Back to School

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It’s already back to school time yet again. Rhett Allain at Dot Physics has a nice post with advice to students, faculty, and administrators. Believe it or not, this will be the first time in 25 years that September has not meant a return to the classroom for me (this includes four years as a teacher and 21 years as a student — counting preschool). Other than a major relocation, September will be just another month of work as a writer.

But even if I never teach again, education will always be a major interest of mine. Making education work for everyone seems like it should be simple, but somehow it isn’t. There are students dealing with poverty, abuse, English as a new language, medical issues, learning disorders, or simply a teacher whose style doesn’t match with their own. Yet with few exceptions, they have more say over their own educational path than their teachers, parents, national leaders, or anyone else. Like Dorothy in Oz, the ones that beat the odds realize at the end, they had the power all along.

Indepedence, determination, initiative, stamina . . . this is all it takes. But no one develops these qualities overnight, and it’s a much tougher challenge to try to develop these qualities in someone else. This is where it gets complicated. And this is where I call bull on those pundits and politicians who claim a single, Magic Bullet solution to a “broken” educational system (e.g., charter schools, standardized testing). If there were any single thing that worked consistently to turn out committed, independent learners, absolutely everyone would be doing it.

Orwell and $500, 000 Books

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I received a bit of happy news today. The Canadian publisher has agreed to send me an advance copy of Haruki Murakami’s newly translated, IQ84. It will be released in North America near the end of October. The title is a play on words, the q and nine being pronounced the same way in Japanese. The book is a tribute to Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, and it got me to thinking, I’ve never read Anthony Burgess’ variation on the same theme, so I thought I might pick up a copy. Here’s what I found:


That’s right, a new copy is available for the low, low price of half a mil.

My bad, it’s “almost like new”. But look, 98% of the previous millionaire book-buyers have been satisfied.

There’s an explanation for this, and here it is. Presumably the algorithm jdmediabooks is using also happens to like nice, round numbers.

 

Becoming a Real Writer: What’s a Real Writer?

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Even defining oneself as a real writer is a tricky proposition. Are we talking professional versus amateur? Well, by the strictest definition, professional writers don’t exist, as writing doesn’t fall under the definition of a professional career (i.e., a certain set of formal training requirements, a professional association which is in charge of accreditation/licensing, as well as disciplining its members if they break their professional code, as with architects, lawyers, physicians, etc.). Sure, there are journalism degree programs, writing workshops, but these are, to varying degrees, optional.

What about money? If you get paid you’re a real writer, right? I once received a cheque, very early in my part-time writing, for under $5.00 for a story I had written. Was I a pro from that point forward? SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) has specific guidelines before they’ll recognize you as a pro SF writer, which includes selling a certain number of stories to markets they categorize as professional, all of which pay more than $5.00 per story. So, according to them at least, no.

What if you quit your day job and make enough money to live on just from your writing? Well, that certainly seems reasonable, at least on the face of it. It’s not about getting paid, but getting paid enough, and getting paid consistently that matters. It’s the only way you’ll be able to do it as a living, after all. But if you’re living in your parent’s basement and not paying rent, then getting enough money to buy frozen burritos and slurpees may not be the same as being a real writer.

Having said that, though, plenty of great writers don’t get to ever quit their day jobs. Lots of the magazine articles you read come from freelancers, who may not make enough sales to quit their bartending job. This has been particularly true in the last five years or so where staff jobs are harder to find, and many newspapers and magazines are cutting back or shutting down. On the fiction front, even novelist Steven Gould started writing full-time only very recently, 20 years and half a dozen published books in. What did it for him? His first novel, Jumper, being turned into a movie. But I considered him a real writer long before that.

So, I’m inclined to say you’re a real writer if you write, and people read what you write. Maybe you’re a part-time writer, maybe you’re a writer with a day job, but if that disbars you from being a “real” writer, then there are actually far fewer real writers than most people realize.

Warren Buffett Doesn’t Think He’s Paying Enough Taxes

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And good for him. Sometimes it takes someone with a forensic accounting
degree to pick up on someone not paying enough taxes, but not this
time. His New York Times op-ed is a breath of fresh air.

OUR leaders have asked for “shared sacrifice.” But when they did the asking, they spared me. I checked with my mega-rich friends to learn what pain they were expecting. They, too, were left untouched.

The point is often made that the majority of American, working-class conservatives consistently vote against their own interests. I don’t think the point is made enough that we ought to vote for what’s right for our fellow citizens as a whole, rather than thinking only of our own interest*. (As an environmentally-minded inividual, I would also include future citizens in that consideration.) If nothing else, we’re all dependent on each other, and economic collapse is bad for everyone in the long run.

Link via Scalzi, whose take on this is worth a read.

*Just so we’re clear, I am indeed Canadian, but like many of my countrymen, I follow US politics as carefully as my own.

Sometimes it takes someone with a <a
href=’http://www.forensicaccountingdegree.org/’>forensic accounting
degree</a> to pick up on someone not paying enough taxes, but not this
time.

Science Fiction as Real Literature

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I have a number of reviews on the backburner, but one of the things I’m reading in-between is The Secret History of Science Fiction, an anthology with an agenda. The basic premise, as explained in that link, is that if Thomas Pynchon’s critically-acclaimed novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, had won the Nebula, rather than the much pulpier Rendezvous with Rama, maybe science fiction would have earned some degree of respectability. The person who originally put this argument forward was Jonathan Lethem, a writer known both in literary and sci-fi circles, and his short essay is reproduced here.

I got a little annoyed with Margaret Atwood a few years back when she stated that her excellent novel, Oryx and Crake, was not science fiction. I took that to mean that she felt she was too good to write that speculative stuff. It’s a great novel with important societal themes, but it is unquestionably science fiction. The decision to categorize books in a certain way is usually simply about marketing, and not determined by the author. But it can give the false impression that real literature is one category while science fiction is another.

In reality, quality writing, character-driven narratives, and social relevance can all be found both in and out of science fiction. Science fiction isn’t about style or substance, the only real requirements are that it asks some kind of speculative question and the universe follows rational laws.

Great examples of highly literary science fiction include some of Atwood’s works, another Canadian writer, Robert Charles Wilson’s works (particularly Spin), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s brilliant work, The Wind-Up Girl.

What about something like Slaughterhouse-Five, or Charles Yu’s debut novel, How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe (which I reviewed here), or even Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is as likely as not to be found in the literary or “chick lit” section? If you click that review link, you’ll see I argued that Yu’s novel, at least, is not science fiction.

Is that because the book is a little too post-modern, a little too emotionally immediate for science fiction? How else could a book about time-travel not be sci-fi? I must think that mature themes don’t fit into the genre, which must be limited to juvenile adventure fantasies geared towards 12-year-old boys. Well, no. I don’t consider it science fiction because the book is very self-referential, contains aspects of self-parody, and its narrative follows more of an emotional logic than existing within a consistent, objective universe.

In this case, the work is more meta-fiction or modern allegory than anything else. The metaphor of the narrative takes precedence over the logical details of that same narrative. That’s not a knock, it’s just the kind of book it is, more akin to the style of someone like Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist) than the tighter plots normally found in both general and genre fiction.

The point is, there’s no tier-based system as far as quality goes. You’ll find hack work in every section of the book store. If you know someone who is, or are yourself under the impression that science fiction (or mystery, or fantasy, or historical fiction, etc.) is hack work exclusively, you should consider taking a look at a couple of the books mentioned above (or any number of other great sci-fi works, Flowers for Algernon is rightly on many school reading lists).

Perception is everything. I’ve been stealth gifting non-SF friends with top-tier speculative works for years. (The key is in finding the right edition, without the pulpy covers some of the mass market paperbacks have.) If you’re a lover of literature, and you want to read the best that’s out there, you can’t limit yourself to one genre, even the genre of general or literary fiction. The best writers doing their best work are not found exclusively in any one category.

Marking His Territory

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We have two dogs in our house, a male and female, two and three years old, respectively (with rounding). When we were training our young miss, we used a squirt bottle as a last resort, when verbal commands and positive reinforcement couldn’t get her attention. Veterinarians and professionals from vet tech schools tell pet owners that spraying should be used when other methods don’t work.

To this day, she leaves the room if she sees someone, for example, spraying disinfectant on a counter-top, and she doesn’t like to be outside while we’re watering the garden. She’s still wary, though she hasn’t been squirted in years.

So you’d think she didn’t like getting wet. But at the park last night, she decided to sniff around the same patch of grass our little mister was, well, “spraying”. We’ve had close calls before, and usually give them a heads-up when one isn’t watching where they stick their head, but unfortunately, this time we were too slow.

It bothered us more than them. With urine dripping from her left ear, our little miss continued to go about her business, apparently unfazed. But it occurs to me, since he’s marked his territory, and with no objection from her, this may mean our puppies are officially engaged.

Reviewer Cred

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I’ve made somewhat of a surprisingly realization recently. I don’t need to pay for books anymore. It turns out that if I ask, publishers will pretty much give me what I want for free. I found this out a few months ago when the publicist for a book I was looking forward to passed over all the outlets I normally review for. I decided to take a shot at simply contacting the publicist and asking if I could have a review copy, providing links to a couple recent books I’d reviewed for that publisher, and basically saying I could publish the review wherever they wanted.

I wasn’t sure I had the reviewer cred to pull it off, but the book arrived shortly and, emboldened by my success, I went down my Amazon wish list and started grabbing publisher imprints and sending e-mails. So far no one’s turned me down. In some cases there was no e-mail response, but the book and press kit still arrived promptly. I’ll still buy books — I read as much stuff from decades or centuries ago as recent releases, and that’s what used bookstores are for, after all — but for those brand new titles that still have publicists working them, I’ll hit them up for a copy.

***

Although my first foray into writing for an audience was in my student days, for my university newspaper, I’ve been reviewing books for various online magazines nearly as long as I’ve been writing news articles. And I still enjoy getting advanced reading copies of work I’ve been looking forward to. I thought it was a pretty sweet deal as a student still in my teens, and it still seems like a good deal to me today.

I know that technically I could save the two hours I typically spend on a review for paid writing work instead, and then buy the books I want with money left over, but you have to break it up. Some of my paying gigs are of a technical and very constrained nature, utilizing my scientific background and following very specific style guidelines, and it can get tedious. I need to always remember that I enjoy writing, and a good way to do that is to write things that I want to write, not just what I’m being paid to write. This blog should also ideally fall into that category.

And there is a balance. I prefer a certain degree of scheduling tension, which forces me to do this “for the love” writing within a reasonable time-frame, and on a regular basis, and that’s why I commit to a schedule for my unpaid writing just as I do with my paid writing. Agreeing to review something is a perfect example of writing for the joy of it, but still being committed to a reasonable turnaround time. Of course, there is a little more leeway in my schedule than with my paid work.

Science Fiction to the Rescue in WWII

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I reviewed the new Heinlein biography recently, which I quite enjoyed. It’s the first of a planned two-volume project, so I am also eagerly anticipating the second, particularly since by the end of part one, only Heinlein’s first couple of books had been mentioned (along with a few notable shorts).

This volume was surprisingly interesting given that the majority of it covered Heinlein’s life prior to his full-time writing career. After all, the reason anyone would want to read a bio of a famous author is because they’re interested in his work, but it turns out he was also an interesting man before he became an interesting author. Of course, he also lived in interesting times, and having now read several histories and biographies taking place in the first half of the twentieth century, I find I just can’t get enough of it. So much happened in the century of my birth.

One rather surprising tidbit came after the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated US entry into World War Two. Heinlein, though he had been forced to give up his first career as a naval officer due to pulmonary tuberculosis, tried absolutely everything to get enlisted again for the war. It seems the Japanese attack had an incredible galvanizing effect on US citizenry such that patriotic, able-bodied men (and women) were volunteering left and right, to the point that officers in charge of enlistment couldn’t keep up.

Though still medically unfit to serve, Heinlein was able to use a former officer contact to get in as a civilian engineer at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. His navy contact also requested that Heinlein, working with pulp giant, editor John W. Campbell, try to recruit — no joke — more science fiction writers to come do war work. In fact, in those early days of the new genre of science fiction, many of the writers did indeed have scientific or engineering training. Heinlein ended up bringing in a young Isaac Asimov (a recently minted chemistry PhD), and L. Sprague de Camp to work in the same research facility out of the yard as he.

Heinlein also ended up doing some minor engineering work that, unbeknownst to him, was related to the still top-secret development of radar technology. Across the pond, English SF giant, Arthur C. Clarke, was also working more directly on radar applications.

Pretty cool. When the world was in jeopardy, the allies called on their best genre writers to save the day. SF enthusiasts often claim their favourite authors can see into the future. When the Allies needed help, however, these writers were brought in to help create the future. Along with the bomb, radar was the top-secret, brand-new Allied technology of WWII. Future Nobel-winning scientists gave their best for the war effort, alongside future Hugo-winning sci-fi writers. Who’d have thought?

The Freelance Life

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I started this site — which is now, and likely will continue to be, primarily a blog — because I’ve recently started writing full time, and I thought I could justify grabbing my own little piece of the Web. I foresee this as a focus of organization for myself, more to help me keep track of my ongoing projects than to promote them, or myself. It seems like I’ve been writing articles and essays and, yes, blog entries, in my head for some time now, and I need a place to get it down.

I’m sure the blog will develop its own focus over time. One of the things I hope to do is share some of the nitty gritty details that have taken me from part-time writing to being able to take a year off from my day job and being able to pay the bills with words. The full-time writing experience, for however long it lasts, is also something I’d like to get down for posterity. And of course, I’m always looking for work, so any readers out there are invited to contact me for my services.

We’ll leave it at that for now. See you soon.