The Desolation of Smaauwwwg

Just as with the first outing, the middle of part of Peter Jackson's extended The Hobbit fanfiction is visually awesome, has great action scenes and is about as tightly focused as a ball of wool after a kitten's been at it.  By adding all the stuff Gandalf is off doing, the story reads far more as Lord of the Rings: The Prequel, and while it's still fun that way, it takes away quite a bit from the story.

The introduction of Tauriel, with an entirely irrelevant plotline about the need for the elves to involve themselves in the fight against the dark, only emphasises this prequel feeling - though on the whole Tauriel's story is one of the most interesting in this particular segment of the trilogy and she's a lot of fun to watch and almost manages to ignore the half-formed suggestion of a love plot wedged in with her "we are part of this war" theme.  I was sorry to see that while Tauriel was introduced so that there could be a female character doing stuff, Bard's two daughters are used for screaming and hiding under tables.

Smaauwwwg himself was all kinds of awesome, as was the humungous piles of gold scenes.

Year's End and Side Projects

Happy end of year break to those who enjoy it!

As a side project (since I have my end-of-year break from work) I've started a tumblr called Hugo Eligible Art(ists).  This is related to the earlier discussion about the scarcity of female artists nominated for the Hugo Awards.  Since I'm nominating and voting in the upcoming Hugos I figured the simplest way to decide who I'm going to nominate is to collect All the Art! :D  Not just limited to female artists, but any artists eligible.  It's a really interesting project for me, because I love SFF art, but usually don't have the faintest idea who is behind the illustrations.

I've been having fun emailing lots of publishers and artists (and the Hugo Committee), but the project is still in its early stages and could always use more publicity if you want to share the link.  It should be an _enormous_ collection of art if it gets off the ground, particularly including nominees on the Best Fan Artist category (I'm still trying to work out precisely what's eligible there).

Bones of the Fair release

Bones of the Fair has now been released into the wild!  Hope you all like it. :)

I'll add links as it promulgates across the various platforms.

• Smashwords (Release month 50% coupon: TW44S)
• Amazon (US, UK, DE, FR)
• Trade Paperback (CreateSpace, Amazon  - ebook bundled for free)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble

As a promotional extra, Champion of the Rose will be $0.99 during December.

Those who follow the blog will notice I've changed the cover - I decided I wanted to see more of Julie's art, so got rid of the frame concept.

This was a fun book to write - mainly because of Aspen, who is one of the most relentlessly upbeat characters I'm ever likely to produce, and has the funniest way of describing people.

Next up for me is some time working on the various books I've started more recently, along with The Sleeping Life (and maybe Wellspring).  Because I have so many books on the hop at once, there's a good chance that I'll end up not releasing anything at all next year, or at least not until the very end.  It rather depends on how I divide my time.  I expect to have a lot of fun fooling around with all those different worlds, though!

The Artistic Superiority of Tits Out

Recently Julie Dillon, the first female artist to be nominated for a Best Professional Artist Hugo in close to 30 years, posted on Tumblr a gigantic compilation of pictures by women artists, stating:

This year, I was incredibly honored to be nominated for a Hugo award in the Best Professional Artist category, but I was a little shocked to find out there hadn’t been another woman nominated in that category since Rowena Morrill in 1986. That’s more than a little ridiculous, considering there are so many women artists out there, they are all amazing, and they all need more visibility and recognition.

And the question of course is, how is the disparity in nominations possible?  There are clearly a ton of female artists out there.  Quite a lot of them are working in the SFF field, producing covers that would come to the attention of the SFF community.  Why then are so many male artists being acknowledged, and female artists somehow failing to exist when award season rolls around?

A couple of years ago I joined the Tumblr crowd, mostly as a lurker, and one of the accounts I followed was an art reblogger.  Every day without fail gorgeous art would appear in my Tumblr feed - a selection of representative works duly accredited, with a link to the artist's site.  And it was awesome!  Lovely art, very impressive.  I've discovered tons of awesome artists through Tumblr. (Euclase, I am in awe).

But as a side-effect of this particular Tumblr feed my dashboard was suddenly full of half-naked ladies.  Tiny, cutesy women defying the laws of gravity.  Curvy women with their asses in the air.  "Strong" women in that weird pose where you can somehow see their front and their back at the same time.

Now, there are plenty of women out there who like a fine pair of breasts.  And professional artists are generally working to some sort of order - a request from an art director, a specified scene from a book, a strong imperative from marketing to match other covers that work.  Artists don't all get to decide what they depict, and how they depict it.  So a percentage of "tits out" poses are to order.  But I started looking at the names of the artists behind all those sexy sexy ladies and noticed a distinct correlation between (my guess at) author gender and amount of nakedness, and type of pose.

When the statistics regarding the Hugo artist nominations were raised these last few months, a  connection formed for me between that Tumblr feed featuring so many naked ladies, and also with this rather awesome cartoon of Batman drawn for the female gaze.  And when I saw Julie's incredible compilation, I could not help but notice a rather outstandingly small percentage of asses raised in the air.  There was certainly the occasional breast, but vastly more complete coverage or restrained cleavage, and far fewer women in invitingly submissive poses.

Now it would be ridiculous for me to say that the sole reason for the disparity in Hugo nominations is the presence or lack of tits in a particular artist's work.  There's clearly a lot more going on here than (het cis-)gender preferences impacting on voting (just as I cannot overlook the from-the-beginning presence of individuals attracted to men in the science fiction community, with their own preferences where art is concerned).

All I can really do is point, ask the question, and hope in future we see more female artists on the Hugo ballot.

Contrast

Contrast is a puzzler/jumping game which - while quite short - is definitely recommended.  Particularly because although challenging in places, I could get through the puzzles without resorting to a walkthrough!  The sign of a good puzzle.

In Contrast you play Dawn, an acrobat who exists in a curious in-between world, visible only to the child Didi, whose life is complicated by family money troubles and a dad trying to make good.

Didi fearlessly sneaks out at night to poke her nose into all the things her parents are trying to keep from her, and happily calls on her not-quite-imaginary friend to get her into places she can't reach herself.  The gameplay involves Dawn's ability to shift in and out of a shadow realm, which turns light, dark and shadow into a mechanic where a staircase can be created by a lantern, and a merry-go-round a spectacular and ever-moving jumping puzzle.

Along with some lovely visuals, the Torch Song soundtrack adds a gorgeous, floaty noir background to what proved to be an excellent game.  [And at a mere $15, well worth the money.]

Travelling Fantasy Roundtable : Part 20 : Being Human

Part  20 of the Travelling Fantasy Round Table, our roaming discussion on aspects of fantasy literature, is in two parts at Valjeanne Jeffer's tumblr. This month we're discussing fantasy and being human.

Self-publishers and Posterity

The Library Journal's Annoyed Librarian column recently published an article, Self-publishing and Libraries, and a follow-up, For the Self-Publishers.  The gist of the first post is:

• "Publishers are supposed to stand between the public and awful novels and “inspirational” works."
• [Speculation about the motivations of self-publishers (which are presumably significantly different from trade published authors).]
• "But with almost 400,000 self-published books a year, the amount bought or preserved by libraries is going to be negligible. In the future, it will be like the vast majority of these books never existed."
• "Or maybe that’s true now. If an ebook is published in the wilderness and nobody reads it, does it still count as a book?"

The second post, responding to comments on the first post, covers the following:

• Trade published books are not necessarily going to be better edited than a good quality self-published book.
• Library users want the most popular books, not niche books.
• Librarians rely on certain sources (Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly, etc) for reviews to allow them to make book purchase choices.
• Librarians do not have the time or budget to evaluate quality individually, so a librarian is infinitely more likely to choose a trade published book which has been reviewed by a trusted source.  Most of these sources do not deal with self-publishers (or only do so on an exploitative payment basis).

These posts inspired the usual eye-rolling in self-published circles, but (ignoring the misplaced suggestion of self-pub = poor quality) their overall gist appears to me simple common sense.  There are a lot of books out there, and librarians usually have a limited budget and even less time to spend.  They're going to focus on popular, reviewed and 'trusted' books.

I disagree, however, on the question of posterity.

Print on demand and ebooks have completely altered the question of how long a book is remembered.  Unless the book world goes through another revolution, every book I release will be available for as long as I allow it to be available and then it will linger on on pirate sites and eventually public domain.  For as long as there is a version of the internet, my books will remain.

I already have over ten releases.  Each year (except for the ones where I am exceptionally slack), I will release a new book.  Physical copies of my books are purchased by readers who particularly like my work (or just prefer to read from paper).  Some of these will circulate to second hand book stores.  Two of my books have finalled in 'creditable' awards.  I am linked three times in Wikipedia, though probably don't quite meet the notability requirements to warrant a page of my own.

I've never been reviewed by Library Journal or Publisher's Weekly and don't really expect to be.  I have been reviewed by Sherwood Smith and Rachel Neumeier, and believe me, the Library Journal isn't going to make me squee nearly as much as the idea that People I Read Have Read Me.  It's possible for any of my books - new or already released - to become a break out hit, or at least a minor success, but even if I simply continue on at my mildly improving growth rate, I have still made tens of thousands of sales.  There are people who consider me an auto-buy author, which (along with re-reading) is one of the biggest compliments a writer can have.

I do not suggest, however, that libraries are irrelevant.  Libraries were my lifeblood, back when I was a kid in a poor family who got new books on occasions like birthdays, if I was lucky.  For a book-a-day girl like I was, libraries were essential.  And the collection of the libraries I had access to shaped me.  My libraries had lots of Norton and McCaffrey and McKinley and Jones, and thus for me science fiction and fantasy has always revolved around female writers.  I gather that some libraries somehow failed to have much if anything in the way of SFF written by women, and thus some people actually don't associate SFF with women.  [That's a hard idea for me to get my head around.]

For the kid I was, growing up in a family where you got books from the library or for your birthday or not at all, a writer not 'preserved' by a library would simply not exist.  But that kid still would have grown up, and transitioned to second hand stores, and then the luxury of buying brand new books on the day of release - sometimes in hardback!

And that was back then.  If I was myself, and ten, in 2013, that once-a-year gift would have been an ereader, and I would be fully appreciating Project Gutenberg, and the plethora of free ebooks used as promotional tools by publishers, and I would shamelessly download pirated books because, after all, it was the books which were my lifeblood, and libraries only the intravenous system which delivered them.

The system has grown.

I started this post because Flannery, Readventurer Extraordinaire, excitedly tweeted to me that she'd seen Stray sitting out on display at her local library. In the nearly four years since I first published a book, this is the first - the very first - time I've had an "in the wild" sighting of any of my books. I was so excited I demanded asked her to go take me a photo. So there we have it: my book in a library, ready to give some unsuspecting teen what Norton and McCaffrey and McKinley and Jones gave me.

Flannery checked the library system, and there are five copies of each of the Touchstone books, and four of And All the Stars. King County Library System is apparently the busiest in the US, and evidently has managed to spare a little bit of time and budget for the occasional self-publisher. [I suspect it was making the Cybils finals which may have triggered the purchase - that definitely did raise my profile generally.] What a lovely picture that is, Stray being a real book and not looking out of place at all.  My excitement demonstrates that libraries are still an important part of the system, but they're not the only part of the system.

My posterity's doing fine, thanks very much.

Edit: Now with a bonus picture of my books in Minette Public Library!  [Or some of them - the rest were apparently checked out!]

Gosh I write skinny books.