It’s obligatory to do Seasonal-themed issues of a lit mag, and as much as I enjoy bucking trends, I also enjoy bucking the need to buck trends, because contrarianism knows no bounds.
This is one of our longer issues, as one of the four pieces is a radio script, and the other is almost 7,000 words. The other two come in at about 2,000 words, which is pretty standard for a piece of short fiction.
I like to call Solar System Blues my first novel. Certainly it was my first serious attempt at self-publishing, and my first serious review. Because of this, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted for the cover, and just kind of used the templates that CreateSpace and KDP offered.
That has changed.
Self-Publishing Review had this to say on it:
The world building is subtle and the author avoids too much information dumping on the whole. This book is a quick read and is only 140 pages. While the action and mystery come at the reader fast, after you get past the first few pages, it doesn’t feel overwhelming.
In honor of the new cover, I’m doing a Kindle Countdown Deal starting July 2. That means between July 2 and July 5, you can get the ebook for the low low price of $0.99, and between July 5 and July 9, for the low price of $1.99.
Honestly, what do you have to lose? Click here to buy.
My plan is to start one.
It will take some time, but I believe it will be worth it, and satisfying. I’ve hinted at this before.
I’ve taken inspiration from Dead Rabbit Books, and their podcast, and whom I’ve interacted with on their subreddit. It’s all very much in embryo but my partner at UJ has agreed to the idea.
The interesting thing is that this isn’t really new.
I started my micro-press, Future Tense Books, back in 1990 and I honestly had no idea what I was doing for the first few years. The dawn of the Internet, along with more printing options, has made it easier to run a small press since then.
Don’t let people tell you that small press publishing is a ghetto. Some of the authors I’ve worked with have gone on to major presses.
Art is never a ghetto.
Book Awards are becoming increasingly ridiculous, an extension of Twitter rhetorical battlefields with some side-talk about literature.
You should read it in full, as it nicely encapsulates the descent into madness that has resulted from the beachhead politics has made into fandom and entertainment. But this in particular amused me:
I’ve tried understanding American politics before, and it’s a bizarre mutation. Their conservatives are, like ours, highly religious, but they also champion freedom of speech, like our liberals, and they want a minarchist state, preferring to let market economies work. Their liberals are, like ours, pro-equality, but unlike ours they seem to disfavor freedom of speech and prefer heavier government structures. This is interesting, because this markets bit at least comes from the economist Hayek, who championed free markets at all cost. Hayek’s views were considered liberal in his day and would be considered a liberal pretty much anywhere else; it was Keynes who was the conservative.
This is like driving on the left side. They take something normal and do it the other way around.
Well played, sir.
Unnamed Journal has been kicking a long for a few years now, and I’m mighty glad of it. As a creative outlet, as a process of marketing and stamping your corner of the internet, it has been invaluable. Not only did draft chapters of Void and Last Tomorrow first appear on UJ, but it’s given me a platform to create The Meditations of Caius Caligulia, a project I never thought I’d actually get off the ground, and has caused me to slowly build up my own homebrew space opera universe, short story by short story.
And that past tense doesn’t mean it’s going anywhere. Far From it.
If anything, UJ, currently a quarterly literary journal, is going to be expanding into other realms: a podcast, possibly a larger publishing arm. These things are in the future, and the details have yet to be hashed out. But UJ has a acheived a stable output, and we can only build from here.
Is that a Hasty Generalization or a Sweeping one? I lack the data to tell. I also don’t care that it’s illogical.
It’s how I feel, therefore it’s true.
What am I talking about?
This.
Long story, short, an author allowed internet bullies who spoke for the “community” to shame her into not publishing her book. The book in question had yet to be published. Doesn’t matter. It has been seized on, it has been denounced, it has been made to un-exist.
This is how we live now.
But but but, don’t I realize how damaging such a book could be, because it reifies this or doesn’t show proper respect to that? Don’t I realize how this book is Hitler? FOR SHAME.
I don’t care.
I also don’t care if you have claimed, at some point in your life, to speak for a “Community”, and you don’t think that you’re an ass, and you’re offended and you hate me now.
Good.
I’m glad you’re offended.
I’m glad I wrote something that pissed you off.
Welcome to the party, pal.
Because the long slow march of shrieking cretins who have debased every part of our culture has been pissing me off for a while. I haven’t said much about it, because what’s the point? Anyone who genuinely thinks that a fantasy novel which has as a hook the enslavement of magic-users is a thought-crime deserving of rage, anyone who applauds the destruction of art for the sake of their politics, is beyond persuasion. As Joseph Mills put it, a mob has reasons that reason knows nothing of.
But the flip side of that is, it genuinely does not matter if you try to meet them halfway, or if you flip them the bird. It is not possible to avoid being offensive any longer. No matter what you do, you’re going to piss off someone.
So I’m going to.
“Community” is a word used by bullies to give their unexamined premises and tendentious conclusions the false authority of societal need. It is a word utterly ruined, which sickens my heart whenever banally uttered by a smug imbecile. It is verbal diarrhea.
It’s also a pretty funny if preciously self-aware sit-com from the last decade. I still like it, but I don’t watch it much anymore. It’s gone now, and Archer is funnier, anyway.
I speak these words as an aspiring author myself, and I speak them as one who just realized that, if The Sword gets published, I’m going to make people angry.
I can’t predict why, exactly. But I can predict I will.
Because this is the world we live in now.
So I promise this: if no agent or publishing house wants it, I’m going to set up a crowd-funded launch. If someone persuades Indiegogo or whatever site I use to shut me down, I’ll find another one. If I get nowhere that way, I’ll put together the scratch for as big a self-pub launch as I can manage. If the trolls go after me on Amazon, I’ll find another way. I’ll mimeograph the damn thing and pass copies around like samizdata (is that an inapt use of that word? I don’t care).
I will not be stopped.
Because you are evil, and you deserve to have the thing that offends you shoved in your face.
I hope I make you cry.
(Hat Tip to Larry Correia, who, if you think I’m obnoxious, is an order of magnitude rantier and more offensive.)
