Now that he’s stepped out of the shadows on his own, I want to direct the attention of those who’re interested toward Ted Ts’o, who put up the $1000 challenge grant to kickstart the Big Meow online publication project.
Thanks, Ted!
So (for those of you who mailed to ask) here’s the checklist for that appearance on Irish national TV, as per my predictions:
(1) (Studio car lateness?) Extreme: never got here at all: broke down somewhere near Naas. Local taxi company had to be recruited at last moment. (2) (Driver lost?) Didn’t really have a fair chance: see 1. (3) (Haircut?) Turned out OK. (4) (Stuff to wear?) Did OK too. (5) (Thing I really should have expected to go wrong but didn’t find out about until Peter called me afterwards?) This.
So much for my fifteen minutes of fame. 🙂
Oh well. We all had a good time.
Something has come up which is going to require another day or so to handle before I post about which way this project’s going to go. It’s not a bad something: rather the opposite. (No, no publishers are involved.) But it adds an ingredient to the mix, as it were, that I hadn’t been expecting, and I have to discuss it with a couple of people.
Check in again tomorrow.
One theme I’ve been hearing lately in emails about the book (which have been in just about every other way complimentary) is, “I hate e-books. Please do a dead-tree version!”
Well, okay. I’m in the process of reformatting a file so that we can have a CafePress edition. (I was going to wait to do a Lulu.com version with an ISBN…and then suddenly this morning, thought, “Why? Who cares whether the thing’s got an ISBN or not? We’re not ready to market to Amazon yet.”
So wait a few days, say till the middle of the week, and there’ll be a paper version available for order direct from CafePress. I’ll post here when it’s ready.
Also, though it won’t be ready for some time, the very talented Ursula Vernon has graciously agreed to do a cover for the print version. We’re in the very early stages of discussing design. I can’t wait to see what she’ll do: I know it’ll be terrific.
Just so that people know: I’m aware that this is the Presidents’ Day “long weekend” in the US. So I won’t be posting about the final result of my deliberations until Tuesday morning. (I kind of hate to use the word “decision”: it does, after all, have its root in the Latin word that implies you’re about to kill something…) The extra time is just as well: it gives me a little more time to evaluate the incoming emails and make up my mind.)
It’s been two months since I broached this subject. Now it’s time to make a choice. I’ll be evaluating my options over the weekend.
If you have an opinion and you haven’t emailed me, now’s the time.
So I’m minding my own business Thursday morning when the phone rings. On the other end is a nice lady from a production company connected with RTÉ, the Irish national broadcaster. Somehow or other, she’s gotten hold of my name, and she wants to know if I’m interested in appearing on a TV show called “The Big Bite”. This is an afternoon current affairs and discussion program featuring a journalist-presenter and usually four guests who sit around discussing some interesting topic, normally — but not always — something that won’t get too rancorous in mid-afternoon, just before the cooking and casual chat show that follows.
It turns out that Monday’s topic is whether or not there’s likely to be life on other worlds, and they thought it would be fun to have me on the show. The other guests are a professor of astrophysics from University College Dublin, Dave Moore from Astronomy Ireland, and someone else whose name I forget at the moment. Either way, it sounds like the opinions of the group are going to be heavily weighted towards the “yes” side.
So that’ll be enjoyable. Meanwhile, I go into the usual pre-appearance craziness. What time will the car from the studio get here? (Always too late.) Will the driver get lost? (Yes, even though I e-mailed them an extremely clear and straightforward map.) I need a haircut. (Thank heaven the hairdresser has time to take me today.) I have nothing to wear. (Well, yes, I do. For something like this, jeans and a silk sweater and an Hèrmés scarf — no, make that the shawl with the sun, moon, and stars on it — will do just fine.) And so on, and so on…
Oh, well. Everything will sort itself out. And it’ll be fun to get up to RTÉ again; I haven’t been up there for a couple of years.
Tags: Radio TelefÃs Éireann, RTÉ, the big bite, TV, television, appearance, Diane Duane, science fiction
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I had a query about the subject late last night, so I thought I’d cross-blog the response here. (…”Cross-blog”. Is that a word? Well, it is now.)
As regards The Big Meow: I don’t have enough information yet to make a decision about writing the book, as I haven’t yet hit the “break-even” point in terms of responses to my initial posting about the project. So far I’ve only heard from a few hundred people, and even if every one of them bought a book at the stated price, I’d still be losing money on the deal. As the project stands at present, I would need to hear positively from at least a couple/few hundred more people before I could commit.
— And so that no one reading this misunderstands me: for costing purposes on this project — without getting into actual figures — I’m “paying myself” the lowest amount my agent would have allowed me to take for a work-for-hire/licensed-property book between three and five years ago, when I was still doing such things. This amount — again, without getting into actual figures — would be about one-fifth to one-sixth of what I normally get for a writing a novel these days. To do this very on-spec piece of work, I would be taking a considerable drop in pay while I spent a significant portion of my work year on the project — so you can see where my concern lies, as I have cats to feed, and they don’t understand explanations about wanting to write just for the joy of it: they want to know where their dinners are.
(An additional and slightly related issue: one of the ways I’ve been testing the water as regards self-publishing is with online sale of a book already written but never published elsewhere, though it was bought by mainline publishers twice — details here at the website for Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South. The sales so far of the book’s e-version have been only modest…and this for a novel already written. Looking at this situation, I have to ask myself whether The Big Meow is really likely to do any better, and whether I may be about to start wasting a lot of precious time on something that’s just “a nice idea”.)
…So if you know somebody who’s interested in seeing this book written, or (looking over the heads of whose who’ve already mailed me) if you’re yourself interested, now’s the time to drop me a note and let me know. The original post laying out the situation with this book is here. The blurb for the prospective novel (and the project’s homepage) are here. The address to mail support or inquiries to is
thebigmeow@youngwizards.com
If you haven’t done so already, please let me know what you think.
Or you could, if you liked, convince me more concretely by putting money-where-mouth-is and buying a copy of A Wind from the South. (There are sample chapters and links to reader comments at its website.)
But I also want to thank very much all those who’ve already written — so many of your comments have been really heartwarming — and those who’ve read AWFTS and have been having fun with it. You guys make the work worthwhile. 🙂
(sigh) The graphic above (which occurred to me very early this morning) is the only worthwhile thing I’ve gotten done today. (If you like it you can get one here: we have a tea one, too.) Everything else has been about sick cats. If you’re not a cat person, or feeling sympathetic, skip this blog entry….
Goodman — the all-white cat and the middle-ranked of our three males — found and ate something bad, early in the week, in his wanderings through the countryside. He came down with a terrible case of diarrhoea, went off his food, and initially stopped drinking as well: then the drinking picked up again, so we thought at first he was getting better.
But he wasn’t. He got very dull and lethargic, and was completely disinterested in food — so much so that when I offered him steak one night, he just stood there and stared at it.
When that happened, on Tuesday, I said to Peter, “He goes to the vet tomorrow.” And that’s what yesterday was about. Taxi rides, moaning unhappy cats, sitting around in waiting rooms full of greyhounds, waiting for blood work and other tests to get done, etc etc. Finally our vet told us that Goodman had enteritis — no surprise there — and he stuck him full of pain relievers, anti-diarrhoeics, and cortisone, and sent him home. “Bring him back tomorrow,” our vet said.
So we got up early this morning and did that. Goodman was already significantly improved over his condition just twelve hours before, though the diarrhoea was still a little bit with him (and we’ve had to follow him around the house with paper towels mopping up the occasional leak). Today he had some more shots, and we were given some diet food for him, and we came home again and relaxed a little in hopes that things would get back to normal.
Until we saw that Mr. Squeak, the senior male, who’s been working on extending his territory by the most straightforward method — by beating up on the male cat who lives down the road about a quarter mile from here — had started to limp. At first we thought it was a sprain. But a little while ago I got a whiff of him, realized that whatever else they may do, sprains don’t smell, and took a few minutes to check out his side more carefully. Turns out he’s got an infected bite or other wound buried under all that thick Norwegian-forest-cat fur, where he can’t get at it to clean it, and it’s paining him so much that it’s hurting him to walk…and enough that he won’t let us clip the fur to get at it and and clean it up. So now Squeak has to go to the vet first thing in the morning…get sedated, have the wound cleaned up, possibly stitched, get some antibiotics…
Ah well. In the good news department, for those of you who were asking, there are some more hardcovers of Wizards at War available in the bookstore. (There are some more advance readers’ copies as well, but I have to go into the store and add them.)
Oh, and for those who were asking how I manage to follow baseball season in Europe? It’s these guys — NASN, the North American Sports Network. They have a pretty fair schedule once the season gets going. (wry look) I wish that was right about now…
FourDocs is where you can upload four minute docs about your world. Don’t worry if you’ve never done any filmmaking before — there’s expert help for you in the user-friendly Guides…
All the material you upload is covered under a Creative Commons licence. For your four minute films, this means any other site user is able to copy, distribute and display the film as long it is for non-commercial purposes and they don’t alter it.
More at the FourDocs page. (They also have a blog.) This looks at first sight like one of those “Let’s Try To Keep The Yoof Out Of Trouble” ideas, but who knows, it might grow out of that… (Thanks to Veer for the link.)
I see the Young Wizards books turning up on a lot of “If You Like Harry Potter…” lists these days — hundreds of them, scattered all over the US and Canada (and some elsewhere in the English-speaking world). But this is the first time I’ve seen one of these:
This, I guess, bemuses me even more. Generally speaking — to my eye, at least — in a strictly thematic sense, the YW books have even less in common with Narnia than the “Harry Potter” books do. There’s not even the common thread of “kids learning wizardry and having adventures”: the similarity is more like “kids having magical adventures in another world.” And sometimes, even that would be stretching it.
…Yet at the same time, there’s no denying that the YW books are somewhat haunted by C. S. Lewis’s influence, from Narnia (where I first met him) onwards. It’d be fibbing to claim that Perelandra wasn’t on my mind when I was writing High Wizardry, or that Out of the Silent Planet isn’t very much on my mind (or at least loitering in the background) while I finish work on A Wizard of Mars. Lewis has been my mentor-at-one-remove for many years…so I don’t mind being on this list, really. It’s honorable company to be in: extremely good company — and not just Lewis’s, either.
Still…one walks very softly when coming along behind the great Lion. But in a case like this, bringing up the rear isn’t such a terrible place to be.
For those who might be interested, we’re in the middle of restructuring the Young Wizards CafePress store. Things are getting moved around, old designs are getting spruced up or dumped, and a lot of new designs are being installed to take advantage of the much wider range of products available since the store opened up in ’03.
Just added: a couple of T-shirts that appear in Wizard’s Holiday and Wizards at War — Roshaun’s “Fermilab” T-shirt and Sker’ret’s “Will Do Magic For Food” shirt. Also, there’s an entire section devoted to various sorts of Wizard’s Oath material, which people have repeatedly been asking for.
(Also: CafePress is just now rolling out its API. As soon as I can figure out how, I’ll install an RSS-fed box on OOA so those interested in such things can see what’s new in the store without blog posts being required.)