Author: StevenDBrewer

Author of speculative fiction and poetry in English and Esperanto. Teacher of scientific writing. Lover of natural history. (he/his)

I attended the 2022 Lambda Literary award ceremony. I had a lovely time and felt very welcome. I met a bunch of new people and reconnected with a few I’d met before. I was kind of surprised how little overlap there was with Flights of Foundry — I saw a handful of people I recognized, but fewer than I had expected.

The meeting was conducted online and used Airmeet as the platform but had a couple of things I hadn’t seen before. First, it led participants to fill out their profile. Only about 30% of participants did, but this was still significantly higher than at a bunch of online events where it seems everyone is functionally anonymous. Second, they were using an informal discussion tool where everyone was distributed across the screen and could double-click near them to open up a voice/video chat window with them and everyone else in the vicinity. Only a small percentage of the participants came to use the environment, but I thought it actually worked pretty well. I had nice discussions three or four times with people and would have been happy to spend more time meeting and chatting.

The actual awards ceremony was preceded by several hours of panel discussions. They were interesting and useful.

Queer New Worlds was about queer voices in speculative fiction. It was interesting to hear a variety of perspectives. I asked a question that seemed to puzzle the panelists: how to write to bridge queer and straight audiences? The answer that they seemed to like best was that you should write what you want and let the audience find it.

Banned Book List was a gallop through the books currently being banned for queer content. I asked how to get your book banned and got a very nice tongue-in-cheek answer that matched the cheekiness of my question.

LoveWins was about queer sex and erotica. It was a fun romp with lots of interesting discussion.

My take, as a newcomer to this community, is that many queer writers see their work as fundamentally disjunct from writing for straight audiences. It may, in part, due to the uniquely poisoned atmosphere in the public square today, which is being driven by the right-wing mania to torment people that their evangelical minority base hates and wants to see punished. My personal take, is that the majority of people in the country have already accepted the normalization of queer and trans content. I am hopeful that the right wing will find some other whipping boy soon and this particular phase will only last as long as the so-called “War on Christmas.” With their capture of the Supreme Court, they can certainly cause mischief, but I’m hopeful it won’t persist.

That said, I think it’s important that everyone stand up and make clear that they support our queer folk who just want to live without being threatened and harassed by right-wing assholes.

My own writing does try to bridge queer and straight audiences. I would like queer audiences to find characters that they can identify with, like the trans protagonist, Revin. Or his gay mentor Will. Or his bisexual mentors Grip and Curtains. At the same time, my goal for straight readers is that they discover they can also identify with Revin and perhaps even forget that he’s trans from time to time — only to “wake up” when events happen that throw his gender into relief, whether a casually gendered statement (e.g. “Boys like you are always hungry” or “Your penmanship is almost as good as a girl’s”) or in places where gender is enforced, like in a bath.

I participated in a… Well, I don’t really know what it was. It was called “Five College Publishing Day” and it offered panel discussions related to academic publishing. It was described as beginning with “a roundtable discussion with editors, agents, and authors who will share their perspectives on the rapidly changing world of publishing today, followed by four sessions on different areas of publishing and writing.”

Organized primarily by the UMass Office of Faculty Development with support from Amherst College Press and other members of the Five Colleges, it brought together a range of professionals from academic presses, but also a literary agency and a non-profit independent press.

I’ve had little connection to academic publishing. As an NTT faculty member, my rewards are disconnected from publishing so it’s not something I’ve pursued professionally. I did, at one point, explore trying to translate the books by Kalle Kniivila into English and contacted two academic presses to see if they would be interested, but both declined.

In the past year, I’ve started working with Water Dragon Publishing and spent a fair amount of time exploring the current publishing market. And I was somewhat surprised to discover how utterly disconnected from Academic Publishing that world is. They call it “trade publishing” and they seem to wrinkle up their noses when they say it.

It was pretty clear that, as a non-tenure-track faculty member, I was in the wrong place. People said things like:

Where do you find the time for this? That’s when the luxury of tenure really matters.

Pawan Dhingra — Amherst College Press

and

A second book is an immense amount of work. Your first is a bit easier because you’re really just revising your doctoral work.

Olufumi Vaughan — Amherst College Press

and

We invite you onto the marketing team as a VIP member — especially for your second book because that’s the book you want to write rather than what you need to write.

Maura Roessner — University of California Press

I asked a couple of questions, both of which seemed to leave the panelists flat-footed.

There is now burgeoning world of publishing opportunities: academic and trade publishing, but also the independent and small presses that exist on a spectrum down to self-publishing. How you make the calculus on how much time spend exploring this spectrum versus making a choice to situate your work?

This question left them bewildered. I got a range of replies that were utterly disconnected from my experience in publishing. One said “Figure our your authorial identity!” Another said, “Within one’s discipline, it’s pretty clear who your peers care about.” Another said, “Schedule time to explore the space. Find ‘comp titles’.”

The responses to my second question were even funnier.

There’s a lot of discussion right now about digital media offering broader kinds of genre publication (e.g. Kindle Unlimited, Project Vella, etc.): not just novels, but novellas, novelettes, and serial publication. How do you see the market moving?

Nobody actually touched the question. One panelist wrinkled up her nose, “Fiction? We mostly don’t do fiction, but don’t dismiss university presses that may be trying to build a home for trade because they’re trying to diversify their portfolios.”

So, it was a pretty weird event from my perspective as some looking in at academic publishing from the outside. But it helped me understand the role of the academic press. To get tenure, faculty (in some disciplines) need to publish books. And the books they need to publish are mostly not books that would be profitable in the trade publishing business. So universities and non-profits subsidize this publication.

Which is not to dismiss the scholarly significance of these publications. But as someone looking at publishing from the other side, it’s pretty wild.

I don’t know how else to say it: I love my writing. I love everything about it. The process, the results, and all of it.

I love the initial forays I make into a story, writing some of the candy bar scenes that motivate me to tell a story. And the opening scene. And I love plotting the rest of the story. I love when I write the ending. And when I fill in the rest in between.

I love editing the story. Reading it over and over again, finding gaps and inconsistencies in the story. Or discovering a small change that really heightens the drama. Or the clever turn of phrase that captures the humor of the moment. Or the subtle change in word choice or order that makes it read more smoothly.

I love just reading my own stories. I love them. I lurve them!

And when other people read them. And comment on them. And when they’re surprised. And when they see the thing I was trying to do.

And, of course, I really love to sell a story.

I really, really love that. And I love all of the parts of that too: Getting the initial acceptance. Seeing what the editor finds to suggest. Seeing the work actually come out in print. Adding another line to my CV.

I love it all.

But I really can’t say I write because I love it. It’s more like a compulsion.

I haven’t always loved writing. I was a terrible writer as an undergraduate. As a doctoral student, I improved a lot. But my fiction was still execrable. It’s only recently, in my late 50s, that I feel like I’m hitting what I’m aiming at.

I can see that a lot of writers really struggle with liking their own writing. And I’ve certainly known perfectionists who could never make their own work perfect enough to satisfy themselves. I may be just arrogant and overconfident, but I don’t have that problem.

I was chatting with my publisher, talking about organizing writing events, and I had an idea. I said, “Maybe I should do a twitch stream of me writing!” I was totally joking, imagining people watching me stare at a computer screen with a look of focused concentration. (Or, you know, look at Twitter.) But he said, “It might actually be fun to do something like this for everyone one afternoon. ‘Watch our Authors at Work.'”

I thought a little more and said, “Maybe we could make up a stream that has cameras watching the authors like Hollywood Squares with word counts visible while we do sprints.”

At first, I speculated that it might be complicated enough to do this that I should look for a student or someone to do it but, upon reflection, it proved to be relatively simple to set up. Maybe there are easier ways, but here’s how I did it:

First, it assumes the writing will be in a text file called “obs_sprint.txt” in your home directory. To write the file, I use atom.io with the autosave-onchange plugin turned on. But other editors would be possible.

To do the word counts, I wrote a bash script: “obswc.sh”

#! /bin/bash
while [ : ]
do
	echo Words: `cat ~/obs_sprint.txt | wc -w` | tee ~/obs_word_count.txt
	sleep 30
done

Every 30 seconds, this script outputs the word count to the shell (so you can see it) and saves it to a second text file called “obs_word_count.txt”. The script runs until you kill it with control-C. (Note, we could easily change the delay if 30 seconds isn’t frequent enough.)

Next, I configured OBS Studio to have a Text “source” reading from the word count text file. Then I made the text big (200pt) and placed it up a bit from the bottom (so it won’t be covered by the Zoom controls). Finally, I used “Start Virtual Camera” and selected the virtual camera in Zoom. (Note that in Zoom, the preview it shows you of yourself is flipped horizontally, but other people will see the correct view).

Now I can start the script, empty out the obs_sprint.txt text file, and start writing. Every 30 seconds, my word count will be updated on screen.

Now if we can just get John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig to go head-to-head!

Years ago, I read about the idea of guerrilla marketing: a low cost way to try to attract interest. The core was to post something mysterious, funny, or inexplicable that would get people to notice something and that you could use to tie to what you wanted people to buy.

With my new book For the Favor of a Lady coming out on March 25 (via Water Dragon Publishing) I thought perhaps I could attract some interest doing something other than just plugging the books.

I figured out one way to avoid just plugging by attaching my announcements to the story fragments I write for #vss365. Every day there is a new prompt and I usually write a one tweet story fragment. Periodically, I write a fragment that references characters and situations from my existing stories and, as a second tweet in the thread, I add a pitch for my stories. I don’t have metrics that indicate it “works”, but it makes me feel better than posting and reposting the same plug. But I wanted to try something new.

On the book covers, we’ve begun to develop some motifs. One is that each cover has a dirigible on it. And we’ve also added some framing around the edges. So I wondered if I could take some photographs that had framing like that and then photoshop in a dirigible.

I went through all my old pictures and found that I basically didn’t have any pictures that that kind of framing. So I gave up on the part.

I went to Flickr and found three pictures of dirigibles that were by themselves in the sky (easily photoshoppable) and were not restricted against remixing or commercial use. In some cases, I had to make some adjustments (erasing text on the dirigible). And then I inserted them into some pictures.

“Good Year Blimp” flickr photo by tequilamike https://flickr.com/photos/hyttinen/2273716687 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
“Goodyear Blimp” flickr photo by Phil_Parker https://flickr.com/photos/45131642@N00/6996190987 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
“German Zeppelin NT” flickr photo by Kecko https://flickr.com/photos/kecko/4080605473 shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

It worked about as well as I could have hoped. (OK — I could always hope that it would go viral and get millions of views). But a friend was only too happy to play tsukomi to my boke:

I couldn’t have asked for a better straight line.

I can keep doing it for a while to see if I can fish anybody else in.

A couple of months ago, I volunteered to read submissions (aka “slush”) for Water Dragon Publishing when I had some time. After picking his jaw up off the floor, the editor welcomed my offer and said he would send me some manuscripts when I was ready. With the beginning of spring break, I finally had time and was provided with 16 manuscripts to start with. It’s been a fascinating experience for me.

When my brother Philip Brewer attended Clarion, he mentioned that he’d been expecting that getting his own manuscripts critiqued was what would be the most useful thing. But it turned out that critiquing other manuscripts and seeing what other people made of them was actually more useful. Reflecting on the experience he wrote a blog post about how to critique a manuscript. In my case, I was writing something far short of a full critique, but I found these principles helpful to structure my thinking.

I’ve come to realize that most of what is published in science fiction falls into a rather narrow slice of what gets written. And so studying what’s been published is not particularly useful for learning. What gets submitted, however, is a much richer source of data for learning to recognize problems. It’s hard to look at my own writing and recognize problems with exposition or pacing. But the slush pile has a lot of manuscripts where these problems are manifest. It’s been really helpful for giving me a better sense for how to recognize and address these problems with my own writing.

I’ve finished a first slug of manuscripts and requested another set to look at before spring break is over. It’s not something I’m going to want to do forever, but it’s been a fascinating adventure. What I really should do is join a writing group. But I haven’t found one yet where I feel comfortable. I’ll keep looking.

When I attended Boskone several years ago, I had a brief interaction with Walter Jon Williams. He wrote many stories that I loved, but I particularly enjoyed a trilogy he wrote about a character named Drake Maijstral, Gentleman Thief. In these science-fiction stories, humans had been incorporated into a galactic empire and one of the customs was a role for people to be an “Allowed Burglar” provided their thievery was carried off with panache. They were written as a “comedy of manners” and undoubtedly are some of the inspiration for those elements in my own writing.

Anyway, when I thanked him for writing these wonderful stories that I had loved, he replied, “Oh, so you were the one who liked them!” He clarified that they had not been a commercial success so it was unlikely there would be any more. That’s sad, but at least I got to read those three. I should probably buy new copies and read them again — they were wonderful.

Another story you don’t hear people talk about much anymore is Space for Hire. This was a book by William F. Nolan who became famous for his book Logan’s Run. His earlier book was a pastiche of the noir detective novels with the main character, Sam Space, clearly modeled on Sam Spade of the Maltese Falcon. They were silly and lighthearted. And, as a teenager (or perhaps still pre-teen) I loved that book.

As I was going to write this blog post, I couldn’t quite remember the name of the book so had to google it and found this blog post by someone else who also identified it as a “forgotten book.”

Another story I remember from my teenaged years was a Heinlein novel. This story, in some ways, might better remain forgotten — except for the fact that it’s ideas are still jiggeting around inside my head.

One of the challenges about getting older is how much culture changes: all of the messages and ideas you’re exposed to in your youth influence you in complex ways as you grow up and become an adult.

This was brought home to me when I did my graduate study in science education. One of the key things I learned in my course of graduate work was a really simple idea but that had profound repercussions for everything I later did professionally. Many of our traditional educational practices are based on the false premises that students come in without advanced knowledge and that our teaching transmits the necessary knowledge to them. These fundamental ideas appears everywhere in our traditional thinking about instruction — for example, we might ask ourselves after a lesson, “Did they get it?” (Meaning, did I successfully transmit the concept?)

In my graduate work, I came to understand that learning is not the product of teaching: it is the product of the activity of the learner. Students are not empty vessels waiting to be filled up and you can’t transmit knowledge to them. Students already know a lot of stuff and, for students to learn, they need to consider what they already know and then replace and extend it through their own activity.

It’s one thing to know this and it’s quite another to expunge a lifetime of experience and metaphors and everything else. For many years, I would find myself saying something and only while I was saying it, realize that it was yet another transmissionist idea or metaphor that I had uncritically learned, but never seriously considered or questioned — or updated with my new found insights.

The book I’m talking about is The Day After Tomorrow. At least, that’s what it was called when I read it. I was unaware a lot of the history of the story until I looked at the Wikipedia article. The story idea actually came from Joseph Campbell who has been pilloried in the science fiction community over the past 10 years for his openly racist ideas.

In this story, published originally in 1941 (during World War II), the United States has been conquered by a “pan-asiatic” army and a tiny outpost of American military develops a super weapon that can discriminately kill people based on racial heritage. The whole book has a lot of racist thinking in it, of the kind most of us thought had died out, until Donald Trump made white supremacists think it was OK to crawl out of the sewers and cesspools they’d been hiding in for years.

The thing I remember best from the story was the use of infrasonic vibrations. They use low-frequency vibrations to disorient people. Of course sound has now been weaponised by the LRAD.

But who knows what else I remember from the story that is still in there waiting for me to bring it to mind to consider and expunge it? It’s a long-term problem. Fortunately, it’s a problem of fixed term.

When we first started talking about the cover of For the Favor of a Lady (Book Two of Revin’s Heart by Water Dragon Publishing) I said, thinking of the climactic last scene, “Well, it’s gotta be Ravensbelth with an airship overhead, right?” So we started with that. But when I looked at the proposed artwork, I realized it actually fits even better for the next book Storm Clouds Gather. So we set that one aside and started thinking again. Then I remembered a passage from the story:

Lady Momoire occupied a luxurious suite of rooms on a corner of the palace, with windows looking north and west, over the ocean. Revin imagined watching the sunset through the windows and then shook the image out of his head.

Seeing a cover come together for a story I wrote still doesn’t seem quite real. It’s such a magical experience to have other people becoming invested in my stories. Seeing the scenes I imagine coming to life through the eyes of other people is something I had not really thought about before I was published as an author.

The covers for Paper Angel Press are being done by Niki Lenhart and I could not be happier. As we have gone from a single story to a series, we’re starting to identify motifs: in the first, we viewed an airship through a porthole. This time, through a window. And there will likely be similar framing for the stories going forward. It’s as though we’re developing a pattern language for the covers that tie them together. As I’m writing the next stories, now I’m beginning to think of iconic scenes that would work well for cover imagery.

Who knew that writing could be so much fun!

The real challenge will be when we do the fix-up novel that collects the novelettes. I predict that’s going to be tough to choose.