C. E. Murphy

too. many. books.

the essential kit

I know it’s blasphemy, but argh, there are too. many. books. in this house. Between Christmas and EasterCon, I (we, but I cop to it: *I*) had some significant Bookstores Accidents, and while this is most of the time merely inconvenient because there are never enough shelves, when I’m facing moving, all I can really wonder is why I didn’t bloody well buy digital copies of ALL THESE BOOKS.

I mean, I know why. It’s far, far more satisfying to go browse and buy physical books than it is to do the same with e-books. And the local bookstore from which I prefer to buy books doesn’t have an e-storefront, so I can’t even go browse and then order digital copies and keep the money flowing to Chapters. And I *do* bring loads of books back to the secondhand shop for credit (thus compounding the problem in one way, but nevermind that right now), but right now I have a *ton* of unread books, which obviously are not best for trading in.

I suppose all I can do is either pack them up or spend the next few weeks reading frantically. I mean, there’re what, maybe 30 books max, I could no doubt read them all–well, in a week, if I could just flop down and read without interruption, but ahahahah.

Maybe I should make a list and have people vote on the order I should read them in. Or maybe I should just START READING.

In the meantime, I really should instigate a rule of only buying one book by an author in hardcopy (because it’s easier/more fun to browse/discover that way), and if I like it, buy the rest digitally. I’m doing that with Rachel Caine’s Morganville books…

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Laydeez Do Comics

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Last night Maura McHugh and Lynda Rucker launched the inaugural Laydeez Do* Comics event in Dublin. It was an enormously successful launch, with 3 excellent speakers (Sarah McIntyre, Alan Nolan and Maeve Clancy) and around 15-20 attendees. I saw people I knew, met new people, and met some people who knew me. :)

As always, going and talking to people about comics makes me desperately want to do them. In my copious free time. *agonize* I have this ever-growing pile of script ideas, and just aaguuuugh! I know people who would draw for me, if I could just get scripts written! Waughghgh!

Of course, all three of the speakers are writer/artists, which makes me feel like I should be DOING WEB COMICS AND PRACTICING DRAWING. (No, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. There’s probably a medical term for it, though.) And of course I think “God, no, it would be too humiliating to show my pathetic drawing skills,” but then I think of the first page of Questionable Content compared to today’s strip and I think well, that’s no excuse… Anyway, my personal neuroses aside, it was a terrific evening and I’m very much looking forward to the next one in September.

Oh. *laughs* Also, I brought homemade gingersnaps, which I figured would go over well, but I wasn’t expecting the rhapsodies I got. I was asked for the recipe twice. And I heard someone ask who’d made the cookies and someone else responded, “The woman in the front row with the long hair,” which is just so not how I ever imagined myself being described… :)

*Ladies do, not Lazy Do, which is how I persist in reading it… :)

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a momentary reality check

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We’re looking for somewhere new to rent, and I mumbled about a lovely place that costs an impractical, um, *checks conversion rate*, $2350 a month. This caused someone (that I have known since childhood, so while it was cheeky, well, actually, total strangers ask these questions too, so) to ask the following question, and since I wrote out the answer anyway, I thought I might as well post it.

“I thought successful authors like yourself made a lot of money? Am I way off base?”

Yes. :)

Here. I’ll talk some real numbers.

For example: my most recent 3 year average income is about $47K gross, which sounds pretty good. However, that’s with my best *ever* year of writing income as part of the average. If I take that year away and factor in something more normal, my 3 year average is more like $34K, which still isn’t half bad, but it’s not stupendous amounts of money.

But that’s gross. Before I ever even see that, 15% goes to my agent’s commission, which brings a more normal average year down to about $29K. Then you convert it to euros, which on average takes about 30% away from the take-home, which puts it at about €20K. It’s a living, but it’s not what most people would call a lot of money.

Furthermore, I write fast. Less fast now that I’ve had a kid, but I still write fast, around 300,000 words/3 books a year. So if you pretend the money you’re getting paid is for the book you’re working on right now (which is really not how it works, but that’s a different long story) that’s about $10K (or €6.7K) per book. And again, I write fast, so a 100K book (an average Walker Papers novel, for example) takes me 100 hours.

That makes my hourly rate look really good, even if you add another 50 hours on top of that for revision and editing and everything. But I rarely get to write a book in a straight shot, so it’s usually more like 6-12 weeks of work. I mean, I can and have and no doubt will again do 10-12 hour writing days for several days on end, but a more normal (pre-child) writing schedule was about 4-5 hours a day. Which is not, I realize, something to cry in one’s beer about. :) But the point is a great hourly rate doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of cash, because of how the system works.

The people you hear about who make a lot of money? JK Rowling, Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer, Michael Connolly? They’re the outliers. Writers’ lives and incomes are not like they’re portrayed in the media or movies. They’re the rock stars compared to the garage bands.

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Recent Reads: TOUCH OF POWER

touchofpower_mariasnyder Maria’s one of the other Luna alumni who got picked up at the same time I did. She’s done a kind of splendid shooting star rise, reaching the NYT with first book, and going on to take the YA world by storm since then.

This book might work better for that audience. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it (except a language thing Maria’s chosen to do in all her books which I understand but find jarring), but I was underwhelmed, which leaves me feeling like probably I just wasn’t a good audience for it. There were a few things I liked quite a lot–Avry, the heroine, is a healer who assumes other peoples’ injuries and sickness to heal them, and the way that worked is nice. There are murderous plants, which is always a good touch. There’s a romance that–

–actually, that’s one of my problems with the book, I think. The romantic interest pretty much comes across as a jerk, and I not only never warmed up to him, but I didn’t really believe Avry doing so either. Particularly since there’s a much nicer alternative.

Maria’s got a YA SF thing that I’ll be picking up, but I don’t expect to read any more of this series. Ah well. Can’t like ‘em all, even when people you know write them. :)

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More on genderflipping

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After last week’s post on genderflipped covers, my friend Flit dug up an article she remembered reading about a a bias study regarding female playwrights.

The article is well worth reading, but for the TL;DR folk among us (sorry, I only just learned that TL;DR meant “too long; didn’t read”, so now I have to use it at least once), the take-away is “in an as-controlled study as is possible, it turns out women discriminate against female playwrights more strongly than men do, even though plays written by women make more money.”

That doesn’t really do the article justice, but it’s as close as I can get in a sentence-long summary. Go read it, really, if you’re at all interested in the topic at hand.

The reasons behind the above two take-aways are complex. It appears that women discriminate against women more strongly because they percieve that if they don’t, when they bring too many womens’ work to the table, the men around them will dismiss it/them. So they’re culling early. And it appears the reason womens’ works make more money is that people will take a chance on a promising young male playwright and produce his play, but will tell a promising young female playwright “Now all you need to do is write a hit!” and only after a truly remarkable script has been written will it be produced.

The latter in particular seems to me to fall in line with what I’ve read any number of times regarding women submitting material to anthologies/editors/conference papers/etc: that women are accepted in higher proportion relative to the percentage of submissions, because the work is of higher quality. This is due, evidently, to women being taught that they have to be perfect before they can risk trying, because anything less will fail.

This is not saying men will throw any old shit to see if it sticks, but evidently that they’re trained to believe that they should try, whereas women are less so trained.

So that may in effect be the answer to the Great Social Experiment I’d like to try, the one of writing two series of the exact same type, one under a male name and one under a female name. (Although to properly balance it I couldn’t even write one under CE Murphy, because that’s a name with a known quantity and reader base, which would skew the results. They’d have to be two equally unknown (or known) names, which makes it an even more impossible project.) Or perhaps that actually has no reflection at all on what the results of a Great Social Experiment might be. But it does feel like it all ties together, although of course the way it ties together most basically is “Society: it am broked.” @.@ :)

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Genderflipping covers

So Maureen Johnson, YA author, threw down a gauntlet a couple of days ago regarding the way books are marketed and asked her jillions of Twitter readers to gender-flip some of their favorite book covers. To make a cover that might have been offered up if the book was by a person of the other gender, or was gender neutral (initials instead of full names. She’s written a terrific article about the whole problem of gendered covers here, and it is truly worth a read. Really truly honest to God.

But if you never click through on another link I offer, go check out the slideshow of covers people did, because they’re flipping awesome. Er, so to speak. Let me show you my single-most favorite of all of them, or at least my favorite of the fantasy novels. This is a recent GRRM cover for A GAME OF THRONES:

grrm_current

This is Georgette R. Martin’s A GAME OF THRONES (image by Electric Sheep Comix):

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“Her publisher decided she didn’t need the second “R” in her initials,” said the artist.

It’s nearly perfect. I think the font is actually *too* ornate, but I totally get a Jody Lynn Nye vibe off this, and wouldn’t be surprised at *all* to see it on one of Michelle West‘s books.

Now: for a degree of fairness, GRRM’s covers have undergone enormous changes in the past 15 years. This is the first one I actually remember seeing:

grrm_original

It’s still aimed at a totally different audience than Georgette’s cover is. And honestly, of the three, Georgette’s is the least likely one I’d pick up, although for me, the fact that it has a woman’s name on epic fantasy would make me take a look, anyway.

There’s a Tumblr tag of genderflipped covers that is one of the most worthy things on the internet. Some of them are merely in the A for Effort category, which is admirable on its own, but honestly, many of them are *brilliant*. Check out this TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY by Johanna Le Carre (image by xotus):

tinkertailor_by_xotus

This, this, *this*, this is what makes me want to run the Great Social Writing Experiment. To write two series of the same type under one obviously female name and one under an obviously male name, and not let anybody, including my editors, know the gender (clearly a theoretical agent would be in on this, but beyond that) of the person writing the books. Just to see what happened with covers, reviews, promotion, sales, all of it.

This is not, mind you, a practical experiment. I mean, it’d be a lot of time and effort and investment and while I was getting it off the ground, what, I’m going to survive financially by saying, “Hey, here’s my Kickstarter! Fund me, and in ten years you’ll find out what the project was! Hardcover LEs all around!” or something? Yeahno. :) But oh how I would love to try it.

(Someone asked on Twitter, so I’ll answer it here too: No, I haven’t seen any “EC Murphy” covers (and don’t expect to, because my name isn’t that big), but I have to admit I’d kind of love to see THE QUEEN’S BASTARD or PRETENDER’S CROWN with the assumption of a male writer. :))

Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t necessarily want all covers to be gender neutral, but what prompted Maureen to do this genderflip thing was saying “If I had a dime for every boy/man who’s said “Can’t you get less girly covers so I can read this?”…” She went on to say,

The assumption, as I understand it, is that females are flexible and accepting creatures who can read absolutely anything. We’re like acrobats. We can tie our legs over our heads. Bring it on. There is nothing we cannot handle.

Boys, on the other hand, are much more delicately balanced. To ask them to read “girl” stories (whatever those might be) will cause the whole venture to fall apart. They are finely tuned, like Formula One cars, which require preheated fluids and warmed tires in order to operate — as opposed to girls, who are like pickup trucks or big, family-style SUVs. We can go anywhere, through anything…

There’s obviously a larger societal problem going on here, but it’d be pretty damned nice to see Michelle West (or Kate Elliott or Judith Tarr or or or or or) getting covers that weren’t oriented At Girls.

It would be even nicer, of course, if a cover like Georgette Martin’s or Johanna Le Carre’s wasn’t off-putting to boys. Making covers more neutral can’t be just about making them more appealing to the male of the species; that’s still assigning them a gender preference, the one we regard as default. But! As an awareness issue, this kind of project certainly does the trick, and I loooooove it!

crowdfunding across the universe!

the essential kit

Two things: first, the most awesome car commercial ever made:

Second, and completely unrelated, a friend of mine is running a crowdfund project for a performance piece this summer that my sister and other persons of my acquaintance will be performing in. It’s in dire need of support, with seven days and 75% of the way to go yet. Perhaps you will go support it because I have just shown you the most awesome car commercial ever made (*hopeful*! O.O), or maybe just because you’re awesome, or maybe you can boost the signal even if you can’t support it. <3!

Recent Reads: Astonishing X-Men (Warren Ellis run)

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ASTONISHING X-MEN: GHOST BOX, EXOGENETIC, XENOGENESIS: Sometime back Warren Ellis said he was never going to write for Marvel again. After reading this trilogy of story arcs, I really wish he’d stuck with that. I gather the X-universe storylines have taken a turn for the bleak recently, but I liked GHOST BOX less than anything else of Ellis’s I’ve ever read, and less than any X-story I’ve ever read, including what I considered to be the god-awful Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely run that culminated with Cassandra Nova.

The art in GHOST BOX was pretty painted stuff by Simone Bianchi, but I didn’t think the pages were well laid out or easy to follow, and this comes from somebody who really follows comic stories through the text, not images. The Ghost Boxes opened doors to multiuniverses, and the last issue of the GHOST BOX storyline was a glimpse at three or four multiverses. They were very well done, all of them, in both story and art, except *Jesus*, depressing.

EXOGENETIC was an up-tick in both story and art; Phil Jimenez remembers that Cyclops’s nickname is Slim, which no one has remembered for most of the past twenty-five years, and draws him accordingly. I liked the art very much. I’ve read reviews that didn’t care for the story at all, and I see their point, but I still preferred it considerably to GHOST BOX.

All that can be said about XENOGENESIS was I didn’t dislike it as *much* as I disliked GHOST BOX in terms of story, but I thought Kaare Andrews’ art was appalling. I mean, actually embarrassing to look at. While there are individual panels where I absolutely freaking love the style he’s coming in with, in the vast majority I find the women horrific (See the third panel here for an example that isn’t even as egregious as many of them are). I’d rather look at Frank Quitely’s art, and I don’t like Quietly’s art at all.

So yeah. Basically, that was awful. I’m going to read AvX next (well, for some value of next, WRT whenever I get around to reading another GN) and then step on board with Marjorie Liu’s ASTONISHING, which I have considerable hope for.

extraordinary people

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So I was reading something–probably Kate Elliott ()’s fabulous The Omniscient Breasts–and some guy was commenting (to paraphrase), “Why would anybody want to read epic fantasy about women, who basically got married at fourteen and stayed pregnant their whole lives and never went five miles from where they were born?”

I find the blindered attitude behind that to be staggering. I mean, unless this guy is working under the delusion that actually every male in history has left home, become a knight, discovered he’s the lost orphaned king of the land, and taken back his country…then who does he think he’s reading about when he reads epic fantasy starring male characters?

Stories are about extraordinary people, regardless of their gender. Sometimes they’re ordinary and have been thrust into circumstances that makes their simple *survival* an extraordinary event; sometimes they’re the lost prince; sometimes they are nominally ordinary but have a gift or talent to see them through or elevate them. Or whatever. They are very rarely about the day to day life of Arthur Dent, needing to buy a new toothbrush and unable to find his left slipper. And thank goodness for that: we all have plenty of needing to buy a new toothbrush and being unable to find our slippers.

I feel like this post ought to really be an impassioned tirade full of marching and singing and raising banners and the like, but when you get right down to it, 1. I hope like hell I’m preaching to the choir here anyway, and 2. it just seems so self-evident that doing anything other than boggling at the idea that somebody is that small-minded is kind of wasted effort.

Although the extraordinary people aspect may tie into the problem a lot of women readers seem to have, which is that they found female role models in the books they read as children to be lacking. I never had that problem; it never occurred to me, and if it had, well, I didn’t (despite plenty of checking) have a door to Narnia in my wardrobe either, or a sword to pull from a stone, or six signs to seek, or mysteries to solve every few weeks, or a black stallion to care for, or what-have-you: of course these people weren’t like me, and to that end, the gender of the protagonists never struck me as an issue.

It’s also possible that, as with Title IX, I am just on the cusp of a generation that benefited from women who had felt that exclusion growing up and were writing books to address the problem, and am therefore not quite able to comprehend what I intellectually know to be factual. I could list you dozens, possibly hundreds, of books I read with female protagonists, all before age twelve. And frankly, I couldn’t list nearly that many with (solely) male protagonists, which might mean the girls made more impression on me, or it might mean I just lucked out and read huge numbers of books with female protagonists.

I got a little off topic there, didn’t I. :)

gender parity

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So after reading Juliet E McKenna’s quite terrific blog post about women in SF/F, I became curious as to the percentages of books I read by each gender (only because this guy is trying to balance his own gender parity in reading). Since I’ve been keeping an annual reading list since 1998, I could offer up a very thorough look at fifteen years of my reading proclivities.

I haven’t got the time right now to do a 15 year retrospective (if somebody else wants to, have at!), but it was quick and easy to check this and last year’s books read, anyway.

In 2012, I read 40 books by women, 21 by men, 1 by gender unknown, 1 by a writer pair, and 1 by Richard Castle, who technically falls under gender unknown. :) Out of the 21 by men, 10 of them were graphic novels, which is neither here nor there but mildly interesting to me.

To break it down a bit farther, since a number of the books were by the same writers, I read 20 women writers in 2012 and 14 male writers (plus the above changed out). While that’s not parity, it’s not too far off.

This year out of 21 books so far, 13 are by men…but 11 of them are re-reads and those 11 were written by only two authors. So 4 men and 7 women so far.

Am I likely to try to set a goal of gender parity in my reading? No. Why? Well, mostly because I’m so terribly far behind on my reading anyway that if I have to add thinking about that in, I’m never going to catch up. :)

(see, now i can’t stop myself. 2011, 9 women, 10 men. 2010, 6 women, 8 men. And that’s as far back as I can go quickly, because of how I used to keep the lists…)

(eta: can’t…stop…! 2009: 23 books by women; 15 writers. 37 books by men; 22 writers. Also, again: 23 of the 37 were graphic novels. For whatever that’s worth. Besides commentary on the preponderance of men writing superhero comics.)