Why is Science Fiction So Popular With Pirates?

This morning, E-Bay very kindly sent me my regular daily update of the ebooks that I might care to purchase from their honest vendors.

http://books.shop.ebay.com/i.html?_trksid=m194&_sacat=377&_odkw=&_dmpt=US_Fiction_Books&_osacat=377&_nkw=ebooks&ssPageName=ADME:B:SS:US:1172

I post this link to make a point. I do not encourage anyone to actually bid on any of these items. I do encourage you all to click the Report button as and when you see an ebook or ebook-on-CD being offered that you know for a fact ought not to be on EBay.

There are Immortals, Jules Verne, Star Trek, Harry Potter, the usual Vampires, A Princess of Mars.... I won't advertise. Some of the classic, sci-fi collections are probably out of copyright, and may be legal. Some most definitely are not!

Who is selling this stuff? What motivates them? Who put them up to it? Why do they think they can get away with it?

Don't they know that they are breaking the law... several laws? Do they realize that if they sell stolen ebooks through EBay and PayPal, their real names and addresses are available to the FBI and anyone else who might care to prosecute them?

Are they reporting their illegal income to the IRS? If they are using the USPS to mail their bootlegged CDs across state lines, are they aware that they are compounding their crimes?

Who are these science fiction fans with an outrageous sense of their own invulnerability?

Apparently, a lot of them are young males! Surprise. A Publishers' Lunch report on a Verso study claims that

"questionable downloading, while affecting all age and gender brackets, is concentrated disproportionately among younger male readers. Among males aged 18-34, over 45 percent report engaging in such downloading activity within the past twelve months."

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6714772.html

I googled "males 18-34" and found http://crimespace.ning.com/forum/topics/ebook-piracy-facts
where a commentator offered this enlightening theory:

"My guess is most 18-34 agers don't read mysteries, but rather sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, anything that doesn't require a lot of intellect, anything that stimulates the imagination and provides rapid pace. All normal, of course."

My own reading of online commentary would tend to back up what Dan said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUCyvw4w_yk

and on a more refined level on CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/01/ebook.piracy/index.html#comment-27819047

It does seem to be largely young gentlemen who are eager to discuss the merits of stealing. Robin Hood lives in cyber space! He's redistributing intellectual property; disseminating knowledge. From what I've seen on a pirate-hosting site, a lot of these young men are especially interested in sharing carnal knowledge with one another. That, and text books, and science fiction... and vampire stories. Half of them must yearn to be Edward.

Now, I'm all in favor of as many people as possible reading science fiction. It may not be educational, exactly, but it is aspirational and inspiring. Scientists seem to follow where fiction has led. This is a good thing. However, fiction and non-fiction authors need tangible encouragement. The better they are paid, the more time they can spend on research and thought, and excellence in the quality of their content and in their writing. Right now, most of us are not very well paid.

"Net Neutrality" isn't going to help if "Net Neutrality" is Orwellian 1984-speak for leveling the playing field for pirates.... as if it's not already an uphill battle for authors and publishers!

EFF Files Comments on Net Neutrality | Electronic Frontier Foundation

"We know from bitter experience that dragnet copyright enforcement efforts often end up inflicting collateral damage on lawful activities," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Neutrality regulations should not excuse ISPs that discriminate against or block innocent content just because they claim it was done to protect copyrights or cater to law enforcement."

My problem with this is the definition of "lawful" and "innocent". Too many Internet users, especially "EBayers" don't know what "lawful" and "innocent" mean. They don't seem to grasp the first principle of what an ebook is, or what copyright notices in the fronts of books say or mean.

For those who have never noticed, here's a selection of front matter warnings from a variety of publishing houses:

St. Martin's Press copyright notices.  

"No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010."


Harlequin:
"All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying or recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises limited..."

Dorchester Publishing:
"All rights reserved. No part of this book in whole may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law."

Resplendence:

Warning: All rights reserved. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringe-ment without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

Total-e-Bound
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Total-E-Bound Publishing.

LooseId
All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

LL Publications/Logical-Lust Publications

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied, transmitted, or recorded by any means whatsoever, including printing, photocopying, file transfer, or any form of data storage, mechanical or electronic, without the express written consent of the publisher. In addition, no part of this publication may be lent, re-sold, hired, or otherwise circulated or distributed, in any form whatsoever, without the express written consent of the publisher.

Phaze
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.

Mundania
All rights reserved under the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.


Under The Moon... 
Excluding legitimate review sites and review publications, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

Copying, scanning, uploading, selling and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without permission from the publisher is illegal, punishable by law and will be prosecuted.
--

What all these publishers are saying is "You do not have the right to make a copy of this book!" and also "You do not have the right to 'share' or sell COPIES that you have made of this book."

Too many people think that if they scan a paperback or hardback novel, or cut and paste an ebook,  and put it on a CD they have somehow created something new and original that is theirs to do with as they please.

Well no. It's still the same copyrighted story that took a hardworking author months or even years to imagine, research, write, hone, polish and promote.

Taking a bunch of favorite novels, copying them all, putting them all onto a CD and calling them "My Private Collection Of My Own Favorite Sci-Fi Novels" does not make them "yours". The authors still own the copyright. You cannot burn ten or more copies of this "Private SF Collection" and sell them on EBay or iOffer or Facebook or Blogger or Wordpress or any other virtual bookstore.

Nor are you free (legally) to upload them to pirate sites. If you didn't write every word of it yourself, from your own imagination, then it is not yours.

An author has the right to make copies or to give written permission to someone else to make copies. An author has the right to perform her work. An author has the right to control the distribution of her work.

First Sale Doctrine confuses a lot of people. Basically, this is what it says. If you bought a hardback or a paperback (or a vinyl record, or a DVD etc) from a legitimate seller, you may sell it, or give it away. But, you cannot keep a copy. Once you give it away or sell it, you do not have it any more.

With an ebook, you cannot give it away or sell it because it is impossible to do that without creating a copy or six.

If some crook tells you they have "Re-Sell rights", do take a moment to think about that. Is it logical that 3,000 ebayers have all personally met with King, Knight, Kenyon, Grisham, Rowling, Roth, Harris et alia, and all have personally been given a signed contract from each of those authors?

If those authors are still living and making a living from their writing, is it logical that they would give every EBayer the right to resell their books and to pocket all the profits (apart from EBay's listing fees and PayPal's payment fees and the post office's postage fees if unlawfully copied CDs are being sent through the mail?)

No. It isn't.

Until every blank CD costs the same as it would cost to purchase a library of books (which isn't going to happen) authors aren't going to get paid for bootlegged and burned CDs.

So, do authors everywhere a favor. If you see an unbelievable bargain collection of authors' fiction for sale somewhere, click to "Report" it. Tell the author. Tell the publisher.

Thank you.

Thanks, too, to Pamela Fryer and Brenna Lyons for collecting some of these samples of publishers' copyright notices.

Rowena Cherry

PS for authors.
If you are on LinkedIn.com please join the White House group, and keep the discussion about e-book piracy alive.

http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=2199632&discuss\
ionID=12370276&commentID=10500759&report.success=8ULbKyXO6NDvmoK7o030UNOYGZKrvdh\
BhypZ_w8EpQrrQI-BBjkmxwkEOwBjLE28YyDIxcyEO7_TA_giuRN#commentID_10500759


PPS for everyone
Kid Rock rocks! See his "Steal Everything" video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpCADfZD-eg&feature=autofb

Other blogs on piracy (not all about alien romance fiction by any means):

http://www.RosesOfProse.blogspot.com

http://www.nicolepeeler.com/2010/01/on-piracy/

http://leslirichardson.blogspot.com/2010/01/publishing-pirate-prattle-and-pay.html

http://jimhines.livejournal.com/#asset-jimhines-486067

All the best,

Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

The Authors Guild - Last Call: Google Settlement Seminars by Phone

If Susan Kearney posts today, my apologies (admin!)

Author friends may be interested in this free opportunity

The Authors Guild - Last Call: Google Settlement Seminars by Phone

For those still seeking more information about the Google Book Settlement, we'll be hosting five phone-in seminars next week. These are open to all authors and agents. The seminars are free, except for your usual long-distance phone charges. We've expanded the capacity to accommodate many more people. We encourage you to forward this on to other authors and groups of authors.

Each seminar will provide a short, clear explanation of the settlement and will answer all questions from participants. Each seminar will last about an hour. The seminars will be conducted by Paul Aiken, Jan Constantine, and Anita Fore, the Guild's Executive Director, General Counsel, and Director of Legal Services.

Here are the dates and times, click on a link to sign up:

Monday, January 25, 2010 at 10:00 AM Eastern Std Time

Monday, January 25, 2010 at 3:00 PM Eastern Std Time

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:00 AM Eastern Std Time

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 3:00 PM Eastern Std Time

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 10:00 AM Eastern Std Time

When a seminar is full, it will be removed from the list of options on the online registration form.

--------------------------
Feel free to forward, post or tweet. Here's a short URL for linking: http://tiny.cc/Ehpvi


Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry

All Things to All Readers?

Jacqueline has mentioned that each reader of a book reads a different story. I’ve been rereading bits of Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND and started thinking about what most appeals to me in that novel. It’s Michael Valentine Smith’s analogy to Tarzan. Both are human orphans brought up by members of another species to think of themselves as members of that species, and each develops superhuman powers as a result of his unique childhood. The aspects of STRANGER I enjoy most are the expositions of Martian biology and psychology and Mike’s “raised by wolves” difficulties in adjusting to life as a Terran. There must be millions of other readers, however, for whom the center of the book rests in its satirical reflections on human society or in the “water brother” religion Mike creates (as evidenced by real-world cults based on it).

Suzy McKee Charnas has written that her postapocalyptic first novel, WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD, was inspired in part by THE PRISONER OF ZENDA. She based one of the central characters on the roguish villain of the two Zenda books, Rupert of Hentzau. I would never have guessed that connection from reading her novel. She and I apparently like widely different things about ZENDA. For me, Rupert exists to provide a foil for the hero, Rudolph Rassendyl, and the center of the Zenda duology is Rudolph’s self-sacrifice. Heinlein’s DOUBLE STAR, on the other hand, is an obvious rewrite of ZENDA, with the twist that in the classic novel the substitute, Rudolph, is superior to the weak king he replaces, while in DOUBLE STAR the narrator is the inferior—a thoughtless, self-centered young actor who grows into the role of the wise statesman whose role he assumes.

I recently read SWORD OF AVALON, Diana Paxson’s latest prequel to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s MISTS OF AVALON. I like it better than most of the prequels published so far because it focuses on an event directly related to the Arthurian mythos, the forging of Excalibur. The Atlantean prehistory and the reincarnation theme, which doubtless appeal to many readers, hold no interest for me. What I want from the series is more explicit Arthuriana. Yet another example of how different readers focus on different aspects of the same book. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon in reading Amazon.com reviews of S. M. Stirling’s “Dies the Fire” series. At least one reader finds Stirling’s emphasis on the rebuilding of society with a revival of paganism tedious. That reader would probably welcome more action and battle scenes, which I skim over to get back to what, for me, is the real story—the cultural and sociological stuff.

Likewise, Jacqueline’s Sime-Gen series initially fascinated me because of the quasi-vampiric elements. I’ve come across comments from other readers who hardly noticed that aspect of the books.

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Competing For A Mate

On twitter I found the following somewhat rhetorical question - or perhaps perennial complaint:

jeannevb Divorce lawyer on train talking nonstop on phone w client. Y can't ppl be civil/mature during divorce & remember they USED to luv ea other?

One possible explanation lies at the interface between love and business.

The dynamics of business competition for a market share leading to the resulting monetary profit have altogether too-spooky-much in common with the dynamics of a bid for a share of a partner's romantic attention and the resulting boost to self-esteem from being chosen and loved.

Having believed oneself to be chosen and loved - only to discover it is not so leaves one with less self esteem than before the romance.

Believing that one has received Love triggers an investment of giving Love, of giving the Self. This great out-pouring of the self can create an inner deficit, but in real Love that doesn't matter. Eventually, it all flows back in even greater abundance.

It's the same with a manufacturer who sells you a product, which you open and use, then return for a full refund. The manufacturer has invested more than just the price of the product, and thus has poured out more than can ever be recouped because a return means bad word-of-mouth rumors around the product.

Manufacturers figure returns into their list prices.

People don't figure returns in when they give their hearts to another only to have their S.O. choose a third person instead.

Divorce is as bitterly powerful whether you're legally married or living together. The investment is the same. The loss is felt as robbery, or worse a scam.

We read, write, and extol stories about the eternal triangle. Two women want the same man. Two men want the same women. Three men. Three women. Whatever the triangle, one will be chosen. The other not.

And sometimes, even after choice and full investment, decisions can be changed.

Mating seems to be a zero sum game (where if one wins, the other must therefore "lose.")

Many Alien Romance novels are actually about trying to change that situation of the zero-sum-game. I have to refer you to my interstellar, human/non-human love story novels, Molt Brother and City Of A Million Legends (both available as e-books on fictionwise.com - for free chapters see the middle of http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com ) as examples of "different" ways humans can arrange their family affairs.

There can be arrangements where 3 make a couple. If it works, who's to complain? We can always point to Biblical stories about really strange living arrangements.

As I pointed out on #scifichat (on twitter where I'm jlichtenberg) on Friday Jan 15th, 2010, fiction writing is actually, when you come right down to the essence of the process, merely editing reality.

We take a point of view, (a theme), narrow the angle (select a character), and present a picture of reality that is both actually real and totally not-real. But because it's not-real, it is actually more real than reality.

That is the conundrum created by "modeling" reality as a scientist builds a mathematical model of a system in order to predict the behavior of the real system. The simplification of the "model" allows the moving parts to become comprehensible. But the simplification makes the whole thing very not-real.

Any resemblance to reality is purely accidental, as the disclaimer goes.

I have repeatedly mentioned that the whole structure of the business of "being a writer" -- of being self-employed as a freelance writer in fiction or non-fiction -- has changed totally with the advent of the e-book, of Print on Demand, and perhaps most markedly, of digital video and YouTube.

These changes are more profound than the changes brought about by the invention of the microprocessor chip.

Our fiction consuming customers now spend most of what used to be "reading time" either watching TV, DVD movies, or online videos. For both instruction and entertainment, people now prefer a real "show don't tell" in the form of a video.

Online comics and novels told in picture-panels (both animated and not), as well as games like World of Warcraft and Second Life absorb the time that such creative and intellectually developed people would have spent reading printed books say, 50 years ago (or even maybe 30 years ago).

Meanwhile, the whole generation born to a world when radio drama was THE new-fangled thing has been dying off. Those folks were readers, too, and though they enjoyed an occasional theater movie, really never learned to program a VCR.

It's not just taste in entertainment sources that has changed. It's a turnover in generations that has brought to the peak purchasing years a generation raised on the internet.

The current set of 40 year olds raising their own kids barely remember a time when their home didn't have a computer, and only vaguely remember that computers weren't originally attached to the internet. Most of them remember the tweedle-tweet of dialup song.

Those folks, raised in an online environment learned "keyboarding" in school, and spent a good portion of their college years working on a screen instead of on paper. Today, they earn their livings staring at computer screens.

And these are the tiny slice of the world who would have become book readers.

Those who read as children don't read as many books today as their parents did when their parents were 40.

There used to be an estimated 10% of the population that read 3 or 4 novels a year. They were considered our customers, the audience writers had to write to, to "hit" to sell enough copies to get paid enough to buy groceries.

There still are young people becoming addicted to text-reading for pleasure, but the % of the total population that does that has been shrinking.

I haven't seen any really recent statistics on this, but judging from the way big publishers are twitching this way and that every time something changes in the e-book market, I suspect that the total percentage of people who read fiction for fun may actually have started increasing again -- but only on the e-book side.

There is a whole population of commuters, busy carpool drivers (who have to arrive early to get a good spot in front of the school, then sit for 20 minutes), take-the-kids-to-the-park parents, stop-at-the-doctor-on-the-way-home-and-wait errand runners, people in a hurry-up-and-wait lifestyle who are opting to spend their waiting intervals reading e-books.

Of course, they also play games on their cell phones, read twitter, scan the news, and text-text-text, not to mention gab-gab-gab.

But kicking back with a good book no longer requires carrying even a paperback stuffed in a pocket. And you don't have to depend on a doctor's waiting room to have a current magazine either. Read magazines on your cell, or on Kindle and other readers.

The price of paper books is going up and up (because in mass market, volume determines price), while the price of e-books and electronic copies of magazines seems to be going down and down because the e-book doesn't have to be mass market to turn a profit.

Big players like Barnes&Noble and Amazon are trying to capture and cage a segment of that e-reader marketplace.

Which brings me back to "competing for a mate."

The Romance plot resembles Marketing in a host of particulars.

Marketers are focused on "luring" you with "enticing" advertisements designed to attract your attention with the promise of pleasure or satisfaction.

Typically women (and men too) "package" themselves with clothing that makes a "political statement" or an "availability" statement about themselves. Or maybe a "prosperity" statement. Who hunts for a poor mate on purpose?

Marketers compete for your attention and your money.

The un-mated compete for attention -- and maybe a dinner date and more.

Now we have online dating services that leverage that competition for a potential mate -- as a business model.

Finding a mate is a business which, to be profitable, needs a good "business model" (a way to take raw input and create output that shows a profit).

Business is often viewed as "combat" -- often in the form of Chess or less elegantly in the form of Football. The language is the same as any action novel would use -- "beat the competition" = "beat the enemy."

Finding a mate is often viewed the same way. A woman may dress to "out-shine" her rival at a party, or very possibly to "vanquish that bitch once and for all." Competitive dressing is learned in High School. (Just watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer episodes!)

And finding a mate is all about "possession" as is business.

"He's MINE!" she snarls just as the businessman closing a deal on a hotel at a prestigious address might snarl, "That's my hotel now!"

Avariciousness, acquisitiveness, jealousy, revenge, protectiveness, all that and more are motives in business and in romance.

In love, the object is to marry, to cement a permanent relationship involving the giving and receiving of fertile material.

In business, the object is to "close the deal," to cement a reciprocal relationship involving the giving and receiving of money.

It's really the very same transaction, for very similar motives.

So a good writer should have no trouble understanding the world of publishing?

Nothing could be further from the truth.

No? You think you understand publishing both as a writer and a reader?

Let's look a bit deeper.

Here is a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. It was brought to my attention by Patric Michael, a writer and Roweena Cherry noted it on Facebook.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703414504575001271351446274.html

That article is titled THE DEATH OF THE SLUSHPILE.

It essentially says that publishers (and producers) simply will not and can not so much as flip through unsolicited manuscripts.

To sell your fiction to such markets, you must come to them through an agent (a matchmaker!) whom that particular editor trusts, or you don't even get glanced at, nevermind "attract attention."

In the world of arranged marriages, parents ponder long and hard before choosing a matchmaker. Furthermore, matchmakers are paid really big bucks because the matches they have arranged do NOT end in divorce but happiness and fertility (the HEA ending personified).

The article essentially says that publishers (and producers) have decided for business reasons that they can't afford the time and expertise that has to be devoted to reading slush (unsolicited manuscripts) and making matches.

They will look at manuscripts that come through agents. But agents can't afford to read slush either (just browse some Agents websites and see.) I know enough Agents that I understand their business model. It does not include leeway to make the investment of time and money necessary to sort through a slushpile.

So THERE WILL BE NO NEW WRITERS DISCOVERED OR PUBLISHED.

That's it. A decree made simply because of the profit motive.

Why has this happened?

As I've been noting from time to time, the entire world of the Fiction Delivery System is under major stress and is changing markedly.

Publishers were once (as recently as 35 years ago) in the business of delivering fiction (and non-fiction) to their specific markets. They chose books to publish not because of how many copies they could sell, but because the content of the book should be read, should be published, should be preserved for future generations. Readers could trust their favorite publisher's judgment on that.

That is no longer true.

With a change in the USA tax laws a couple decades ago, it became unprofitable to print a slew of copies (price per copy goes down as number of copies in the print-run goes up) and warehouse the copies until the little trickle of sales for that title ended, then "remainder" the rest. That's a business model. It was changed by Congress, the elected folks who rarely have any business experience, are not known to be avid fiction readers, and who made a law that treats printed books the same as say, boxes of roof nails.

"Remaindered" means the book goes out of print, and the publisher can continue to sell copies but not pay the writer a royalty. Roof nails don't "go out of print" and then not-pay the nail-designer.

That tax law still taxes inventory kept in a warehouse. E-books don't have an inventory in a warehouse. Neither do POD books.

This tax law drove many publishers out of business and started the cascading collapsed the entire book distribution system in the USA, a collapse which is continuing today.

As a result, bigger more predatory businesses with a different business model bought up publishing and distribution. Most of the USA publishing houses now have been bought by non-USA based publishers.

Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt is one of the biggest publishers, and the company that owns Houghton Mifflin recently filed for "restructuring" (which means they just don't pay their debts -- it's one step above bankruptcy).

Here's the story from Reuters.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1418697020100114?type=swissMktRpt

And it's the same story we've been hearing with banks and other businesses going bankrupt during this recession -- too much debt, too much risk.

The new publishing system is in the business of making a profit, not of delivering fiction. And it has failed to make a profit.

The new distribution system, automated though it is now with robots and computers, still can't get enough of a "margin" to thrive, and distributors are still folding or being bought, or raising prices to where publishers can't afford to publish.

The smaller publishers went first, and now the biggest are failing. Meanwhile newspapers and magazines likewise have fired writers and reduced payroll.

Why can't they move this printed paper through the system at a profit?

Because the MARKET has changed.

Those willing to pay to read text on paper are dying off. Of the tiny fraction of all humanity that has ever been willing to read text for entertainment, the newest additions to the ranks actually prefer electronic copy. But the ranks of new readers are not growing as fast as the elders are dying off. Younger people prefer other forms of entertainment.

Marketers tried to turn publishing into a profitable business. They failed.

Perhaps they failed because they chose books to publish for profit, not because the content "ought" to be preserved for humanity?

Maybe not. Publishing was never, ever, run for a profit. Just ask the Monks in the Middle Ages who spent a lifetime copying books. They were supported by donations to The Church and didn't make a profit on their books. (and they didn't do a lot of fiction, either)

Meanwhile, today, self-publishing and e-books carefully chosen by small publishers for well defined markets are thriving.

There's a question I seldom heard anyone ask. "Are e-books competing for the attention of the same readers who read print books?"

I don't think so. People who want an e-book won't buy a print book. People who want a print book simply will not buy an e-book. There's a bit of a venn diagram style overlap in the two populations, but it's a tiny slice who are "in transition" -- and who tend to drop paper buying once they get "the right" reader device, one they really like.

Many traditional publishers are trying to distribute their titles as e-books either simultaneously or after the print edition. They see e-books as an alternate distribution channel, another way to make a profit with titles carefully chosen for profit potential (and no other attribute).

Unfortunately, the proliferation of e-books and self-published books (not the same thing; "e-book" publishers do edit and select for profit potential) created something of a different problem. A self-published book may not go through the "select" process, but the author usually dreams of a profit.

There is just so much stuff being published (and produced) that "should not be published" that there is no economic way for anyone to find, amidst the torrent, the one or two items that humanity really, REALLY needs preserved.

The noise has swamped the signal.

And the gatekeepers have given up and welded the gate shut, as you see from the article sited above.

This is not the first time this gate-shutting has happened. And I don't think it will last.

But for the moment, no new writers are being admitted except via agents (who are not set up to read slush). And agents can only deal with items that actually will make a big profit -- and already appear enticing to marketers.

Sunday, January 17, 2010, I found an article that puts another perspective on all this.

Listen up, worldbuilders, because this is how world building is done.
Observe reality, edit reality, create a new world.

While text-based fiction on paper is declining, and/or shifting to e-delivery, a portion of those who would have become text readers are shunning text for movies and TV. But text-consumers have never been a significant market. That's why films make so much money. Text-readers will go to films, but film-buffs won't read a book (unless it's a spinoff).

It's all economics and business model.

"I'll make you a star!" was the cry that went up in the 1930's -- not from publishing but from Hollywood.

Hollywood became the world's iconic source of video entertainment.

But the USA is a tiny market compared to the world. So by the 1970's, no Hollywood studio could make a profit without a strong after-market in other countries. By the 1980's or so, Hollywood products also needed a strong VHS sell-through, and now DVD, Blu-ray, download and streaming video.

Alien Romance readers all know how Manga and other Japanese products have swept into the USA. The Japanese have specialized in telling tender people-stories in video done very cheaply -- so it's very profitable. British TV and film has always been popular here, but not with every demographic, and it takes "every demographic" to make a profit on an expensive product.

The market in the USA for foreign films has always been small. But with the success of Canadian TV imports (now made unprofitable by a USA tax law so we don't get made-in-Canada TV shows like Forever Knight and Highlander anymore), the USA has shown itself open to other country's fiction products.

Meanwhile, Hollywood, once the unquestioned source of all films worldwide, met up with the "Spaghetti Western" made in Italy, then higher quality items emmanating from less likely markets. The world learned a lesson. Hollywood's products could be out-competed for the necessary "mate".

In the last 20 years, the technical production of Hollywood films has moved "offshore" -- to Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and less likely places. New Zealand did the LORD OF THE RINGS and other extravaganzas. The biggest driving force behind that move was the artificial increase in the value of the US dollar - held too high too long, contributing to the worldwide recession we're in now.

It's all taxes and politics, competition and compromise. (The SFR question is, "Does it have to be?")

As I said above, you'd think knowing how to plot a Romance would teach you how to run a business.

But if you have missed the connection between the politics behind the value of the US Dollar, the choice of Federal Reserve governors and Chairmen and the choice of which scripts or screenwriters to buy and make into expensive films, you have no clue what business is all about and are seriously impaired when it comes to worldbuilding.

So, back to Hollywood. The US film industry began losing market share in markets much bigger than the USA. Recently, "Bollywood" has become the primary supplier of motion picture entertainment in India, unseating the US films.

The icon status of Hollywood is confirmed by the nickname "Bollywood" -- a name which isn't Indian at all.

Hollywood, this great, iconic engine of entertainment which iconicised American Culture many places in this world, saw their market share trickling away.

The value of the US dollar tanked, big time and that has a huge effect on profits of international companies. There's talk of abandoning the US dollar as the "Reserve Currency" and the denomination for pricing oil.

Panic set in. Dominance and ownership is threatened.

This is a feeling just exactly like the feeling the losing member of a love-triangle feels. "Oh, no!"

And the response of Hollywood was very much the same as a spurned lover.

Gradually, over the last 20 years as Bollywood became the preferred source of motion picture entertainment in India, Hollywood has strained to capture the attention, to preen, strutt and entice that international market.

Why? Because even with offshoring production costs (when the US dollar was strong, it became ultra-cheap to do extravagant productions in Australia or Canada), Hollywood was dancing on a razor thin margin as dangerous as that now totally lost by paper publishing. With the reversal in the value of the dollar, the whole business model of Hollywood had to change - fast!

The world was out-competing the USA in entertainment-production for the first time in history.

So what did Hollywood do?

A long time ago, Hollywood began selecting and creating scripts entirely and totally for the story's ability to be understood WITHOUT DIALOGUE.

Subtitles are awkward and translations and dubbing only "work" across narrow cultural gulfs.

The biggest audiences flock to films they don't have to understand, just to be wowwed by intense and impossible visuals.

Hollywood went for the ACTION FILM that needs no translation (i.e. primal as I've mentioned so often in connection with Blake Snyder's SAVE THE CAT! series).

Hollywood has been practicing and in this latest crisis environment, has perfected the ability to choose this type of film script. The biggest big bucks have to go to the projects that can sell well in all worldwide markets.

And since that's what Hollywood was investing the big bucks in, that's ALL USA audiences were ever allowed access to, which has cultivated a taste for that type of film in the USA too.

The scripts have become subordinated to the actual people-stories to avoid cultural gaffs, and bewilderment.

We've all wondered why that is. We've seen it on TV -- scripts with holes you can drive a truck through win awards.

Why? Because they're exportable. They were never done for the USA audience to begin with, and nobody really cares what we like because we're a minority in the world audience.

Anything not exportable to the broader market just doesn't get made -- or if it does, it gets mangled in order to simplify it and make room for more self-explanatory (a cave man could understand it) visuals, chase scenes, fight scenes, battle scenes, sex scenes.

So Hollywood, the great icon of the USA's industrialization years, went to war with all rivals to win the "mate" of India's movie-going population.

IN 2009, Hollywood finally began to win. The film AVATAR is a perfect example.

Here's an article in TIME magazine on Hollywood vs. Bollywood in 2009/2010.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100117/wl_time/08599195281500

And this article says:
"Hollywood films, which only cashed in on 1% of the total Indian market 10 years ago, now skim 7% of that growing market."

As a result of that win, however narrow, you can expect the product coming out of the big production companies in Hollywood to become more and more suited to the non-USA marketplace, i.e. Bollywood's market, or China's market.

With the US dollar becoming cheaper, an imported Rupee buys Hollywood more Dollars. That makes it more imperative to please India's movie-goers than it does to please USA movie-goers.

It's the same in publishing, especially in e-book. Fiction writers' mating habits must change to woo the international market's fiction consumer.

Your reader/viewer is the mate you as a writer are seeking and the clergy who will marry you is your publisher, the Agent is the matchmaker. Other writers are your competitors.

That's how it is in 2010. How will it be in 2025?

Can publishing and producing (via small publishers, e-book publishers, small producers, the indie producers) once again afford to disseminate fiction because it "ought" to be cherished and passed on to posterity?

Or are we forever trapped in a for-profit-or-die scenario?

Can you see a similarity between that question and the question, "Can lovers afford to get married for love alone? Or are they forever trapped in a for-sex-or-die scenario?" Or maybe, "...in a marry a rich spouse" scenario?

Sex and money are the obvious profit. But love is the real point of romance, just as "ought to be preserved for posterity" is the real point of publishing.

Or not?

Build your own world. Then write in it.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Microsatellites, mass extinctions, and .... mammoth-punk?

I don't really know about "mammoth-punk"; I went with alliteration.

Science fiction and science fiction romance embraces "steam punk" and "cyber punk". What would (or do) we call alternate history dating back 800 years, or 35,000 years or even 75,000 years?

Suppose for a moment that the theoretical Toba catastrophe never happened. This theory suggests that a massive volcanic eruption on Sumatra covered the Indian subcontinent in 16 centimeters of more of ash, compounded an ice age and reduced mankind to perhaps as few as 1,000 "breeding pairs" thus creating a "bottleneck" in human evolution.

By the way, this theory seems to be at odds with Spencer Wells's study of Y chromosomes in Central Asia (see article published in the December 2004 issue of Discover magazine) which latter appears to suggest that the first humans moved out of Africa about 50,000 years ago.

Suppose for another moment that Genghis Khan (800 years ago) and described by Discover contributor Robert Kunzig as "a prodigious fornicator" was impotent.

How might our world be different?

Apparently, Genghis Khan's breeding territory cut a broad swathe across Asia, from Iran to the sea of Japan, and he had a woman in every port (and village along the way) and 500 wives. Allegedly, there is a microsatellite ("a short, repetitious sequence of DNA in which the number of repetitions can change from one generation to the next") that appears to suggest that Genghis Khan's male descendants are all across his former empire.

Robert Kunzig's "The Hidden History Of Men" (about Wells's "Human Genome Diversity Project") is a fascinating article, illustrated with three excellent maps. I love maps for world-building and inspiration! One map shows Genghis Khan's stomping ground. Another shows where Spencer Wells and his team took blood samples from men. The best map of all looks like a tattoo on some guy's back and shows little flags with genetic markers, tracing mankind's migrations after leaving Africa.

This map on Wikipedia shows a mitochondrial-related migration map. Mitochondrial mapping relies on female chromosomes.

Scientists seem to agree that all of us originated in Africa. I'd like to think that some of us didn't, that some of us originated on another planet or were seeded here by an interstellar Genghis Khan. But why Africa? Why not South America, or Australia, or India, or France?

I asked Google "Why did mankind originate in Africa?" and found plenty of  How-and-why-we-now-know-that-we-did..." but if someone knows the Why of it, it's not at the top of the search results.

Was it because the Sahara back then (before life left the sea) was the perfect warm, shallow, primaeval soup?


Freshwater lakes.

There is a theory about why some people left Africa. Mega-Drought. Climate change!   http://geology.com/news/2007/lake-malawi-coring-may-rewrite-out-of-africa.shtml Paradoxically, there's also a theory that the Sahara desert will once again become lush and fertile as a result of global warming. Geology.com is an absolute treasure trove of links, for those fascinated by our planet.

All the best,
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

In the Dollhouse

Have you been watching Joss Whedon’s TV series DOLLHOUSE, now in its final episodes? The Dollhouse is a secret facility where “dolls,” people who have bound themselves into a kind of indentured servitude for five years, have their memories erased and receive “imprints” of artificially created personalities at the request of wealthy clients. At the end of an assignment, an employee’s imprinted personality is wiped, and he or she returns to the Dollhouse in a sort of neutral mode until the next assignment. The speed and ease of erasing personae and implanting new ones make the process look more like magic than science, but it does raise some classic SF questions.

When a doll (or “active”) receives an imprint, the false memories feel as authentic as real-life ones, and he or she experiences the new personality as completely genuine. In effect, the procedure creates temporary manifestations of serial multiple personalities. Are these personae “real people”? When one is erased, is someone being murdered? The protagonist, Echo (played by Faith from BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER), eventually develops a new self with access to all her old imprints, even though dolls are supposed to be essentially blanks. If her original personality were implanted (as is standard at the end of the five-year contract), would that constitute killing Echo? One character, not a doll, recently suffered severe brain damage, which was repaired by having his own personality (fortunately on file) re-imprinted. Is he still the same person?

I’m reminded of the familiar SF trope of achieving immortality by uploading one’s mind into a computer. Is a computer program that duplicates an individual’s mind in every detail really the same person—or merely a copy in the same sense that a Xerox of a document isn’t the original? Also, Dr. McCoy’s misgivings about the transporter in STAR TREK—if the transporter transmits only information, not matter, and creates a duplicate of the traveler at the other end, is the original traveler still in existence? Or has he been destroyed and replaced by an exact copy? And does that question have any practical meaning?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt

Worldbuilding For Science Fiction Romance

As I've pointed out in many posts on this blog, the sift-sort screen a writer uses to pull a second draft out of a first draft is built on the warp and woof of composition.

Composition is the essential ingredient that transforms Reality into Art.

Composition is created differently in different art forms, but the principles are always the same. If you know one art form, you can at least appreciate if not practice the others. And you have a leg up on learning the others.

"Business" and "Marketing" are two other art forms that today's writers really need an appreciation for.

Healing or Medicine are art forms where the medium is actually "science," or as in oil painting, the pigment is science and the canvass is the unique human being.

In say, interior decorating (something a writer must do with every interior scene) you choose a key color and come off that key color with compliments, contrasts, and tones to create a palette. Colors are associated with emotions and with various mystical functions. So what's happening in the scene, the subtext and plot movement dictate the choice of color of carpet and drapes.

The room's decor all stands or falls on the exacting relationships between the key color and everything in the room. You can (as a writer) choose color combinations to convey the mood of the scene set there. For example, if a main character is conducting a conversation in his living room, you can dress the main character to match or clash with his room's decor to convey a subtle mood to keep the visitor off balance.

In say, figure skating or ballet, choreography is composed to fill the display arena or stage, and costumes are colored to underscore the mood of the music.

In photography, an angle is chosen to follow the "perspective lines" you've seen oil painters trace in charcoal on a bare canvass -- to draw the viewer's eye precisely to a given focus spot. The good photographer will hang upside down from a tree limb to get that view.

In music, "scales" are created by the relative pitches of a set of notes, while other notes are excluded. From those notes on the scale, the composer creates a mood and plays the emotional tension up and down to thrill the audience.

Human emotion is rooted in the perception of the relationships of things to other things - sensory input to other sensory input. Pattern recognition is our survival mechanism.

The term "black velvet" for example calls forth color perception and tactile perception - add "voice" for sound, "A voice like black velvet" -- in truth such a phrase makes absolutely no sense. In Science Fiction Romance, it conveys a world of meaning, very precisely.

How you as a writer arrange things in relationship to other things in your fiction conveys your theme -- and the most powerful themes are the ones that are never stated in words.

The theme of a story is the key color, the key note of the scale, the defining edges of the skating arena or stage, the universe of discourse and all its unconscious assumptions.

The theme of a story is not just repeated. A motif is repeated, but the motif is chosen from the theme -- it is not the theme.

The theme is echoed or exemplified in every single element, every relationship of one element to another -- in the composition of the worldbuilding.

If something doesn't fit the theme of the story, fit into the arena or stage, inside the edges of the photograph, or onto the scale, the writer must delete that thing or change the "angle" (for example, choose a different main character or combine two characters, or separate one character into two.)

Sometimes, the element that's been deleted must be replaced by something to perform a plot function. The replacement must be chosen from the theme to complete the composition.

The deleted element may (in fact usually does) belong to some other story the writer has incubating in the subconscious. Usually what must be deleted is just plain GOOD, sometimes even GREAT -- very often the scene or character that has to be deleted is the one which first popped to mind bringing along with it the story that is now being told.

Just because it came to mind pulling this story with it - does not mean it belongs to this story.

A story has a composition that the reader will be looking for.

An element the writer feels is important might actually betray the reader's trust that this universe has a composition. That betrayal of trust will throw the reader out of the story, leave them bewildered and disappointed.

Writers Need Editors

Testing the "composition" and searching for any intrusive element (character, plot twist, ending point, beginning scene, mid-point, setting, McGuffin, backstory, background exposition) is a job for another pair of eyes besides the writer's eyes.

That's why writers need beta-readers, preferably not friends but acquaintances the writer knows have an appetite for the kind of story this is supposed to be.

Beta readers don't necessarily need a conscious mastery of composition.

That's really the writer's and editor's job. The beta reader however will squirm or point at something that doesn't work. "I didn't like this character" or "I just didn't understand this." "It would be better set in Italy." "This is boring." "The ending isn't satisfying."

Beta readers untrained in composition and the craft of writing will squirm and use non-quantitative (and very unhelpful) language. They will use subjective measures of how "good" a story is, not the objective measures I've been focused on in these posts. They don't know what they like, they just know the feeling of liking. (which is fine if they'll pay you!)

The writer's business is to know that what the beta-reader is pointing at may not actually be the source of the reader's problem.

What's being pointed at is not necessarily the source of the problem in the manuscript.

If a writer is professional enough to know this about beta-readers, a bad opinion from a beta reader won't "hurt" or dismay or evoke any particular emotional reaction. It will merely trigger an alert re-evaluation of the composition, searching for the source of the reaction (without asking the beta reader any further questions). Composition is always the source of the reader's reactions -- almost nothing else, really, but composition speaks directly to the reader's innermost nerve.

The reader may say the ending was unsatisfying while the writer knows that what made the ending unsatisfying was a missing scene that should have formed the middle of the story. But during writing, the writer didn't know what to put there in that scene, so didn't write it (or maybe cut it because it seemed to corny).

How do you compose that missing scene? Look at the composition as a whole, and check everything against the theme, and the bit that punches up the ending will be apparent.

This is much easier to achieve when you are not mixing genres.

But my favorite stories are all mixed-genre!

What Makes Science Fiction Romance into both Science Fiction and Romance without ruining either genre's punch?

Composition. That's it in a word, and Linnea Sinclair has noted that it's a hard struggle to get that balance right. This editor says that, that reader says something else, this audience wants more this, that audience wants more that.

Linnea and this phalanx of brave new writers are creating A NEW COMPOSITION.

Once created, other artists will be able to use that composition to hit the mark every single time.

At the moment, both readers, writers and editors are groping. Readers have to have their tastes expanded and the expectations trained. Writers have to learn a whole new set of no-no's. Editors have to understand the risks of exploring new territory also come with rewards.

So let's look more closely at the problem of composition with two genres, equivalent to jumping double-dutch, and see if we can find some rules to test.

Science Fiction has never been adequately defined, but for our purposes think of it as fiction about the scientific way of investigating the world, "going where no man has gone before." Think of Roger Bacon's "scientific method." Think of empiricism. Think about hypothesis, theory and fact. Think about well proven facts suddenly being demonstrated to be untrue.

ITEM: Evidence is mounting about Dark Matter and the Big Bang theory. The universe is actually not behaving as if there had been a Big Bang, at least as far as we can see now. NEW HYPOTHESIS has it that this is due to the Dark Matter strewn about the universe. But wait - it was an old hypothesis that Einstein came up with and then decided couldn't be true.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0106/New-findings-on-dark-energy-back-discarded-Einstein-theory

So "Science" is all about doubting what you know to be true, and the scientific method is all about knowing that you don't really know what you actually know for sure. In fact the more positive you are, the more likely you are to be wrong. But wait! Once you figure out that you were wrong, you know for sure that what you think now is also probably wrong!

That's the scientific method. Doubt, investigate, prove, and doubt some more. Never cease questioning.

Remember my blog post on Theodore Sturgeon's ASK THE NEXT QUESTION. That's the scientific method.

http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/theodore-sturgeon-ask-next-question.html

And so that's the plotting method of SCIENCE fiction.

Take something that is so relied upon that it is never questioned. Question it. What if? If only...? If This Goes On ..." Create a world based on something we know for a fact turning out to be not-true.

Romance is a story about the initial phase of forming an idealized and permanent relationship.

Science Fiction Romance is a Romance (primarily) that occurs during, in spite of, or because of, some "built world" which exemplifies the scientific way of looking at things by discarding a belief that has been well proven and well supported.

In SFR, the SF should be the background and the Romance the foreground (in artistic composition terms).

That means all the worldbuilding has to be shown not told as background elements.

BACKGROUND vs. FOREGROUND

"Background" and "Foreground" are composition concepts

We've discussed back story, background, and foreground at length in previous posts here. So let's simplify the definition we'll work with.

Think of a painting or photograph.

We see a tennis player, wearing pristine whites, positioned in the front of the frame, racket raised, ball standing still in front of the player, free hand under the ball. Off to the right is the suggestion of a net. Off to the left is the suggestion of people in the stands. Beneath the player's feet is astro-turf. Way back is a woman on a tall chair painted white. Behind her is some blurry greenery. Above is bright blue sky. The shadows are long to the left of everything.

Can you tell what's foreground and what's background?

If I did it right, the player is obviously foreground. The player is described FIRST, and in great detail. You should be able to tell that the player is about to SERVE THE BALL (it's an action in progress which is where you always start a story). You can tell it's pretty formal by the player's dress and the referee. You don't see the opponent at all. Everything else is "suggested" at varying degrees away from THE PLAYER. Everything that's described is positioned RELATIVE TO THE PLAYER.

The player is the foreground, the rest is background.

You do the same thing when you write any story. What you put first, what you describe in detail, what you describe everything in reference to, is the foreground.

The foreground is the focal point, the point the artist wants to draw the reader/viewer's eye to. It's the important thing. The thing ABOUT WHICH this story is. Everything else is chosen to support that focal point.

The PLOT is the development of the Relationship in the foreground.

The COMPLICATION to the plot is the development of the scientific puzzle in the background.

In ROMANCE, the foreground is the lovers and their relationship.

In SCIENCE FICTION the foreground is the single scientific principle that has been called into doubt, and the resolution of that doubt by investigation.

So how do you compose a blend of Romance in the foreground with Science Fiction in the background?

What works best, because the Romance readership is not totally composed of those trained in the rigors of the scientific method (or who are not wholly bemused by scientific thinking processes) is what's often called SOFT SCIENCES.

Sociology, psychology, parapsychology, politics, religion, economics, archeology, anthropology (maybe not paleontology which is mostly hard science).

But those are still sciences and make dandy SF backgrounds for real Romance.

So let's watch how a composition of these two genres can be created from scratch using the principles of composition so familiar in all artforms. This principle works for any genre combination.

For Example

Think of the art of fabric weaving and putting a pattern into a weaving.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weft

The whole universe is often referred to as the product of a goddess that weaves the tapestry of events.

When you start out to build a "composition" you won't succeed if you apply your creativity to the principle behind the construction. Creativity has to be applied to the part of the composition that shows, the part that varies from one universe-fabric to another.

So look at the illustration of fabric weaving. The principle is that a warp is constructed of parallel strings that are made of a strongly spun yarn, and a softer, maybe weaker yarn is twisted between the verticle strings, over and under, now you see it now you don't.

The creativity of the artist is in the pattern, not in the concept of over-and-under.

The craft of the artist is in the clever way this thread and that thread are chosen for strength, for "hand" or for size. Make those choices wrong, and the "fabric" won't be a fabric -- it'll just unravel or fall apart.

The seamstress won't be able to make garments from the fabric because the seams will unravel if the craft of fabric-weaving isn't well applied.

You can, however, weave a wondrous fabric by combining different types of yarn, or making yarn out of more than one kind of fiber. Still, ultimately, over and under, strength and flexibility, are matters of craft.

How is that analogous to a story?

The Theme is the warp of the fabric you are weaving with your craft skills.

You choose what theme you want to use via your art, but you do have to have one or the fabric will fall apart.

A short story can have a theme and 1 sub-theme, the over and under of the warp, now it shows now it doesn't, to make a pattern.

The story's Setting is the weft or woof of the fabric you are weaving with your craft skills.

The theme is what your story says. The setting is how you say it.

You can use the same theme in different settings: a historical, a Regency Romance, a Roman Legion Romance, a Western, a Contemporary, a Paranormal, or Futuristic.

You can use the same warp with different woofs to get totally different fabrics.

The Setting is woven through, around, over and under the Theme of the fabric until they are of one piece.

The writer tamps the theme and setting down snug so the viewer/reader/audience can't tell the difference between Setting and Theme. Well tamped, the two together form a single, solid whole upon which the pattern is visible.

But the warp and woof of the fabric MUST NOT ATTRACT ATTENTION, or you spoil the effect for that "beta reader" type of reader (the ones who pay you).

The reader is the seamstress, cutting and sewing a garment from your fabric and its pattern for her own pleasure. If a seamstress likes working with your fabric (it holds shape, doesn't bunch when sewn, doesn't fade or pill) she'll buy more from you in a different color.

As Marion Zimmer Bradley quoted often, "The story the reader reads is not the story the writer wrote."

The reader creates their own story by turning the material this way and that, cutting, pasting, (editing mentally).

The writer's job is not to impart the writer's story to the reader but rather to incite the reader's imagination to create their own garment from the material. The writer's stock in trade is fun, enjoyment, pleasure.

To test my analogy, just ask someone who has read the same book you have read to describe what they read. The book you read will likely be barely recognizable in the description.

Ever seen a post on a forum asking if anyone can identify "A book where ..." because they can't remember the title?

Each reader remembers something different about the story and fills in the gaps with their own creativity.

So in our example, first let's choose a theme (sometimes in actual writing, the theme is the last thing you discover about the story you've written -- it doesn't matter as long as the finished product holds together good and tight).

THEME

"Only Age Brings Wisdom." A corollary of Experience Teaches in the School of Hard Knocks.

We could tell the story of acquiring Wisdom in any Setting.

Acquiring Wisdom makes a great Romance theme because it is a logical extension of "Love Conquers All."

Since this is SFR, let's say our Setting is The Near Future -- a futuristic sociological SF Romance.

It's a Romance, so IN THE FOREGROUND (Tennis Player) we have two Classic Characters refusing to fall madly in love with each other because they are on opposite sides (over and under) of the thematic proposition, Only Age Brings Wisdom.

Our Hero is an advertising writer. He thinks up those annoying commercials that pitch products you don't want and makes you want them even if they're too expensive.

He's a Confidence Man at heart. He makes you do foolish things because you don't have Wisdom (yet). And he's proud of that ability.

He's spent lifetimes perfecting the ability to make anyone do anything. (BACKSTORY THE READER DOES NOT NEED TO KNOW: In past lives he ran the racket on rich widows, or he's done heiresses out of fortunes.)

But in this life, he's gone straight. All he's ever done in this life is to pick up women in bars and get them into bed. So he has absolute confidence in his ability to make any woman groan "I love you" within 3 days of meeting her. His ad campaigns are famous. They work.

And so he has no respect for women.

Our Heroine is one tough broad with an attitude.

She's spent lifetimes (as man or woman) building and holding a family together against all odds, often violent odds. She has decided that The Government is the enemy of The Family because of 18, or even 21 being the voting age. Youth has bad judgment. (Illustration - all the young people who fell for Country Wide's 0-down mortgages.) They marry the wrong people mistaking infatuation for love; they don't save enough money; they choose the wrong majors in college; they party before studying; and are apt to try drugs from peer pressure. She feels law shouldn't grant that much freedom before the age of Wisdom because it weakens society.

Betty Friedan is her heroine. An individual can cure the ills of society.

SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE: recent NEWSWEEK ARTICLE
http://www.newsweek.com/id/230061
shows that the Baby Boomers who tried drugs in the Woodstock Summer of Love are now coming down with Hepatitis C which takes 30 years or more to incubate.

So instead of getting married and raising boys to march off to war, she's a career woman who has finally been appointed CEO of a Polling Organization that's made a name for itself using a computer algorithm she has created.

Contracted by an online Match Making Service, her company has been doing statistics on marriage and divorce, and the life-courses of children through variations of the situations of their parents. She's investigated (maybe won some kind of prize for?) the grandchildren of divorced parents, and the grandchildren of unhappy marriages (that should have ended in divorce), and how to match up people with such a history to create a solid marriage that will last. She has statistics on children pushed out on their own too young.

It's Election Year. She's out to change the world because all this family pain she's been researching is just too much to bear (echoes of past life stresses). She applies for and gets a contract to do political polling for, say, a major online presence - or possibly a TV network.

She's going to prove, scientifically, that advertising chooses the winning candidate, regardless of the real heartfelt views of the voters.

In other words, she's going to prove that the world is being run by advertisers -- like Our Hero, people who are only grifters twisting people's minds against their will.

The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political advertising damages families by pitting the opinions of youth against those of the family elders, splitting families with acrimony.

And now, at last, she has the computer power, the surveying power, the money and corporate power to achieve her goal of scientific proof and present her personal solution.

She wants to get Congress to raise the voting age to 45, which has been scientifically proven to be the upper limit of the effectiveness of advertising. People over 45 do not change their buying habits in response to seeing a commercial or online advertisement.

(That's why TV, movies, and even books are aimed at younger people.)

Her objective is to remove advertising from all political campaigns since it would be a waste of money if those who can be influenced by advertising are not allowed to vote.

Our Hero is of course hired by one of the political parties to create the best, most persuasive political ads ever.

If she succeeds and the voting age is raised to 45, he will essentially be impoverished because his only clients would be makeup and Slimfast manufacturers, maybe jeans makers. Maybe government anti-drug use commercials. He's scared of her. He likes his Manhattan penthouse and chauffeured limo lifestyle.

So as the campaign develops, her polling reveals the upper limit to the effectiveness of his ads. He desperately brings online more and more unproven jazzy techniques trying to push his effectiveness age higher, succeeding a few months at a time in persuading older folks to believe whatever nonsense he's peddling.

Worldbuilding

Think of every sort of change that will be wrought on our society as digital TV enters the market. We have a 3-D set coming onto the market this year, and a 3-D channel being launched. On Demand movies, series episodes, and anything you can find online now will be on your living room set (along with all the games that are online, probably console games too).

All the data sites like Google collect on you will make you the target for ads specifically crafted to make you do things against your better judgment, and these visuals will be very, very powerful because they really are aimed directly at your weakest spot.

Nothing like that exists today.

This is SFR. You can be manipulated and the technique does not even involve "subliminal advertising."

The hardware is evolving to where you'll even do email, twitter, Facebook etc on TV screens hung on various walls around your dwelling -- you'll never be out of eye-shot of such a device, and much of what it does may be 2-way interactive, tracking your behavior and feeding you advertising tailored to your behavior. Think of images that project into the air in front of you.

Think of how many of the changes in society sparked by cell phones were completely missed by futurologists of the 1950's (except Robert Heinlein; he got it).

Now, build a world, warp and woof, Theme and Setting tamped down to make one solid pattern. Build it out of the changes that computers, polling, and advertising psychology will have created in society by -- oh, say 2025. Add in human nature's never-changing traits (like the age of Wisdom; and question what age that might be.)

Polling and Advertising are natural allies against the you as a member of the population. Already, polling and advertising's single biggest client is government in the form of political campaigns.

Polling and Advertising are all about mass movement among people, all about crowd control and predicting and directing the majority of people to do this, think that, believe the other. Polling is the eyes and ears of Advertising, just naturally so.

But the internet, Web 2.0, social networking, are all about communication between individuals with no third orchestrating party, no gatekeepers.

At the moment, the third controlling orchestrating parties are struggling mightily with every scientific tool to get on top of this unruly population of social networkers. (Think e-publishing, self-publishing, blogging the news.)

Human nature is winning in the world where your readers live.

A very controlled and well edited, fact-checked world of journalistic ethics hard won in the early 1900's has suddenly turned back into the world of rumor-driven news as people talk directly to each other instead of through an editorial filter of journalists and fact-checkers. People hardly know the difference between opinion and fact already, and cell-phone-video and YouTube are confusing the issue even more. Seeing is believing, right? (That plane never crashed into the Pentagon -- see the video?)

What will happen next?

Well, the major theme of all Romance is Love Conquers All, and in our example here we're exploring Wisdom being gained only with Age. Romance is normally the business of the very young. The thrice divorced are not so susceptible to being swept off their feet.

Our Hero and Our Heroine, one in Advertising and the other in Polling, are at each other's throats with opposing views and equivalent computing power.

It's war.

What happens after they fall into bed for one wild night of carnal sexuality? (that's the PLOT)

Will they form an alliance, expose the winners of the election for the incompetents they are? Show how they were chosen by a manipulated youth vote? Will they split the country into a generation-war? (Think Star Trek: TOS's "genetics war" of the 1990's.)

Or does the choice of the over-45's win the election, then prove to be incompetent demonstrating that age has even less judgment of character?

Does the choice of the under-45's prove to be wiser?

Or do we find proof that young and old voters alike are insightful judges of character who are able to ignore commercials, given some special training in grammar school?

Or will one destroy the other's business, humiliating their own Soul Mate?

How can Love conquer the Pollster vs. Advertiser face-off?

The answer to that question lies in the Worldbuilding, in the warp and woof, and the answer is the Plot of this story.

In today's world, as things stand for your reader, there is no solution, and so there's no way this story could happen now. It's a Futuristic.

You, as writer, must artistically and creatively choose what changes to make this plot resolvable. (and plant that element in chapter one)

The world you build is the Setting or soft, flexible woof of the fabric that weaves around the warp or inflexible Theme revealing then concealing the ultimate statement about reality, thus asking the seminal question your Theme addresses -- is Wisdom only available to a human beyond age 45? Or are younger people wiser?

This is SF Romance, so the science of the worldbuilding has to provide a solution that could not exist now, that could not work the way things are now, that stretches the imagination of the reader and astonishes and delights with surprise, that provokes thought, that shakes the reader's certainties in unexpected ways, but also delivers the satisfaction of a plausible Happily Ever After ending.

Take the condition of Advertising (and the psychological research behind it) and the condition of Polling (how accurately it predicts outcomes of elections even now 11 months before the actual vote), add the condition of Politics (the show-don't-tell of a President addicted to his Blackberry so the company had to invent a new security protocol so he could keep it!) and extrapolate into our future.

In building your world, don't forget the force of Religion (think about those Mega-churches and the financing behind them as well as the social forces creating them). Then there is international politics, and the explosive effects of terrorism on old-form established governments (Yemen brewing up a storm while Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran hold world attention -- anyone noticed how close Yemen is to Sudan? Is there a power-axis brewing there?) Given the political instability, unemployed scientists and engineers are racing to supply tech solutions to "Security" at airports and elsewhere.

What will those unemployed brains come up with that will change the world our children will live in? Maybe change them? (don't forget genetics modifications to cure diseases)

And then there's China desperately trying to keep its people off the internet, and Iran choking off access to twitter.

There's class warfare (it's OK to tax the rich because they're a minority and it's majority rules -- and the rich can't have lobbyists advocating for them in Congress because it's wrong to go against the will of the majority even if the majority wants to destroy you) -- and generational warfare (youth that doesn't see the point of buying health insurance when old people get all the benefits.)

Look at the whole picture here, not one issue at a time but as a whole pattern, and extrapolate a result of all this churning change when mixed with the person-to-person communication revolution.

You can use astrology or any other tool you prefer to create your extrapolation rules.

If the theme is "Only Age Brings Wisdom" -- then you need an ending where one or the other or both protagonists reach that age and gain Wisdom, or gain Wisdom without reaching that age and disprove the proposition.

Youth growing up swimming in high-powered advertising has a much better chance of becoming immune than their forebears ever had against advertising when it was a new technology. But that doesn't seem to be happening today.

Turn the issue around backwards, and visit an alternate universe where only those under 45 are allowed to vote? How would that work? How did it start? Who could overthrow it? Should it be overthrown? Argue all sides of the issue, each side with a character exemplifying the point of view.

If the majority of voters were under 45, they could pass a law against lobbying and then pass a law (Constitutional Amendment maybe) with a voting-age ceiling.

As you build your world, warp and woof, you need to consider all the different beliefs your readers might hold and create a powerful (and plausible) spokesman for each of those beliefs.

That means you must be able to understand and explain a belief that you, personally, think is utter blithering nonsense. And you have to do it with a straight face because some of your readers take that nonsense as gospel.

Before you can expect your readers to believe six impossible things before breakfast, you have to be able to do it yourself -- and convince the world that you believe them!

How do you organize all those characters that exemplify the sides of an issue you're writing about and their different beliefs?

COMPOSITION. That's it. That's the whole trick of this entire profession.

You anchor the composition in your foreground character (the Tennis Player) and describe and portray each of the other characters from that central reference point. Everything in your composition is relative to your central reference point, just like notes in a scale or colors on a palette.

In a Romance, typically, there are two "central reference points" -- your lead couple. Their center-of-gravity (a point somewhere between them, perhaps closer to the more vivid or powerful one) is your central reference point. Everything in the composition is measured, described, formulated, colored, keyed to that central reference point.

From that central reference point, you choose the fiber, dye lot, and gauge of your theme to form the warp, and the time, place, social level, and details of your setting(s) to form the woof. Tamp them together until the reader can't tell the difference, and the rest will unfold naturally.

Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com

Flowers as Worldbuilding: The Book Of Dreams

What's on your bedside reading table?

I seldom publish reviews, and I'm not sure that I've ever before made a list of what is in and around my bed. However, it's rather important in my little family that we each stay healthy, so we are all washing our hands and gargling with salt water a lot... and sleeping in different parts of the house.

Why? My husband will be showing his hot rod, the VSR, at the Grand National in Pomona next month. Right now, we're creating his "build book" which is a glorified scrap book showing some of the best photographs from early sketches to men with small knives working on the clay model to showing the car on the carpet of the ballroom of the Ritz Carlton on Amelia Island.

I've just ordered some promo postcards from Vistaprint... my author-promo skills come in handy... and we are highly amused to see that one of the Vistaprint cards that was picked up from the SEMA stand is being auctioned on EBay.


Make of it what you will, around my bed are the following:

Black Sheep by Georgette Heyer

Flowercraft by Violet Stevenshon

Zoobooks Magazine (the Elephants issue)  The Sharks issue isn't far away.

Silk and Shadows by Mary Jo Putney

The Business of Winning by Robert Heller

Logic Problems by Penny Press (in fact, I have three of them)

Birds, from the Usborne Discover series

Tempting Fortune by Jo Beverley

Super Sudoku

The Evening News by Arthur Hailey

Explore the World of Prehistoric Life by Dougal Dixon

The Columbia Encyclopedia Vol 3

Sex - A Man's Guide from Men's Health (Rodale Press)

An Ellora's Cavemen anthology with CJ Hollenbach on the cover

Another Ellora's Cavemen anthology with Rodney Chapman on the cover

The Book of Dreams (The fifth and final Demon Princes novel) by Jack Vance

I'm reading "The Book Of Dreams". The subtitle --"The fifth and final Demon Princes novel" and also a couple of lines in the back cover copy intrigued me.


THE LAST DEMON PRINCE

HOWARD ALAN TREESONG

gave a banquet to ten friends. All died in agony, save himself.

HOWARD ALAN TREESONG

went to his old school reunion to teach his former classmates the meaning of horror.

HOWARD ALAN TREESONG

was the most elusive of the five Demon Princes upon whom Kirth Gerson had sworn vengeance. A galaxy-wide guessing game proved his undoing.

HOWARD ALAN TREESONG

wrote his own holy book and called it The Book of Dreams.

JACK VANCE

penned the book of Revelations for that pseudo-bible and thereby brought the most suspenseful galactic manhunt series ever written to a smashing conclusion.

The back cover is a little hard on the eyes! I think it was the "Princess Bride" element (Treesong's implied immunity to poison) that appealed to me most -- apart from Demon Princes. Disappointingly, the "demon princes" don't appear to be demons, and they aren't princes, either. They're powerful intergalactic criminals. The Sopranos in outer space? I'm not averse to "suspenseful galactic manhunts", either.

It should be noted that this book was first printed in 1981. So it was before The Sopranos (first aired 1999), but Princess Bride was published in 1973.

I should also add that I'm a slow reader, and I'm only on page 37 of 235. I'm savoring this book, but it's not (for me) a fast-paced page turner. That may change.

The hero, Kirth Gerson, is revealed to be an intergalactic newspaper magnate. Not quite Clark Kent-like, Kirth Gerson lives a double life, posing for much of the time as Henry Lucas, "Special Writer" a lowly investigative reporter and op-ed writer at one of his own newsdesks.

One day, he is fumbling around among the paper files when he comes across a photograph marked "Discard". In other words, it might have been shredded if he hadn't found it. In an intergalactic world when a paparazzo could be murdered for taking a picture of the wrong supercriminal, this photograph of ten people at a banquet is a very big deal. Someone has written "Treesong is here."

Nine of them are probably dead, if one can trust back cover blurb. While the supervillain, Howard Alan Treesong, might be assumed not to be one of the two women seated at the table, Kirk Gerson's first mystery to solve is, who is whom and which is Treesong?

Being the cosmic Murdoch that he is, Kirk Gerson decides to launch a new magazine with interstellar if not intergalactic distribution, publish the photograph on the front page of the inaugural issue, and make it into a "Name the Celebrities And Win" contest.

I am enjoying Jack Vance's world building, and especially the little swipes he takes at our modern world!

Apparently:

"Jack Vance is one of the truly important science fiction writers of our day." --Los Angeles Times Book review

Human vegetarians, for instance, have become graceful, slender, beautiful idiots. They've evolved into deer-like creatures that forgetfully abandon their babies, so the omnivore humans pick up the babies and raise them to be domestic servants (or slaves).

Colonising monastic orders haven't done too well, either.

I find myself stopping to wonder "What's the deal with the lists of flowers?" It bothers me. This appears to me to be a book by a man, written for men. I infer that because a colleague of the hero (who does not at this point in the story appear to be a villain) owns a vegetarian. He dresses her in a short smock and nothing else. When she bends over, we can see that she has no underwear. We are told that vegetarians bite and hiss to protect their virtue, but that groups of men get around that by offering the vegetarians molasses candy. Vegetarians cannot bite to defend themselves when their mouths are full.

"Vance's descriptive eye is sharp, and his ear for the language is close to infallible."--New York Newsday

Jack Vance doesn't list only flowers... I pick on that because so far, there have been three of them. He also lists artists, artifacts on display in shop windows, objects in rooms. It's quite effective, and reminds me of a screenplay.

In every list, Vance names several names (or items) that are familiar to all of us, and mixes in made-up names without explanation (none is necessary) to show that we're in another place and time. "Giotto and Gostwane; William Snyder and William Blake..."  "... wallflowers, pansies, native bulrastia, and St. Olaf's Toe..." Another interesting and economical use of plantlife was "green mematis" (obviously derived from clematis).

I do wonder what it is about wallflowers that do as well as they do on so many faraway future worlds. So, I looked them up. Plausible. Interesting choice. Any relative of the cruciferous family is all right with me. I'd have chosen a geranium, though. Wallflowers feed and attract all manner of insects from weevils to butterflies. Geraniums repel them.

However, the more I think about Jack Vance's world-building, the more I appreciate it. I love his casual throwaway lines about three moons, and about the religious orders who first colonised his worlds. I am definitely going to have to go back to the beginning, and read the series from the beginning.

The "Demon Princes" novels are:  (quoted from Wikipedia "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License;)

• Star King (1964). The antagonist is Attel Malagate, a renegade from a species called the Star Kings, who are driven to imitate and surpass the most successful species they encounter; with their contact with humanity in antiquity, they began consciously evolving into imitations of human beings. The bait Gersen uses to trap him is an undeveloped and fantastically beautiful planet whose location is known only to Gersen, which Malagate covets to become the father of a new race that can outdo both humans and his own species.

• The Killing Machine (1964). Kokor Hekkus, a 'hormagaunt', has prolonged his life by the vivisection of human beings to obtain hormones and other substances from their living bodies. But eternal life can be boring, and so he has converted the lost planet Thamber into a stage wherein he acts out his fantasies.

• The Palace of Love (1967). Viole Falushe, an impotent megalomaniac ironically fixated on sex. He was so obsessed with a girl in his youth, he created a number of clones of her in a vain attempt to get one of them to love him back. This novel contains some of Vance's most compelling and unforgettable characters, such as the mad poet, Navarth, who has a central role.

• The Face (1979). Lens Larque, a sadist and monumental trickster. In the course of the novel, the protagonist experiences some of the same outrages that motivated the villain to concoct his most grandiose jest, leading to one of the most humorous endings in all Vance's work.

• The Book of Dreams (1981). Howard Alan Treesong, a 'chaoticist', who embodies elements of all the foregoing, and has the most imaginatively ambitious plans of all.

All the best,
Rowena Cherry
SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/ 

The Will to Write

Happy New Year, bah humbug! Well, not really. :) But I do find January depressing in many ways. It’s the Monday of the year (unfair to Mondays, which I rather like during the part of the year when I’m off work on Mondays). The Christmas season ends, with the house looking a bit bleak when the tree and other decorations are suddenly removed. There are no holidays in this month. (New Year’s Day is effectively part of the Christmas season, and Martin Luther King Day doesn’t count for us because that’s a work day for General Assembly employees.) Legislative session starts, the busy 90-day stretch at our day job, and the last half of January and the first week of February constitute the most grueling period. And this happens during the worst weather of the year—late nights, weekend work, waiting for the parking shuttle in the face-freezing cold, and a chance of dangerously icy streets.

Although I’m not much for New Year’s resolutions, the first day of the year being an arbitrary date anyway (the Romans considered the new year to start in March, for instance, not a bad idea since that’s the threshold of spring), I do have some modest goals. First, I need to finish a short Lovecraftian erotic romance I plan to submit to one of Ellora’s Cave’s “theme” months, the theme being music in this case. In the long term, I’ve resolved to write a vampire story for submission to Silhouette Nocturne Bites (maximum 15,000 words). I haven’t had any luck with Bites yet, but Silhouette did publish a vampire romance novel of mine several years ago, so there is hope, right? Because the novella seems to be my natural length, I’ve been focusing more on stories of that size rather than novels lately, now that electronic publishing has provided us with lots of novelette and novella markets. A great improvement over what Stephen King called the novella in his notes to DIFFERENT SEASONS—the “banana republic” of publishing.

I’ve recently recognized the source of an occasional impediment to my writing, however, not exactly a block, but a drag on productivity. A comment in the latest issue of the RWR, Romance Writers of America’s organizational magazine, brought this point to mind. An author said that she finds writing a welcome escape from the stress of real life; when problems weigh on her mind, she enjoys turning to her fiction, an area where she has complete control. I realized that my reaction to real-life problems and crises tends to be the opposite. When something goes wrong, the problems of my characters suddenly feel flat and uninvolving by contrast. Oddly, this reaction doesn’t in the least discourage me from writing something fun and frivolous. It’s the dark, painful character situations that seem, in contrast to real-life suffering and difficulty, hollow and artificial. In the face of real pain (mine or that of someone close), it’s hard to render the troubles of my imaginary people (usually troubles that are “impossible” anyway, since I write fantasy) believable to myself. No, I don’t have that feeling about reading other people’s dark fiction. I just envy them for the ability to make fictional difficulty, pain, and fear believable. Yes, I know the basic answer is to work harder at channeling my own emotions into my story people’s lives, easier said than done (because real-life worries tend to lead to depression, and depression saps energy). Any thoughts?

Margaret L. Carter
Carter's Crypt