I’m going to tell you a story about llamas. It will be like every other story you’ve ever heard about llamas: how they are covered in fine scales; how they eat their young if not raised properly; and how, at the end of their lives, they hurl themselves – lemming-like- over cliffs to drown in the surging sea. They are, at heart, sea creatures, birthed from the sea, married to it like the fishing people who make their livelihood there.

Every story you hear about llamas is the same. You see it in books: the poor doomed baby llama getting chomped up by its intemperate parent. On television: the massive tide of scaly llamas falling in a great, majestic herd into the sea below. In the movies: bad-ass llamas smoking cigars and painting their scales in jungle camouflage.

Because you’ve seen this story so many times, because you already know the nature and history of llamas, it sometimes shocks you, of course, to see a llama outside of these media spaces. The llamas you see don’t have scales. So you doubt what you see, and you joke with your friends about “those scaly llamas” and they laugh and say, “Yes, llamas sure are scaly!” and you forget your actual experience.

What you remember is the llama you saw who had mange, which sort of looked scaly, after a while, and that one llama who was sort of aggressive toward a baby llama, like maybe it was going to eat it. So you forget the llamas that don’t fit the narrative you saw in films, books, television – the ones you heard about in the stories – and you remember the ones that exhibited the behavior the stories talk about. Suddenly, all the llamas you remember fit the narrative you see and hear every day from those around you.  You make jokes about it with your friends. You feel like you’ve won something. You’re not crazy. You think just like everyone else.

And then there came a day when you started writing about your own llamas. Unsurprisingly, you didn’t choose to write about the soft, downy, non-cannibalistic ones you actually met, because you knew no one would find those “realistic.” You plucked out the llamas from the stories. You created cannibal llamas with a death wish, their scales matted in paint.

It’s easier to tell the same stories everyone else does. There’s no particular shame in it.

It’s just that it’s lazy, which is just about the worst possible thing a spec fic writer can be.

Oh, and it’s not true.

READ THE REST

When I finally hit on the idea, it was like a firework going off: sudden burst, then glorious comet tail of delirious excitement.

That’s when I know I’ve got something.

I started my second two years of college majoring in Broadcast Journalism. Ultimately, I had hazy dreams of being a war correspondent or National Geographic reporter. But the deeper I got into my journalism classes, the more apparent it was that journalism wasn’t selling the Truth. Journalism was about selling ads. This duplicity enraged me. Oh, sure, there are lots of media folks fighting the “let’s follow Lindsay Lohan around in rehab” jig, but the bread and butter of journalism today is about sensationalism. It’s about getting eyeballs onto web pages. It’s not about uncovering corruption and Saving the World.

What I always liked about advertising was that it wasn’t trying to tell you it was something else. Advertising is advertising. I’m here to make you desire something you don’t know about and most likely don’t actually need. But I’m not pretending that I’m out here saving the world. I want you to buy a product.

Advertising gives me a unique challenge: I have to find out why and how people hurt, and communicate to them in a way they understand and in spaces they frequent to let them know how my product solves their problem (even if we have to make up a problem).

I’m a big sucker for advertising in my everyday life. I notice it working on me all the time, particularly when it comes to food. I have to throw away ads and coupons that come in the mail for junk food (especially pizza). Everytime I visit gourmet gift websites to purchase something for my family and the ads for the gift baskets follow me around on other sites (gotta love those new ad tracking cookies), I have to delete all tracking cookies immediately. I watch ads in movie theaters and can actively feel the good ones working on me and connecting with me. One of the many reasons I don’t watch TV is because of the ads. I mute all Youtube ads. I use an ad blocker on websites whenever possible (stuff still gets through).

It’s a weird thing, to simultaneously know you’re being played while feeling all the emotions of being played. I can appreciate the artistry of an ad a lot more now, having worked on it from the other side. There are some tactics that always work, easy things like offers and discounts, and those are nice. But what I love is when somebody finds a way to tap into me, as their target audience for whatever product, in a way I haven’t been spoken to before. In a way that shocks and delights me. Great ads are cathartic. They speak to our experiences. They cleverly associate feel-good emotions with particular products, so you run off and buy McDonald’s every time you want to feel happiness.

The McDonald’s example also demonstrates the insidiousness of advertising. I remember the first time I realized what Disney had done to me. Maybe it was on my Honeymoon, when I took my spouse to Disneyworld for the first time and got him just as hooked on the experience as I was. My parents had taken me to Disneyworld for years. I must have been a dozen times now.

At Disneyworld, everything was taken care of. Your meals are pre-paid. Your tickets are pre-paid. Everyone is nice to you. Those are nice perks, yes, but what kept me coming back there – and what keeps me yearning for it now that I’m over thirty – is happy memories associated with early visits when I was a child. Disneyworld is geared toward children of a certain age, and if you’ve experienced it during that key time in your life, it’s hard to disassociate all those gloriously delightful emotions of safety, happiness, security, love and joy that you mapped onto it when you were an impressionable young child.

It’s insidious. And it works. I feel a visceral pull to go back there every year, though I have no children of my own and my spouse isn’t nearly as hooked as I am. I want to go. I have to go. Even knowing that it’s a marketing mega-machine that’s pushing me there.

Why do love advertising, then, when it’s used to fleece us out of thousands of dollars for shit we don’t need to buy a moment of happiness that is, at best, fleeting?

Advertising got people to smoke. It encourages people to overeat. It tells us we need things we don’t to be happy. To spend money we don’t have. To rack up debt. It encouraged us to buy cars, and disinvest and destroy our public transit systems. Nobody really bought a diamond engagement ring before the 1930s (“diamonds are forever” is an epic bit of marketing).

But advertising also got people to stop smoking. In my lifetime, smoking went from something folks did everywhere – in the office, in planes, in hospitals – to a furtive, dirty habit engaged in by rebellious teens and a few groups of folks forced to smoke outside during snowstorms. The way advertisers figured out how to stem this tide was fascinating. Everyone knew smoking was bad for them. But they still smoked. What changed was when the messaging became about telling people how bad smoking was for their children. How they were poisoning their children, and others, through secondhand smoke. I remember when my father started opening up the sliding glass door and smoking “outside” instead of inside. Others began to as well. And the tide was turning.

Advertising got people to wash their hands regularly. And vaccinate their children. Advertising is why we bathe regularly. It’s why we wear seatbelts.

Advertising changes people’s perception of the world. It’s not just about awareness – we can be aware of all sorts of things, like how smoking will kill us or working out regularly is a good idea – but about finding the ways to actually get people to change their behavior.

Changing perceptions, and then behavior (because I do think you need to do one before the other) is an incredible challenge. And when I’m faced with a particularly tough market (“This market never responds to our emails”/”This segment has limitations on offers we can make”) I get really stoked. I love these challenges. I like figuring out what messages work, and why, and then replicating them, evolving them, transforming them to increase responses and sell more widgets.

When I get good enough at this, I’d like to apply the science behind it to something beyond selling widgets, though. I’m fascinated that we have such vast resources for changing human behavior to sell things but we don’t seem to be able to create campaigns that stop people from, say, shooting each other or raping their friends and colleagues (though there has been some progress on this by – surprise! “don’t be that guy” ads targeted at men), or getting people to support universal healthcare or a nationwide public transit system.

The talent and ability is there. We’re just missing the money and backing behind it. There’s not a lot of money in an ad agency telling people *not* to buy a gun and shoot someone, or *not* to assault someone. But I can tell you right now that I’d be giddy as all get-out to work on a massive campaign in support of one of these, because based on everything I’ve learned from what I do day in and day out, crafting 400-600 projects a year and freelancing for several more clients, we can sell people just about anything. We can encourage people to be and do and support just about anything.

We just need to decide what our priorities are.

Hamburgers, or improving human lives?

Writing a book can be a lonely process, often done in a vacuum. You do the best you can, and you work intensely hard. I wrote the first line of God’s War: “Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert,” in 2004, after returning from South Africa. I wanted to write a novel about a bounty hunter, and I was still haunted by the sound of the muezzin outside my flat in Durban.

Thus began eight years of writing and research. It’s been a rollercoaster ride of agents and deals and haggling over contracts and stressing over sales numbers, and angsting over reviews, and one very, very drunk night with a bottle of whiskey while I live-streamed the Nebulas.

When I signed with Night Shade books and it hit the shelves here in the U.S., I hoped to sell 3-5,000 copies and maybe get on the Tiptree honor list or something nice like that. Night Shade is a small press, and that’s not a bad run, for them. I did not expect so many people to read it, or care about it, or care so passionately about it. I certainly didn’t expect the awards attention. But I was most delighted when this book got two offers from UK publishers. It’s a weird, dark little book, and I’d always thought it’d do better in the UK than in the U.S. Now we’ll see how that turns out.

I get asked a lot about what I think of the “controversy” surrounding the book. I read all of my reviews, and I used that feedback to adjust and strengthen and add more nuance to subsequent books in the series. Not writing from my death bed also helped the coherence and nuance of subsequent books, and I admit that though I am happy to see folks responding so well to God’s War, I still think Infidel and Rapture are the better books.

That said, what I think of these books isn’t really relevant once I release them. You do the best you can, you take the hits, you incorporate the feedback, and you use it to write better books. I hope that folks who find aspects of the first book problematic hang around for the sequels. I made some deliberate and not-so-deliberate choices, but there was a purpose for them, and a series arc I was working toward. I also made a lot of mistakes, which I own, and there will always be things I’d have done differently, but I wrote the book I had the skill to write at the time.

I look forward to seeing how the series does in the UK, though I’ve stopped reading reviews of the books, at least until I begin my next series set in that world (don’t hold your breath. I have another project I’m pitching first).

I learned a lot while writing these books, and though I know it’s lame to say it, I miss Nyx intensely. All the time. It’s why it’s been so gratifying to read most of my reviews, to find people who connected with her the way I did. I wrote a heroine I had never seen in fiction before (the closest is probably Monza from Abercombie’s Best Served Cold). I wrote an 80′s apocalypse hero who just. won’t. die. and lived and breathed and fucked and fought however it was she pleased, without guilt or apology. I wanted to create a character that de-romanticised the ruthless-assassin-on-resource-strapped world trope.

It’s heartening to see that she’s fascinated so many other folks the way she fascinated me. Now, I look forward to a whole new group of readers across the globe getting the opportunity to read about her and her disfunctional little team of rogues, too.

Thanks to everyone who has supported and continues to support these books. It means a lot, and gives me hope that there’s a future for this type of strange buggy fiction.

As somebody working in marketing, I live on data. We need to know what our target market wants, how they talk, where they go (so we can market to them there), when they click, why they click, when they call, why they call, etc. etc. There’s an astonishing amount of marketing data out there now that I churn through at work in order to craft better marketing messages – email analytics in particular will leave your head spinning. In fact, there’s so much data that sometimes the whole thing just looks like a lot of hocus-pocus (and some of it certainly is).

Much of this is, I expect, to do with data overload. We aren’t getting the right data, or we have the right data mixed in with the noisy, useless data – and it’s often difficult to tell the two apart.

Over the last month or two, I’ve noticed my social media feeds – in particular Twitter, but also Facebook – have become increasingly noisy. Twitter is wonderful for getting breaking news on a particular topic. The problem is that after that initial signal, it becomes a seething morass of noisy chatter that sounds a whole lot like a bunch of clueless people screaming on the internet (I include myself in this category, often).

In fact, the noise has become so intense and so distressing to me recently that I took extended breaks from the Internet during its two noisiest times, for me – the Steubenville rape case verdict and the Boston bombing.

The massive influx of hateful garbage – against “slutty drunk girls” and “those violent must-be-brown-people” was dizzying. Seeing such a churning hatebag of the absolute worst humanity had to throw at the internet was just too much for me. Even if I wasn’t following the people who said these sorts of things, they linked to these hateful people so they could rail against their statements. It was “listening” to rape apologists lament about these poor, poor boys who had ruined their lives and then “listening” to people have long, seemingly-serious conversations about whether or not the Boston bombers were “really” white and how that was somehow important, that I was really done.

I hated everything about humanity.

I had a lot of time at Blue Heaven to think about this, and what I was going to do about it. When I got home and read a few reviews of my work, one of which really got me down, I realized I needed to do something about that, too. Because God’s War is two years old now. I need to concentrate on my new project. I need to move on.

So this week I started to make some changes. I culled the people and organizations I was following on Twitter from 511 to 302. And I made a (for serious this time!) pact that I was going to stop reading reviews. It was important to read reviews of the GW series when it was ongoing; I felt that was a responsibility I had so I could work to fix things going forward that I’d gotten wrong. But the reviews haven’t said anything new in a long time (my favorite ones are still those that say GW is “incomprehensible” as if I’m writing in ancient sanskrit), and I think I’ve gotten out of them everything I’m going to get, for now.

I had already culled my Facebook feed some time ago by splitting it off into a personal page and an author page, but I resolved to go ahead and spend less time there as well.

The cost/benefit for social networks was just getting too high. I realized I could take a break from them for a couple weeks every two months, or simply reduce overall noise. Reducing the noise seemed to be the better option.

I was reminded of why I closed comments on my blog. I used to just delete hateful comments because, hey, hateful! Whatever. But the thing is that when you go through and delete hate mail, you still have to see it, if only for a few moments to realize it’s hate mail. The trouble with Twitter is that all the hateful garbage is packaged up into a single 140 character tweet, so it’s harder to ignore it, especially when your entire feed goes crazy about some national story, and the shark frenzy begins.

Some part of me will miss my manic Twitter life, but not the part of me that wants to finish this new book. I’m really proud of this new one, folks, and I’ve worked on various permutations of it for a long time. In talking with my agent about some plot things I wanted to do, I said there were things I just didn’t feel I was competent enough to pull off yet, but last week, I did those things, and I think I pulled them off, and it was so satisfying to realize I’d reached that place as a writer, that I could write a story about people destroying their dopplegangers and a character that swaps gender throughout a novel in a pretty convincing way.

This is the part of being a writer that I love. I love doing things I didn’t think I could do. But as long as I’m out in the world drowning in noise, I’m going to doubt myself, and it’s going to be harder to push past my comfort zone.

Hopefully, with a little less noise, I can write something that delivers a little more signal.

Being a writer often feels like a very lonely business. Everything you go through, it feels like you’re going through it alone, and that No One Ever in The History of The World has ever had your sales numbers, or your contract problems, or your fears and challenges. It turns out, of course, that no writer is a special snowflake. We’ve all been through various permutations of these challenges, and it was refreshing to get honest discussion related to business, craft and careers that you just can’t get anywhere else, outside of maybe a small group discussion at a con.

I was carrying so much anxiety with me before Blue Heaven that I actually chose to drive down, even knowing it was a 12 hour drive from Ohio to the east coast. I left right after work the Friday before the workshop, drove almost five hours to Lewisburg, West Virginia, spent the night at a Sarah-Conner-hiding-out-from-the-Terminator type motel, and then drove the last 5-6 hours on Saturday.

All that zen travel time gave me the opportunity to relax and destress and start to focus again on my current project.

I love the ocean and living on the coast more than anything, so sharing a house with a bunch of other writers that was right on the beach was pretty remarkable, for me. The fact that so many people lived on what is basically a sand bar was a little disconcerting, but it was a nice place to visit.

I wrote like a mad person last week, clunking through 4-5000 words a day, with a last big push on Thursday when I stayed up until 1am just so I could hit 9000 words for the day. Peer pressure is a grand thing. There’s something about sitting in a big room with writers who are generally all, you know, *writing* to jumpstart your own writing output.

We had a couple great days of weather, and I collected far too many shells off the beach. I also discovered the first day, when I tried to jog on the beach, that the sand on the shores of the east coast is not at all the same as that on the west coast – it’s less dense and hard packed, and made jogging a slog. So I had to go back up to the road and jog there instead. No great loss, but funny. Sometimes you have these grand images in your head about how things will go, but geology and geography have other ideas.

As with so many things in life.

One of the great learning lessons about my last year of experience in the publishing biz is that it really started to put things in perspective, for me. When I start to snark about covers, or copyediting, or even small contractual things, they all felt very small, almost frivolous. Sure, these things are still important to me, but compared to the shanking emotion of the possible bankruptcy of your publisher and complete loss of thousands in outstanding payments, well… a couple typos in a book just fail to inspire the same furious feeling.

Writing so much fiction in such a short time reminded me what I love so much about writing it: you get to create something from nothing. You take this scenes and images and people directly from your head, and you put them down on paper. You get to share them. It’s the closest thing we have to sharing our thoughts with others in a tangible way; something less impermanent or prone to distortion than speech, and hopefully more difficult to dismantle than a monument (after all, writing has multiple copies and formats. Monuments can be eliminated with a single  act of destruction).

I could spend the rest of my life at the beach, just writing.

I drove home on Saturday, sneaking quickly out of the house at 6:30 a.m. because I am a sorry emotional sap about goodbyes, and got home at 6:30 p.m. that night, to a house full of dogs and curry in the slow cooker, and a garden of lilacs and blooming red bud and magnolia trees.

It’s not a bad life, here. There’s hope. There’s good things.

If I learned nothing else from the kindness and humor of the other writers I spent time with last week, it’s that as long as you keep writing, you can get through just about anything.

Blue Heaven, for me, was trying to go forward by going back to the beginning, to what this nutty biz is all about.

The excellent company helped. Excellent company + liquor was even better.

Also, they have these crabs here. Enjoy some crabs.

THE DINNER

I don’t read a lot of literary fiction these days, but the idea behind this one – that you’re introduced to a character you have some sympathy to begin with who you slowly realize that, uh, maybe you shouldn’t… is really done exceptionally well. This unreliable narrator reminded me a lot of American Psycho (the violence here is not nearly as graphic as that, but it does exist). The conceit is this: a man finds out his son has committed a terrible crime, and the events of what happened, and why, are framed by a dinner the man and his family are having. If you’re a writer, I recommend this for the pure technical genius of it. This is also a rather short book, and the first I read entirely on my phone.

EMBEDDED

Have you played through the game Borderlands? Remember how fun it was, until you got to the rather deflating ending? That’s what Embedded is like. It’s not bad. It’s a fun little military SF book, and guess what! It has actual women in it! Who are actual characters! The mix of women characters makes up for the way a few others were handled. Still, no rape/attempted rape scenes, and no idiot women. That alone, to be dead honest, swayed me to recommend this to folks who enjoy military SF/fantasy but hate the misogyny that generally comes with it.  Would be interested to see what others thought of it.

AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

Most folks know Maureen McHugh is brilliant, but really, folks, she is brilliant, and she owns the short story form. These are tough, gritty, character driven stories that pull no punches, and show a tremendous range of characters and character voices. I was actually reading this collection about 20 miles outside of Lancaster, OH, which showed up as a setting in one of my favorite stories in the collection, and made me laugh and laugh, because who sets a science fiction story in Lancaster, OH? Wonderfully done, highly recommended.

And amid all the chatter, what gets me is how everybody goes on and on about how stupid writers must be to sign these things. And without weighing their options and personal situations and having all that information, I’d agree. The deal is seedy. It’s made to fuck writers in all sorts of interesting new ways. But guess what? So are a lot of boilerplate contracts sent to unagented authors from major and minor publishers all over the world. In fact, the SFWA just got a few fixed recently that have been in play for a bit now. That Hydra bullshit? That was from a major house, guys. One without a Writer Beware rep.

Fucking authors is not a new thing. Our job is to try and get fucked less (Or fucked better. Glass half full/half empty thing).

Night Shade fucked the shit out of a lot of people, and they did it with a smile and a wink and asked us to consider just how hard this was all for them, when they fucked us. They owe thousands and tens of thousands of dollars to our friends and colleagues, to writers and artists and editors and freelancers we hang with every year at cons and harass on Twitter and buy drinks at the bar.

But when a writer weighs their options and collects the information and negotiates this boilerplate into something palatable (because yes, writers have agents, and no, you are not obligated or expected to sign a fucking boilerplate contract – has anyone said that publicly yet?) and signs, that’s their decision. And there are a number of people who need $5,000 or $10,000 or $25,000 right now – not a promise of 50% of retail ebook sales over the next ten years. These are people with medical conditions, crappy living conditions, and debt piled high because Night Shade kept promising to pay them next week, next month, next year.

Then Night Shade fucked them.

Now they have to make a choice. It’s a shitty choice.  And there’s a whole lot of gambling involved.

I am reminded of Roger Zelazny dying in poverty.* I am reminded of how often we are fucked because we’re poor.

But I have the privilege of not being poor right now. So I haven’t made my decision yet. I’m still unimpressed by this boilerplate, obviously, for all the reasons pointed out publicly (and some not so publicly) and I’ve requested revisions, as any author considering this deal at all should be requesting. There will likely be many rounds of revisions. If it doesn’t improve, it’s no deal. But I have the privilege of doing that, because I have a decent paying day job. If I don’t get paid out, I have to scuttle some cons this year, and there will be messy legal battles. But I won’t suffer for it.

Deal/no deal means a lot more to some other people. To your friends. Your colleagues.

So if this goes through, I want you guys to think about them too, before you judge that choice.

But most of all, when the dust clears and whatever happens happens, I what you to remember EXACTLY who it was who fucked us. It was not Borders, or The Big 5, or even opportunists like Skyhorse and Start, who are doing what Big Media Businesses do.

It was Night Shade.

I want it said again, because we’ve all been so afraid to say it while holding our tongues in the hopes of getting paid, while our books were rushed to production and released with little to no editing or marketing support, and promised checks never came.

It was Night Shade.

The people who put us here. Who gave us this choice.

It was Night Shade.

Yeah, their contract terms were better. They promised more money. But money people promise and money in your fucking pocket are two entirely different things. People are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, saying what assholes Sky/Start are, in an absolutely un-ironic way. Does anyone remember what horrible business people J&J are? Because some of the stories you’ll hear will turn your shit white. They’re like that abusive ex who’d say they worshipped the ground you walked on one minute, and then be screaming and throwing plates the next, then tell you it’s OK baby I just love you so much! That’s why I get so emotional!

Publishers are in this to make a profit. They are a business. So let’s keep this all in perspective as we rush off to say Sky/Start are run by greasy media people who will fuck us. Don’t say that unless you’re pointing back at the slick salesmen at Night Shade who’ve been trying to fuck us, too.

We’re leery of Sky/Start because they aren’t “one of us.” They don’t go to cons with us on weekends. They don’t buy us drinks. We haven’t hung out in the bar together. They look and act a lot like the high school jocks with the rich parents who you hated in high school. But let’s put this in perspective, here. These folks are business people (with all the good and bad that implies). That means they actually want to run a profitable and successful business. But I get it. We’re SF/F people. We want folks who understand SF/F. We want to hear from them, directly, that they love and read our books, and that they plan to involve genre folks we “know” in the operations of the business. We need known quantities. And we need to know they’re not only not fucking us, but not fucking our friends, too. Changing the boilerplate and giving that “net receipts” a solid floor is something they should do for everyone. At the very least. I can’t speak for others, but I can tell you now that knowing they’d not only change that for a few people with lawyers but for everyone would go a long way toward demonstrating they have good intentions here.

Are Sky/Start the riders of the apocalypse? Let’s put it this way: Are they worse than J&J? It’s easy to put up with abuse from people you know. I think people are more anxious because these folks swooping in are unknown, so the few links we dig up about how some guy was a jerk or four years ago Sky was charging a $100 “rush reading fee” are all the information we have to go on, and people freak out.

But where are the Writer Beware link roundups for J&J? Nobody’s passing those around anymore.

We should have put out more Writer Beware stories about them. We should have talked publicly about the abuse, so all these new authors who recently signed and now have books tied up in escrow wouldn’t be in this position. I should have known before Night Shade came to me with a deal that things were rotten. Instead, I got an email immediatley upon announcing that I’d inked the deal saying “You know they aren’t paying people, right?” Everything authors knew about the rotten abuse at Night Shade was shared in private. With a few exceptions (Moon and Williams, most notably) no one was talking out loud about what was happening. The SFWA was accomodating and gracious and gave them chance after chance. We should have spoken up. All of us.

But we didn’t. Because these guys were “nice guys” we knew, not “big megacorp unknown entity.”

Well, guess what? The majority of people who abuse other people generally aren’t strangers. Most abuse comes from people you know.

So remember that. And remember whose lap this is all in.

This is Night Shade’s fucking mess, and it enrages me that once again, it’s us authors left to pick up the pieces, and make the best of being fucked every which way.

But don’t call us stupid. Don’t question our choices. Don’t think we’re not fully, painfully, agonizingly aware of how fucked this choice is and doing everything we can to cover our asses and make the best of it.

We totally fucking get it.

And we know exactly how we got here.

The real horror show here is for the Night Shade guys to walk. To try and salvage some scrap of their old business whether or not this deal goes through, and trundle along paying out back payments to writers in dribs and drabs while fucking over a new crop of desperate young writers who don’t know any better for another year or 18 months before their ceiling of debt collapses on them.

Last night, after some more emails with my agent(s), I opened up the manuscript for the new project I was working on. And you know what? For the first time in two years, when I opened up a piece of fiction — I wasn’t angry. It didn’t feel like it was shit. In fact, I could actually kind of finally see the shape of the book.

For two years, I have equated writing fiction with grinning and bearing it. Getting promised the moon and then fucked over. Waiting for breach of contract. Waiting for expected payments. Being made promises full of sand that trickled just as quickly through clenched fists.

I don’t yet know the fate of the Bel Dame Apocrypha, but I can tell you this – whatever happens, its future will no longer be with J&J (one way or another). And that, my friends, makes me full of the sort of grim optimism that ran Nyx through thirty years of bug-infested deserts.

It will get me through this.

Good luck to everyone else working hard to make their own decision. It’s a shitty choice for folks no matter what you choose, and I have great love and respect for all of you.

P.S. I’ve been asked by readers if they should keep buying my books from Night Shade. The answer is YES. If the deal goes through, I get paid that money. If it doesn’t, then those sales numbers will contribute to my sales record and help me find a new home with another project at a stronger publisher. Do please continue to support Night Shade’s authors. We love our readers and fans, and we wouldn’t have survived this without you.

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*Of all the angry hate mail I expected to receive for this post, hate mail from angry Zelazny fans was the least expected. I read about Zelazny dying in “relative poverty” in an introduction to a short story collection of his about a decade ago. However, either that source or my memory could be incorrect, as I’ve given away over 800 books in the last 5 years and can’t find the reference. So let’s amend this to, “I am reminded that most writers don’t die millionaires.” Which should only get me angry mail from the few hundred writers in the US who are actually millionaires. The moral of this story is not to say anything about Roger Zelazny in a post that will be read by more than 10 people.

I’ve lived with this for the last seven years. Most people get it when they’re kids, but it’s been known to occur when folks are in their early 20s and in a few outlying cases, when folks are in their 40s. It’s a pain in the ass, quite literally sometimes, but you learn to live with it. The alternative is dying, so you kinda have to deal. If you’d have told me I’d be testing my blood sugar 8 times a day and jabbing myself with a needle 4-5 times a day full of synthetic drugs in order to live by the time I was 26, I’d have laughed at you. But them’s the breaks.

But having an immune disorder has its challenges. Depression over the disease being one of them. It’s not like I’ll ever get better. Unlike being a type 2, it’s not like losing 50 lbs and living on vegetables is going to effectively cure me, either. It doesn’t go away. There’s no “fighting” it. There’s no cure.

That can get to you.

I was in the grocery store the other day, listening to this guy oversharing with the woman giving out free samples, and it became clear in just a few minutes of eavesdropping that he was a diabetic. Most likely a type 2, but the end result is effectively the same.

“I sat down and ate a whole key lime pie yesterday,” he said. “You know, sometimes the urge to eat is just so overwhelming. I just couldn’t help myself. I went to bed, and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital. I guess I’d gone into a coma because my blood sugar was so high. And they had to work hard to bring it back down. And the doctor had a come-to-Jesus conversation with me, and my wife was crying, and everyone was very upset. But I just had to eat this key lime pie.”

This is one of those “diabetics you always hear about.” The ones who drink to pass-out drunk without checking their blood sugar. The ones who don’t test their blood sugar because it’s inordinately expensive, or because they don’t understand the disease. Or, because… well, because being sick is depressing.

One of the results of being on medication like insulin is that sometimes you can take too much, and your blood sugar dips low, low, low, to levels you can’t even imagine. This triggers your body’s “I NEED TO EAT” response. You have not felt hunger until you have felt the hunger of a person with a blood sugar number of 35 (normal is 80-120). I am also a mostly-reformed binge eater, so I am sympathetic to this NEED TO EAT A WHOLE PIE.

But when you’re eating a whole pie without taking your medication, there’s a lot more going on there, and I’m sympathetic to that, too. You get tired sometimes. Sometimes you just want to eat a whole pie. Or drink more than three or four beers. Or eat a plate of cheese fries without consequences. You want to pretend you’re young and healthy and fearless and your choices have no immediate repercussions. I am like this about life a lot more these days. Some of this is just being in my 30′s, with responsibilities, as opposed to in my 20′s, when all I had were some student loans and a rent payment. It sucks to have to think things through. To muddle through possible consequences. To be an adult.

Because sometimes you really just want to eat the whole pie.

After that, it’s off into the big, bad world to find it a home.  Wish it luck!

Prologue

Because ruin came so often from the sky, no on one in Saiduan watched the sea as the invaders came in on the morning tide. The dread dealers drove before them a swarm of seething, mindless vegetal flesh – a massive black surge of death that slithered up the coastline like ravenous snakes of acidic kelp, devouring all it touched.

Everything on the world called Raisa began and ended with the sky. Armies fell and cities burned under the light of the ascendant satellites that blazed across the heavens, flaring brighter than Raisa’s triad of moons. Families devoured their dead to satisfy the blazing, erratic satellite called Sina, the soul-stealer. Generals sacrificed children under the green light of Tira. And when Para was ascendant the blasted mountain peaks from which it drew its name became a place of pilgrimage, drawing hundreds of thousands of Para’s worshippers from across the world to prostrate themselves beneath Para’s blue essence.

In the billowing blue folds of the sky, the cracked face of vegetal flesh the invaders had summoned moved and multiplied as if Para’s sister Tira, the life-bender, were the dominant body, instead of four years into its descent. Those who used Tira’s influence to unmake and remake the stuff of life were brought to the Saiduanese beaches to destroy the horror that the invaders had wrought before it reached the city.

But Tira’s weak conjurers failed, and were devoured.

The city called Araduan was next.

And for a time, the Saiduan forgot about the sky.

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Maralah secured Aaraduan’s inner and outer gates with shimmering skeins of air and soil summoned by a parajista. The parajista had far greater control of the air than she and her perpetually descendant star, and she seethed at her own impotence. She cursed the invaders for not coming ashore fifteen years earlier, when she was the most deadly power in Saiduan.

She marched into the hold to watch the burning of the archives. A half dozen sanisi assassins tossed ancient records of bamboo, human skin, carnivorous plant exoskeletons, finger bones, and the pounded carcasses of winged insects – most of them long since extinct – into the roaring hearth. On some other day, one not so mad, Maralah imagined the Patron of Saiduan himself sitting beside the hearth with one of the records, tracing the columns of text with his worn fingers as some sinajista conjured a flame for him to read by. But the Patron would never sit here again. The room itself would be eaten soon, and the sanisi along with it.

What records they could not save, they destroyed. Better than leaving it to the invaders, who would spill into the hold in an hour, maybe two, drawn to the archive room like dung beetles to fresh shit. How the invaders so intimately knew the layout of every hold on the Saiduan coast; how they were able to dismember their defenses with seething plant life that should not have existed while the heavenly body Tira was descendent, was still a mystery. All she could do was delay them in an effort to ensure the Patron and his broodguard outran the onslaught and found some safety further inland.

Like the other sanisi, Maralah dressed in a long black coat that touched the heels of her boots. She wore a knee-length padded tunic and long trousers. The hilt of her ensoulede blade stuck up through her coat. She kept two more blades at her hip. She was not beautiful, which was a blessing. Men and women alike had turned away from her face from the time she was small, with or without the veil Saiduan families wrapped their children in until they reached maturity. Those who did not see her did not anticipate her wrath. It had given her a great advantage. Now that she carried the ensouled blade of the sanisi, they had another reason to turn away. The blade marked her as one of Sina’s soul stealers. It still meant something, even in decline.