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The Finances of Freelancing: Some Gritty Details for the Geeky

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Recently I purchased a $234 solid state hard drive.

I’ve been waiting for almost three months to buy it.

Before that, I knew I didn’t have the wiggle room. I knew I wouldn’t have it for another month, unless one of a handful of promised windfalls due to fiction writing would show up.

The windfall showed up, I got to get it early.

When I left my job in 2006 I threw myself into freelancing and writing with a sort of white-hot energy. And that elbow grease paid off. By 2008 I was posting big numbers every month. I made enough I could travel as needed to promote books, I lead a fairly cheap life based out of Ohio.

The old way of handling my accounts

I’d always balanced books using Quicken software, and sort of forecast finances by manually adding upcoming bills (using Quicken’s bills window as well). I usually had some idea of what the next two weeks looked like. During deadlines I’d let things lapse for a month or so, but the solid money and lines of credit made sure no disasters happened. I mainly avoided balancing the checkbook under deadlines because I’m slightly dsylexic. Balancing takes me as long as 4 hours, because my mind plays tricks on me with long columns of numbers (6 and 9 are a bitch!).

All that was thrown upside down last year when I ended up in the hospital. For one, when I got out I was struggling to get the energy to do freelance work. I was working in twenty minute shifts then lying down on the floor. After three months of paying the first round of medical bills, I’d chewed through the very comfortable buffer of savings I’d built up because I was only able to work a few hours a day.

I realized I needed to reapproach things and create a system that ticked along with minimal oversight (not 4 hours a week), automatic if possible, and simple for me to comprehend where I stood (after four months, tackling the balancing, understanding where I stood financially, all of that just made an already dark situation worse).

I realized that in addition to the downsides of my system only forecasting a 3-4 weeks out was that, in addition to not being able to lose myself in deadlines, this system meant I had a tendency to spend or lose large infusions of cash as they showed up, as they didn’t fit within my 4 week snapshot.

For years I’ve been reading books on personal finance. Now the need for ‘automation’ began to make sense (some concepts are hard for me to understand, this one always puzzled me).

Another trick I found somewhere was the idea of using lots of different accounts for different types of spending goals.

Multiple accounts for multiple activities

I realized I had three types of outgoing flows in my life:

1) repeating, forecastable, monthly bills. Things like my mortgage, a car payment, a credit card payment, a student loan payment. I also included power bills, because they’re roughly the same month to month. Gas varies wildly based on season, but I took the highest month available and set that as the monthly amount. I know with certainty that $x,xxx comes out every month.

2) variable monthly spending. Things like groceries, dining out, gas for cars, personal spending cash, clothes.

3) writing related outflows. Monthly webhosting, travel to conventions, computers, office supplies. I could divide it into two like above, but it works for tracking purposes.

So these three accounts were created. On my first month I did the following:

  • Put all the repeating bills into an excel spreadsheet that I’d paid the previous month, and the date they were withdrawn from my banking account. I added up the total amount for the month that they were going to cost and put that total amount on the first of the month into that account.
  • Did my best to figure out what we spent on clothing/groceries/dining out/entertainment/personal cash and other variable spending items and seeded the account with a month’s worth of that amount.
  • Seeded my writing account with a small amount of money.

So here’s how it currently works:

My repeating account slowly ticks down, but it’s where I deposit money I make and Emily makes. Because there’s a month’s money in there, I don’t worry about it getting low. At the first of the month, the sum of the variable account needed for its month also comes out of the repeating account and so is thus auto-refilled.

Because the repeating account is automated, I don’t need to worry about whether the mortgage bounces or things will get too low. Variable is where my consumer spending impacts the budget. Going out to dinner too much will only invoke stress about the variable account, not the monthly repeating.

I balance the variable account against the bank once a week or so, by bolding things as they clear. But it’s not a stressful experience, I’m just checking things off, really. With the variable, it’s easy at the halfway point of the month to see where we are. Is half the money in there? If not, we need to slow down…

As extra money above and beyond trickles into the monthly account, the buffer grows visibly. I even made a chart, and it visually made clear to me how monthly income comes and goes: it looks like rolling waves. In the old days I’d log in and see $4,000 and think, wow, I have $4,000. Now I look at a chart and see that the waves bounced between say $2,000 and $4,000 and I think, there’s a usable buffer of $2,000 in the monthly account.

Here’s what the sheet looks like with made up numbers.

When starting out, to seed the account, I had to use some money from a line of credit, but it was worth it. I initially linked the monthly account to a credit card, scared about overdrafting. The system worked, so I now delinked it, and as I’ve started to build a savings, linked it to that.

The variable account presented the most issues, as we do occasionally go over. I had it overdraft protected. Near the end of the month, because I only check thing occasionally, I would let a bunch of overdraft fees hit the account. I now let it draw from a savings account. I’m reconsidering the monthly variable amount now that we have kid expenses, as I seem to be about $200 off in my estimates.

The benefits

What’s fantastic is that I have forecasts in the monthly account that go out for a whole quarter, and for the year. After a year of paying off tremendous amounts of medical debt I’m down to my last couple bills, and I can glance at the future and let out a sigh.

I can even use the spreadsheet to now game scenarios. Doing that led me to cancel most of my con travel over the year in order to pay for things more important, and I’ll be repeating some of that for next year as well.

I was also able to see the impact of shaving down various monthly bills that were adding up, and was able to take back almost $350 a month we were wasting.

In 2008 I had a buffer of money, but no idea outside of a month what was going on. Just recently I received a nice subrights check. A quarter of it went to the savings account that backs the three other accounts. $234 went to a new harddrive. Half of it is set aside to write the last couple healthcare bills checks that even me out, a year later. The remaining bit goes into the monthly repeating buffer, and which, forecast out a year, means I don’t have to worry about the monthly repeating bills (as long as Emily’s and my monthly repeating checks continue) for a year.

I would never have been able to forecast that far ahead, or understand all that, a year ago.

It also lets me do other interesting things too, this system. The variability of writers income is renowned. Since I can’t count on some payments arriving on a set date, I keep them off the monthly chart in a column of expected payments. When they arrive, they go into the buffer of the cyclical monthly account, or into savings.

This is all super technical, but I’ve run into a bunch of writers who ask me how I set up my accounts. One writer was very intrigued by my spreadsheet, as were some friends, so I promised I’d explain this system.

Looking to the future

I do need to tweak my writing account. Right now I use it so that I have a virtually idiot proof business system. All writing related purchases go through it, making it easy to collect my writing expenses for taxes at the end of the year by printing out my bank’s yearly summary for my accountant. I toss what receipts I’m able to keep into a box (I mainly eyeball big receipts. The IRS allowance on dining out for business is bigger than what I spend, so I only need receipts for the big purchases or non-eating purchases, which are in email, I’m virtually paperless at this point).

I do need to figure out how much to keep in that account each quarter and develop a ‘budget’ for the writing. Right now my writing account is empty and anything I spend via it basically comes out of the savings that its linked to, because savings is built out of irregular writing income that comes in and gets socked into there. Being able to forecast writing expenses better would be a good tool.

I also toy with getting two personal accounts for our personal cash spending, but at that point wonder if I would be adding too many credit cards to the wallet. I need to just accept that I need to add a couple hundred more to variable and relax.

I also am now working on savings goals (I’d like hardwood floors in the house, a Subaru WRX Sti, a large flat screen TV, a surround sound system, and my garden landscaped this spring) and creating a second savings account at SmartyPig that will withdraw a set amount a month toward these goals out of the monthly recurring account. I’m also learning to enjoy what I have, based on seeing that not spending allows me write more, freelance/hustle less. That’s the power of the graph!

The for sure next step though, will be ‘occasional large expenses’ account that works just like variable. This is for things like medical bills, car repairs, plumbers, taxes, etc. Right now I take those out of the monthly account, keeping an eye on the buffer and savings. It adds a bit of admin upkeep to the monthly account. Setting up a monthly ‘occasional’ withdrawal of X amount will add an account, and add a checkbook, but I think will be the final leg of making my system easy to eyeball and run automagically for the most part.

The last 12 months have been extraordinarily challenging, both physically, mentally, and personally. But out of that crucible, I’ve come up with a few interesting systems for handling stuff.

Barring a black swan event, a year from now I’ll be in a much stronger position than I was a year past.

It says so right here on the chart.

And if a black swan event does hit (lose a gig, someone loses a job), I have a buffer and a way to forecast my way out of it, one that requires 10 minutes a week to oversee instead of 4 hours, and that I can forecast a year out.

As more and more of my income comes in via fiction, being able to put those lumps into the savings, and let it dribble out monthly via the monthly recurring account, also gives me a methodology for handling a freelance lifestyle and figuring out my cash flow.

It’s just one way of doing it, a reply to a common question.

Here’s the sample spreadsheet:

samplebudgetDownload

If you’re a freelancer and have a system, post a link in the comments, I’ll add the link under here.

Links to other people’s freelance money management systems:

Catherine Schaffer uses a form of zero-based budgeting

An Unanticipated Personal Encounter with the Canadian Health System

Posted on by Tobias Buckell
IMG_0893.JPG

This weekend, while attending the annual gathering of science fiction and fantasy fans in Montreal for Worldcon, I overdid it a bit.

Well, I lie. I overdid it a lot.

The Worldcon was fantastic. Full of old friends and acquaintances. Montreal has fast become one of my favorite cities from what I saw of it, and everyone was super friendly. More surprising was how family friend Montreal was. People were constantly stopping to talk to the twins, and Emily reported a ton of help with navigating the stroller and babies around from random strangers. The phrase of the week for us is “Deux Bebes!” which we heard over and over again on a daily basis in a variety of locations and situations. The twins were a hit!

But there was a lot of walking. The Palais de Congress was a huge convention center, and several of my panels and lunches required me to walk across the entire thing. At night, the Delta-Centreville (party hotel) was a long hike for me, and then the Hyatt Regency, where we stayed, was a bit of a hike slightly uphill from the Palais. There was a crazy amount of weary, tiring, hiking.

By Sunday morning, I was feeling completely sapped, and not getting enough sleep. I tried to nap before the pre-Hugo ceremony, but felt like I’d hit a brick wall by the time I’d walked over. I had to duck out of the Hugo ceremony briefly to lay down. By the end of the night my pulse was racing a bit, so I went back to the hotel to sleep. When I woke up my pulse was even higher.

After checking it several times, I decided it was high enough that I would follow standing orders to check into an ER when this sort of thing happened. I took a metaprolol a bit early and told Emily we needed to pack and go.

I was a bit nervous, and asked for an ER, but mentioned needing it for my heart. I was taken to the Clinique de Cardiologie de Montreal by a taxi driver.

The biggest barrier was quite simply language. At first they were worried about flu, and had me in a corner for that, but someone with more English ability figured out that I was there for a racing pulse and things got moving. Emily and the twins came with (and throughout all this garnered a fair amount of attention and cries of “deux bebes!” from nurses and people in the waiting area).

Next up was that I didn’t have a health card or was in the system, so they (pretty quickly) created a temporary ID of some sort and took some basic information, then got me into a triage area. After taking my pulse and pulse-ox, blood pressure, and temp, they confirmed my pulse was high and something was up.

After a brief wait they stripped me of my shirt and got me into a booth where they strapped me to an EKG machine and took a look.

At this point, not knowing language, it got a bit hard to understand what was happening. From past ER visits, mostly what happened is that I was x-rayed, sometimes catscanned, and blood was drawn to look for signs of damage to the heart, and if none detected, I was released. This is pretty much what happened here. Once the EKG came back, they had me wait for a bit, then generated an ordered for me to get x-rayed. Unlike in the US, where you are put in a bed the moment you arrive, I walked to the radiology department. Then, since I was a furriner, I had to go downstairs and pay for the visit, which I’d been expecting to come at the end of things. The bill was $480 for the whole ER visit, one lump, with a couple receipts so I could send them to my own insurance agency when I got home.

After that I sat in the waiting room, then was taken in by a nurse to get my blood drawn, again my ER experience let me know despite language barriers with the nurse that this was to look for damage in the heart (it releases certain enzymes if its being damaged, I gather).

After that, things slowed down, and we got our only slightly tough period. I had to sit in the waiting room, with a mask on, with a gown on on top, while I twittered and texted various people to update them. The wait was maybe an hour, and then I got to see the doctor once the results of my bloodwork had come back and he’d looked at my EKG. It seemed longer because I was sitting and waiting.

The doctor talked to me for a while about the past incidences, quizzed me a lot on why the Ohio doctors hadn’t dug deeper to figure out why I’d had a PE instead of just treating it, and had some other questions. In the end, he told me I’d just overdone it. Stress, too much activity, pushing myself, all of which I just shouldn’t be doing. The mild tachycardia resulted.

He also wanted to talk to me about the big picture of dealing with my condition, as its something he’s familiar with at the clinic. He told me it’s not necessarily something I’ll get over, but that I’ll probably be managing for a long time (if not life), and that the medicine I was on was for quality of life, not a cure of any sort. He told me it was not dangerous, just annoying, and that I probably needed to adopt a more ‘zen-like’ approach to life in order to fold it into how I approach everything, keeping the fact that I have this thing now. There was a lot of great advice about holistically managing to prevent these episodes, some of it that I’d picked up on from Karl Schroeder (Toronto based, who went through his own experience, as he blogs here), and some much needed reassurance by the doctor about some of the details of these things by the doctor.

He also told me that I should have gone to a nearby ER, I sort of confused the taxi driver when I mentioned needing an ER for my heart, as the Clinic I was in was more of a total care place, even though it did have an ER. This may have explained the more walking about I did. But it also seems they decided pretty quickly on that I wasn’t in danger, which is why I was walked about, as other patients were there in wheelchairs or beds.

Then I was released.

Emily says we were actually in and out faster than we usually are.

I’m also still not sure what the difference would have been had we gone to a regular ER/Hospital.

As for differences between the US and Canada, which everyone right away asked about in my twitter feed and via email, here is what I noticed between this clinic and experiences back home:

-Fewer accountants and a vastly smaller billing department. Lima Memorial has a massive area for billing, this place had admissions, a secretary for handling the medical card (who gave me a temp), and downstairs where I had to pay cash because I wasn’t in the Canadian Health System, there was a small office near the cafeteria with one lady working a window who took my credit card.

-No crazy multiple billing system. The hospital charged me one fee. Hematologists, radiology, EKG reading, the ER doctor, and the hospital didn’t all bill me separately. In the US this visit would generate 6 or so bills from various departments, sent at staggered times. This alone reduced my stress level, as I knew right away what the total cost was and had it on one bill.

-No matter what, in the US I’ve been put in a private room on a bed, then all vital stats taken by people who came to me, or moved the bed around from station to station. The Canadian method of this particular clinic was to triage me, determine whether I was in trouble, then once they knew I was going to make it, dropped me down a notch and had me walking all over the place. This was a bit alien to me. But I don’t even know if this is US vs CA, it may be big city vs rural area, as I live in a much smaller town.

-In both cases nurses and doctors followed the same sequence for my symptoms, US or CA.

-The Canadian doctor seemed far more interested in getting me to understand how to deal with this as a person, not just turfing me back out once they’d dealt with the problem. I spent more face time with him in the office just talking, even if briefly, than with my main Ohio cardiologist who has me in and out in five minutes once he determines my EKG readings are okay once a quarter. The doctors in Columbus, OH, teaching hospital actually spent a similar amount of time, which was nice, but they also didn’t spent as much time talking me down off the ledge or giving me approaches on how to handle this thing as a ‘person.’ I don’t know if I just lucked out on a doctor, but it was very, very welcome this morning and will have implications on how I handle this recurring speeding heart.

Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data.

But, unlike what some people are screaming, I was not marched to a death camp and asked to choose how I wanted to die. I got triaged quickly, they figured out what was going on quickly, and then after a wait for bloodwork, they sat me down and walked me through some stuff I needed to hear that I hadn’t been fully explained before. I paid a single, total bill in one place, quickly. Had I been Canadian, I gather I would have had to just show my card, rather than take the step of sitting down to fill out info for a temporary Health ID.

I’m a DAD!

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Calliope Ann Buckell and Thalia Lyn Buckell were born, just before 7AM this morning, 5 pounds 8 ounces and 5 pounds 6 respectively. Mom and daughters are hale and hearty and the doctor said it was an easy and textbook delivery.

edit: for those wondering, we’re back home, but the twins are in the special care unit still. They were having trouble keeping their body temperature up and had a touch of jaundice (oompah loompah babies) so they’re working through that. The pediatrician we talked to today is hoping tomorrow we can bring them home. While Monday we were still in a hospital room near special care, today was a bit long because we had to drive down to Lima and spend all day sitting around the room with them, which is a bit tiring (as can be seen with my scruffy ballcap “I’d like to take them home to a more comfortable chair” look I have rocking of late that Emily snapped a picture of…)

I Have to Confess: I Am a Spine cracker

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

There are people who treat the book-as-a-physical-artifact, who love the physical object. I have a bit of that in me, I can’t ever bring myself to annotate or write on printed books. I think that came from all those years of not being allowed to in school.

But other than that, for me a book is no more than a container for the words that I want to get at. So for me, readability is the most important part of a book.

So when I sit down to read a book, the first thing I do is audibly crack the spine of it so that the damn thing lays flat when I sit it on a surface and am reading it. When the pages try to spring up and interrupt my flow, I shove my thumb down the crease and flatten the book out.

When I used to browse the used books in stores, I would actually gravitate toward books with five or six visible cracks in the spine: there, that was a book that would stay the hell put!

Dog ears are particularly welcome. This tells me where I stopped.

My personal love is for paperbacks. I love the form most of all. It lends itself well to a voracious reader like me. It’s easy to crack the spine. It’s small and portable, will even fit into the pants pocket of a pair of baggy jeans. It’s cheap, so I can read lots of them. More of them would fit on my shelf. It doesn’t have an annoying cover sleeve that falls off, or gets in the way.
I love books. But I love them for what is in them, not the book itself.

I guess that’s why it wasn’t too hard for me to switch to reading a good percentage of my books on screen.

When Do I Retire (or Trunk) a Story or Novel That Isn’t Selling

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

From my ‘ask me a question‘ entry, I finally get around to answering the two last questions in the queue:

James asks:

When do you retire (or trunk) a short story? I’m staring at my list of stories, and only a few of them I think are good. Should I trust my own instinct, or maybe I’m not best placed to judge them? Quite a few have been through my crit group, and none have been trashed.
I thought I’ve read you answering this before, but I can’t find the answer.

James, I’ve written over 130 short stories and published just over 30 of them, and about 95 of those are now trunked (and for those following along ‘trunked’ means ‘no longer submitting the short story you’ve written to any markets.’)

So what leads me to keep the surviving 5 out?

Basically there is still something about them that I believe is cool and worthy, but 2-3 of the 5 are starting, at this point, to look like I may retire them. I think realistically I have 2 pro quality stories lying around, but since I’m not entirely sure, I may continue subbing the five.

I use a couple things to figure out when to retire a story. As a writer, each year, you should obviously be growing enough each year that you look back at something you wrote a year ago and see flaws. If you’re not looking back on even earlier writing and seeing how much better you are now, then you are not growing as a writer. You should be able to see how much your earlier efforts suck, but also, you should also be able to spot bits of polish and neatness. So the earlier work is easy for me to spot what’s out of sorts.

If I don’t obviously see why the work sucks so bad it shouldn’t be submitted, the next metric I use is: has a work has exhausted all the markets I submit to? If so, then I retire it.
What’s the last market that something goes to? This can range from writer to writer. I get criticized for saying this, but I believe you should set a lower limit and not submit stories below that. It could be a money limit (nothing less than 3 cents a word, or 1 cent a word). From 1999-2006 I tried to make myself submit only to markets that paid 3 cents a word or more.

Even if I wasn’t sure about a story I still subbed it. Why? Sometimes an editor would spot something cool, and then give rewrite suggestions. I sold 2 stories that I knew had problems that way, because the editors were able to explain to me what I was doing wrong and I worked on fixing it. One of those led to a sale to a nice place!

Because of the worry that I was an apprentice, and because (rumors to the contrary), I’m not that much of a roaring ego-maniac, I tried to submit only to the big magazines and anthologies so that if my stories had issues, they would get professional help. Plus, aiming high seems to often produce high results.

If the story had been to all the markets paying 3 cents a word, then I retired it until another market came up, or the story obviously was full of fail. 95 stories of mine have either gone to all 3 c/w a word markets or I spotted lots of fail. The 5 left I submit to markets as I spot them, but they’re getting close to being retired.

Don’t Trust the Dabel Brothers! Crystal Rain Comic Book Falls Through

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

This is one big frustration that’s been two years in the making, and I feel compelled to blog it up as a data point for other people because I am that guy who tries to shine light into how things work so other people don’t make the mistakes I make. I have all my correspondence backed up and archived, and so I dug through it to make sure all my dates, facts, and things said were accurate.

Here are the bare facts, with no commentary first:

In early 2004, contract in hand for my first novel to Tor, Crystal Rain, I read the whole thing over very carefully. I noticed that my agent had negotiated graphic novel rights to stay with us.

In early 2005 I met one of the Dabel Brothers at a convention and was really impressed with the great art work of one of their comic books. I talked to them about my novel, and later sent an email talking to them about it. Ernst Dabel was intrigued and asked for a preview copy of Crystal Rain and to see the cover as soon as I did (April 7th, 2005, 10:30AM) in reply a while later to my email.

May 13, 2005 at 4:41, Ernst replied that he liked the cover very much and requested a link to the Amazon page. From May-February there was little correspondence, though I do see I forwarded early reviews and ‘buzz’ about the book to them and on Crystal Rain’s launch date, Ernst sent an email asking if they could adapt Crystal Rain into a comic book (Feb. 7th, 2006 11:56 AM). He handed my details over to Les Dabel.

On Feb 16th, 2006 (12:03 AM) Les wrote that he would get me information by the end of the week. On the 28th he apologized for a delay. On March 8th I got a contract that I passed onto my agent along with the Dabel Brothers’ emails.

After that, there was a long lull. Finally on July 31st, 2006 the Dabels promised to get the contract changes back to my agent that he’d asked about. After a second round, my agent reported a contract had been agreed upon on October 3rd, 2006 and emailed it to me to look over. I signed it and sent copies to my agent.

In the past, once I’ve signed contracts for any US deal, my agent has said it’s okay to announce it. So I did here. Dabel had just announced that they’d teamed up with Marvel.
There was more silence over the next couple months once I’d sent the contract back. On Dec. 19th I exchanged emails with Les saying how excited I was about seeing the novel make this transition. I showed them the cover for my next book, Ragamuffin.

And then… more silence. We never received a copy of the contract back, no details on when Crystal Rain would be adapted, and I never got paid the very token advance for the rights to make Crystal Rain a comic book/graphic novel.

On July 11, 2007, I dropped a line to the Dabel Brothers asking what was going on, noting that Crystal Rain was in paperback, available in Wal-Marts, and so on.
Silence.

On August 13th, 2007 (1:19 PM) I asked again, point black “I haven’t heard from you guys all summer. What’s up?”

Les replied at 1:50 apologizing and asked if I could receive a call. I said sure.

I was then told that Dabel was having trouble with Marvel, because Marvel had never heard of me and had not been interested in my book and put the stop on it, but the Dabel Brothers were doing something new and moving forward, and the second half of 2008 was going to be awesome and they were going to launch Crystal Rain then.

My agent was to talk to them on the 14th and have a conference call about details.
At 7:58 on August 14th my agent emailed that they hadn’t.

I found out that Marvel was discontinuing their relationship with the Dabel Brothers. On August 16th, 7:58AM, I emailed that I was sorry to hear about that, and that we still needed to talk about Crystal Rain via phone conference with my agent, as they had promised.

Nothing. I kept my hopes up though, because at least I had a date now, 2nd half of ’08.
September 4th I started hearing grumblings about the Marvel/Dabel Brothers fallout, and that it left some people unpaid and so on. My agent emailed asking me if I wanted to continue hoping, or take another course of action. I started calling around and emailing people who’d worked with Dabel to get some bead on what I should do next.

I won’t repeat or insinuate anything. But what I got back in feedback depressed my hopes of ever seeing Crystal Rain in comic book form.

Nonetheless, I had a contract and a date, that was something, and I shouldered on.
On November 14, 2007, after still more silence, I saw that Dabel was now with Del Rey. My agent counseled me that we should send a certified letter saying that the agreement we signed and sent them was null and void.

On the 15 I finally, after doing some more checking around, research online, agreed that it wasn’t worth it. My agent reported on Nov. 26th that a return receipt proof came back.
Thus ended my 3 year attempt and work to get Crystal Rain out as a comic book via the Dabel Brothers.

My feelings about this:

I’m frustrated to have placed my trust in them for this long. I was excited by the idea of Crystal Rain becoming a graphic novel. Everyone who heard the news said stuff like “yeah, your writing is adventurous and dynamic, full of eyeball kicks, it would translate well.”

Furthermore, I felt it would be nice cross advertising, both of my readers to Dabel and for new readers to find me. And for existing readers to see a cool new version of Crystal Rain.

I’ve done my best to believe in these guys because, frankly, they do great artwork. My first worry was that 4-5 month delay in negotiating the contract, which I felt was a bit long.
The second delay troubled me as well, but there was a lot of other work going on. I pinged the brothers a few times, and the silence did trouble me. The fact that I had no money in hand, had never seen them announce anything on their blog or site, also troubled me.
When they got back to me this last August, full of excitement over my work and how they were finally going to get to launch it, I was flattered. And excited. Until I found out that the Marvel deal had fallen through and a lot of the content creators stayed with Marvel.

So that could explain the sudden newfound enthusiasm and discussion.

But soon I was seeing announcements of other people signing on, and then there was that ominous silence again. Emails not being returned.

Sometimes people fall into the cracks. Sometimes deals fall through.

At this point though, I felt, if Dabel wasn’t interested, they should just have said so, or say so. I did feel that other authors with larger names were doing okay, which made me feel like I was talking to someone in a party, and someone with of more importance walked by and I was suddenly having a conversation with air.

On one hand, a small comic book company has to push it’s bigger names. On the other hand, I’m a nobody at lots of other venues and am climbing my way up, and I never got this kind of treatment.

And frankly, to be egotistical, with over a thousand people a day passing through my blog, decent sales, solid reviews, and some buzz going, I’m not exactly chopped liver here. I’m in my late 20s with a novel career, reputation in new media, and some solid reach. For fuck’s sake, I at least expect some open communication, or a ‘sorry, we can’t work with you.’ I’ve been turned down before. I may get let go from somewhere. That’s fine, but to remain in limbo, and then when I do reach someone, to get the big enthusiastic talk-up. I felt like I was being treated like a multi-level marketer prospect, not a fellow businessman, and certainly not a fellow creative professional.

Every business occasionally fubars, and I’d been passed some negative links about Dabel business practices, but I’d brushed them off as outliers. So I I decided to go hunting online to get a sense of what I was dealing with.

My research

Comic Book Resources has a column that linked a few times to the Dabel Brothers/Marvel fallout. This one from August has this columnist about the Comic Book business say:

I’ve been hearing more and more from people, unpaid by the Dabel Brothers, but none wishing to speak out for fear of never being paid, for losing work, or be seen as a troublesome employee. You know, a comic book creator union can’t come fast enough.

In 2007: September 4th saw this article that many forwarded me with names people who were distressed about not being paid and then follows with this:

There are plenty of other people who have asked me not to run their details, for fear that they will never be paid or will alienate potential employees.
*snip*
One explanation Les Dabel has given to people asking what happened is that he believes he signed a poor initial deal with Marvel, against his own attorney’s advice. He paid off other debts initially, but gave Marvel until this September to pay enough money to keep the cashflow going. However, this did not stop Dabel from promising and failing to pay creators. Despite claiming he has guaranteed incoming arriving from Marvel, he states he couldn’t get a bridging loan from any bank. And in San Diego he was claiming that he was ending his deal with Marvel to speed up payments to creators, at a loss to himself.
This story is thrown in doubt in that the deal broke up only weeks before September, the date at which according to Dabel, Marvel were meant to pay a large cash sum. Creators remain unpaid. And any bank, shown contractual guaranteed income coming in a short period of time, would likely fall over themselves to lend money.

Here is a recent one just this week: an artist who is very much in a feud with them for talking negatively about them all over the internet about their not paying people. He is threatened with a libel lawsuit. You can poke around the details here and here.
While everyone, including me, had wondered if Marvel wasn’t bullying around Dabel, I started to see that in the past 5 years or so Dabel had a similar pattern of fallouts with every business partner they’ve been with.

Publishers Weekly’s Heidi MacDonald:

Against that is the Dabels rep for dissolving publishing relationships — in the past they had distribution agreements with Image, Alias, Devil’s Due and Red Eagle Entertianment — all ended, as has their deal with Marvel, which seemed to be making money for everyone. The Dabel Brother wiki page makes reference to court proceedings regarding the Red Eagle Entertainment deal (for a series of Robert Jordan comic books) but that has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Researching this seems to reveal a constant move of Dabel Brothers from partner to partner, with un-amicable separations every 1-2 years:

In 2006, Red Eagle Entertainment and Dabel began fighting over the Book of the New Spring. Dabel claimed that Red Eagle stopped paying them, which led to various problems with delivery (Robert Jordan confirmed here). You can see Les defend himself here with stuff that seems to make sense.

In 2005, Alias and Dabel Brothers split thusly:

According to a statement from Alias, they are releasing DBPro “after a series of late and failed deliveries, and an expression by Dabel Brothers that they would like to return to their roots as an independent publisher.”
From Alias: “”Alias is all about promoting and defending creator and studio rights,” said Alias Publisher, Brett Burner. “DB Pro has been afforded other publishing opportunities which they believe are in their best interests to follow, and we are not in the business of holding creators back from reaching their full potential.”

In 2004 Devil’s Due and the Dabels had a nasty running forum and internet battle with both alleging each other payment issues.
Again, Comic Book Resources was there with other notes on the Devil’s Due breakup:

Some have had a hard time believing anyone who’s done as much licensed work for as long as Devil’s Due has (longer than they’ve done comics) would have a vendor contract with a termination clause… but the Dabel guys seem to be on the verge of demonstrable damages with these press releases. There are also allegations that the brothers have yet to pay certain freelancers for projects, and at least one is now boycotting them – though Mike Bullock is doing his best to smooth things over there…

In 2003 Dabel left Image:

While expressing similar sentiments of others who have left Image, Dabel explained the #1 reason for moving to Devil’s Due in black and white ““ money. “I’m getting a better offer from Devil’s Due,” Dabel said. “It can get really expensive to publish books, and with Image right now, we’re not making enough through them to cover all of our costs. We’re paying all our staff and creators, but that’s coming out of my pocket, and not the profits from the book, as ideally, things should work. The books are making money ““ don’t get me wrong, but a large chunk of that is staying with Image. If we’re going to continue publishing comics, we had to make a decision to do what best suited our financial health.
*snip*
“A lot of the books at Image never are completed, or those that have started in color have moved to black and white and the number one reason is that barely anyone is making enough money to support the books ““ it’s just too expensive. Devil’s Due is going to be very creator friendly, even to the point that that Devil’s Due will be pushing individuals to promote their own name, so he’ll allow us to brand our own name. With Image, you could only brand the Image name, now, with our new books, our name will be in the corner. Devil’s Due’s name will be there as well, but so will ours, so everyone will know that the book is from us.”

Summary

I don’t know if the Dabel Brothers are just some guys with bad luck, or if they are just not good at business, or what. But there are constantly delays, accusations of non-payment, and very bad feelings with every major venture. I’ll be curious to see how their partnership with Del-Rey works out.

I’m annoyed to have held Crystal Rain off the market for almost 3 years. If that doesn’t show my good will and intentions, I don’t know what does. I do resent that my possible window of opportunity to get people really psyched about Crystal Rain in graphic novel form and get some synergy going has been very diluted if not lost (I have hopes for Sly Mongoose, though).
I’m glad that I did not entrust my rights with them, though, digging around and doing this research. I wanted, however, to put this up publicly because I know many major name authors have been treated okay by them, but I want to make sure that since the Dabel’s have moved to hunting for novels to adapt, that you should make sure you at least have money in hand before moving forward on anything. No matter how good-intentioned or excited they may be, they either have a lot of concurrent bad luck, or are business-incompetent (but graphically/artistically gifted).

Be very, very careful. Like use an escrow account, or do something to protect yourself.

(And no, I never did see a dime from them)

I’m Not Saved, So Sorry!

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

A compact and frail little lady in a McDonald’s uniform was hovering near the coffee table tonight as I joined Emily. Emily was crunching on grades, I decided to join her. I sat down with my drink and turned to my laptop.

Said little old lady hesitated, then moved close, clutching a large KJV Bible tightly to her chest like a talisman, or maybe a shield. She got to the edge of table, and I turned, waiting for the question I knew was coming next.

“Are you Saved?” she asked in a very tiny voice.

“No ma’am, sorry, I’m an atheist, I’m fairly comfortable and happy with it. Thanks.”
After a small and uncomfortable silence, she looked at the ground. “I hope you come to HIM soon.”

And then she left the coffee shop.

After she left Emily mentioned she’d been waiting outside the coffee shop summoning up the courage to go in.

“I feel bad for her,” I said. “It’s really hard to do that. When I used to go around banging on doors for the Church of Christ it was always weird, but you have to kind of charge into the subject and hang on.”

Of course, I was the last thing she needed to encounter, a stout and friendly, comfortable, total non-believer. They’re never really all that good a prospect. What you’re really looking for is someone already going to a church or a person who’s ‘spiritual’ but not attending. Someone who’s already made the step that believing in something makes sense. The wedge is already there. All you have to do then is hammer the differences and you can get them to at least offer to go to your church.

I had been fully ready to buy her a cuppa and flip through the bible with her, in a nice and gentle manner, to explain what in the bible left me a non-believer after I read it cover to cover, but she would know that even the devil can quote scripture. For someone carrying a bible to her chest, asking strangers in a coffee shop if they were saved, when you encounter the raw devil in the flesh (which isn’t very common here in bible-land, and is what I represent to some here), a hasty retreat when you were hard pressed just to walk into the shop, that makes a certain sense.

Maybe one day she learns how to have open discussions with strangers about her deeply held beliefs. Sadly, many like her are taught that this is what witnessing to other people means: accosting strangers in places like that to try and draw them into a ‘scales from the eyes’ argument where they use the bible like a verbal weapon to try and force someone into being saved. Fortunately she was a fairly meek rear guard holy warrior, more apt to annoy other Christians like my wife, who was just here for some coffee and space to get her grading done.

And so life goes on in rural Ohio.

What Does It Mean To Be This Caribbean Writer?

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

I hope it’s no secret to many reading here that I don’t consider myself wholly white. Some of you reading since 1998 may know a thing or two about me, but since I’ve become published in novel form more people are coming to the blog and reading and finding out about me online and express confusion about this point.

A number of people have emailed me or stopped me to ask me “what does ‘caribbean-born’ mean?” and others are curious as to why I constantly point out things about diversity in SF. What they may not know is what others around me know: I consider myself multi-racial.

I jokingly have been called ‘an undercover brother.’ Vin Diesel calls people like me ‘shadow people,’ neither one race nor the either due to circumstances and self-identity, and considers himself one, yet another reason for my close attention to his career.

Things came to a head a couple days ago with a few emails challenging me to prove that I was actually multi-racial and not just a ‘poser’ who wanted the ‘advantages’ of being hip and multi-racial.

For some people, any attempt to identify in ways that they can’t control are troublesome.
One reason I’m private about my past family life is that I had a complicated family life and my biological parents are radically split for reasons that are none of anyone’s business except those I choose to share that story with. Growing up was not all fun and smiles on the beach, as people assume.

But I was born on the island of Grenada, West Indies, and is one of the two Caribbean islands that shape what I think of as home. Grenada, with it’s spice and colorful flowers and deep jungles and people, that is my first home. No matter how split my parents are, my cousins and aunts and uncles are all Grenadian and that is the blood that runs through my veins because of my father. I can’t deny or wish to change that, it’s simply who I am. And I’m proud to have been born there and lived there for the first nine years of my life.

People want to know something for sure, then it’s easy as clicking this link here, to see my father’s business still in Grenada. He’s the brown-skinned man in both the pictures at the bottom of the page. He’s my father that I haven’t seen or talked to in almost 20 years. Judge for yourself whether I’m multi-racial, fine.

Even better, here to the right is a crop of the one of the rare pictures I have of my Caribbean side of the family. My grandmother, two cousins and me (with my mother and father cropped out) standing on the tallest hill of Carriacou.

And yet, I’m one white looking dude. Genetics is wild. Some 7 different genes code for skin color, and when parents get together it’s a crapshoot. In this case, my sister got tan looking skin tone and I got fairly white. But that doesn’t change the fact that my father is who he is, as are my cousins and aunts and uncles. It doesn’t change the fact that I grew up playing cricket on Lance Aux Pines beach, that most of my friends until I came to Ohio were usually not white, and that I often spoke with a patois when I needed it, or a British accent if I chose. It doesn’t change that I played football, the one where you actually kick the ball, and that I had textbooks with a full complement of races in them, or that my obvious skin color meant I was the one who was not normal, but yet, I never had any trouble maintaining I was mixed until I moved to the US. My childhood was Caribbean in its nature, essence, and impact on me. Most people from the Caribbean understand where I come from (with some rare exceptions of some assholes near Grand Anse who would always yell ‘yankee go home’ at me), most grant me this without my having to fight for this. I should merely have to state it.

So, as for my identity: I’m Caribbean. An English mother and a Grenadian father. By blood, by birth, and by spending 15 and half years of my life in the islands, I can’t imagine calling myself anything else but.

Why not pass? The idea of passing is an interesting concept that tells me more about the person who asks that of me. The implicit assumption for many is that passing as white confers the easiest route, their astonishment at my not choosing that is a often an interesting hangup.

So what is up with two Caribbean Science Fiction novels? My fiction plays with a wide variety of people and genre tropes. I don’t write exclusively “Caribbean SF” but I am a Caribbean-born SF/F writer. But some of my stories are rich with the Caribbean.

Since I was in sixth grade I’d been drawing spaceships taking off from island harbors, rather than gantries. I even used some early island settings, but a lot of my early SF aped the SF I was reading: galactic empires, etc. But somewhere in ’98 when I was in college, I decided to really focus on becoming a writer. And part of that involved what I was going to write about.
I began to add pieces of Caribbean background to roughly a third of my stories. A character, a place, and certainly inspiration from island history and anecdotes. But I was nervous about using it, aware of the fact that by Caribbean readers I may be thought of as stealing the exotic for my fiction, and by other readers as some sort of fraud.

It was later in that year, however, that I sat down to write my story ‘The Fish Merchant,’ feeling that I wanted to bring together the things that I wanted to write into a short piece: one ‘Steppin’ Razor’ like badass (Pepper), a non-Caribbean but non-Western locale (China), adventure genre action, and a twist on a traditional SF trope (first contact).

When I finished my first piece that drew this all together, it was a heady rush: this was the sort of thing I wished I’d been able to have to read on the shelf. And yet, as I got accepted to the prestigious Clarion workshop on the story and started submitting it, I kept on writing more ‘vanilla SF.’ One because I didn’t want to risk screwing up another Caribbean inspired piece of SF, and another, because there was a growing feeling that I’d lost the Caribbean. A white looking Caribbean multi-racial expat, who grew up on a boat, both identifying with, but in many ways, living on the edge of, Caribbean society, who was I to write this stuff? I had a huge impostor syndrome issue. And I was still worried that even though I adored ‘Fish Merchant,’ others would not find it interesting as I did.

That changed at Clarion, when not only did many students enjoy the story, but I met two instructors who really encouraged me to take the instincts I had with ‘Fish Merchant’ and go further. Authors Tim Powers and Mike Resnick both felt that the story was something interesting and that played to my strengths. So did Scott Edelman when he visited Clarion, and it was he who later purchased the story for Sci Fi Age shortly after Clarion and gave me my first professional short story sale.

The confidence given me there led to many more stories being written over the next six years that drew my interests, backgrounds, and love of genre together:

The Fish Merchant -Science Fiction Age
In Orbite Medievali – Writers of The Future
Spurn Babylon – Whispers From The Cotton Tree Root
Trinkets – The Book of All Flesh
Death’s Dreadlocks – Mojo: Conjure Stories
In The Heart of Kalikuata – Men Writing SF As Women
Four Eyes – New Voices in Science Fiction
Necahual – So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy
Anakoinosis – I Alien
Toy Planes – Nature Magazine
The Silver Streak – Space Cadets
The Duel – Electric Velocipede #11
Manumission – Baen’s Universe (upcoming)

This represents about half of my bibliography (not including the two novels).

When it came time to write my first novel, Crystal Rain, I considered all the concepts and ideas I had, and the most compelling ones drew from many of the same sources as these stories above. As in Toy Planes, I felt that Caribbean people had a place in the future, and that if humanity were to populate the stars, that Caribbean people would immigrate in that great diaspora, and that they should have stories as well. And yet, even as there is the Caribbean take, the Caribbean’s proximity to the cultural West means that a great deal of my influences are still very much recognizable to anyone.

The reason I read genre fiction is entirely different than any other literature. I find the action, high concepts, and sense of wonder the amazing element that separates it from anything else I encounter. I like to think, secretly and to myself, that literature is the soul of humanity, its dreams. Feverish, bizarre, reflections of its processing what has happened to it so far, and figuring out how to store that, remember it, and experience it.

But the genre I work in is something different, it’s the imagination of humanity, its daydreams, its nightmares, its pleasant fantasies, it’s hopes and its inventions. It’s not like the other literatures. And I want people like me to look into the imagination of humanity and see people like himself looking back at him. I may not be perfect, but I am excited that it is something that I’ve been managing to publish and gain a readership for.

Hi, my name is Tobias Buckell, and I am Caribbean. And I’m an SF/F writer. I’m proud of both the genre I write in, and my identity.

The Continuing Problem of So Little Diversity in Science Fiction

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Angry Black Woman gets heated discussions going in her comments about diversity in fiction markets.

Nick Mamatas weighs in as well.

As for myself, online I keep seeing the same repetition. Someone says SF/F isn’t diverse, people respond by chanting “Hopkinson, Butler, Delany, Barnes” like it’s a magical phrase that dispels the +10 diversity attack spell.

Delany doesn’t write SF anymore. Butler passed away.

Hopkinson and Barnes.

People aren’t even considerate enough to add “Due” to that list, Barnes’s wonderful and incredibly talented wife. Also a person of color.

So out of 1500-2000 or so writers who’ve sold at least 3 professional stories by SFWA’s standards (let’s say there are 500 or so not in SFWA who might be eligible) people only can realistically name 2 working current writers of color in the comments section off the top of their head.

12% of the US is African American. By simple math you can take our figure of 2,000 writers who’ve sold 3 or more pro level short stories and we should expect to have 150-200 SF writers of color active in that grouping.

We don’t.

Even accounting for statistical variations, that ratio is wildly uneven.

Is the cadre of writers in the field diverse?

No.

Whatever conclusions or actions you wish to draw next, the mathematical fact remains that we don’t even have a healthy fraction of even 100 writers of color.

This could be a larger societal issue, an issue of fandom, the technical nature of SF/F, or that readers don’t see their faces in SF/F and don’t read it and therefore don’t write it, whatever your theory is (and I’m making no accusations or forwarding theories of my own here, that isn’t the point of this particular entry), it still doesn’t change the fundamental fact that is not a racially diverse field.

Seriously, do the math.

But please stop saying “Hopkinson, Butler, Delany, Barnes” as if it makes that problem go away. All it does is embarrass the field and further alienate potential writers and readers of color because by saying that as a defense, you’re demonstrating just how unbalanced the equation is, and how ignorant you are of it. They’re some of my favorite writers, and its troubling to see their names used as a tool to disprove the lack of diversity in this field when the issue is the math.

Seriously, and with all respect and friendliness, this being said in a friendly and neutral tone of voice: do the math and think about it.

Here’s a link to US Demographics.

To find currently published writers of color, keep up with the Carl Brandon society. The awards list mentions how hard it was to find works, and if you know the markets, you’ll see a lot of them were combed from *outside* our field.

Why Write Zombies?

Posted on by Tobias Buckell

Mfitz in the comments says:

I don’t get the appeal of zombies.


It’s a weird twist for me, I didn’t use to like them, but I started researching and watching them all for a story I was doing and ended up getting hooked on them.

Why zombies work:

1) guilt free action/adventure mass killing and gore (cuz they’re not really human beings, right?) [the audience’s fave moment in a zombie movie is when that asshole get’s bitten, and then he turns into a zombie, and the hero gets to say ‘it’s okay, I got this one’]

2) zombies are often a stand in for societal parallels/fears:

a) early zombies are foreign and made by foreign magic (work as a metaphor for an ‘invasion’ of foreigners and racial fears of 30s and 40s America)

b) later zombie movies tweak social worries about consumerism (shopping mall locales, work locations etc)

c) even later zombie movies ding large corporations or scientists for creating drugs or viruses that infect us, playing on fears that multinational corps or gov’ts make us zombies with their mistakes, showing how we’re merciless at their hands

The deeper I dig the more interesting zombie fiction is as a mirror held up to what people are tussling with in regards to the outer world as a whole.

One of the reasons I love SF isn’t for its predictive abilities, but it’s abilities to explore current social issues with some of the automatic baggage hidden or removed in order to play with the ideas. Zombie fiction often seems to, even unintentionally, play to that. So every time I watch a zombie movie, I’m always looking for the unintentional (or may intentional) social criticism in it.

But above and beyond that, zombie movies bring in post-apocalyptic and survivalist settings as well. And what I like about them is that they reject the survivalist wet dreams about grabbing a gun and shaking off the annoying liberal restraints on society that Real Men ™ are shackled by. In a zombie movie your best bet for survival is to connect with survivors and form a band of humanity that each has skills necessary to the group’s survival. Yes there will be killing and gore and a hero, but there is usually a need to create a small civilization in order to move on.

Zombie movies always come down to thinking about what makes civilization and what drags it down, and while they have different answers, it always interesting.

That and there’s the titillation of a high body count, gore, and freakishness, no matter how you look at it. No denying that.

Still, there is this element of transcending the gore with those large mirror questions/thoughts/comments on civilization that get me drawn into a good zombie flick.