Hand me my Chewbacca costume
In a few weeks I’m going to my first ever science-fiction convention:
Continuum (Melbourne, Australia,
11-14 June). They asked me to write a piece for the program book, so
here it is:
I admit it: I am a conference virgin. I’ve never done this before, just about everything I know I got from movies, and I’m hoping it’ll be fun but worried it will be painful. I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do but will be desperately covering this up and pretending I’ve done it loads of times.
At first I wasn’t sure I was qualified to speak about science fiction. Only one of my novels is sci-fi, and even that masquerades as mainstream fiction. But then I thought about it:
- I use Linux, read Slashdot, and program web games, and yes, yes, there’s no proven link between tech geekery and science-fiction, but we all know the correlation is there
- I think Neal Stephenson is a god
- Jennifer Government is being developed as a sci-fi movie by Steve Soderbergh and George Clooney, and I think this is the coolest thing ever
- I once met Chris Carter and got to hang out with the X-Files people
- My agent went to college with Joss Whedon, and this deeply impresses me
- I believe that the Star Wars prequels are not just bad but desecrations
- I have trouble finding purpose in a world without Buffy
So dammit, I am qualified. I also thought about some of the short stories I’ve written over the years:
- Plucky crew dock with what appears to be a deserted spacecraft but isn’t
- Girl’s best friend hits puberty before she does; also becomes werewolf
- Six-year-old girl sees alien invasion as opportunity to get back at her brother
- Teenagers hang out on the beach and tell scary stories until they all get eaten by weird bugs
- Small group of post-Earth survivors defend their homeworld against what is ostensibly alien attack but turns out to be other human survivors
- High school girl has sex with exchange student, goes nuts, gets hit by a train
Admittedly, most of these were written in high school, and featured my classmates as characters. The last one, for example, was called Jenny, and was very popular with everyone in my year except for Jenny. (I ended up marrying her, though, so she must have forgiven me.) Still, I’ve written my share of SF and H.
Not that you’d know, though, because none of these has ever been published. It is, I’ve discovered, very tough to sell fiction in Australia. The only way I managed it was to get an American publisher, which was not only easier than landing a local one, but made me abruptly more attractive to Aussie publishers. There is something bizarre about having to go to America to impress an Australian publisher, but the fact is new writers require heroic measures to get noticed. I have some experience with this, which I’ll be sharing in my Shameless Self-Promotion panel on Monday.
So if you’re interested, come along. Just remember, it’s my first time. Be gentle.
Retrospective #1
Now we return to some stories we were following earlier. In response to
My
life as a sex god, several people wrote in to inform me
that I am not attractive. Jennifer, for example, wondered if she’d
missed something:
How can these fans tell youre pretty? It CERTAINLY isnt from the pics you post on your site.. have you actually looked at those?
While Jonnie was more emphatic:
I really don’t think that you’re that good looking. Maybe no one has told you this, but your HEAD is WAY TOO BIG for your body!
What!? I thought everybody had to deal with their head sinking down and mashing the keyboard from time to time. Now I find out I have to hang out next to James Van Der Beek just to look normal? It’s… oh. Wait, I see what’s happened here. Jonnie mistook that stick figure with my head on it for a full-length photo.
After I expressed a wish for a Rent-A-Friend in Throwaway dialogue as art form, just like in Newlyweds, Steve was quick to put his hand up:
I just wanted to officially state that I will be your “RENT-A-FRIEND” in Portland, OR. You call and I am there. I will cackle with joy at every phrase.
I tell you what, if this works out, I’m putting Steve on permanent retainer.
Several Canadians wrote to tell me they planned to take immediate action following my Snubbed by Canada post, in which I lamented the fact that my last royalty statement for Syrup showed a paltry six sales there. I am now looking forward to a big turnaround. Based on these letters alone, sales are set to almost double!
Finally, part of the Mysterious Packages puzzle has been solved, with Sharon confessing she sent me the Office Space DVD to repay me for posting her a book. I’m pretty sure Sharon already paid me plenty for postage, so I’m grateful for her generosity, or early-onset senility. The other part of the mystery, though—that strange “Jennifer Government #75” card—remains unsolved. Spooky.
Jen cheapened in Australia
The Jennifer Government B Format hits shelves across Australia
today—B Format being a smaller, cheaper paperback
edition. The theory behind releasing multiple editions of the same book
is that it’s already sold as many copies to actual
interested readers as it’s going to, so the only way to
generate new sales is to make it price-competitive with bird cage liner.
Although the first edition of Jennifer Government in Australia was thirty bucks,
so this time around it’s really just price-competitive with other books.
Available now in all good bookstores and most of the crap ones, here are also some places to buy online: Angus & Robertson, Collins Booksellers, Dymocks and Booktopia.
My life as a sex god
I’m becoming more attractive. At first I merely
suspected this, but now I’m sure of it: I am heaps better looking
than I used to be. I must be, because more and more I get
e-mails telling me that I’m pretty, and previously I never got
any. I think you’ll agree there’s only one logical conclusion:
my looks are increasing in a linear relationship with my age.
By the time I reach 80 I will be an irresistible
sex symbol and have to fight off young women with my
walking frame.
Just today, for example, I received an e-mail from Toni who says:
Oh………. and you are absolutely the hottest thing since bluetooth
Whoa! For a web geek like me, that’s so hot I have to adjust my USB cable. Earlier this year on my American book tour, a girl asked me to sign her bra. Admittedly, she wasn’t wearing it at the time, which makes the incident less sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll than please-label-your-clothing-before-laundering, but still: that never happened before. It used to be that girls were very determined to keep me away from their bras.
I got a tip-off, though, that perhaps there was more to this than simply my being a chiseled example of desirable manhood when one e-mail said:
you’re relatively handsome for a writer
Ah, yes. Of course. I had forgotten: my competition is Salman Rushdie and Peter Carey. Everything is relative.
Snapped
I was interviewed for Melbourne’s
MX Magazine
this afternoon (article to run on Monday), and they wanted
to take some photos.
I said, “Smiling, looking serious, funny expressions, what?”
“Funny expressions,” said Nic, the photographer. “We like funny expressions.”
So, ignoring the fact that I was standing in a very public and busy part of Melbourne and passing businessmen were doing things I couldn’t see but were sure were inappropriate behind my back, I did what I could.
Nic sniggered. “What was that, your Magnum look?”
“Hey,” I said. “I thought you photographers were meant to build up my confidence. Lower my inhibitions. Develop a bond of trust between photographer and subject.”
“You don’t have a confidence problem,” she said.
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Snapped
Lost in the Amazon
The average rating of any book on Amazon.com is four stars. No
matter how brilliant or terrible: four stars. The only exceptions are:
- If the book is brand new, its rating is five stars because the only reviews have been secretly written by the author.
- If the book is widely unknown, it has four and a half stars because the only people who have bothered to post reviews are devoted fans.
- If the book gets lots of publicity and everyone says it’s great, it gets three and a half stars because people complain it’s overhyped.
Before the UK launch of Jennifer Government, I had a chat over lunch with my British editor about the despicable things publishers do. It was a long and wide-ranging discussion, as you can imagine. But the part that’s relevant here is that he said, “It seems that if you post a truly awful review on Amazon, a completely over-the-top bashing, it’ll generate four or five very positive reviews in response.” Then he added, “Not that we would do that,” which was just as well, because I was getting nervous about their marketing plan. But he’s right: Amazon is not so much a collection of reader reviews as a forum for people to argue about books.
I find it tough to read Amazon’s user reviews of my own novels, partly because they can be incredibly scathing and partly because many are written by obvious lunatics and their fevered scratchings bear little resemblance to English. Bada-boom! Oh yeah, that felt good. Anyway, bad user reviews range from the vicious (“Much better than William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition! But that’s not saying much”) to the really vicious (“If you must read this book, do some good and support your local library. Sales will only encourage mediocrity”). It’s difficult to restrain the urge to track these people down, follow them to their work, and stand behind them all day yelling, “Hey, everyone! Carl’s doing a crappy job! His work is lazy and uninspired, and if you ask me, he should be unemployed! Frankly, even I could flip burgers better!” But that would be churlish.
Even the good user reviews can be a little frustrating. Take this review of Jennifer Government from hutsutraw in New Jersey:
This book has a lot of characters, blazing story - you really have to focus on what is going on where and with who. It is a fast paced, entertaining story. The only fault I have with this book is the lack of character description. Other than that, it’s definatly worth reading.
Great! Me, I dislike physical description (but that’s a subject for another blog), but I understand that not everybody feels that way. Thanks, hutsutraw. Only… wait a minute… what’s the rating? Three frickin’ stars! Three! Because I didn’t tell you what color shirt everyone was wearing? I get three out of five for writing a novel that is allegedly flawless in every way except that!?
I tell you, it’s not good for the blood pressure. I’m not one of those writers who refuses to read reviews of his stuff, but I can definitely see where they’re coming from. Matthew Reilly, an Aussie author, once told me, “If you believe good reviews, you have to believe bad ones, too.” My view is a little different. It seems to me that people who write good reviews about my books are intelligent, discerning, witty, and extremely good-looking. Bad reviews, on the other hand, are written by escaped asylum patients. I know, what are the odds? But experience really does seem to bear this out.
P.S. Humble apologies to everyone on the mailing list who got two copies of my latest few posts. I think the problem has been fixed now.