Artistic freedom in a limited-outlets world

SF Signal has a very interesting topic up on MIND MELD today:

Q: Once upon a time, sf/f was full of taboos: no swearing, no sex, etc. We're thankfully past those days, but are there any taboos still remaining or new ones that have sprung up? Have you ever had trouble with publishing something, or caught yourself self-censoring?
Peter Watts

As is the practice on Mind Meld, a few pro writers are asked to weigh in and the floor is opened for comments. The site may shortly go up in flames; stay tuned. What I find most fascinating is the passionate allegiance people exhibit to one side of the question or the other: the writers (and remember these are pros, not the Bitter Unpubbed) who take the question itself to task, so frustrating is the suggestion that art is not completely hamstrung by publishers' taboos or fear of others'--versus the writers who are offended by the suggestion that we should tolerate (gasp) pottymouth, much less inappropriate behaviors or philosophies, when those things are simply not necessary to great storytelling.

Look through the words to the experiences they reveal, and you may see a deeper conflict: the one between artists and entertainers, between those who want to wrestle with Big Questions and the true meaning of humanity--and those who want to be a part of the comfortable, accepted "artistic elite". I see this conflict play out over and over: at cons, on discussion boards, etc. Big Publishing is heartless and fascist, say those whose art is too risky for publishers who put money ahead of art; Big Publishing is the only thing protecting the Qualified from the Fanficcers, say those who are either comfortable within the accepted norms or both able and willing to channel their creativity into works that don't challenge their audiences overmuch.

The image above is from The Long Tail. Setting aside the political-party overtones, which I think Completely Miss The Point in any context, the image fits the situation. Self-censorship by an industry is still censorship; it is one of the most insidious symptoms of fascism. But I'm getting a bit off topic, as usual. Let's see if we can drag this back on course.

Big Publishing is Big Business. It is in the business of making money. People who work for Big Publishing are not necessarily fascists, but in order to keep their jobs they must adhere to the business model that says making money is more important than art--that choosing works which will not sell enough copies to support the Lifestyle to Which Publishing Has Grown Accustomed is a bad plan; that choosing works which may inflame the wrath of that vocal minority which fancies itself the arbiter of decency (whatever that is) and Good Taste is equally bad if not worse. Big Publishing is not in the business of taking risks; it provides a safe haven for well-behaved entertainment folk, and tries to guide the public in the direction of appreciating art that matches its ideals. It is the wrong place for artists.

Fortunately, there is a place for artists. It's called Independent Publishing. Contrary to whatever confusions organizations like Author House may have imposed on you lately, Independent Publishing is not the same thing as Subsidy Publishing or even Self-Publishing. Independent Publishing is run by people who are passionate about art, who will take on the task of bringing to the public works that will push the mainstream audience out of its comfort zone and delight those who were already hanging around outside. Independent publishers do many of the same things Big Publishers do or once did: choose works carefully, work with authors to make the works the best they can be, give individual attention to artists' visions and careers, produce, distribute, and promote books in ways that match the works themselves.

Independent publishing is not for everyone. It's a trapeze act rather than a safe career. But it may be the last remaining haven for true artistic freedom.

All writers report to Twitter. Now.

Hey, remember how you'd gotten that nagging feeling that twitter was somehow going to turn out to be worthwhile? Yeah, here it is:

#queryfail

Seriously. Go to twitter and read. Learn. Laugh. Cry. Maybe some of each.

Why it's hard to make the grade in publishing

Writing for publication is not like writing for your creative writing class. There are no grades on your assignments; truthfully there are rarely assignments at all, and you'll be lucky if you ever actually lay eyes on the prof or receive a rubric of any sort. And the whole thing is pass/fail. At first glance, it's the easiest class ever.

Here's the problem: the only passing grade is an "A".

Feelin' the Love

This week the lit blog Baby Got Books is, as BGB host Tim Frederick puts it, "throwing objectivity to the wind and having a love fest" in honor of Zachary Steele's Anointed, which we're launching this weekend at Wordsmiths in Decatur. He graciously invited me to write today's post, so I wrote a little love letter to small press publishing.

Scroll right down after you finish reading my post for Russ Marshalek's hilarious interview with Zach, which is the post following mine. Tim says it best: those two should have their own reality show.

The shifting landscape of publishing

There's a lot of talk out on the interwebs this week about the future of publishing: most notably this article in Time. But the thing that's really blowing my mind is this Publisher's Manifesto by Sara Lloyd. To my publisher brain, this is the equivalent of reading Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces with my writer-brain: it makes my head fire with ideas I never had before, at a rate that would probably make your average brain-scanner blow up. Each time I go back to it I have a different set of thoughts.

If the Time article predicts a book landscape as alien to us as the shores of the Amazon, the Publisher's Manifesto makes me reconsider my methods and role: how am I to serve my writers and readers in this shifting landscape? How will the ways I market books change?

The short answer, I currently suspect, is that each work will demand its own methodology. I am already talking with other publishers with whom I swap ideas and support (yes, another shocking idea, that) about the strategies for books they're publishing. In some cases I can see books becoming the centers of online communities; in others my mind is running towards serialization and online roleplay. Still other stories, I think, must be enjoyed as we have always enjoyed novels. Each of these subgroups will demand a different type of strategy, and each work within these subgroups will become the center of something unique.

This, I think, will become one of my most important jobs as a publisher: helping works find their ways in the wide electronic world. And here's the key: that's not the same thing as "publishing digital editions". I can already see that this will require a remodeling of author-publisher relationships, in ways that I think will be exciting for some, frightening for others.

I don't have answers yet. But I'm sure having a lot of exciting ideas. Stay tuned...

What are we to make of this?

It's quite likely that there's something wrong with me, some Creutzfeld-Jakob of the publishing brain. I turned down a publishable novel this weekend.

Really, there was nothing showstoppingly wrong with it. I yanked it out of the slushpile with lightning speed because the writing was top-notch. It was SF rather than F, which excited me because Mercury Retrograde is so heavily weighted in favor of fantasy. PoV slips were minor, and I felt certain I'd be able to coach the writer through where he was going wrong. And it started in media res, which almost never happens. I had every expectation of falling in love.

So why did I turn it down? Not because of any fault, but because of what it turned out to be: a sort of James-Bond-in-space with a female protag. Sounds like a great concept, right? This is the kind of thing that dominates the upper end of SFF novel sales, and a publisher with a better moneymaking brain would have jumped all over it. I'm sure it will sell quite soon--or within a timeframe that passes for "soon" in the publishing industry. In fact I'm certain the only reason it wound up on my desk is that the path to publication with a big house has grown so very, very long.

But for better or worse--or, more to the point, for richer or poorer--it was the things this very competent novelist didn't dig into that made my decision for me: character and ideas. For me, it is not enough that a character is well-defined and heroic: I want to see him or her *develop*, deal with conflicts that are deep and defining and change as a result of confronting them. I don't want the story to turn on an Achilles heel: I want to dig into why Achilles' sexual orientation changed the course of the Trojan War. And great worldbuilding and gee-whiz-ness don't do it for me unless they are there in service of ideas the author is exploring. I understand that most readers don't share my needs: most read to be entertained, to zip through a story that gives them a good ride and maybe some good moments to roll around in their minds later. And that the smart money is in giving people entertaining diversions, not stories that will challenge them, ask them to become emotionally involved or even changed by what they read.

As a reader, though, it's things in the latter category I want to read. As a writer, that's what I want to write. As a publisher, I want to create a space where writers can do that sort of work without having to consider themselves failures if their work doesn't get below the magic Thousand Mark on Amazon. But all I really knew when I decided to decline the offer of that very competent novel was that I didn't love it. I had to wander around for several hours afteward, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me.

It's possible that I recognized with my artist-brain, long before my conscious mind caught up, that to start down the path of choosing novels for monetary rather than artistic reasons is to risk artistic ruin. But it's also possible that I just have Mad Cow.

This might be a manifesto

Yeah, I might have to nail this one to the cathedral door when it's done.

Today is the official release date of Shorn by Larissa N. Niec: the first book published by my brainchild, Mercury Retrograde Press. I'm immeasurably proud of the work we've done on this one--and it *has* been a "we", because in addition to the writer, any book must also have an editor, a proofreader, a typesetter/book designer, a cover designer, one or more artists, and people whose task it is to get the word out so people can fall in love with the creation and make its story part of their personal myth set. Shorn has had--still has--a whole team behind it. Because we're a new press, and we can't afford to hire full-time employees yet, I've done the majority of the work on this project, and for the most part I find the work fulfilling; but in the race to do this book justice, I have mostly set aside my own writing life. This is a thing I've viewed as a temporary necessity; in my mind, once we crossed the finish line on Shorn, things would calm down and I could get back to the study with a clear conscience.

I now understand that was unrealistic. There is still work to be done for Shorn, and the work will continue for a couple months yet: getting the word out, setting up relationships with new sales channels (a task for which I'm hugely grateful, btw), propagating the ebook versions and beginning to figure out the logistics of audio book production. Meanwhile Anointed, the next book on Mercury Retrograde's menu, is already waiting for me to start doing my share of what it needs; by the time that's done, I'll be behind on the next one. (And, oh, you're going to LOVE the next one, but there are still nagging legal entanglements that must be resolved, so for now I must leave you to fantasize. Two words to start with: Urban Fantasy.)

The bottom line: I am never going to be *caught up* on Mercury Retrograde business, at least not until Mercury Retrograde can afford staff. That's normal for a start-up business, and I've done the whole start-up thing before, so while I'm not uncomfortable with the headlong dash and all the other stuff that goes along with it, now that we're in a Mercury Retrograde period, my muse is crying for time in the study...and suddenly I remember that I founded Mercury Retrograde because the house I wanted to publish my own fiction didn't exist yet. It exists now, and I love it; but if I publish six, nine, or twelve books per year that win the hearts of critics and fans alike, earn out and go on to make money for their authors, and yet I am not writing fiction, I will not have done what I set out to do.

It is never going to be a convenient time for me to go back to writing; so long as I am writing, things will move more slowly in the office than they otherwise might. But it occurs to me that, while I refuse to hold other Mercury Retrograde authors to hard deadlines when meeting those deadlines would require them to compromise their art, I'm giving my own work no such respect. That has to stop.

So, while Mercury Retrograde Press authors and fans may wish I could move a little faster in the office, I trust they will understand that I must go back to carving out regular time in the study. No book will go unedited, un-typeset, or unpromoted; it's just that schedules will be a bit more fluid than they've been. In the long run, I suspect, all of Mercury Retrograde's books will benefit.

In the mean time, I have to go back to the study.

On Writing--Or Not

I am not writing right now. I cannot express how much this pains me; the writers among you will understand. It's not that I'm *blocked* or that I don't know what to write--it's that I can't find the time. I'm in a crunch period that began about two weeks ago and is likely to run two more, and I don't even have time to make dinner consistently or return phone calls not related to work (and I'm really sorry about that, btw. You know who you are.)

It's work, of course. The beautiful business of publishing. I am still the person responsible for most everything Mercury Retrograde does, and I don't want to complain about that: this is my brainchild, and I love the work. Well, except the filing and bookkeeping. In case you haven't heard, we have a book scheduled for official release on October 1st, and we are busily finalizing final things, scheduling Larissa's book tour, and doing truckloads of publicity. All very important and enjoyable stuff, and in many cases the first time I've done the things in question--which means there have been false starts and mid-course corrections, and just generally that things have taken longer than they will for the next book and the one after that. I understand all this, and it's not so hard to be philosophical about it, because I love the work.

But just the same there is a certain defrocked wizard on the verge of getting sucked into things it will take him years to fully understand, waiting for me in the study...and I know exactly what the next hundred pages should be. It's hard to be patient.

Must dig in and make the final push, down here in the office. Soon there will be things to read and see: a book, details of an author tour, a new Mercury Retrograde website, Mercury Retrograde's close-to-finalized catalog for next year. Right now it's insanity on the inside and pretty boring from outside. I'll be back in the study soon.

Decatur Book Festival: Dragon*Con Annex

From high atop the eyrie of the Flatiron Building, the Great Eye of Tor Books cast Its glance across the landscape--and Its attention chanced to fall upon the Decatur Book Festival. It had been looking for Dragon*Con, but what the hell. Criteria were considered: expected attendance of 75,000. Check. Book buyers and author panels. Check. Major metropolitan area. Check. Worthy of attention. Minions should be dispatched.

Later, some of the aforementioned minions came by and redirected Its attention to the actual Dragon*Con, only a short (according to the timetables) ride away on public transport, and breathed a collective sigh of relief when It blinked understanding and fixed Its gaze on the larger prize. Still, in some place on which it is perilous to speculate, a plan was forming. Why not take over two festivals at once? Mwahaha.

There is something about Tor which we SFF geeks cannot resist. Perhaps it is some sort of geekish pheromone. We don't even know what has lured us into these places in which It can enrapture our attention and make us buy books we didn't realize we needed. This is, I believe, similar to but not the same as the glamour by which It forces the corporate buyers at B&N and Borders to bow to Its whims. All I really know is that when I looked at the program for the Decatur Book Festival, having (for reasons I didn't understand until too late) decided to direct my attention there rather than Dragon*Con this year, there were several panels full of SFF authors. I confess it: my programming kicked in. I decided these panels were of interest.

Oh, yes, they were entertaining. I enjoyed listening to Kevin Anderson, Tobias Buckell, Cherie Priest and John Scalzi on Saturday morning. I was immediately intrigued by the similarity between this panel and a hundred other such panels I had attended at SFF cons. Perhaps author panels are the same everywhere, yes? Perhaps. When I realized all four authors are under contract with Tor, and that a couple of Tor editors were in attendance as well, I merely thought, Well, good for them. Decatur Book Festival is big enough to merit the attention of a New York house, after all.

It wasn't until I wandered into Brandon Sanderson's panel (I hesitate to call it that; the poor guy obviously ran all the way from Dragon*Con, and then was expected to handle a session invented by a teen literary group all alone) and recalled that he, too, is a Tor author that I began to understand. Props, btw, to Mr. Sanderson, who did a lovely job with the topic they threw at him, engaged the audience in lively discussion of SF and Fantasy and the relative merits thereof. Only at one moment did he begin to get all Literary (thus perking up my little ears in hopes of Yet More Interesting Discourse) and started talking about the Hero's Journey as documented by Joseph Campbell. But he caught himself immediately and brought the discussion back to the arena his fans desired.

That was my favorite moment of the entire festival, because I am a SFF geek and it reminded me of the difference between the things we talk about at literary cons (of which I am an unabashed fan) and the things we talk about at more fannish events.

But I am not sure I experienced the true Decatur Book Festival, because aside from those panels that turned out to be a part of Tor's plot to annex the Decatur Book Festival to Dragon*Con, I saw little besides the schmoozing, the power lunching, and the fans circulating among booths, drenched in their own sweat--all of which was pretty much like the rest of Dragon*Con. I had planned to attend both days, but (due, I suspect, to the Ungodly Heat, the Atlanta smog, or some unholy combination thereof) I spent the day working up to a migraine and most of the next day trying to recover.

I'm disappointed that I missed out on the True Decatur Book Festival. Next year I will make a point of attending some panels that have nothing to do with SFF and perhaps even hold some sort of power lunch with someone who doesn't really understand the difference between SF and F or what all the fuss about the distinction is. But I must say that there is one way in which Dragon*Con has it all over the Decatur Book Festival, and it has nothing to do with the proximity of a proper tiki bar in which to broker publishing deals.

Air conditioning.

Shorn launch weekend!

Already they are arriving. Soon my house will be full. Tonight: the open house. If you're local, stop by. Tomorrow: brunch for our out-of-towners, hanging around watching Todd cook (drool!), and THE LAUNCH at Wordsmiths.

Larissa will give a reading; Ari will exhibit some of his works that are *not* in the book and sign repros of the one that is (oh, yeah, Larissa will be signing books, too); Todd will feed us wonderful foods; and we will all drink champagne.

Oh, yeah, and did I mention that there will be an exciting Announcement?

Cause there will.

See you there.

One of the nicest beatings ever

So, yeah, Wynette read my draft of the first two acts of Affairs. Her take:

"This would be a really good book from anybody but you. You can do better."

Uh, thanks? Uh, uhm...really. How am I supposed to feel?

Let's be clear: she's right. The things she bitched about were things that have been troubling me as I've been writing: some serious flaws in Deaclan's motivation which--were I to address them--would derail my trip towards that plot point this novel had to hit; the way plot had to keep giving way to the weight of backstory and worldbuilding this novel was trying to carry. There's other stuff I would like to improve, too, but those are the things that can't be addressed within the current framework. The bottom-line problem is that I am a character-driven writer and I've been trying to write to a plot point. Which is to say that I've been writing a plot-driven novel. Of course I can do better than that.

So, where do we go from here? The headline: this book won't go to press this year. Oh, it *could*: I'm the publisher, after all. And it wouldn't be an embarrassment in the scheme of things...but it wouldn't be my best art. And that would be sorta pointless. Instead I will dig back in and attack this story (which, as those of you who've been playing along know, will have numerous volumes by the time it's done, mostly because the idea is Too Freakin Big) from the other possible angle of entry. Which will obviate (no, who am I kidding? alleviate) the worldbuilding problem I've been fighting. I'd actually had a hard time deciding which of these two points of entry to use, and now I have sufficient data to be certain which is the way to go. It's going to be easier, and probably better, this way.

Why, then, the perpiscacious reader asks, if trying it the other way will be easier and better, didn't you just damn well do it that way in the first place?

That would be because I had made the mistake of attempting to think like a publisher.

Oh, sure, I've got to think like a publisher. But when thinking like a publisher gets in the way of thinking like an artist, I will succeed as neither. I'd chosen Affairs as the starting point for the series because it's got a better hook. It will probably be easier to sell. All things being equal, that's better, obviously. The problem is that all things aren't equal. The other approach, beginning with The Shadow of the Sun, is more art and less hook. Hamlet meets the Tain Bo Cuilagne meets Paradise Lost. How the hell do you soundbyte that? Who besides Irish mythology geeks has even *heard* of the Tain Bo?

Don't glaze over. It will be a good ride, nay a great one. It just doesn't have that nice *hook*.

Back to the study for me, right after the launch.

Nerves...of steel

The closer I get to the end of Affairs, the more ways it finds to make me nervous. Today I am writing a scene that must be there for structural reasons--but it is turning out to have a surprising emotional charge, complete with elements I must keep under control lest I pull in thematic stuff that belongs in the next volume, because it is the first time Lesle and Deaclan have been alone in the same room since he pulled the rug out from beneath me *again*. I am once again walking the tightrope of being true to what these characters would really think, do, and say about everything that has happened of late--and controlling the flow of the novel.

This is complicated by the sheer mechanical issue of page count, which in turn is complicated by Mark.

Mark has been upper management for the vast majority of his career, which means he's got finely-honed methodologies for attempting to control things beyond his power. Since he helped me arrive at appropriate pricing for Shorn in the UK and European markets, one of those things has been Affairs. Suddenly he's gone from simply being proud of my artistic achievements to seeing the business side of it-- and he asks me questions like "When will you be done?"

(That all depends how much help I get on my mundane tasks, doesn't it?)

And "How long is it now?"

This is because he has learned to calculate the cost of producing a book. So rather than finally going to sleep last night, he's doing page-count math in his head and telling me that if I go all the way up to the 240K-word-count limit Wynette assures me I must observe if I am to keep the book under $20 on the cover, I will never make any money on this.

Now, which of my two advisers has published books before? Sigh.

I am trying not to take this personally. I know this is just a sign that he's fully on board and engaged in the emotional process with me, and it is simply a fact of his personality that things beyond his control make him crazy. But now, as I sit in the study writing this two-scenes-from-the-Act-3-break moment, I keep finding my eye on the little window in the menu bar that tells how many words I've used up, my attention distracted by the page count in this chapter.

Yeah, you've gotta have nerves of steel to be a writer-publisher.

Conundrum

Apparently Shorn is not only posted but AVAILABLE on Amazon now. The book is, of course, in pre-release: scheduled for release in October. Of course I understand *how* it happened to go live on Amazon; it has to do with the handshake between Lightning Source, the printer, and Ingram, the distributor, and the subsequent handshake between Ingram and Amazon. And I don't want to give the impression that I'm complaining, because I love that people are buying during the pre-release phase. But it does feel strange that one can purchase a book on Amazon--and that book is *in stock*--before it's released.

Stuff like this is why most mortals will never understand the publishing industry.

What baffles me personally is how a book can be in pre-release and yet in stock but Lightning Source can't get the cover image uploaded despite polite but insistent nudging.

Most likely this is a sign that I will never understand the publishing industry, either.

Q&A with Publishers & Editors

Part 2 of Diane Wolfe's project is up here. A lot of really thoughtful answers. Nice work, Diane!

We're up on Amazon!!!

OMG, I am squealy excited! Shorn is available on Amazon for pre-order! There's no image yet (must add getting that taken care of to my to-do list) but there's a button one can click to pre-order the book.

Unspeakably excited.

FWIW, you will be able to order a pre-release version from the Mercury Retrograde website in a few days. Genre collectible to be? Maybe...

I'll post the link for the pre-release version when we've got all the kinks out. Meanwhile, BEHOLD! We are on Amazon!!!

Shorn on Amazon

The Shorn Launch

Look what I found on the Wordsmiths Books site!

The advance write-up for the launch of Shorn

I am over the moon with excitement. Russ said it best:

Free Drinks!

A few thousand words on book signings

from Ubermensch Russ Marshalek, who will be the True Host (I will only be the one who gets to look like she's done something important) of Larissa's book launch in July.

The man says a mouthful:

A Good Blog is Hard To Find: On the nutso book world, Vol I

Why I write sequentially

Today I feel as if I've got a tiger by the tail. Yesterday I executed the plot point I had planned for that point in the story--but, as so often happens, I was surprised by a character's emotional reaction, left with a profound feeling of uncertainty about what he's going to do next and how it will influence the unfolding story.

Don't read too much into my assertion that I had planned this plot point: I had only realized what Deaclan was going to do at this point in the story a few days earlier, when I began thinking about the plot point to which he's reacting and remembered that--because of the rules of magic and magical bonds already in play--Deaclan would be immediately aware of things anyone else could only have guessed at. And that those things weren't going to make him happy. Suddenly this event which I had originally planned as part of another plot was affecting Deaclan and his tactics, and -- more importantly, to my mind -- moving him into an emotional space I wasn't ready for. One unanticipated emotional response from a character can--and frequently does--change the way the plot unfolds.

The closer I come to the end of this novel, the more nervous things like this make me. In early chapters, when characters surprise me, I feel entirely comfortable just letting them do their things and finding out what they're getting at as things unfold. But now I am (I hope) within fifty pages of the climax, and the novel has to end in a particular place--and, more troubling yet, because the next novel will continue the action of this one, my plot structures must work across the divide between these books. I must not allow characters to reveal things that I need to use in the next volume--and I can't fall into the trap of allowing them to stagnate because I'm trying to hold off. And when my characters surprise me, they always move my reveals forward from where I'd planned them. I am, after all, notoriously slow at most everything. I can only assume that when the muse pushes faster, he's the one who's right. But suddenly each of my subplots is straining towards stuff that has to be in the next book, while my main plot is time-bound. The climax must occur on a particular day, because it is a holiday; and as my characters speed up the pace of the subplots, and I try to keep my reveals under control, that day begins to seem a very long way off.

Why all this worry? Because there are only so many pages that can be fit between a single set of covers before the book becomes too expensive to produce. If there were no such limits, I would probably write novels that were 800 or a thousand pages long. Readers will only pay so much for a book, and distributors and bookstores will demand their cut of the purchase price. If the money remaining after all those requirements are met is less than the cost of producing the book, I am essentially paying readers to read my stories. And of course I want to share my stories with everyone, but I can't afford to do that. As long as my stories go to market in book form, I have to keep the chunks of my story below a certain threshhold--and each of those chunks must stand satisfyingly alone.

This is a set of tricks which seems more easily managed by people who develop outlines and then stick to them. Unfortunately I develop outlines, draw maps of my story territories if you will, plan my trips--and then the characters hijack the bus. Every so often, when we stop for meals, I negotiate with them about moving in the direction of the climax point for which I'm shooting, and we modify our maps and set out again. But the characters have a tendency to forget to look at the map, or to drive too fast--and my nice measured story arcs look as if they were drawn by someone riding on a bus being driven much too fast on a poorly maintained road.

Which, of course, they are.

We will get there. But I'll be uneasy until I bring my subplots to their first-book climax points.

What's Your Favorite Book?

I'm reeling. The Truth of the Publishing Universe has just been handed to us, and I'm going to be mulling it over for days. Harris Interactive surveyed American adults to find out "What is your favorite book of all time?" The answers:

1. The Bible
2. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
3. Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
5. The Stand, by Stephen King
6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
7. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
8. Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown
9. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
10. Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

The results of the poll are fascinating, in a first-time-you've-seen-water-through-a-microscope way. You can see Harris's release here. One of the things we learn there is that every demographic group, bar none, chose (in unprompted results!) the Bible as their favorite book. But the #2 through #5 slots have more to do with the distribution of the sample than anything else: GWTW is #1 among women, LOTR among men, for example, and we all know more women than men bother with reading. The next few slots are heavily influenced by age and regional and ethnic identities.

What I take away from it:

1. I am going to have to finally sit down and read Atlas Shrugged, which can't seem to find its way off my long list.
2. The BIBLE??? Seriously???
3. To Kill a Mockingbird sucked. Just sucked. Why do people love it?
4. OMG, the BIBLE. No pun intended.
5. The DaVinci Code doesn't really surprise me. I mean, when's the last time you were flying someplace that you didn't see at least one person toting that piece of crap around? But he's got two books on the list. This makes me shudder for the reading public.
6. Dan Brown needs a really good editor almost as badly as THE BIBLE.
7. Books of Large Size win Fanbases.
8. It's good to be an SFF writer. I'm including Dan Brown for the purposes of this exercise, btw.
9. The Catcher in the Rye only made the list because they didn't interview anyone under 18. I spend a lot of time explaining to people who are now reaching its supposed target age that it was a mind-blowing book in its era, but its era is not our era, and that's why they can't figure out what the hell the fuss is about.
10. People need to read more.

I know I'm weird, but if someone had asked me that question, none of those books would have occurred to me. Oh, sure, LOTR blew me away when I read it--30 years ago. I've read works in whose company LOTR would hang its head in shame since. What is my favorite book now? (Besides the one I'm working on, of course.)

Twofold answer, of course:
Nonfiction (perennially): The Hero With a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell
Fiction (today): Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

What are your favorite books? Leave me a note & help restore my faith in the future of reading.

OMG. The BIBLE.

I am weirder than you

Once upon a time, my mother and my mother-in-law were visiting at the same time...and actually achieving rapport. (I hear the married people among you gasp; for the benefit of the rest of you, mother and mother-in-law working together can generate exponentially more aggravation than either of them alone. Go rent The In-Laws if you don't believe me.) At any rate, they were commiserating about how unreasonable and unmanageable Mark and I were, individually and collectively.

"It's like they're having a contest to see who can be weirder," my mother opined.

Well, let me tell you, I Win. Naturally Mark doesn't want to admit defeat, but I know I've got it locked. Not only am I weirder than him, I'm weirder than you.

It's tempting to blame my father. Evidently it was his idea to name me Barbara, the accepted meaning of which is Stranger. He loved the cognitive dissonance generated by pairing it with Friend, which of course was my last name until I married Mark and added his to the mix. Any Rosicrucian worth his salt can tell you that enlightenment can be achieved by disciplining one's mind to accommodate contradictory truths: what they call achieving modulated paradox. (Knowing that, of course, is one of the things that makes me Weirder Than You.) But my father is a very logical person, so I don't think that was the intent.

Nevertheless, there it is: he named me Stranger, and I am.

I realized recently that one of the things that marks me as different from the norm is my taste for the edge in my business and creative lives. Most people crave safety; I'd rather work without a net. I'm not an adrenaline junkie; it's just that the places where they string the nets are not interesting, and I'd rather have a rich intellectual and creative life. Mark and I have spent our adult lives embroiled in one start-up and/or privately-held business venture after another. There's no net out here; we swing from one chandelier to the next. Sometimes it's fairly hair-raising, but none of the mistakes we've made have killed us, and very few of them were irreparable. We exchange the feeling that we are safe and everything is under control, which is most people's primary motivation for choosing big established companies when they look for jobs, for the opportunity to make our own mistakes, do our own art (his is a scientific rather than *artistic* art, but the principle is the same) and pursue our own visions.

It is my current belief that there are certain experiences which change a person so profoundly and irrevocably that it becomes almost impossible to remember what it was to exist on the other side of that experiential line. Becoming a parent, particularly the parent of more than one child, is one of those things: when you are truly responsible for another human who you know will not thrive unless you give them heart and soul, that changes everything. People who have crossed into the parent zone share understandings that people who have not had the experience will never really comprehend unless they make the same crossing.

Likewise, declaring oneself a professional in the arts works a profound change on the artist. There the responsibility is to one's self; but the necessity of taking responsibility rather than waiting for the Gods of Art to come down and anoint one changes works a change in one's artistic life which is nearly as profound as the transition to parenthood: we become, in effect, artistic adults. Becoming a pro liberated me; I now believe that has a lot to do with the fact that I came out where I did, on the independent side of the line. Becoming a pro finally gave me the control to go with my outside-the-norm ideas.

I have only recently recognized that choosing start-up or independent business models is another of those paradigm-changing choices. Those of us who run our business lives from the chandeliers share experiences and attitudes that people who gravitate towards the feeling of safety view as just plain nuts. We're accustomed to being in the fray of business, to dealing with whatever comes our ways, rather than being insulated; we take for granted that we will make mistakes, but that we will survive and learn from our mistakes, and we know from experience that very few of the mistakes we make will be uncorrectable. We accept all this in order to pursue our own visions, and most of the time we take for granted that this is just the way things are: because we know that working without a net is the price of doing the work that lets us grow.

Wynette likens running your own business to running the Iditarod. I find real resonance in that: running the Iditarod is -- well, am I the only person who has noticed the similiarity of its spelling to the word idiot? It seems a senseless activity. You assemble your team and drive out into the middle of nowhere, under conditions that could potentially kill you. People who have been through the Iditarod not only share an experience, a mode of being, that the rest of us can only look at in puzzlement, but are driven to repeat the experience over and over. Mark and I have been running the Iditarod, metaphorically speaking, for about 20 years now. We haven't won yet; but it hasn't killed us, either, and we've managed to raise two fantastic humans and have some wonderful intellectual and creative adventures along the way.

To outsiders, I know, a high percentage of what I do looks crazy. But I must swing from the chandeliers, indeed must have a fistful of exposed wiring, if I am to reach my potential. It's just one of the things that makes me weird. I am grateful to have a husband and creative partners who understand and are willing to join me out here, beyond the nets.

(Yes, we are secretly having more fun out here. Anyone who has ever heard me laugh the Evil Laugh will surely understand.)