duck or buck hunt (probably not puck). Look, something quacked, okay, duck. You’ve held that word in the back and now you can allow it to resolve.

Luckily, no one ever stopped to tell me that you’re supposed to read at certain levels or paces as a kid. I moved quickly up through readers and into books, at what I realize now was a young age. And I read fast. And the faster I read, the less I needed to worry about the letters and words.

And so, after a time, I began to encounter the realization that people reading out loud were often also reading at their ability speed.

I truly realized this when my stepdad handed me an Arthur C. Clarke book to read. I did so, enjoyed it, gave it back to him and told him it was pretty good. He was a bit taken aback. I don’t know how fast I read it, but he didn’t believe I had, so quizzed me (this actually happened to me a lot when I was lent books by adults). I sat down and recounted the book in… excruciating enough detail he had me stop.

“Read this out loud,” he said, handing me an open chapter. “At the speed that you read.”
Me: stares blankly. “But… you can’t do that. You can’t read out loud at the speed you read. It can’t work.”

Him: “Try.”

I did. I sounded like the micro-machine man, and even then, it didn’t actually approximate the way in which I scanned clumps of words at a time.

Sometime after we spoke about this, I took an after-class session on study skills. One of them was to teach speed reading. I read the included half page article in a three second glance, took the provided quiz, got all the answers. There was a place to calculate how fast you read and put it on a chart so you could improve. There was nowhere on the chart for me. I was sometimes a bit smug about that, later, but it never particularly was smart to advertise…
Now we know why I fell into this. I fell into this because I have a mild bit of dyslexia and I’m ADHD. Because I wanted movies in my head, and because ADHD can allow laser focus, I find it possible to read a book in a single night (just keep going faster and faster and fall right into it all). Because the words are hard, I just decided to skip the word and not worry too much about it. I stumbled into a weird method of reading that allowed me to compensate for what are normally reading handicaps.

I’m damn lucky. It was dumb, dumb luck. I learned to read in a very unstructured environment, where no one told me not to do all this. My rushed reading never bothered my initial teachers (I would try to blister through reading out loud, wherever I was first taught, I vaguely remember). My mom taught me that many people read quietly, so I quickly moved to that method. And that let me focus on word pairs. And scanning. I often lose my place, and read paragraphs out of order on the page if I slow down.

I never thought I had a touch of dyslexia, because dyslexics struggled to read, right? And I read like a motherfucker, so I couldn’t be dyslexic. There was some fear of being labeled that in my extended family. Bad experiences, I guess. But that stuff runs around the genes. It’s gotten easier and easier over time. I don’t know if I’m training my brain enough, or have worked with the words enough for so long, that it’s gotten better. But it has. I don’t know what that means. And now that I don’t read two fiction books a day, like I used to, the speed has slowed way, way down… by my standards. A good book is usually consumable in four hours.
It is mostly still hard when I do numbers. I balance the checkbooks, which means I use excel to create ledgers. And when I sync them up by hand, they’re always wrong. It always takes a few passes, and the culprit is always a damned 6 or 9 transposed that I read wrong. Or, thanks to the fonts used these days, a 2 or 8. It’d be nice to not have to go through that every single time, but blowing up the font on the web browser, or on excel, helps. Thank goodness for computers.

I find captchas to be hellish puzzles that are just plain unfair.

I’ve talked to others who struggle with dyslexia far more than I do. I don’t have a simple solution, that’s not what this post is (though that font for dyslexics is pretty cool, and seems to help some. Again, thank goodness for computers), I just have the one I lucked into for myself. I’ve taught a few dyslexics (or people who’ve been tagged dyslexic) speed reading, and it’s helped some of them (but not all), as I think some of the pressure, fear, anxiety that fuels trying to identify each letter or word gives more road bumps. Learning to be free to not have to process each word gives you a certain freedom to fly and look at the paragraphs.

I can’t complain. When I talk about the oddities or struggles that came with either ADHD or this, it’s with a certain amusement. That I got out completely unnoticed until adulthood due to coping mechanisms (actually, reading with ADHD is the easier problem. The bigger one is organization and memory, which I never got to cope with well, which, looking back, explained a lot of everyone’s frustrations with me all the way to adulthood and my getting a PDA and then smartphone). With pride that I got an education when coming from the background I come from. And now that more people’s reading habits are being warped by online scanning, a chuckle. I’m already well warped beyond that.

My biggest struggle comes with talking openly about how I explore text. Because it’s ‘not the right way.’ I knew that young. I kept it close. People knew I read quickly. But nothing breeds resentment more than making something look easy. In college I flipped open a book for class on a computer and set it to scroll past so I could read it in the 30 minutes before class while I ate noodles in a computer lab. In class, as I began to argue about the themes in the book I had just read, another student, outraged, said that I had only just speed-read the book, and was unqualified to have an opinion. I’d been ‘busted.’ Because I couldn’t possibly have experience the text? Or because it looked too easy?

Easy was years of banked experience, thousands of read books, and unconscious development of a system. But there it was, I was doing it wrong. (I was a lazy student, though, because of this ability. I’d read a whole textbook the night before a final. Because, why not?).
Harder as a writer, too, to talk about this. I talked about the fact that, if I liked a book, I’d go back and re-read it. When I found out about ‘rasterizing’ of pictures I began to describe that as my reading process. If I liked a book I’d read in an hour or two, I’d keep coming back to it. My favorite novel, I read over forty times until I could feel it burn in and stick.

But try telling lovers of the word and well turned phrases that you read like flying over an ocean. Try explaining rasterizing. Try talking about the fact that phrases do repeat, just like words, and when in the trance articles are just part of the word and verbs as well. That text is agglutinative when you are absorbing it.

It was as an adult that I would be told more times than as a child that I was failing to do literature right. That I should take my time, to slow down, and savor what I was experiencing.
From professors to colleagues. So many people like that word. Savor. As I were a glutton, shoving food down my throat so fast I didn’t have a chance to properly taste it.

Metaphors are so damn important, whether we realize it or not. And for me, my metaphor was that I felt like a bird getting speed up so that I could skim over a landscape and have it revealed to me. Sometimes I’d have to come back to parts of it, and I would miss many details. But the world was there to come back to, never gone. A landscape to be explored. And to stop flying was to come back down to earth, and land in a gully somewhere where I’d be unable to see over this, or that, or was it this, or was it that. Shit.

Words were never food. They were always a mindscape.

I listen to audiobooks now. It’s the only way I can experience text on a word by word basis in a manner that’s not inherently frustrating. It’s been interesting, listening to novels I’ve already read this way. I’ve found some new tidbits. I’ve also found that some of my favorite novels are no longer my favorite via word by word. I’ve also been able to listen to some novels that I hated slogging through, because they feature enough unique turns of phrase my way of reading gets slowed down enough that I slip out of flight, hit the page, and find myself struggling to reread the same sentence five times. Those novels are hard to get into flight for, because you know in order to read them like that, you’re going to miss a lot. And you worry that sometimes maybe there’s an incompleteness there.

Have I come to view word by word as intrinsically better? No, just a different experience. I’m glad to have it, I know it strengthens my abilities to experience literature like this. New experiences are good.

I’m sure someone will have a field day about what this means for my writing. The biggest impact it has, though, is on my ability to give readings. I’m still trying to learn how to read well. Not because I get nervous about an audience, but because while speaking out loud I read the text in front of me automatically. All of it. Which means when reading to an audience I’m usually scanning a few paragraphs ahead, rescanning, tweaking it, and then losing my place as my words run out and I try to rescan to find my place, causing me to stumble. My reaction has been to find a few pieces that I’ve almost got memorized, so that it’s starting to become performative and reassuring. I have an app that helps as well.

Mainly I am writing this to say there’s no one true way to experience literature. If you read a lot, you’re winning. And that, to anyone with ADHD or dyslexia out there, keep trying. You may be surprised yet at what you unlock.

I used to be worried about people’s reactions to all this. To whether I was doing it right. And then one day I stopped caring and talking about it. And it hurt to get pushback, but it was even cooler to find people who took heart by finding out that I had dealt with this. Because so many people seem to suggest that writers, or professors, or people who deal with words, are perfect with them.

I struggle with doing it certain ways. And I fly doing it others. I know I got lucky. But I know that I wouldn’t trade the way this worked out for anything. I read and write books. It’s my life. And everything around me seemed to suggest that that wouldn’t be the case. But I’m glad I didn’t read ‘right.’ I truly am.

You find your own path. And it’s good.

Addendum: for the curious, there’s been a lot more research about this then when I was first diagnosed, and I no longer feel so alone/crazy in suggesting that it helped me. Here’s a study that got results out of formalizing this accidental process of mine, teaching dyslexic kids to speed read helped them more than it stuck with normal readers. If you google speed-reading and dyslexia, you can read points, counterpoints, research, etc. It’s probably true that dyslexia has many underlying contributions to an outward-facing result, and some methods (dyslexic font, speed-reading) might help, and some might not. As in many things in life, mileage varies.

American Healthcare Was Already Socialized: By Ronald Reagan. We’re Just Fighting About How To Pay For It

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Today the US government shut down. Ostensibly by Tea Party Republicans to try and stop socialized medicine from becoming a reality. In fact, false equivalence reporting has lent an air of respectability to the effort (they might be fighting a losing battle, and the polls are low for congress and Republicans, but they’re fighting for their minority opinion).

By the way, false equivalency is when you’re a news organization and someone says ‘our party believes the world is round’ and you have someone on saying ‘the world is flat’ and the reporter says ‘opinions differ’ and offers you poll results about what people believe after the two talking heads hash out why the world may or may not be flat.

So here we are.

But the fact is, US medicine has been socialized since the year 1986.
1986.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan passed a bill called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, or EMTALA.

See, up until 1986, hospitals and doctors could turn people away if they didn’t have the money. So could emergency rooms.

Let’s repeat that.

Up until 1986, in the USA, hospitals could turn a dying person away at the door if they didn’t have money, or refuse to treat.

As you can imagine, costs were kept down.

In 1986, Republicans passed EMTALA. What did EMTALA do? It socialized healthcare and made emergency rooms just like police, or firemen, or roads. It said people showing up on a door step of an ER dying *could not be refused* treatment.

Why did this happen. Because patients were being, literally dumped, by hospitals to prevent having to assume the expense of treating them:

Why did this happen. Because patients were being, literally dumped, by hospitals to prevent having to assume the expense of treating them:

Congress passed EMTALA to combat the practice of “patient dumping,” i.e., refusal to treat people because of inability to pay or insufficient insurance, or transferring or discharging emergency patients on the basis of high anticipated diagnosis and treatment costs. The law applies when an individual has a medical emergency “and a request is made on the individual’s behalf for examination or treatment for a medical condition.”

Here’s what that looked like on the ground:

Ron Anderson, M.D., president and CEO of Parkland Memorial Health and Hospital System in Dallas, was the medical director of the emergency department at Parkland in the early 1980s, and he knew all about dumping. “I would see patients transferred with knives still in their backs, or women giving birth at the door of the hospital, simply because they were uninsured.”
…
These, and many other shocking incidents, caught the attention of the CBS investigative show 60 Minutes, which, on March 17, 1985, broadcast an episode titled “The Billfold Biopsy,” about the dumping of unstabilized patients at Parkland.

So basically, Ronald Reagan set up hospital emergency rooms as socialized healthcare, and then…

…didn’t fund them.

It’s an unfunded mandate.

So it’s illegal to let patients die on your doorstep. A step forward in society (Reagan at the time said it allied with American’s Christian principles and his own). But the Republicans of the time never paid for it. They kicked that particular can down the road.

As a result, hospitals saw emergency room visits drastically increase. Insurance companies, because many of the uninsured used emergency rooms as care (to which they’re legally allowed, it’s how to collect the payment later that’s in issue), try to refuse to pay for the increase. Hospitals got clever at burying costs into healthy patient’s procedures, or anywhere else.

The system gets distorted.

So we already have socialized healthcare, it’s just that the hospitals, the government, and the insurance companies are all putting their fingers on their noses and saying ‘not it!’ due to that single fact: the 1986 bill was an unfunded mandate.

The thing is, one way or another, we do pay for it. Via taxes. Via higher costs of procedures. Via too much red tape caused by this giant game of ‘not it.’

Because of EMTALA.

Hillary Clinton tried to create a way to pay for it, so that all citizens chipped in. It looked too socialized. The Heritage Foundation suggested that all citizens just be forced to carry health insurance, and that if it cost too much for poor people the government chip in a little. Much like using the road (only, because the road is ‘being alive’ everyone has to have car/health insurance because you can’t get off the road, except for by dying), everyone has to have insurance. Massachusetts adopted this model, and it’s not perfect, but it’s way better than the current situation.

Obamacare imitates the Heritage and Massachusetts model. But it’s being fought by anti-Obama Tea Party folk because it’s socialism.

No son. Socialized medicine arrived in 1986.

What is being fought out is a case of ‘will we now be fiscally responsible about the socialized medicine that Ronald Reagan signed into law or will we continue using the expensive, unfunded mandate via emergency room payment system that has been a mess since 1986?’
The current House Republicans claim to be fighting socialized healthcare. If they were, I’d respect their ideological position. But none of them are filibustering or trying to repeal EMTALA. I haven’t seen a single attempt to repeal EMTALA by any of them.

So stopping the government, all the fits thrown this week, all this misery and the high, high cost of this shutdown to the economy, will come merely because Republicans refused to pay for a mandate their party created in 1986. (also, if you’re a Republican or Tea Party and not campaigning against EMTALA, I don’t take you seriously if you say you’re fighting socialized medicine, because you’re not, you’re just fighting to not have to pay for it).

Right now, ACA lets freelancers and people in between jobs get healthcare. It lets people outside of large corporations get healthcare. It lets small businessmen get healthcare.
It makes the practice of insurers dumping people with preexisting conditions illegal.

It makes it easy to find a healthcare package.

It has already been shown to be slowing down the rising cost of healthcare in studies.
And people want to try to stop it. Because it might help people not have to wait until they’re hurting in front of the emergency room to get the benefit of that 1986 law, it’ll let people start taking care of themselves ahead of time.

It’s been working in one state very well for a long time. It works well in other countries. We know how the ground game goes.

One group is doing everything they can to stop it, because this refinement of how the 1986 law is handled society-wide is coming from someone they didn’t vote for. That’s not a reason to hurt millions. It’s the biggest, saddest, childish thing I’ve seen.

Remember it come the next round of elections.

Remember well.

Here is Healthcare.Gov.

Is Worldcon Dying, and Should Authors Still Go to Cons?

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Every few years there is a big soul-searching about what Worldcon (one of science fiction’s biggest gatherings) *is* and *means* from attendees after a major Worldcon. Newer writers, newer participants, who have strong feelings about what is missing, pipe up.

Since I’ve been blogging about this stuff since 1998, there are usually a few reactions. Either their comments get folded in (remember the great wars to get electronically published material eligible for awards? I do.). Or people demand that those challenging issues join (though from many accounts if you’re an outsider to the culture it can be hard to figure out *how*). Or… the improvements show up in some other convention and the benefits accrue to it.

I’ve seen Confusion in Detroit grow from a very aged and greying regional convention to a growing, younger, more vital convention. I’ve seen conventions that were at the same state it was in ten years ago continue their slow slide. Often they’re happy to continue the slide. This is who we are, dammit, we’re happy about it.

I’d like to change that, but since I’m not volunteering, it’s not my place. Maybe it’s okay to watch some things wither away from the point of view of the bar with a scotch in my hand, and look forward to the more vital, crowded place full of a more diverse crew…
…but it’s not the fate I wish on any given event. So I sometimes rue in public. And I hope Worldcon doesn’t follow that fate.

I worry aloud because I care. And because I’m a writer and I like to see venues thrive and readers thrive and I would hate to see the Hugo Awards dragged down. Because seeing those happy writers win an award voted on by the readers was amazing. I love that.

* * *


Are Worldcon numbers dropping? This has actually been hashed out before by Cheryl Morgan. In 2010 she wrote an article, reposted at SFWA.org now as a response to something written by authors who had discovered DragonCon was more happening (see, three years later we’re all hashing over an already argued online argument!).
Here’s the basic chart:

Worldcons have grown from inception until the early 80s, at which point they settled into a rough size of 3-5,000 (depending on location, but the range holds fairly true).

“If you take into account different attendance levels in different parts of the world then attendance has been pretty much steady from 1980 onwards. Canadian Worldcons have  never exceeded 4,000 members, so Montréal was not unusually small.  British Worldcons just exceed 4,000. The numbers in the USA are more varied. The largest Worldcon ever was L.A.Con II in 1984 which drew 8,365 people. It did that, at least in part, on the back of being the first venue ever to show the original three Star Wars movies back-to-back. Of course that would not be a draw these days. No other Worldcon has exceeded 7,000 members. Of the 20 US Worldcons from 1980 onwards, 13 of them have had fewer than 6,000 members. Two have had fewer than 4,000. Both of those have been in Denver.”

(Via A Future for Worldcon? | SFWA.)

Judging by that plot, baby boomer SF/F fans have pretty much settled into a pattern that looks like it will probably hold true for at least another 15-20 years, depending, of 3-5,000 person Worldcons.

Some have claimed interest in Worldcons and Hugos are up, due to higher votes and nominations in the Hugo voting process. I would believe that probably has more to do with the fact that voting is *easier* now than before thanks to a) electronic ballots and b) packets with nominees in them and c) pin numbers automatically sent to you from last year’s con that allow nominations for the next. That has gotten hella easier than when I first entered the field.
By the way, if you want to understand a lot of just how much we’re rehashing arguments, current writers should read the above article I linked by Cheryl, that does an amazing job of explaining some of the… ins and outs and what have you’s…

* * *

Before my heart defect took me out of the game for a while in 2008, I did a great deal of travel (some of it on my own dollar, other trips as a guest). I got a chance to participate at DragonCon and San Diego Comic Con, in addition to regional conventions like Boskone, and smaller local conventions. I spent a lot of money in 2007 and 2008 going where I could.
Since 2008, I’ve also tested the waters of GenCon (the 40,000 person plus gaming oriented convention), been invited to the 2-3,000 person AnimeKon Expo in Barbados, been a Guest of Honor at local conventions in the midwest, and attended as a guest lecturer to various events around the country.

In the beginning common wisdom was that we should attend conventions to build our readership. I used to attend everything I could afford, and put out brochures with story snippets (CDs with free stories, etc) and more on them. The higher access to professionals ratio at the smaller fan cons meant I got to meet some writers, some who were very friendly to an up-and-coming newbie like myself.

When I started getting out to the big SF cons it was a heady experience. Authors I loved at the bar, or hanging out at parties (who sometimes talked to me!). Going on panels in front of 30-100 people (depending on the lineup). Signing at the autographing line. Seeing people wait for me to arrive at the KaffeeKlatsch (how cool!). Meeting readers in the hall, at parties, waiting for me at the end of a panel.

But there were issues. The greying of fandom. Lack of diversity. Those stood out at me. Often they could be depressing, weathering casual prejudice by sometimes other panelists or audience members when I was asked to talk about race.

This seriously dampened my desire to want to participate or engage.

But I forged on out of a desire to interact with my readers and grow my readership. It was gratifying to see my work come out in the long list of books nominated for Hugos… on the long list, if you will.

* * *

I had to make some tough decisions in 2009. Faced with medical bills and debt from not being able to make as much, twins arrived, and education debt, I couldn’t justify convention attendance as an investment in growing my readership.

Some very incredible con-runners keep asking me when I’ll be able to attend XYZ con, and I have to be honest and explain that I cannot, in good conscience, attend a convention on my own dime these days. Not until I’m completely debt free.

I will occasionally go to a major Worldcon, or a WFC. Usually if it’s close by, or if it’s subsidized by another business trip or concurrent travel (this year I altered the ticket back from Barbados to swing me through San Antonio). But it’s rare.

More often than not I show up without trying to get on panels or anything like that. I’ll explain why shortly.

* * *

Mike Underwood on a Reddit post related to our twitter conversation has the summary that best summarizes the various categories of conventions:

Small fan-cons (Balticon, ReaderCon, etc.) – These regional cons are very focused on the SF/F literary world, and tend to provide a very intimate experience – access to professionals is high, due to a lower fan:pro ratio.
Big SF cons (WorldCon, EasterCon) – Explicitly SF/F lit focused, with notable, if often greying, fan presence. This is based almost entirely on experience at WorldCon (2012 and 2013).
Big Multi-Media Cons (Convergence) – Explicitly multi-fandom, but SF/F lit has a place at the table. In 2013, Convergence had a full age spread, with a strong youth presence (esp. in Steampunk and anime).
Huge Multi-media cons (GenCon, Dragon Con) – notable SF/F lit element, but SF/F lit is not the focus. These cons shew young, with notable numbers of teens, 20-somethings, etc.
Huge Media Cons (Comic Cons) – More than 50K up to 100K+ attendees. Some literary presence, but it’s definitely an also-ran compared to the central theme.

I would probably lump the last two into one category for myself.

Having attended the full range of those categories, the one thing I began to realize was that plugging myself into them meant differing results.

At GenCon the Author Alley moved hundreds of dollars of books, covering my gas and the motel room, thus paying for itself. I also was exposed to a lot of new readers who introduced themselves, took bookmarks with directions to download free samplers. I saw a bump in sales afterward.

Comic Con saw me paired up with Mysterious Galaxy, a long time supporter and fantastic crew of booksellers who moved a good number of books and put my face in front of a larger crew than normal. I was also able to make contacts outside the usual suspects of fellow SF/F authors. Broadening my horizons.

DragonCon, again, paired me up with a bookseller and allowed me to stand at a table for the better part of a day.

At the core regional and Worldcon conventions, usually the routine is a couple of panels a day where I am co-panelist with a wide variety of people, and a varying audience, with a rendering or one hour autographing session at some point if I’m lucky. A check of the dealer room usually indicates a few copies of my books sold.

I’ve also done a city book fair where I sat at a table and shook hands and met people and sold a couple hundred dollars worth of books.

At the first AnimeKon Expo in Barbados I sold hundreds of dollars worth of books standing at a booth, and hundreds of dollars more again this year (the most books sold record holds for both AnimeKons). To be fair, I was a Caribbean SF author in the Caribbean *at an SF oriented convention*. I have however been at an academic conference in the Caribbean, invited as a guest, where I did… a reading, and a quick autograph session, with much lower sales (a few books). So I do suspect layout and approach actually do have a huge impact.

* * *

So the question is, what am I doing at a convention. And there are many variables that plug into this.

First, what stage am I in as a writer?

I make a living (or a good chunk of it) as a writer (and freelancer). I’m in a different stage than when I was just a writer trying to sell some short stories, or even when I’d just sold some, or even than when I’d just sold my first novel and was first trying to find readers.

Secondly, what is the purpose of the event I’m at for myself, in my current role? What’s my job, per se, at different events?

In my own sphere I’ve come to regard Worldcon as a ‘water cooler’ event. A place I spend money to attend, that then allows me to catch up in real life to all manner of friends. I’m starting to prefer to attend those without panels and obligations so I can just lightly float through the social circles I wish, retreat to my room when I need to nap, and so on. The thinking is, as very few books will sell, why not focus on the thing that seems locked in more to what I’m there for.

At events where I shake hands and am at a booth to sell books, my focus is to gear up and do that. Let’s move some books.

If I’m invited as a Guest or Guest of Honor, my way paid, then it doesn’t matter how many books I’ve sold. I’ve been flown somewhere to meet people and be available. That then, is my focus. I will do my best to go out of my way to attend all the room parties, go to as many panels as I can, and walk around the hallways so people can meet the guest.

Last year, I went to a Worldcon that was nearby and didn’t attend programming. I had a marvelous time networking and chatting with friends and not having obligations outside of that. The focus worked.

This year I tested out attending panels. It was fun, but again, very few books sold via the dealer room system and a remarkable lack of youth and diversity. Again, that isn’t Worldcon’s focus, they’re oriented at a different demographic. That makes me think it works best for me as a water cooler convention. I have to hope the demographic collapse 10-20 years off is navigated for the sake of the Hugos, which I love. If I really want that diversity, I can, as a consumer, simply opt for another event (there are many).

However, that isn’t fair of me. If I write this off completely as a way to interact with readers, I write off all the readers that *were* at Worldcon. Graying readers don’t mean they aren’t reading new fiction. Lack of diversity doesn’t mean there aren’t white, older readers digging what I’m doing. It would be short-sighted of me to do this. At my one hour signing I spent about 35 minutes signing for people who showed up (not just collectors), and I was grateful to have their support and attention. It was awesome.

And I know readers wanted to interact more, because while I was skulking around outside the bar I heard readers express how intimidated they were by the writers’ takeover of the bar, creating a space that while seemed to some like a ‘no readers’ zone. From the inside perspective, it was just friends who all have something in common (reading/reviewing/art/long friendships/industry attachments) catching up and meeting friends of friends. From the outside?

So there is a desire to connect. The Drinks with Writers was a successful event for mingling a bit more. Room parties as well, though it’s always tough when they’re spread out a bit, and the quality depends on where and how they’re hosted.

As for moving books, I was impressed by Angry Robot, who used a booth and customized business cards per writer to really promote and sell a lot of their authors’ books. I understand that at 3-5,000 people, investing a lot of time and energy into something like that may be a tough calculation, but it certainly impressed me.

The post-Worldcon examination often has people offering up all manner of suggestions. I don’t have pronouncements, but I think if we want Worldcon to survive well past the demographic drop off, it needs more youth and diversity. I do think other cons will be happy to pick up to serve that need if it doesn’t. I hope it does.

As for how I’ll interact, I’m not sure. I like the idea of attending when I can afford to as mostly a networking event unless something changes. I was tired enough this year I think in the future I’ll do what I saw one author do: limit the events to just a single day so that I have energy and time to nap and be social on my own schedule. I certainly don’t want to blow off fans, so maybe an autographing and reading if I’m allowed? I’m very aware I’m there only if the volunteers arranging it want me to be, so I would understand if they found that to not be enough of a commitment… on the other hand, I’m volunteering my time and effort as well on panels. Some people see panels as a reward, or a geek promotion, but I invest time, energy, and thought ahead of time on them and am often tired afterwards. It’s not free, there is a cost for me.

My publisher in the UK will have a presence at the next Worldcon, and I might be called upon to do a lot more, which would be fine as well. I’d act as if it were a shake hands and stand a booth sort of con, meet new readers. That’ll be fantastic too. Worldcon, by virtue of being in a different place every year, also has the additional frustration of changing in tone each year, and changing what the author might need to view it as. A chance to meet overseas readers and editors might be a good networking opportunity. Worldcon is not a monolith.
At my next US Worldcon, I certainly also would consider buying a table, possibly with another author. I still want to test out a stand-and-shake approach to Worldcon would be like while selling my own wares.

The danger in this, I’m told, is that I will upset dealer-room booksellers. And I don’t want to do that. Some of them are excellent ambassadors out representing one’s books to a myriad of other, smaller, regional conventions.

I’d hate to get blacklisted, or something like that.

On the other hand, there were only a couple book dealers at Worldcon this year, and nothing at all like the larger rows of booksellers I first saw at my first Worldcon in 2001. Are they fading away as well? When do you begin to try and compensate? And is this really a zero sum game we’re playing where we jealously guard these little kingdoms? I was able to figure out how to sell both my books and a booksellers at a recent event with everyone making money.

* * *

I think, mainly, we’re possibly not experimenting enough. All of us. It’s easy to do what worked before and stick with a rut. I fell into the three panels, a reading, a quick autograph session myself. But having done some other things, it can be electrifying to shake it all up (and then also find more readers, sell more books, inject more excitement in).
I would like to buy a table and write something live, like Howard Taylor does live sketches.
I would like to participate in Ignite type events. 5 minutes, don’t talk about your book (or whatever you’re hawking). Maybe we authors could do it guerrilla style. We have a reputation for being boring at readings, so few attend. How can we shake things up, and train ourselves to be better presenters?

I want a panel of all minorities… who talk about anything but ‘minorities in SF.’ Make the topic ‘near future space access’ or something. It’s something we can propose?
I’d like to participate in more mixers. We can do these.

How about some Skype sessions with people across the world for more diversity?

These are all things that aren’t demands for Worldcons to change, these are things we can sneak doing ourselves.

I have very limited energy (damn heart issues), or I swear I’d try to move more of these forward. Mostly, after this very long entry, I hope I just gave you some interesting links and things to think about for the next round.

I think we can do interesting. I’ve seen it happen.

PS, it’s interesting to compare the website of a Phoenix Comic Con and a Worldcon. And I’ll note, that I’ve never been made to feel unwelcome at an event like this, even though I wasn’t a headliner. Sure I’m not in the main guest room with famous actors, but it’s been very fun to attend as an author. The main issue is that so many people show up it’s hard to navigate!
PPS: I don’t demand that a con should return on investment. Obviously if I’m designating it as a water cooler event, I look it as just that. But I have to say, it really helps if selling books can create ROI. Why? I’m asked to do a LOT of events. Right now, due to my medical debt, I simply turn most of them down unless it will be a fantastic water cooler event, or my way is being paid. But if I were able to get more of an ROI (like GenCons), cons might find more people showing up because they’re at least not costing themselves lots and lots of money to attend lots of these events.

Survivorship Bias and Why 90% of the Advice About Writing is Bullshit

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I love this quote from the recent marketing guide that Smashwords published:

“we cannot promise you your book will sell well, even if you follow all the tips in this guide. In fact, most books, both traditionally published and self-published, don’t sell well. Whether your book is intended to inspire, inform or entertain, millions of other books and media forms are competing against you for your prospective reader’s ever-shrinking pie of attention.”

(From Smashwords — Smashwords Book Marketing Guide – A book by Mark Coker – page 7.)

This just does not get emphasized nearly enough. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about a great deal since I published The Apocalypse Ocean. One, because so many rah rah eBook advocates have been indicating to me that if I’d only just publish digitally first I’d keep 70% of the profits and *obviously* make more than I would with ‘traditional publishing.’
Since 2001, I’d been involved in selling eBooks. I initially began with stories being sold through Fictionwise. I did this to test the waters, and begin understanding what I felt was going to be a new way of reading. I also have been reading eBooks since the same year. I’ve since switched to selling a portfolio of short story collections, individual short stories, novellas, and a novel via various eBook outlets.

I lay down my bonafides, because usually the first thing I get is a lot of ‘booksplainin,’ by which I mean people lecturing me about what to do as if it’s self evident, obvious, and usually based entirely on their own anecdotal experience.

In fact, the self assured expertise of anecdotes drives me nuts.

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Here’s the data. Mark Coker, looking at sales of *all* the books self published at Smashwords, points this chart out in a recent slideshare of information and best practices (for all that he’s been an initial booster, I’m grateful to him for sharing some raw data, unlike the other venues which highlight, boost, and act as if the superstars’ stories are average):

The problem, right now, in eBook direct sales, is that everyone is paying and listening to people in the green area. They’re listening to everything they say, and sifting everything they say as if it’s a formula for success.

Like in most cultish behavior, if you follow the rules and don’t get the results, you’re either ostracized, ignored, or it’s pretended you don’t exist. Many who don’t get the same results just shut up and go away. Thus creating an environment where people are creating massive amounts of confirmation bias by continually listening to the top sellers.

In an interview recently, David Kirtley pointed out that in business school there’s this point made that if you interview rich people who have won the lottery, you might come to believe that playing the lottery is the only way to become rich. I thought that was interesting. One of the things I’m constantly trying to point out is that we’re not doing nearly enough to highlight both median and failure modes, because that’s where the real lessons lie. As for myself, I find message boards where new writers struggle to sell more than a few copies interesting, and where I harvest data about the low end.

That survivorship bias is useful to understand, and I just read a very large article that I think should be required reading for authors.

If failures becomes invisible, then naturally you will pay more attention to successes. Not only do you fail to recognize that what is missing might have held important information, you fail to recognize that there is missing information at all.
You must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and losers, successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention to one side of that equation you are always neglecting the other.

and

Survivorship bias pulls you toward bestselling diet gurus, celebrity CEOs, and superstar athletes. It’s an unavoidable tick, the desire to deconstruct success like a thieving magpie and pull away the shimmering bits. You look to the successful for clues about the hidden, about how to better live your life, about how you too can survive similar forces against which you too struggle. Colleges and conferences prefer speakers who shine as examples of making it through adversity, of struggling against the odds and winning.

So here’s how survivorship bias affects people. Here’s a chart from Smashwords of how all the books do in their system:

Guess where on this tail-like chart above the books and authors with the most articles, blog posts, and largest followings sit?

Mark helpfully takes out the top 100 so we can get a better look at it. But remember, the people in the top 100 are the ones that everyone points to as if those results have some meaning for the rest of everyone else:

Does this mean I’m somehow against direct digital publishing? No, obviously I’m a hybrid player and have been for over a decade now. But my refusal to damn either version of publishing means I don’t get lauded by certain parties, ink isn’t spilled over me, I’m not some vanguard. I’m just a working stiff, a mid list writer with a decent but passionate audience. Both methods have benefits and drawbacks, and I’m fully aware of both and try to communicate that.

I am trying to say ‘please approach this with some rationality.’ I’m slowly building up a portfolio over time of work that I hope will offer me an additional income stream. There are some benefits to this form of publication that I like, but to be honest, in a direct apples to apples comparison, I’m making more off the much despised traditional publishing still. By a large margin. This piece of anecdotal data means that the formula for each writer is different, and the constant ‘us vs them’ battle going on is harming artists who are losing a chance to make more money, or get a larger audience, who are being led astray.

It is only by trying lots of different methods, and paying attention to real data, not cherry picked anecdata, that you will best succeed.

If you’ve been successful, good on ya. I’m thrilled when any artist breaks out to making a living. But genuinely understand that survivorship bias means there are plenty of people plugging the same formulas and not getting results that look even similar.

This is not bitterness on my part. I’m actually thrilled with where I am, which is far ahead of many. Over half my income comes from writing fiction (and if I weren’t in debt from having a medical crisis in 2008 I’d likely be able to make a living just on my fiction). I’ve been slowly building my career since 1999, since my first tiny sale. Each year my readership grows, my blog audience grows, the money I make off my fiction grows. I use eBooks, traditional publishing and crowdsourcing all as tools to survive. I’m playing the long game. And maybe I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m pretty open to that, but I’m always happy to report on what’s going on. Each successful career I’ve seen, though, requires a ton of hard work, and many people I see trying any method with a focus on shiny and new and ‘beating’ some system often flame out and fall away. Lots of people who’re doing the right thing and working hard flame and fall away too.

Making a living off art is hard.

But that isn’t a sexy sell.

That isn’t to say you should give up. Fuck that. But I am going to say: get ready to work, don’t expect riches. Focus hard on the art.

And pay attention to those charts and adjust your expectations accordingly.

There’s a lot of snake oil sales going on. And a lot of well meaning people who won the lottery telling everyone to go buy lottery tickets while financial advisors shake their head.

Pretty much the same as its always been…

PS: this survivorship bias also works for writing advice about ‘how to write’ if you think about it…

5 Things That I Hope Will Change in Publishing

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

As a hybrid author I’ve often expressed my fears of Amazon and its use of its large size. I’ve encouraged people to sell eBooks direct on their site. I’ve lauded Kickstarter as a way to balance the eBook channels. It’s led some to claim I’m a print cheerleader, but I’m actually just interested in forward looking disaster mitigation.

That being said, watching the changes in publishing come down the pike, I do think there are a few things, well, actually five, that print publishing (or competitors popping up to replace it) will need to focus on to keep hybrid authors interested:

1. Monthly royalties

Publishing is set up on a six month system. It does this to simplify accounting, of course. There is also the fact that books take time to go out to bookstores and then come back. It takes time to sort out what all has happened. There is a lot of invested infrastructure aimed at catering to that system. It was how you made business for a hundred years, it’s not surprising.
However, monthly payouts are a big deal. For budgeting and planning, it is really, really helpful for writers to see more constant payouts.

Also, it’s tough to put in a ton of work in one month, and then never see the fruits of your labor for (at times) a year down the road.

Monthly payouts would help writers move from the famine/sudden-lump-system that swings this way and that.

I doubt publishers will move the print component over to this, but a parallel track of paying out your digital royalties makes sense, even if it involves work up front. If you want to keep your authors, it’ll have to happen because the alternative is just too interesting (half the reason many hybrid authors are attracted to digital direct sales via Amazon KDP/Nook Press/iTunes Bookstore is monthly compensation for monthly activity. We also live in a world where Kickstarter pays out the same month it funds. Our expectations may not be fair, but they’re there now, for better or worse).

Also, digital royalties have no reserve against returns (the returns system is a system where in books are given to bookstores at a credit, and are returnable. You can imagine the accounting headache) so the money doesn’t need to be held in case bookstores suddenly return a tranche of unsold books. The money is there.

2. Stepped digital royalties

In my contracts for paper, on hardcover, they stipulate if I sell X number of hardcovers I get a certain rate. After I sell X, the percentage goes up (because the house has recouped investment, and we’re sharing more of the royalties). Some step clauses can get pretty high and be very lucrative, the idea being that after expenses are recouped everyone can enjoy a good deal.

Sadly, legal and administrative people in large corporate publishing companies have decided to fight that for digital royalties and only a few high profile authors are getting steps in their digital clauses.

This is one, however, that will be fought. Why? I recently have seen some contracts going to authors that specify that the publisher gets to keep the book as long as it sells a few hundred digital copies every six months (which is easy to do, drop the price temporarily to 99 cents, sell your few hundred, then pull the price back up and you own the author’s rights for another few years of the contracted period). That means some people who are selling books, if the company is un-ethical, are entering into a very long term relationship indeed (if you assume the worst, which is never a bad thing, it could be for life). So what is the value of your digital rights over a lifetime?

If hardcover rights can be stepped, why not digital?
If the publisher has figured out how many books equal recouping costs, and steps the clause after that, contracts will look a lot fairer.

3. Sharing data


When Amazon announced that they’d be sharing BookScan data I saw a lot of publishing insiders I know and love shaking their heads and saying ‘that’ll drive authors crazy.’
Trust me, I know authors are crazy. I’m one. And I know a lot of them. We can be neurotic, twitchy, and overly imaginative. Creatives aren’t encouraged by society to be business-oriented.

But we writers are running small businesses. When the creative cap is off, the business needs to come on. And part of the reason writers are a pain in the ass on the publisher side is that we’re actually coming in ignorant, in the dark, worried about validation, and very very nervous.

As a result, we’re fire walled off so that we don’t cause too much damage.
Boy do I understand the impulse. I’ve seen some spectacular author idiocies in my time. I know how wearying it would be on the other side to deal with neurotics asking questions all the time.

But, part of that is the opaqueness of a process that isn’t made transparent.
Share the data, and the process openly, provide FAQs and upfront information about the hows and whys, and I’m betting you’ll have a less neurotic author.

We didn’t all fall apart when we got free access via Amazon to our Bookscan results. A lot of questions were asked up front, but over time wisdom was imparted, and know there are more knowledgable authors. We’d traded up obsessing about Amazon ranks for obsessing about Bookscan results (we’re going to obsess about something, it might as well be real figures).

This is helpful because it allows authors to see the impact of various efforts to promote books (if at all). If things are successful, both being rewarded faster (monthly payouts) and seeing the data confirm it, more authors will be able to tweak their outreach strategies as well. This benefits everyone. The upside is that it can show authors what works and what doesn’t (they won’t have to take someone’s word for it) and might allow some authors to figure out some stuff that maybe wasn’t obvious to anyone else.

Addendum: the genesis for this point came from the fact that Random House has done this for their authors, and the system is pretty cool (not all the way there yet, but certainly useful!).

4. Different out of print clauses

I’ve seen contracts recently that define out of print as something like the following: if the book has been out a few years, and sells less than $100 worth of royalties for the author in all types (print and digital), for a few publishing periods (each period being that 6 month stretch publishing works on), then the author can ping the publisher, and the publisher has X amount of time to try and raise sales.

As far as I can tell, this is one of the more troubling developments in the last two to three years in ‘traditional’ publishing. While self publish-only people talk about other things, this should be the item they laser in on. Because what this allows is a situation where authors are basically giving their intellectual property to a company forever.

In the past, once the book ‘went out of print,’ a clause like this worked and was fair to both parties. If the book stopped selling, and the print versions all faded away, this clause meant that after a year of it not selling the writer could ask for the rights back. The publisher could take a look at the title, decide whether to invest in a new printing (a not insignificant burst of activity and money), or whether to let it go.

But with the new reality, it’s hella easy for the publisher to print on demand enough copies to keep the book out there. It’s even easier for it to drop the price on the book to 99 cents for a temporary sale. That juices the copies sold up to the minimum, they keep the rights. I sell my own ebooks direct, so I can see how easy it would be to do this.

Have I seen this happening? No, right now publishers seem to be dropping projects back to authors when they realize things aren’t working out.

But the fact that lawyers are working so damn hard to put this in there is chilling as hell. It’s not happening that publishing companies are squatting on IP, as far as I can tell in my own experience, but with these new contracts the *mechanism* is there.
I expect to see agents fighting to increase that minimum way up, or putting in a clause that says firesales on the intellectual property negate the X dollars in royalties per period out of print clause.

Alternatively, I admire that in Europe there are time term limits placed on the agreement, to allow the author to get out after five or seven years. American contracts really need that.
I’ve already had one hybrid author express to me a desire to stop selling paper rights in the US as a result of this clause and to begin by selling their work internationally only in print, and handle the ebook themselves in the US.

5. Better project management integration


Cory Doctorow wings this point in a recent article:

Many of these publishers are separate divisions of the same company, but one thing that is abundantly clear is that none of the different departments are coordinating with one another. Most contemporary sales, marketing, and PR organizations outside of publishing use some kind of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to coordinate their activities. Fundamentally, these are just databases that record all the different interactions that the company has with the people with whom it does business.

That being said, I don’t think Cory goes far enough. He’s focused on the publicity side, I think an entire system that lets anyone in publishing assigned to that book check in on a book’s project management status would be killer.
Think of a system that holds not just the PR stuff Cory is talking about, but information about the book as it’s being developed so that we solve some of the neurotic author issues. A place where the book as it exists can be read by publishing people in house to get excited about it. Where editorial, art, marketing and sales have appended comments to the cover that the author can see (oh, that’s why they’re changing this, or like this, or hate this). Yes, it’s annoying to have other people in and commenting, but with designated project leaders, it’s okay. It’s done in other orbs. The book’s details (expected pub date, author turn in date) are all on there.

As the book is being developed, there’s one central location for author to add ‘don’t forget reviewer X’ and email updates that flag everyone assigned to the book.
Yeah, hi publishing experts, I know it’s a naive thing to expect existing infrastructure to do these things because the existing systems already move along a path of their own. But someone will design it, and it will be a major feature for attracting authors away.

Addendum: for a glimpse of how some groups are doing this now, take a look at Booktrope.
Besides, this was 5 things I expect (hope) will change, not 5 things I know will change!
Interestingly, pieces of each of these 5 things are things that I’m seeing independently start to form up at smaller publishing venues (two of the contractual issues I’ve spotted have been addressed by some smaller publishers, so while not widespread, I find it intriguing that some nimble minds are seeing it as a way to attract authors. We can’t offer you money, but we can offer you fair contracts/monthly payouts, or digital royalties that escalate once we’ve recovered our losses).

Addendum: By the way, point #2, if adopted, probably solves #4, it occurs to me…