Just The Caffeine Talking

How To Authorify, Part 3

February 2014 was a revelation to me. Up until A Darkling Sea came out, I still had the quaint belief that the author's job was to write stuff and the publishers took care of selling it. I forgot that one of the most effective selling tools in the publisher's kit is the author. During February I hit the road as a pitchman for A Darkling Sea.

Tor Books did something clever. They had three first-time authors based in New England with books coming out at the same time. So they sent us around as a little traveling show. 

My fellow road crew:

Brian Staveley, author of The Emperor's Blades, the first volume of a Big Honkin' Fantasy Trilogy. Great guy, very energetic and enthusiastic. He's been a teacher and so could use his classroom skills to manage our book appearances.

Ramona Wheeler, author of Three Princes, an alternate history spy story set in a steampunk Egyptian Empire. A very gracious lady with an impressive amount of erudition about all things Egyptian.

After-action Reports

Our first appearance was supposed to be at the Towne Book Center in Collegeville, Pennsylvania on February 4, but a catastrophic blizzard the night before made it impossible to get there, so it had to be cancelled. We're still hoping to reschedule that one.

The second date was the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Holyoke, Massachusetts on the following evening. That was the closest venue to my house. Unfortunately, the same blizzard which overwhelmed Pennsylvania had brushed Massachusetts, and hardly anyone showed up.

A couple of days later the three of us reconvened in Worcester, Mass., at Annie's Book Stop. By that point people had dug themselves out a bit, and we had a small but fun gathering. The staff at Annie's are all hard-core SF and fantasy fans, so it was almost like a miniature science fiction convention.

The next day I drove the length of Massachusetts to a second Barnes & Noble appearance at the store in Hingham. That was a Saturday with much nicer weather, so the turnout was better. (The bookstore staff did something clever: they set up our reading/signing right next to the store cafe, which effectively doubled our audience. At least a couple of people from the coffeeshop drifted over to the signing table afterward.)

Another couple of days off. I discovered that it isn't as easy as I thought to alternate between road trips and writing, especially since I still have to squeeze in parts of domestic life as well.

On Tuesday the 11th we met in Portsmouth, New Hampshire at RiverRun Bookstore. That whole day exceeded expectations. Portsmouth was a lot bigger, nicer, and more interesting than I had thought it would be. I drove out early and had time for a nice dinner with Ms. Wheeler and her companion. If you happen to be in Portsmouth I can unreservedly recommend the restaurant Cava.

RiverRun Bookstore is not a huge store, but the manager is intensely professional. The event was well-planned and well-promoted, with New Hampshire SF giant Jim Kelly serving as moderator for a panel discussion by the three touring writers. We drew the biggest crowd of the tour so far.

Another day off, during which I worked to catch up on stuff I'd missed while on the road, and kept an anxious eye on the weather forecast. Note to self: see if I can arrange for my next book to come out in a more pleasant time of year.

On Thursday the 13th I drove out to Cambridge in light snow which turned to sleet as I got closer to the coast. I stopped off at the legendary Pandemonium Books and Games to "sign some stock" as we old hands at the book-promotion game put it.

Personal aside: I don't understand buying a signed copy of a book. I'm happy to sign them, and if my scribble helps move inventory, then I'm all for it, but I don't understand it. The signed books I own are signed by people I know or writers I admire, and I got them to do it myself. But just a random signature? I don't get it.

After an unpleasant walk through deepening slush (doesn't anyone shovel their sidewalks in Cambridge?) and a sub-par dinner I got to the mighty Harvard Coop bookstore feeling a little cranky. The staff there, however, were extremely professional and enthusiastic. They must have done a fantastic job of getting the word out, because we had a very good crowd despite the vile weather. Ms. Wheeler was unable to get there, but Brian Staveley and I managed to keep the audience entertained. Afterwards we adjourned to a nearby pub with some of the people from the signing, and the weather even started to improve. Definitely a successful evening.

As the Boskone science fiction convention began the following day, I simply stayed the night at the convention hotel on my publisher's nickel (a whole bunch of nickels, really). I signed more stock in the dealer room at Boskone and participated in a group reading by the mighty Cambridge SF Workshop. It probably says something about how frazzled I was getting that I can't remember what I read. Something, probably fiction.

I only had about twenty-four hours at Boskone, because on Saturday the 15th Brian and I were scheduled for a reading on his home ground: Bartleby's Books in Wilmington, Vermont. I drove directly there from Boston and had some moments of genuine anxiety as I penetrated deeper and deeper into the wilds of southwestern Vermont with the low gas light on my dashboard glaring at me. Happily I had enough fumes in the tank to reach a station in Wilmington, so Tor Books didn't lose a promising new writer to bears. 

After that I had a whole week off, with no worries but my kids home from school on vacation and another seige of abominable weather.

The big finale to our tour was this past Monday, at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in sunny Manhattan. I spent the morning getting to New York by car and train, and then spent the afternoon strolling from my hotel to the bookstore on foot. Along the way I got to visit the Tor Books offices in the historic Flatiron Building. (Sadly, the inside of the building is fairly generic-looking, unlike Daniel Burnham's wonderful gaslight-era exterior.)

I was a little uncertain whether a bookstore in New York's trendy SoHo district would draw a lot of science fiction readers, but the Housing Works event blew away all my expectations. The store volunteers did a superb job of promoting it as part of their ongoing "Geek Week" event showcasing science fiction, fantasy, and comics. Tor Books ponied up for an open bar, and the result was a packed house. There must have been more than a hundred people in the store.

For this event the travelin' threesome were joined by California dark fantasy writer David Edison, author of The Waking Engine. The four of us answered questions about our books and random topics, played a round of "Exquisite Corpse" to spin a story based on elements suggested by the audience, and (of course) signed a lot of books.

I spotted several New York-based writers in the audience: the fantasy-writing duo of Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, and fantasy-technothriller pioneer Myke Cole, among others. A great time was had by everyone.

Lessons Learned 

So what do I think about book promotion?

I suppose this is where I get to go all rock star and talk about how hard it is being on the road, but the simple truth is that I enjoyed the hell out of this book tour. Writing is a solitary activity, so getting out and meeting people who like books — my book among them — is a tremendous ego boost. For now I'm perfectly willing to go wherever my publisher feels like sending me. 

BUT, I have learned that book tours are pretty much full-time work. While I did get a little mental plotting and brainstorming done during my solitary hours behind the wheel or in the hotel room, I eventually gave up taking my laptop along. (For one thing, having it in my bag made me worry all the time about losing it.)

I got a few opportunities to have nice meals, but I also wound up gobbling down something at Burger King a couple of times. In future I'll try to allow more time for travel, especially when I'm driving in dodgy weather.

There's one stop left on the tour: Flights of Fantasy Books and Games in Albany, New York. I'll be there March 30. Come on out and get a book signed!

More Guest Blog Action!

Here are a couple more guest-blog posts. 

At My Book, The Movie I give my imaginary cast for the entirely hypothetical film version of A Darkling Sea.

At The Qwillery I've got a guest post about sexifying monsters in fiction and film. Don't worry, it's safe for work.

 

It Gets Real

Recently I've been rereading some classic detective stories — some of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, some of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, and some of Raymond Chandler's works. It occurred to me that mystery stories, and the historical development of the genre, had an interesting parallel with science fiction.

 Both science fiction and mysteries began as fundamentally unrealistic. This is obvious with respect to science fiction — there were no Martians invading Britain in H.G. Wells's day, nor vast interstellar wars when E.E. Smith was writing — but it may seem odd to say about mysteries. After all, there really were crimes and detectives when Doyle and Christie were writing, weren't there?

I say that mysteries were fundamentally unrealistic because the early mystery stories, from Poe's "Murder in the Rue Morgue" down to at least the era of Agatha Christie, were completely divorced from the reality of crime and crime-solving. Real-world detectives don't rely on clever feats of deduction or knowledge of obscure trivia. They get the job done by patient legwork and research, asking questions, and (nowadays) making use of technological methods like fingerprinting and DNA matching. The focus is less on figuring out a puzzle and more on building a case which can bring a conviction in court. 

Mystery fiction in its first golden age — the Doyle-to-Christie era — was all about elegant logical puzzles and arcane trivia. A whole subgenre emerged of "locked room mysteries" and similar tales about crimes which appear impossible and therefore baffle the authorities. At times the lengths to which criminals in mystery stories would go to make their crimes unsolvable was frankly insane. And it had nothing to do with any real-life crime and everything to do with the demands of the genre.

 In one of Dorothy L. Sayers's classic Peter Wimsey novels, Lord Peter focuses on figuring out the seemingly-impossible method because once you know how the crime was done, that will lead you to who did it. A real-world cop standing over a man shot to death on a sidewalk, surrounded by neighbors who swear they didn't see it, might not agree with Lord Peter.

I'm not the first person by any stretch to notice this. Raymond Chandler eviscerated the whole genre of puzzle mysteries long ago in his brilliant essay "The Simple Art of Murder." It was Chandler, and other writers of what came to be known as the "hard-boiled" school, who knew something about real crime and real criminals, and began to drag mystery fiction out of its unreal bubble. Oh, to be sure, there are still plenty of amateur sleuths solving cozy mysteries nearly a century after Chandler's essay, but the heart of the mystery genre nowadays seems to be in procedural stories about (more or less) realistic cops and private investigators solving (more or less) realistic crimes.

This shift had a very important follow-on effect. When mystery stories stopped being elegant puzzles set in a kind of Never-Never Land of country houses and eccentric millionaires, the characters in them changed. They became real people, with real motives. For a modern reader, stories like those of Agatha Christie or G.K. Chesterton have a strange, dreamlike quality about them. (Doyle, to his credit, made the settings of his Holmes stories a lot more real and vivid than many of his successors could manage. Compare the grubby London and Thames waterfront he shows the reader in "The Sign of Four" with the fairy-tale city of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.)

 Let me pause here to point out that I'm not saying Chesterton or Christie were bad writers. They were extremely good writers working within the parameters of a very artificial field.  Both of them were masters of gaming the implicit rules and twisting the reader's expectations, which wouldn't have worked outside the "classic" mystery format.

Science fiction, as I said above, had a parallel shift, a generation or so after mysteries. In the case of SF, it wasn't that realism invaded the genre, but rather the genre invaded reality. Science fictional tropes like nuclear weapons, spaceships, computers, satellites, and all the other things we like to brag about predicting turned from fictional to real. Now, obviously science fiction writers have tried to surf the wave and stay ahead of reality, but I think the experience of seeing science fiction turn into science fact had an effect on the creators of the genre similar to what happened to mystery fiction with rise of the more realistic hard-boiled school of writers.

When the setting got more realistic, the characters had to follow. Compare characters in "Golden Age" SF from the 1950s with those in modern stories. It's more than just the change in attitudes from one decade to another. The writers really are paying more attention to characterization and psychological realism. Even in the most old-school contemporary stories, such as — for instance — my own A Darkling Sea, there's a lot more focus on the characters as individuals and how they're affected by what's going on.

It's worth remembering that there was once a split within science fiction almost as sharp as the divide between the old-school puzzle mystery writers and the hard-boiled crowd. In the 1960s the fracture lines between Campbellian SF writers like Asimov, Clement, or DeCamp and the more consciously literary writers like Silverberg and Ellison were quite distinct. As late as 1985 Asimov himself wrote a bomb-throwing essay called "The Little Tin God of Characterization" in which he tried to reclaim SF as a literature of ideas instead of, well, literature.

Interestingly, this never happened to genre fantasy. Writers like Dunsany, Tolkein, Lieber, and Howard all had extremely well-realized characters and settings right from the start. I wonder if that's one reason fantasy never quite had the "kid stuff" stigma that bedeviled science fiction. I can still save my thesis though, by positing that fantasy, as a modern literary genre, is the the more realistic development of the ur-texts of fantasy — fairy tales, folklore, and myths. Genre fantasy is what you get when you write about real people in a fairy tale or myth.

I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that this is a law of literature: that when you write realistically about something, the people in the story have to get more realistic to match. Has anyone else noticed this? If not, I want to claim it as Cambias's Law.

Lovecraftian Interlude

Recently I've been re-reading H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness for the umpty-ninth time. It's one of my favorite stories, and like many great stories one keeps finding new bits in it. This time around I noticed something subtle, so subtle I can't make up my mind if Lovecraft meant it deliberately or not.

It's about one of the minor characters: Professor of Engineering Frank Pabodie (pronounced "Peabody" according to HPL). Pabodie doesn't get any real scenes in the story, and I don't think we ever hear any lines of dialog from him. But at the same time, he's a key figure. He invents the drilling machinery, made of a unique aluminum alloy, which lets the Miskatonic University Antarctic Expedition search beneath the icecap for fossils. Pabodie also comes up with some modifications to the expedition's airplanes, improving their function in the polar environment. He even comes along on the trip to Antarctica, and accompanies Professor Lake on his scouting trip which turns up important fossils and inspires Lake to redirect the entire expedition in order to locate their source.

Awfully helpful, isn't Professor Pabodie? He turns up everywhere — except on Lake's doomed exploration which takes him to the vast mountain range at the heart of the continent. 

In fact, one starts to wonder about Pabodie. He's one of the prime movers of the whole expedition — Why? He's not a geologist, nor a biologist. He could whip up his amazing devices and stay comfortably home in Arkham. He's present at some key discoveries, but manages to miss the trip which ends in a massacre by Elder Things. (Almost as if he suspected something like that might happen.)

As it happens, there's another Lovecraft character who's a master of super-science, knows much more than he tells about Earth's prehistory, and could well have personal reasons for poking around Antarctica. Did he perhaps spend a few years teaching at Miskatonic in order to push the Antarctic expedition along? (Or did he just put on the real Professor Pabodie's skin after he no longer needed it?)

Professor Nyarlathotep, I presume?

Wow

A Darkling Sea has even reached the newly-Bezosicated pages of the Washington Post. No word about whether the reporter had to meet with secretive crustacean informants in some dingy parking garage. Read the review here.

Guest Blog Round-Up!

As part of the process of letting readers know about my new book, I've been doing a lot of guest blogging. It's been fun, and I trust the 'blog-reading public aren't getting sick of hearing from me. Here's my 'blog tour, so far:

For the Tor/Forge 'blog I wrote about building Ilmatar.

For Lawrence Schoen's delectable Eating Authors series I wrote about lunch in New York.

For John Scalzi I explained The Big Idea behind my story.

For Sarah Hoyt I wrote about the radical notion at the heart of A Darkling Sea.

And for Fantasy Book Critic I explained some of the influences that fed into my book.

That's all of them for now, though I've banged out one or two others yet to appear. I kind of like guest-blogging. Not only does it give me the chance to share my thoughts with a different audience, but I'm also discovering new 'blogs and writers I enjoy reading.

On the Road, Week 2

The A Darkling Sea book tour continues! I and my two colleagues Brian Staveley and Ramona Wheeler will be reading, answering questions, and signing books at the following locations.

Tuesday, February 11, 7 p.m.: RiverRun Bookstore, Portsmouth NH.

Thursday, February 13, 7 p.m.: Harvard Coop Bookstore, Cambridge MA.

Friday, February 14, 7 p.m.: I'll be part of a group reading by the Cambridge SF Workshop at Boskone, at the Westin Waterfront hotel in Boston MA. (This isn't part of the book tour, but it's happening in the middle of it.)

Saturday, February 15, 3 p.m.: Bartleby's Books, Wilmington VT. 

On the Road, Week 1

UPDATE: The Towne Book Center signing in Collegeville PA has been cancelled due to snow. I'll let everyone know when it's rescheduled.

Now that A Darkling Sea is in stores, I'm hitting the road to promote it. Tor Books has put together a little traveling carnival, consisting of me, fantasy author Brian Staveley (The Emperor's Blades), and steampunk author Ramona Wheeler (Three Princes).

During the first week we're hitting four bookstores in the Northeastern United States:

Tuesday, February 4, 7 p.m.: Towne Book Center, 220 Plaza Drive, Collegeville PA.

Thursday, February 6, 7 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, 7 Holyoke Street, Holyoke MA.

Friday, February 7, 7 p.m.: Annie's Book Stop, 65 James Street, Worcester MA.

Saturday, February 8, 2 p.m.: Barnes & Noble, 96 Derby Street, Hingham MA.

Come out and meet Tor's new talent. We'll sign books, talk about them, do readings, answer questions — hell, we'll probably sing and dance if you want.