Communion Of Dreams

Nah, other than a mild cold, things are going OK.  But since it is the first of the month, thought I would post a quick note about how stats look hereabouts.

April saw just under 500 downloads of the .pdf of Communion.  This continues to happen in clumps, for whatever reason.  Comparing it to over 1,100 in March, you might think that things have slowed down - but that’s just the clustering effect, I think - there was a substantial cluster right at the end of March.  Had it been a few days later, the stats for both March and April would have been almost the same.  We’re now at about 9,000 total downloads.

About 50 people downloaded the MP3 of the novel last month, bringing that total to just under 100.

I still have a hard time getting a handle on how people find out about the book, or this blog.  In March I signed up for some additional stats/information about the Communion of Dreams website, which gives me all kinds of data, but it still seems that the majority of people who find out about the book do so by word of mouth.  Not a bad thing, just a bit odd.  Particularly in that I get very little feedback or commentary from people - yet they seem to be passing on a recommendation to others to download the book.  Goodness knows that I haven’t done anything remotely approaching a real effort at promotion, so something is happening of its own accord.

This blog is now at 18,000 total views, averaging upwards of 70 views a day.  The somewhat odd thing is that there is a consistent bit of traffic to look at one post: Welcome to the Hobbit House from almost a year ago.  That gets 20 - 25 people a day.  I think that the secret to getting a lot of traffic would be to write about Hobbits.  At least until the new movie is done and out.  So, if you see me mentioning Hobbits just randomly in posts, you’ll know that I am just blog-whoring, trolling for hits.

But hey, Hobbits are cool.  Right?  Just saying the word is somehow comforting:  Hobbits.

Uh, sorry.

Anyway, that’s just a brief look over the current stats.  Something more meaty later, or tomorrow.

Jim Downey

A discussion over on UTI about a post I made there took a bit of an odd turn, engendering some interesting discussion about polygamy. This morning I made a comment that I thought I would share here, since it does relate directly to some of the things I do in Communion of Dreams. You’ll see what I mean.

Heinlein’s use . . . of non-standard family structures got me thinking about many of these issues when I was very young, and helped me form my opinions intellectually before getting into emotional commitments.

I tend to think that the serial monogamy that we see as a default in Western countries reflects the differences between societal conventions and evolutionary inclinations, with a big helping of “we live a whole lot longer now than early humans did” thrown in for good measure. It is rare to see a marriage last more than ten or fifteen years these days, and I think that makes a lot of sense - when most humans lived until 30 or so, it would make sense that pair-bonding would be a good strategy to raising and protecting children into early adulthood. That would mean a “marriage” of about the length I mention above.

But we live a lot longer now, and people grow and change throughout their lives. So it is unsurprising to me that divorce is common (something like half of all marriages end in divorce) as a way of dealing with these changes. Some people find a way to grow in tandem with their partner, and some find ways of allowing a certain freedom of definition for each partner within the structure of an ostensibly conventional marriage (some, of course, do both). Different cultures have found different strategies to accommodate these stresses - some allow for polygamy of the ‘conventional’ sort (think the Mormon or Islamic variety), some make divorce easy, some de-emphasize marriage itself, some ‘look the other way’ when one or the other partner in a marriage cheats or has a formal concubine system.

A fairly recent development in all of this has come to be known as polyamory - defining relationships as being more open and less “possessive”. There are some fairly well-known practices and practitioners, such as Penn Jillette. This attitude pretty well covers most of Heinlein’s alternative marriage structures and can work for some people, though it would understandably require a different sort of approach and mindset than what is commonly considered about marriage/love/relationships. In an homage to Heinlein I had originally used alternative family structures as the “norm” in my SF novel set about 50 years from now (a survival-strategy response to environmental conditions), but early readers of the book got too hung up on that so I changed it. Perhaps if/when I am an established author I can get away with it, as RAH did.

Children? I dunno - don’t have any, by choice. Not an issue for me, in several senses of the term.

[Mild spoilers ahead.]

To me, the novel actually does work better the way I had the family relationships defined before, with a group marriage built around a small number of adults who have just a couple of fertile people at the core.  This would allow for those precious few who are able to have children (remember, the fire-flu plague had not just killed vast numbers - it also left most people who survived it sterile) to do so with minimal stress, the rest of the family caring for them and the children born into the family.  Think how it would be otherwise: the few fertile couples trying to have and raise children in a society desperate for kids, maybe even willing to steal them or force child-baring couple to give their children to others.

But this change was just too hard for some people to wrap their heads around comfortably - they wanted to turn it into something about sex rather than about children.  Maybe they felt threatened by the idea, since the time-frame of the novel was so close to our own.  I dunno - my head doesn’t work that way.  So I made the change, and tried to work in enough explanation for the type of ‘family’ that exists in the book, while removing the polyamory element.  So far no one has commented on the current version as being a problem for them, and that is likely how it will stay.

Jim Downey

(Again, if you didn’t recognize the quote used in the title, shame on you.  It’s from this.)

In the month or so since I posted this, there have been more than an additional 800 downloads of Communion of Dreams.  Meaning that we’re now approaching 9,000 downloads altogether.  This tends to happen in ‘clumps’ for some unknown (to me) reason, where there will be a baseline of 5 - 10 people a day downloading the thing and then it will suddenly jump to a seventy-five or a hundred or a couple hundred downloads for a day or two.

Anyway, it’s likely that sometime in the next month or two, total downloads will cross the 10,000 mark.  Going to 5 digits seems like a cool threshold, and I’m thinking that I should do something to note/celebrate/mark the occasion.  But I have no idea what.  So if anyone has any suggestions, leave a comment or drop me a note, OK?

Oh, and that contact of the agent mentioned in the post a month ago?  Still haven’t heard back from them.  Because of other things I’ve mentioned being busy with here, I haven’t gotten around to contacting any other agents.  I suppose I should do that.  Ah, well.

Jim Downey

Well, there’s been another surge of interest in the book the last few days, and now there have been over 8,100 downloads of it.

As I told my wife on our morning walk today, saying “over eight thousand” sounds like a lot. I mean, it’s not just some kind of flash-in-the-pan interest thanks to one posting on a SF discussion forum or something. Over the last thirteen or so months, there has been a continued interest in the novel. And one of the most interesting things is that it largely seems to be due to word-of-mouth - I can only track about 1,200 downloads back to people visiting from other sites (and that is being generous in figuring that just because someone visits from a link on a site they decide to download the book.)

So, I decided to take a step I have been putting off for a long time: this morning I sent a query to a literary agency. In fact, I sent it to one of the agencies I had selected as being a good fit a year ago - they were one of only three who even bothered to respond to my query (of 9 or 10). And they turned me down, saying that they thought the book sounded interesting but were “insufficiently excited” about it. Here’s an excerpt from what I sent them today:

About a year ago, I contacted you concerning the possibility of representing me and my work. Your assistant at the time kindly declined on your behalf. But a lot has happened in the intervening year, and I would like you to reconsider. Given your long history working with science fiction authors, I still think that you are the agent for me.

My finished novel is discussed below. But first allow me to explain briefly why I think you may want to reconsider representing me.

When I set out to find an agent early last year, I also decided to put my novel online, available as a free download in .pdf form. Since then, over 8,000 people have downloaded the book. Some of this has been due to mention of the book in various forums, but that only accounts for about 15% of the downloads, according to my server statistics. The vast majority seems to have come about entirely because of word-of-mouth. And those numbers of downloads have continued to slowly grow. In the last week alone, almost 350 people have downloaded the book.

Shortly after posting the book online, I also started a related blog. The numbers there are not huge, but typically run about 100 visitors per day. Comments pertaining to the novel are almost uniformly very positive. Many people indicate that they are eager to buy the book in conventionally printed form. One person who produces audio books as a sideline was so enthusiastic about the book that he produced an unabridged audio version and made it freely available to me to use - this has just been added to my website in recent days.

Over the past year, as I was the primary care-provider for a family member with Alzheimer’s living here at home (culminating in her death last month), I also wrote about the experience of being a male care-giver for my blog. When I cross posted those entries to other forums, they always received a very enthusiastic response. That series of blog posts runs to about 40,000 words, and I am now planning on developing them into a book on the subject - a memoir, if you will.

So, we’ll see - see whether that is sufficient to entice them to represent me, or if I just get another rejection. Rejection hurts, kicks you right in the ego, there’s no doubt about it. But it is a necessary part of the process. And all of you who have downloaded the book, who have told others about it (and my blog), who have sent me comments and feedback - you all have made it easier to face the prospect of rejection. Thank you.

I’ll keep you posted. This is just the first step - in coming days, I will probably spend some time to select a couple of other agencies and contact them as well. We’ll see what happens.

Jim Downey

Well, late yesterday afternoon I finished listening to the audio production of Communion of Dreams. Wow. As I told Scot at OwnMade AudioBooks:

Finished the last disc this evening, before dinner. Was a little disappointed - you need to have a closing spiel like Jim Dale has for the HP books. Seriously. It will add a nice “professional touch”. If you want to tag something onto the end of the last MP3, we can swap it out on the website (about 30 people had downloaded the audio version as of last night - not bad for the first weekend!).

Anyway, you may remember that I worked in radio for a few years before going to grad school. So I had been giving some consideration to doing an audio version myself. I’m really glad I didn’t - you make it sound easy. And I know better.

Your production values are really good - only once in a while would I catch a little ‘canned’ quality, likely from getting a little off from the mic’s sweet spot. A better studio might help here, or better equipment, but it will be marginal. The different voices were pretty identifiable - and only now and again did some of the characterizations seem a little overdone.

In all honesty, for the most part I didn’t notice your reading - it was simply an audio interpretation of the book, and you got me engaged in the story. That’s about the best tribute I can offer.

I know that they’re big files - total of about 1.2 gigabytes. But seriously, download them and give ‘em a try. Feel free to burn them to CDs to take on a long car trip or something. As I have mentioned, I find the interpretation that he brings to the work to be a really good additional layer of understanding. And besides, they’re free. If you were to download a comparable amount of music from I-Tunes, it’s cost hundreds of dollars. Such a bargain!

Jim Downey

A good friend - the one who actually got me started in book conservation (and has written a brilliant book on her time in the UICB program) - was by to visit for the first time in a long while. No discredit to her, we were just unable to have guests for the last year or two of caring for Martha Sr.

Anyway, last night, over a glass of wine and chatting, she handed over a wrapped package. “Your Christmas gift.”

(We’ve always been close enough friends that such things can be done whenever the timing works out, rather than obsessing over calendar pages.)

I unwrapped it. A small CD/DVD travel case. I unzipped it - and saw the first disc labeled “Communion of Dreams by James T. Downey.”

I was stunned. Gobsmacked, the Brits say.

My friend’s husband (also my friend - I’ve known them since they were first married) does custom audio books. He’d read Communion of Dreams last year, and really liked it. And together they conspired to produce the book as an unabridged audio production. 12 CDs worth.

I’m not sure yet just how long that is - I’m guessing about 20 hours. I just listened to the first chapter last night - and it was brilliant! A wonderful adaptation of the text, with some fun interpretations of the characters. Over the next few days I’ll get nothing much else done, I’m guessing, as I listen to the thing. Wow.

And here’s the best part: I have permission to use the MP3 versions that also came along with the gift as podcasts!

My good lady wife is starting to do the work of adapting my CoD site to host the MP3 files, and once we have all the details worked out, those will be available as a free download as well.

This is really cool - and really exciting! Just this past weekend downloads of the text of the book surpassed 7,750. I was just starting to think of contacting agents/publishers again - now having the podcasts of the book available will really help to promote the thing and make it easier to arrange conventional publishing.

Very, very cool!

Jim Downey

I find it odd, but somehow telling, that the obit for my MIL has gotten the most hits of anything I’ve posted here previously, and as a result I’ve hit a new “best day” for the blog today. Ah, well.

The newspaper coverage of her passing can be found here and here.

* * * * * * *

And that’s not the only news about us. In a strange twist, the same issue of the Tribune which contains Martha Sr.’s obituary also has this piece about this year’s Notable Historic Properties. Which includes our home (second from bottom on that page.)

* * * * * * *

While I was being preoccupied with caring for Martha Sr. in her final days, there seems to have been a burst of activity with the novel. I don’t know if someone posted it to some websites or what, but in the last week almost 500 people have downloaded the thing. If anyone knows what is behind this, drop me a note or leave a comment if you would be so kind. Oh, that pushes the total downloads over 7,000 - thanks, everyone!

* * * * * * *

Got this very nice note from someone who had just downloaded the book and started reading it. ‘Rich’ said:

Thanks for making your SF novel available. I am now in the middle, and you’ve REALLY got my interest. This is a good thing.

I have only noticed 2 very minor technical things that I think most people would not notice, but being an engineer and trained in physical sciences, I saw them.

In the first description of the airlock on Titan, using water to wash off tholin dust would be difficult as you have described it. If the Titan atmosphere were pumped out to a vacuum, liquid water would boil off instantly, unless there were another replacement atmosphere first.

When Jon first breathes the air inside Darnell’s dome, “the usual sharp whiff of methane” – Methane is odorless, needing to have mercaptans added so we can smell it.

Like I said, these are small details, and do not detract from my enjoyment of the story.

D’oh! My response:

Well, thanks! The first can be easily changed with a tweak to the description (which is what I actually envisioned - the new ‘Earth normal’ atmo being pumped in first, then things flushed with a water rinse), but I didn’t know that methane was odorless. Huh. Silly me - it’s the same as ‘natural gas’, isn’t it?

No worries, I can tweak that by giving the tholin precipitate some kind of smell, and rejigger the text to reflect that. But I would not have caught it without your help.

See, kids - you write me, you’ll get a real, personal response! Well, sooner or later. Just because the novel has now been downloaded 7,000 times and I’m well on my way to becoming a famous and fabulously wealthy author, doesn’t mean I won’t answer my email . . .

* * * * * * *

And, lastly, thanks again to all who have commented or sent messages about Martha Sr.’s passing. It has been much appreciated by us.

Best,

Jim Downey

. . . to link to an announcement I made at Daily Kos about Martha Sr.’s passing.  You can find it here.  Thought you might like to know about it.

Jim Downey

My shooting buddy S called me up yesterday morning, wanted to know if I felt like getting out to do a little plinking. Since we had a warm front move through the night before, it was forecast to be in the upper 50s - not your typical January weather for Missouri. A chance to get out and do some shooting was most welcome.

He said that his Brother-In-Law was in town. I knew that S and T (the BIL) had hunted together for years, and that S trusted T not to be an idiot with a weapon, but I didn’t know much about him beyond that. S wanted to know whether it was OK for T to come along, try out some of our pistols. “Sure!”

So we set it up and went out to the range. As is my preference, informal shooting on private land - just tin cans at about a dozen yards for pistols, somewhat further for a little 9mm carbine of mine. Relaxed, laid-back, but still sufficient to keep my skills sharp and my mind off of being a full-time care provider for a few precious hours.

Since I didn’t know T, I wasn’t sure of his proficiency with handguns. And as we were talking about the guns we brought, getting them out and getting them ready, it was clear that he hadn’t ever shot a number of them. This isn’t too surprising, since several of them are somewhat uncommon.

My buddy S and I went first - our guns, make sure everything is working OK. When it was T’s turn, with a casual concentration he outshot us both, with our own guns. Turns out he has a law enforcement background, and still is involved in firearms training. As I noted to a friend in an email last night:

Nice to be shooting with someone that good, who wasn’t trying to be a dick about it. I’m a pretty decent shot, and can be quite good if I push myself into a ‘competition’ mindset. But I would really rather just relax and shoot without having something to prove. S is the same way. But trust me when I say that is somewhat rare - too often the competition bug gets in the way.

T was a state level competitor, but that was some years back. So now he’s relaxed - and good. Probably no where near where he was when he was competing, but that’s OK. Shooting cans at 15 yards was perfectly fine.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

OK, I’m going to brag a bit. Though it is all true.

When I was heavily involved in the SCA I was *heavily* involved. For a period of maybe about ten years I was known throughout the world-wide organization, in no small amount because of my ability as a fighter in the SCA style of martial arts. I had achieved the highest awards and rankings, acted as the chief officer in charge of all the fighting rules and safety criteria, and had literally written the definitive instruction manual for one particular sub-set of the martial art (greatsword use, if you want to know). I was, simply, one of the best there was. Given that there were tens of thousands of people engaged in this martial art around the world at the time, this was no small accomplishment, though of course in the ‘real’ world it doesn’t amount to anything of note.

But one thing which you might find a bit curious: in an organization where the basic measurement of skill is winning within the context of a tournament (patterned somewhat loosely on chivalric tourneys of the Middle Ages), I only won exactly four tournaments in my entire SCA career. Two of those were ‘Crown Tourney’, in which the ‘ruler’ for a six month period is chosen, and two others were other somewhat prestigious tournaments. But that’s it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune posted a piece last week titled “50 things I’ve learned in 50 years, a partial list in no particular order.” It’s kind of fun, and while I disagree on a few points, as I approach my own 50th birthday later this year I find it’s a list I pretty much could have come up with myself. In particular, he notes this:

38. In crisis or conflict, always think and act strategically. Take time to figure out what the “winning” outcome is for you, then work toward it.

I learned this long ago as applied to all of life, phrased simply as “define your victory conditions”. It has meant a somewhat less conventional life for me, mostly free of the trappings of “success.” And I’m OK with that.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

My friend responded to my email about shooting yesterday with this:

Nice to be shooting with someone that good, who wasn’t trying to be a dick about it. I’m a pretty decent shot, and can be quite good if I push myself into a ‘competition’ mindset. But I would really rather just relax and shoot without having something to prove. S is the same way. But trust me when I say that is somewhat rare - too often the competition bug gets in the way.

You are men.

Men have testosterone.

It’s very simple math.

My reply:

Over-simplified, actually. It’s more of a mindset.

***

I won four tournaments in my entire SCA career. Crown twice, Valour, and a memorial tourney in Des Moines. That’s it. Yet I had a world-wide reputation, and it was justified. By almost any measure you could devise, I would have been considered an ‘alpha male’ in terms of the prevailing testosterone pop-psych.

Why? For the same reason that I didn’t want to get all competitive with T and S when shooting yesterday: winning things like that just isn’t that important to me. Some guys with *plenty* of testosterone are perfectly happy to define their lives in ways different from the prevailing pop-psych.

My friend’s insightful response:

Although I have noticed that at some level of competence, whatever the subject, people don’t seem to have quite the need to compete that they would otherwise. I’ve run into it myself in some areas. I think that with T and S and you, all of you knew that you’re competent shots and the idea was not to plink off the most cans, but to have fun trying weapons. And that’s what you did. I guess a better way to say it is that when people are comfortable enough in their own skin, their own level of ability in whatever they are doing, they don’t need to compete and can just enjoy participating in the activity.

Is that what you mean?

Exactly.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

After shooting, we got back to my place, and hung out a while back in my bindery (where I have a large working table where we could set out some guns and whatnot to look at and talk about.) In the course of the conversation, S mentioned to T that I had written Communion of Dreams, and that it was up on the web for anyone to download.

“Doesn’t that make it kinda tough to make any money off of it?” asked T.

“That’s not the point,” I answered.

Because, while I wouldn’t mind selling the book to a publisher, and think that eventually having the book online will help in doing so, that’s not what my ‘victory condition’ is. My victory condition is to have people read the book, find it an engaging and thought-provoking story. Sure, lots of money from having a best-seller would be nice, but in all honesty I can earn a decent income from my book conservation work. My real goal is to be respected as a writer. And if I have to do that in an unconventional way, well, that’s a path I’m used to walking.

Jim Downey

I took yesterday off from all blogging (including commenting on blogs), just to relax and watch movies. But I did stop by here and get the year-end stats for the blog and my Communion of Dreams site, and here they are:

• 6,288 have downloaded the novel. As noted in this post, that reflects a slow down over the past couple of months, but still amounts to over 500 downloads per month on average. Sure, it’s not block-buster size sales, but it ain’t bad.
• This blog has had a total of 10,834 visits.
• Typical visits per day is now between 50 and 70. The best day was in August, at 152 visits.
• I posted 247 entries in 2007, which amounts to something on the order of 100,000 words (or more - this software will not allow me to calculate that easily, so I am estimating an average post length of between 400 and 500 words). That’s a solid-sized novel, and makes me feel pretty good about maintaining my writing skills.

So, just for reference, there it is. Thanks to everyone who visits, links, comments, or helps to promote this blog or my novel.

More later, depending on how the day goes.

Jim Downey