We have no say.

Here is a copy of the cover for an anthology I have a story in.  It’s coming out on the 6th – which is next Tuesday.  It’s either so bad that it’s good or it’s really, really bad.  I can see it on shelves right before Halloween, though.

It’s being considered on the internets by other authors.

My story is one of the High Hills stories set in Laguna Beach, California, behind a magic door. It is not about a bunny, or a raccoon.  It is about a frog.  And I had a blast writing it.  Also, one my writing buddies has a story in there - John Pitts.  I’ve read it; it’s good.  His last story in a DAW anthology turned into a three book deal with Tor.

Comments on the cover art welcome.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I have been wearing my author hat lately because of book releases, but there are two very excellent futurist events worth discussing:  one in the recent past and one in the recent future.

I’ll start with the recent past. The Seattle Times did a very nice article about futurists in the Sunday Magazine last week.  They mentioned me, in a small way, which made me feel fairly shivery and pleased, especially since they mentioned me in the company of a lot of excellent professional futurists, including my mentor Glen Hiemstra, local technology futurist, philanthropist, and activist Mark Anderson, and others like Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures.

The article  does a nice job of discussing the varied ways we futurists go about our business.  For example,Mark is a very good prognosticator and often does call events before they happen (he specializes in deep knowledge about the forces acting on the technology field).  I read everything I can get my hands on and turn the intersections into topics of talks or science fictions stories, Glen is one of the most effective speakers I know about the general topic both what the future might hold, and more importantly, how we  might influence it.  It must have gotten a lot of readership because today I am in Chelan, Washington at a conference and multiple people mentioned that they saw me quoited in the article (and really, I think there are two lines in there about me).

Thanks to Carol M. Ostrum for an excellent article, and thanks to Rick Rashid from Miscrosoft for the best quote in the article. No, Iwon’t tell you in advance.  Go read the article. I am, by the way, the only woman quoted in the article.  Side note, but we could use more female  futurists.  They guys ae great, but some balance would be lovely.

Now, on to the near future:  I will get to be in the same physical place with some of the people mentioned in the article on the 15th of October.  The very wonderful FiRE conference that I attended in San Diego in long form last summer is being brought to Seattle in short form — so there will be one fantastic and mind-bending day of speakers and challenges and discussions at the Four Seasons.  It will be worth it.  It’s titled FiRE Global, and is specifically themed about applying technology to the world’s challenges.  This is something we desperately need to do.  Solve problems.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I’m pleased to announce that Reading the Wind is out in paperback.  In honor of its release, I posted a new story on the Academy of New World Historians website.

The new story happens offstage to the action in the book, and is the first part of the overall story that has been narrated by Bryan. In the story, Bryan talks about what happens to him as he walks down the Street of All Designs.  If you then send me a comment from the Academy Site (or  comment on this post), I’ll enter you into a drawing for free books.  I’ve given away two so far, another one will be given away Friday, and one more every week up until November when Wings of Creation comes out.  On the Wings release day,  I’ll draw a name and send out a full hardcover set of the three books to someone.

Also, if you entered before, and you didn’t get a comment or a reply, then the spam filter ate it.  I have verified at least one case of the Internet eating comments meant to be entries, so if you’re not sure if you’re in, email me again.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

People ask me regularly if I have books available on the Kindle.  It’s possible that happens more to me than to other authors, since I live and work in Amazon’s home town and my friends are tech geeks.   I’m pretty sure that my novels will find their way there eventually through my publisher, Tor Books, but I decided to put a few short stories on the Kindle myself after hearing that other writer’s are having success.

So I enlisted my trusty and helpful web expert, Jeremy Tolbert, in the project, and within a week or so there were three stories up there.  Here’s what I chose:

“Savant Songs” which is about a brilliant autistic scientist and is my most commercially successful short story (It came out in Analog and in Year’s Best SF10)

“A Lingering Scent of Bacon,” which got me my best-ever acceptance letter fron editor Kerrie Hughes, and which came out in the anthology “Maiden, Matron, Crone.”

“The Licit Zone,”  which is a “Kindle Original.”

This is completely an experiment.  I don’t expect to get rich from it.  But I like the idea that it keep the first two stories available since they are otherwise pretty hard to find right now, and I like them both.   Maybe releasing one only on the Kindle will have interesting side-effects.  Who knows.

Each story is a $1.99.  From your Kindle, you can find them by searching for my name in the Kindle Store.  Just for fun, I want to encourage you to buy one of the stories, read it, and comment back here (good, bad, neutral…I’m open).  I’ll draw one to three names (depending on how many people try a story) and send each of you a free copy of “The Silver Ship and the Sea,” which is the beginning of my current series of books.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

The morning started with the most explicit of the conversations on philanthropy: a look at the work Pearson Learning has done in Africa, and a brief discussion of project Inkwell. The first project we saw, the Sara Communication Initiative, helps girls in Africa tell their stories, and actually brought me to tears for a moment. Project Inkwell is working to get more technology into schools. After seeing our resident household twelve-year-old who attends an essentially paperless school, I can see the value of technology-based training and the need to get it into more places around the world. In particular, the project is hooking children in the US up with children in Africa. A follow-up conversation that happened offline to the conference was the question, “Will we ever stop seeing videos of children in Africa thanking us?” and I think these projects will help make that go away.

The second presentation I want to comment on was by Roger Payne, Founder and President, Ocean Alliance, who gave a thoroughly gloomy commentary on the state of ocean wildlife. This was a sub-plot that ran throughout the conference and I found it perhaps the most worrisome discussion overall. FiRE was largely about applying technology to real problems and finding real ways to develop excellent business models in the process. But I’m not sure we know enough about the oceans to apply technology solutions to them as easily as we can address, say, world hunger. The problems and possible solutions seem to be on a bigger scale. It drove home that we have rather a lot to get done if we want to survive well into the next century.

We heard from Jay Miller, who has spent his life’s work on recording and helping to save the Lushootseed language. I was lucky enough to sit beside him on the bus returning from the Calit2 trip, and hear a number of details about the difficulty inherent in saving a language where all but two of the native speakers are dead (and now it is all but one). This seems like a small thing in context to the topics we generally discussed at the conference, but I think it was very symbolic of the history that technology and change are taking from us. As we have lost some of the native understanding and wisdom that lived in the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes, we may have lost some of the wisdom we could use now as we try to save the Earth from our own excesses.

And then, just in case the hero of modern commercial rocketry and alternative energy (Elon Musk), and the CEO of HP (Mark Hurd), and the man behind Calit2 (Larry Smarr) wasn’t enough heroes, we got to hear from a man on the front line of activism, Paul Watson, President and Founder, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. With his fleet of three boats, he spends much of his time on the high seas coming between Japanese whalers and their prey. Literally. His stories made me grateful he was alive for the sake of the whales. To top it off, he has a great sense of humor and kept us in stitches.

For closing comments, FiRE was a truly phenomenal collection of thinkers across a broad spectrum. I remember when I was finishing college, the schools were just then promoting the concept of “interdisciplinary studies.” This conference, while centering squarely on technology, was the grown up version of interdisciplinary study in the real world. I was truly honored to be invited.

Surprisingly, although I am a tech professional, I found the economics and the environmental discussions the most fascinating, and have pages of notes on those while I only have sentences on most of the tech topics.  Perhaps they are not as new to me though - I’ve had high-level discussions about Cloud Computing for a year or so now.

At some point in the future I’ll imagine I’ll be able to link to some of the video taken there or to other blogs. In the meantime, I’m home after seven days of traveling, and quite happy to be in my own place surrounded by my dogs and people and books.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I didn’t set out for these books to be about war, at least not when I wrote The Silver Ship and the Sea.  Current events, however, have a way of coloring artistic work, even science fiction that’s being written about a far future.  The Iraq War and The Silver Ship and the Sea started at about the same time.  So the series ends up being driven by a battle that happened on the colony planet Fremont and driven to a bigger battle that will happen in space between splintered factions of the the Five Worlds.  While space war is not the throughline story for any of the books except the last one (not written yet), war turned out to be the throughline for the series as whole.  Which surprised me when I started to think about it, but also makes sense in the larger context of our society.

While I still wouldn’t classify the series as military science fiction, I hope it might interest milsf readers.  So when a call for people to interview went out, I decided to volunteer.  Thanks to author Mike McPhail for the interview.  You might also just drop by www.milscifi.com while you’re out and about the nets as well.  The site has interviews with people like Bud Sparhawk, Jack McDevitt, and Lawrence M. Schoen, as well a number of newer authors.

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.

I usually wake up with fiction stories in my head.  I’ve kept writing fiction in the last month, but the stories in my head lately have mostly been blogs.

Here’s the futurist take on it:

Earth has become a computer connected world. I’m a science fiction writer - so a bigger percentage of my readers are online than some other genres might be.  The raw population of the world is bigger than it ever has been (and has grown by around 30% in the last twenty years).  The broadband connected population is growing.  Younger generations know how to use the web to market and to decide what to buy; they were born with keyboards and monitors and ipods and cell phones.   Marketing of everything from underwear to toothpaste to cars has gone viral and online.  Physical means of delivering information (newspapers and bookstores) are dying.

I don’t like it, but I can’t change it.  I had foolishly hoped the old ways might support me anyway.  You know, that past world where writers write, agents sell, publishers publish and market.  Yes, everyone still does do their job.  I still depend on my capable agent and editor and publisher.  But I have to do more than write, since there are a lot of equally capable writers (and better and further along writers) out there who are also marketing effectively.  John Scalzi.  Jay Lake.  Cory Doctorow.   Neil Gaiman.  Tobias Buckell.  Mary Robinette-Kowal.  Elizabeth Bear.  If I want to sell my fiction, I have to do more than just write it.  I have to market myself and my work.  I’ll admit I do like attention, but I’m not the natural self-promoter that, for example, Jay Lake is.

On a personal level, I got a shock that made this into a mission for me - an expected easy sale didn’t materialize.  I sat back and had a little cry (well, all right, maybe a big one)  and went WTF? and thought about it over a cup of coffee.  Then I emailed some friends, including Jay Lake, and went “Help!”  Jay connected me to the able Jeremy Tolbert, who I hired for some advice (and he did a very nice job).  I contacted Shaun Farrell, and he agreed to let me do some guest blogs (and by the way, if you comment there, you may win a free book.  I’ve already given one away).  I was going to do a video for my public speaking career anyway, and paid extra for an interview about my books.  I’m working with the fellow who did the video, Tim Reha, to plan more videos (and get better at them.  I learned a LOT from video number 1 - video number 2 will be better.  I know how to talk - even on camera - so that was fine, but I came off looking a bit like a middle-aged business person instead of a cool writer, and spent way too much time head-nodding).

So what exactly am I doing?

• I use my Twitter account a lot.  A lot more than I thought I would, actually.
• I use Facebook
• I’m trying to get more guest blogs set up.  For example, my writer’s group is all pro writers and we’re going to guest each other’s blogs.
• I’ve had the videos made through my work at Futurist.com (three - two futurist videos, one of which mentions my books, and one just about the books)
• I’m getting better at categorizing and tagging posts
• I’m learning these tools.  That’s not as small a job as it sounds like.
• I’m spending a lot of time talking to people (on line and face to face)
• I improved my website from a social networking viewpoint
• I’m blogging about twice as often
• We have a loosely linked personal interest site shared by me, Toni, and three dogs called threedogsblog.
• I’m part of a shared futurist twitter feed.

My goals?

1. Make that sale materialize.  Other sales, too.  Don’t worry, I won’t leave all my eggs in one basket.  But I’m stubborn and I want the one that want.
2. Get good (and efficient) at this - I’m still spending way too much time.  I don’t have time.
3. Become an expert.  This will be useful in my day job anyway.
4. Stay authentic - some suggestions have been too “markety” and feel about as friendly as the new Facebook design.  I don’t want to do that.  I want to actually connect.

So here is a set of random comments about what I’ve learned and done so far.

• This is complex.  Link things as much as you can.  For example, if I Twitter, it shows up on FaceBook.  Friends helped me with that, too.
• I have lost writing time.  I have to be careful with that balance.  Writer’s write.  The sound of valuable time draining away is the most insidious part of social networking.
• Some of this is free.  Some of it isn’t.  I’ve spent money to save research time - that’s a good trade for me.  But if I had more time than money, I could learn this stuff.  People are helpful.  If you ask someone how they did something, they’ll probably share.
• I have had some new people comment.  I’ve had more comments.  Nothing like the major blogs.  Drop by and look at Scalzi’s Whatever to see a real following.  But mine’s growing, and just like your books don’t start out on the lists unless you’ve been there before, electronic readership builds. I’m still seeing more comments from my friends in the writer community than the reader community, but that’s okay.  I like my friends, and the other circle is growing, too.
• Since I’ve asked for advice and gained help along the way (free and fee-based) I feel like I have a cheering team in this effort.  That actually matters.
• I have no idea yet if what I’m doing translates to the physical book sales I want.  The two industries -  internet word-of-mouth marketing and social conversations, and the New-York based book industry -  are at opposite side of the time continuum.  One changes moment by moment, the other is slow and often misleading (because of the returns-based book model, and because authors, and I suspect others, can’t seem to get information in a timely way)
• New York is learning, too.  Torforgeauthors and I follow each other.  There is also a torbooks out there.  I suspect the difference is the editing and publicity arms of the house, but I actually don’t know.  Maybe it’s Tor’s official tweets and all of our authorial wisdon in tweet form.   Good for them, anyway.  And drop by Tor.com for some of the best online fiction.

What about you?  What web 2.0 stories are you waking up with?  What ideas do you have?

Mirrored from Brenda Cooper.