My Best Reads of 2014

2014 was a rough year. Twice, I found myself so sick for prolonged stretches of time that I wasn't cognitively capable of reading at all. That's why it was a surprise to look over my Goodreads list and remember that I've actually read a plethora of incredible prose this year. While I may have gotten down on film and videogames, books have remained something special. This might even be my favorite line-up since we started the #bestreads tradition.

So here are my twelve darlings. I couldn't cut it any further.

Don't Write This: Fiction in Danger Zones

Senility as wish fulfillment.

I've already written a full review of Jo Walton's My Real Children, but I want to talk about something not in my review, and in no review I've yet read. The novel follows Patricia Cowan as she suffers a peculiar senility, forgetting most of her life, and then seeming to recall two different lives in high detail. Late in the novel, we see how the onset of senility hits her in both lives, and in one her lover dies. Patricia immediately hopes her senility will make her forget the death happened. This excited me. 

For the last two years of his life, I called my grandfather every night to make sure he had at least a little daily contact with a family member. He hated living in an old folks home, and was very demented on top of that. Our nightly contact made him remember me more than the other grandchildren, though there were still calls when he mistook me for his son, friend, and on one night, his mother. Living that intensely with a disability can stifle the way you think about it. It's easier to default to a somber, anodyne mode, both in avoiding conflicts, and in taking your mind off of things. It takes a different mind to see something so painful and be creative with it.

In reading that paragraph of Walton's novel, I wasn't offended. It was enlivening to read someone subvert our default thoughts of dementia, and simultaneously, tap into those desires, because in moments of weakness we've all wanted to forget things. In the moment, I could only compare it to FX's Archer.

I'm probably the only person to parallel My Real Children and Archer, but one of Archer's great strengths is its anarchic sense of humor. People mistake the show as dark, but it features the lightest hearted graphic tiger mauling I've ever seen. The series uses the drug trade, asphyxia fetishes, eco-terrorism, homophobia and the Oedipal complex as fodder for amazing character humor. It is neither didactic nor cynical; it's creative enough with its deployment of highly flawed characters to avoid offense while depicting the people themselves as intensely offensive. This is great for some audiences (like me), but also stifles how others think about creativity in danger zones, making them think it has to be transgressive.

Archer is often transgressive, as is most comedy about touchy subjects, because that's the easy edge for a laugh. But take George Carlin's early performances of The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television. For the first six he's juvenile and profane – and then he hits "fuck." It's the beginning of life, he says, and yet it's something we use to hurt each other. Very rare for George Carlin, he isn't sure about his footing on a topic, and only has one joke, before saying he'll try to make a full bit out of it next year. He did, and the later versions have never been as interesting to me. That he's vulnerable and unsure about something so touchy, after being so flippant about the other touchy subjects is a haunting deviation.

As I've aged, I've become increasingly attracted to artists who can remain creative in danger zones. It seems either the hardest thing to do (plausible) or so risky to market that it's avoided (also plausible). Certainly if you botch your attempt at a new angle on pedophilia then you can offend a wide audience. But if you try, you might get John Ajvide Lindqvist's Let the Right One In, and that scene wherein the pedophile Hakan rents a child prostitute, but is then so disturbed by how the boy is treated that he tries to give him enough money to run away. This foreshadows the compassionate angle Lindqvist later casts over the vampire/familiar relationship. The compassion of a pedophile in an otherwise uncaring world was so unexpected that it gave me goosebumps, where most vampire stories give me boredom. 

A predator in need of companionship.

These deviations stir me up. In most art you can get a sense of how touchy subjects will be handled; Grimdark Fantasy will probably slouch into rape, and a children's cartoon will probably avoid or didactically instruct about disabilities. Predictable paths are not always wrong, and often writing from a place of reliable sensitivity can avoid opening wounds. But I don't accept the failure state of attempted creativity in a danger zone as loathsome. My general reaction is discomfort for an author who probably knows they screwed up on something meaningful. It reads like seeing someone fall when both of us thought they should have flown.

Maybe I'm so attracted to these because I haven't figured out their parameters yet. There's a strong attraction for some people mired in what we don't yet understand. But to remain flexible with in writing about topics as tender as senility and pedophilia is too much for most artists. It's why most won't touch it at all. That might be why the few that can do it, even for a paragraph are so precious.

Consumed Podcast #14 is Live: Locke Lamora, Jo Walton, Battlestar Galactica, more

For the second episode in a row we managed to get all three hosts together: Nathanael Sylva, Max Cantor, and myself. This time we had an insane jumble of topics, two thirds of which we cut right before air. Still, we managed to cover a lot of distance, including the most book talk the podcast has ever seen, covering Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora, Jo Walton's Among Others, and Shirley Jackson's classic The Haunting of Hill House.

Eventually we shift to the television shows Max and Nat have been binging on, particularly Battlestar Galactica and Justice League Unlimited. Surprisingly, it's the superhero cartoon that gets more praise for its depth, while Max struggles to balance the narrative achievements in Battlestar against its racial and plotting issues.

We saved the weirdest part for last, discussing Frog Fractions, a free videogame that starts out parodying educational games and becomes a genre-bending work of art that I could only compare to Tristram Shandy. I'm not even sure how much Max left in of this conversation, because it goes to a lot of paces, including self-publishing, Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, how pigeonholded Romance is, whether editors help or hinder creativity, and... well, you should really just hear it.

You can download the episode for free right here.

Saturn, Disability, and the Hugo Awards at ChiCon 7 - The Wrap-Up

THE ADLER

Good view for a Thursday.

A beautiful building right on the river, across from Chicago’s unparalleled skyline, was the perfect place to spend Thursday night. I spent sunset chatting about Hugo nominees and waiting for Saturn to become visible. While it was tiny even in the most powerful telescope we had, it was striking. Even when its figure is smaller than the tip of your pinky finger, you can make out its rings. Until then, I’d honestly thought that was an invention of cartoons, but it really does look like one of the glowing stickers I used to have on my wall as a kid.

While you’ve probably heard some complaints against the con-runners (and are about to read some more), they handled the Adler very well. Admission was free if you had your convention badge, and they rented eight buses to shuttle everyone to and from the planetarium for hours into the night.

ACCESSIBILITY ISSUES

While everyone working at the Hyatt Regency Chicago was courteous to me, I couldn’t recommend using the site again. Giving the floors arbitrary color names rather than numbers, and even less sensible themed names for the rooms (good luck finding “The Gold Coast Room” on “The Bronze Level”) were one thing, but the hotel is split into two towers that can only be navigated by three means:

1) a skybridge on the second floor where no convention events took place, requiring you to take either an escalator or a second, much slower elevator downstairs.

2) crossing the street outside on the ground floor, between a floor with three panel rooms and a floor with none.

3) crossing an underground bridge on the Bronze Level, where there were many panel rooms, including at least one that was only accessible up a set of stairs.

Complicate that with some elevators going down only to this set of colored floors, and some stairwalls only going this high, and you had a lot of baffled attendees walking indoor miles per day just to get lost. I expect to hurt when I’m at a convention, and had to set aside an hour every day to be in private over body tremors, but that’s my issue and I can handle it.

If they ever want to make a WorldCon Risk...

If you were in a wheelchair, though, you routinely had to cross to the other tower just to get downstairs and cross back to the tower you’d just been in to reach a room. That’s no reasonable way to ask someone to get downstairs. There have been reports of handicapped con-goers only being able to attend every other panel due to travel times within the Hyatt. They were rightly furious to make such long treks only to find a room with its own private set of stairs and no other point of entry. 

Especially at this point, I don't think outrage at con-runners is constructive. You can't fix architecture; you can only avoid patronizing it. WorldCon sites should be accessible to all attendees. Right now there are bids for 2015 between Florida, Washington and Finland. At none of the room-parties for these respective bids did I hear anyone pitch accessibility services. I’m hoping the post-con furor raises awareness. When you have over a thousand attendees, your location needs to start with being accessible.

THE HUGOS, AND A LITTLE SOMETHING

I am a longstanding and publicly-admitted cynic about awards shows. They are generally artificial and reek of politics-over-product. I can’t say that about the 2012 Hugos; at least half of the nominees claimed not to have written speeches thinking they would lose, and that same number looked genuinely shaken, stunned or overwhelmed. Whoever screamed in surprise when E. Lily Yu was announced for the John Campbell for Best New Writer was perhaps the single loudest I’ve ever heard in my life, and I’m told it was Yu herself.

There were a lot of class acts. Jim Hines won for Best Fan Writer, mostly for his amusing series on how women are objectified on book covers, and excused himself from the category for every future Hugo to ensure that more new voices would be recognized. Ursula Vernon (Best Graphic Story) gave an endearing ramble on how she entrusted her boyfriend with the ending to Digger, just in case she ever died before it finished. John Picacio was the only figure to swagger up to the podium, and while he hadn’t prepared a speech, he remembered in the six times he’d previously failed to win Best Professional Artist the names of artists he’d grown up on and wished had been recognized with their own Hugos. He waited about a decade just to name them from that podium.

This is Jim Hines.
As far as I know, this is not a degrading pose,
but he sure has a grip on that thing.

And as coldhearted as I am, Jo Walton almost got me to choke up. She deserved the Best Novel Hugo that she won for Among Others, but still seemed to be processing merely getting nominated. She me by recounting something Ian Osmond told her: "Lots of people have said Among Others is a love letter to fandom. Didn't you expect to get a reply?"

It was well worth the half hour traffic jam leading to the sole escalator back upstairs.

It was also at the Hugos that I had my highest point. It was perhaps the only time of the year I’d wear a tie, and the last day that I shaved, but I couldn’t help being myself. I sat with an exceptionally good-spirited group of guys, and we quickly fell into joking about great novels and bad Adam Sandler movies. When they asked what I did, I described my upcoming novel and they showed keen interest, though I didn’t know how keen. I just enjoyed making them laugh, because that’s one of my favorite things to do for other people, even if it’s at the expense of Deadman and Jason Todd.

It was as Jo Walton finished her acceptance speech that one of them leaned over to me, writing on a scrap of paper. He asked how to spell my last name. I told him, then asked what was up.

“I can’t wait to read your novels,” he said. “You’ve got a fan for life.”

I shook all of their hands and probably failed to express how much that meant to me. Exhausted and pretty sick with the syndrome at that point, I couldn’t have felt better.

I still want a Hugo, though.

Reading and Writing at ChiCon 7

Day Two of Three from the ChiCon 7 diary. Tomorrow I want to touch on disability issues at the hotel, the Hugo Awards, and seeing Saturn for the first time. Today is devoted to the public readings and private writings that go on at these sorts of conventions.

THE READINGS

I went to my share of readings over the weekend, and saw some very talented writers. The one that rocked me back in my chair was Mary Robinette Kowal, sharing “Locked In” from Apex, at the Broad Reading meeting. It’s a piece of flash fiction that captures Science Fiction, Horror, Tragedy and the Medical Thriller without succumbing to nearly any niche’s expectations, and it’s a great reminder of why Apex Magazine is a top resource in the industry.

I managed to make a total ass out of myself afterward by congratulating Kowal on that story and not realizing she was the same Mary Robinette Kowal up for a Hugo for the superb “For Want of a Nail.” It’s great when you realize the two people you’re a fan of are the same person. Not so great when you realize you're an idiot.

This is not two people.
Some people have a harder time learning this than others.

Broad Reading was a neat setup, housing over a dozen quick readings from individual members in an all-female writing group of all levels of expertise. Most official readings were for one person. Jo Walton, who won the Hugo for her touching tale of adolescence in Among Others, read from her work in progress about teens in space who want to party on the ship forever instead of land. George R.R. Martin’s reading room couldn’t have been packed any more hopelessly if he’d written it.

Friend and fellow #fridayflasher Emma Newman showed the chops she’s honed recording audiobooks in a fine reading from her short story collection and the upcoming Split Worlds. Probably the highlight for all readings for me was when she read of a curse being cast on our hero, and somewhere outside our walls, a pneumatic hiss went off and filled the room. You couldn’t pay for better publicity than that, though the hotel should check that elevator.

There’s a lot you can learn from a reading, even a bad one. Maybe especially a bad one, because you can study how authors psych themselves out. One author, who I won’t name, kept stumbling over her excerpt. At first I felt bad, but then I started constructing narration in my own head, and realized her errors were highlighting how strong the voice would be on the printed page. It was kind of uncanny, and reaffirmed a couple of things I suspect about how plot progression works. One of my recent hobbies is listening to readings or audiobooks and testing how it would sound in my head, as opposed to how it’s intended.

THE WORKSHOPS

These are an institution at WorldCons, and will hopefully be for the foreseeable future. Oz Drummond and Lou Berger organized at least eighteen different groups of three aspiring authors (“victims” is the official unofficial name). These trios were joined with two professionally published authors, forming critique groups of five, to hone the victims’ craft. I had the pleasure of working with Martha Wells and Gregory Wilson, who treated all three of us with total professionalism and consideration.

Typical writer reaction in workshops.

Our session lasted two hours, and we spent about forty on every victim, myself included. Your mileage will vary, but we were all serious about craft and I don’t think a minute was wasted. This workshop was a big test for my thoroughly peer-read The House That Nobody Built, as I thought it was near publishable an wanted to see how it would stand up to scrutiny. I left jubilant, having retained more of the positive feedback than the negative. But just as important, the negative feedback was all reasonable, like the desire for a few details, or how to streamline the synopsis. Reasonable, and addressable in just a few minutes of word processing.

So it was the positives I lingered on, which is rare for me. One of my pros asked if I’d already queried it, seeming to think it was ready. One of my pros also described it with what I wish to God will be a cover blurb: 

“This is like Dungeons & Dragons, except awesome!”

There were some other developments at the convention I can’t speak on yet, but cross your fingers for me. I’m doing everything I can with what luck I get. I can’t praise these workshops enough, if you have the fortune of attending a convention that runs anything like it. If I turn “pro,” I’d be happy to help operate one.

True Story of John: YA Fiction Versus Real Young Adults

I didn’t have much of a YA phase when I was an actual young adult. By my teens I wanted Stephen King and Noam Chomsky and whatever else people my age weren’t supposed to be able to handle, just as I craved R-rated movies and staying up past midnight. I wanted meatier fiction with more robust characters and plots, and for authors to do more with their prose. It’s only in recent years that I’ve tried to acquire a taste, or at least a respect for YA.

Among titles about teens, few excited me as much as Among Others. It stormed the early 2012 awards, and as soon as it was available at my library I seized the peach-colored paperback. I found a folding chair and carried the book down to the lake, away from phones and computer and human distractions. After slathering my Irish self with sun tan lotion, I sat back to read of Jo Walton’s faerie-loving bookworm. “Morwenna,” what an exotic name, and she was so reserved, so sympathetically introverted and brave and well-read and well-meaning and timid and enchanting and wise within her inexperience. She was the archetype of a child, and I could think of no adolescent trait she lacked.

A few dozen pages and a stiff wake shaking the dock later, I looked up from the paperback. Behind me in the woods there was a girl screaming at her wrinkled grandmother. The girl could have been the age I imagined Walton’s protagonist to be, though she behaved nothing like what I’d been imagining as she wriggled in her grandmother’s grip. I also hadn’t imagined Morwenna in a pink bathing suit.

Most of what she screamed was raw noise, not words, since protest is often the chief weapon of children. There were stray phrases about how unfair she was, and how she was mean and she wished she were dead. The grandmother was less audible over the shrieking, but I made out that the girl had been swimming for an hour and they’d be late for something if they didn’t leave now. “But I’m sorry,” I heard as they trekked towards a car in a hail of juvenile wailing.

For several moments afterward it was difficult to look at Among Others, not unlike the difficulty of meeting someone in the eyes after a humiliation. I clucked my tongue at this portrait of a fictional girl and the display of a real one in stereo.

“Realism,” I said. I had to laugh to myself. Fiction is harder to get into when you’re hit with the reasons people mistake it for lies. 

It's since come to my attention that Jo Walton does not consider her novel to be YA.

The Problem With Prologues

Not a month goes by when some agent or editor doesn’t decry prologues. Allegedly they drive away readers and signal poor quality fiction; they are labeled unnecessary and signs of poor craft, too short or abrupt, useless and dissonant from the main narrative. Last night I talked to an agent who said she tosses any manuscript that features one.

I’ve never been rejected over a prologue. It’s just a pet peeve of mine because not a month goes by when I don’t read a popular novel from traditional publishing that opens with a prologue. When they’re poor, I simply skip to the main body of the novel, as I suspect most audiences actually do.

But if this anti-prologue dogma is going to be preached at all emerging writers, the industry ought to hold their actual employees to it. Below is a very incomplete list of some notable prologue-uses.

1. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (debut novel)

2. Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind (debut novel)

3. Patrick Rothfuss’s Wise Man’s Fear (Locus nominee for Best Fantasy Novel 2012 –1/5)

4. Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris (debut novel)

5. Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn Book 1: The Final Empire

6. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight (debut novel)

7. Vernor Vinge’s The Children of the Sky (Locus nominee for Best Science Fiction Novel 2012 – 1/5)

8. Stephen King’s Carrie (debut novel)

9. Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot

10. Stephen King’s The Dead Zone (King’s first #1 Bestseller)

11. Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (Locus nominee for Best Science Fiction Novel 2012 – 2/5)

12. Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Series Book 1: Eragon (debut novel)

13. George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones (debut novel)

14. George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings

15. George R.R. Martin’s A Storm of Swords

16. George R.R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows

17. George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons (Hugo nominee for Best Novel 2012 – 1/5; Locus nominee for Best Fantasy Novel 2012 – 2/5)

18. Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (debut novel)

19. Daniel Abraham’s A Shadow in Summer (debut novel)

20. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s Leviathan Wakes, as ‘James Corey’ (Hugo nominee for Best Novel 2012 - 2/5; Locus nominee for Best SciFi Novel 3/5)

21. Jo Walton’s The King’s Peace (debut novel)

22. Jo Walton’s Among Others (Hugo nominee for Best Novel 2012 - 3/5; Locus nominee for Best Fantasy Novel 2012 – 3/5; Nebula nominee for Best Novel 1/6)

23. Terry Pratchett’s The Color of Magic (debut novel)

24. Terry Pratchett’s Snuff (Locus nominee for Best Fantasy Novel 2012 – 4/5)

25. Catherynne Valente’s Deathless (Locus nominee for Best Fantasy Novel 2012 – 5/5)

26. Garth Nix’s Abhorsen Trilogy Book 1: Sabriel

27. Garth Nix’s Abhorsen Trilogy Book 1: Lirael

28. Garth Nix’s Abhorsen Trilogy Book 3: Abhorsen

29. Seanan McGuire’s October Daye Book 1: Rosemary and Rue (debut novel)

30. Seanan McGuire’s The Newsflesh Trilogy Book 1: Feed, as ‘Mira Grant’ (debut novel as Mira Grant)

31. Seanan McGuire’s The Newsflesh Trilogy Book 2: Deadline, as ‘Mira Grant’ (Hugo nominee for Best Novel 2012 – 4/5)

32. China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station (debut novel)

33. China Mieville’s The Scar

34. China Mieville’s Embassytown (Hugo nominee for Best Novel 2012 – 5/5; Locus nominee for Best SciFi Novel 4/5; Nebula nominee for Best Novel 2/6)

35. N.K. Jemisin’s The Kingdom of the Gods (Nebula nominee for Best Novel 2012 – 3/6)

36. Jack McDevitt’s Firebird (Nebula nominee for Best Novel 2012 – 4/6)

Just imagine a publisher shunting one of those debut novels over a prologue. Now, remember how many times J.K. Rowling was rejected. And you know what? It's susceptible to all the criticisms lobbed at aspiring authors in workshops, and it's perfectly functional.

Two of the six Nebula nominees for Best Novel lack prologues: Kameron Hurley’s God’s War and Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti. God’s War has literary quotes from The Bible and The Quran, but nothing resembling narrative in the way of Mira Grant’s blog excerpt about “The Wall” or Vernor Vinge’s Chapter 00. Meanwhile, the fifth of the five Locus nominees for Best SciFi Novel is Charles Stross’s Rule 34, which I’m told lacks a prologue - I don’t have a copy and couldn’t find a preview online.

So out of all the books nominated for a Nebula, Hugo or Locus this year, either two or three of the twelve open with Chapter 1. None of those books nominated for more than one of the awards lacks a prologue. All of the nominees that hit #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List have prologues. Of the nine-out-of-twelve majority, guess how many of the prologues are short and dissonant from Chapter 1.

The Brutal 2,000-Word Day

Last week the New York Times ran an article suggesting that authors only writing one book a year is slacking. Nowadays indy authors have a better chance of building an audience if they write multiple books a year, and big publishing houses view additional output as useful promotion. To write less might just mean we’re lazy. Lisa Scottoline has received particular bile on social networks for being described as struggling to write 2,000 words per day.

How do I write so much per year? Bubble baths.

 Twitter whipped out the ballistics-grade snark. Writing is easy! Anyone can bang out a thousand words in an hour. That’s just a long blog post. I didn’t work that hard on NaNoWriMo! Get back into the salt mines, authors!

What rankled me was the number of mediocre writers espousing this condescension. Many were hacks whose e-books aren’t worth 99-cents and whose blog posts run over 2,000 words because they don’t know how to edit. Of course it’s easy to fluff up word count if you don’t care about craft. 

It rankled worse with rush-pundits who actually show raw talent that, with the time and reflection they insist you eschew, could develop into something great. What they’d learn from experience will be stifled by the positive feedback loop of rushing adequate chunks of text to market. Traditional publishing has nearly killed the Max Perkins style that gave us Fitzgerald, Wolfe and Hemingway. God save us if the next wave of publishing kills taking your time.

Slacker! He'll never go anywhere.

John Scalzi was particularly level-headed. He advised folks to calm down and recognize that everyone has his or her own writing speed. And he was right. Many of us grew up on Stephen King, who seems to write at the speed of sound. Amanda Hocking and Seanan McGuire do multiple novels per year, and Jim Butcher has at least one door stopper a year. Meanwhile Jo Walton and Justin Cronin take about two years to release one book a-piece, and Patrick Rothfuss and George R.R. Martin can run even longer.

In a better world those authors who were at ease with promotion and speedy production would use their platforms to help the slower. I stump for talented authors of all paces routinely and have been lucky to find like-minded folks. But while Scalzi was correct, I still ran hot.

Last night Jo Walton’s Among Others took the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and it took her at least two years to release it. This should remind us of great works that make that schedule seem liberal: it took Harper Lee decades to give us To Kill a Mockingbird, and just as long for Larry McMurtry to produce Lonesome Dove. Imagine an editor yelling at J.R.R. Tolkien to meet his deadline on Lord of the Rings. Imagine the next genre luminary getting the same browbeating while she tries to puzzle out world-building we haven't conceived of yet.

Or imagine some blowhard on Twitter screeching that she's not working hard enough.

A great work, but also one of privilege.

The self-publishing world, and particularly the Locke-and-Hocking world of cranking out as many e-books as possible, is not delivering such works. The best of these books I've read were passably entertaining and couldn't strive for more in their production cycles. In a market where a large catalog and frequent releases are your best shots at a career, it really can’t, and if you want to make a living, that two-year cycle of a Jo Walton or Justin Cronin seems implausible barring a very lucky hit. And when Amanda Hocking got that hit? It was having her sizable catalog that helped her become a millionaire.

Since I see something like this self-publishing model dominating the industry in a few years, this is disturbing for the future of an art form. We can’t stop the price cycling that Amazon, Apple and the Big Six have steered us toward. We can alter how we interact and help each other. That novel Harper Lee spent so long on owed a debt to Truman Capote’s assistance. Those who succeed in the speedy new market can help not just teach and critique, but to promote talents that have different paces.

The rebuttal is that the market doesn’t want great literature. It wants twists and thrills and titillation, and little else. It’s too dumb to recognize exposition and formula, and authors are fooling themselves for caring about more than dollars. This "market" would become a race to the bottom of both price and ambition, allowing The Novel to survive a few more years by imitating reality television’s innovations. If the future of publishing really is who can write the most blood-and-smut the fastest, then I might as well kill myself now.

You may notice I haven’t committed suicide today. Like yesterday and last week and last month, I’m taking exactly as long as my novels require. I will not sell you something that is unworthy of your time, regardless of whether it’s through HarperCollins, Tor or Kindle Direct Publishing. And when I read something great, hailing from any country, creed or composition cycle, I’ll share it. If the next Lord of the Rings emerges from self-publishing, I’ll grin through my humiliation and help its author out. Whoever it is will probably need the help.