secure this beckoning sunshine

Looks like IngramSpark's LightningSource might be a viable alternative to CreateSpace. It's through Ingram, which is one of the (if not the) major book distributors, so I get the distribution Lulu doesn't give me. Setting up a book looks more complicated and is definitely more expensive—$49/title setup (unless there's a print order of fifty or more copies in the first sixty days, in which case that $49 is refunded) and $12/title/year to distribute, I have to provide (which means buy) my own ISBN instead of relying on CreateSpace to get one for me, and I have to provide a JPEG of my completed ebook cover or a PDF of my completed print cover instead of being able to fiddle with CreateSpace's Cover Creator. But that may just be a price I'm willing to pay.

crossposted from conallpublications.com

I was tagged by annathepiper, whose Writing Process post is here. The idea is, a bunch of writers talk about their writing process and tag writers who haven't been tagged to talk yet, and the rest of y'all follow the links and discover new writers.

What Am I Working On?

Today is Bear In Chair Prompt Call day, so I am working on whatever people tell me to work on! Beyond that, I have a distressing number of works in progress. Black Velvet Band Medley wants to be the frontburner project at the moment, but it requires more research and outlining: this is the one in which War On Drugs prisoners slated for prison labor on the Luna colony end up on a transport to set up the Tau Ceti colony instead and our heroes pull a La Amistad, and it's the one (a one?) addressing colonialism and the prison-labor loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment.

How Does My Work Differ From Others Of Its Genre?

Speculative fiction—media in general, but I'm particularly concerned with speculative fiction—is distressingly male, distressingly white, really distressingly straight, and it goes without saying that it's very nearly all cisgender. My work is, for the most part, none of the above.

Why Do I Write What I Do?

It distresses me that I and so many other people can't see ourselves reflected in the media. More to the point, it's wrong that we can't see our media reflections. I have a bumper sticker on my car: "Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture." —Allen Ginsberg. And as Junot Diaz says, "You know how vampires have no reflections in the mirror? If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves." I am taking back a little of that control and I am making some damn mirrors.

How Does My Writing Process Work?

Mostly I wing it. With Leah Far-Sighted and sequels I'm trying the snowflake method of outlining, but it isn't going so well. "Start at the beginning, write until you reach the end, and then stop" works much better for me, but it's not really a method designed to result in an intricately plotted novel. The one novel-length project that I've successfully completed using that method is a Harry Potter fanfic, which (since I spent much of it having my characters chase Horcruxes) essentially had the outline laid out for me. I'm trying to get better at outlining before writing.


If you wanna be tagged, holler.

ETA: First tag: perfectworry!

crossposted from conallpublications.com

So apparently Jonathan Ross is presenting the Hugos.

seananmcguire is very upset. scalzi has no idea what's going on but nobody he reads is happy about this. So I looked up who the guy is.

He's openly misogynistic. He's openly heterosexist. He's openly ableist. He makes fat jokes. In a different category of what's wrong with this choice, he doesn't produce speculative fiction anything, which is distinctly odd for the person presenting the most prominent awards for speculative fiction. And while I'll grant that this last category of what's wrong with this choice isn't his fault, he's a white cis man, and there's a long history of the Hugo presenters being white cis men.

I've been following the SFWA debacles about representation and diversity and misogyny and so forth. Not closely following, but enough to get the gist. Picking Jonathan Ross to present the Hugos seems like one more car in speculative fiction's train to Irrelevantshitville.

I realize I am a minnow in a very large pond and nobody who could affect this decision is going to hear my voice, but: speaking as a speculative fiction writer, I want the fiction I love, both that I produce and that I consume, to reflect underrepresented populations, both those I'm part of and those I'm not. I want speculative fiction to produce delight and shock and I-never-thought-about-it-like-that in its consumers—all its consumers, who are not and should not be limited to a small demographic slice, if only because people outside that small demographic slice also have money. I want speculative fiction to be inclusive, not exclusive.

I don't want to be on a train to Irrelevantshitville. And the more the speculative fiction community tries to exclude people, the faster that train goes.

ETA: He's withdrawn. \o/


crossposted from conallpublications.com