Robert Heinlein’s TUNNEL IN THE SKY. Robin McKinley’s THE BLUE SWORD.
Anne McCaffrey’s DRAGONSONG.
Those are the first three books I specifically remember reading as science fiction and fantasy. They weren’t; I’d been reading SF&F in the guise of children’s books for many years, but they’re the first I recall as genre-specific. I loved them all, but I loved DRAGONSONG and Menolly beyond reason. I had–who are we kidding, still have–a crush on Robinton, on Sebell. I still want a fire lizard. I always will.
I met Anne McCaffrey the first time I came to Ireland, in 1993. Knowing I was coming, I wrote to her and said it was presumptuous but I couldn’t come to Ireland without at least asking if I could meet her, because–well, because she was Anne McCaffrey. Because I loved her books. And she sent a postcard back with her phone number and said “Give me a call when you get here.”
So I did. And she’d had the worst day ever, the transmission had, like, fallen out of her car, the newly-built pool in her house had flooded, there was a ditch dug around the whole house so the foundation wouldn’t get ruined (McCaffrey’s Moat, she called it), and my friend and I got on the wrong public transport service when we went out to Bray (we took the bus, we should’ve taken the train, AKA “Dart”, but I had no idea what a “Dart” was) and she waited until we found her anyway, and she brought us back to Dragonhold and we spent the afternoon with the Great Dame of Science Fiction.
She showed us Robin Wood’s painting of Masterharper Robinton, and told the story of how she’d very nearly been out-bid for it at the convention auction she bought it at. (Somebody apparently finally went and told the other bidder that the woman bidding was Anne Freaking McCaffrey, and not to be an asshole.) She told me how when she saw the painting it was at the art show, and Robin Wood saw *her* and started to blurt “Um look here I did this painting, it’s supposed to be Robinton–” and Anne said, “Yes, yes, of course it’s Robinton, I could see that from across the hall!”
She had at least half a dozen of the other People of Pern paintings–F’Nor and F’lar, Lessa, Menolly, Sebell–all around her custom-built bookcases (“Your books will fit,” the man building them told her confidently. “If you have more than fit on these bookshelves, I’ll build you another one for free!” “This is the one,” she said, showing us a nook bookcase as tall and full as the others, “that he built for free.”), which were also filled with the dragons people had given her over the years. But Robinton was in the dining room, where she could take a meal with him every day.
One wall of her house was filled with Michael Whelan paintings. “I call it my Whelan Wall,” she said slyly, and I burst out laughing and opined it was rather more cheerful than the one in Jerusalem. She’d just gotten the ALL THE WEYRS OF PERN cover painting, and told me how Whelan had done the painting and when she’d seen it she decided she had to write that scene, with the dragons in the trees, into the book.
We met her cats. We met Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, who was there working on the very earliest books of the Acorna series with “Annieone” (and EAS was “Annietwo”). Anne asked if either of us wanted to be writers, and I said that I did. She told me to do anything else if I could, because it was a hard way to make a living. It was a piece of advice I didn’t *really* understand until nearly fifteen years later when I was holding URBAN SHAMAN in my hands for the first time.
Because, well, of *course* I *could* do other things. I did do other things, lots of them, and I was good at those other things and they certainly paid the bills. But there with the first copy of my first book in my hands, I finally really understood that no, actually, it turned out I couldn’t *really* do other things, because while I was doing all those other things they were only a platform to get me to the stage where I could write full time. While I was doing all those other things, I was also writing, because that was more important than going out or sleeping in or getting to the gym or whatever: in the end, I could not, in fact, do anything else and be satisfied, happy, content with what I was doing.
I sent Anne McCaffrey a copy of URBAN SHAMAN and a letter telling her that I finally understood what she’d been saying to me when I was twenty years old, and that it had turned out I couldn’t do anything else, and thanking her for her kindness and generosity to a couple of kids from Alaska all those years earlier.
That fall we moved to Ireland. The next October, at Octocon, the Irish National Science Fiction Convention, Anne showed up. I don’t even remember if she was an invited guest or if she just crashed the party, but she was zipping around the place in her electric chair, commanding attention not just with her speed but with her white hair and her big smile and by just being Anne Goddamned McCaffrey, the Dragonlady.
I had no idea if my copy of URBAN SHAMAN had made it to her, so when I got the chance I went to her table and knelt across from her and told her the whole story I’d said in the letter, all the things I said above, and partway through, she said, “Wait, did you write that book about the shaman in Seattle? You sent it to me, didn’t you? I loved it! I’ve gotten the next ones that have come out and I get to read them before anybody else in the house!”
Anne McCaffrey died Monday at the age of 85. It is not an exaggeration to say she helped shape my life, or that I loved her for all that I barely knew her. I’ve already read more than a dozen tributes to her on my friends pages, and I am clearly not the only one who was so affected by Anne, her works, and her worlds.
We loved you, Dragonlady. We always will.
The “No Dominion” campaign was successfully funded about four hours ago.
I love the way I said that: “successfully funded”, all casual-like. What I really mean is OH MY HOLY LIVING BEANS, $20,635?!?!!?!??! *520 backers?!?!* You guys cracked the third novella! And the “Gosh, I guess I’m singing for my supper!” level! Oh my, I say, oh my. O.O *laughs* No, really, that’s going to be fun. I haven’t sung in a long time. :)
Jami Nord guessed a closest-to-accurate final dollar amount at $20,675 and has won one commissioned Walker Papers short story–and a bunch of other loot as well. Congratulations, Jami!
I cannot thank you all enough. This has been the most utterly amazing, humbling, exciting, awesome experience, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. And in a lot of ways it’s only just getting started, so yay! We’ve got lots more awesomeness ahead of us!
Thank you *so much*. I’ll be doing one more general Kickstarter post in the next few days, talking about what I learned from this project, but in the meantime, let me also thank you for your patience while I’ve talked about nothing else, and I promise to get back to your regularly scheduled blog now. :)
My parents, who are awesome, got me celebratory flowers. :)
Okay, because this thing has gone utterly nuts, I’m going to run a contest for “No Dominion” Kickstarter patrons.
The campaign has about 72 hours left. I’ll give an upgrade to the $1000 package*–which is “I’ll write you a Walker Papers short story of your very own, featuring any secondary character you want” to the Kickstarter patron who guesses most closely the final dollar amount for the campaign.
The contest closes at 2pm Eastern (New York City) time on Sunday, November 13. If you want a chance at me writing you a Walker Papers short story of your own, all you have to do is buy in at $5 or more (yes, if you’ve already bought in you can just go place your guess, you don’t have to put in another $5!), and place your guess in the comments on this Kickstarter update. (Really, I mean it. Guesses won’t count if you post them on my blog.)
*Note:* I may or may not name a character after you, which is the $500 price point. That’ll depend on the story. But the winner will get everything else a $1K package would entail.
Let the games begin!
This is insane. :)
The “No Dominion” Kickstarter campaign is at just below $13K right now, with a week left to go. And I have reached the peculiar point of now being afraid to mention it much, when in fact normally one would be going OMG HOLY CRAP HOW HIGH CAN WE GO?!?!?!
Because at $15K I’ve promised another novella, but with all the little stuff I’ve thrown in, another novella at $15K isn’t really cost-effective. I mean, there are four short stories, and a chapter of HEAVEN CAN WAIT, and not only have I got a novella listed at $15K, but I also (rashly, but I fear I’m still rather enthusiastic about the idea o.o) promised 2 more chapters of HEAVEN CAN WAIT at that dollar amount too. I mean, on the positive side, I did make it clear those were deadline-at-my-discretion, but even so, I’m finding myself in this weird position of going “crap, I hope it either peaks at about $13.5-14K or goes all the way to like $17 or $18K…” And I hate to close it down early because I said I’d run it for six weeks and I by God think I should, so I’m a bit flaily here!
Truth in crowdfunding, lads, that’s what this is. :) So guide me, intarwebs! Shall I sit here being mum or shall I see just how darned far this horse will go?
Also, can I just say HOLY CRAP 360 BACKERS!!! That’s just shy of TWO HUNDRED more than have signed on for any of my other crowdfunding projects! I don’t know if it’s because it’s Walker Papers/Gary vs Old Races, or if it’s because it’s Kickstarter, or if I’ve flogged it more or if it’s been RT’d more or what, but HOLY CRAP!
(I will of course write the second novella if the campaign hits $15K, because I said I would! Just in case this made anybody wonder. It’s just that only in retrospect am I appreciating the flaws in my plans. :))
I can finally show off the cover for RAVEN CALLS, book 7 of the Walker Papers, due out in March 2012!
I’m so excited! *beams*!
Sorry for the sudden burst of silence. After NYCC I went to Alaska, where my writing computer suffered a critical hard drive failure (fortunately, I had backups) and so for a week I had no computer and then I spent another week trying to get the new one set up so it wasn’t totally annoying. Now it’s only partly annoying…
NYCC was a great success. I met a lot of terrific people, many of whom were readers who went out of their way to come up to New York and see me, so that was really fun and exciting. I got a lot of business done, caught up with old friends, and walked a truly astounding amount. :) So a very good weekend in all!
I have to catch up on my Recent Reads posts. *makes a note to self*
The “No Dominion” Kickstarter campaign is going great guns! With ten days left, it’s just $350 away from the Rollover Reward of a limited trade paperback edition of the novella, which will be exclusively available to people who buy into the Kickstarter campaign! My readers are *amazing*!
Also, to my total delight, WAYFINDER has been nominated as one of the Romantic Times’s best fantasy novels of 2011. We’ll find out in May if it won, but I’m really pretty thrilled that it’s been short-listed! :)
The following is my schedule. Not to repeat myself, but let me say for the seventy-third or soth time that professional commitments & opportunities trump everything else, which means there are four items from Friday morning onward on this list that are sacrosanct: the Del Rey Panel, the NYCC-assigned book signing, & the two publisher-supported book signings. Everything else I’ll do my best to make it to, and to be timely, but make no set-in-stone promises. :)
NEW YORK COMIC CON SCHEDULE
Saturday, October 15:
pre-con: breakfast w/Mary Anne, Lei Ann & Pete.
10-11am: video interview scheduled with pretty much my very first fan ever
11am-12pm: Book signing/meet & greet at Luna/Harlequin’s booth
12-1pm: lunch w/Matt
5:30-6:30pm: Book signing/Autographing Table 7, Autographing Area – North Hall
7pmish: dinner with Kirby & Jeditigger, perhaps others
Sunday, October 16:
pre-con: breakfast w/Mary Anne, Lei Ann & Pete.
11am-12pm: kaffeesklatch meetup at Luna booth (2000 block, against the right-hand wall)
post-con: dinner w/Luna editor
I have the sudden rash impulse to write a little back-of-book teaser for the book you’d be getting if you Kickstarted the whole “No Dominion” campaign up to the improbably high-end rollover amount of $30K.
Everybody knows Jumbletown isn’t like other cities. Stuff falls through from other places here, and mostly, it can’t leave. Head north to Detroit or south to Tampa Bay and it’s just ordinary world out there, no fae or vampires, no Civil War soldiers or little grey men. A lot of Jumbletown’s new arrivals are dangerous. A lot of them aren’t. Some of them settle down, make families, make a life…but their children can’t leave.
And then there are girls like Cori May, born in Jumbletown and untouched by the magic that’s trickled through. Her friends think she’s lucky: she’ll be able to leave someday. Cori thinks ordinary (or leaving town, for that matter) pales beside girlfriends with rainbow wings or the power to stun with a touch.
But it’s the very ordinariness of Cori’s human soul that draws the fallen angel Mirael and the demon Sebastian to her. For both, capturing Cori’s love–and her soul–offers redemption. For Mirael, plucking a pure mortal soul out of the Jumbletown mire would win her a chance to return to the Heaven from which she fell. For Sebastian, who may know more about Jumbletown’s creation than he’s letting on, seducing that same pure soul would be a one-way ticket up the ranks of demons in his home world of Hell.
But neither demon nor angel imagined falling in love with Cori, and when it comes to the final battle for her soul, perhaps…
…HEAVEN CAN WAIT.
I’ll write the first chapter if the Kickstarter campaign hits $12K. I’ll write two more chapters if it hits $15K. Those’ll be freebies, available for everybody to read. After that, I’ll write another chapter, posted weekly starting after April 15, 2012, for everyone subscribing at $25 or more, for every $1000 dollars past $15K. If the campaign actually breaks the absurd $30K rollover point, I’ll write the whole thing. :)
(And yes, you can up your donation amount if you want to–just go to the campaign page and, um. Okay, well, I know it’s possible because a bunch of people have done it already, okay? I don’t think it’s very hard, even, but I don’t actually know how to do it… :) “and click “Manage Your Pledge.” Enter a new amount in the pledge amount box. Note that you are not adding to your existing pledge; the amount you enter will be the total amount collected if the project is successfully funded.” (via the kickstarter FAQ & Gabriel Who Can Read Instructions :))
(Also, because I appear to be adding a whole lot more stories to this campaign than expected, I’ve upped the high-end rollover stuff–extra novellas, or an extra novel–from $10 to $25. I feel slightly like a git for changing it mid-campaign, but subscribers at $10 will still, without question, get the novella and three short stories, which I think is pretty fair. She said nervously.)
Hat-tip to Trent, who asked if the “Jumbletown” he kept seeing on my to-do list was a story idea (it wasn’t, Jumbletown is a freecycle site in Ireland), and to Corin, who suggested the angelic storyline. :)
Over the weekend, my friend E & I had this big discussion in which she told me I wasn’t squeeing enough about the “No Dominon” Kickstarter campaign. I said I was trying not to drown people in it, which she’d understood, but she still thought I wasn’t squeeing enough. So this morning I shall squee some, and talk about why crowdfunding excites me. :)
First off, the campaign is well over $7500 now, though not yet really near $8K. I suspect (in another lesson learned) that calendars aren’t an exciting enough Rollover Reward. :) I think it’ll probably get there, but it’s a good lesson for next time.
(Odds are it will be an Animals Calendar, because the campaign would have to reach a truly phenomenal dollar amount to justify doing the COMPLETELY AWESOME calendar idea I had after the fact, which is doing a CE Murphy Urban Fantasy Calendar, with location photos from all my urban fantasy novels: New York, Seattle, Boston, Cherokee County, Ireland–and the real Thunderbird Falls, which is outside of Anchorage. But I’ve only got a 6 hour layover in Seattle coming home, and that’s not enough time for even the most strategic strike force of photography expeditions to succeed.
Tell you what, though. If the campaign hits $8K before I leave for NYCC on Wednesday morning, I’ll bring the real camera along just in case. If it hits $9K (only $1400 away!) before I leave, I’ll at least do a desktop download version of the calendar, though it may be heavy on Irish & NYC locations rather than the other places. :))
Anyway, I’m still getting huge delight in having people subscribe–it’s over TWO HUNDRED FIFTY PATRONS now!!! that’s closing in on 100 more than my previously-most-successful crowdfunding campaign! o.O! <-- surprised scuba guy emoticon
And it is all reminding me that again and again, the thing that really hits home for me about crowdfunding is that essentially random strangers are coming together to help get art made. That sounds terribly snotty, I don't really think of my stories as art (I think of them as books or stories), but storytelling /is/ an art, the oldest art, and so: coming together to help get art made.
Even more specifically, to help get art that would not otherwise exist made. It's enormously unlikely that I would have written "Hot Time" or "Year of Miracles" or any of the ORSSP if I had not been supported, quite literally, by the kindness of strangers. I *wanted* to tell those stories, but I can't, as a rule, afford to tell stories for free, and novellas/short stories are a much harder sell in the fiction market than a full-length novel. But as it turns out, it seems that while I can get publishers to pay me for books, I can get--just people to pay me for novellas and short stories, and that means they're *totally* making a space where I can do things I would never otherwise be able to. And that's *amazing*.
I *love* that we're living in a time where instead of an artist requiring a single, extremely wealthy patron, it's possible to do something like a Kickstarter campaign and have hundreds of ordinary-income individuals become patrons instead.
*Kermitflails* That's what art and patronage *should* be: complementary and broadly accessible. Art is not for the wealthy, it's for everyone. The joy of being able to help support it should not be reserved for the wealthy, either, nor should the rewards of patronage (projects dedicated to/named for/inclusive of you, etc) be solely for the rich. I've done a bunch of silly little things already to say thank you to individuals who have hit benchmarks within the "No Dominion" campaign, and that's part of what this is all about: all being in it together.
So, y'know, thank you. This is an incredible thing you guys are doing, and I love you for it. (and in case you missed the link up above, the campaign page is here. :))
The Kickstarter campaign just ticked over $7300. I’m holding my breath to see if by some mad chance it reaches $8K by 1 week in, although that doesn’t seem enormously likely. However, if it does, I’ll do something else fun–maybe run a Q&A where people* submit questions to be answered in-character by the character of their choice. (No spoiler answers will be given, but up through SPIRIT DANCES is fair game!)
I was looking at the Rollover Rewards, and I’m seeing a kind of a long dark teatime of the soul between $8K and $12K, as far as reward levels go. Now, this made perfect sense while I was figuring out the Rollover Reward points, which I set at Goal ($4K), Half Again ($6K), Doubled ($8K) and Tripled ($12K). But it does look awfully gappy and large there between $8 and $12K, so I suspect I’ll end up offering a $10K Rollover of Another Story.
At that point, the $10 buy-in starts to be a real steal, with four short stories and one novella. Actually, possibly I need to bump that up, in fact: the $10K Rollover Story would perhaps be for everybody buying in at $25 or more. Hm.
On that note, in retrospect, I feel I’ve managed some of the scaling badly for the campaign. I think I should’ve set the calendar level at $50, skipped the $75, and set all the $75 rewards as part of the $100 reward. But heck, this is partly about figuring it out, right? :)
*anybody can ask, but you’ll have to be a KS patron to get the answer :)
