Back in the 1990s, I made my first attempt at going full-time freelancer. I had a steady stream of income stringing for a locla paper, some magazines that liked my stuff, I was working on what I thought was a promising book, I had some money saved up. Looked good.
It wasn’t. The paying work dried up: the newspaper cut its stringer budget and the editors who liked my work moved on or found lots of other writers. I was not successful finding alternative sources which I think is a bigger problem: work often goes away but successful writers find alternative markets. And the novel — well, I was writing on my first computer and the freedom to endlessly revise a book led to me revising endlessly. Not Good.
It’s not gotten any easier in the years since. Like anyone else, we have to worry about financial reversals. Management can’t think of anything to do but slash jobs at newspapers and magazines. Here’s a good article about the boardroom games that led Arena Group to fire Sports Illustrated‘s staff. And switching to a non-profit model doesn’t necessarily help. Though for-profit propaganda hacks are definitely hurting. Then there’s the death of Pitchfork.
Going indy frees me up to publish books such as Questionable Minds and Undead Sexist Cliches even if nobody else does. It does not guarantee anyone will buy them, let alone that enough people buy it to put bread on the table. If I weren’t a two-income family and collecting Social Security, I’d have problems. Promotion is an art and as I may have mentioned it’s often frustrating. To prep for the release this year of Southern Discomfort and Savage Adventures, I’ve been looking for suitable book bloggers and none of the ones I’ve looked at so far are accepting new books for review. Local stores have no interest in events involving books printed at Amazon, presumably because they’d be sending people to buy from the competition (and maybe the average quality isn’t great). And out of the several cons I’ve applied to this year, it looks like I’m going to be a guest at just one.
I’ve read articles that say you should spend 90 percent of your time promoting books, 10 percent on writing them which just does not make sense. That means if I worked 40 hours a week on my own writing, I’d be writing 4 hours (and there simply isn’t 36 hours of promotion to do!). Rebecca Jennings looks at how personal branding has become a heavy workload; commenting on the piece, John Scalzi ponders the outdated concept of selling out and “where it feels like putting your art out into the world is often like chucking it down a hole and hoping enough people see it flashing by before it settles forever into the darkness.”
And there are always ways it could get worse: Yann LeCun, a French computer scientist, has argued that as the money we make is so little, books should be free to download: we authors won’t lose much and think how it will benefit society!
No conclusions here, just brooding. And I’m still writing. As John Hartness said when I was at a con a few years ago, I may not be a brand name but I do get to sit on the writers’ side of the panel table.
#SFWApro. Covers by Samantha Collins (t) and Kemp Ward, all rights to images are mine.
As detailed in the first story, Click’s an inventor who saw potential to both do good and get rich by selling his tech to cops. Anesthetic grenades like Doc Savage’s. Concealed hypodermics for taking down someone in a fight. Small explosives, tear gas bombs, gas hidden in cigarettes, explosives in matches — you get the idea. Click’s strength seems to be chemistry though he has other kinds of gadgetry too.
“In this type of story,” Blessingame said, “some person or thing hangs a veil of horror over the characters in this story; we never know when this menace will strike but we do know it will continue to commit depredations until the hero does his stuff and overcomes it in the final climax.” An editor Murray quotes says the figure can be a mystery until the climax or, as in Dracula or Fu Manchu, the heroes know who he is but still can’t stop him from striking.
Dent applied this approach in a number of Doc Savage yarns. in 
Clearly it’s a trope that still works. Which brings me to its presence in my own work. 
(Early morning photograph)
This past Monday, it got worse: he was limping and snapped at TYG when she tried for a closer look at his foot. Fortunately we were going in for his physical rehab check up so we asked the doctor to check out the foot as well. It took her and a vet tech but she managed to find a tiny seed buried in the fur between his pads. A couple of days later, Plushie was back to his old cheery self. Yay!
Lynn Lash was the first and least interesting of the three men, though the stories are still entertaining. He’s one of those millionaires who dabble in crimefighting just because, a common thing in the Golden Age of Mystery. In the introduction, Doc Savage expert Will Murray says Dent probably modeled him on Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective, a fictional criminologist who debuted in 1910. Kennedy’s adventures were hugely popular for a while but according to 
popping out (a hook Dent would later reuse in 
I did get a lot of work done for The Local Reporter but no finished articles. I’m still waiting on responses to emails so I can finish up.
Plus I reread the book Windmaster’s Bane which I’ll be discussing next week.
And on Con-Tinual’s YouTube channel, I’m part of a panel discussing 
Wednesday, I noticed that while the thermostat was set to 72, the temperature on the house, as shown on the thermostat, was 67. Given the temperature outside was going into the high 20s that night, this seemed like a bad thing.
And the other about the debut of the Daily Bugle’s city editor, 
#SFWApro. Art by Carmine Infantino, Gene Colan and John Romita, top to bottom. All rights to images remain with current holders.
— but she hadn’t made much effort to resist when the door was open and I even lightly restrained her. But there she was, on the deck, refusing to come in, even when we offered food. She showed up again later, same result, then vanished most of the day. This left me pretty miserable: sure, she made it five years between when we first saw her and when we finally brought her in this summer, but it’s still a risky life to be an outdoor cat. Plus she’s still limping from her leg injury; what if she thought she still had her old speed and ended up in a coyote or hit by a car?
I didn’t get anything done on Let No Man Put Asunder but overall I’m pleased.
While many of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales take place in the same universe (The Moon Maid, the Carson of Venus series, Barsoom, Tarzan and Pellucidar, at a minimum), his only full-on crossover was TARZAN AT THE EARTH’S CORE. In a direct sequel to 
By the grace of god, luck was with me. The lump on the head, a badly bleeding knee, but no damage of any sort beyond that. I’m very much aware it could have been so much worse. Plus my glasses, while bent, were not scratched; my phone flew out of my pocket but landed face up.
