What is best in life?

So true, so very, very true. But he forgot a part y'know. It's true. Do you know what's really best in life, or maybe more accurately, do you know what is ALSO best in life?

A day of writing.

That's what I'm doing this weekend. I have to mow tomorrow and I may have to do some grocery shopping at some point too. Plus, I am definitely going to see the Avengers again tonight. (Wait, what? You haven't seen the Avengers yet? What the HELL is wrong with you, man? Go. Go on... Go! Ugh!... some people...) Anyways, that's my plans for this particular weekend, a couple of errands, nothing else, nothing....

Except for writing.

You see, a couple of weeks ago, I took up a new six month position at the Salt Mines. They were having a lot of turn-over lately due to a recent (and quite frankly somewhat excessive--I'm looking at you, Head Overseer Mungo) rate of slave deaths, coupled with the openings of several new mines, so now my days have been starting early and running long once again.

These days, I get up with the sun, pack in with all the mewling, stinking dregs of humanity all jammed in tight into their cattle car, and I spend my days writing down the general process of drudgery and shame that makes up daily life here at the Salt Mines, and all in order to ensure that the other business casual day-slaves are clear on what exactly is expected of them and how exactly they are to go about doing it.

It's really not that bad, to be honest, at least as far as Salt Mine slave positions go. It's a lot of: Mine the salt. Load the Salt. Lug the salt out of the mine for your masters. Be quick about it, or we'll whip the crap out of you. Repeat until you die.

For this I get nearly $0.15 an hour and a hole to piss in, too! Ha! I swear, it is just like Christmas. The downside, of course, is that my writing schedule has been thrown off.

Maybe "thrown off" isn't quite the right term. Derailed. That's a good way to put it. In fact, in the past two weeks, I haven't written at all. It is frustrating, to say the least.

(sad face...)

This weekend though, oh, this weekend! This weekend, I get back on track. This weekend, I remember what is good in life and I make myself a little time to get some writing done. In fact, I'm gonna get started right now!

You should try it. Make some time to work on your writing. I feel better already.

Thank you, Conan!

Jon

#reverb10 - Action!

Hokay…

It's now been over a week since I last did one of these #reverb10 posts and that makes it official: I've fallen off the wagon.

I have good excuses though. Really! I was kind of under the weather for a few days there. Then there's the weather itself which has really blown goats and frakked my commute up good. The real killer was last Saturday's family Christmas. We hosted, which means lots and lots of prep work, but it was all good. We went non-trad this year and had Mexican Christmas. We made to slow cooked beef brisket, homemade refried beans, fresh salsa & guacamole, tortillas, and, of course, plenty of liquor. Good times!

Time to get back up on the wagon.

December 13 – Action. When it comes to aspirations, it’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen. What’s your next step?

This is the big one, isn't it? That was rhetorical because, of course it is! It's so easy to talk the talk, but walking the walk is another thing entirely. I'm gonna walk it good, baby! Walk what? The book. What else?

I'm not exactly sure yet how it's all going to go down, but 2011 is the year in which I'm going to start moving ahead on the publication front. I'm putting To Kill the Goddess out there one way or another. My plan is to start with the traditional old-school publishers and see what kind of response I get. Clearly, that's the easy way to go. No, easy isn’t the word I'm looking for. Safe. It's the safe way to go. We all know how that process works.

For those aren't familiar:
1.    query an agent
2.    wait
3.    pray

I think in my case there is going to be a lot of praying. I think my book kicks ass, but like this years Christmas, To Kill the Goddess is non-trad. At its core it's high fantasy, but there's also a healthy dose of suspense thriller, sci-fi, and horror. Add in the multiple point of view storyline, an adult / non-YA target audience, and a complete lack of vampires and, well, you can see how it might be a hard sell. It's going to take someone with vision and while I truly believe there are agents who have the vision to see what I'm trying to accomplish those agents still need to sell my book to an old-school publishing house that is typically more interested in the easy/safe sell than they are taking a chance on something unique.

Add all that together and I think the best I can hope for is a mid-list commitment which translates to selling my book for peanuts and if that's the case then I'm going to take the option behind door two, which is self publication.

Stay tuned to The Scribblerati and see how it goes!

Shame on You, Amazon.com

Up until recently, like last week, I was a huge fan of Amazon.com. I've been shopping there for years. Literally. I don't know exactly how long (well, I could figure that out if I wasn't too lazy to open Quicken) but it was back when most people were still afraid to enter their credit card number into a computer.

I am, or rather was what one could call and Amazon.com fanboy. I've bought all kinds of crazy stuff there. Everything from toothbrushes to comics, and hard drives to electric mixers. I loved most everything about Amazon.com. I loved the product reviews (which have never steered me wrong), the fact that they always had a copy of the book I wanted on their virtual shelf, and the fact that I could do all my shopping while in my pajamas, scratching my – never mind.

I fell even more in love with Amazon.com when they went toe to toe with Apple iTunes and began to sell DRM free MP3’s. I was ecstatic. I knew that Amazon.com wasn't being entirely altruistic, but it felt good to be able to buy music legitimately, and electronically, the way I wanted. And it didn't hurt that by doing so I was sticking it to the music companies that were forcing DRM done all our throats (and making a market for pirated music that hurt both themselves and the artists they presumably were acting in the best interests of).

Fast forward to this last weekend. I won't go into all the gory details, because it's been blogged about incessantly, but here's my summary in Shawn Speak. Amazon.com has somewhere around a 70% market share in the electronic book market. They were selling e-books at the unsustainable price of $9.99, taking a loss on every purchase in order to subsidize the Kindle.  (Let me point out that Amazon.com's e-books are chock full of DRM – irony anyone?).  Publishers didn't like the $9.99 price, but given the fact that Amazon.com had no real competition, there wasn't anything they could do about it.  Enter the Apple iPad. Real competition. MacMillan publishing went to Amazon.com and wanted to renegotiate the $9.99 price. Amazon.com said “frak off” and pulled all of MacMillan’s books from their store.

If I were a published author, and if I was published underneath one of MacMillan's many labels, I would be pissed as hell. Actually, I would have been pissed before that because I wouldn't want my book being distributed with DRM, but that's another story.

I'm not published, yet, but I'm still pissed. I feel betrayed. Maybe it's silly, but I always thought of Amazon.com as a “good” company. They didn't have a “don't be evil” motto like Google, but then I never saw them do anything bad either. Until now.

So shame on you, Amazon.com.

And shame on me, for thinking you were anything more than another evil megacorp.

Digital Rights Throw Down

Looks like the inevitable digital rights clash between authors and publishers is unfolding before our eyes.

Things started to windup on Dec 9 when a couple of different publishing houses announced they were going to withhold publishing e-books until several months after the hardcover version had been released.

A few days ago, Stephen R. Covey said see ya to his longtime publisher Simon & Schuster and let the world know that he would had signed a three-year deal to move all of his e-book rights to Rosetta/Amazon.

Then Random House has declared they own the digital rights for all old contracts that do not specifically mention digital rights.  Sounds fishy?  This guy thinks so.


You can find an overview of the broader issues here.