Filed under: Babylon 5, Connections, Gardening, Kindle, Music, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Synesthesia, Writing stuff | Tags: Alan Parsons Project, Amazon, augmented reality, Babylon5, Crusade, direct publishing, gardening, Habaneros, jim downey, Kindle, literature, music, Peter Woodward, Science Fiction, Twitter, writing
Ah, Spring.
Got my pepper plants last night, unboxed them and set them out in the sun this morning. Six each of Bhut Jolokia, Red Savina, and Naga Morich.
Yesterday was good in another way: had some 50 downloads of Communion of Dreams. That’s about 4x what daily sales of the novel have been this week. No idea why. I can’t find anything which would explain it – if you know, please clue me in. Today things seem to still be running a little ahead of what passes for normal, but not as busy as yesterday.
And lastly, someone “followed” me on Twitter. OK, that isn’t too weird – while I don’t do a lot with Twitter, it is a promotional platform I use and part of that is following people and being followed in return. But this came out of the blue, before I had followed this person or had any contact with them. Who was it? Alan Parsons.
Actually, further digging indicated that it was the account for the Alan Parsons Project. I’m not sure who administers the account. It might be Mr. Parson, or it might just be some flunky.
Now, I have referenced music from the Alan Parsons Project here a couple of times. I’ve always had a lot of respect for their stuff, as well as Parson’s work as a sound engineer in his own right. But what I haven’t mentioned previously is that instrumental tracks from the Alan Parsons Project pretty much were the ‘soundtrack’ behind writing Communion of Dreams. As in, almost without exception, that is the music I put on when I was writing. It was energizing without being distracting, and helped me get into the proper mental zone to work on the book – a kind of induced syneshtesia.
So it was more than a little weird to have APP follow me on Twitter, regardless of who handles the site. No idea why.
Which leaves me with a lot of more-or-less happy confusion, and hope for the future.
Jim Downey
*Galen, of course. Whom I have mentioned previously.
Filed under: Amazon, Astronomy, Book Conservation, Connections, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, NASA, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Space | Tags: Amazon, direct publishing, jim downey, Kindle, NASA, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, writing
Two items.
One: Yesterday’s post was the most popular thing I’ve written here in years. Actually, I think it might be the second-best ever. Go figure.
(Well, three. I should mention this other item.)
Two: Possibly related, though things were doing quite well even before yesterday’s post – so far this month we’ve sold almost 50 copies (mostly Kindle) of Communion of Dreams. Thanks, everyone!
(No, make that four. Damn, forgot about this one.)
Three: Got another review. And it serves as a nice counterpoint to all those who enjoyed the book.
(Finally.)
And lastly, which I intended to be my second point all along: this very cool site showing relative scale of our solar system. I’ve seen this attempted a number of times and different ways online, but this is the best I’ve come across yet:
OMG SPACE is the thesis project of Margot Trudell, an OCAD student studying graphic design in Toronto, Canada. This website aims to illustrate the scale and the grandeur of our solar system, as well as illustrate through the use of infographics our work in the exploration of our solar system with various spacecraft.
And now I need to turn my attention to some book conservation work I want to wrap up. Cheers!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Connections, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, tech | Tags: Amazon, direct publishing, Kindle, literature, Science Fiction, technology, travel, TV Tropes, writing
Some miscellaneous bits this morning…
Since the close of the Kindle edition promotion on Saturday, about two dozen people have actually purchased a copy of Communion of Dreams in one form or another. Yay! Keep it up, people!
Oh, no! – TV Tropes Warning – while doing some ego-surfing this morning (actually, I’m still trying to get a handle on what promotional efforts work, what don’t) I found that CoD is the first listing under the ‘Literature’ sub-heading of the TV Tropes entry on First Contact Team. I always get sucked into TV Tropes, because it is such a good tool for exploring modern literature in all its various and sundry forms, and it is cool to be included in it. Thanks to whomever added Communion of Dreams to the entry! (Any chance of getting a direct link to the CoD homepage?)
As you all know, I screwed up and wasn’t able to extend the promotion to yesterday. However, there’s another day coming soon which is also important in the novel: April 12. From the very first paragraph of the book:
He could see four or five thousand buffalo, one of the small herds. They stretched out in a long line below him, wide enough to fill the shallow valley along this side of the river, coming partway up the sides of the hill, not fifty meters from where he stood. The sky was its perpetual blue-grey, as clear as it ever got at this latitude, though the sun was almost bright. Late winter snow, churned into a dull brown mass by the buffalo where they trekked along the valley floor, nonetheless glinted along the tops of the hills. Weather forecasts said more snow was coming. It was Friday, April 12.
Hmm…let’s see if I can get my act together for that date. Stay tuned.
Lastly, there are some new reviews up on the Amazon page for Communion, and I’d invite you to check them out, rate them if you find them useful. As I said yesterday, reviews seem to really make a difference – if you’ve read the book, please consider writing your own review. Thanks!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Guns, Predictions, Publishing, Religion, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Writing stuff
For whatever reason, recently I’ve had an interest in pickled eggs.
* * * * * * *
Bits & pieces:
“It is late, and things are not getting better.”
“A gun don’t make you bulletproof.”
“Tribal groups who all have their chieftains.”
* * * * * * *
I’ve had false starts, and false hope, before. In some ways, “false hope” is something of a summary of my life.
Anyway, I’ve been doing a *lot* of thinking about the prequel to Communion of Dreams, titled St. Cybi’s Well. I think this is the fourth of fifth time that I’ve started writing it. Before I’ve gotten as far as a chapter or two, outlines for more of the book. Or sometimes just making notes.
This time? We’ll see. At least some people are asking about it after reading Communion. That helps.
* * * * * * *
Yeah, bits & pieces. But none of those . . . fragments . . . necessarily means what it might seem. As I work through a story, I get these summations, these insights into something a character might think or do. I’ve been thinking a lot about Darnell Sidwell, who is the main character of St. Cybi’s Well. That much I’ve known all along.
And thinking about Darnell is risky. Why? Because he and I are tied together in some ways. Well, more than just occupying too much space in my head, I mean. He’s not an alter-ego of mine or anything, but we are close enough in age and cultural experience that I can’t help but compare myself to him at times. And the comparisons don’t always make me particularly happy.
* * * * * * *
For whatever reason, recently I’ve had an interest in pickled eggs.
Not sure why. I don’t remember eating them as a kid or anything. Frankly, I don’t remember ever having eaten one, though I’m sure I must have.
Eggs. Vinegar. Sugar, salt, spices. I like the way the kitchen smells now.
Sometimes you have to experiment.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
There’s a fascinating article in the current New Yorker on the story of Quentin Rowan, who last fall was revealed to have largely plagiarized the much-vaunted spy novel Assassin of Secrets. What is curious about the plagiarism is that Rowan had used passages from a very large number of other works, blending them together to create his novel. From the article:
Like a spy hiding in plain sight, “Assassin of Secrets” appeared to be a bizarre aberration: an homage to Bond that plagiarized Bond. Jeremy Duns, alerted by the Bond forum, began checking the text, plugging phrases into Google Books. He found a sentence from the American spy writer Charles McCarry, and another from Robert Ludlum, the author of the “Bourne” books. “I quickly realized that the whole novel was ‘written’ this way,” Duns wrote on his blog. He informed the book’s British publisher, and on November 8th, five days after the book’s publication, Little, Brown recalled all sixty-five hundred copies and issued a press release: “It is with deep regret that we have published a book that we can no longer stand behind.”
By then, Edward Champion, the editor of the culture Web site Reluctant Habits, had joined the hunt. Champion had exposed plagiarism before, and he told me that “generally people stick with one source, or two or three.” In “Assassin of Secrets,” he found thirty-four instances of plagiarism in the first thirty-five pages, taken from sources ranging from multiple Bond continuation novels to James Bamford’s 2001 nonfiction book about the National Security Agency to Geoffrey O’Brien’s 1988 account of the nineteen-sixties, “Dream Time.”
How did this come to happen? Well, the article goes into considerable depth exploring that question and Rowan’s answers. It’s an excellent and insightful psychological profile, and well worth the time to read it.
But what interests me is how Rowan managed to get the book published in the first place. Again, from the article:
At first, Rowan described “Spy Safari” to me as “pretty much my own,” but after a minute he admitted that he “must have” lifted some passages from pulp novels, “just because it was such a deeply ingrained thing.” He sent the manuscript to an agent named David Vigliano—a former student of Rowan’s father, at Friends—who was known for representing memoirs by celebrities such as Jessica Simpson. Vigliano passed the book along to one of his employees, a twenty-six-year-old agent named David Peak.
He knew someone. He had a connection to an agent. That agent handed the manuscript off to an employee. That employee placed the book a few months later with a publishing house. The rest of the story spun out from there.
One of the things I have written about here over the years is my belief that conventional publishing is essentially broken. Almost five years ago I wrote about the experience of David Lassman, then the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath in the UK, who ran an experiment to see what would happen if he submitted the work of Jane Austen under his own name to a bunch of established publishers and agents. All the submissions were rejected, and only one even recognized the work. Mr. Lassman, you see, didn’t have an old student of his father’s handy.
Now that Communion of Dreams is self-published, and slowly selling as word of it spreads, you might think that this is a moot point, or should be. Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps I should just ignore things like this, focus on concentrating on doing my own promotional stuff and selling copies of my novel here and there.
But the truth is that while I can at least point to the book getting some distribution, some positive reviews and word-of-mouth, I do not have the kinds of resources that even a minor publishing house has for advertising and promotion. Luck still plays a huge part. And that is either blind luck, or the kind that comes from having connections.
I don’t have that kind of luck. But perhaps you do, and will put in a good word for me with the right person. I promise that Communion of Dreams is all my own work. Really.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Connections, Guns, Hospice, Politics, Promotion, Publishing, RKBA, Science, Society
Interesting observation: last week I set up two Twitter accounts, one for “HFYJim” to support the care-giving book, the other for “BBTIJim” for my gun-nut stuff. Since then I’ve been learning the ropes about the Twitter culture, getting established, figuring out who to ‘follow’ and gaining a few followers myself. As of this morning, both accounts had about the same number of followers (about a score).
Now, in any sort of social media like this, you’re going to get some amount of SPAM. It’s always interesting to see where, and how it manifests. Just recently, the new Her Final Year blog has started to get some comments which seem OK though generic on the surface but which are actually links to this or that scam website. That tells me that the blog has now started to show up in search engines enough to be something of a target. No big deal, it goes with the territory.
But in the world of Twitter, spam seems to manifest as bogus followers. Not sure why this would be beneficial, but that could just be because I have my computer set up to filter out all the advertising, flash, and pop-up crap from websites. Anyway, of the two accounts I set up at the same time on Twitter, guess which one had attracted a handful of bogus followers who were ostensibly attractive young women with links to ‘pictures’ in their profiles?
It wasn’t the gun-nut one.
Nope. It was the care-giving one. The one tied to AARP, a variety of different Alzheimer’s and hospice organizations, and which I selected to use to follow different news outlets and science bloggers, many of which have significant left-wing political overtones. Not the one tied to a number of firearms-related sites and bloggers, some of which also have a decidedly right-wing political stance.
Curious, that. Now, this is just a snapshot, and it may be that I’ll see the same thing happen with my BBTIJim profile as time goes on. But I thought it was interesting.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Connections, Gardening, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Writing stuff
I brought in about 15 pounds of tomatoes from the garden this morning.
* * * * * * *
We’re a bit over two weeks in on having Her Final Year published. Details about how it is going here, but basically we’ve been busy getting everything in place, getting the word out, and hoping that one of these days all our promotional efforts will begin to pay off.
* * * * * * *
An old friend dropped me a note this morning, announcing that she’s again returning to blogging after a longish break while she got an advanced degree.
Reviving a blog is not unlike reviving a garden plot, or returning to a book you started and then let lie. There’s weeding to be done, of course. And you sometimes have to dig a bit to condition the soil, find the richness that is waiting there. Cultivation sometimes takes a while to really take hold, and it can seem like all you are doing is pouring energy into the enterprise without much hope of return.
But as any good gardener or writer knows, that hard work early on pays off later, sometimes in ways you cannot predict. Sue is an excellent writer, and a hell of a gardener, and I would invite you to add her blog to your regular reading. It may seem to be Colorado oriented, but I know from her previous writing that you’ll find a lot there to enjoy and think about over time.
* * * * * * *
For the latest HFY blog post, I pulled up the Wikipedia page on myself. Wow – that really needs to be updated. It doesn’t have anything about my writing for guns.com, and of course nothing yet about Her Final Year. Early last year I added some info about the whole BBTI project, but I have always been reluctant about messing around with my own Wiki entry (as the guidelines appropriately indicate). If anyone is feeling charitable and would like to spend a bit of time, your help and objectivity would be much appreciated.
* * * * * * *
I brought in about 15 pounds of tomatoes from the garden this morning. A real mix of varietals, too: Early Girls, Brandywines, Lemon Boys, even some Big Boys (I think).
This was the first big batch. Previously, it’d only been a couple of this or that – enough to satisfy my love of having fresh toms for a salad or a snack. But now I have enough to do something with them – probably the first batch of sauce. And from the looks of things on the plants, soon there will be a veritable avalanche – enough so I’ll need to make time to do some serious canning.
This makes me happy. I love to have home-canned tomatoes through the year, and usually try to put up about 60 quarts or so. It’s a lot of work for a few weeks, but it is so very worth it down the line.
Like many things. Or so we hope.
Jim Downey
I think they did a good job with the photos they chose to go with my text:
One of my earliest memories is of shooting with my dad. I was about five or six. We were out at a relative’s place in the country. Plinkin’ cans with .22s. Then my dad let me shoot his service revolver for the first time, helping me hold up the Smith & Wesson Model 10 he had been issued by his department. Yeah, he was a cop.
Happy Father’s Day, everyone.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
I’ve mentioned previously my Paint the Moon conceptual art project, and how it got started. Recently I noted to a friend that sometime in May was the 10th anniversary of the initial idea for the whole thing. His reaction was that I should do it again, or at least hold a ‘virtual party’ to celebrate the whole thing.
I demurred, for a couple of reasons. One, I have a lot of other irons in the fire currently. Two, part of the charm of the whole thing was the freshness of the idea – trying to recapture that naive moment would likely fall flat. And three, this is a different world we live in these days from the one pre-9/11. On that last point, this news item is relevant:
People who point powerful lasers at planes and helicopters — which can temporarily blind pilots — could face fines as high as $11,000 per violation, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration said Wednesday.
* * *
Pilots have reported over 1,100 such incidents in the U.S. so far this year, and officials said they are concerned that eventually there will be an air crash.
The incidents have increased rapidly around the world over the past six years as online sales of new, powerful handheld lasers have soared. In 2005, there were fewer than 300 such incidents reported in the U.S. Last year, there were 2,836 incidents. In some cases pilots have had to relinquish control of an aircraft to a co-pilot because of vision loss.
Yeah, it’s a different world now – one where an effort to create such a work of art would likely get me branded as some kind of terrorist.
More’s the pity.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Book Conservation, Connections, General Musings, Politics, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
A break in my conservation work this afternoon, as I wait for some wheatpaste to hydrate properly before cooking it. And I thought I would take a moment and explain just a bit why I posted the political item I did this morning.
The basic answer is that I’m just . . . eclectic . . . in my interests. That’s a big part of the reason why I tend to write about so many seemingly unrelated things. Part of that is due to my political inclinations – independent, untrusting of dogma, skeptical of authority.
But specifically, the post this morning is related to the thinking/planning/research I am doing for the prequel to Communion of Dreams. Because that book is concerned with what a world where fear has won looks like – where we *have* given over (almost) all our civil liberties in an attempt to secure safety. That’s not all the book is about, of course, but it does form a big part of the context for the story.
To be a novelist – even “just” a science fiction novelist – is to be a generalist. In order to construct a convincing reality different from our own, you have to be able to look deeply into how and why reality works, and understand how what choices you make as an author change the reality you construct. A conventional novelist can just describe our current reality, and be convincing – the reader will fill in the details on their own, and map their own understanding of reality onto the story the author wants to tell. Someone writing about a different reality – whether it is from the past or the future, adjacent to our world or far from it – has to get the “how” of that reality right, and do so without killing the story with too much exposition.
Anyway. Just a small insight into why I blog about the things I do. Now the wheatpaste is ready for cooking, and I must get back to work.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 