Someone early on here suggested that I should podcast chapters of the book, which is a rather interesting idea but outside the scope of my time and tech right now. However, how about a graphic novel adaptation of Communion? I’d have to get someone else to do it, since my artistic skills don’t run that direction, but there are plenty of talented folks out there, in a wide range of styles – from Buck Godot to Buffy. Nominations?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Carl Sagan, Predictions, Science Fiction, tech, Titan, Writing stuff
No, not ours – the weather on Titan. Another news story has come out confirming my prediction in the book: that there is liquid methane/ethane on Titan, probably due to seasonal changes causing precipitation in a manner analogous to rain here on Earth. Well, actually, it wasn’t my prediction – the credit belongs to Carl Sagan, who very early on predicted that Titan’s ruddy color was due to hydrocarbons in its atmosphere, a substance that he named “tholin”. I just stole it.
And here’s a little ‘easter egg’ – the reference to Sagan’s book Pale Blue Dot is made directly in Communion in several ways, the most notable is in the scene where Jon is dreaming that he is crossing a bridge which includes sconces containing small blue lights which seem to be receding as he progresses across the bridge. I hope the meaning is clear enough.
Jim Downey
Filed under: General Musings, Predictions, Press, Promotion, tech, Writing stuff
So, I was checking stats for the book and this blog this morning, and decided to follow one of the search links shown. And on that, I saw a listing for a Wikipedia page for me.
Huh.
No, I didn’t do it. To be honest, I signed up for a Wikipedia account the first of this year, as I was working to organize the various components for promoting Communion. Like this blog, I figured that it was a marketing tool that I would want to have in place at some point, and knew that there was likely a lag-time between signing up and creating pages (a common precaution to limit vandalism on such sites). But I hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with it yet, being busy with a number of other aspects of this endeavour and life.
But this one was last changed in June ’06. And has some dated and slightly incorrect information. And has me listed as being an ‘Internet Personality’. Very odd. But you may be amused to see what it says presently, so I won’t get in there and muck around with it for a while (I *am* still busy). Have fun.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Feedback, General Musings, Press, Promotion, Writing stuff
I’m tired.
This stems in large part from the fact that the person for whom I am a care-giver (see this post) has a bit of a cold/flu bug, and so needs more care and attention. As a result, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, and I’m guessing that tonight won’t be a lot better.
So I don’t have a lot of energy. Not for blogging, not for writing, not for doing conservation work. Which creates a certain symmetry with the fact that right now I am largely just waiting for things to happen: waiting to hear back from any of the current crop of agents I’ve contacted, waiting to hear about that article in the newspaper, waiting to get feedback from anyone who is reading/has read the novel. Hits to the site have slowed to just a hundred or so a day, and downloads of the full novel are slowly climbing towards 1900. Everything is on hold, waiting, waiting…
Jim Downey
More feedback from a reader. Sent this comment (spoiler alert):
I had some serious problems with the Ling character. In a society where children are so rare and cherished, the idea that she might be just wandering the streets was a difficult one. That the scientist Gish might just meet her one day and propose she go on an important scientific mission the next … well, it just seemed too abrupt.
To which I replied:
As to some of your questions about character motivation and behaviour (particularly as pertains to Gish & Ling) – good. Those are supposed to make you wonder. It’s starting to build the mystery. People, and things, are not necessarily what they first seem. This is a parallel construction to the initial reports of the artifact, and designed to get the reader wondering. The trick is, of course, in getting the reader to wonder about the nature of reality, of what is really going on, but not about my competency as a story-teller…
Yeah, that’s the trick. And it is also the trick with getting an agent and a publisher. Because when a book is published, and gets recommendations, the reader will naturally assume that any such ‘problems’ are intentional on the part of the author, and plow on. But before then, in the stage where I am now, people don’t have that kind of trust in me. A first-reader at a big agency or a publishing house is going to hit that stuff and say “gah – this idiot can’t even get past these problems. Pass.”
Part of me wants to grab people by the shirt collar and shake them, saying “look, just read the whole damned thing, OK, then come back and tell me what works or doesn’t work.” But that’s not how the game is played. Instead, most agents and publishers want three chapters to look at, and judge you on that basis. To be honest, it’s a big part of my motivation for putting the entire book online in the way I have – so that there’s a greater chance that someone who is potentially interested in my book may sample more than just the first three chapters, and realize that there is perhaps more to what I am doing than is evident in the first couple of chapters.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Feedback, Heinlein, James Burke, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff
Got an email from someone last evening about the book (he had just finished chapter one), and he made the following observation:
One page 1, you speak of “he – he – he,” but don’t initially give us Jon Thompson’s name or description. I can live with learning his name on page 2, but I wonder if you might consider sliding in some sort of physical description of him in this chapter?
My reply was this:
Um, that was a very conscious decision. Nowhere in the book will you find any real description of him. Tied with a fairly “close” perspective with him, it makes it easier for the reader to subconsciously identify with the character, thereby becoming engaged with what happens that much quicker. And congrats – of all the people who have read it and commented to me so far, you are the first to notice this application of my literary theory. If an editor convinces me otherwise somewhere down the road, I might change it.
And I thought I would elaborate somewhat on this.
There has been a lot of scholarship into how a reader interacts with a text. 20 years ago I studied that as part of my graduate work at the University of Iowa. And while I can no longer cite authors off the top of my head, I do know that I drew several practical conclusions from those studies. This was one of them – that allowing the reader the ability to imagine themselves as a character (in this case, the main character) will help transition the “suspension of disbelief” necessary for a work of fiction, particularly Science Fiction.
Different authors do this in different ways. But for me, the most powerful books were always the ones which allowed me to step into the role of the main character – to imagine myself as Muad’dib or Valentine Michael Smith, learning about a strange world and my place in it. With Jon Thompson in Communion of Dreams, I wanted the reader to do the same thing: speculate upon their own understanding of themselves in a world that is changing around them, not through technology, but through revelation. It is James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed applied to fiction, and hints somewhat at some of the deeper layers of what the novel is really all about.
Jim Downey
Several things today. First, I got an email from someone who enjoys my blogging on UTI, and sent along this nice comment:
After you mentioned your novel on UTI a couple of days ago, I went to the linked site thinking, “oh great, I like Jim’s writing on the blog, but a novelist?” It’s wonderful! I’m reading a chapter a night before I go to bed, and I’m having a very good time in your world(s). I could always read more each night, but make myself wait as I’m so busy these days that if I gave up sleep, I could finish everything I have to do in the next three months in about three and half months.
Just wanted to tell you that it’s fine work Jim.
I’ll leave it anonymous for now, though I did invite him to come by and post his thoughts for himself. Or I’ll ID him if he gives permission.
Over the last several days, I’ve been trying to identify and contact likely agents to represent me and Communion. As I mentioned previously, I identified over 60 agents who say they handle Science Fiction, so it is slow going to check out each agency online, see what others have to say about them, decide who looks promising, who to contact and who to pass. So far, I have sent queries to seven agents/agencies, and have already heard back from one. That’s the ‘rejection’ part of the title.
But it was quick, painless, professional – all you can expect in this business, and it left me with no ill feelings whatsoever. Having operated an art gallery for 8 years, I know full well what it is like to be on both sides of this equation, and respect anyone who handles giving out a rejection with a modicum of class.
Oh, hits to the Communion site are running between 350-450 a day right now, with something like 150 or so people deciding to download the novel. Over 1100 downloads, last snapshot of the stats I saw.
Jim Downey
Well, I finally found the time and energy to dive back into the Guide to Literary Agents, and to start contacting some of the prospective agencies I’d identified previously, after doing some additional research on them.
And some additional research on me. Because as I put together my query letter (each one tailored to a given agency, based on a general text), I decided to go dig further into the stats for the Communion website to bolster my case for why someone might want to publish my book. I’m not that techno-savvy, and had not previously figured out how to configure my hosting account to get all the information possible. Oh, I knew I had been running (on average) about a thousand hits a week to the site for the past six weeks, but I didn’t know how many people had decided to download the .pdf files of the novel.
It’s over 800. Make that just under 1,000 twenty-four hours later. Wow.
Jim Downey
As I mention on the homepage for Communion, one of the dangers in writing near-term speculative fiction is being outpaced by the real flow of events in the world, whether that is political, social, technological, or scientific. Which is why early on I try and convey that the novel is set in an alternative time-line, thereby giving myself some leeway to be at odds with what actually happens.
But still, you run the real risk of being dated. In the prequel to Communion, titled St. Cybi’s Well (still very much just starting to work on this book), I’m writing about 2012 – only 5 years from now. One of the key items I had initially conceived of for that book was what I called a ‘UniPod’ – a small, Blackberry-sized device which had nothing but a screen on one side, and which would serve as a phone, satellite radio, music system, palm-top computer – you get the idea. Sound familiar? It should – it’s what the Apple iPhone looks like and basically how it functions (I’m sure the additional capabilities will be built in soon enough). And it already exists, four years ahead of schedule.
Likewise, the pace of world events isn’t what I establish as the basis for my ‘future history’. In it, there has already been a nuclear attack against Israel, and they have unveiled (and put into operation) a plan to establish a substantial colony on the Moon using conventional heavy-lift rockets. Unlikely? Maybe. Outlandish? No – I don’t think so.
But these kinds of things get in the way of people getting into the novel, I think. For any work of fiction, you need a willing suspension of disbelief, and a lot of people have a hard time divorcing current events from what I speculate upon. Yet if you were to go back to 2000, and say that you predict where we are today – bogged down in a nightmare in Iraq, significant curtailment of our civil liberties here at home, seeing the resurgence of Russia as a major power, et cetera – I think a lot of people would have a hard time swallowing it. But having lived through it, being there for each twist and turn, it all makes emotional sense to us now. Solid enough emotional sense that some people have a hard time imagining anything different.
Jim Downey
No, not a Holy Grail reference.
For over 8 years I owned an art gallery. I think it was the largest gallery in the state of Missouri, and featured works by a lot of local and regional artists of remarkable talent. At any given time we represented a couple dozen different artists, in a wide variety of styles, and had 200 or more works of art on hand for people to see (and theoretically buy, which they didn’t do enough of, which is why I closed the business three years ago).
That 8 years of selling art taught me a lot of things. Among those things was that everyone has a different sense of taste in what they like in artwork. And that that is OK.
The same is true of writing, of course. I don’t much appreciate poetry, as a general rule, though I know that a lot of really good poetry is out there, that it has a level of sophistication and intelligence about it which appeals to many people. I don’t much go in for mysteries (with a few exceptions), am ignorant of the entire ‘chick-lit’ genre, and wouldn’t touch most techno-thriller stuff unless I was being paid well to review it. And anyone who knows me well will tell you that I am a nut forthe Harry Potter books – I honestly consider JK Rowling to be a top-notch writer. (Yes, yes, I realize that many people consider them unworthy kid’s books, and Rowling nothing but a hack. We can argue about that later.)
Even within a genre, there are writers I like, and others less so. That doesn’t make those writers bad (though some of them are, and that is the reason I don’t care for them). It just means that for some reason or another their work doesn’t resonate with me.
Which brings me around to my point. It’s OK if you don’t like my novel. No, seriously, if it doesn’t do anything for you, that’s fine. It could be that you don’t care for Science Fiction. Or maybe you just don’t like my writing. Sure, I want people to like it (or at least respect it for being well-done), but I long ago learned that tastes differ widely – what I like in art or literature may be completely at odds with what you like. And that’s OK. To argue otherwise is to basically come down to saying “you can’t like blue. Red is the superior color.”
Anyway, don’t be afraid to say you didn’t like the book. I’m a big boy, have survived learning that not everything I do is going to please everyone.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 