Long, long ago I read a short story that still sticks with me. I have no idea who wrote it, or where I read it, but it involved a colony of human telepaths who’d been stranded for years and years on a planet, with no outside contact. They weren’t worried about it. They were happy and things were fine. Then one day a new expedition arrived, and suddenly they were forced to see themselves through the eyes of others—literally, because they were telepaths, remember—and the consensus reality they’d enjoyed for decades exploded. They looked at each other through new eyes and realized they were no longer those sexy twenty-year-old beauties they’d once been. Instead they were seriously old, and the beautiful home they’d made for themselves was basically falling apart and filled with spider webs.

I don’t remember the conclusion of the story—I think it ended well enough—but I cannot shake the image of this consensus reality—or if we narrow it down, our personal realities, because it’s true: so much of our success and joy and self-satisfaction depends on who we think we are and, often, on how good we are at resisting some of life’s cold reminders that “it ain’t necessarily so.”

When my Dad was eighty-one and suffering from many disabilities, he turned to me one day and said, “You know, I’m getting old.” I blinked. I bit my tongue. No one, looking at my dad, would have any doubt that he was old, and that he’d been old for a while, but he had such a determined nature that I think he hadn’t quite realized it until then. The man he perceived himself to be was not the same man that other people saw. He had his own vision of himself and it kept him going for a long time.

A few months ago I was leaving the gym just steps behind an elderly couple who were both still quite spry. He said to her, “You know, eighty isn’t old.” She seemed startled for a moment, but then she emphatically agreed, “Of course, eighty isn’t old at all!” I suspect they hadn’t been together long, but I loved their attitude, and their consensus reality.

Of course it works the other way too and consensus realities aren’t always positive–but it’s the healthy side of delusion that fascinates me, and the way it can perpetuate joy, hope, and vigor—though we should all probably bring in fresh eyes now and then to check for spider webs.

If anyone recognizes the story described above, I’d love to hear about it.

I’m in a quandary. Book View Café makes use of a promotional book-giveaway offered by the website LibraryThing.com, in which a hundred ebooks are given away to early reviewers. The hope is, early readers will post reviews which will encourage other readers to try the book, who will in turn post reviews, resulting in a rapidly expanding pyramid of appreciation that will, via exponential growth, soon take over the world!

Or at least sell a handful more books.

I’d like to include my upcoming novel Hepen the Watcher in the program, but to do so I need to come up with five fairly well-known novels that could be seen as “similar” to HtW, particularly in the sense of “If you liked Book-X, then you’d probably like Hepen the Watcher.”

So I’m looking for suggestions of books to swap in for the Book-X variable.

It’s a bit awkward, because at this point none of you reading this have actually read HtW. So how would you know? But I’m hoping some of you have read the first book of this series, The Dread Hammer. And if so, are there any fairly well-known novels you might suggest on that basis? Books that are similar in attitude, whether from the same genre or not?

Help?

The work-in-progress has been sullen and stubborn, progressing in short, rare bursts. So this week I skipped ahead and started writing scattered scenes that define and clarify the second half of the story. I don’t think I’ve ever worked this way before**, but the method is working for me right now, so I’m going with it.

** Way back when I was writing Vast I got seriously stuck maybe two-thirds through. That time I skipped ahead and wrote the end, then went back and finished it off in a linear fashion.

I’ve got an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) of Hepen the Watcher with a placeholder cover that looks like this:

The final cover art by Sarah Adams is getting closer to completion. Thanks for your patience!

Find a synopsis and sample chapters here on my website.

When I was ten or eleven years old we had a turntable, aka a “record player,” in the corner of the living room, along with my dad’s collection of records, which included what I suspect was everything Neil Diamond had recorded until that point. Many hours were spent playing those albums and singing along with them. In later years, when I met my husband, I think my knowledge of Neil Diamond music was a point in my favor, for he was an avid fan.

I didn’t follow Neil’s music much during later years, until a few years back when he did an entirely new collection with only Neil and his guitar, with no background orchestrations or accompanying singers. That made a nice gift for the husband.

Fast-forward to 2012: Neil Diamond is having his first Honolulu concert in thirty-five years. I was a bit skeptical–the man is seventy-one years old after all—how well could he still sing? Did he have the energy to give a strong concert? We attended last night’s show, and the answers to those questions are: Yes, the man can still sing, and yes, he had plenty of energy to last the entire night. I can only hope I’m doing as well if I reach seventy-one! The concert was fantastic, the evening thoroughly enjoyable, and I’m very glad we went.

Oh, and despite that I haven’t listened to most of those classic old songs in a long time, those days of singing along to my dad’s albums paid off, because I still know almost all the words.

In The Tide is an older story of mine, and the first short that I put out in ebook form. The idea was to sell it for the minimum price allowed at Amazon: 99-cents, which would earn me 35%, or 35-cents on every sale. I note that John Locke managed to get rich on that same margin! Unfortunately, I can’t yet say the same.

I would have priced the story at “free” if it were an easy thing to do. It’s not. Various backdoor machinations are required to accomplish it, and I don’t want to play. So I’ve taken the story down from Amazon and am now offering it free on my website, in both epub and mobi versions. The package includes a five-chapter sample from my novel The Bohr Maker. So if you’ve never read a short story of mine, or want an easy, no-commitment way to sample The Bohr Maker, please snag a copy. And if you know anyone else who might be interested, I urge you, please, PLEASE send them over to MythicIsland.com.

Find the link to the free story in the upper right of the landing page, in that box that says “Free Fiction” 😉

…evidently the price goes WAY up. 🙂

Yes, clearly, just an odd way of handling a book on its way out. No worries! The updated edition with new cover art is, or soon will be, available at Barnes & Noble.

It’s fun to be included on worthy lists! Wired Magazine’s Geek Dad (Erik Wecks) has a post up on 102 Essential Science Fiction Books for Your Kindle. The idea was to list one book per author, said book being presently available on Kindle. The article displays thumbnails of the current book covers to help you browse:

Here you can pick a book by its cover and not worry that you are getting junk with good art. Happy hunting.

Deception Well is Erik Wecks pick for my representative book, which surprised me, as people usually go with Vast or The Bohr Maker first, but hey, it’s okay with me!

Some interesting commentary on the list can be found from Jim Higgins at Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel.

The Kindle limitation guarantees some gaps in his list, as fine and historically wide-ranging as it is […] But there is much to like and praise about Wecks’ list, including its historical diversity and its attention to the work of female writers.

Looking at the list, I know I have a lot more catch-up reading to do. How about you?

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve made another short story sale, my second since I started writing short fiction again last fall. This one, titled Nightside on Callisto, has gone to Lightspeed Magazine, and is tentatively scheduled for the May issue.

This sale was a completely new experience for me. I’m used to waiting weeks for a response on a story, but this round took roughly 22 hours from submission to acceptance, thanks to editor John Joseph Adams’ policy of acting fast on all submissions. That’s a policy I could easily get used to!

Like most writers, it took me a long time and a lot of rejections before my first novel sold. This was a good thing. I am so very, very glad that the first book an agent ever took to market for me never found a buyer. In these modern days I suppose I would have gone ahead and published it myself—and then I would be faced with the fact of its existence ever after. We hate to admit it, but often, a rejection is a good thing.

The second novel of mine that ever went to market was an early version of The Bohr Maker. It was turned down many times, and with the most painfully “almost but not quite” rejections I ever hope to see.

For some reason I was flipping through the file a few months ago and discovered this gem of a rejection, addressed to my agent and later forwarded to me:

“This is the worst situation I can think of: really liking a book, and having to pass on it…The author has a very complicated vision working here, and I’m not sure that it works. There are so many threads, and so many changing viewpoints, that it becomes difficult to see where it all comes together, or how – or why…”

This was written by Laura Anne Gilman, who was then an editor at Berkley—and Laura Anne knows of what she speaks! Because of notes like this one I finally pulled the manuscript from the market and rewrote it from beginning to end. When it went out into the world again, it sold to the first publisher that saw it, and went on to win the Locus award for best first novel.

But it never would have been rewritten if I didn’t have experts in the field like Laura Anne telling me in very clear terms that something was lacking and it needed to be rewritten.

Expert advice is a great thing to have, even if it’s painful in the moment.

Laura Anne and I recently crossed paths again at Book View Café, and shortly after that I discovered that she works as a freelance editor. This past fall I hired her to edit my soon-to-be-released novel Hepen the Watcher. She gave me a great critique, asking me to explain things, fill in holes, and take advantage of dramatic opportunities that I’d missed on my own, and the book is much stronger for it.

Over the past year, Laura Anne has been writing a weekly post at Book View Café’s blog on a wide range of practical aspects of writing and publishing. Those posts are now available in ebook form under the title Practical Meerkat’s 52 Bits of Useful Info for Young (and Old) Writers. If you’re at all interested in writing professionally, I urge you to take advantage of Laura Anne Gilman’s writing and publishing expertise by picking up a copy at Book View Café. I’ve got mine! At only $2.99, how can you go wrong?