A book deal for Charlie
As
reported
in Publisher’s Weekly, Vintage Books will bring
Machine Man to life in print form in the US & Canada,
most likely in 2011. This will be a rewritten version of what’s
currently going up online—since I think the two mediums have very different
requirements, plus I haven’t yet seen a first draft I didn’t want to rewrite. Or
any draft, actually. But that’s my personal issue. So anyway, once I finish the serial,
probably later this year, I will start trying to figure out how the hell
I do that.
The particularly cool part is that Vintage (like Scribe in Australia & New Zealand) is happy for me to keep the serial online. Which may sound obvious to you, but that idea caused some publishing industry minds to EXPLODE. Their natural inclination is to scrub the internet free of any potentially competing versions whilst locking down e-books so tightly they don’t work on your device. That’s possibly just my bitter experience talking. But this is a significant step for a publisher, and I’m really happy Vintage took it. I didn’t want to take down my online serial. That would be like leading my child into a forest and abandoning her there. Then, I guess, going home and building a new child based on the first one. And offering her in print form. Wait. This analogy may have gotten away from me.
What we’ll have, then, is the original, unedited serial online, and a more polished (I was going to just say “polished,” but that could be a stretch) novel based on it. Given my track record of rewriting books until they cry, it will probably differ quite a lot from the serial. But on the other hand, it won’t have reader comments. Which is a shame, because those are awesome. It’s like book club five days a week.
This all makes a pretty amazing outcome for a project I started just because a reader bugged me. It’s been successful in a whole lot of ways. So thank you.
P.S. I can’t believe that Publisher’s Weekly’s “Deals” section, by Rachel Deahl, isn’t called “Deahls.” That’s a no-brainer.
P.P.S. My favorite sci-fi site just posted an article about this entitled “Max Barry Jams In Public, Creates A New Publishing Model, Slices Your Legs Off.” Ahh, bless your nerdy hearts.
14 comments
Me referenced in bash script: http://bit.ly/RIQ2T. I am so turned on right now.
Me talking about risk (video): http://bit.ly/4cXIN
Risk
Here’s me talking about risk:
(Link: Max Barry On Risk, ABC Fora or via The Monthly.)
Actually, first that’s Julian Morrow, introducing me. I feel I should point this out because you don’t see me very often, and even to me, all thirty-something white guys with no hair look the same.
Australians with digital TV can catch this on ABC2: an extract (I think) this Sunday at 6pm, and the full thing on Thursday at 5:30pm.
This lecture was for Sydney PEN’s Voices, and delivered at the State Library in Sydney on July 15, 2009. It’s not the kind of thing I usually do. In fact, it’s probably the first time I’ve been asked to write something serious since I became a novelist. It was a cathartic experience: I’m deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to do it, and to the audience on the night for being so supportive.
Two pigeons having sustained, vigorous sex outside my study window. I'm a little intimidated.
Gahh! How can I be sick again??
Landed in Canberra. There are cows right outside the airport.
Entering ABC studios. Doing pre-interview routine: whispering, "You're cool. You're cool" to self.
Outside Sydney State Library, called home to say nigh-nigh to Fin. Explained that Daddy has to read some other people a story tonight.
Me in the Media
As I write this, my intestines are trying to crawl out of my body. They’re
very determined. No, no, I don’t want your sympathy. Well, all
right, then. Maybe just a blanket. And my feet are kind of sore. You could rub
those.
But I’m not writing to let you know of my gastrointestinal issues. That’s just a bonus. I’m writing because I’m doing stuff:
Me on Australian TV: I’m a panelist on “Jennifer Byrne Presents: Brave New Worlds,” discussing Utopian/dystopian fiction. This is my first ever TV panel, and the more time that’s passed since it was taped, the surer I’ve become that I was A TOTAL DICK. But I’m hoping they edited those parts out. To find out, tune in to ABC TV at 10pm Tuesday.
Me speaking: I’m delivering two talks on “Risk” as part of the PEN Lecture Series, in Sydney (Wed 15th July, with The Chaser’s Julian Morrow) and Canberra (Tue 21st July, with Genevieve Jacobs). This will eventually be available on the web somewhere too, possibly here. Relatedly, here is me being interviewed about the upcoming lecture. Notice how carefully I speak while trying to hold my bowels together. That’s professionalism.
Fruit Duty at Fin's kindergarten. Almost killed a boy by not reading allergy chart, otherwise fun.
Now that’s real-time
Yesterday I did something very cool. You might not think so. If you’re the
sort of person who paraglides, for example. Or leaves the house most days.
But for me: totally exciting.
In the morning, I carried my coffee upstairs to my office and checked my email. This is almost always a bad idea, but still, hard to resist. I had a message from Meredith, who said she was very much enjoying Machine Man. That wasn’t the cool part. Well, it was. It’s always cool when someone tells you they like something you wrote. It never gets old. But what came next was even cooler: Meredith was a neuroscience major. She wrote:
I’m surprised he doesn’t have any phantom pain, since that’s extremely common; while the prosthetics would help trick the brain for sure, with that many limbs taken off, he would certainly have pain. No one totally understands phantom pain, but the idea is that our perceptions are not totally sensory; they are, in a large part, just our brain’s best guess. So, basically, the brain guesses that the limb is still there, but you can’t control it (unclench the phantom fist, etc.). A very simple technique has just been developed by Dr. Ramachandran at UCSD that is incredibly successful: Using a $5 drugstore mirror to make the arm that’s still there look like the arm that got cut off. This makes the brain think that what your one arm is doing, the phantom arm is doing. So those with phantom pain can get rid of an uncomfortable position.
I knew of phantom pain, of course, but thus far hadn’t thought of anything interesting to do with it. Now, thanks to Meredith, I did. Suddenly phantom pain seemed extremely interesting. So I opened up a blank page and began writing.
Often people email me interesting things about the subject areas in which I write. After Company, for example, I heard a lot of terrific workplace horror stories. Which is great, but I always think, “I wish I’d heard that two years ago.” Because then I could have used it in the book.
Yesterday, I sat at my desk with no idea what I would write for that day’s page, received an email from a neuroscience major, wrote something based on her insights, and published it. Then, to make it even better, the first reader comment (from always-interesting Pev) was: “Nice research on phantom limb pain, Max.”
This is the kind of research I can dig: the kind other people do for me, before I even know enough to ask. It’s not the first time it’s happened with this story. And it’s a totally unexpected side-benefit of the real-time serial format. I’m loving this.
Jen is devouring the Twilight novels. Should I be worried?
I have a cold. NOT SWINE FLU. A cold.
Ever since I started emptying my coffee grounds in the plant outside, small, jittery birds have been digging it up.
Up to my elbows in Perl. I like Perl. Yeah, I'm the one.
Started selling Machine Man from my website via PayPal. So far nothing has gone horribly wrong. That's a win.
Heh, "reader's block." From: http://bit.ly/VVlcQ
Going to hospital to have Fin's cast removed. She's excited. Haven't told her yet this involves buzzsaw.
Girl at my talk: "I want to be you." Which is funny, because I want to be blonde and 16.
Heading to Eltham College to talk to 16-year-olds about writing. This could get messy.
Magic day with my daughter… lunch on the grass outside the State Library while she chased pigeons.
Machine Man update
Seriously:
I’m making this story up as I go. I didn’t say that just to lower your
expectations. It’s a work in progress. I haven’t plotted it out in advance.
I write each page a few days before you see it.
I’d like to believe the reason I keep getting emails like, “Come on, tell me: how much of this have you written already?” is that people think Machine Man is so amazingly brilliant that no mere mortal could dream it up on the run. Unfortunately, I have to face the fact that you just think I’m shifty.
So look, I swear: it’s for real. I’ll show you the blank pages I haven’t written yet.
Anyway. Six weeks in, I’m thrilled. I like the story, I like checking the latest comments about each page, and 2,700 people have signed up for it. The unsubscription rate is 7%, meaning 93% of people who try it out via email stick with it, which I couldn’t be happier about. Well, I guess I could. 100% would be better. But maybe that 7% just changed email addresses. Or someone close to them died and they couldn’t handle any contact from the outside world for a while. You can’t rule that out.
Now some news:
Machine Man is going to be a book. You know, a real one. My Australian publisher, Scribe, decided there was no need to wait to find out whether the rest of the story—i.e. most of it—would be any good, and offered for print rights. That’s some pretty good blind faith right there. I’m touched but slightly afraid.
I did an interview on Machine Man for LiteraryMinded.
I’m enjoying this enough to see it though, so the end of the free feed is nigh. I’m thinking Chapter Ten; i.e. the last free page will be 43. That’s eight and a half weeks in, which seems about right. Actually, page 33 would have been a good place, story-wise, but I hadn’t gotten around to setting up PayPal. Soon, anyway, you’ll have the opportunity to pay $6.95 for the rest of the story. If it helps, you can think of me using that seven bucks to buy shoes for Fin. Look at her! Right now she has to walk around in baskets.
And a few thoughts:
My favorite chapter so far is Chapter Five, which contains my favorite page (20), which contains my favorite line (“Don’t do that thing.”). I realize this is something no self-respecting author should ever admit, but that line made me giggle like a child.
Biggest surprise was the reaction to page 23. I forgot that nobody but me knew that Lola was into prosthetics. I mean, really into them. And people liked this development. Which was great to discover, you sick bastards.
At the risk of disappointing you by revealing its very mundane origins: Page 21 is more or less the original idea I had for this story. I was walking along one day when I saw an unattractive man in a beautiful car; I had a notepad with me and wrote down: The cars are better than the drivers. I thought about this while waiting for the train, at which point I added: I want to be a train, which is essentially page 2. The rest follows naturally, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Anytime anything interesting happens, I see everyone's heads down, tweeting about it.
If swine flu was as infectious as the idea of swine flu, we'd all be dead by now.
SHE'S CONTAGIOUS
Uh-oh. Stomach… clenching. Gorge… rising…
Woke to: "Daddy? I've done a vommie." Now five chucks and counting. Poor bunny.
I think I've finally figured out Twitter. The idea is to rank everyone on the planet by popularity. Right?
It's impossible to put on your shoes and urinate at the same time. I'm just saying.
It's a Daddy Day! So far I have played dress-ups, teased kittens, and supervised a poo. What have YOU done?
Had maybe-idea for serial to write after Machine Man. Good day.
Mmm, Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade beckons. What could possibly go wrong?
Taping over. Adrenaline crashing. So… tired…
Makeup on for taping of show. Resemble wax statue of self. Kind of turned on.
Boarding plane for Sydney. I just met legendary Aussie YA author John Marsden, I think I love him.
"Book Club" TV show featuring me scheduled to air July 14 on ABC. Flying to Sydney for taping this Friday. Wheee!
Jen's hives apparently caused by plant known as "pregnant onion." Pregnant with DANGER.
Terrifying Love
Forgive me, but I need to get this off my chest. I am a
Richmond Tigers fan.
That’s a football team. And by football, I mean Australian Rules. I don’t
want to get into a whole debate about which football code is best,
but it’s this one. Let’s just stipulate that and move on.
I began following the Tigers when I was about eight. Looking back, I think it was the exact moment they transitioned from a league powerhouse to the most spectacularly unsuccessful football team of the last quarter-century. I love the Tigers, but so far the journey has comprised three or four moments of ecstasy in an ocean of misery and despair.
Currently we are at the bottom of the ladder, with zero wins. We are probably about to sack our coach. I have been a strong supporter of our coach over the last five years, because he is smart. Our previous coach was not smart, and that didn’t work out so well. So this was a refreshing change.
But now I’m thinking smart is overrated. It’s useful. But it doesn’t seem to be as important to winning games as other qualities; in particular, being Terrifying and Lovable.
Because
I woke at 5AM this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep, I decided to rate
AFL coaches on those three dimensions. I scored a coach highly on
Terrifying if he is combative in interviews, physically intimidating, and
generally looks seconds away from pushing somebody’s head
through a wall. He scored Lovable points if he is the sort of bloke I
would want to share a beer with or invite home for dinner. And I awarded
Wily points if he is clever and tactical, both on match day and in the media.
(Incidentally, my first thought was to rate coaches based on how many Google hits their names returned when coupled with relevant words. But I couldn’t find ones that worked. The word “tough,” for example, occurs frequently in articles about Richmond, but in contexts like “tough season,” “tough luck,” and “Convincing anyone to coach this club will be tough.”)
It turned out that Terrifying was about twice as important as Lovable in terms of modeling a coach’s success, and Lovable in turn was about twice as important as Wily. This explained a lot for me. Richmond’s current coach, Terry Wallace, is very Wily, but not very Terrifying, and a little too self-interested to be Lovable. Our previous coach, Danny Frawley, was very Lovable, but neither Terrifying nor Wily. And I suspect Lovable can only take you so far: if you keep losing games, you probably become rapidly less Lovable. Those coaches who have a significant impact in their first year or two, then are powerless to stop their team sinking down the ladder: I think they’re Lovable coaches losing their shine. And one more thing: this accounts for the vogue toward younger coaches. “Lethal” Leigh Matthews, an extremely successful coach over many years who was nonetheless replaced last year, was one of the most physically intimidating men the game ever produced, but at 57, he wasn’t getting any more Terrifying.
Based on this, I hope Richmond’s next coach will be Nathan Buckley. I have no idea whether he’s any chop as a tactician, but he seems like a really decent, stand-up guy who might, if you annoy him, tear off your arms. Perfect.