The Music Will Never Stop 3

Continuing…

November 24, 2013:

“Six Sonatas for Flute and Harpsichord,” Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach performed by Jean-Pierre Rampal and Robert Veyron-LaCroix.

Light classical; pleasant, not terribly involving. I think I’d only ever played it twice, and it’s in excellent condition; the only noise was a faint scratch at the end of the second movement of Sonata #4. Other than that it sounds as if it could have been digital to begin with.

No problems with the transfer.

I actually have a lot more by JS Bach, not sure if there’s any more by CPE Bach or any of his brothers; I’d forgotten just how big a Bach fan I was for a couple of years. Also Josquin Desprez and assorted medieval stuff.

The classical and medieval music are probably two-thirds of the remaining albums; next biggest group after that is comedy. I’m debating whether I should just get all the Bill Cosby material on CD; it’s cheap enough that way, and would be stereo, where the albums are monaural, but loses some of the sentimental value. I think I’ll see what sort of shape they’re in before deciding.

(It’s Cosby’s first four albums, all bought new pretty much as soon as they were available; my mother was a huge Cosby fan back then.)

Classical/medieval, comedy, then more children’s albums, and a couple of oddities (e.g., Environments I). Oh, and some off-Broadway material from “Hair.” No more soundtracks or pop/rock or Broadway.

I’ve pulled all the albums off the shelves, and stacked them on the floor across from the turntable; stack’s maybe five inches. I’m getting there.

November 25, 2013:

“16 Sonatas for Harpsichord,” Domenico Scarlatti, performed by Luciano Sgrizzi. I think I only played this one once; really, I don’t feel a great need to hear a lot of harpsichord sonatas as a general thing. Nice to have them available, though, and the MP3s came out really well.

December 1, 2013:

Still on my classical binge — “A Baroque Trumpet Recital” and “The Art of the Baroque Trumpet,” both late-’60s Nonesuch albums. Not much to say about them. I hit one bad skip, but amazingly was able to successfully edit it out of the recording.

More baroque still to come.

The Music Will Never Stop 2

Continuing the comments on copying LPs to MP3:

November 11, 2013:

“Mel Brooks’ Greatest Hits.”

That’s not what it says on the front of the sleeve — there it says “Mel Brooks High Anxiety.” But the spine and label and so on all make it clear it’s “greatest hits.”

Side 1 is all from “High Anxiety,” but Side 2 has “Springtime for Hitler” and “Puttin’ On the Ritz” and all the other classics.

It’s in beautiful condition, and I got a flawless copy with no problem. I’m very pleased to have it!

November 13, 2013:

“Irish Songs of Rebellion,” by the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. This is a 1969 Everest/Tradition re-release of their 1959 album “The Rising of the Moon.”

One of the weird things about it is that as well as changing the title, they swapped the sides — Side 2 of this version was Side A back in ’59, and vice versa.

It’s a pretty good album, with Patrick Clancy’s original liner notes providing fairly detailed information on each song. The arrangements and harmonies are very simple

I’ve heard other versions of some of these songs; Peter Paul & Mary did a couple, and I admit I like the PPM versions better. Still, the Clancy versions are probably more authentic.

It’s a very clean copy; didn’t have any trouble making it.

November 18, 2013:

I just wasted far too much time tracking down credits for “Happy Birthday and Songs for Every Holiday,” a Disneyland Records collection from 1964 that’s mostly repackaged Mickey Mouse Club material. It skimps badly on crediting the songwriters and performers.

I don’t know whether this had ever been played before; it sounded brand-new. It had been opened, but still has the original shrink-wrap and is in virtually perfect condition.

No idea where I got it. At some point in the ’80s or early ’90s I apparently acquired half a dozen kids’ records that I don’t recall ever playing; I’m guessing they were either gifts or a yard sale find.

November 19, 2013:

Added to the MP3 collection: “The Baroque Lute,” by Walter Gerwin. Released by Nonesuch in 1969, three years after Gerwin died, five years after the album was recorded.

It’s not bad. Lute music doesn’t have as much tonal variety as some other instruments, but it’s still pleasant to listen to. This is three suites, one each by Bach, Buxtehude, and Pachelbel.

There’s some faint wear on Side Two, in the Pachelbel section; mostly it’s excellent condition. The software did crash once during editing, but I’ve learned to save everything to disc frequently, so I was able to pick up where I’d left off without too much trouble.

November 21, 2013:

Tonight’s prize: “Occupation: Foole,” by George Carlin.

Some very funny stuff, some dated Nixon jokes. Well worth having in my collection.

Most of it was just fine, as far as condition, but there’s a scratch/skip in “Cute Little Farts” that rendered it completely unplayable, so I bought a new copy of that one cut off Amazon for 99 cents.

More to come…

The Music Will Never Stop

Continuing the comments on copying LPs to MP3:

November 6, 2013:

Today I polished off “German Drinking Songs,” Everest/Tradition TR-2076. Don’t know the date. No idea who the singers and musicians are. It says “Recorded live in Munich,’ and nothing else about its provenance.

It’s a really crappy job of packaging — the sleeve lists two cuts that aren’t actually on the record, a bunch of the German titles are misspelled*, and there’s absolutely no useful information. No artists, no copyright, no composers, nothin’.

I tried to look it up, and discovered that Everest had a history of sleazy behavior, such as issuing unauthorized editions that they didn’t pay royalties on, so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised.

Anyway, the album is probably from somewhere in the period 1958-1963, and it has a bunch of classic Oktoberfest music, not all of it actually drinking songs — or even songs, really, as there are a couple of instrumentals among the twenty brief numbers. There are four songs about the Rhine all in a row, followed by two about Rüdesheim; why were people in Munich singing those?

(The cuts range from 36 seconds to just over three minutes; they jammed twenty songs/pieces into a thirty-minute album. The cover says twenty-two, but it lies.)

Side Two is pretty much all Munich-related drinking songs, including a couple of classics — you may not recognize the title “In München Steht Ein Hofbräuhaus,” but you’ve almost certainly heard it; in virtually any Hollywood movie with an Oktoberfest scene, it’s the song playing in the background.

I don’t know where I got my copy. It’s in reasonably good shape — no warping or skips, but a fair bit of surface noise. The transfer went smoothly.

==

* Whoever typeset the album cover left out all the umlauts (of which
there were many), transcribed the ess-tsetts as B’s, and reversed
several vowel combinations.

November 10, 2013:

Here’s one that was hard to catalog: “Walt Disney’s Babes in Toyland,” which is not the soundtrack album. There was no soundtrack album; this is the closest approximation, but while it’s all the songs from the movie, it’s not the versions that are in the film. It doesn’t feature Annette or Tommy Sands or Ray Bolger, though it does have Ann Jillian and Ed Wynn singing their bits from the film.

It’s very confusing; why did they do it this way? Also, several sources online say the record’s from 1961 because the film was released in December of ’61, but the album very clearly says “Copyright 1964 Walt Disney Productions” on the cover.

Actually, the singers on the album are much better than the ones in the film. (Which I have on DVD, so I’m not relying on fifty-year-old memories.) And it’s a clearer recording. Some of the songs are expanded, also an improvement.

Anyway. Got a nice clean transfer, though there’s some minor surface noise in spots.

I may have mentioned here [i.e., on SFF Net, where I’d posted about watching the DVD] that it’s a pretty lousy movie, which it is, but one thing I didn’t mention because it didn’t really register until I listened to the nice clear lyrics on this version is how staggeringly, mind-bogglingly sexist some bits are. In particular, the song “Just A Toy” is simply appalling even for the time.

Other than that, though, it’s cheesy fun.

More to come…

Domestic Archeology

Five years ago we were getting ready to move from our house in Gaithersburg to somewhere closer to my wife’s job. We had lived in the house on Solitaire Court for twenty-two years, and raised our kids there, so we had accumulated a lot of stuff — a lot of stuff. We didn’t realize how much until we had to clean the place up for potential buyers.

So we set out to declutter the place. We didn’t want to take all that stuff with us. We threw out vanloads of junk. I sorted out my books and comic books and so on, and started weeding out the stuff I didn’t want.

And I looked at the piles and piles of stuff in various obsolete (or nearly so) media, and decided something had to be done about it. I didn’t want to have LPs and cassette tapes and CDs and reel-to-reel tapes, VHS and DVDs, and so on. This is the twenty-first century, and all that stuff could be consolidated onto digital media, which would save huge amounts of space. Eliminating the multiple players would simplify matters, too.

Converting it all was far too big a job to be done before we moved. I was able to thin out hundreds of duplicates of one kind or another (books in multiple editions, LPs I also had on CD, etc.), but most of it got hauled to the new house, and I’ve been working on it ever since.

Ripping all the 500 or so CDs to disk was relatively quick and easy, though about half a dozen got screwed up and need to be re-done. (“Need” is the correct tense; I haven’t done it yet.) I disposed of a couple of our CD players (though I admit to keeping two). Then I started on the phonograph records, which required installing the appropriate software (Audacity) and hooking my stereo and turntable up to my computer.

It takes a long time to copy 450+ albums and a few dozen singles, 78s, and other oddities to MP3. I finally finished a couple of months ago. Then after moving my turntable into dead storage in the basement I hooked up my tape deck and started on the cassettes; I only have just over a hundred of those. I’m in the middle of that, with the reel-to-reel tapes still to go when the cassettes are done.

(I’ve made some progress in other media besides sound; I have one more long box of comic books left to trade in at Beyond Comics, out of the 14,000 comics I started with, and about 300 assorted books have been replaced with ebooks on my Kindle. And all the VHS tapes are gone, replaced with DVDs or Blu-Ray, even if I had to burn them to DVD myself.)

Anyway, as I’ve worked my way through all this stuff, I’ve been posting about it on my old SFF Net newsgroup. Not many people read there. Not many people read here, either, but this blog is easier to link to, and generally more permanent and more accessible, so I’ve decided to copy edited versions of some of those newsgroup posts to this blog. I didn’t keep copies of the early ones, though they’re all somewhere in the SFF Net archives; the ones I do have are all from the last few months, when I’d already finished all the ordinary pop/rock/folk music I had on LP, and had gotten to the stuff in my collection I hadn’t played in decades.

Here’s the first entry, from a post dated November 2, 2013:

National Lampoon’s “Lemmings” is now squared away on my computers in MP3 form. Condition was excellent, transfer went very smoothly.

This brought back a lot of memories; I saw “Lemmings” live at McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ when it first toured in 1973. Back then nobody knew who John Belushi and Chevy Chase were, but after watching the show we knew they were pretty damn funny. Chase’s Hell’s Angel routine was a lot funnier live than on the album because so much of it was visual; it involved the sort of pratfall he became famous for a couple of years later on “Saturday Night Live.” (He splashed beer on the audience in the process.) And there’s no explanation on the album of what’s going on in the middle of “Lonely At the Bottom,” Belushi’s Joe Cocker parody — he fell down while singing and couldn’t get up, and the band stopped playing and walked away until he managed to get back on his feet. On the record it just sounds like a bunch of grunting and gasping.

There was a lot that didn’t make it onto the album — the entire first act, for one thing, and also “Pull the Triggers, Niggers,” because they’d already put a shorter version of that song on “Radio Dinner.”

(Some other stuff on “Radio Dinner,” such as “Deteriorata,” was also in the first act.)

Anyway. Funny stuff, and most of it has held up fairly well, though “Papa Was A Running Dog Lackey of the Bourgeoisie” is kind of dated.

More when I get around to it.

On the Nature of Memory

I’m not sure what my earliest memory is, but I do remember this:

When I was four or five — I know I was at least four because we were living in the house in Bedford, and I know I was no older than five because I couldn’t read yet — I was poking around in my parents’ bedroom. My mother had a fancy, if somewhat battered, vanity table in the French Empire style, painted cream with “gold” trim, with a big trifold mirror, and with three drawers, one under each mirror panel. There was a big drawer in the middle, and much smaller drawers on either side. I was looking for something in the left-hand drawer.

I don’t know what I was looking for, or why, or whether I had my parents’ permission to be in there at all. I might have been after one of these odd hair curlers my mother had that I thought made great toys, or maybe I was just seeing what was there. In any case, I found a picture postcard. I didn’t recognize the picture, couldn’t even figure out exactly what it was a picture of, but it seemed familiar. There were bands of bright color against a dark background, and I had the definite feeling I’d seen those colors before.

So I took the postcard to my mother and asked what it was, and why it seemed familiar. She told me that it was the lights on Niagara Falls at night, and she didn’t know for sure why it would be familiar, but that we had all visited Niagara Falls when I was two, and had seen the colored lights shining on the falls, so maybe I was remembering that.

Or not, because, you know, I was two at the time. I certainly didn’t remember anything else prior to the summer of 1958, when I turned four, but maybe, maybe the sight of Niagara Falls at night had impressed me enough that I still remembered it.

I decided that sounded good, so when asked I would sometimes say that my earliest memory was seeing Niagara Falls when I was two.

But I don’t think I really remembered it even then, and I certainly don’t really remember it now. It’s possible that what I actually remembered on that long-ago afternoon was seeing the postcard before. Or it might have been something else entirely — colored lights in the darkness might have been the big Christmas tree on the town common a block from our house, for example. It might have been a picture in a book. Or it could have been pure fantasy; maybe that feeling of familiarity had no actual basis in fact at all.

So maybe my earliest memory was seeing Niagara Falls when I was two, but does it count when the actual memory is long gone, so I only remember remembering it?

And then there’s another memory that might be my earliest. It’s from early in the summer of 1958; I don’t know exactly when.

At the beginning of that summer we were living in a peculiar house on the outskirts of Billerica, Massachusetts. We had a big yard, maybe an acre or so, so most of the neighbors weren’t all that close, but to the south our next-door neighbor was just across a gravel driveway and a strip of lawn. The family there had a little girl not too far from me in age; I don’t recall her name, but I’m pretty sure she was a year or two older than me.

We had, in my parents’ bedroom, a device called an Aircrib, but more commonly known as a Skinner baby box, that my father had built from a kit. This was a climate-controlled enclosure where a baby could sleep without being troubled by changes in temperature, loud noises, airborne infections, etc. My baby sister slept in it. It had a roller system so that soiled bedding could be pulled out from under the baby without actually taking the kid out of the crib. The roller itself was a wooden rod painted blue, maybe three feet long.

I have a very clear memory of holding that blue rod with both hands, swinging it over my head, and chasing the girl from next door, intending to whack her over the head with it as hard as I could. I remember rounding the corner of the house, chasing her across the lawn. I still remember this very clearly — the bright blue rod, the rich green grass, the girl’s dark hair bouncing as she ran.

But it never happened. Ever. Nothing remotely like it. I handled the rod once or twice, but never outdoors, probably never outside my parents’ bedroom. I never chased or hit the girl next door — heck, we were friends, more or less. As near as I can determine, I dreamed this one night in 1958, and for some reason that stuck more than anything real that happened before mid-July of that year.

So can a dream count as my earliest memory? I definitely remember it, and I can definitely, irrefutably date it to sometime between May and mid-July of 1958, but it’s something that didn’t happen anywhere but in my head.

I specify mid-July because that’s when my very first absolutely inarguable memory is from: my fourth birthday party. I remember the cake with pink icing (I had insisted on pink over my mother’s objection), and the sugar-candy candle holders, and… well, not much else, actually.

I also remember an incident from August of 1958, when we were getting ready to move to Bedford; it happened on a visit to the house we were in the process of buying. I mention it because for years my parents denied that it ever happened, which confused me.

I’m not clear on exactly why we were visiting the house. It was apparently during school hours or something, because my older siblings weren’t there; my younger sister was only seventeen months old and spent the whole visit in our mother’s arms. My parents were meeting with the women (mother and daughter) who were selling us the house and had brought their two youngest along, and it was my first look at what was going to be our new home, so I was pretty excited. We walked through the big double doors into the front hall, and I looked around, and one thing that really caught my eye was the hall light fixture. It had two pendants with glass shades, which had a brick pattern on the glass, and one light was yellow and the other was red, which I thought was very cool. I’d seen red bricks and yellow bricks, so it made sense.

So, we bought the house, we moved in, and the first thing I notice when we do is that now both front hall lights are yellow. I ask my parents what happened to the red one.

“What red one?” they say. “They’ve both always been yellow.”

I am very confused and a bit upset by this; I know one was red. I remember it clearly… just as I remember chasing the neighbor girl with that stick. Hmm.

They continue to deny there was ever a red light there, so I eventually decide my memory is playing tricks on me.

And then years later — many years later, a decade or more — my mother casually mentions in passing that she can’t imagine why the Harleys (the people who sold us the house) had put a red bulb in one of the hall lights. It had made people’s faces look weird, and she had insisted my father replace it with a white one before we moved in.

I stare at her in disbelief. “You said there was never a red light there!”

Flustered, she says she had only insisted there was never a red glass shade. Both shades were always yellow. One just looked red because it had a red bulb in it.

So my memory was not wrong that time, but I had been convinced it was.

And my point is simply that memory can’t be trusted.

Magazines Reloaded

So I just took a look at the magazines that have arrived in the last month or two, and thought I’d post an update.

I was, you may recall, involuntarily subscribed to Forbes, Yachting, ESPN: the Magazine, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Chevy High Performance.

Yachting is still coming — it was a two-year subscription and runs through next June. Generally I still go through an issue in maybe five minutes, but there was a fluke a couple of months back, and one issue was fascinating, with a whole bunch of interesting stuff. Articles on things like how to deal with infections picked up in foreign ports, insects that can stow away and damage your boat, unusual ports of call, historical stuff, etc. I read it cover to cover, and thought that if this was going to be their new standard I was going to be spending a lot more time with it.

It wasn’t the new standard; the two subsequent issues are back to the five-minute flip-through stuff.

The subscription to Chevy High Performance ran out. I don’t miss it at all. I was slightly surprised they never made a serious effort to get me to renew, but they didn’t.

Men’s Health ran out, as well, and again, I didn’t get the expected barrage of renewal offers. I’m puzzled.

As I said last time, I passed Men’s Fitness on to a friend — sent in a change of address with his address. I assume he got it; I haven’t asked.

It took a couple of issues before the change of address for Forbes went through, but it’s gone now.

Entrepreneur is still coming, but I’ve fallen behind on reading it.

Fast Company is also still coming, and I’m a little behind on that, too, but not as much.

ESPN sent me two issues after the supposed expiration date, but it’s gone now, and I belatedly read my last issue a few days ago. It’s still the coolest sports mag I ever saw — articles on sports surgery, gay luchadores, and a zillion other unexpected goodies, all well written and researched — but I should get more accomplished now that it’s gone.

The crowd is definitely thinning.

Building Universes

[Note: Someone suggested I should do something to preserve and disseminate some of my more interesting Usenet posts. I said I’d give editing and converting them to blog entries a try. Here’s the first.]

It was reported that Orson Scott Card said that he didn’t think much of the Star Trek and Star Wars universes — that “most seventh-graders can come up with better ones.” This was my response.

The thing is, nobody came up with the Star Trek universe; it just accumulated. When the show started, nobody thought it was necessary to create a consistent background, and nobody bothered. In the very early episodes even stuff like what “USS” stands for and what the name of the government is aren’t consistent; they didn’t settle on “United Federation of Planets” until halfway through the first season. The “science” was nonexistent because nobody on the show cared, and nobody thought viewers would notice or care. If stuff changed from one episode to the next, so what? They assumed viewers only cared about the characters and the action.

There’s a reason that the various “tech manuals” and the like didn’t come out until years after the original Trek series was off the air — they didn’t exist until people who had worked on the show went back afterward and created them by going through what had been seen. It wasn’t worked out in advance, it was built up as needed.

As for “Star Wars,” George Lucas knew perfectly well it was nonsense and initially rejected attempts to even call the first movie “science fiction” — it was “space fantasy.”

So if by “better” you mean more consistent or more scientifically accurate, then any bright seventh-grader probably could do better, because neither Roddenberry nor Lucas was trying for consistency, logic, or scientific plausibility. All they cared about was providing a cool background for storytelling.

Which they obviously succeeded spectacularly at, though in both cases it was the result of years of accumulating cool ideas from multiple writers, actors, set designers, directors, etc.

The whole concept of “worldbuilding” didn’t really exist in Hollywood until 1982, when “Blade Runner” established it — I remember reading articles in places like STARLOG about how Ridley Scott had consciously decided to have Syd Mead and company design the world beforehand, instead of letting it accrue gradually or be worked out by fans, and this was seen as almost revolutionary.

Yeah, some writers and SFX people had tried to work out background stuff for movies and TV before that, but the directors hadn’t seen it as binding and would change it any time it was inconvenient for a story.

So yeah, “better” technically is easy. “Better” as a backdrop for cool stories? Not so much.

Magazine

Well, it’s finally happened. I got a renewal offer. Took longer than I expected.

About a year ago, I started getting stuff in the mail that I hadn’t ordered. I’m not sure whether it was meant as a joke, or a birthday present, or what, but someone — I don’t know who — had signed me up for a whole bunch of things. They started arriving, without explanation.

First there were the cosmetics on trial. I returned those. I was a bit concerned because the packing slip said they’d been paid for with an AmEx card, and I made sure it wasn’t mine. Put a watch on my credit, just in case.

Then came the intro package from Book of the Month Club. I canceled my new membership immediately, explaining I hadn’t actually signed up, someone else had, and I asked where I should return the books. They said not to bother, so I added them to my “to read” stack.

Next was the membership in the North American Hunting Club. That brought a knife, a game cookbook, and a magazine subscription; I returned the cookbook and canceled my membership, so I only got one or two issues of the magazine, but I kept the knife, as it was a “free gift.” (Some gifts aren’t free?) These folks were much less helpful and cooperative than BotMC or the cosmetics trial, but they eventually accepted that I wasn’t interested, and I passed the magazines on to some guys serving in the military overseas. (The magazine wasn’t bad if you’re a hunter; I’m not.)

And after that, it was all magazines. New ones kept showing up through March 2013, too. I’m guessing my mysterious someone had a bunch of airline points to burn off before they expired. At any rate, I eventually found myself with subscriptions to Forbes, Yachting, ESPN: the Magazine, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Chevy High Performance. (I think that’s all of them.)

Yachting was the first to show up, if I remember correctly. It’s weirdly fascinating because there’s the contrast between the rather down-to-earth attitude, with articles on maintenance, ports, etc., and the fact that it’s about toys costing millions of dollars. I read the first one pretty thoroughly, but quickly got inured to it and now typically go through an issue in about three minutes, mostly looking at the pictures, before passing it on to friends who like boats.

Chevy High Performance — if you own a Chevrolet muscle car from the ’60s or ’70s, you need this magazine. If you don’t, it’s absolutely useless and might as well be written in Etruscan. I don’t. This is another one I pass on to guys in the military. But wow, if you want to know anything about restoring, maintaining, or hot-rodding an old Chevy, this is a gift from the gods.

I’d seen Men’s Health and Men’s Fitness on the racks at the supermarket, and assumed they were sister (or in this case, brother) magazines. Never had any interest in ’em. But once they started showing up, I read them, and discovered they aren’t siblings, they’re rivals, and Men’s Health is the good one. It’s more upscale, better written, better edited, and all around classier, so I still read it, though I’m not going to renew when my subscription runs out. It looks at lots of lifestyle stuff for guys in their twenties and thirties. Men’s Fitness is much more concerned with, well, fitness — exercise, diet, and not much else. Where Men’s Health has a well-rounded feel and is clearly aimed at straight men, Men’s Fitness is narrowly focused and has (at least for me) a faint homoerotic vibe. I found it really boring, and transferred my subscription to someone else who was interested. (I hadn’t mentioned that homoerotic vibe to him, but then, it may just be my imagination in the first place.)

Then there are the three business magazines. I’d heard of Forbes, of course, and always assumed it was a business mag, but it isn’t, really; it’s money porn. It’s not about business, it’s about billionaires. It’s rather badly written, self-congratulatory in tone, and mostly about how wonderful the very rich are, simply because they made piles of money. Add in the editorials by Steve Forbes and others that demonstrate an insane misunderstanding of real-world economics, and the real world in general, and you have a magazine that I’ve found steadily more and more repulsive. When I noticed from the label that I’d been given a two-year subscription I decided I had to get rid of it, and Julian had a friend who works in finance, so I’ve just signed that one away.

Entrepreneur, on the other hand, is kind of fascinating. It’s not about business in general, but only about entrepreneurs. It’s better-written than Forbes, and doesn’t take a political position; it just looks at how these guys got to where they are now (and maybe you can too!). That was one of the late arrivals, so I may revise my opinion in time. I don’t really have much use for it, and would hit the old change-of-address road if I knew of anyone who wanted it, but at least it doesn’t embarrass me to have it in the house.

And Fast Company is cool. It’s about the cutting edge of business — innovation in every field, high-tech news, online developments, etc. It’s tied to several websites that I haven’t really looked at yet, but every time I read an issue I come away with scribbled notes about things I want to check out online. This one might be a keeper.

Which brings us to ESPN. Okay, I watch ESPN sometimes. I’ve read Sports Illustrated. I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong.

ESPN is the best magazine we get, including the ones I subscribed to myself, rather than having dumped on me. I’m not a big sports fan, but there is some fine, fine writing here. It’s got stats I never thought about, human interest stories I’d never have considered. A recent issue had a huge feature on racism in Italian soccer that did a better job of looking at race and history than anything I’ve read in more general publications. There are big chunks I skip in most issues, because I frankly don’t give a damn about basketball or most of the NFL, but even there, I can see it’s some fine writing and excellent research.

And today I got a renewal offer for ESPN — another year for just a buck.

I wouldn’t even be tempted by any of the others, but that one…

But no. I don’t have the free time to read more magazines; I’m years behind on my fiction reading, and could always use more time writing. So I am reluctantly going to let it go.

But it did prompt me to finally write this blog post. I’d been meaning to do it for months, and this renewal offer was what finally pushed me to do it.

So there we are.

The coming of Vika’s Avenger!

Well, I’ve gone and done it — I’ve just launched my Kickstarter campaign to finance the publication of my science-fantasy novel, Vika’s Avenger. You can get the details on the Kickstarter page, but here’s a little about it:

On a distant planet, 12,000 years in the future, a country boy named Tulzik Ambroz comes to the ancient city of Ragbaan seeking the man who killed his sister Vika. Ragbaan’s civilization has risen to astonishing heights of power and technology several times — and then collapsed each time, so that now most of the city is abandoned and empty, and the three million remaining inhabitants make no distinction between magic and technology. How can a stranger, with only a portrait his sister drew to identify his quarry, hope to find a single individual in such a place?

And if he does find him, what will he do about it?

If you want to have a chance to read the story, come pledge something. You have just thirty days.

State of the Art

I was out of the house for four hours today, and we had a houseguest (though I’m cheating by counting him, since he left before I got up), so my daily four-page writing quota doesn’t apply, and instead of attempting to meet it anyway, I’ve decided to type up a summary of the state of my art, i.e., my writing career. Because it’s gotten kind of complicated, and there’s some news in there.

I have of late been reading up a little on the current state of fiction publishing; a good example of what I’ve found is “Escaping Stockholm”.  (Actually, it’s not typical; it’s better than most.)

What Judy Tarr describes here is quite close to my own experience — decades of publishing successfully, and then a few years ago everything blew up. I’ve been trying to find my footing in the new world ever since, without much success.

There’s also Tobias Buckell’s piece on survivorship bias.

And Harry Connolly’s reactions, starting here.

What do I conclude from this? That I’m probably never going to settle back in to a comfortable niche with a New York publisher, and I’m not going to get rich self-publishing. Which I’d already suspected.

But I am, in Harry’s terms, a lucky guy — I throw lots of stuff out there, seeing what sticks, hoping something will take off. Sometimes something does stick, as the Ethshar serials have, though nothing’s really taken off.

So what have I tried since Tor dropped me, what am I trying, what might I try in the future? Anything and everything, pretty much.

I’ve been writing in several genres, some of which don’t really even have names, and I’m thinking that maybe I should try even more, as more of that luck-seeking behavior. I wrote a dark urban fantasy, One-Eyed Jack; a 19th-century adventure novel, Tom Derringer and the Aluminum Airship; a science-fantasy detective/revenge story, Vika’s Avenger; and a YA contemporary fantasy, Graveyard Girl.

All of these, by the way, stand alone but could become series — I wasn’t about to close off any avenues if something took off.

I’m also working on more traditional SF and fantasy, though I haven’t yet finished any of those except the Ethshar novels, The Unwelcome Warlock and The Sorcerer’s Widow.

Oh, and there’s non-fiction, in the form of Mind Candy.

Those last three went to Wildside Press, because that’s an easy and comfortable solution and I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get rich off any of them anyway.

I self-published One-Eyed Jack. Everyone was talking about how much potential there is in self-publishing now. Well, I’m with Tobias Buckell on this one — even as an established author, I’m out on the low end of the curve, along with thousands of other people.

So I figured I’d try Kickstarter with Vika’s Avenger, and I’m still planning to, but I am not at all optimistic about it, because I’ve looked at the numbers. Novels have been one of the least-successful categories on Kickstarter, and tend to not bring in much money over goal even when they meet their targets. That’s why I didn’t push ahead with my original plan to launch in March — I looked at the numbers.

There’s been an interesting side-effect there, though. I talked to a social-media expert back in December, who pointed out something I already knew but hadn’t thought about very much, i.e., people browsing the web are attracted by graphics, not text. I need graphics if I want a successful Kickstarter campaign; the video, in particular, is important. So I’ve been working on my video (in iMovie), kludging it up in my spare time, and I asked my fans on Facebook for volunteers to provide images I could use. I got a couple — and one of them was so much more visually imaginative in its depiction of Ragbaan than what I’d had in my head that I’m seriously considering writing another draft to incorporate some of that cool imagery.

I’m now hoping to get the video done in the next week or two, and to launch the Kickstarter campaign in mid-June; then as soon as it’s done I’d launch the next Ethshar serial, Ishta’s Companion, on my own website. Maybe find a way to cross-promote them. I may not get much writing done for awhile; I’ll probably be spending all my time on the web.

Meanwhile, Tom Derringer and the Aluminum Airship is languishing on an editor’s desk, and I’m debating whether to withdraw it (it’s been there for several months, which I assume is a pocket rejection) or not. If I do, I’ll be looking for some non-traditional way to publish it; don’t yet know what.

Graveyard Girl came back from my agent with a long missive pointing out the weaknesses in the story, and I really ought to revise and expand it to fix those, but I haven’t yet figured out what the new ending should be.

So, my writing isn’t going much of anywhere; what about publishing? I’ve been self-publishing under the name Misenchanted Press, and maybe I should try publishing other people’s stuff. I came up with the idea of a line of “Misenchanted Classics” — obscure SF/fantasy novels I’d loved as a kid that had been out of print for decades.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t the first or even second person to think of that; every novel I wanted for the line but one is either back in print or about to be, from one small press or another. The exception is represented by an agent who has ignored my emails.

But on the other hand, while I never landed any of my childhood favorites, I am pleased to announce that I’ve just signed a contract with Stuart Hopen to publish a new, revised edition of his novel Warp Angel. He’s gotten the rights back from Tor, finally, and I have the revised text (he reworked the ending) in hand. I may also eventually be publishing a new novel by Christina Briley, The Raven Coronet, though that’s much less definite, as she’s rewriting it again.

I’ve also recently signed a contract to co-write a game-based serial novel, but I can’t say anything more, because the contract included a page or two of non-disclosure agreements that I haven’t yet read in detail. The pay on this isn’t much, really, but I’m hoping it’ll be fun, and the first check arrived and has been deposited.

Another minor item: My article “The Other Guys,” about pre-Comics Code horror comics not published by the infamous EC Comics, which was originally published in The Scream Factory and recently reprinted in Alter Ego, is going to be split in half and used as the introductions for two books reprinting pre-Code comics. These nice little windfalls do turn up sometimes. We’ve agreed on terms, haven’t yet signed a contract or check.

And as I’ve reported online, I have a score or more of novels in progress. It’s just today occurred to me that if I’m going to be ignoring genre restrictions and not even pretending to try to sell it to a New York publishing house, I could even write Fast Times — that started
out as a proposal I sent DC Comics for a “Flash” spin-off mini-series,
but it mutated, as my stories usually do, and wound up a weird, impossible-to-classify thing.

Anyway. So far, I’ve had my greatest non-traditional success with the Ethshar serials, so I’m thinking maybe I should just focus on serials — not just Ethshar, necessarily. Maybe Tom Derringer would work as a serial. (If I could find an enthusiastic illustrator, I’m pretty sure it could — airships! Mexican jungles!)

I dunno. I’m just trying everything I can think of, hoping something will take off. We’ll see what happens.