Bum Scoop

This past weekend I attended World Fantasy Convention 2011 in Columbus, Ohio, which is not quite the Stygian Pit of Hell that my Ann Arbor-aligned friends and family had led me to believe… odd, that.

As so many others have said in their own blog reports, there is just way too much, too, too much to get into, too many people to name them all individually. I will, however, try to pick out the highlights.

Driving the last hour or two with Tobias Buckell was certainly a nice way to start the con. I’ve known Tobias for years, since he was introduced to me by Charlie Finlay at ConFusion back in… 2001? Something like that. Always good to see him again, of course, though unfortunately that was really the only time we got to sit and talk for the duration of the con.

One of the first people I saw at the con was Danielle Friedman who was almost embarrassingly (for me) glad to see me. She is always awesome, it seems.

And the funniest/strangest story of the con came up on Thursday night, when I had about an hour to talk to Darja Malcolm-Clarke who, it turns out, has been a sort of shadow-companion for the last fourteen years or so. Same university at the same time, same graduate school, lived in the same parts of two different towns. We even worked at the same pizza place at the same time for a couple of weeks. There are many other connections, but that’s what you get for now. Suffice to say it was an hour of “No way!” and “Of course you did” type interjections. One of the absolute highlights of the con.

The number of awesome people met otherwise is… almost unfathomable. I’d try to list everyone, but it’s just too unwieldy and I’d hate to miss someone (since I know they’ve just been dying waiting for this blog post to go up). Suffice to say, it seems like I was always hanging out with someone else that I wanted to meet, or never thought I’d meet, or didn’t realize I wanted to meet until just then. Many new friendships, I hope.

And the one moment I really was after at the con was meeting David Drake, which I accomplished at the Saturday night autograph session. (He took one look at me and said just, “Marines?”) I’ve been reading his books since high school and, since going to Iraq, found something of an even deeper appreciation for his fiction. At least in those few minutes as we chatted about war and writing and whatnot, he was an absolute gentleman, and I could not have hoped for a nicer, warmer interaction.

Of course, I was also grateful that I got to just sit at times and chill out with my friends: Merrie Haskell, Catherine Shaffer, Steve Buchheit, and Lawrence Kapture are truly awesome individuals, and if you’re wise, you’ll want to be friends with them, too.

So that’s that. A great weekend full of awesome people. I was glad to get home to my wife and kids, of course, as I had missed them all. And I can’t even begin to express appreciation to my wife for wrangling our three unruly (but awesome) kids for the whole weekend on her own. Hopefully, if I go to WFC again next year, I’ll be able to bring her with me and we can foist the kids off on some unsuspecting grandparent or something.

Mirrored from Bum Scoop.

Jerry Holkins, a/k/a Tycho of Penny Arcade, has discovered the Anita Blake series. The comic is also quite funny.

It’s a tasty nugget, one that keeps coming around: how, oh how do we save short fiction?

I’ve said before that I tend to regard the question of short fiction survival, especially magazine survival, as an academic question at best. I don’t write a lot of short fiction, I’m not a member of that club scene, and while there’s stuff out there that I like, I wouldn’t notice much if it vanished, I don’t think. The genre(s) would certainly be poorer for it, granted. In its current form, it’s a playground for cutting edge stuff and does serve well as a sort of extra-hip scene for genre authors.

So, in response to Warren Ellis’s latest effort to keep the discussion alive, I noticed that Cory Doctorow has outlined his plan to keep the magazines alive. If he were running them, anyway.

I think the biggest impediment to the magazines’ sales is that there’s no easy way for people who love the stories in them to bring them to the attention of other, potential customers. By the time you’ve read the current issue and found a story you want everyone else to read, the issue isn’t on the stands anymore and the best you can do is to try to get your pals to shell out to pay for an ebook edition.

I’ve said stuff like this myself in the past, and I have to say, I agree wholeheartedly. Word-of-mouth is incredibly hard to spread if it’s not easy to point to. If you say, “I really like this blender. You can get it at any Target,” the word-of-mouth will spread easily–the object is easily attainable. Contrasted with, “I really liked this story. You might be able to find the magazine it’s in at Barnes & Noble. Maybe. But it’s not prominently displayed, and it did come out weeks ago, and…”

But then he says:

Contrast this with the online mags, whose stories stay online for months — sometimes forever. If you love a story in Strange Horizons, you can paste a quote from it into your Livejournal, use the first line as your sig, email the URL to your brother, print the first page and tape it up in the toilet at work.

Which I found myself nodding along with less and less the more words he tacked on. Have you ever seen short stories quoted? Put in sig lines? Taped to the toilet at work? Seriously? In other words, again as I said before, when was the last time you recommended a short story to anyone? I know there are a number of authors and aspirants who, at least in theory, might glance this way. If the short fiction scene is a sort of club scene for writers and hardcore genre fans, then where’s all the murmurs and whispers, pointing out the cool new stories and authors, where’s the excitement?

Jonathon McCalmont thinks part of the problem is lack of engagement with the critical community, that is, the magazines don’t do enough to court reviews. Which is probably true. I know F&SF has offered free copies to bloggers who will review them, but they’re not going after the people who do the reviewing, they’re trying to spread word-of-mouth. That’s cool, but again, very tough when the bloggers have nothing to link to.

But beyond that, I don’t know how much reviews matter in the word-of-mouth category. An aggregate of reviews might, which is why something like Rotten Tomatoes is so valuable to the film industry. But if a story in Interzone strikes Jonathon wrong, and he’s the only one reviewing it, unless he carries with him a significant base of readers who have come to trust his reviews to reflect their own tastes, he won’t have much of an impact all by himself. Hell, it’s pretty obvious at this point that big-name movie critics like Roger Ebert or Leonard Maltin can’t make or break a movie with their review, otherwise Rob Schneider would be begging penniless in the street.

But there’s not enough critical mass in science fiction reviewing to achieve that.

And, really, reviews tend to be far more formal than most people need, especially on the word-of-mouth marketing stratum. What they need is, 1) do I trust your taste? and 2) do you recommend it or not? Trusting taste can, indeed, come in the form of the reviews themselves as the reviewer breaks down why they do or do not recommend the thing, but this is not the basis for word-of-mouth. That comes from the interconnected network of individuals, passing on to the people they know, who then pass it to those that they know.

What works about Cory’s ideas is that SFnal bloggers don’t have strictly SFnal audiences, most of the time. I know I don’t, though I’m rather small fry. Scalzi doesn’t, Doctorow doesn’t, etc. Scalzi asked Tor to send Old Man’s War to Glenn Reynolds, not just because Glenn reads SF, not just because he has a big audience, but because his audience is incredibly diverse. As far as genre tastes go, they’re probably quite eclectic and mostly well outside the established genre audience. Only people who really care about SF are going to read SF reviews, but if I say to you all, “Hey, check this story out,” chances are pretty good that someone who does not really care about SF will go check it out.

So. Again. You want to save short fiction? Talk about it.

And even though, like I said, I have no particular dog in this hunt or skin in this game, as they say, I’m going to pile on another cliche and put my money where my mouth is.

“Fire in the Lake” by Chris Roberson, over at Subterranean. Pretty good historical detective fiction.

“Answer Me This” by Casey Fiesler over at The Town Drunk. Humorous and light, as is their thing, about inheriting a living sphinx.

Oh, and at left, both on the blog and LiveJournal, is a permanent box with what should be a rotating roster of recommended stuff. I’ll probably wait until I get five to ten in there, then start shifting the oldest ones out.

A friendly acquaintance from the Detroit con “scene,” Yanni Kuznia, has had her voice immortalized in a promotional audiobook of Charles DeLint’s Promises to Keep from Subterranean Press. All you need to know is at the second link there. Sadly, Yanni hasn’t mastered the art of updating her website, so… old info at the first link. But, as you can see, she’s an actress and a model (among many other things), and I recommend checking her stuff out.

Concerning DeLint, I never really got into his stuff, though I know my sister was for a time, which generally tends to be recommendation enough. I’m thinking I’ll probably download the audiobook chapters and listen to them on my way down to the Indiana border tomorrow (and back, depending on how long the chapters are). I think you should, too.

As it is, this a pretty cool promotional tool that Subterranean has been making significant use of lately. John Scalzi and Elizabeth Bear have both gotten the same treatment, and I find it exciting to see Subterranean really putting itself on the map in terms of making the most of the ol’ web presence. Also: always cool to see (or hear) Yanni working.