It's No-No-November.

Let's stipulate that I spend way too much time on Facebook and get that out of the way upfront. 

I usually enjoy looking at the memories that Facebook shows me each day, but the crop these past few days has been bittersweet. It's convention season, you see -- the two big writing conventions I've been in the habit of attending over the past ten years are always scheduled for late October or early November. Today's memories include a photo of the mass autographing event at the 2014 World Fantasy Convention in DC; a photo of the freebies table at the 2015 World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY; and some photos my pal KS Brooks took of me in Las Vegas when we attended the 20 Books to 50K convention there in 2017.

Checking my somewhat faulty memory and my contemporaneous blog posts, it appears that 20 Books to 50K event in 2017 was the last convention I attended. I'm not quite sure what happened in 2018. I believe I intended to go to 20 Books to 50K again in 2019, but ended up rolling my membership over to 2020. We all know what happened -- or more accurately, everything that didn't happen -- in 2020. When the 2020 event was canceled, I rolled my membership over again, to this year. 

This year, I'm not going. I'll be there as a virtual attendee instead. And I probably won't attend many of the virtual sessions.

IzelPhotography | Deposit Photos

I have reasons: 

1. The convention is on the Strip this year, which is more expensive than where we were before. 
2. I'm not a fan of Vegas; lots of people love it there, but I'm not one of them. (I don't really like amusement parks, either, for similar reasons.) 
3. I'm working for the New Mexico legislature as a proofreader again this year, and I started full-time two weeks ago. I would have had to take the week off without pay to attend this year's convention. Plus my supervisor was really leery about my going to Vegas for a week and catching who-knows-what while I was there; she was ecstatic when I told her I'd decided not to go.
4. That who-knows-what thing. Santa Fe has been a safe place to ride out the pandemic; Vegas, once it reopened, was definitely not safe. It may be better there now, but the thought of going out amongst the Great Unmasked and Quite Possibly Unvaxxed was just too unnerving for me. 
5. November is also NaNoWriMo, and I always end up missing a few days at the beginning of the month for a convention and then spending virtually all of Thanksgiving weekend writing. 

Of course, I'm not technically doing NaNo this month, either. I'm up to 5,378 words on The Atherton Vampire 3, but there were a few days last week when I didn't write. I think I'll still be able to get the book done by the end of this month, although it doesn't matter if I'm a few days late because I'm not actually doing NaNo.

The bottom line is that I've said no to a number of things this month that I typically say yes to. No writing convention, no NaNo. It's No-No-November.

To be honest, I'm been rethinking this writing gig for a while now. I've been at it for more than ten years; I've written and published upwards of 25 books; I've made a little money; and I've earned a little respect from some of my fellow indie authors. I'm not sure what else I have to prove. 

When I was in my early 20s, I wrote a list of life's goals; then I spent the next 40 years pursuing them. I've reached each and every one of those goals, including this one: "Become a published author." The goal wasn't to make a living from my writing (and anyhow I did that as a journalist for 20 years). It also wasn't to write a bestseller. It was to get published. And I've done that.

Years ago, I took backpacking training for Girl Scout leaders. I was so out of shape that I had a hard time slogging along the trail with my heavy pack on my back. I kind of whimpered at every little rise we climbed. (Yeah, I know -- pathetic.) But the lodge at the end of the trail had an ice cream parlor, and I just kept thinking about rewarding myself with ice cream when the hike was done. It became my goal -- if I could finish the hike without dying, I could have ice cream! But when the hike was over, I forgot to get the ice cream -- and I wasn't mad when I remembered it later. For me, reaching the goal was the important thing. The reward was beside the point.

I'm going through the same kind of thing now with writing. I wanted so badly to retire and get out of DC that I promised myself that when I finally did, I would live the life of an author -- writing every day and promoting the heck out of my work and all that stuff. Then in the fullness of time, I retired and left DC. And what I'm discovering now, a year into retirement, is that maybe I don't want to be a full-time writer, after all. The writing life was like that ice cream I'd promised myself on the trail: it was the reward. But my goal was always to get out of DC. And from where I'm sitting, the reward is looking like a whole lot of work -- probably more than this retiree is interested in pursuing.

I expect I'll still keep writing. I'll definitely publish The Atherton Vampire 2 as an ebook this month and The Atherton Vampire 3 next month, as planned. But after that? I don't know. We'll see how it goes.

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These moments of goal-reviewing blogginess has been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Music, mounds, and atheists: A World Fantasy roundup.

Last week at this time, Kitty and I were wending our way across Pennsylvania, coming home from this year's World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio. So this week, I thought I'd mention a couple of convention highlights before they recede into my memory.

Convention panels, I find, are hit-or-miss. Sometimes you get a really super-fantastic panel that's into having a conversation about the topic, both with each other and with the audience; and sometimes you get a panel with a blowhard who considers himself an expert on the topic and/or simply doesn't know when to shut up. My editor Suzu Strayer, who attended the conference with me, chalks some of this up to a lack of intellectual rigor: panelists, she maintains, should be required to back up their assertions by citing facts. That sounds like an awful lot of work to me. All I really expect from a panel is to have my thought processes kicked a little -- and to be entertained.

Now that my criteria for judging have been established, my two favorite panels (besides the one I was on) at this year's convention were "Fantasy and Music" and "Atheist Fantasy: Is God Dead?"

First, the music panel. The entertainment factor was established from the outset, when the panelists "tuned up" vocally. That was followed by a discussion of the way writers use music in their works of fantasy. I picked up one tip that I wish I'd known about before I wrote SwanSong: Mercedes Lackey puts the full lyrics to the songs her characters sing at the back of each novel, and only uses pertinent portions of each song in the main part of the story. That was followed by a discussion of authors, or fans, who have written music to go along with the songs in novels.

I was fascinated by a quick mention by Fred Durbin (I think) of the Shepard tone, which sent me Googling because I had never heard of it before. It's an aural illusion akin to Escher's famous staircase to nowhere -- you think you hear the music going up and up, endlessly, but it's not. (Here's more info on it, and how it was used in a Super Mario game.)

In nearly the same breath, he went on to talk about the tritone or devil's tone, known musically as an augmented 4th or diminished 5th. This is created by playing two notes together -- say, a C and an F# -- that create dissonance, a sound that leaves you dying for resolution to a prettier chord. (Wikipedia has some examples here, if you'd like to take a listen. Mental Floss has a much less technical discussion here.) Back in the Middle Ages, the Church prohibited the use of the tritone, as much because it was difficult to play as anything else. Today, you hear it a lot in heavy metal music and the blues, as well as in classical pieces when the composer is after something sinister.

Speaking of the Church: the atheist fantasy panel was scheduled, aptly, for Sunday morning. The question here is that if your world is full of good and evil, or even people who act on moral values, do you need to have gods in your story? Of course, someone can be morally good yet not be religious; morals are societal constructs that religion simply enforces. But if you have a character who is religious, do you have to have the gods show up? In the Pipe Woman Chronicles, my answer was yes; that was pretty much the point of the whole series. But in a different type of story, of course, the gods never have to make an appearance at all. The panel gave me some points to ponder for future novels.

And speaking of future novels, Suzu and I took a side trip on Saturday morning to find some mounds. Our first stop was the Shrum Mound, an Adena burial site in Columbus. The Adena lived from about 1000 B.C. to about 100 A.D., before the Hopewell, who built the Newark Earthworks. The Shrum Mound isn't on anybody's list of significant sites, but we thought it felt peaceful.

From there, we proceeded to Chillicothe and Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. The site we visited, known as Mound City, originally had at least 23 mounds surrounded by a nearly square earthen wall. A number of the mounds were destroyed in World War I when the Army built Camp Sherman on the site, but some have been excavated by archaeologists and then rebuilt. In other words, the site is in nowhere near the shape that the Hopewell left it in; all the artifacts they buried with their dead have been dug up. Still, some things are authentic. In this photo, you can see a grassy mound on the left -- but beyond that, there's another one under the trees. The signage says the whole site was wooded like this when white settlers first found the site.

Besides the mounds, there's also a path down to the Scioto River. The route is one that the Hopewell would have taken to get from the river to Mound City. I believe all of the major Hopewell sites are situated along rivers or creeks, and archaeologists speculate that making the journey by river may have been part of a vision quest or coming-of-age ritual. In any case, the weather was beautiful, and I learned more stuff that may show up in the new series.

Which, by the way, is progressing. I passed 10,000 words today on the NaNo novel and I think it's going pretty well. I'll let you know next week if I still feel the same way.

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These moments of musical blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Life and its passages.

I have news!

1. Next weekend, I'll be attending the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio. I'll be on a panel called "The Fantasy of the American Heartland" Thursday afternoon, Oct. 27th, at 4:00pm. If you're planning to attend the convention, I hope you'll stop by and say hi.
2. At long last, the omnibus of the Pipe Woman's Legacy series is just about ready to go out the door. Release day ought to be sometime this week. Keep an eye on the usual social media sites.
3.  I'm also overdue for sending out a newsletter, so be on the lookout for that, too.

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Maybe it's the time of year -- Samhain is only a week away -- or maybe it's that we have lost so many great people in 2016, and we still have two months to go. But Death seems to be on my mind a lot lately. (Witness my Mabon post of just a few weeks ago.)

But death isn't always bad.

Take the Tarot, for example. This is a photo I took of the Death card from the first Tarot deck I ever bought. When this card shows up in a reading, people who are unfamiliar with its meaning have been known to freak out. And why not? It's the thirteenth card! Everybody knows thirteen is an unlucky number! And there's a skeleton on a horse! And the sun is setting on the horizon!

Really? Maybe it's rising.

And what about that flag Death is carrying? On my card, the flower is red, but in regular Rider-Waite decks it's white. (What can I say? It was a cheap deck.) White is the color of beauty and purity, and it can also symbolize immortality.

The thing we tend to forget when we get all worked up over death is that something has to end before a new thing can begin. What this card actually signals is the start of a period of transformation -- the death of old ways of thinking and habits that have been holding us back. Or it can mean the end of a season of life -- say, the transition from high school to college, or from childlessness to parenthood, or from the working world to retirement. Of course you're glad to be on the threshold of this new phase of life, but it's also a bit frightening. Once the old way is behind you, you can never really go back.

On the card, Death is wearing armor because it's invincible. Nobody yet has gotten out of this life alive, and nobody living has escaped profound change of some sort.

In that sense, Death is just a phase. We're standing on the threshold of the transition from the old way of life to the new. Negotiating the transition may be tricky, and it will likely be painful. But it's going to be worth it in the end.

Speaking of beginnings, NaNoWriMo starts in a little over a week, and you may have guessed by now that the cycle of death/transition/rebirth will be one of the themes in my NaNo novel this year. But don't worry -- I promise it won't be too serious.

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These moments of deathly bloggery have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

The World Fantasy Convention Report.

This year's haul is noticeably smaller than in years past.

Warning: If you're looking for nuggets of writing advice, they're here -- but you'll have to put up with a fair amount of fantasy-fiction name-dropping and some fangrrl squeeing before we get there.

Sorry that I'm a day late in posting this week. Today is my World Fantasy Convention hangover day. I've been to enough of these now that I've learned to build in a post-convention day off, to help ease my re-entry into the normal world. This strategy first paid off after the WFC in San Diego, where guest of honor Neil Gaiman was treated like a rock star. I described this to an attorney I was working for, whereupon she said, "I don't know who that is." If we'd had that conversation the day after convention's end, I might have broken down sobbing. As it was, I was able to feign a simple case of mild surprise. (The sobbing came later, in private.)

This year's convention felt kind of thrown together from the start. There were fewer than the usual number of communiques from the organizers before the convention, and the book bags were a lot smaller than usual. At past conventions, I'd received between twelve and fifteen books in my bag -- some ARCs (advance reader copies), some overstocks, some because the author was a guest of honor. My hardback copy of Gaiman's American Gods came in my book bag in San Diego. This year -- well, reference the photo above. I bought the Donaldson volume in the dealers' room; four of the others came in my bag, together with a paperback copy of a book I got in hardback last year (David Baldacci's The Finisher) and a mass-market paperback of a book I'd received in my bag a few years ago (Peter Brett's The Warded Man). I picked up the Novik from the book exchange table. The author of Without Bloodshed, Matt Graybosch, told me his publisher had ordered enough books for every bag, but never heard where to send them or when the deadline was.

(The peppermint pig wasn't in the bag, either. It was a freebie at the registration desk.)

Anyway. As a member of Broad Universe, I participated in their Rapid Fire Reading Thursday afternoon. I had about five minutes to read, and chose the scene from Dragon's Web in which Rafe first meets Sage's father at the pizza place. I was gratified that the audience laughed in all the right places. (Note to authors: Broad Universe has a special rate at NetGalley, and you don't have to be a speculative fiction writer -- or even a broad -- to take advantage. The rate is $25/month for members and $45/month for non-members. Full details here.)

Once my reading was over, I was able to relax and be a fangrrl. Of course, that meant attending every panel Stephen R. Donaldson was on, and first up was a geek girl twofer: Donaldson interviewing guest of honor Steven Erikson, whose ten-book Malazan Book of the Fallen series is well on its way to becoming a classic of the grimdark subgenre. (Yes, grimdark is an actual thing.) Erikson's books are doorstop-sized tomes, running a thousand pages or more. He explained that he kept his editor from cutting them down to size by insisting that this scene here in book A was crucial to understanding a scene in book G -- which may or may not have been true. Donaldson (who has been known to say, of his own ten-book series, "internal consistency is a bitch") wanted to know how Erikson keeps all the details straight -- to which Erikson said, "Oh, please - when one character changes gender? Twice?" Turns out he has great intentions about note-taking, but lousy follow-through; the assistant he hired to organize all the details of Malazan discovered 50 or 60 notebooks, each containing about three pages of notes.

I ran into YA fantasy author Sarah Beth Durst in the elevator, and later saw her on a panel with Donaldson about whether quest narratives are in or out of fashion. Sarah, bless her heard, said she really enjoyed The Martian because everyone in it was so nice -- prompting Donaldson to blurt, "I was so bored!" He then invoked the spirit of Lester del Rey, who ran the Del Rey imprint at Ballantine in the 1970s and '80s. Donaldson said del Rey believed there were three types of conflicts in fiction -- man against others, man against nature, and man against himself -- and that while just one will make a good story, you need to include all three for a great story. Clearly, in Donaldson's estimation, The Martian fell short.

The other "quest" panel I attended was not nearly as interesting. Moderator Jeanne Cavelos, who runs the venerable Odyssey workshop program, kept a tight focus on the topic of what to take on a quest -- even though authors Carol Berg and Catherine Cooke Montrose kept trying to steer the discussion away from a packing list into more interesting territory. After all, the key element of any quest is the questers themselves: not the physical things they bring along, but how they survive, what they find, and what they bring back with them -- and that includes self-knowledge and maturity as much as it does whatever McGuffin the party has been sent off to fetch.

Finally: Walking back from the art show Saturday night, I stumbled across an impromptu concert featuring six or eight convention attendees (one of whom, I learned later, was Charles de Lint). Among the songs they sang was one called "The Family Car". I didn't get a video, but here's one of some other people performing it on "The Prairie Home Companion" a few years back.

Yes, there's irony in people who work in traditional publishing singing heartily about the car as America's safety net. Publishing is a tough business, no matter how you do it.

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These moments of convention-addled blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Seasons: Halloween in Michiana.

“Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” Ms. Thea murmured behind her. “It’s so close to Samhain. The veil is already thinning.”

“Maybe it’s the best idea,” Ms. Elsie replied quietly.

The conviction in her voice gave Julia the courage to step into the labyrinth.

At the moment her toes touched the path inside the ropes, everything changed.

- from Seasons of the Fool

As (I hope!) you know by now, Seasons of the Fool is up for nomination at Kindle Scout. The nomination period for my book closes Wednesday, Nov. 26th, which gives us four Sundays between now and then. Four Sunday blog posts...four seasons...I'm sensing a theme here....

Darron Birgenhaier | flickr.com

We've established that I'm old, right? When I was growing up in Michiana, trick-or-treating was an actual thing. We would get dressed up in our costumes and traipse around to the neighbors and hold out our little buckets or bags, and they would give us candy. It wasn't until I was a little older that people started getting spooked by stories of razor blades in apples and the like. And then came the stories about crazy, trippy people handing out drugs instead of candy, and, well, that's when most parents instituted the practice of checking over one's haul and tossing out anything that wasn't wrapped.

Urban myths die hard. Just last week, I opened a bag of miniature Milky Way bars and found one that had missed the wrapper machine at the factory. I debated whether to throw it out. But it was in a factory-sealed bag and it didn't look like anyone had injected anything into it, so I ate it. So far, I'm still here.

The thing I remember most about trick-or-treating in Michiana was it was cold. Late October near Lake Michigan is not for the faint of heart. My mother used to buy my Halloween costume a size bigger than normal, because it was pretty much guaranteed that I'd have to wear my winter coat under it. And yes, sometimes we would already have snow by Halloween; I remember stepping over snowbanks to get to people's doors.

I have a confession to make, and it's in relation to this: A few days ago, advice columnist Prudence posted a letter from a woman who complained that poor kids were getting all her good candy. "Halloween isn’t a social service or a charity in which I have to buy candy for less fortunate children," the sniffy woman said. "We already pay more than enough taxes toward actual social services."

Prudie, bless her, shut her down. "Stop being callous and miserly and go to Costco, you cheapskate," she said. I wanted to stand up and cheer, because I was one of those 99-percent kids who would go trick-or-treating in better neighborhoods to get better candy. I mean, come on -- it's common sense. Who wouldn't rather get a bunch of candy bars than a bagful of Smarties?

Ms. Cranky One-Percenter, I have the perfect solution for you. Next year, band together with your neighbors and get everybody to agree to hand out nothing but Necco wafers and Laffy Taffy. I guarantee that the following Halloween, your neighborhood will be a ghost town for real.

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Partly to take my mind off the Kindle Scout thing, I'll be out and about this month. Next weekend, I'm attending the World Fantasy Convention. I'm doing a reading (from Seasons, natch) on Saturday the 8th at 3:30pm. If you're planning to attend WFC this year, I hope you'll stop by.

The following Saturday, which would be Nov. 15th, I'll be in New York to attend the Self-Publishing Book Expo. I'm not speaking or reading, but I'm looking forward to sitting in on some panels and learning some new stuff.

And as a thank-you to you guys for putting up with me this month, I'm running a contest to give away a Kindle HD6. If you win, I'll even let you pick the color. The entry form is below; if it doesn't work for you, try using a different browser than Internet Explorer.

Thank you, and good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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These moments of bloggy nostalgia have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

WFC dreaming, or: the weekend I was nearly famous.

We'll get to our post in a moment. But first, the news:

• The Land, Sea, Sky Trilogy is now live at Amazon. This omnibus edition includes a new author's note and the first chapter of Seized, just in case readers get to the end of the book and want to know why Antonia treats Naomi like a rock star. If you enjoyed the Land, Sea, Sky books -- or if you have been meaning to get around to reading them -- now's your chance. And not that I'm encouraging anyone to wait...but starting this Thursday, the omnibus will be on sale for 99 cents. I hope you'll check it out, and tell all your friends, too.
• The fractal jaguar is having his moment in the sun this weekend. The book trailer for Fissured is featured at Indies Unlimited today. Click through if you haven't seen it -- or, heck, if you'd like to see it again.
• I received an e-mail this week from the organizers of this year's World Fantasy Convention, notifying me that "A Man's Got to Do What a Man's Got to Do" has been selected for inclusion in Unconventional Fantasy: A Celebration of Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention. The anthology will be recorded on a thumb drive and given to everyone who attends the convention next month. I happen to know that a whole bunch of my fantasy-author heroes also have pieces in this anthology, so I am fairly giddy about being included. 

Which segues nicely into this week's post, in which I reprise (with a tweak or two) a thing I wrote for Indies Unlimited a few weeks ago.

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I don’t mean to brag, but I had 850 people show up at my first book signing.

Okay, they might have been there to see Gene Wolfe, or Stephen R. Donaldson, or Elizabeth Bear, or Peter Straub, or Patricia McKillip, or…well, you get the idea. But I was there, too!

“There” was the 2010 World Fantasy Convention, in Columbus, Ohio. This annual convention travels to various venues around the world – last year’s was in Brighton, England – and is geared toward speculative fiction in general and fantasy in particular. Membership is capped at 850, and many of the attendees are authors, agents, and editors.

Watchers with SRD in 2010.

I went with some friends from Kevinswatch, and we all went because Donaldson was going to be there. But one of the questions on the sign-up form was, “Are you an author?” This was right after Calderwood Books had published The Maidens' War, so I checked “yes” and put in the Calderwood Books website since I hadn't really started blogging yet. Not only did the WFC organizers believe me, but they put me on a panel. And they let me sign books with the big guys on Friday night.

I've mentioned the mass autographing session here at hearth/myth before. It's a World Fantasy Convention tradition, and it’s pretty crazy. They set up long tables in a ballroom-sized conference room, and they give you a table tent with your name on it. Seating is first-come, first-served, and the lines to get a popular author to sign books can be long. When Neil Gaiman was an honoree in San Diego in 2011, the line to see him wrapped around the ballroom. There were, in fact, so many people in line that he couldn't get to everybody; the convention organizers had to set up a second signing later in the weekend just for him.

Then there are the dealers, who set up outside the room with crates of unsigned books and send runners with stacks of books into the autographing session. The runners stand in the lines, get the books signed, and bring them back to the dealers – who, of course, charge more for autographed books.

There was no line in front of my table, alas, and none of the runners had The Maidens' War in their stack. But my friends gathered around my table, had me sign their copies, and chatted as if I was an actual somebody. One of my buddies even took my picture as I signed his book. I caught at least one passer-by eyeing my table tent to try to figure out who the author was who had attracted such a crowd.

It was really hard to go back to the day job the following Monday, let me tell you.

I'm not expecting such a rousing success this year. For one thing, I won't be a starry-eyed newbie. Well, okay -- I'll still be starry-eyed (I mean, jeez, Guy Gavriel Kay is a guest of honor!), but at least I won't be a newbie. Still, I'm looking forward to this year's shindig. For one thing, my travel and hotel costs will be minimal, as it's happening ten minutes from my house. For another, I get to be in an anthology with Donaldson. "Nearly famous," indeed!

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This post originally appeared in a slightly different form at Indies Unlimited.

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These moments of nearly famous blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Thanksgiving 2012, or: Gratitude with an Attitude.

My weekly news feature has been sadly neglected of late; I apologize for that, but I've been concentrating on writing (Tapped and Book 4) and editing (Tapped), so promotion has gotten shoved to the side a little bit. Well, that's about to end.

For one thing, as of today, we are just about 30 days shy of the date of the first scene in Seized:  the night Brock proposes to Naomi.  That means the Winter Solstice and White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman's first appearance to Naomi are fast approaching, too.  I'm planning to mark the occasion with a little celebration.  You'll notice the decorations are already going up -- the banner up top and the countdown clock (roll your cursor over the countdown clock -- it's kinda fun, once or twice).  I've got several guest blog slots lined up, some of which are listed on the Tour Dates page.  And I'm planning a contest.  ("Ooooh!  Aaaah!")  More details to come next week on all of that, but in the meantime, get ready, and tell your friends and neighbors.

Speaking of redecorating, I keep forgetting to mention this:  Tucked away on the Buy My Books tab is a link at the top of the page to "Lynne's Book Emporium on Amazon.com."  There you will find, besides links to my own books, links to most of the books I've been using as reference works for the Pipe Woman Chronicles.  If you enjoy perusing bibliographies and "suggestions for further reading" lists, feel free to take a look.


In addition, I should mention that I did more at WFC in Toronto than just attend one panel.  I did a reading, sold two books (yay!), met some local knitters (yes, that's right -- I met two knitters who live in northern Virginia while at a writers' conference in Canada), and people-watched.  One of the panels I attended was the Patty and Mike Show, where Patricia Briggs (who writes the Mercy Thompson books and the Alpha and Omega series) and her husband held forth for an hour or so.  I got a t-shirt, too.



The Friday night mass autographing session is always a great place to spot writerly celebrities.  I was pretty much stuck in my own little corner all night.  But as I was leaving, I happened to turn around and notice Patrick Rothfuss sitting by the door.  If you've ever wondered what the guy who writes the Kingkiller Chronicle looks like, take a gander over to your left.






Moving on from convention news, I should mention that I've got a cat again, if only for a limited time.  Tom, a.k.a. Tommy Wommy, a.k.a. Mr. Wommy, a.k.a. The Wommy Man, is once again in residence, due to a quirk in my older daughter's housing situation.  Here he is, in all his adorable glory. You can easily see why he merits multiple nicknames.  (I should just convert this to a blog featuring pictures of Mr. Wommy, shouldn't I?  That would drive up page views, I bet....)

Finally, I'm feeling much better about my NaNoWriMo totals after this weekend.  As of right now, I have written a little more than 35,000 words of Book 4 and feel confident that I will finish it well before the end of the month.  Which is good, because I will need to do final edits and formatting on Tapped then.  Whew.

Anyway, enough about all that.  This Thursday is Thanksgiving here in the US, and one of our hoary traditions (besides watching huge balloons float down NY streets on TV and eating ourselves sick) is to list things we give thanks for.  So here you go, my list of Five Things I Am Grateful For This Thanksgiving.  (I could come up with more, but this post is already pretty long, and I'm sure y'all have things to do.)

1. Friends and family, of course.
2. My fans.  I'm especially grateful for those who fit the description for both #1 and #2.
3. My day job, which allows me to live comfortably while pursuing my dream of being a full-time novelist.
4. The ability to write the books I want to write and to publish them.  Indie publishing for the win!
5. My colleagues at Indies Unlimited and the Indie Exchange, who, besides being available at a moment's notice to commiserate and cheer each other on, are just plain fun to hang out with.

And a Bonus Thing I Am Grateful For This Thanksgiving:

NaNo is almost over!

Have a great Turkey Day, everyone.

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This moment of bloggy gratitude was brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

What a difference a year makes.

Nowhere, I submit, is the upheaval in the publishing world more apparent than at writing conventions.  At last year’s World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, I attended a panel during which an agent (or maybe she was an editor) made some disparaging remarks about self-publishing, and a few audience members stood up and respectfully explained to her why she was wrong.

Fast-forward to 2012.  This year’s World Fantasy Convention, in Toronto last weekend, featured a whole panel discussion about e-publishing.  

One end of the dais seemed to be spewing dinosaur breath.  The former editor-in-chief of Del Ray (Random House’s speculative fiction imprint), Betsy Mitchell, complained that her business is drying up; she said indie novelists aren’t willing to pay $3,500 for the kind of top-notch professional editing job she can offer.  (I wondered whether it had ever occurred to her that the vast majority of indies simply can’t afford her.)  Next to her sat Robert Runté, an acquisitions editor for a small Canadian press, who called the indie trend of using beta readers “editing by crowdsourcing.”  He also said he used to write reviews of speculative fiction novels for money – but “that job is gone.”  Who’s taking up the reviewing slack?  Bloggers, said Emily Craven (although apparently she doesn’t review books on her own blog).  

The panel agreed that 99-cent e-books devalue the author’s hard work, although there was some support for a 99-cent price point for the first novel in a series.  Craven suggested a reasonable price for an e-book would be half the price of a paperback edition.  Leslie said most e-books published directly through Kobo’s Writing Life list for $2.99 to $5.99, while Smashwords authors tend to undervalue their work; prices for Smashwords titles sold at the Kobo Store average from 99 cents to $1.99.  

Ah, Smashwords.  Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld.com said, “Friends don’t let friends use Smashwords.”  He went on to explain that the site’s automated Meatgrinder conversion software “doesn’t always work as well as it should.”

The panelists also warned indies away from making their own cover art.  One suggested using a site such as bibliocrunch.com, where you can list your project and your budget, and artists (and editors, too) can then bid for your business.  Still, they advised, it’s best to ask for samples and references before hiring an artist or editor for your book.

In terms of the market for science fiction and fantasy, the panelists said Amazon accounts for somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of sales, with the rest more or less evenly split among the other sellers.  Leslie also said only about twenty percent of self-published authors make money from their books.  But then, that’s not all that different from the way traditional publishing works.

I could have wished for more on the nuts-and-bolts of indie publishing.  Heck, I would have liked to see more indie authors and book bloggers on the panel.  Ah, well.  Maybe next year.

This article first appeared at IndiesUnlimited.com on Nov. 9, 2012.

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This moment of bloggy reportage was brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Late update (sorry!).

I'm a day late and short on time for my weekly blog post.  Sorry about that.  When I was supposed to be posting here, I was driving home from Toronto and the World Fantasy Convention.  I'm relying on you guys:  the next time I blithely suggest that driving to Toronto for the weekend would be doable, please remind me that it takes 12 hours, no matter what Mapquest and Google Maps promise, and tell me not to do it.

Ahem.  Anyway.

We weathered Hurricane Sandy just fine, without even losing power.  But my heart goes out to friends and others in the New York/New Jersey area who have lost so much from the storm.  I hope the power comes back on and life gets back to some semblance of normality as soon as possible.

The Toronto trip has put me way behind on NaNoWriMo, as I knew it would -- but I did get in a couple of writing sessions (although the second was cut very short by a bout of food poisoning -- it's okay, I'm fine now).  So I am only, by my calculations, about 5,000 words behind where I should be today (ack!!).  Hoping to catch up by the time I go to bed tonight.  Although I also need to unpack, do laundry and clean the house.  I did have a lot of time to think about book 4 while driving, which is all to the good.

A full convention report will have to wait 'til next week, when I'm not behind the NaNo 8-ball.  But I had a great time (despite having to talk to Ralph on the big white telephone), and I even sold a couple of books.  I will tell you, as a sort of teaser for next week, that the publishing industry's take on indies has changed markedly since last year's convention. Let's just say I was smelling a lot of dinosaur breath this year....

Have a great week, everybody.

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These moments of brief blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

NaNo or No?

So it has come to this, my annual dilemma:  Should I participate in National Novel Writing Month (a.k.a. NaNoWriMo, which I often shorten further to NaNo) this year or not?

The pros:  As alert readers of this blog know, this would be my fourth NaNo.  My earlier NaNos were in 2008, 2009, and 2011.  Each time, I won -- that is, I reached the goal of 50,000 words in 30 days.  And each time, I got a publishable book out of it (The Maidens' War in '08, SwanSong in '09, and Seized last year.)  I have an idea teed up, too -- book four of "The Pipe Woman Chronicles" -- and I've even got an outline-ish thing written for it already.  I've got to write the book anyway, and November is as good a time as any.  So why not just commit?

Of course, there are also the usual and customary, all-purpose pros: NaNo is a great experience for anyone who has ever said to him- or herself, "I've got this great idea for a book."  It's also perfect for anyone who gets bogged down in revising while writing the first draft, because there just isn't enough time in 30 days for those kinds of shenanigans.  It's a first draft!  It's supposed to stink!  Just keep writing!

If you think writing is too solitary, NaNo volunteers have organized a bunch of events throughout the month, at which you can sit in a room and tap away at your keyboard with a bunch of other people who are tapping away at their keyboards.  (I mean, I don't get the attraction, personally.  But a lot of other people do.)  For instant socializing gratification, there are message boards on the NaNo site and Facebook groups galore.  If you'd rather work alone, that's okay, too -- you never have to see another human, and you really only have to go to the website twice: once to sign up, and once to dump your manuscript into NaNo's official word counting device so you can collect your swag.

The cons:  No rule exists that says I have to do NaNo every year; you will note that I sat out 2010, and the world did not end thereby.  Also, I'm going to lose four days at the very beginning of the month for World Fantasy Convention; I might get to squeeze in a little writing in Toronto, but it certainly won't amount to 6,668 words.  I've begun NaNo with a deficit before and it's not a lot of fun.  Besides, I've already won three times -- what else have I got to prove?  And to be honest, I'm still kind of in recovery mode after powering through the first draft of Tapped in about three weeks in late August and early September.  And if Tapped is going to be published in early December, I'm going to have to spend some time in November getting it ready to go.

The hedge:  But I don't have to win, do I?  I can write as much of the fourth book as possible during November, and if I don't get to 50,000 words by the 30th, oh well, at least I'll be farther along on it than I would have been otherwise.  And I've proven with Tapped that I can write 50,000 words in less than 30 days, so it's entirely possible that I could win NaNo this year, even with all the other distractions.  Plus I don't have to drive anywhere for Thanksgiving this year, so I'll have most of that four-day weekend to catch up.

I don't have to win.  Do I?  Or do I?

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News:  Speaking of NaNo, the BookGoodies podcast interview was postponed to this week, due to the host coming down with strep throat.  I had strep back in my radio days, so I was totally sympathetic.  The new date is this Thursday, October 25th.  I'll post the particulars on my Facebook page.

I thought it was time to do a little housekeeping around here.  I moved all the book trailers to their own tab.  You will also note, if you scroll waaaaaaay down to the bottom of the page, I've added a link to Preditors & Editors -- a great website for checking out whether the agent, editing service, etc., you're about to do business with is legit.

And I've now got my very own Pinterest page.  My boards ain't works of art, but feel free to use the link to the left and check them out.

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These moments of bloggy indecision have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

All praise to the Google!

http://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2009/10/21

My desktop computer is in the shop, so I'm writing this post on my netbook computer with the teeny-tiny 10-inch screen.  At least I was able to plug my desktop's keyboard and mouse into the netbook, so it's not as alien a setup as it might be otherwise.  But still, I'm getting a crick in my neck from the unaccustomed screen position. And I can't watch videos on this underpowered machine.  Not that I watch a lot of videos anyway, but it's the idea that I can't that's bothering me.

Why am I whining about all of this?  (Kudos to you if you've stuck around thus far.  Your whining threshold must be pretty high!)  It's because this inconvenience has reminded me again of how much teh intarwebz have invaded my life.

I have a desktop computer at work; at home, I have my own desktop computer, as well as a netbook, a Nook Tablet, and an iPhone.  An information search about any question, no matter how low-priority the answer, is at my fingertips for 98 percent of my waking hours (it would be 100 percent, but sometimes I can't get a signal on my phone) and even for a portion of my sleeping hours.  (I've been awakened more than once by a chime from my phone, telling me somebody just mentioned me on Twitter.)

Before we went to Europe, though, my friend Kim and I checked into the cost of an international data roaming plan, and quickly concluded it would be more fiscally responsible just to turn data reception off for the duration of the trip.  It was a good idea in theory -- but in practice, oh, was it painful.  At least once a day, one of us would come up with some question in the course of conversation that the other couldn't answer.  The "I don't know" response was always accompanied by a disgusted, "But if we had data, we could look it up!"

Mark my words:  Someday the pre-intarwebz days will be known as the New Dark Ages.  It was a time when we lived in ignorance and fear.  A time when a search for answers involved delving into actual books made of actual paper (the horror!) and perusing digests, indices, tables of contents, and other arcane documents, in hopes one of them would point you to a book that actually contained the information you sought.  A time when librarians held vast power.  A time when we posed questions, such as, "Who won the Oscar for best cinematography in 1963?" and almost invariably got this response: "Huh.  I dunno."

You kids don't know how good you have it.  All praise to the Google!

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Now that that's out of my system, I have some actual news.

1.  This Wednesday night at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, I'll be doing a podcast for BookGoodies on winning at NaNoWriMo.  You do know about NaNoWriMo, don't you?  If you've ever said to yourself, "I oughta write a book," you really should consider participating.  Anyway, I don't have particulars yet about when the podcast will be available. (It's probably on my other computer....)  I'll post the info to my Facebook page when I find out.
2.  As of this past week, I am now a weekly contributor to Indies Unlimited.  The Evil Mastermind has promised me a gruel upgrade as compensation for my extra duties. I'll let you know how it goes.
3.  The program for World Fantasy Convention 2012 is out, and I'm in it!  I'll be doing a reading on Friday morning, Nov. 2.  I also plan to participate in the mass autographing session that night.  If by some happenstance, you'll be in Toronto for the convention, please look for me.
4.  Oh, and by the way, the first draft of Tapped: Book Three of the Pipe Woman Chronicles is complete.  We're moving up the publication schedule to take advantage of the Christmas shopping season, so look for the book at your favorite online retailer starting in early December.

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I'm Lynne Cantwell, and I approve this blog post.