This observation, lifted from a conversation about something else entirely, is quite worth pondering when I get back to working on Humorless:
Steampunk, to me, often seems to have a whole lot of ‘steam’, and very little ‘punk’.
Which is to say, the emphasis often ends up on the trappings of the fictional steampunk age (flying machines, engine magick, people wearing goggles for no real reason, etc), and not the social issues behind the fiction – class struggle, the social effects of technological revolution, and protagonists who are at odds with authority but lacking in social power or influence.
Couldn’t have said it better myself (largely because it hadn’t consciously occurred to me).
Now, to be fair, there isn’t a LOT of steampunk to be had in the first place, so in ways this is an understandable omission — the author might feel pressure to turn up the ‘steam’ volume on their story to get it recognized as such, and ignore the other half the equation.
I’m thinking over Humorless in light of this observation, and I see a similar kind of overbalancing – zeppelins, brass fittings, strange weapons… sure, but where’s the social imbalance and conflict? It could (and should) certainly BE there, to earn the ‘punk’ syllable… but it isn’t.
(Part of me whines that it’s comedy, not a social commentary, but that’s a cop out.)
Actually, if you accept this whole idea, Girl Genius isn’t steampunk — it’s much more some kind of Steam Fantasy for which there is no official genre designation.
In the coming apocalypse, you will still be fined double for speeding in construction zones. We have to have order, dammit.
There are doubters among the readership, but I’ve long-since agreed with the theory that zombie movies, stories, and games flourish when the chips are down in the real world. Lots of wars going on that no one wants to fight? Zombies. Economic Uncertainty and Upheaval? Zombies.
Vampires are a monster that comes out when smooth and shiny predators are on the loose in the real world. Werewolves… well, when was the last burst of werewolf horror? It’s been far enough in the past that I think it’s engendered by something we don’t fear much anymore.
But when there’s upheaval and collapse? Zombies.
Now, I’ll admit that I play the genre of zombies a little loosely here and essentially mean Survival Horror (whose main concept can be summed up as “they just keep coming, and we’re running out of ammo.”), but the basic conceit holds, as does the trackable correlation to real world events.
Then again… what if it’s predictive? What if the zombie outbreak is imminent?
*long, uncomfortable pause*
Okay: no, not really, but… come on; we’re all geeks here. Who among us has NOT contemplated, at least briefly, a survival plan in case of a zombie outbreak? Show of hands.
Those of you who did not raise your hands are either fibbing, or you’re my wife. She’s apparently counting on me to get us out.
And, to be fair, I’ve given it some thought.
Variation A: I’m at work when we hear the news.
This is actually not a bad option, due the fact that I work with a lot of gun-toting libertarians that take their families to the shooting range for Quality Time Night. My first order of business would be to raid their F-150s for a spare rifle (no shotguns, please) and ammo.
Step Two, depending on panic level, is to stop at the Army Surplus store and grab a few things like jerry cans and a machete or two.
Step Three, get home.
Variation B: I’m at home when we hear the news.
Step One: curse myself for not stopping and replacing my long-lost machete and/or hatchet the dozen times I’ve thought of it.
Either Phase A or B: Hold up
The whole thing might not be that big of an outbreak. Wait and see. Stay quiet. Luckily, we can barricade the front of the house fairly easily, using spare lumber in the garage that can be moved to the house via the backyard. Our dried goods supply is solid for a week or so, and by then we should be able to tell the way things are going. We lock up and shut down everything upstairs and get into the basement, which has most everything we need for the time period, plus an escape route that leads right to the garage.
Last Phase: It’s bad: get the heck outta Dodge.
If the outbreak is going wide, or even looks like it is, we leave. We can stock up Sherwood (Kate’s Forester) without going to the front of the house. While the gas mileage is much better on my vehicle, the Subaru’s all-wheel drive, sturdy construction, ability to swing weapons at attacking undead while standing up through the moonroof, and increased storage space makes it a no-brainer. Don’t forget to pack:
The gas jerry cans I *do* already have.
A couple baseball bats and the semi-truck “Tire Tester” for melee weapons. Also, the two aeration forks, for simply shoving creatures away from the car as we flee.
Once again, bemoan the lack of appropriate edged weapons – and the fact that I don’t have a firearm in the house at this time.
The goal: get to my family’s house in South Dakota. The (lack of) population density is a benefit (unless the outbreak goes extremely wide, at which point hordes of the undead will sweep across the great plains like pre-colony herds of buffalo), and all the things I *don’t* have close to hand (ammo, weapons, defensible positions with self-sustainable food supplies) they do.
The trip needs to avoid major highways, so it’ll probably take about 15 hours and we’ll need at least a couple stops to refill gas – events which will be fraught with peril, unless I was able to snag those extra jerry cans – so figure it’ll take a full day, which I already know can be driven without rest if necessary.
This route is one of several that avoids interstate highways, which will become zombie buffet lines within the first few days. As an added bonus, we'll be able to visit the World's Largest Ball of Twine.
Now, if things are getting REALLY bad and those buffalo-herds of zombies are coming, we head north as a group, armed to the teeth and aiming for tundra. The frozen winter months will give us respite from daily attacks, and if we get REALLY remote (an environment I fully trust my family members know how to survive) we won’t have to worry about the other major threat – desperate strangers.
WOW, that’s grim.
PROS: Flexible, with enough detail to hang other plans on.
CONS: We lack sufficient supplies to make it to the boonies without stopping for gas and other necessities, thus increasing our danger by exponential numbers.
How about You?
Don’t tell me I’m the only one who’s ever given this more than a few seconds of passing thought. Reveal your plan for surviving the undead plague in the comments.
Okay, all you schmott guys: this is not going to be about me going on about something – this is going to be about YOU going on about something.
me: You know what I’m curious about in terms of book-marketing money spent? Kate: what’s that? me: Google ads. Kate: what about them? me: For Instance, the ‘related sites’ stuff that shows up alongside GMail and on websites and stuff.
They don’t cost much, relative to whatever, and lots of people embed them on websites, plus Gmail and Google search pages, it seems like the kind of thing that would be a no-brainer for people to do.
You’d need someone skilled doing the keywords for the ads, so that you’re showing up alongside the right searches, obviously, but it just seems like a good idea.
Related to that: Facebook ads; which is somewhere I actually do see book ads.
I almost never see them in Google ads though, which is WEIRD.
I have to assume people just… don’t do them for books, because if they did… the kind of emails I send and receive would call up book-related ads… or game products… whatever. Something.
I mean, I’m exchanging emails with a guy about his story, so it’s all about writing and characters and motivation and the genre the thing is set in… and the “related” Google ads alongside are… “Document management”, “Google TV ads”, “Convert PDFs to Word”… a Talking Smartpen, and “Google Docs Backup”.
Kate: I see a lot of ads from print-on-demands houses, and editorial services and such in Facebook, but no, not really for books themselves.
me: It feels like an marketing blindspot. Especially when many avid readers are also writers and talk about such things in email.
Right, so… what am I missing, people?
Someone has to know more about this than I do.
Why is this not happening? Am I the only one not seeing ads for new books showing up in Google ads, or are people simply not doing them?
If so, why?
Is it so complicated as to make it a bad idea? What’s the cost outlay to set it up? How much tweaking do you have to do to get your “Product” showing up alongside things to which it’s related.
Has anyone out there done this sort of stuff as part of their day job? Facebook ads, Google ads… whatever. I don’t care, I just want to learn.
The tagline on this website is there for a reason. For a very very long time previous, it said something about Falling Down, and while that Something is still true, it’s not entirely relevant as an introduction (and warning) about what goes on with this site.
For those who know me (and who inexplicably choose not to flee as soon as they figure this out) it’s a familiar joke – wondering aloud about whatever my current obsession might be, or how one of my nigh-on-neverending projects is going. (My obsessions change often, but I am constant in my affections.)
Time is a problem for a dabbler like me. When I want to do something, I want to do it well. I’ve learned enough to know that if I want to do it well, I need to do it regularly. There are only so many hours in the week, which means that if I want to do something, I need to not do something else. The problem is that I want to do everything. This inevitably means I want to do more things than I can do regularly, and thus I end up clinging to things that I do infrequently, taking time away from things I could do well, and spiraling into an overbooked and yet unproductive schedule.
Yeah… tell you what, Paul: whichever one of us figures out how to deal with this first, we’ll let the other one know, deal?
And by “novel”, I mean to say “utterly stupid and short-sighted.”
Earlier this evening RPGNow, Paizo, and DriveThruRPG pulled all of their Wizards of the Coast PDF products (where both new and much much much older products were available) at WotC’s request. The ability to purchase them ended at noon – the ability to download products that you’ve already bought ended at midnight.
According to Wizards of the Coast, this was done to prevent piracy. (In a followup statement, they clarified that they believe this… because they are luddite morons.)
“We have [taken these actions] to stop the illegal activities […], and to deter future unauthorized and unlawful file-sharing.”
I love the vast understatement from one gaming site today:
“I predict an increase in piracy of Wizards products.”
REALLY?
Let me take this one step further. I guarantee – not ‘predict’, but guaran-goddamn-tee that every single PDF of WotC products made available after midnight tonight will be a pirated copy.
Just… think about it for a second; you’ll see exactly what I mean.
See… before today? Sure, some people were sharing PDFs like that on file-sharing sites, and there was pirating going on. Sure, yes.
Was it because the PDFs were made available by WotC and sold online?
No. You’ve been able to get PDFs of ANY game book — hell, any book at all — even ones that have never had electronic versions available, ever since scanner technology became remotely mainstream (early 90s), because people have time, and geeks have desire for the electronic versions.
Until today, at least most of the people who wanted electronic versions of their game book were getting the PDFs the easy way: google search, got to RPGNow, click, click, download. No torrent software. No worrying if you picked up a virus with your latest PDF. Easy.
Now, the only way to get the electronic version of a WotC product is to get it from a pirate site.
I can either not get it at all (sucks for me, and WotC gets no money), or I get it from a torrent site (hassle for me, and WotC gets no money).
The pirating people? This has no fucking affect on them what. so. ever.
Well, no; that’s not entirely true.
This move by WotC, ostensibly meant to fight piracy, will actually ensure that more people will come to their site to download ALL the PDFs they want (for games, for novels… whatever — I mean, as long as they’re THERE for the DnD stuff, they might as well look around and see what else is out there, right?…).
It’s not just stupid and short-sighted. It doesn’t just ensure the piracy of their work by 100% of those that want PDFs of DnD material; it actually hurts all the other companies in the industry as well.
I’m being interviewed by another writing site in a few days (this one live, via Skype, with someone in Austrailia – it’s is SO COOL to live in the future), and they were kind enough to send me some of the questions they planned to ask, so I could get my thoughts in order. (Good plan, on their part.)
The last question on the list is a doozy: “Why are you still pursuing traditional publishing for Hidden Things when there are so many other options out there today?”
I’ll be biting my tongue not to say “masochism”.
But there’s a flipside to that question, and it goes something like this: “You have a book that was good enough to get representation from an agent, and which you’re (slowly) bringing in line with a publisher’s desires and looking at some success with actually getting the thing published in the traditional market – getting over the threshold, really. Why are you putting so much time into learning about indie publishing?”
Like the header warns at the top of the page, I’m all about my perpetual projects and daily obsessions. The possibilities that exist out there for authors regardless of how they want to get their work out to a reader are definitely one of my obsessions, and as such, it’s one of those things that will continue to get a lot of posting love from me on this blog. Hopefully it’s not boring folks too much; me, I find it fascinating.
I’ve made a living of walking into completely unfamiliar new businesses every couple years, learning said business, then teaching those in the business about how to do it better — that’s how I pay the bills. One of the things I do in those situations is question the standard operating procedures. “It’s done this way because that’s how we do it” is an immediate red flag to me, and the more I learn about how publishing functions today, the more red-flags I see.
In the movie and music industry, the big companies started to focus only on big-money-making projects, and as a result artists that wanted to… you know… do art (or at least their own thing) went independent. The same focus on big-money-makers has been happening within the publishing industry (thanks in part to consolidation of publishing into a half-dozen meta-imprints), but there hasn’t been the same leap to indie publishing. Affordable tools are out there, the quality-in-production is there; authors have the ability to publish, distribute and market books without any involvement from mainstream publishers, thanks to print on demand (POD), e-book technologies, Web 2.0 and the fact that Amazon is now the #2 bookseller in North America and #1 worldwide — but the authors don’t move, because of the stigma of self-publishing.
Yes, before house-consolidations began, publishers were everywhere and there was truth to the idea that an other only self-published if they weren’t good enough to make it ‘legitimately’. This is no longer true, but the characterization of self-published authors as talentless hacks persists.
“It’s that way because it’s always been that way.”
That’s not survival behavior. It’s not even intelligent behavior, which is puzzling, because it’s coming from intelligent people.
I post a lot on this topic right now because I’m trying to figure it out.
And by “novel”, I mean to say “utterly stupid and short-sighted.”