6000 words, which I count a great victory (the snakelet being a major force for distraction). Temp title: “Days of the War, as Red as Blood, as Dark as Bile” (just until I find something slightly less unwieldy).

Snippet:

In the old days, the phoenix, the vermillion bird, was a sign of peace and prosperity to come; a sign of a just ruler under whom the land would thrive.

But those are the days of the war; of a weak child-Empress, successor to a weak Emperor; the days of burning planets and last-ditch defences; of moons as red as blood and stars as dark as bile.

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When Thien Bao was thirteen years old, Second Aunt came to live with them.

She was a small, spry woman with little tolerance for children; and even less for Thien Bao, whom she grudgingly watched over while Mother worked in the factories, churning out the designs for new kinds of sharp-kites and advance needle ships.

(am aware Thien Bao is a man’s name in Vietnamese–there’s an in-story reason for it, but am struggling to manage the related exposition. Might just give up and go for a more traditional woman’s name)

Hoping to level up into progress on the novel after that (but not wholly optimistic).

Because that sentence came fully formed into my brain yesterday afternoon. No idea where it’s all going, though…

In the old days, the phoenix, the phuong hoang, was a sign of peace and prosperity to come; a sign of a just ruler under whom the land would thrive.

But those are the days of the War; of a weak child-Empress, successor to a weak Emperor; the days of burning planets and last-ditch defenses; of moons as red as blood and stars as dark as bile.

(for those who are wondering: I am indeed slowly working on the novel, but right now my brain is a bit frazzled and it’s hard to muster the energy for something long…)

This is a collection of stuff I’ve already said elsewhere or on this blog, but for what it’s worth… The usual disclaimer applies: these are my personal opinions and my personal experience (I know not everyone has the same opinions and I certainly don’t pretend to speak for everyone!). I also don’t pretend to have easy solutions for everything I mention here (and God knows I made some of those mistakes myself, and will continue making them, but hopefully I’ll improve on that front as time goes by); but I think it’s better to know all this stuff and then decide how to handle it rather than go on being blissfully unaware of it.

Warning: this is me in ranty mode, not helped by the 3 hours of sleep I got over the past few days (yup, I know that I volunteered for that whole sleepless thing. But doesn’t change much to how I feel…)
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Just a quick note to inform those who don’t know already of the birth of the snakelet last week–which in turn explains my continued radio silence. We’re all well, but overwhelmed–as those things happen 🙂
Blog’s going dark for a while, though I may update with the occasional rant…

Ok, so I’m biased because I wrote the preface for this, but you can now buy the e-edition of Djibril al-Ayad and Fabio Fernandes’s We See a Different Frontier here on amazon.

(I admit I’m not a big fan of the cover, but that’s my  personal opinion, and the fiction collected in the antho itself is well worth a closer look)

The anthology collects SFF from the point of view of people outside the usual SFF hegemony, with countries such as Brazil, Singapore, the Philippines, etc.; and writers such as Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Joyce Chng and Benjanun Sriduangkaew. Stories focus on imperialism, the difficulties of navigating a postcolonial history and of being the silenced voices on the world scene–it’s a very chewy, fertile terrain in which to plant fiction, and by and large this is a stunning anthology. The stories I loved most were Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “What Really Happened in Ficandula”, an angry tale of retribution and revenge that stretches across generations, Dinesh Rao’s “Bridge of Words”, an elegiac story about diaspora and losing one’s language, and Benjanun Sriduankaew’s splendid “Vector”, about the rewriting of history and the fight of the oppressed to impose their own voices over those of their oppressors.

Do give it a try. It’s a great read, and it’s stuff that needs to be tackled in SFF.

25k words in. Wow.

She’d never thought they’d lose him–that in one bloody, confused night as the neighbouring House of Hawthorn tore itself apart, he would take his sword and his wings, and walk out of the House he had founded; and never come back, leaving almost nothing behind–a scattering of things he’d infused with his power, a handful of ill-prepared students at the helm of a faltering House; and Selene, his heir by virtue of having been the closest to him.

So… I thought it might interest people to share my experience with epublishing my novella On a Red Station, Drifting. What follows is a few disjointed thoughts on what I did and how I did it.

-Why: the original edition of On a Red Station, Drifting was a paper, limited edition hardcover with no ebook edition planned; I got lots of requests for an ebook edition, especially from readers not in the UK. I figured that since the market for novellas was so freaking limited, I might as well dip my toes into the world of self-publishing and see what happened.

-Cover art: I decided to get new cover art for the ebook version, to differentiate it from the paper one (which was a limited edition, and whose cover also had the slight problem of being far too busy to display at low resolutions, a definite handicap when dealing with buying ebooks). I browsed a couple things on deviantart (seriously considered using a couple existing pieces, but one was too dark and the other one at a large horizontal format and therefore quite unsuitable for an ebook cover no matter which way I turned the problem). I ended up commissioning Nhan Y Doan , whose work I had long admired, for a watercolour with the two main characters on it.

It’s a bit scary to commission an artist; many thanks to Colin Tate, who gave me pointers for navigating the entire thing. Basically I described what format I wanted; and the “feel” of what I was going for by showing the artist a few covers in genre with a predominantly red/orange background (I wanted red for obvious reasons); can’t remember everything I used, but one of them was Ian M. Banks’ Against a Dark Background. I also put in an excerpt from a scene that showed the interactions between the two main characters, and provided a summary description of both of them and their clothes, again using pictures as references. I was a bit scared of how it would turn out, but the end result was fabulous.
The cost of the commission was a little over 130$, to which I would have added lettering (which the artist didn’t provide)–except that the fabulous Janice Hardy very kindly did it for me, offering me several choices of fonts. I went for the one that most clearly appeared SF-esque, in order to counterbalance the soft watercolour design, itself an unusual choice for an SF novella.

-Conversion to ebook format: after much trying around, I used Scrivener for Mac plus the kindle converter KindleGen, which you can download on the amazon website. I found the instructions here useful, though I did end up having to fight a bit to get my part labelled as “book 1” and not “chapter 1”). For EPUB, same thing except no need for KindleGen. The files produced are pretty clean; I ran them past people with a Kindle (huge thanks to Stephanie Burgis), and on my own Kobo Glo, just to make sure that it generated OK.

-Pricing: after much dithering, I priced the book at $2.99, and a similar amount in the other Kindle stores. I wanted to take advantage of the royalty rate at 70% on amazon, and also didn’t want to sell the novella too expensive or too cheap–I had a look at similar books on amazon and found that they were all at slightly higher prices than this (or much higher in the case of Nancy Kress’s Before the Fall, After the Fall–except I’m not Nancy Kress!).

-Publishing: I published on Kindle Direct Publishing because, let’s face it, it’s the biggest ebook market. At the same time, I wanted to give people a chance to find the book through other distribution channels, so I went through Smashwords in order to complement publication on amazon (Smashwords takes a percentage of sales, but has the advantage of distributing across the board to Apple, Sony, Kobo, etc.–at the time I signed up for it back in May, it wasn’t possible for me to sell on B&N, for instance, because I wasn’t based in the US).

Gotta hand it to Amazon, it’s pretty simple to open an account and upload your book file once you have everything. I can get paid via bank transfer, which is handy (but I understand this isn’t possible everywhere, and that this can be a pain in the %%% when you don’t sell enough books to reach the minimum amount necessary for them to issue a check). Smashwords is also pretty simple, although what I did was upload the EPUB file direct without trying to format a compatible Word document, which I’m given to understand is more of a headache (I did end up fighting a bit with their uploading system, which flagged non-existent errors and wouldn’t let me publish).

Cheryl Morgan also very kindly offered to publish the book on her Wizard’s Tower Books ebookstore, which puts me in fabulous company as well as giving me a more targeted market.

The split from my sales so far is: 89% sales through amazon (all Kindle stores conflated), 8.5% through Smashwords (about 1/3 of these are direct smashwords sales, and the rest is a conflation of other retailers like Apple, Kobo…), and 2.5% through Wizard’s Tower Books.

-Stuff I wish people had told me before: the tax withholding from Amazon and Smashwords if you’re not a US resident. I didn’t know that 30% withholding was the norm, and that you had to fill forms to get them not to do that anymore (see here for handy guidelines if you’re not a US citizen and not living in the US)–and that it took up to 1-2 months for this to be taken into account.

-Accounting: Smashwords is great, they pay you at the end of a given quarter via Paypal and that’s it. Amazon is… odd. I still haven’t quite worked out their payment logic. They also account separately for every store and every royalty percentage (I get 70% within some countries and 35% within others), so reading the sales files can rapidly become a headache–not to mention the fact that for stores where I don’t sell a lot, I basically am not seeing any money for months. Well, I guess at least I do get paid at some point…

-End results: obviously the experiment is still ongoing, but overall I’m pretty pleased. I published in the leadup to the Nebulas, at the time the novella was announced as a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards, which considerably helped visibility. I did a couple promo items (on SF Signal and other places), though due to pregnancy fatigue plus the headaches involved in selling our house plus buying a new one I wasn’t really aggressively marketing, and more relying on word of mouth. The first payment from amazon basically went into paying for the cover, but from now on it should be all profit (the kind of fabulous profits that will allow me to book my dream holiday to Mũi Né–hahaha wait, maybe not).

So, that’s my experience with ebook publishing–what about you? Have you done it yet, and how has it worked for you?

The view from our window

So, we have survived the move,–except that we live among a pile of boxes at the moment, and spare time is pretty scarce. There is an internet connection, but we’re busy unpacking and setting up. Hopefully more soon…

Two very different animes:

My-Hime is set in an academy on an island, and follows the trajectory of Himes, girls who discover themselves to have special powers (namely, bonding to a Child, a creature whose power they’re then able to call on–but only on condition they wager the life of the person dearest to them). The main character, Mai, takes care of her sick little brother Takumi, but soon gets embroiled in the business of Himes, and the sinister purpose behind them… I really like the relationships between the girls, and the fact that the person dearest to them isn’t necessarily a romantic attachment; but rewatching it, it’s hard to ignore the ginormous amount of fan service (the anime focuses on breast to the extent it becomes frankly creepy, and don’t get me started on the mini episodes at the end of each big episode, which feature way too much nudity, implied or otherwise). Also hard to ignore the fact that the one lesbian turns into a raging psychopath (to be fair, a lot of people aren’t shown at their best, but since she’s the only lesbian it becomes problematic). Still, I quite like the anime. It’s soapy as heck, and has a big tendency to the melodramatic, but that ending always has me in tears.

Meanwhile, all you need to know about Mawaru Penguindrum is that it was written by Ikuhara Kunihiko, aka the man who brought you Revolutionary Girl Utena. So if you don’t like symbolism-heavy anime, or anime where things fail to be tied together with a little bow… best to give Mawaru a pass, really. It’s kind of hard to summarise, but it deals with the relationships between the three teenage members of the Takakura family, who live on their own following an unspecified tragedy. The youngest sibling, Himari, is seriously ill; and when she dies (in episode 1, so no spoilers) and is revived, her two brothers Kanba and Shouma find themselves hunting for the mysterious penguindrum.

OK, that’s making it sound way more serious than it is. It’s an anime with penguins and in which people actually utter the sentence “the dark bunnies of fate” quite seriously. For about half its length, it’s also overly concerned with the really creepy obsession of a teenage character for an adult teacher, and I really could have done without the implied rape scene in episode 14 (and the psychotic bixesual. Sigh). But then, about halfway through, you earn exactly what the Takakura parents did, and it shifts gears–into a meditation on fate, loss and whether guilt can be passed on from person to person (and you understand why the anime itself is so focused on the subway system. In retrospect, had I been a little more cognisant of Japanese culture, I probably would have understood much earlier). Like Utena, it sort of doesn’t quite make sense but ends with a strong punch that’s enough to make you forget that it doesn’t. Definitely worth a watch; though it’s a bit of a shame the female characters have a tendency to get sidelined, especially towards the end.

Locus kindly interviewed me for their August edition. You can find an excerpt from the interview here (and a neat picture that handily disguises the snakelet bit of the equation).

Many thanks to Liza Groen Trombi, Francesca Myman and the rest of the Locus team (and wow. If anyone had ever told me I’d share a cover with Kim Stanley Robinson…).