The Novel Viewed As Moldy Bread

Way back at the dawn of time, I used to do research on hypertext. This was the early Eighties and the Web hadn't been invented yet. It was a time of wonderful freedom - like the days before the IBM PC and its Microsoft operating system were invented, when there were dozens of different personal computer architectures and dozens of different operating systems. Once the IBM PC appeared, all that diversity was quashed. Well, the Web did the same for the many budding hypertext systems - all those brilliant ideas were trampled in the rush to the lowest common denominator.

Which is all very dreary, but what's it got to do with writing? Not much, really. It's just that I've started writing a novel as a hypertext and I've been pondering the many ways such an object could be structured. I have a strong urge to write it as a linear structure - beginning-middle-end and everything lined up neatly in between. Something in me says this is how a book should be. But I'm fighting it. I'm trying to force myself out of this groove and to play around with some ideas.

The first, obvious, thing to do would be to have the main plot be linear with a few loops out along the way into sub-plots. The main line and the sub-plot loops could then have little spikes off them for discursion, or minor character backgrounds. This isn't so bad, it may even be something like the real 2-D structure of a book if it didn't have to be 'flattened' into a 1-D line. But there is more that could be done.

The main plot could be a number of threads - different character perspectives, different emphases on the themes of the book, or different interpretations of the action. These threads could be bundled into particular outcomes, based on decisions made one way or another throughout the book. With this approach, the book is now, effectively, many books, depending on the paths you take.

But a book isn't necessarily a sealed entity. As a hypertext, it can grow tendrils out into the wider world of knowledge and opinion. Obscure references can be linked to their exegesis in Wikipedia, the social and political context of the story can be expanded indefinitely, technical terms can be explained, maps can be referenced, animated models and video can reveal what even the best writing might leave unclear. Like a mold growing on the loaf of the Web, the book can thread its ever-branching hyphae throughout its host's body.

It's all fascinating, and the possibilities reminded me of those far-away days, scribbling diagrams on whiteboards, struggling with graph theory, and trying to hammer SGML into something computable.

But what about the reader? How much complexity can a reader take? How many divergent plotlines will a reader tolerate? How many different points of view does a reader actually want to take on a story? Where does a hypertex stop being a novel and start being intellectual masturbation? I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.

In the end, to be kind to my readers, I will probably go with a simple structure - the one I called 2-D a couple of paragraphs ago. But, oh, the possibilities!

'Skyball' now online in Bewildering Stories Issue 324

Why waste your time reading blogs when you could rush over to Bewildering Stories Issue 324 and read my newly-published short story 'Skyball'?

Yes, I'm in print again! And this particular achievement is always going to hold a special place in my heart. It was the first of my sci-fi stories ever to be accepted for publication. It will also be fondly remembered for the process I went through with the editor Don Webb.

Don is a very exacting editor and I had a tough time working the story into a state where he would accept it. He's also an intelligent editor and easy to get along with. I had never been through such an exercise before (although I've been through similar with other editors since) so it was a hugely important and valuable lesson for me which, I hope, will have lasting benefits for my writing.

But the experience didn't stop there. Bewildering Stories includes a set of 'challenge' questions that Don asks as a way of exploring the stories he publishes. These reflect deep and thoughtful insights, and show how intently Don considers the work he publishes. In the case of 'Skyball' the questions reference one of Don's own essays “Space Aliens as Metaphor” which sparked me to draw an analogy between alien invasions in fiction and the Iraq war, which in turn prompted Don to write a commentary on my analogy.

It really doesn't get any better than that.

Writers wishing to have their own 'Don Web experience' are urged to submit their work to Bewildering Stories. This is not a paying market but the value I got from it went way beyond getting a few extra bucks in my PayPal account. Readers looking for good fiction should just go along and read the magazine. Here is an editor working hard to make a serious contribution to the genre.

P.S. Don't mention this to any of my Australian compatriots, but I was telling someone about Don's challenge questions and his other comments and I could see they were impressed. "Is this an Australian magazine?" they asked, sounding confused. "No," I replied. "It's Canadian." "Oh well," they said. "That explains it!"

Is sci-fi the new black?

I've spent many hours now trawling through listings of literary agents, trying to find ones that are sci-fi friendly, and there are very, very few of them. In fact, agents who say they handle sci-fi are outnumbered at least ten-to-one (maybe twenty-to-one) by the ones who go out of their way to say 'No science fiction.'

Now, I know that sci-fi isn't the most popular genre on the block - fantasy out-sells it by ten-to-one, and crime and 'general' fiction are 30 and 40 times more popular, respectively, than sci-fi, and, let's face it, fiction as a whole is less than a third of the total book market - but must sci-fi writers really be treated like pariahs? Must we be singled out and shunned by agents as if we were poets for heaven's sake?

I can only think of a single reason. My guess would be that, although sci-fi books in print represent less than a third of one percent of the books published each year, sci-fi writers represent a large proportion of all writers submitting manuscripts to agents. If only a third of one percent of the MSS they received were sci-fi, agents wouldn't need to mention it. So agents are trying to maximise their chance of finding a publishable book per thousand metres of slush by excluding all the 'noise' sci-fi (and poetry) introduces.

The worst offenders in the 'No peddlers, hawkers and sci-fi writers' stakes are the agencies who say they handle 'literary fiction' or 'quality fiction'. I suppose they're willing to miss out on the chance of a Bradbury, a Vonnegut, or a Ballard, in order not to have to wade through all the space operas and steampunk epics.

Well, there's no harm in asking, I suppose, so, would all the other sci-fi writers out there just stop writing for a few years, please? Then the agents won't need to hold back the floodwaters with such paranoiac fervour and I might actually get one of them to take on my books.

Sci-Fi and Fantasy: Why I like one and not the other

I write science fiction. I read science fiction. I love science fiction.

But why?

Today I read two highly-aclaimed short stories by fantasy writers. Both recently won awards. Both were well-written. Both were well-constructed stories. Both were really, really boring.

Which is a puzzle. Why shouldn't I like fantasy when I like sci-fi so much? Both genres take the reader on journeys into worlds invented and strange, fabulous and wonderful. Just because some worlds contain soul-stealing demons, why should they be less interesting than ones containing mind-stealing aliens? Both genres utilise inventiveness and novelty, and both explore the consequences for their characters of the new ideas they introduce. So why does fantasy leave me cold?

Well, I think I know the answer. The ennui that crept over me as I read these two stories today (rushed over me in one case) showed me just where the fault lay with each piece.

Firstly, they were not real. The novelty, the ideas, the situations, were all just completely made up. Souls, demons, dragons, magic, witches, gods, and all the other paraphernalia of fantasy worlds, are completely and utterly fictional. They bear no relation to the real world whatsoever - except as issues in the psychology of people who actually believe in such things. If you put characters - however realistic - in worlds of magic swords and dreaming gods, my reaction is 'So what?' because such worlds do not and never could exist. It's irrelevant what people would do when confronted by a binding spell because such a situation will never, ever arise.

Secondly, the characters weren't real either. Yes, alright, some of the characters were real enough - ordinary people with ordinary personalities, but there were also purely evil creatures - or creatures inhabited by pure evil, evil spirits, etc.. Sometimes (sadly, not infrequently) you find purely good ones as well. Even if such characters have only minor roles, it spoils the whole story. Like gods and goblins, such creatures do not happen in the world, or in any conceivable real world.

OK. I can hear you clamouring to come back at me on that. Lots of people believe in fairies and angels and such. What's so awful about having them in a story? Nothing, I say, as long as you don't mind me not reading it.

Alright, you ask, why are aliens and cosmic minds and transhumans so much better than elves and magicians? What makes faster-than-light travel and phasers and teleports better than bracelets of power and ley lines and magic pyramids? Well, on the one hand you have things which could exist, are extrapolations of what we already know, or are justifiable leaps of imagination based on actual reality, on the other hand you have things for which there is no plausible way for them ever to exist and which often, quite explicitly, exclude themselves from possibility by being ostentatiously supernatural (as in 'not natural').

Of course, some science fiction (some of the most famous and most popular) also relies on magic. Dune, Star Trek, and Babylon 5 (to name the tiniest few) use ideas like telepathy and telekinesis, Star Wars has The Force - ideas that are clearly in the realms of the supernatural rather than the scientific. For me, such lapses into fantasy spoil a good sci-fi story. By all means confront your characters with superhuman robots and hand-held beam weapons, uploaded brains and wars in space - these are things we might all have to deal with one day soon. But don't make them have to worry about telepathic aliens because (uless they're using wireless networks to connect their brain implants) that just aint gonna happen.

That's why I consider science fiction a completely different genre to fantasy: it is reality-based, fantasy is not. That's why I only like sci-fi and not fantasy: I like to imagine and play with what really could happen, not with absurd impossibilities. That's why I had to force myself to get to the end of these two award-winning stories rather than dump them after the first mention of dark forces: because it seems childish to read stories about things that cannot ever possibly exist.

What Is The Future Of Publishing?

As a one-time Authonomy user (see why I left) I have been following the recent controversy about what happens to their top-ranked authors. Rumour is that not one has yet had a book contract and, instead, some have been quietly offered the chance to take part in a print on demand (POD) self-publishing experiment. Well, Harper Collins, which runs the site, has published an apology for the concern they've caused and assurances that POD is merely another service that HC is offering Authonomy users. It's all very odd, I must say.

But that's not why I'm posting. What struck me about the HC post was that they assured authors who felt like self-publishing that this would not bar them from future publication with HC. To quote:

"And as a publisher we certainly don’t have a problem with authors who have self-published: we’ve acquired a number of authors who took this route initially."

Which is nice to know, since I've read several self-published books which are better than most of the stuff currently on the shelves at my local bookshop. (I'll pass over the hideous grammar of this sentence and the horrible notion that HC 'acquires' authors - as if we were commodities to be bought and sold.)

Agents, publishers and bookshops act as filters on what is available to us to read. Agents and publishers in particular use their professional skills to prevent the great bulk of manuscripts which are poorly written from being published. This, I believe, is a valuable service. It means that, what you see in the bookshops, in the high street and online, meets a minimum standard of coherence and literacy. It is a fairly low standard, but it is there.

But what the agents, publishers and bookshops also do, is try to guess what we the readers will want to buy. So they exclude manuscripts - however well written, however thoughtful, intelligent and insightful - which they do not expect will sell in large enough numbers. The reason for this is obvious: publishers and booksellers need to make money from selling books, and agents need to make money from supplying publishers with books. If the books that are printed don't sell, the whole supply chain collapses.

For the writers of books, this can be a frustrating, infuriating situation. Some writers are not writing commercial works - but they would still like to see them in print. Some writers are producing highly commercial works but their themes or presentation, genres or style, or whatever, are not judged to be saleable that year, or that month. Some writers who produce good, saleable work still don't get a look in because the industry knows it will make more money from a da Vinci Code lookalike, or a celebrity memoir, and each publisher can only do so many books in any one year.

So there are a lot of writers out there who will take the risk and publish their book themselves - because they believe in it, or because they can make enough money from it (even though a publisher couldn't), or because they just don't care about the money. There is a world of talent and excellence in self-published books that the ordinary buying public never sees simply because the agent-publisher-bookshop chain excludes them.

I can understand why each of these groups is loathe to accept that there can be high quality self-published books. The agents simply have no role in the self-publishing supply chain. The publishers are also excluded middle-men. The booksellers can't easily take on self-published books because, without a book going through the agent-publisher filter, there is no guarantee that it will meet even the minimal standards of quality I mentioned earlier - the booksellers would have to become their own filter, judging the books they allowed on their shelves. (For booksellers, there are also issues of quantity, reliability of supply, economies from single-sourcing, and the sale-or-return deals they have with publishers, that would make them wary of self-published works.)

Which all means that the self-published author, no matter how good he or she is, or how saleable his or her book is, is almost inevitably doomed to economic failure because they simply cannot get their product under the noses of the book-buying public. Yet, in this digital age, it has become cost-effective to lay out all our wares - good, bad and ugly - and let the market decide which are the quality products. After all, we find the best blogs to read, the best news aggregators to visit, and the best online shops. The Web has made finding what we need and what we like easier than it has ever been, and a lot quicker and better-focused than marching around town, browsing through bookshops.

There is so much talk these days about the future of publishing - which is mostly about ebooks and other delivery mechanisms. Maybe some of that talk should get down to the basics of how the whole industry could be restructured to let more voices be heard and to give the public more choice in who they listen to.

A Plug For AWM Online

Every Australian writer will be aware of The Australian Writer's Marketplace - one of those 'listings' books like the UK's Writers' and Artists' Yearbook. It's the must-have reference for anyone trying to find places to sell their writing in Australia. What they may not be aware of is the website, AWMOnline. This has all the content of the book (and more) but is searchable. It costs the same to subscribe to AWMOnline as it does to buy the book but, if you ask me, the value you get is much greater.

In a recent attempt to add yet more value for the Australian writer, AWMOnline has established a forum where subscribers can get together and exchange information. It is still very much in its infancy but I have to applaud the effort. Australian writers in particular need electronic fora. Being part of a writing community when you live 250 kms from the nearest city (150 kms from the nearest bookshop!) is not easy. So my hat is off to the Queensland Writers Centre (which publishes The Australian Writer's Marketplace and runs AWMOnline) for this effort to build an online community of writers.

Which means, if you're an Australian writer, or want to sell into the Australian market, subscribe to AWMOnline, and then join in the discussions on the forum. The more the merrier!

Manuscript Brokers Wanted

Agents are brokers. They are the middlepersons who sit between writers and publishers and make the connections between the needs of each group. Trouble is, agents are in short supply.

What we now need is a new kind of broker: one who will sit between agents and writers and make those connections.

I mention this for two reasons. Firstly, I'm looking for an agent. I've just finished my latest novel, TimeSplash! and I'd like to see it published.* Trawling through agents' websites, one by one, trying to understand what genres they like to work in, whether they're accepting new clients, how they like to be queried, and so on, is only part of the work involved. I'm also working my way through authors of similar material, trying to find out who their agents are. None of this is easy. All of it is time-consuming and tedious. The yearbooks for writers that list agents and their preferences are helpful and take a lot of the pain out of the initial stages of the work, but you need one per territory (so, for me, at least Australia, America and the UK) and the printed ones are at least a year out of date already.

Secondly, I just read a blog posting by Janet Reid of FinePrint Literary Management, telling the world that she wants people to send her queries right now so she can read them over Christmas. Wow! If only I wrote crime fiction! This is the kind of service agents should be providing - both to writers and to publishers. It got me thinking just how much easier and more efficient finding an agent could be if they were all willing to let the world know when they were open to new queries.

Of course, even if they were all as proactive as Janet, one would still have to subscribe to the blogs of every agent in your genre. But it would be a start.

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if I could just tell someone what kind of agent I needed and they would then line them up for me? Or if there was a 'clearing house' online where I could tick a few checkboxes to describe my book and up would come a list of a dozen agents around the world, actively seeking for manuscripts of that type? Surely there would be money to be made by someone in starting up an electronic marketplace like this?

On the other hand, even Janet Reid isn't perfect. Consider this post about 'surrogate writers' which basically says she'll dump any query that doesn't come directly from the writer. Makes it kind of hard for the new middlepeople to get into the market if agents don't like hearing from them. But then Janet wasn't talking about my new breed of broker (meta-agents? super-agents?). She was talking about writers who get their mums to send in a query for them! I just hope that, when manuscript brokers start to appear, her email filters won't search for phrases like 'I'm writing on behalf of...' and file their correspondence under 'Junk'.

Meanwhile...

*For any agents reading this, TimeSplash! is a sci-fi thriller, set about forty years in the future and deals with the struggles of two young people trying to prevent a very singular terrorist attack on London. He's doing it because he's a nice guy who just got dragged into it. She's doing it because she has a personal vendetta agianst the terrorist.

Dead America - News of the Dead

Check this out! Writer Luke Keioskie has started up a new website based around the 'world' of his unpublished zombie novel Dead America. The site features news items from Dead America's alternate reality, along with fake adverts offering services, like cosmetic surgery, to zombies.

Apart from being way cool in and of itself, as a marketing vehicle to get a buzz going around his novel, this a fantastic idea. Everyone who has come across Dead America agrees this is a great premise for a novel, and I know for a fact that Luke is a skilled and original writer. Surely it can't be long before a publisher catches on too.

Where do you get your ideas?

As a budding writer, I feel I must prepare for this one. Imagine. An audience of three thousand in a gigantic auditorium. It is the plenary panel session at Schmoozecon, the world's premiere writing convention, and I am up there in an uncomfortable plastic seat along with all that week's great names. A weedy-looking guy in round spectacles near the back of the room stands up and a girl in a Schmoozecon T-shirt rushes over to hand him a microphone.

'Ahem,' he booms, his thin voice amplified almost beyond my pain threshold. 'Could the panel please tell us, where they get their ideas from?'

I cringe at the question. I cringe at the grammar. I cringe at the guy on my left who has already launched into a brief history of tropes in science fiction. I have just ten or fifteen minutes before the chairperson turns her smile my way with a raise of the eyebrows. What do I say?

The truth is, while it may seem odd to people who don't write, there's nothing special about 'ideas' in the sense of 'those things that writers have'. Mostly, they're the same kind of ideas that everybody has but, instead of dismissing them as crazy nonsense, the way a normal person would, the writer hoards them and makes things out of them. Where I might read a news item about how designers are looking at cities holistically, taking an ecological persective on energy use and sustainability, and think, wouldn't it be cool if a designed city led to unforeseen ecological niches within which entirely new life-forms evolved - the way anybody would - the man in the street would simply slap himself across the face and tell himself to grow up, but I would rush to my computer and write an eighty-five-thousand-word masterpiece called 'In All The Dark Places' (or somesuch) in which brick-eating metropoloids drag sleeping humans into their foetid lairs, strip the flesh from their bodies and use their bones to build altars to the concrete-and-glass towers they worship as gods.

It's like collecting bottle tops, or spent matches. The stuff sensible people would throw away. And then building ten-metre long killer millipedes out of them. That's all.

And, as the chairperson's gimlet eye swivels my way, I take a big swallow, force a smile between my frozen cheeks and say, 'Er, um, I dunno. They just... you know... like, come.' Panicking, I remember a joke. It involves a gorilla at an arms convention. I open my mouth to tell it but the woman on my right has begun a short discourse on the distinction between 'ideas' and 'ideation'.

There, you see, I need something like that for next time.

(This little idea was inspired by The Writer's Technology Companion.)