Busy busy

I've been punching together a new first draft. Ways to ge, yet. The art of writing is the art of editing your own writing. Now that' I've got one draft of it done, I can actually start. First paragraph shared below.

Goblins are naughty creatures. They wiggle and fidgett and complain when they work, if anything at all that they did could be considered work. Their jobs are for the most part very silly. The most important job of all to a goblin is being the goblin that gets to climb to the top of the biggest tree in the goblin tree village and to sing a very old song at winter solstice while ringing the very old bells. Goblins also have great respect for the tree bark sniffers, who can identify the breed and and health and history of a tree just by sniffing at the bark. What they do with this information is not very clear, since they don’t write very much down about them, but it’s extremely important to sniff bark and identify trees. They also put great stock in dancing when the leaves fall in autumn. They make big piles of leaves down on the forest floor among their loyal beetle bobs and jump into the piles and swim around while they sing an autumnal song. In spring, they take tiny hammers and crack the ice at the creek because it seems the most mischievous thing to do, to wake a sleeping waterway. In summer, they gather up and redistribute all the seeds of the flowers, as if the wind would not do that already by itself. Much of what they considered important, to the rest of the people who are not goblins, would not seem very important at all.

Annual Awards Post

I had a great year. My kid turned 1. Eric Bosarge and I laid the groundwork for a small publishing house. And, I was in four consecutive issues of Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine.

“Full Metal Mother”, “Finnegan, Bring the Pain”, “Astroboy and Wind”, and “Keep the Line Tight But Not Too Tight, or Esteban and the Moon”

I would appreciate it greatly if you take a moment to consider these works for awards consideration as short stories.

RocketStackRank really liked “Finnegan, Bring the Pain” in particular, giving it five stars and praising it for its powerful emotional story of the people who don’t colonize the galaxy, and instead say goodbye to the ones who do.

Re: Kickstarter being not awesome right now for their employees...

So, since starting our campaign, a lot of people are posting negative things about how they won't support our campaign because Kickstarter is making some bad press regarding their labor practices, right now. A friend suggested that we say something publicly about that, and I sort of don't feel like I want to step into the mess of a huge on-line discussion about this company's actions. It was advised to us that we do, and I can't really speak for Eric. I can only speak for me. Again, this is just my point, and I think Eric and I are going to work on what our official stance, together, as we build our company is. So, this is all me.

I think there's not a lot that Eric and I can do about the scandal, at this point. I also think that a lot of the people talking about this are doing it on Twitter, and have links to their Amazon accounts, and in some cases are partnering with Amazon Prime to make movies out of their books... So, Amazon and Twitter and Facebook's Union Stance is...? Also, here I am on Blogger with my Gmail account. and Google, to my knowledge, is not a pro-union place. I'm not interested in making a purity argument. I'm just trying to suggest that being pure is impossible in the arts, right now. We don't have an alternative to Amazon, and if they called me and said they wanted to make a film out of one of my books, I'd be really into that, even when I know their warehouse conditions are awful and they're an aspiring monopoly.

I get the desire to hold bad actors accountable, but hurting the many creators that have relied on these tools to build something positive for themselves and their communities, I think, does more harm than good. The place where we can actually hold them to account without harming each other in our creative endeavors is at the ballot box, by supporting politicians who will work to protect workers and communities against companies that are being dicks while also obeying the letter of the law.

Eric and I both work in education. He's a high school teacher; I tutor at a community college. We don't have the resources to be that selective in how we move forward building something new. We will be leaning on Amazon when we have a product to sell. We will be using Facebook and Twitter to help promote the books we make. These three companies are not ethically awesome. It sucks. But, they obey the law. And, it is not something we have the power to change, individually. It is why voting for better leadership is so important.

We did not know about the actions of the Kickstarter management team before we went down this path. It would have changed our decision-making, had we known, absolutely. Even under the hypothetically nonsense scenario that we agreed with their corporate leadership's decisions (we don't) why would we want to launch a campaign right in the middle of so much bad press?! The staff at Kickstarter have been awesome, particularly Margot Atwell. Without their guidance and advice, I don't think we would have been as clear about what we are doing, even with each other.

I do think the labor laws need to change in this country, and I support Elizabeth Warren's campaign, both financially and with my voice and vote. If a company is behaving badly, while obeying the law, the law needs to change. I'm happy to work towards that goal.

I am reminded of the time Night Shade was going down, and went into bankruptcy. A lot of people on-line were mad that authors had been treated badly, and decided to boycott or actively promote boycotting Night Shade titles. The company was going down no matter anyone's actions, at that point. These voices had no bearing on the outcome of Night Shade's fate. The people who were harmed by that boycott were the creditors and authors who were owed. Freelancers needed to get paid. Authors saw their sales suffer, which made it harder to move forward in our careers. I don't have the power to control Kickstarter. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Amazon. We also don't have a viable alternative ecosystem in the arts, with tools that provide the same level of reach. 

I don't think Eric and I are particularly interested in getting into a debate about Kickstarter's labor practices, right now, nor are we interested in debating the merits of any major tech company's labor practices. We're just trying to use the tools that are available to us to build something bigger and more awesome. Someday, we hope to be able to build something better, but these are the tools that are available to us, today.

KICKSTARTER: Vernacular Books is lifting off in 5... 4... 3...

Join us at the Kickstarter for more info, and please donate, donate, donate. Each donation is basically a pre-order.

http://kck.st/2ngRwtz

The Future of Crime...

It used to be if someone wanted to mug you, they had to look you in the face and make a threat. Not anymore. Hackers can wipe a bank account without ever having to risk drawing blood. Bad people use technology for personal gain. Nothing's new about that. What is new is the ways technology opens up opportunities for exploitation.

New technology is coming on-line all the time, creating new opportunities for creative criminals and dissidents. Stolen elections, companies held hostage by hackers, and acts of terror have all been committed with technology that didn't exist a few short years ago. 

Join leading edge speculative fiction authors on an exciting walk into darkness where people and machines plunder, cheat, kill, and steal in ways we can't even imagine with tools that may not even exist, yet. But, they're coming. 

They're coming for us, and all we hold dear.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vernacularbooks/the-way-of-the-laser-future-crime-stories?ref=project_tweet#

Find me at ArmadilloCon next weekend

ArmadilloCon is where I’ll be next weekend, the first weekend of August. Find me there, if you can. I am on a single panel, and only around for Friday and Saturday.

Peace.

latest story out in the new Analog.

Check for my story “Finnegan, Bring the Pain” in the latest Analog Magazine. There will be a story in the next issue, as well. My advice is subscribe.

Coming real soon...

I've got a story called "Full Metal Mother" coming real soon in Analog Magazine.

https://www.analogsf.com/next-issue/

I won't say much about this one, but I will tell you this: It's another piece of a novel that should be out somewhere. I had an offer that fell through on the full novel when the contract terms could not be agreed upon between us. So, it will be out somewhere, I'm sure, but I don't know where and I don't know when and in the mean time, pick up the next issue of Analog Magazine for another piece of the novel.

Other pieces of this novel have already appeared here and there.

"Everything is Haunted" was in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.
"Farmers" was in Analog Magazine.
"Dolores, Big and Strong" and "Paul and his Son" were in Asimov's Magazine.

You could find those, if you like, and see a few more pieces of this same, sad world.

Poetry Elsewhere than Here

Sign up if you like to read some more:

I'm up to Sonnt #293:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/25193940

Sonnet #290

Go here, and sign up:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/sonnet-290-24840816

Sonnet #289

the poetry has moved behind a very small paywall.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/sonnet-289-24785010

Thank you for hanging out with me, here, and following along!

Postemon #1

Sonnet #288

It takes damage to get to the top of the heap
It takes planned, organized damage to rise
Until all of society bends to the way your lies
about yourself, about how you can easily sleep
How you made yourself, you say, and still
The way we value cities is how we sell them
Best to men like you, who stand above and stem
the cost of damage with money, we build
each place for men like you, how you dream
how others who wish to emulate you seek to grow

The things the rich men do not want seem
To drift away: dirty work, untamed grass, unknown
people with different ways: They must fall in stream
Share your damage, demand damage built and grown

Read "Tiger" Free at Reckoning Magazine's Website

Tiger

Joe M McDermott

As a one-star Inspector General for the UN’s military police, I was uniquely positioned to assign myself any case that I chose, particularly after many years of hard assignments. I had chosen the matter of the mysterious Doolittle, a sort of multi-national guerrilla artist whose work I had encountered in my time amid the water riots of Bangladesh. The machines were dangerous, like wild animals.

I was following leads among machinists and fine artists in my region to no solution, limited by my own budget and time constraints, perfectly happy to find nothing at all until I retired and the case was old and forgotten, when I was suddenly assigned a powerful data crawler: an AI-algorithm named Deep Thor. The case was assigned his advanced intelligence analysis for three weeks, total, which is an astonishing amount of usage with a powerful AI on such a criminally trivial matter. I had no request or desire for this assistance. Apparently, Deep Thor had found a special interest in Doolittle, independently, and requested this deep dive to assist in case of terrorist escalation that was, I had to admit, possible given the machines’ high-level industrial design and the integrated radical political manifestos. I felt I was to blame. This was a result of my own official reporting intended to justify my long-continued investigations, fed back to me by machines incapable of human nuance.

Continue reading: https://reckoning.press/tiger/

Sonnet #287

All the words we've ever spoken hang in space
The energy of them, the ripple of them extend
Into the wind, itself, we are all the weathermen
We are all blowing every phoneme to the place
Where all the lost words gather. I breathe, you breathe
The breath of us spills out into the trees
It falls into the ocean eventually from capture in the leaves
It sinks into the groundwater, we drink what we seethe
Shout all you want into the endless skies
Sing every song you want to be carried
For even if we cannot hear the lingering sighs
The echo of every cry out trembles unburied
When the music plays, it never stops, it lives and dies
Out in the air: Make good music, good words, and varied