Sin Is Beautiful

So, yes. Time to shamelessly shill myself and ask all of you to do things for me.

It’s awards nomination time, and though I’d absolutely love a Hugo, I don’t know that I quite run in that crowd (and it’s quite a big crowd). But I would like to call your attention to the Furry Fandom’s equivalent, the Ursa Major Awards. I was honored with a win for Dangerous Jade a few years ago, and I’d really like to see if a more recent work — my short story, Pavlov’s House — has what it takes.

Pavlov’s House, if you haven’t met it, is set in the same universe as Dangerous Jade, but deals with those war dogs of mine, last seen starting a war in the story collection War Dog & Marginalized Populations. In it you meet Sokolai, one of Eschowitz and Scheuen’s brothers, who is having a hard time living with what happened during the Tajik revolution. It was published April last year by Strange Horizons, which was kind of a huge thing on a personal level. If you haven’t read it, you can take a look here, or listen to the podcast version here.

The Ursa Majors are, of course, the Furry Fandom’s home-grown awards, covering everything from games to books to comics. They work on a system where public nominations (which you, yes, YOU can contribute to) are followed a couple of months later by a public vote (ditto).

If you liked Pavlov’s House, please do consider nominating it over here, and otherwise do check out some of the great stuff that’s been recommended over the course of last year — there are always a couple of gems in there.

Okay, so. After the whirlwind of August, my September was about settling down and getting back into the grind to work. Unfortunately this coincided with a decision to go over my outlines for the next work-for-hire, which briefly turned into an obsessive hunt for problems and trying to fix them which ballooned the entire preliminary work/outline process to eat up most of the month. Feature creep, am I right?

Feature creep aside, the gears are now turning, prose is now falling from my keyboard, and the trick is to start clinging rigidly to my schedule once more. No real work news beyond that, though…

Well, okay. There’s a little other work news. My Amazon self-pub sales have completely and utterly flatlined.

The last time anyone bought one of my books was late August. Personally? I think this is a sign that I haven’t really published anything self-pubbable in more than a year, and have been putting zero effort into that whole side of things. What this year has really been about, in terms of material presented, is Orbital Decay/Journal of the Plague year, from Abaddon, and my short piece — Pavlov’s House — which went up on Strange Horizons. That is literally all there’s been to show, despite the fact that I finished writing Dog Country. 2013? 2013 was not a great year for me, writing-wise. This all really highlights the weird lag we see as writers. We won’t know the real consequences of what we work on today until months or years have gone past.

See. My amazon sales flatlining? This is against a background of one of the most productive years I’ve had since I started writing, finishing off my first novel, attending a Worldcon where I had a great time meeting friends, editors/support staff I’ve worked with, being contracted to write another novel (in five parts — more on that later) and generally having a great time. There are some foundational things going on with my career that are absolutely great.

But my self-pub sales are flat.

And obviously that doesn’t feel good.

Why are my sales flat? Because in 2013 I spent about half of my time spinning my wheels. I produced two works that were any good — Orbital Decay and Pavlov’s House — and the rest of the time on abortive half-projects, feeling bad, rehashing older works, and generally not getting anything done. It was a lousy year for so many reasons, as was 2012 really, but the knock-on effect has only really started coming home to roost now. The benefits of this year’s productivity? Don’t expect to see any of it until 2015, if not 2016.

I need to put together some more material for self-pub again sometime soon, is the real conclusion to draw from all that.

In other news, in an effort to keep my schedules schedule-ey I’ve signed up for a competitive Mechwarrior Online team. Practice is four nights a week. I may well write more about my experiences here, but, for now, in the early days, let me just say that I am being reintroduced to the fact that playing games competitively is exceptionally technical. For a game about giant robots stomping around, the approach is almost unforgivably scientific with discussions on approach angles, in-game systems like ECM and sensor drone UAVs, and the relative merits of clusters of missiles versus lasers. Also? All my reflexes are wrong and I need new reflexes.

I don’t think I can buy those on Amazon, though.

So on Friday, at Eurofurence 20, Kyell Gold held a brief panel on writing furry fiction.

The hyper-short version is that he gave a brief talk on how stories start out, with a focus on four major elements: A strong setting in mind; a character in possession of a strong defining element, like a vocation or (for furries) species; a specific desire; and a specific obstacle against acquiring that desire.

Then he handed out pens and paper and got the audience to try writing for forty-five minutes, with the idea that those who ended up with something they liked could stand up and read it out loud and get some brief commentary from him regarding those four elements.

Feeling desperately in need of practice reading stuff out loud in front of a crowd, I wound up writing the following. Apparently I did okay, which is cheering!

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