Communion Of Dreams


3800
July 26, 2007, 9:08 am
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Feedback, Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff

I’m deep into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so may not have much in the way of substantive posts over the next couple of days.  Combining that with my care-giving responsibilities increasing over the last week due to something of a decline in my charge’s health, and I don’t have much extra energy or attention span.

But I wanted to note that we passed 3800 downloads of the novel yesterday, and I have been getting a bit more feedback here on the site to it.  These are certainly good things, and I would like to thank one and all who have helped promote the book by telling their friends or posting comments about it elsewhere.  Certainly, nothing that I have done has reached so many people.

Thank you!

Jim Downey

5 comments


Rejecting Jane Austen.
July 20, 2007, 6:33 am
Filed under: General Musings, Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling, MetaFilter, Promotion, Publishing, Society, Writing stuff

How would you like to have been the guy at a publishing house who sent back J. K. Rowling’s query for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (as the book was first titled in Britain)? Purportedly, over a dozen people have this bit of professional shame lurking in their past. There are plenty of other such stories out there of writers who had trouble selling their first book, who then went on to hugely successful writing careers. But given Rowling’s phenomenal success (which I think is fully deserved), this is the tale I find most amusing as I struggle in obscurity with my own writing.

Getting published these days is largely a matter of luck. Oh, if you are already a celebrity, then getting a book published is a simple matter. But as we live in an age of celebrity, I don’t find that in the least bit surprising. But for a first-time novelist, breaking through is really a matter of luck as much as anything.

Don’t believe me? Figure that quality will eventually attract a publisher, the way that J.K. Rowling did after a dozen rejections?

Tell that to David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath. Lassman, a frustrated novelist himself, decided to see what would happen if he sent around sample chapters and plot outlines for some ofJane Austen‘s work to British publishers. From The Guardian:

After making only minor changes, he sent off opening chapters and plot synopses to 18 of the UK’s biggest publishers and agents. He was amazed when they all sent the manuscripts back with polite but firm “no-thank-you’s” and almost all failed to spot that he was ripping off one of the world’s most famous literary figures.

Mr Lassman said: “I was staggered. Here is one of the greatest writers that has lived, with her oeuvre securely fixed in the English canon and yet only one recipient recognised them as Austen’s work.”

Lassman barely tweaked some of the names and titles, but left the text largely alone. And so, one of the most celebrated authors in the English language couldn’t get past the first-line readers employed by most publishers and agents to filter out unsolicited submissions.

As I try and psyche myself up for making another round of passes at agents, trying to convince them that having over 3500 people download my novel based almost entirely on word of mouth is an indication that there is indeed some demand there, I will remember this. I do not delude myself into thinking that I am a writer on the same level as Austen or Rowling. Hardly. But not all published work is in anything like that league. Further, the decision as to what gets published, what gets past the poorly paid staff stuck with opening envelops, is largely a matter of just dumb luck rather than the reflection of any sort of quality judgment at all.

Jim Downey

(Via MeFi.) 

6 comments


Ben Bova
July 18, 2007, 2:17 pm
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ben Bova, Frederik Pohl, General Musings, Heinlein Centennial, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff

If I published 4 books a year, for the next 25 years, I’d have accomplished in my 74 years what Ben Bova has accomplished in his life so far.

Yeah, it reminds me of that line from the short-lived series Crusade: “Whenever I get to feeling too proud of my accomplishments, I remind myself that when Mozart was my age, he’d been dead for six years.”

Bova is a legend in Science Fiction. Justifiably so. But he’s more than that. He’s a decent human being.

I say that for two reasons, both observed up close at the Heinlein Centennial. The first is summed up nicely by the James D. Miles quote which I have long appreciated:

“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”

During the Centennial, I was waiting for a friend at a rendezvous point before going off for some lunch. The session I had attended had wrapped up early, so I was just standing there in an entrance hall, minding my own business. From one of the adjacent corridors came a distinguished gent, walking towards me. As he got closer, I recognized him. It was Ben Bova.

He came up to me, peered down at my Centennial badge, and quietly introduced himself. There was no implication that I should be impressed or honored – he was just one guy introducing himself to another stranger who happened to be in the same place at the same time. A part of me, experienced with countless hours of public relations, took note and admired how smoothly and genuinely he did this. The other part of me tried not to stammer too much in response to his queries and comments. We chatted for a few minutes, him telling me that his flight up from Florida had been delayed, asking me why I was attending, et cetera, and then the person he had been waiting for came up (I’m embarrassed to say that I cannot recall his name . . . he was another ‘V.I.P.’ who knew Bova evidently as an old friend). Bova introduced us like I had been his old army buddy. We all chatted for a minute or two. My friend ML came up. Bova took the initiative of introducing himself and his friend to her. Then he glanced at his watch, and said to his friend, “Well, I suppose it’s time I should get in there.” With a smile to us, he asked, “Will you be joining us?”

My friend glanced at me as he turned to go. I nodded, said quietly, “Um, let’s roll with this.”

We followed a few paces to one of the empty meeting rooms. Just inside the door Bova and his friend stopped, Ben looking around somewhat confused.

“Um, perhaps you’re still on Eastern Time? There isn’t anything scheduled during the lunch break . . .” I volunteered.

“Ah, right you are,” he said, somewhat chagrined.

“You’re welcome to join us, we were just about to go get some lunch.” (Hey, lunch with Ben Bova? How cool would that be?)

“Oh, thanks, I really should go get checked in. I just got off the shuttle, and thought I was going to be late getting to this session.”

We (ML and I) slipped out, Bova said goodbye to his friend, and the three of us went one direction, Bova off towards the reception area for the hotel in the other.

Now, that was the first insight. And I concede that it could well have all been just a highly-polished act by an author long experienced with dealing with fans at Cons and whatnot. But the next bit provided the other reason for my assessment.

ML and I had our lunch, and I returned to the room where Ben Bova had thought that he was to be participating. I had planned on going to that session anyway, since the other speaker was Frederik Pohl, and the topic was “Editors in Transition,” about the early days of SF publishing.

And here’s the second thing. I haven’t a nice little quote at hand, but I can assure you that it is true: you can also tell a great deal about someone by how they treat the elderly, particularly if that elderly person is suffering some form of diminished capacity.

Frederik Pohl, to my eye, is still as sharp as a tack. But he’s pushing 90, has had some health issues, and is getting a little forgetful . . . nothing that should come as any kind of a surprise in someone that age. As the full-time care-giver of someone who has Alzheimer’s at 90, I can honestly say that there is no reason to think that he suffers from any kind of dementia or mental deterioration. He’s just evidencing the normal traits of age, and even that very mildly indeed.

The thing is, watching Ben Bova interact with Fred Pohl during the hour long free-wheeling discussion of ‘the good old days,’ I saw another side of Ben Bova that most people probably don’t. There was the usual deference and respect, but there was also a genuine warmth, what I would characterize as perhaps even a kind of love. It’s the sort of thing that allows a person to smile quietly and let slide an error or mistaken memory without the need to correct it or even bring it to the attention of the older person. It is, in my experience, a deep reverence borne of long understanding of another, and reflects that person’s own self-confidence and self-understanding. I didn’t know it until I started to do the background research for this post, but Ben Bova has long experience with the martial arts, and that was the quietude I recognized in him.

I did see more of Ben Bova in the course of the weekend – his giving autographs, accepting awards, making little presentations, interacting with friends and fans. I didn’t attempt to claim any more of his time or attention – no reason to be a nuisance. He had been very generous with me already in that regard. And besides, I’d seen enough to understand some things about him which I deeply respect.

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to UTI.)

4 comments


Damn.
July 5, 2007, 12:37 pm
Filed under: BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Press, Publishing, Science Fiction, Slate, Ursula K. Le Guin, Writing stuff

With The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon has finally made the only use of genre fiction that a talented writer should: Rather than forcing his own extraordinarily capacious imagination into its stuffy confines, he makes the genre—more precisely, genres—expand to take him in.

Gah. That’s from Ruth Franklin in Slate on May 8th. Brought to my attention by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing. But he made up for it by posting this response from Ursula K. Le Guin:

(10/15/07: Text has been removed because of copyright issues. See this post by Cory Doctorow for a complete explanation. Since I took the text from BoingBoing, I feel it only appropriate to respect the wishes of the parties involved and remove it now.  You can read it in its entirety at the Ansible link.)

Damn. And that’s only about half of it. Not for the first time I read her work and think “I wish I’d written that.” But hey, anyone who writes science fiction is obviously just an untalented hack, according to Ruth Franklin, so I guess it can’t be any good.

Jim Downey

2 comments


That first novel…
July 1, 2007, 9:32 am
Filed under: Failure, Mark Twain, Marketing, NPR, Promotion, Publishing, Writing stuff

There was a very good segment on this morning’s Weekend Edition Sunday with Jon Clinch, the author of the novel Finn. Clinch talks about his experience in working on several prior novels, none of which were satisfactory to him, before embarking on Finn. It is interesting that he used the web to first promote himself, then land an agent, then get a publisher for the novel – the same kind of thing I am attempting to do with this site and Communion of Dreams.

But even more interesting was the business with his attitude towards his previous novels, which he thought were important in helping him as a writer, even though they were “failed” projects ultimately in terms of artistic satisfaction (and not being published.) I think we tend to underestimate the value of failure, in our focus on success. I have lots of what would conventionally be characterized as “failures” in my life, but each one was an experience which helped lead me to new understanding about myself and the world. Basically, I’m of the opinion that if a failure doesn’t kill you, it isn’t really a failure. And since none of us gets out of this life alive, anyway, we’re all doomed to “failure”.

The most interesting people I know are not the ones who have only succeeded in everything they’ve tried – that type is either too self-satisfied to be interesting, or so unambitious to have never pushed themselves. Give me people who go too far, who push themselves in what they do past their abilities, who are ambitious enough to want to Paint the Moon. Those are the people who are interesting.

Communion was not my first novel. No, during college I wrote one, another near-term speculative novel, once again based on the notion that a pandemic had caused a general societal collapse. I think it is stuck away in a box someplace in the attic. Even though post college I spent several months trying to rewrite it, it is fairly dreadful, and deserves banishment to the attic. But it helped me learn a *lot* about writing a novel, and allowed me to work out a number of themes and ideas which I then used in Communion to much better effect. So that book (titled Equipoise) was not entirely a failure. And I’d bet that most ‘successful’ authors have one or more such books tucked away in a box somewhere, if you can only get them to admit it.

Anyway, I enjoyed the interview with Clinch, and will have to look up his book one of these days.

Jim Downey

2 comments


Are you afraid?
June 29, 2007, 4:30 pm
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Babylon 5, Fermi's Paradox, Gene Roddenberry, General Musings, Guns, J. Michael Straczynski, JMS, MetaFilter, Predictions, RKBA, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space, Star Trek, Violence, Writing stuff

In a few days I’ll turn 49. Statistically, I’ve got a couple more decades to go. Realistically, I could drop dead tomorrow from an undiagnosed heart condition, develop cancer or some other terminal disease, or just get hit by a truck. You tend to take this sort of philosophical attitude when your own parents both died before they hit 40.

But that does not define my life – I do not constantly worry or live in fear. I don’t panic when I hear that they’ve found a couple of car bombs in the heart of London, any more than I lose my head over reports of a new strain of bird flu discovered in Indonesia, or that there are weather conditions that favor the development of tornadoes in my area.

I take reasonable precautions, try and keep track of my health, wear my seat belt, indulge in particularly dangerous sports rarely, and try and keep aware of my surroundings. I do carry a concealed weapon (legally – all licensed and everything), but no more expect that I will have to use it than I expect I’ll have to use any of the several fire extinguishers around the house and in the car. I don’t go poking around bad neighborhoods or bars late at night, don’t seek to draw attention to myself when I don’t know what the tactical situation is.

And I guess that’s where I come down on the question of whether or not we should be broadcasting “contact” signals out into the cosmos, in the hope of connecting with some other intelligent life.

Just about every major science fiction author has dealt with the question of alien contact at some point or another. Sometimes it is handled with an assumption of happy-happy E.T. helping us out, being part of the big brotherhood of intelligent species. Sometimes it is having us be lunch. Sometimes we’re the bad guys, enslaving other races or having them for lunch.

I tend to agree with Carl Sagan’s position that we’re unlikely to be at anything resembling technological parity with another race (and this is the premise of Communion of Dreams). And I tend to agree with those who advocate a certain caution in making our presence known in the universe. Via MeFi, there’s a very good article on this very topic in The Independent by Dr. David Whitehouse, formerly the BBC Science Editor and a respected astronomer, that I heartily recommend. An excerpt:

The fact is, and this should have been obvious to all, that we do not know what any extraterrestrials might be like – and hoping that they might be friendly, evolved enough to be wise and beyond violence, is an assumption upon which we could be betting our entire existence. When I was a young scientist 20 years ago at Jodrell Bank, the observatory in Cheshire, I asked Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of Jodrell Bank and pioneering radio astronomer, about it. He had thought about it often, he said, and replied: “It’s an assumption that they will be friendly – a dangerous assumption.”

And Lovell’s opinion is still echoed today by the leading scientists in the field. Physicist Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been for decades one of the deepest thinkers on such issues. He insists that we should not assume anything about aliens. “It is unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity, just as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses,” he says. ” We must be prepared for either possibility.”

The Nobel Prize-winning American biologist George Wald takes the same view: he could think of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a superior technology in outer space. The late Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who died a decade ago, also worried about so-called “First Contact”. He recommended that we, the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos, should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes. He said there is no chance that two galactic civilisations will interact at the same level. In any confrontation, one will always dominate the other.

Do I want to see us in some community of space-faring nations, such as the reality envisioned by J. Michael Straczynski in Babylon 5, or Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek? Yeah, that’d be cool. Do I expect it to happen that way? Um, not at this point. The only thing we know is based on our experience here on Earth, where whenever a technologically superior culture encountered a less sophisticated culture, the latter always came out the loser to a greater or lesser degree. Until we have some solid information to the contrary, I don’t think that it would be wise at all to draw attention to ourselves. After all, we have no idea what the neighborhood is like.

Jim Downey

Cross posted to UTI.

7 comments


Milestones.
June 27, 2007, 6:58 am
Filed under: Feedback, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff

Happy 100!

This is my 100th post here, and there are a couple of other mildly interesting milestones to report: sometime in the next few days the 3,000th download of Communion of Dreams will happen, keeping the average up to about 600 downloads a month. We’ll also likely cross 2,000 visits to this blog in the same time-frame (plus those folks who receive feeds).

Not huge numbers, but better than I might have hoped for in each case – thanks to those who visit here, thanks particularly to those who help to spread the word about the novel to friends. My goal is still very much to land a conventional book publishing deal, but I am encouraged that people are still at least downloading the book.

I’d like to invite any and all to just say hello in comments, and of course I’m always happy to have feedback on the book or blog.

Best,

Jim Downey

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“…an awful waste of space.”
June 26, 2007, 10:29 am
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Fermi's Paradox, movies, R. Buckminster Fuller, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space, Writing stuff

A friend passed along this entry from today’s Quote of the Day:

If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.
George Carlin

Communion of Dreams is, essentially, about what happens when we are unexpectedly confronted with the reality of the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence. In this I am echoing countless other science fiction stories/novels/films, some more consciously than others. Most directly, I am paying homage to two authors:Sir Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan. For anyone interested in doing so, references can be found in my novel to both men, directly and indirectly.

And whenever you tackle this problem (whether or not there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe), you are also basically dealing with issues similar to religious faith. At least for the time being, we have no evidence, no scientific proof, of either E.T. or God. Friends who know me as a strong atheist have commented how surprised they were with how I deal with the issue of religion in Communion. Yet this is in keeping with how science fiction writers, and Carl Sagan specifically in his novel Contact, tend to approach this issue: leaving open the possibility and understanding the revolution in thought which it will demand when there is proof of E.T. (or God, for that matter). I don’t recall it being in the book, but there’s a line in the movie version of Contact which has always made sense to me, when the protagonist’s father says regarding the possibility of life on other planets: “I don’t know, Sparks. But I guess I’d say if it is just us… seems like an awful waste of space.”

Which brings me to another favorite quote, one I’ve appended to my emails for the last several years:

“Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not.
In either case, the thought is staggering.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller

And I think that sums it all up for me, on both the question of God and whether there is other intelligence out there. For Communion, I come down on the side of proving the existence of one, and figure that is enough for one book to tackle.

Jim Downey

1 comment


I don’t get it.
June 25, 2007, 11:30 am
Filed under: BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Firefly, Guns, H. G. Wells, Heinlein, Joss Whedon, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, SCA, Science Fiction, Serenity, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff

There’s a long and wonderful tradition of mixing genres in literature, and science fiction in particular has always had a tendency to appreciate anachronisms, to play the game of “what if spaceflight had been discovered/introduced 100 or 500 years ago”, or to suppose that for some reason some critical tech wasn’t discovered until well after it actually was in history. You can have a lot of fun with this, of pretending that H.G. Wells or Jules Verne (or even Mark Twain, for that matter) were writing not fiction, but suppressed fact, in their stories, and then extending the tech from that point forward. Conversely, someone like Joss Whedon can have a good time giving the crew of Serenity conventional modern firearms rather than futuristic weapons.

I understand that. I can enjoy an anachronism as much as the next guy. In fact, I was very heavily involved in the SCA for about 15 years (to the extent that I was King twice, held all three peerages, and served in numerous offices including Society Marshal). That’s how I met my good lady wife, and many of my closest friends.

But I don’t really get the whole fascination with Steampunk. Oh, sure, there’s been a lot of good fiction done in the sub-genre. But it’s like it has taken on cult qualities. People go nuts over it – BoingBoing sometimes seems to be Steampunk-crazed, and a search turns up almost 200 entries on the site with that theme. It’s not just appreciation of the literature – it’s the whole “build a steampunk this or that artifact” that has people all excited.There are whole publications and websites devoted to home-brew steampunk projects, not to mention clothing & accessories, weapons, et cetera. A good buddy of mine sent me a link to this ‘Steampunk Jar of Articulated Fireflies‘ yesterday, all excited that he had all the materials on hand to build one, except the phosphorous BBs. Um, OK…thanks for that, but, uh, why would you want such a thing? It’s like Star Trek fandom suddenly took over the defining aesthetic for some significant portion of society, and started making it cool to have your own bat’letH and creating a market for cell phones that function like Original Season communicators. I mean, it’s just plain weird that it has penetrated so far into the culture, with no sign of slowing down.

Yes, of course some of my reaction to this is touched with envy. It’d be a rush to have my fiction engender this kind of fan creativity. Well, to a certain extent it would be. I think the first time I came across someone with a subcutaneous bone-conducting mic/speaker based on my description in Communion of Dreams, I think I’d freak out…

Jim Downey

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I get mail…
June 21, 2007, 11:26 am
Filed under: Feedback, Gene Roddenberry, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Star Trek, Writing stuff

A friend sent me this in response to yesterday’s post:

I’d missed the list of Honoured Guests. Have to make sure my autograph-mad friend doesn’t find out, I’m sure he’d ask me to round out his collection. Me, I just plan to be completely starry-eyed, at least about the space travel people. The writers – eh. No offense, but anybody can make stuff up; it’s really cool people who make it happen.

My reply:

None of it is necessarily mutually exclusive, and there are roles for both. I don’t expect you or anyone else to attend the event for the same reasons I do, and that’s OK. But you’ll note that it is being held in honor of the writer, not some engineer.

But Wil Wheaton’s response is a whole lot better:

“We are some of those people, and we are gathered tonight in one of those places. When we were here a few weeks ago to shoot footage for our documentary, I discovered that this museum is more than just a collection of cool artifacts from the final frontier and beyond. It is an affirmation of why I, and so many other people around the world, love science fiction, and why science fiction endures – whether created by Jules Verne in 1864, or Gene Roddenberry in 1964, or some hot new stereovision writer in 2064 – with a relevance that transcends generations.

“There are countless examples here of the real power that science fiction has to address current events in a way that’s safe and acceptable for most audiences, while speaking very seriously about them to those who look beyond the spaceships and rayguns to the ideas behind the stories. Whether it was written one hundred years ago or just published last month, science fiction can give us warnings about the future, hope for the future, or just blissful escape into the future, visiting fantastic worlds that are light-years away – and as close as our bookshelves and televisions.”

That’s just an excerpt from his post about being the one to induct Gene Roddenberry into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in Seattle. Go read the whole thing.

Jim Downey

(Via BadAstro Blog.)

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