The Nameless Horror

I remember the crazy early days of blogging. I know, I know - Grandpa Rickards remembering things! Ha! Yes, I know what you children are saying. Don’t know you’re born, with your Snapchats and your electronic-books and your Face Book. I used to blog every day. Twice, some days, if I was bored or drunk enough. And people used to read things on the internet back then. You had to make your own entertainment, see…

Seriously, it’s been a year since I’ve both remembered the blog exists and had a moment to type something. Must get better.

Part of the problem is I’ve been very busy with freelance editing work - I think I’m on four novels done (copyedits or critiques) so far this year, with I think a couple of dozen short stories thrown in for good measure. I tend to try to hide from words when I’m not working so typing blog posts for no one’s amusement but my own… no.

(Part of the problem is also: it gets harder to remember how each time since it’s such a peculiarly Byzantine system the site runs on. Smart Focused John set it up cleverly five years ago, but Modern Tired John only barely remembers how and there are numerous hoops through which to jump.)

Anyway. A lighter couple of weeks beckons and my god I need to look less like I’ve died. So, welcome to Stuff I’d Recommend From The Past 12 Months Or So! In no particular order:

• Wonderbook, 2018 edition (Jeff VanderMeer): I’m an unashamed fan of VanderMeer and I enjoy a good storycrafting book, so this was a no-brainer. It’s different, looking more at the ideas side of the process than all that structural stuff that’s in every other storycrafting book (though there’s some here). Big, bright, colorful, and a thumping brick of a thing to actually try to hold and read - great. Thoroughly recommended.
• Invisible Planets (Ken Liu, ed): A collection of 13 Chinese SF shorts. A couple didn’t quite hit the mark with me, but some are very good, and that’s the joy of collections like this; if one entry doesn’t float your boat, there’s always more.
• Three Moments Of An Explosion (China Miéville): Speaking of collections, there’s this. Again, some stronger than others, but some are very good indeed.
• Angels With Dirty Faces (Jonathan Wilson): There was a World Cup last year, and I ended up reading a bunch of history-of-football-related stuff, of which this, the footballing history of Argentina, was the pick of the pack. Fascinating, especially in the interweaving of the social and cultural context.
• Most Of The Early Discworld Books (Terry Pratchett): Teenage nostalgia kick, from Pyramids onwards (I think - #4, right?), but I’d forgotten just how good - and how short - they were.
• The Thing Itself (Adam Roberts): Weird meditation-on-divinity meandering SF(?)-a-thon. Good, though I think it was at its strongest in the opening stages, but whaaaaaat.
• Normal (Warren Ellis): Fun novella, a locked-room mystery about a psychologically-damaged cultural trend analyst exploding into bugs.
• The Victorian Underworld (Kellow Chesney): Research for a thing, but surprisingly interesting and engaging.
• Junkie Love (Joe Clifford): Joe’s a nice guy (in digital form, certainly), and you need that wry humor because holy shit what a hole to climb out of when he was younger.
• Annihilation: The film, that is. Not a slavish adaptation of the book (which is very introspective, and probably impossible to turn into a film), but a superb capturing of its spirit and themes. Beautiful, and also horrible.
• Return Of The Obra Dinn: It’s a game, and one that topped just about every decent ‘best of 2018’ list in December for good reason. Not only is it a brilliantly-crafted, and beautifully presented, whodunnwhat covering the individual fates of the 60-odd (mostly missing, some skeletonized) crew of an early 1800s merchant vessel, it also makes you feel like an absolute Holmes-level genius when, through what feels like your own mental efforts, you correctly identify a man purely from the type of cravat he wears. My only regret about playing it through is that I’ll now have to wait until I’ve forgotten who everyone was and what happened to them all before I can play it again.

There’s probably more (and there’s loads I wanted to read over the past year - even now, Max Booth III’s The Nightly Disease is staring at me from the shelf - but haven’t because I also read a lot less when I’m working more), but the RSI is creeping up on me and it’s getting late.

tl;dr: Not dead, just busy.

MS ANNABEL BAILEY

PROCEED WITH YOUR DUTIES AS INSTRUCTED BY THE MAGISTRATE’S OFFICE UNLESS ORDERED OTHERWISE. IN ADDITION, YOU ARE TO PERSONALLY REPORT ALL OF THE FOLLOWING IMMEDIATELY TO UNDER-SECRETARY BITTENCOURT AT THE GREEN GLASS TOWER, IN ABSOLUTE CONFIDENCE FROM THE MAGISTRATE’S OFFICE:

• DISCOVERY OF NODES OF POTENTIAL GREATER THAN Ø=0.02
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• OBSERVED OR CALCULATED INFORMATIK USE IN THE LOWER QUARTERS
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— MINISTER TIMO SCHILLER

In a bid to get myself writing more by publicly tracking progress, the ‘first 100’ series is/will be the first 100 or so words spat out whenever I’m working on my own material, whatever they are, unchecked and unedited.

I’m a big fan of Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, and thoroughly enjoyed the delightfully fungoid Finch, so my Christmas request last year was his newest - though not new; I’m behind the curve as always - Borne.

If you’ve read any of Vandermeer’s previous work you’ll know the running themes to expect: weird biological mystery, an uncertain world, traces of body horror and a fluid approach to identity all wrapped up in a gloriously steaming mass of freakish details.

In the case of Borne, all that and also bears.

The book is told as the personal recounting of Rachel, a scavenger in the ruins of a city ravaged by rogue biotech and the creations of the Company, who used it as a development base until one of their inventions (or conversions), the gargantuan bear Mord, turned on them and wrecked everything.

One day, climbing Mord’s fur (“gargantuan” isn’t an understatement) to look for salvage in the dust and rubble that clings to him, she finds a weird polyp/egg/seed and takes it back with her. That seed grows into the creature she calls Borne. And so things spiral from there in ways I won’t go into.

It’s fascinating, bizarre, unsettling - and in Borne himself, remarkably engaging. The backdrop - particularly the Balcony Cliffs - is never less than atmospheric and interesting, and remains tantalisingly unresolved in places. If I were to have any gripes, it’s that the Magician (a sort of secondary-ish antagonist) does less than I was expecting and isn’t quite the threat she’s built up to be - and her children are, but that’s very much small potatoes (and also possibly a factor of such a tight, individual POV). It’s a cracking book.

Also, bears.

In a cleared space amid the papers was a delicate cluster of glass tubes attached to a spray of flexible copper pipes like a fan of octopus tentacles that fed into a central valve like a mouth. Around it, separate for now, were parts Annabel recognised as a small pump, some kind of filter intended to hold a chemical catalyst, and a cooling coil fed by a copper vial no bigger than her thumb. Probabilities tumbled out of it uncalled-for, each shaped by combinations of its final form and the chemicals it might eventually contain within, and few of them looked good.

She turned her attention to the drafting papers while Jozef skimmed the letters beside her, occasionally muttering to himself in Polish. The papers held plans for devices like the one on the desk and more, larger, contraptions clearly military from their design. The title scrawled at the top was in a language she didn’t recognise.

“Do you know what ‘bosszúálló fegyver’ means?” she asked.

Jozef thought for a moment. “‘Revenge weapon,’ maybe. My Hungarian isn’t great; most of the words I know are what people shout at me when I’m threatening them with arrest.”

In a bid to get myself writing more by publicly tracking progress, the ‘first 100’ series is/will be the first 100 or so words spat out whenever I’m working on my own material, whatever they are, unchecked and unedited.

Publishing has always been an odd industry, even before the commercial and social pressures of the modern era, and following a tangentially-related conversation elsewhere I got to wondering about one possible future version of a publishing arrangement. Traditional publishing contracts are relatively loose in terms of what they offer the author with respect to getting the book in front of readers; the publisher is effectively employer, and while most contracts go into the percentages and remunerative side of things, the actual treatment of the book is left more open. Could a more restrictive format in which the publisher acted more as a service provider on a shorter timescale work?

Imagine getting a contract from a publisher that says:

• We’ll pay you such-and-such an advance and/or these percentages of royalties on these given formats.
• We’ll print and have the right to sell x paperback (or x hardback and y paperback), to be released within [this range of a few months].
• We can sell up to z in ebook or POD hardcopy form (whether small-scale POD or modern short-run commercial printing).
• Those rights being exclusive for a given territory/territories/language as per normal.
• We’ll offer promotional support (advertising, PR staff, giveaways, etc.) at release and for [this period] either side to an equivalent budget of no less than $pr at present costs. (This would definitely be the hardest part to quantify, but it’s not actually much different to a regular promotional plan; it’d just mean considering and constructing it at time of sealing the book deal rather than in the run-up to release. And, obviously, it makes the commitment to promote a given book a firm one.)
• Once those x, y and z books have been sold, or 3-5 years have elapsed (less for single hardcopy edition, more for hb/pb split; sales are almost always heavily concentrated in the first couple of months after release, so even a short period more than covers peak earning period), whichever happens first - effectively, once the promised service has been completed or run its course - the contract ends and all rights revert.
• All the current usual stuff about you delivering material of publishable quality (better defined; I’ve never seen any attempt to do so in a contract) to deadline if the deal is for two+ books, us providing editorial and design services, what you do and don’t have veto on.
• If we want to extend the contract, reprint or expand the run, or otherwise change things, a new/amended contract will have to be negotiated.

Would that be feasible? Would it be desirable?

The long wars over the relative benefits and validity of self-publishing versus traditional are more or less over (there are a few holdouts, of course, like soldiers abandoned on some remote island who never received the ceasefire order and refuse to abandon their foxholes even though all their gear is rotten and rusted).

The advantages commonly cited as offered by publishers are: hardcopy distribution, quality control/assurance, convenience (the ancillary services provided by publishers, from cover design to PR to editing, can be perfectly adequately carried out by freelancers, but if you self-publish that’s for you to arrange yourself), and cash up front.

Disadvantages commonly cited include: long lead times or other scheduling issues, uncertain (and sometimes bizarre) pricing, difficulty in ending a contract or reclaiming rights otherwise held in near-perpetuity, level of support (particularly in terms of promotion) varying from plans or promises.

A publisher can get your book into big chain stores (or any stores at all), mentioned in press or paraded at events, and they’ll pay you an advance for doing it. But your book won’t come out for a year (less for digital-only) and external factors (a bigger author delivers a new book and takes the slot, a distributor changes its ordering pattern, the sudden success of the next Gone Girl sees everyone scrambling to push anything even vaguely similar out faster than planned, etc.) can hugely change your due date without you having any input - and current contracted “published no later than” clauses normally have a lot of leeway, you might find yourself with an ebook being sold for $12 in a vain bid to protect hardback prices, a lack of concrete definitions of terms like “out of print” might mean that you can’t get the book back without a fight, and while they may have signed you talking about being the next big thing, six months down the line the success or failure of other projects might mean that your book is no longer something they want to put their energy into.

Generally speaking, as far as I’m aware (and certainly as far as I’ve experienced myself), a publishing contract goes into great detail about the financial arrangements between them and you (for mass market paperback sales (up to the first 10,000) - x%, for book club editions - y%, etc…), sets out the broad responsibilities of both parties (you’ll write everything, with x deadline, while they’ll edit, print and package the book; you’ll have technical veto on x and y and z (though you’ll almost never use it because of the functional power dynamic; you don’t bite the hand that feeds), and if you fail to provide a “publishable quality” work they can shitcan you), explains a little of rights reversion (usually after a number of years, if the book “goes out of print” - whatever that means, or sells less than a (tiny) number of ebook copies in a couple of consecutive quarters, maybe with a secondary definition like “if the book is ever dropped from our catalogue”), and spends little or no time on promises about how much weight they’re going to put behind the book in terms of all those non-cash things that publishers provide (sometimes they’ll stipulate a minimum print run, but that’s it).

This seems a little ass-backwards. I understand why it’s always been this way - given that even if the book you’ve bought is finished bar a light edit, in the twelve months before it comes out, even in the six months before you’re shopping it to distributors, a lot can change. The market suddenly decides that it wants psychological thrillers and that finely-crafted procedural novel just can’t justify as big a slice of your limited print and promo budget as you’d planned. Another similar novel to your Next Big Thing comes out a few months before from another publisher and despite pushing it strongly, it tanks; maybe there isn’t the market for yours that your publisher hoped and they cut their cloth accordingly. Publishers are businesses operating on tight margins in an industry whose economics and consistency are crazy, and they need some ability to hedge their bets. I like publishers and want them to thrive.

But still, the market generally buys what’s put firmly enough in front of it; people suffer decision paralysis when presented by thousands of unfiltered options and they’re normally happy for someone to winnow the field. The relative commercial risk encapsulated in all that hedging and loosely or wholly undefined terms and conditions in a standard contract generally fall more heavily on the author; delaying a release six months makes little difference to a publisher’s bottom line unless they’re a small publisher right on the ragged edge, but that’s a sudden six months without any income for the author. Likewise with punting a particular book down the priority ladder, dropping a format, etc.

I’d think in the modern era that a deal more clearly setting out the practicalities of what a publisher’s offering - not just the finances - would make a deal more attractive to an author considering their options. It might also allow them to compete with one another, or with self-pubbing, on specific terms other than how much cash they’ll put up. Publisher A might offer a higher royalty or a bigger advance, but Publisher B might be offering a bigger print run and a stronger PR package, not just promised in talks but locked into the contract. No different to employment contracts in most industries, in fact.

The last contract I signed was a few years ago with a new, modern publisher, and it was much better in terms of laying out everyone’s duties and responsibilities than ones I’d had before. (And while it didn’t work out, that at least meant I knew exactly when and how and why I could pull out.)

Would/could/should a shorter-term, more concrete and committed approach work in practice?