Tag: writing

Everybody screws up

I was a bit embarrassed about my little digging-related miscalculation in A Throne of Bones.  I felt a little better about it after encountering a mistake in Isaac Asimov’s Forward the Foundation, in which a
highly improbable nightly murder rate was asserted on Trantor.  And
given the level of attention to detail for which David Foster Wallace,
supposedly one of the greatest novelists of the last 30 years, is
rightly lauded, I feel downright positive about my own blunder after catching the following error in this passage from Infinite Jest.  Apparently, the longer the book, the more likely it is that the possibility of a basic error approaches certainty.

1610h.
E.T.A. Weight Room. Freestyle circuits. The clank and click of various
resistance-systems. Lyle on the towel dispenser conferring with an
extremely moist Graham Rader. Schacht doing sit-ups, the board almost
vertical, his face purple and forehead pulsing. Troeltsch by the squat
rack blowing his nose into a towel. Coyle doing military presses with a
bare bar. Carol Spodek curling, intent on the mirror. Rader nodding as
Lyle bends and leans in. Hal up on the spotter-shelf in back of the
incline-bench in the shadow of the monster copper beech through the west
window doing single-leg toe-raises, for the ankle. Ingersoll at the
shoulder-pull, steadily upping the weight against Lyle’s advice. Keith
(‘The Viking’) Freer 68 and the steroidic fifteen-year-old Eliot
Kornspan spotting each other on massive barbell-curls next to the water
cooler’s bench, taking turns bellowing encouragement. Hal keeps pausing
to lean down and spit into an old NASA glass on the floor by the little
shelf. E.T.A. Trainer Barry Loach walking around with a clipboard he
doesn’t write anything down on, but watching people intently and nodding
a lot. Axford with one shoe off in the corner, doing something to his
bare foot. Michael Pemulis seated cross-legged on the cooler’s bench
just off Kornspan’s left hip, doing facial isometrics, trying to
eavesdrop on Lyle and Rader, wincing whenever Kornspan and Freer roar at
each other.
‘Three more! Get it up there!’
‘Hoooowaaaaa.’
‘Get that shit up there man!’
‘Gwwwhoooooowaaaaa!’
‘It raped your sister! It killed your fucking mother man!’
‘Huhl huhl huhl huhl gwwwww.’
‘Do it!’
Pemulis
makes his face very long for a while and then very short and broad,
then all sort of hollow and distended like one of Bacon’s popes.
‘Well
suppose’ — Pemulis can just make out Lyle — ‘Suppose I were to give you
a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to
tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we’re
imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of
the keys would you be willing to try?’
Troeltsch calls over to
Pemulis, ‘Do the deLint-jerking-off face again!’ Pemulis for a second
lets his mouth gape slackly and his eyes roll way up and flutters his
lids, moving his fist.
‘Well I’d try every darn one,’ Rader tells Lyle.
‘Huhl. Huhl. Gwwwwwwww.’
‘Motherfucker! Fucker!’
Pemulis’s wince looks like a type of facial isometric.
‘Do Bridget having a tantrum! Do Schacht in a stall!’
Pemulis makes a shush-finger.
Lyle
never whispers, but it’s just about the same. ‘Then you are willing to
make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The
paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that
door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key.’
Pemulis pulls
his lower lip down as far as it will go and contracts his cheek muscles.
Cords stand out on Freer’s neck as he screams at Kornspan. There’s a
little hanging mist of spittle and sweat. Kornspan looks like he’s about
to have a stroke. There are 90 kg. on the bar, which itself is 20 kg.
‘One more you fuck. Fucking take it.’
‘Fuck me. Fuck meyou fuck. Gwwwwww.’
‘Take the pain.’
Freer has one finger under the bar, barely helping. Kornspan’s red face is leaping around on his skull.
Carol Spodek’s smaller bar goes silently up and down.
Troeltsch
comes over and sits down and saws at the back of his neck with the
towel, looking up at Kornspan. ‘I don’t think all the curls I’ve ever
done all together add up to 110,’ he said.
Kornspan’s making sounds that don’t sound like they’re coming from his throat.
‘Yes!
Yiiissss!’ roars Freer. The bar crashes to the rubber floor, making
Pemulis wince. Every vein on Kornspan stands out and pulses. His stomach
looks pregnant. He puts his hands on his thighs and leans forward, a
string of something hanging from his mouth.
‘Way to fucking take it
baby,’ Freer says, going over to the box on the dispenser to get rosin
for his hands, watching himself walk toward the mirror.
Pemulis
starts very slowly to lean over toward Kornspan, looking around
confidentially. He gets so his face is right up near the side of
Kornspan’s mesomorphic head and whispers. ‘Hey. Eliot. Hey.’
Kornspan, bent over, chest heaving, rolls his head a little his way. Pemulis whispers: ‘Pussy.’

It’s an amusing scene, but first
of all, no 15-year old boys, with or without steroids, have ever done a
single 110 kg curl, let alone more than four.  That’s nearly 250
pounds. Even at my most bulked up, when I was benching 325 pounds, I never curled more than four reps at 150.  These days, I usually top out with 4×52 kg, which is only a bit more than 115 pounds.

Based on the fact
that Wallace mentions 90 kg being on the bar, it’s pretty clear that he actually meant
90 pounds, which is one 45-pound plate per side.  Still impressive, as with
the bar, (another 45 pounds), it is 135 pounds.  Which is readily doable, although still not reasonably conceivable for 15-year old tennis players who are described as having one arm more developed than the other.

Striking back, ineptly

Darth Vader’s failure at the Battle of Hoth:

How did the Galactic Empire ever cement its hold on the Star Wars Universe? The war machine built by Emperor Palpatine and run by Darth Vader is a spectacularly bad fighting force, as evidenced by all of the pieces of Death Star littering space. But of all the Empire’s failures, none is a more spectacular military fiasco than the Battle of Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back.

From a military perspective, Hoth should have been a total debacle for the Rebel Alliance. Overconfident that they can evade Imperial surveillance, they hole up on unforgiving frigid terrain at the far end of the cosmos. Huddled into the lone Echo Base are all their major players: politically crucial Princess Leia; ace pilot Han Solo; and their game-changer, Luke Skywalker, who isn’t even a Jedi yet.

The defenses the Alliance constructed on Hoth could not be more favorable to Vader if the villain constructed them himself. The single Rebel base (!) is defended by a few artillery pieces on its north slope, protecting its main power generator. An ion cannon is its main anti-aircraft/spacecraft defense. Its outermost perimeter defense is an energy shield that can deflect Imperial laser bombardment. But the shield has two huge flaws: It can’t stop an Imperial landing force from entering the atmosphere, and it can only open in a discrete place for a limited time so the Rebels’ Ion Cannon can protect an evacuation. In essence, the Rebels built a shield that can’t keep an invader out and complicates their own escape.

When Vader enters the Hoth System with the Imperial Fleet, he’s holding a winning hand. What follows next is a reminder of two military truths that apply in our own time and in our own galaxy: Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.

I’ve probably given the art of attempting to describe fictional battles in a realistic manner a little more thought than most, given the heavy military elements in my current series.  What I find interesting is how little thought goes into most such portrayals, and how obviously unfamiliar with the various military strategists most authors and filmmakers are.  Now, obviously some things are just there because they look cool or allow the hero to do something heroic; the Imperial Walkers are totally ridiculous in literally every single way.

Most “military” science fiction shows no sign of having ever encountered even the most basic military concepts such as unit cohesion, leadership, and morale.  This is fine in today’s SyFy world, where the readers are inordinately female and more interested in the vicissitudes of the romances of the beautiful and tactically brilliant United Nations of Earth major with naturally curly hair, who has never lost a sporting competition, a fight, or a battle, and is torn between her attraction to the handsome enemy general with executive hair and her affection for her rugged, loyal, African company commander.

The amusing thing is how these “military” writers don’t even pay attention to the most fundamental facts of militaries in the real world.  For example, over 10 percent of the women in the U.S. Navy have to be shifted to shore leave every year due to pregnancy, and then receive a one-year reprieve from ship deployments or combat zone assignments after giving birth.  But when is the last time you saw or read about a single female warrior getting pregnant in order to escape a deployment?

The worst example of pseudo-military action I can recall seeing was in The Return of the King, when Faramir leads a cavalry charge against Osgiliath.  Now, as a general rule, even the charge of the Rohirrim against Saruman’s Uruk-Hai at Helm’s Deep was more than a little dubious, since horses resist charging towards disciplined bodies of infantry bristling with long pointy objects.  But horsemen charging towards archers safely ensconced in a fortified position could only be topped by a naval invasion of Topeka by the Imperial Japanese Navy.  In military history terms, it is a straightforward category error.

One of the things I’m enjoying about writing A Rash of Blings is exploring the different military doctrines, especially in light of how the availability of magic and other elements affects them.  The Amorrans were obviously based on Vegetius, with just a dash of Maurice, but I will be very impressed indeed if anyone is able to identify the historical model upon which the elvish doctrine has been built.

Cartooning the controversy

I’ve been pleased to see that most of those who have taken on the task of slogging all the way through A THRONE OF BONES appear to think rather well of it.  And while my publisher suffered an understandable amount of angst prior to publication, I’m not terribly surprised that there haven’t been too many serious objections to the presence of vulgar language, graphic violence, and sexual scenes in the novel.  I think this is because most of the individuals prone to thoughtless knee-jerk reactions aren’t going to go to the trouble of wading through an 850-page book in order to go through their fainting couch routine.  Not when there are so many shorter books available about which they can more easily complain. 

Those who take the requisite time to read through the book tend to see that the inclusion of these less-family friendly elements adds to the verisimilitude of the reader’s experience.  None of us may have experienced an arrow grazing our cheek or piercing our arm, but we have all had that moment when we misapply the hammer or slip with the knife, and we all know what tends to come out of our mouths at such moments.  It is seldom hosannas of praise to our Maker or calm and reasoned discourses on the manifold wonders of Science.

In like manner, many of us have been away from our wives for a month or more, and we all know the intense combination of desire and hunger that we feel upon seeing them, smelling them, and touching them.  To omit such aspects of the human experience is to deny reality, it is to deny a vital element of God’s Creation, and it is to make the fiction even more of a lie than it already is.  I don’t criticize those authors who choose to omit these more mature elements, as I am sure they have their reasons for making such compromises, but I am staunchly opposed to those readers and publishers who would deny authors the ability to make such decisions for themselves.

What the SFWA writers who have mocked me for preferring, (and know that it is a choice on my part), to be published by a small and independent press fail to understand is that freedom is now more important than advances, marketing muscle and retail distribution.  The beauty of Hinterlands is that I can not only write exactly what I want to write, but I also have the freedom to use my books however I see fit.  By the end of this year, the significance of that should become obvious in a way that has implications that go far beyond with whom I happen to publish.

The cartoon makes a valid point.  Many of those who question or condemn the vulgar legionaries in A THRONE OF BONES don’t hesitate to watch NCIS or read A DANCE WITH DRAGONS.  I’m entirely willing to accept criticism from those who limit their media consumption to 50-year old Disney movies and Christian bonnet fiction, but not from anyone who betrays even the slightest familiarity with secular entertainment.

I know I’m not the ideal standard bearer for the cause of historical and intellectual verisimilitude in science fiction and fantasy, much less the cause of behavioral realism in Christian fiction.  I’m too outlandish, too controversial, too vulgar, and too intellectual.  I’m also insufficiently talented as a wordsmith; the primary role of my prose is to simply stay out of the way of the story and the reader’s experience of the world and the characters.  The problem is that there doesn’t appear to be anyone else who is willing and able to point out the observable problems, provide the counterexamples, and then face the inevitable criticism.

So we’re left with a literary movement that consists of one writer, of limited literary abilities, who is published by a small press that doesn’t sell to the retail chains.  It shouldn’t have a chance in Hell of making any difference whatsoever, and yet, it has one key thing going for it.  It is aligned with the truth, and the truth always wins out in the end.

That settles that

The month-long experiment has come to an end.  The results are in.  I was more than a little curious about what sort of effect the end of my WND column would have on the blog.  After all, the blog only began as a sort of permanent mailbag to replace the little mailbags at the end of the column, and it initially became useful to me as a means of responding to multiple emails about the same column at once.  It was so effective in this regard that the numbers of emails I received about the current column eventually dropped from dozens per day to only a few per week despite the fact that the column readership grew considerably over the same period.

It seemed to make sense that because a lot of people originally first came to visit VP by way of WND, we would see a noticeable decline in the traffic here without my column there.  That didn’t bother me, as traffic has never been a priority here and I assumed all the regulars would likely continue to swing by.  I was more than a little tired of fruitlessly attempting to advocate liberty to a crowd that was much less interested in it, on average, than in being in a position to dictate to the other half of the country.  That is why, at the end of the experiment yesterday, I was surprised to learn that after retiring my column on December 31, VP traffic not only did not decline last month, but increased to 630,860 Google pageviews, (895,311 combined with AG), up nearly 20 percent from the previous month. 

What happened?  It wasn’t the SFWA presidential campaign that made the difference; there aren’t that many SF/F writers in the first place and most of them don’t pay any attention to the election.  A fair number of rabbits did come by the one day to show how they could hop on one foot and shake their fluffy little cottontails on command, but less than appear from a single Instalink.  Nor were there any Instalinks to VP in January to skew things upward, though there was one to AG.  What happened was that two weeks after seeing there were no negative effects on traffic from the end of the column, I added a link to VP from AG for the first time.  The unexpected increase in January almost entirely comes from that little modification to the AG layout.  Go figure.

What I learned is that while there is a significant amount of overlap between the two blogs, as anyone who recognizes the regular commenter names can tell, there is rather less than I assumed.  I never bothered linking the one from the other because I thought that everyone who went to AG was already a VP reader.  That was initially the case, I’m sure, but it is clearly no longer true, especially in light of the emails I’ve received from AG readers who were clearly surprised to discover the existence of this blog.  I’ve said from the start that because the human interest in all things socio-sexual is considerably greater than in pretty much anything else, AG would eventually surpass VP.  That hasn’t happened yet, but at the present rate, it should take place within two years even though, as the chart shows, VP is still growing at a reasonable pace itself.

So, it would appear that I was wrong and those of you who said WND was no longer doing anything material for me from a readership perspective were correct.  I admit it.  You may commence the crowing now.

While the sole purpose of this blog remains the Amusement Imperative, which concerns entertaining myself in whatever manner happens to strike me at the moment, I do appreciate the way in which the Dread Ilk continue to contribute to the discourse here in their inimitable manner.  It’s remarkable how even the class of anklebiters has gradually improved over the years.  They may still be nipping at the sweet, sweet taste of my ankles, but at least they are aware they are doing so and not operating under the illusion they are gnawing through the foundations of Western Civilization or the last remaining supports of the Patriarchy.

Warning: spoilers ahead

Since there has been so much discussion of reviewing A THRONE OF BONES of late, I’ve decided that enough time has passed to permit a Q&A about the book with those who have read it.  If you have not yet read the novel, but intend to do so, I strongly recommend that you not read the comments.  And if you have, this is your place to ask me questions concerning the events and characters of the existing book and the novellas, NOT the one that I am currently writing.

On a related note, A Wardog’s Coin won’t be out until next month because I have been occupied with working on Book Two as well as a Selenoth-related social game that is going to be a fantasy epic in its own right.

Of language versus substance

Let me be first perfectly clear about one thing.  I could not care less about the so-called “Christian” market.  I have never been a CBA author, I will never be a CBA author, and while I am an evangelical Christian, I am not of the evangelical Christian culture.  I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the works of the modern authors who are popular within that world, and as a writer, I consider my peers to be George R. R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, and Steven Erikson, not Jerry Jenkins, Ted Dekker, or whoever happens to be writing the books du jour in that market.

To me, a Christian novel is one that is written from a worldview perspective that contains the idea that Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of Man in some form.  It doesn’t matter if the idea is overt or an analogy.  That’s it. The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia are clearly Christian works, as is Ray Bradbury’s excellent short story, “The Man”.  And yet, none of these three works ever so much as mention the words “Jesus Christ” or even portray various Christian activities such as baptism or communion.

My view is clearly not the most common opinion.  And while I certainly respect the right of my fellow Christians to place a more stringent series of requirements on what they believe is, or is not, Christian fiction, I really don’t care in the slightest what their opinion happens to be.  To a certain extent, I suspect that the divide centers on the idea that a Chinese novel must be either a) written by a Chinese man and set, at least in part, in China, or b) written in the Chinese language.

Now, I am a Christian, and the various books and stories in the Arts of Dark and Light series overtly utilize something that is clearly recognizable as Christianity in a manner that is historically consistent with the medieval milieu.  Some characters are observably “Christian”, others are pagan, others are simply… something else.  But I don’t write in what could be described as the contemporary Christian language.  And therein lies the difference.

I hadn’t intended to say anything about what happened right before A THRONE OF BONES was published, but as it happens, my publisher at Hinterlands has broached the subject in a surprisingly candid article about his decision to publish the book on the Speculative Faith Blog.  He writes:

Things were going along pretty well until two days before the book was to release. I got a note from the folks at a prominent Christian fiction writers group in America saying that if we released this book, they would take MLP off their list of approved publishers. That meant that all MLP books would not be eligible for their annual award.

As much as I believed in this book and its author and our goals, I was not prepared to let one book sabotage the chances of all my other authors receiving an award I think has value.

Oh, the drama. Was I going to cancel the book? Was I going to go through and remove everything this organization found objectionable? Was I going to hurt all my other authors? Was I going to succumb to what some folks said amounted to blackmail? (I didn’t think it was blackmail, by the way. I saw it as them adhering to their guidelines.) Remember, this was all happening 36 hours before the book was set to release.

I finally asked the organization if it would change anything if I created a new imprint and released the book under that imprint. They said, “Oh, yeah. If you did that, the problem would go away.”

“Really?” sez I. “All my other books would still be eligible for the award?”

“Sure.”

And thus, Marcher Lord Hinterlands was born, a brand new imprint for one book (so far).

A Throne of Bones by Vox Day released on December 1, 2012. It weighed in at just under 300,000 words and over 850 pages in hardcover. It is currently our overwhelming bestseller both in hardcover and in e-book.

I am one of those who saw the situation as something uncomfortably akin to blackmail.

Now, I should also mention that I am entirely happy with the solution; what author wouldn’t like having their own personal imprint?  Nor did I have a problem with the organization telling Jeff that my book would not be eligible for any of the awards they give out.  I also think that the way in which the situation was speedily resolved to everyone’s satisfaction was a testimony to the way that Christians with strongly differing opinions can come and reason together to find a way past their differences.

However, having been blackballed on at least two occasions at different publishing houses, (I’m not being paranoid, I was told as much by the individuals within the publishers who originally approached me and asked to publish my work; on more than one occasion I’ve been paid to NOT write a book), I think it is unwise for Christian organizations to be seen appearing to practice the same sort of blackballing, and worse, guilt by association, that I’ve seen in certain secular publishers.  On the one hand, I think it is wrong for secular publishers to act as gatekeepers relentlessly pushing their specific left-wing ideology on the market, on the other, I think it is wrong for Christian publishers and other professional organizations to act as gatekeepers relentlessly pushing a highly antiseptic view of what is, and is not, Christian, particularly when that view appears to be based more on cultural values than upon genuine spiritual or doctrinal issues.

The most problematic aspect of the situation, in my opinion, was that the organization asked to see the manuscript before it was published, thereby causing it to look as if they were behaving in an inappropriately censorious manner.  While they certainly have the right to act in whatever manner they see fit ex post facto, the attempt to intervene prior to publication was, in my opinion, totally unacceptable and amounted to the same sort of ideological policing that I have criticized in the SF/F market.  I tend to suspect that they were merely trying to anticipate a potential problem and head it off at the pass, which is what ultimately happened, but nevertheless, I don’t think that anyone except the author and the publisher should be addressing these sorts of issues prior to publication.

I leave it to the readers to decide whether my books are Christian fiction or not.  I don’t care.  I consider them to be epic fantasy, written in the tradition begun by George MacDonald and exemplified by J.R.R. Tolkien.  And to those who will roll their eyes at the idea of “a Christian answer to George Martin” and imagine it is meant in the Stryper sense, let me hasten to disabuse you of that notion.  A THRONE OF BONES is neither an homage nor an imitation, it is a challenge.  It is intended as a literary rebuke.

I believe Martin and some of the other authors of epic fantasy have not extended the sub-genre so much as they have betrayed it.  And in doing so, even as they have attempted to make their works more “realistic” than those of their epic predecessors, they have actually made them much smaller in terms of the human experience.  In their colorblind rejection of what they suppose to be “black and white” morality in favor of their beloved “balance” and “shades of gray”, they have inadvertently turned their backs on the full rainbow spectrum of colors.  They paint ugliness, but no beauty.  They sketch images of hate, but none of love.  Their sex isn’t erotic, it merely the slaking of appetites.  Their work, for the most part, is quite literally and intentionally soulless.

I’m not at all interested in attempting to become their polar opposite, as some erroneously see it.  Still less am I trying to write some saccharine, watered-down version of their works.  Instead, I’m attempting to embrace the whole.  Good and evil.  Love and hate.  Joy and sorrow.  Beauty and ugliness.  Art and philosophy.  I am not saying that I have been, or will be, successful in this, I am merely pointing out that to claim that A THRONE OF BONES is an imitation of Martin, or any other author, is not only to miss the point, it is missing the entire conversation.

SFWA Platform: the first five points

As some of you already know, I have declared myself to be a candidate for the SFWA president in the next election, which takes place this spring.  Here are the first five points of my platform; I’m interested in any ideas for improving them:

  1. SPLIT THE NEBULA AWARDS: Science
    fiction is not fantasy. Fantasy is not science fiction. I propose
    doubling the number of Nebula Awards, and presenting awards for Best
    Novel, Best Novella, Best Novellette, Best Short Story, and Best
    Script in two categories, Science Fiction and Fantasy.
  2. AWARD A CASH PRIZE FOR BOTH BEST
    NOVEL AWARDS: A $5,000 prize will be awarded to the winner of Best
    Novel:Science Fiction as well as to the winner of Best
    Novel:Fantasy. The long term goal will be to work towards making
    the winning of a Nebula a more prestigious and financially valuable
    event than winning the Man Booker Prize.
  3. EXPAND THE MEMBERSHIP: The right
    to SFWA membership will be granted to all self-published and small
    press-published authors who have sold more than a specified number
    of ebooks to be determined, eligibility number to be confirmed via
    official Amazon report. It will also be granted to all SF/F-related
    computer game lead designers, senior designers, and writers with
    primary credits on two or more SF/F-related games.
  4. ELIMINATE THE APPEARANCE OF
    CORRUPTION IN THE AWARD PROCESS: Closing the nomination process to
    the membership and the public made the appearance of corruption
    worse, not better. Reducing the number of recommendations to reduce
    logrolling was a good idea, hiding the results from the membership
    created more harm than good.
  5. EMPOWERING THE NEBULA JURIES: The
    most prestigious and lucrative literary prizes are awarded by
    juries. The Nebulas should be no different if they are to attain
    equal prestige. I am entirely open to a debate about the best way
    to ensure jury integrity, but my initial thought is to randomly
    select the juries from the membership, with jurors barred from
    voting for works published by their publishers. In situations where
    the latter bar would lead to an obvious injustice being done, the
    SFWA President and Vice-President would have the ability to release
    a juror from the bar on a case-by-case basis if they both agreed
    such an act was justified by the quality of the work in question.

The left side of the arc

A number of readers have commented that A THRONE OF BONES is significantly improved, in terms of their perception of its literary quality, over my previous novels.  I myself have the sense that I know what I’m doing now in a way that I simply did not 10 years ago, and that while I feel too jaded and indifferent to be writing what could be described as “angry young man” commentary anymore – hence the column retirement – I feel extraordinarily energetic with regards to the novel writing.  Producing 7,500 words of fiction per week comes relatively easily now, whereas the weekly 750-word columns that used to flow like water had increasingly become difficult.

So, I found Steve Sailer’s analysis of PG Wodehouse to be very interesting in this regard, as it seems to indicates that one’s forties, fifties, and even sixties are the writer’s prime novel-writing season.

The consistency of ratings over time is the most striking fact. But a
few temporal patterns can be discerned due to the huge sample sizes of
raters. My Man Jeeves at age 37 was a rookie effort, falling 0.13
points below his career mean. Wodehouse hit a long peak from his early
40s into his early 60s with six straight Jeeves novels rated above his
career average, but his ratings slip only marginally in his old age….

The peak is probably 1938’s (age 56) The Code of the Woosters. The
topical political satire of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union
of Fascist Blackshirts, as Bertie’s nemesis Sir Roderick Spode, leader
of the Blackshorts, makes the book stand out. 
The next novel was 1946’s (age 64) Jeeves in the Morning (formerly Joy in the Morning),
which Wodehouse had a lot of time to work on while he was interned by
the Nazis (he was caught at his beach home in France in 1940). It has
equally high ratings as Code of the Woosters, although fewer raters. In 1982, Alexander Cockburn designated Code and Morning to be the peaks of the series.
Ring for Jeeves (age 71) is the most obvious dud, but Wodehouse rebounded well. For example, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, published when he was about age 81, garnered above average ratings from over 3,000 raters. That’s pretty extraordinary.

On the one hand, one could argue that I started writing novels too early.  Or, at least, publishing them too early.  Wasn’t it Hemingway who said that everyone had a million worthless words inside them that they had to get out before writing anything decent?  I’m finally past that point now, and it is encouraging to know that I’m likely on the left side of the career arc, and so long as I put in the effort, can anticipate continued improvement over the next twenty years.

How you like them sour grapes?

I’ve never quite understood those who genuinely appear to believe that I have any reason to be jealous of John Scalzi.  Yes, I am presently running for the SFWA position he is vacating, and sure, I do regularly lay the metaphorical crosshairs on him, but anyone who can fail to see the vast amusement that is regularly to be had with the author of l’affaire Rapey McRaperson falls very well short of being my ideal reader.  But be that as it may, the one thing to which various observers inevitably draw attention is something I’d always assumed was at least partially true, which is the assumption that Scalzi’s blog readership at Whatever is significantly larger than mine at VP and AG.  Longtime readers will recall that fans of PZ Myers also used to make a habit of pointing this out vis-a-vis Pharyngula, although we don’t seem to have heard much of that since the establishment of FreeThoughtBlogs and the inception of the low grade civil war presently raging between the anti-feminist New Atheists and the pro-feminist New New Atheists.

So it was informative to read this post, in which the SFWA president is impressed with the growing size of his blog readership.

“[H]ere are the stats for Whatever for 2012. WordPress’ stats software recorded 8.165 million views last year, which is up from 5.409 million in 2011, which is up roughly 50% over the previous year. That’s a pretty good jump for the year; as a contrast, the jump from 2010 to 2011 was 5.4 percent. I attribute the jump this year to a number of  blockbuster posts, most notably “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” The month with the largest number of views was May, with 1.1 million (not coincidentally the month of the “Straight White Male” post); The lowest number of views were in February, with 436,000….  To add to the confusion, Google Analytics (which I also have tracking Whatever) consistently reports lower numbers of views than WordPress; for example, in December, WordPress has Whatever getting 749,000 views; Google has it at 718,000.”

That looks genuinely impressive at first glance.  8.165 million views!  But the last number made me do a double-take. And then it made me laugh. You see, Google Analytics also tracks Vox Popoli and Alpha Game. Those two blogs happened to combine for 719,700 views in December.  719,700, if I recall correctly, happens to be a little bit more than 718,000.  Nor is it an anomaly, as that was actually down from 745,857 in November.  This inspired me to look further into the matter of comparative blog traffic.

Interestingly enough, the lowest number of combined views all year was in June, with 570,971.  In February, Vox Popoli alone had 494,534 views; combined views were 596,181.  Not only were both numbers considerably higher than Whatever’s 436,000 WordPress views for the same month, but on the basis of the reported December ratio, Whatever’s more directly comparable estimated Google views were probably in the vicinity of 418,000.  So, prior to the monster post in May that temporarily more than doubled Whatever’s traffic, this marginal “pit of manstink” appears to have had a readership that was 40 percent larger than the Great Hutch of the Rabbit People.  Moreover, last year traffic grew at a rate of 30.3%, from 5,969,066 in 2011 to 7,777,620 in 2012.

Doesn’t quite fit the rabbity narrative, does it?  In fairness to McRapey, I have to point out that he has never once attempted to play the traffic card himself, and on one or two occasions he has even attempted to explain to some of his more imaginative fans that the readership here, for all that it supposedly dwells in “the land of epistemic closure” is not quite as inconsiderable as some of them would like to pretend it is.  The reason for the mistaken perception on everyone’s part is innocent enough, though, as it appears to be based on the fact that WordPress offers the most generous view calculations while Sitemeter’s are the most stingy, combined with the fact that I make my Sitemeter numbers public while Scalzi only reports his WordPress numbers on an annual basis.  But Sitemeter is known to be at least a little unreliable; for example, there were several days earlier this year when I saw that it recorded no traffic at all.

So, corrected for the WordPress/Google ratio, here is how the annual traffic compares on the basis of Scalzi’s reported Whatever traffic and the Google numbers for VP (2009 through Feb 11) and VP+AG (Mar 11 through 2012):

The data indicates that Whatever needed that monster post just to keep pace with the continued growth of VP+AG.  I now await with no little interest to hear how the “sour grapes” theorists will explain that I am jealous of the traffic and exposure of a blog whose readership numbers my blog appears to have first passed up more than a year ago.  Now, it must be pointed out that Whatever did end up with 50k more total views in 2012, thanks to the aforementioned blockbuster post, but it should be readily apparent that VP+AG now have a bigger and more reliable readership base than Whatever.

By the end of 2013, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see the occasional month pushing somewhere between 800k and 900k Google pageviews.  And if the Alpha Game traffic eventually surpasses Vox Popoli’s as I have always assumed it would given the higher level of interest in intersexual relations than in economics, SF/F, and my personal ideosyncracies, the two blogs may well surpass 1.1 million/month next year without requiring any well-linked monster posts.

An SFWA coverup?

Former SFWA president Michael Capobianco denies that the Nebula Award rules were changed in 2010 due to a perception of corruption.  He writes on Black Gate:

“The Nebula rules change was instituted not because of the
perception of corruption, but to change it from an award with multi-year
rolling eligibility to an annual award coinciding with calendar year.”

Is that so? Then why are the nominations no longer an open process and hidden from public scrutiny?  Why are nominations now capped at five per member when previously Active members were allowed unlimited recommendations? And, if we are to take Mr. Capobianco’s explanation seriously, how on Earth were those two changes required in
order to make the award coincide with the calendar year?

Since Mr. Capobianco claims that there is no issue of perceived corruption, I will send a request to the current President to post the full record of all the nominations for the 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novel on the SFWA web site on a page that is open to the public.