Dave Freer's Tree

It appears the tree of greed and short-sighted insanity is well watered right around the world. Here we have car prices going UP - an average of 11.3 % I believe as sales fall throught the floor. Or as for e-books (http://www.ereads.com/2008/10/random-house-changes-e-book-royalty.html). Sigh. Firstly as demand is increasing, it means you can bring your prices down, secondly, as some of the major expenses - namely, printing, paper, warehousing, physical distribution and RETURNS - are not a factor. Costs actually compare VERY favorably to the costs for other media, and therefore the rates of payment to authors and costs to public could both be very much improved. Fortunately Baen so far anyway have no part in this, and I hope they keep it that way. They pay a better % too.

The shortsighted result of this is very obvious -- already established well-known authors are thinking... well, they could really do this without the publisher. Instead of accepting 12.5% and falling... they could have 50% and pay some editor to work for hire and pay a cover artist (and get to CHOOSE their cover art), and get off-site storage for next to nothing, and probably come out with say 45% of the take. The next move I predict from publishers is going to some form of 'only we have the rights to sell your e-books in perpetuity', especially aimed at smaller authors and newbies who are in a poor position to resist. I hope we get some form of authors' collectives next to cut retail and advertising costs.

Onward. Just over a 1030 today. Good stuff but still. It's MGC blog day and dear Discovery Health are BAAACK. Now claiming I am the one that never changed my address. Well, ODD they had my present address. Odd that i still have the archive of the general notification, odd that they successfully send their bum-fodder to me - but not invoices or notifications. And even odder that they have an 8 year old address that... after I shat on them about it... 6 times I think in 2 months they managed to 'correct' once.... only to go back to the old address again the next time. They have a problem. They don't seem to be able to fix it so somehow it's my fault. Ah well. Sod them. As soon as I actually know what is happening I'll move, or just leave.

Anyway. at least I did move forward. Dentist tomorrow morning.

This little fellow came in from the cold today. I had to take him out again - not only would the cats not leave it alone but B is not fond of them. I don't like puff-adders but this little natal greensnake - I think - was more afraid of me than I was of it.

I was thinking today about just how I was letting things get on top of me. Believe me, a midlist author (where the reality is virtually any publisher leaves you to sink or swim - and really all you can do to swim is produce lots of good stuff) and all the other cr*p and uncertainty have been getting me down badly, and that in turn affects my writing, which in turn actually makes everything else worse. So I decided... it was time to take charge, get back to a regular schedule and stop letting the world screw my plans for life over. I'm going back to my come hell or highwater 1000 publishable words a day. I was doing 2.2K - but allowing myself off when editing, and recovering, and well, when I just couldn't. This has to stop. I tend to build up momentum and hat just hasn't happened since Dragons Ring got turned in. So now we're on a daily mission. Yes. you may ask. Only 1125 today. So far.

I am accessing through very slow, very bad dialup. Sorry i haven't been able to reply to messages. My apologies. This is the first time I've managed to get a webpage in 2 days.

Dave

The clerics that rule Iran do NOT want the world to see this. For the sake of this young woman killed for no reason go and look at it. It's a small bit of spitting in their eye.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjQxq5N--Kc

To her family, my deepest sympathy. I can barely imagine the sadness.

I've always wanted to get this right, and never quite got to it. I love knowing just what fish are there and it's a great sampling technique aside from anything else. So today, just because, I spent a couple of hours at it. My word. It'll take a few more hours. :-) Fish remain very safe.

My misadventures with Discovery Health and their appalling service and attitude got me thinking about the economic situation in here - dunno how it compares to the rest of the world but some of the dynamics here are scary.

For a start we are a country with massive disease issues - A true figure on HIV infection is impossible to find but figures range from anywhere from 10% to 25%. There are places where it is much higher. As Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe are in mid 20% that's probably accurate here too. We have been unable to combat TB effectively, and swine flu will probably be horrendous.

Then we have massive real unemployment. (officially - by cheating the stats it's about 23%, unofficially - by also counting people who haven't looked for work in the last 3 months, it's mid 40% - and you thought you had a problem.)
If you took the burgeoning state sector out of the employment equation, you'd be lucky to come up with 20% of the working age population supporting the edifice.
The sectors supporting SA are mining - down 33%
manufacturing - down IIRC 22%
agriculture - export and domestic
Construction - state and private contracts.
tourism - dented by crime, and the current world situation - mostly foreign.
Services - banking, insurance etc (almost all domestic)
And retail - consumer goods and food sales - domestic

Now at the moment the state sector is doing fine, growing nicely in salary increases and numbers.
Retail food sales are doing fine.
All the foreign and export business is down at least 30%
State expenditure on contracts is doing fine, private has stopped.
Retrenchments in the private sector are apparently at 25% and growing.
Which means an 1/8 less of earners, and a serious loss of tax revenue (as the state sector produces far less tax revenue than it uses.)
At the moment people are still holding the line. Still finding money from their retrenchment package to pay to avoid not having insurance (crime!) and medical cover. This is finite though. Of course house sales and credit spending are down - except from the state sector, so banks are hurting. Car sales are down more than 30% though.

If we have a steady uptick within the next six months or less, things will be OK. If not the cascade effect is going to be horrible. In the medium term not even our bloated protected state employee sector, and state contracts, can keep going with a vanishing tax base, without going Mugabe and printing worthless money.

If swine flu gets here, it will have a huge effect both on our fragile economy and on lives. At _best_ there will be thousands of deaths. Even at 10% of the 10% needing hospitalisation - that's 500 000 beds. We don't have anything near that, let alone spare. If it gets nastier... starts killing even a 1/4 of the immuno-compromised, we really can't cope. Look at a million deaths, minimum. I don't even want to think about worse - but it could be.

I hope things get better soon.
And we still have people here saying how much better off we are than the US and Europe. Do you think so?

Discovery Health - a company I would seriously not recommend if you ever have to deal with South Africa in any way are doing their best to piss me off too much to write coherently. Now, ten years back, medical aid (medical insurance) was an agreeable luxury in SA. Private care was better than state care, but state hospitals were still, largely, going to cure you rather than kill you. Some were very good, although they were under strain. Now a decade on, with a combination of AIDS and neglect and corruption, our State system needs ICU itself. The Medical Aids - and indeed the private healthcare industry -- were keen on customer service once. Now... well, they've gone from a luxury to a much begrudged VERY expensive necessity. The industry has responded to the collapse of state healthcare by increases at around twice the rate of inflation. They've declared handsome profits and their executive pay would make the US banker with golden toilet rush off and order a matching bidet to prove he was nearly as well off. I think the fair term might be 'rampant profiteering' rather than 'gouging', but it certainly feels like the latter to most of us caught in their ever-upward spiral. I've been paying these dear people for more ten years, same method of payment, just increasing resentment at having to. They've grown to behemoth size and can't keep track of their payments. So they'd like me to make it easier for them. At my expense. And my time. Now, I don't mind making their lives easier, but at their expense, no matter how trivial that expense is. My response was thus 'sure, at the 54 cents the bank charges me.' Their response is that the way I pay them is not according to their rules and therefore they will suspend benefits unless I do it their way. Get Dave pissy. Ask their CEO Adrian Gore and his assistant Abi Adams why they accepted my payments for more than 10 years if it is against their rules. If it was accepted in error, I'll be very happy to have it back, and repay them the trivial amount they've expended on my behalf. They - oddly - don't seem to want to answer that, despite being asked twice, and being able to send me a snotty e-mail 'In terms of legislation, contributions may not be discounted.'

Grin. You have to laugh. 'discount'? DISCOUNT!?! "I got a bargain. 0.026% discount!' What a bunch of... The arrogance, take-it-or-leave-it has to seen to be believed.

The odd thing is that this is an industry in real deep trouble. Not only is the recession starting to bite (and it will be hard, here - mining is down 33%, industry IIRC 22%), but the SA Government has come up with a plan, which although it has as much chance of working as most of their plans, for a universal affordable healthcare. With levies from all of us. Now there are plenty saying it's unworkable. But there are a lot more saying 'so? what we've got now is workable?" I'd say 99.999% of the medical aid customer base want to see them at least whacked down to size no matter what happens in the end. It's a grudge payment as I said exploited by a group of people who know their customers have no real choice but to pay. Those outside the net, want the same level of services, and would very hard put to believe their inaffordability is due to anything but greed from particularly the Medical Aids (as that's the face they see) if they think about it all. We need the doctors (they can leave), and we need the hospitals (although they can't leave). So I'm betting the axe is going to start falling on Medical Aids as the scapegoats. All that could save them is member intervention and support. But they seem dead set on imitating the CEO's of the US motor corporations for arrogant stupidity when they went scrounging the first time. I conclude business executives are not quick learners. And I suppose I am not either because I let a bunch of ... irritate me out of writing. You're waiting for my next book? Thank Discovery Health.

< sarcasm mode on > President il-bob Mugabe, the darling of African leaders (who give him a standing ovation every time he appears), whose brilliance has lead his country to great heights, has recognised the election of his good friend President Ameanihadadinnerjacket (with whom he is good friends, BTW) as free, fair and legitimate, and has urged his fellow kleptocratic despots... uh sorry, noble choices of the people to follow his example as they usually do. It is believed the place next door is hastening to do so as soon as it can find the rubber stamp. It may have been left in the UN when they voted against censure of the Burmese Junta, or against the prosecution for war crimes of the pres of Sudan, or when they stopped the Dalai Lama coming here. It's so hard to keep track of it when you use it that often. In the meanwhile President dinnerjacket has thanked il-bob for being such a role model in the conduct of elections.

sigh

Good world to live in. And I could be worse off and live in one of those places.

Yeah well. It's been a long week since I posted. Life of a midlist author wannabe-something-better is fairly fraught. Look the reality is in publishing - especially now - everything is slow. I'd been waiting on an advance for a book for some months, and finally got it (of course I'd lost about 20% of the value of it from when it was negotiated thanks to the currency fluctuations) and a couple of checks for shorts - one of which finally got here (the other still claims to be in the post). And the medical stuff was OK. So lightly bouyed with relief I took the weekend off and went here - Mzikaba to try and catch some crays and get my head right.



Sadly it turned into very wild water and not a lot of crays. Some pretty places though:



Or looking the other way:



I got chewed to pieces by bed-bugs. Not fun! I'm still itching. And then our 83 year old host got sick and I had to drive his skadonk (elderly rattletrap) back - took me 7 hours instead of 4 and a half. I was not a much rested camper... and then my joys started. Standard Bank (who are to this particular writer's creativity what myxamitosis was to rabbits.) announced they couldn't cash my cheque -- because my account was dormant (translation - I don't deposit money every month) Sigh. I've been doing the same thing for 10 years. A nasty 2 days fight ensued. These are the bastards that cream about 5% off every check, BTW. And they still give me a hard time. I won, but not a lot of prime concentration happened. This is the crowd that claim to support the Arts... with their support I'd be 6 foot under, I reckon. Then the Oz folk said the medical hadn't arrived. We tracked it down, signed for by them. Still, worrying. And then my dear 'so called' Medical Aid, Discovery Health('so called' because getting money out of them is anything but an aid to your health) claimed I hadn't paid them. I had, could prove it - but it did allow me to find that their record keeping makes 10 day old fish seem sweet smelling. Huge fight (which I won, eventually) ensued. So. It's been a relatively shit week of writing, mostly due to stupid beaurocracy of various sorts. Isn't it funny how these organisations are fine with losing you production time, costing you money, but when you suggest (as I did to Discovery) that at a cost to them of 54 cents (SA cents) they could get e-mail confirmation from my bank of payment into their account... that they want me to spend it for their benefit? Or Standard Bank want me to put money into my account every month, but won't accept a check when it arrives because I didn't the month before? And how the costs and risks are always yours?

Ah well. All done now. But I need another dive to get over it, which I can't have.
Nil carborundum illigitmi.

Well, being mooed may be be better than being booed, but at ten to six this morning the cow sticking its head in my office door was a less than a happy experience. Some 40 of the obstreperous bastards had invaded the garden. Hours of happy fun and trampled plants and large volumes of cowshit ensued.

On other news I have sold a short to Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine ;-). My first Australian appearance.

just outside my office.

My agent Mike has threatened mayhem if he ever gets another rejection from an editor saying a book is 'too traditional'. And another friend of mine got her teens proposal rejected as 'not edgy enough'. A good thing she didn't offer them a 1940 style boarding school story with a bit of magic. That'd never sell a bajillion copies. On an associated note... I see as a symbol of recession, movie-ticket sales are well up. Must be all those avante garde edgy films they're doing... except the sales of those have actually fallen further. They must be well on the other side of the U-tube and heading for the main sewer line by now. The movies that are doing well are... you guessed it: Traditional comedy, cheerful animation, and generally feelgood movies. In times of trouble it isn't an experimental dish of dried mopane worms in a crushed raw peanut and fermented fish sauce we reach for. It's comfort food. The familiar, the safe, the sure-to-be enjoyable. A double batch of your mum's choc-chip cookies. A steak and beer. Both an escape and a refuge. Guessing this isn't even peewee engine science let alone rocket science. Right now, an editor not buying a book because it's 'too traditional', implies they too want to be out of work. I do hope they find it an edgy enough experience.

Anyway - what the hell is 'edgy' and what makes something 'traditional'? 10 year old ideas and styles? Does that make you traditional? 20? 30? 50? Let's look at some of the 'edgy concepts' Non-'traditional' families? That was pretty edgy in about 1960. Drugs? Please. Maybe when Aldiss wrote about it in 1960. Sex? gay, multiple partners, sadism... It's been done to death by 1970. Feminism - it was really edgy in 1965. It's as passe as socialism, which was risky when Mack Reynolds was doing in about 1960. Racial equality? 1970s are full of it. Euthanasia? Pebble in the Sky. Virtual reality? Wow - recent! 1984. Pagan? - at least 30 years. Green? maybe even more. That leaves... grunge a la Meiville that's not 30 years off being 'edgy'- merely 10. And the latest hot thing is Victorian steampunk... very new that.

Now, there are many places where these ideas are still edgy and new. But it's not in New York publishing! And, as NY publishing has made no impact on those places and people in 50 years, if that's your mission, it might possibly be time to try another approach. Just possibly. Actually, to find anything that sf isn't exploring right now, you'd have to venture into pedophilia or beastiality or... heaven forbid, really edgy ideas about those fringe people - Heterosexual. Married. Anglo-saxon. Nuclear families. Ideas like heroes who are something depraved like agnostic or worse Christian or Jewish are too bizarre to entertain, although common as villains. And I beg you, the world is not ready for the idea of colonists (something it just happens every single human on earth is) who are not the arch-evil. Fortunately NY publishing is too conservative for that.

Oh well. Back to my traditional fantasy. Last I looked it had a non-traditional family, some odd sexual assortment, drugs (although that's probably a fail - they're not good), feminism, even some socialist society, racial equality issues, social and class issues, green issues... I know it's low on virtual reality, grunge and victorian steampunk... but there is only so much you can do in Renaissance fantasy.

Sesame Street has a local - SA franchise arrangement of sorts. It's called Takelani-Sesame and includes some local characters. They also produce early readers under the supervision of Sesame in the US.

It looks like I'm at last moving a foot out that literary broom closet (which critics so often mistake for a urinal) sf and fantasy, and going onto mainstream work they can appreciate the literary merit of. It seems possible I'm going to sell a grade r (school readiness) counting book to the Takelani-Sesame crowd. I have picked out my Rolls-Royce and tropical island with matching topless gardeners while awaiting their offer. I'll get a Booker for this, I shouldn't wonder. If it's not too far above the judges, that is.

Heh. Seriously, I am rather tickled by the idea. A friend of mine is one of their regular artists and got me to do a proposal and text several years ago. It appears in fullness of time, they've decided they like it. I could be a mainstream lit'ry figure now I could be. The excitement!

I'm used to dealing with the weird world of South Africa, and the weirder world of publishing. It's always a bit like looking at existance through a fragile flawed crystal looking glass, which not only shows things bass-ackwards, but frequently with added illusions (and will break if you drop it). Little things like the sales of of new vehicles having fallen through the floor, so the price goes up, or historically in recessions uplifting escapist entertainment sold well, so editors will buy miserybooks that sold badly even before it went pear-shaped. But the strain does tell. When you add this odd world to all the uncertainties your local simian is facing (from how do I pay the bills to visas and house-selling) it's beginning to affect my perception. Not really surprising that after nearly 30 years of cooking, and by now knowing exactly when everything has to go on to be ready at pretty much the same time, that I managed to boil rice the other night... remembering salt and water and to light the gas... and forgetting the minor detail of 'add rice'. So when everthing else was perfectly ready the rice was still suffering from a serious dose of 'packet'. And then I made bread without salt yesterday. For some people the kitchen is a place of disaster anyway. For me this is the equivalent of forgetting to put trousers on before going to work. Even when my head is so elsewhere in the current book that I put life and my marriage at risk by calling my wife by the current heroine's name, I can cook. Ah me. We hope that either my head comes back from holidaying without me or that the little men in white coats get here before I forget something more crucial and life-threatening.

Semper simianus.

You know, one of the things that goes with being cock-o-whoop that EVERYBODY needs to be nice to (even if they hate and despise you) - like a CEO, a judge, your bank manager, or the cop giving you a ticket, is that you miss learning or forget the social cues that say "Idiot. Wind your stupid neck in before you get your damnfool head chopped off." (Like - if you're a hetro male - when your wife or girlfriend folds her arms and says 'fine'.)

Now banks have been in that position for a long, long time. Their executives have got so used to the fact that the ordinary bloke dare not tell them they're slightly less popular than the clap. They're used to being treated as important to society, wealthy and powerful and they believe they're going to stay that way. Hmm. 'Fine'.

On the other hand, at the moment you could just be opening your yap to change feet And you should just zip it, because even if you're right, you look like a gouging bastard going after people who are taking strain. I can't wait to hear the great Australian public's delight at the fact that -- when everyone else is battling and keeping prices down (and heading inflation toward deflation) THEIR fees rose by 8.3%.
'Fine' just 'FINE'.

I thought these people were supposed to have brains? Do they really think they're that untouchable? It's like those motor industry plonkers flying in to Washington to scrounge public money in their private jets. I'm not a big one for governments intervening (although, sadly, corporates are mini-governments and all that can deal with them is bigger ones - which is why I favour making them non-viable entities) but any government that doesn't castrate them publicly, and hurt their precious bottom line very badly, is quite frankly asking to be out of power.

I hear in NY "I don't want to look like a banker" has become a statement frequently heard by shop-assistants. Wonder why? I'd say the Australian Bankers' Association ought scuttle into the kitchen, wash the dishes, hoover the house, and take the public that special expensive meal (with wine _and_ chocolate after) and realise that actually they're not that important - and take a good long hard look at what happened to US motor industry CEOs, and cut aggressively anything that could be construed as gouging. Because there are worse things than not making the same profit margin.

"one day you'll wake up, in the present day a million generations removed from expectations of a being you really want to be..."(Thin Ice, Jethro Tull)

I went to funeral today - Graham Clarke - a cousin of my wife. He was 97, so it was not one of those surprising things. What was was the number of people - a lot of kin of course, who had come, and how young many of them were. Here was a man who'd seen two world wars... most of the people there never saw one.

And I woke up... a million generations from the being I still want to be.
A sudden glimpse of mortality. I'm not going to see 97. The family history is bizarre - half live 80+ the other half do not see 50. One of the downsides of a long family history is knowing this stuff. I expected to belong to the second half. They lived hard, fast and dangerous - and dropped dead. Now it appears I've dodged that bullet, at least for now. And I'm still a million generations from the person I once wanted to be. I think I still do. Ah well. Never look back at might-have-beens.
To the living and the dead.
Salute.

For those of you interested in writing (and reading) I'd take it kindly if you popped in and made a comment on A writers website I participate in

Humans are strange, complex creatures. Writers moreso. Some are human too. I haven't evolved that far, for which I am very grateful. Humans do things which are noble and wonderful and altruistic. They can construct art that moves the soul. They can give their own lives to try and save strangers. They're capable of acts of great inventiveness, beauty, wonder and courage. They can show a nobility of spirit that would make your average monkey think New York was almost worth it.

They can also commit genocide, destroy for the sake of destruction, hate irrationally, and be a horrible bunch of ornery ratbags, relishing spite and schadenfreude and power over others. And weirdly enough not even all of that has to be a bad thing for society.
As this overview shows

Where this really breaks down is when you have those who are able to set their spite, their schadenfreude, their quest for self-aggrandizement and power... above the leveling influence of the same. Being part of the high caste in India - when the victims are untouchables, being some of the ruling elite putting down a disempowered minority that you dislike, being part of a minority that - because of historical persecution - are now above criticism, and beating up some soft target. To put it another way, the powerful getting a charge out beating up the weak in situation where they're safe. Often they'll pretend they're taking on some lion (because we admire those who show courage) - but they know perfectly well it's an old, toothless, clawless, circus lion with cataracts, and safely in an electric fenced enclosure when they shoot it.

The key question that separates the bullies - those who derive pleasure from abusing the weak and defenseless - from the heroes, is not how good the apparent reason for doing the attack is, but just what the potential cost to themselves is. If there is no risk, or the risk is negligible and they are protected by their status in that society, and the target is weak and helpless, they're not heroes: They may be bullies or camp-following sheeple, but not heroes. If it is standing for what they consider right for their group, and consequences are potentially dire... you're a staunch fellow, and I'd like to know you. If it is standing up for the rights of others, where, if you succeed you will hurt your own interests, then you're one of those fellows that make me almost aspire to being more than a filthy flea-ridden simian.

Now, in the hierarchy of targets for spite, fiction publishing doesn't come very high. Reading is a relatively small poor business. Really. 18 000 books can put you on the NYT bestseller list. In sf/fantasy, more so. 10K HC copies can get you onto the top of the Locus list. Yadda yadda Harry Potter, Dan Brown - those are rare exceptions, and I can prove these figures. In the publishing plantation, sf/fantasy authors are the sharecroppers. The weakest smallest part of the process. 95% of them work for so far under the living wage per hour it would be illegal in Bangladesh. They mostly work ridiculous hours, and give their heart and soul to it. Unless they're JK Rowlings level, they are at the absolute mercy of evey step of the chain, agent, publisher, distributor, retailer, critics(amateur and professional) and readers. They're one-person businesses, and anything that goes wrong is all their fault. The newbie sharecropper is getting 56 cents for each book... and will be lucky to sell 4K. These are the new sweeper-class of US society. I'm not too sure why they do it.

So: What do you call people who don the nice white hood of an internet pseudonym or the safe distance of the net to beat up the smallest and weakest victim?

If you don't like an aspect of someone's fiction - there is a really, really easy answer. Buy the work of someone you do like. Get your friends to buy it too. Get together and go to the cons they attend, and get them to sign. Trust me, publishers, and retail and, as a result, the poor sharecroppers will hasten to follow that line.
Anything else is pointless nastiness to weak people who cannot retaliate.

I walked over to fetch milk this morning. Down the middle of the road, of course (no sidewalks and not much traffic). The sky was blue between thin filoplume clouds. The Drakensberg mountains look like a juvenile baker's appretice dusted them enthusiastically but inaccurately with icing sugar. A Jackie-hangman was eating a dead berg-adder in the middle of the road. A few black-headed sacred ibis flew over. There was a beautiful grey doing his best to look like a donkey so he could avoid fantasy book cover. I exchanged cheerful 6.30 AM's Saubonas with a kid trotting past on a horse. He must be 10, no saddle, no helmet, no jodpurs no boots. Just a big smile and wattle twig for a crop.

It's a different world here. I forget it sometimes.