I realize you probably have nothing to do with this personally, but I feel like it’s worth saying, since the company’s actions reflect on you.
Having your company attempt to get writers to act as unpaid lobbyists against another company’s CEO is a crappy thing to do. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
So. My novel Dog Country’s done.
Or, more accurately, it’s as done as I feel like I can reasonably make it in the time available to me. In theory it’s the second draft, or at least that’s what I’ve got it numbered as, practically it’s kind of a third/fourth pass. At some level I would like to try and keep working on it until I feel like it is amazing and perfect? But if I do that, honestly, I am not going to get anything else done at all this year, which would suck. So, got it as good as I could get it by the end of July, and now it’s off hunting agents. Thankfully, for my ego’s sake, there’s been a little bit of positive response, but nothing like an offer of representation yet. (Yet.)
As it happens, there is a reason I picked the end of July, and that’s because I’ve started work on my next project, which I can’t say too much about yet, but you will hopefully be hearing plenty about it early next year. What I can say right now is that it’s pulpy fun goodness, and it involves the extinction of all life on this planet. (Fictionally. Not for realsies. I abandoned mad scientist school in favour of being a writer.)
So. This month, in addition to The New Thing, I’m going to be attending a bunch of conventions. Namely LonCon 3 and Eurofurence 20. At LonCon 3 you will find me in the Furry Fandom panel at Six PM on Saturday, in the Capital Suite, and I will also be wandering around the rest of the convention like a stunned lemming. Assuming the Excel Centre doesn’t mysteriously kill my phone, which it has been known to do, you will be able to contact me throughout via yelling at my twitter handle, @foozzzball. Ditto Eurofurence, although there you’ll probably find me attending most of Kyell Gold’s panels. (Kyell will be glad to point me out to you.)
Other interesting events in the past month include me hitting one million words written since I started taking daily wordcounts in 2009, the first issue of my mailing list google group thing going out ( https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/malcolm-cross-updates/oRQPskjGVoI for a little bit of release news not covered here ), my short story ‘Pavlov’s House’ appeared translated in the Polish magazine Fantastyka Wydanie Specjalne 03/14 as ‘Dom Pawłowa’, which feels all kinds of special, and, having seen Guardians of the Galaxy today, let me just say, wow, Rocket Raccoon is my spirit animal.
The world is an unhappy place at the best of times, but lately it feels worse than usual. Planes crashing or being shot down, civilians being wounded and left starving in the crossfire of half a dozen wars across the Middle East, the Ebola epidemic ripping through West Africa, take your pick. It’s almost impossible to list it all, and it feels overpowering. Like there’s nothing I can do.
I’m sure you’ve felt the same way at some point in your life. What can an individual do against wars and plagues? Not much, these problems are so far beyond the scale of us as individuals as to be impossible to confront.
As an individual, I’m almost powerless. I’m really worried about the Ebola outbreak in Africa, but I can barely afford to donate five dollars (pounds, actually — I’m in the UK — but it was dollars in a story I wrote) to one of the humanitarian aid organizations working to contain it without making a noticeable dent in my monthly expenses — and what’s five dollars going to achieve, anyway? Five dollars is five dollars, for some of us it’s a little, for some of us it’s a lot, but it doesn’t seem like five dollars can do all that much.
Thankfully, we’re not individuals. We’re fandoms and creative communities, we’re circles of friends and acquaintances. My five might not achieve much, and your five might not achieve much, but together, that makes ten, and that achieves a lot more than five. It all adds up.
I’m a big believer in the power behind crowdfunding and community activism, both of which have provided inspiration for my writing. I’m a member of the furry fandom — just one of a gazillion internet communities and fandoms — and I’ve seen the power fans and friends can have, from convention charity auctions and donation drives to personal friendships and just helping each other out on a bad day.
A lot of us are having a bad day right now. Plague is one of the few problems in the news right now that we can all agree is a bad thing, even if many of the others are political, but even in the midst of issues we can’t agree on, it’s easy to see that those unintentionally being hurt in conflict need aid. That’s why I chose to send my five bucks to Médicins Sans Frontiéres/Doctors Without Borders, who are currently active just about everywhere people are suffering right now, and who do their best to remain apolitical and impartial in dispensing humanitarian aid. There are a lot of other organizations working to provide humanitarian aid, of course, and I encourage you to find one you like to support, but otherwise I suggest Médicins Sans Frontiéres.
Please, add your five to my five and make it ten by donating to Médicins Sans Frontiéres/Doctors Without Borders. Go to http://www.msf.org/donate, follow the link to your nearest Médicins Sans Frontiéres office, and contribute to making the world a little better.
As a writer, my profession doesn’t allow me to directly help or heal, but I can say thank you for adding your five to mine and making it ten by giving you the gift of some of the stories I have to tell. I hope you enjoy them, I hope that if you’re a creative you consider reaching out to your fans in a similar way, and I hope that you encourage your friends and communities to add their five bucks to yours, and help you make a difference too.
Thanks for helping me to deal with a problem much bigger than I am.
– Malcolm Cross (30th July, 2014)
To donate to Médicins Sans Frontiéres/Doctors Without Borders, go to http://www.msf.org/donate and follow the link to your nearest Médicins Sans Frontiéres office.
To let me say thanks for your donation, and for adding your five to mine, please follow this link to get your thank-you copy of War Dog & Marginalized Populations.
So. Most of the previous month has been eaten up by edits on Dog Country, and I’m about twenty percent into the second second draft (it needed more than one second draft), but, annoyingly, I’ve spent a lot of that time planning out my edits rather than actually making them. Complete with a revision outline. Makes the progress feel very, very slow.
Regardless, though, whatever I wind up with for Dog Country at the end of July, I’m going to start making plans to either start marketing it or trunking it. I’m actually reasonably happy with the book, so, I’ll probably start on trying to convince an agent and/or publisher as to its merits. We’ll see how that goes.
In other exciting news, the print anthology Orbital Decay’s appearing in, The Journal of the Plague Year, is now out in the UK! I believe you can get ahold of it in the US from August 12th onwards. It’s bundled with two more works from the post apocalyptic world of the Afterblight Chronicles, a pair of nifty little novellas by C.B. Harvey and Adrian Tchaikovsky — a classic rags to riches to ultimate damnation style tale of apocalyptic mayhem in the outback, for Harvey’s Dead Kelly, and an interesting take on a near medieval siege between a militant gang made up of those who would strip the old world, against a commune of those trying to build for the future by reaching into the past, in Tchaikovsky’s Bloody Deluge. Totally worth picking up if you haven’t yet read Orbital Decay and were waiting for it to hit print, or if you like Orbital Decay and just want to see more!
(Links to paperback and kindle editions on Amazon via my author page here (UK) or here (USA) – also you can pick up it up electronically and DRM free direct from Rebellion Publishing.)
Finally, I am slowly, slowly experimenting with putting together a mailing list, mainly for the rare announcement of new material from me, but once every couple of months you’ll also get snippets from things I’m working on, bits and pieces out of my random scribbles file, details on whatever I’m working on, news about appearances, that kind of thing. You can join by sending an e-mail to malcolm-cross-updates+subscribe@googlegroups.com , and waiting for the system to send you a confirmation e-mail with a link to click on.
Okay. Time to begin the second second pass on Dog Country. … You read that right. The first second pass, which went fairly well, felt a little too light. So, I need a second second pass, this time with some handy feedback from friends. So that is lined up to eat up the majority of my June, but what happened in May?
A lot of planning and idea exploring, for personal projects, shared projects, and hopefully a contracted project. Also a day trip to Confuzzled! (Furry convention in Birmingham, AKA ‘CFz’.)
Confuzzled was good, met some people I haven’t seen in ages, attended a few panels, got to stare at a gazillion people in fursuits. Mainly, though, it’s made me look forward to attending LonCon 3 and Eurofurence in a few months!
I can also report that the 1920s are a crazy period of history, parasites are really creepy and if you do research on them you will lose your appetite for a day or two, Godzilla was a nifty movie, had a couple of little anniversaries to mark (one month on from Pavlov’s House being published was one of them!), Storium is a nifty RPG platform but eats up a little too much of my creative headspace, and finally that according to the dentist my teeth are pretty much okay.
Which is great, because I need to sink them into my next draft.