Our store is now open! Click the link to your right and go check it out.
The number of badges in the store will increase, and other items, like posters and bookmarks, will follow (as well as the books early next year).
Add comments
I apologise for slacking, I really do - no interviews for almost two weeks, and only sporadtic Mirrorheart updates. (The Mirrorfall edit, however, is doing very well - I’m 2/3 through that).
There is also a very good reason I’ve been unable to concentrate on the writing half of Wibbly for a couple of weeks - the business side of Wibbly.
As of this week, we’re an officially registered with all that entails (ABN, certificate, even a spiffy bank account) and…*drumroll* a BADGE MACHINE. ^_^ Currently in production are a bunch of Wibbly (and other geeky) badges. These will be sold through the site store, once we get one - until then, I’m considering a number of options (including etsy, and invoices via PayPal).
I’ll post pics in the next couple of days. 
(And try to get back to that writing thing 
).
Serial Author Interviews -
Sarah Suleski
To anyone reading or writing in the serial world, my next should need no introduction. All three (yes, three!) of her serials are works that are synonymous with quality fiction.
The Gone-Away World
Geek nirvana my arse.
Sometime before moving, I signed up to Random House’s newsletter, in return, I received a free copy of Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World. The blurb was brilliant, the tagline was better: “Part Adventure” (hey, I like adventure) “Part Comic Opera” (sounds like fun) and the major selling point “Part geek nirvana”. I’m a geek, consider me sold, gimme my free book and I’ll seek out the matching t-shirt and the author’s blog.
I will return to the issue of “geek” later. For now, the book.
Physically, it’s “C” size, one of those large trade paperback sizes - at five-hundred-something pages, that’s one hefty paperweight, also uncomfortable. That size works well with thinner books, or in hardcover. In softcover, you end up with a bent cover and sore hands.
The first chapter begins with a small italicised sentence, summarising the chapter and telling us what to expect. This is a good sign - other, very good authors have done this. In the first paragraph, you realise that he is not one of those good authors. It has something to do a bad cover story about the heretofore unknown magic ability of beer to create bald spots on pool tables.
[As an aside, when I gave this book to my fiance, who is in some aspects, more learned than I, this is where he stopped, and was unable to continue, even when I asked him to continue...in the name of science!]
The prose is from a nameless, first-person POV. First-person is a stylistic choice that I have no problem with. Keeping the narrator nameless is a quirk, one that distances you a little from the story, but again, is a stylistic choice. [The protagonist of The Time Machine in the original novella was nameless, referred to only as "The Traveler"]
Reading from this character’s point of view is, honestly, like observing a Kevin Smith character afflicted with ADHD - tangents are traveled down until they are run into the ground, metaphors can go on for more than a full page, and we are given little factoids about the cadre of characters in the bar (many of which could have waited until a later point).
Morpheus, the Sandman may collect names like some people collect friends, but unfortunately we’re not him. Somewhere in the vicinity of a dozen names are tossed around in the first half-dozen pages, some mentioned once in passing, along with a piece of information about the character, but not again for a few pages. It makes for an unpleasant jumble.
The other unpleasant jumble is that the story is front-loaded with world building. I understand that the world is post-apocalyptic, but streamlining information, and only giving it when it is pertinent is the mark of a good writer. I felt bogged down by the facts presented to me, and along with the names, made me felt as though I was looking at the author’s story bible, and not a complete one at that. Leaving apart the stylistic choice to leave the narrator nameless - no dates are mentioned, nor even what country we are in. Because of the author’s voice, and thus the narrator’s choice of words (eg: “pound store clothes”) - one can assume England, or elsewhere in Britain.
Oh, and on page 23, a conspiracy is introduced.
After very nearly throwing it across the room (several times) I summoned courage and read on, thinking that surely it would get better. It had to get better, right? Random House was giving away 500 copies just to people who signed up to their newsletter, so it’s got to be good right? Traditional publishing doesn’t throw their money down the drain on untested, untried commodities, right?
I got to page 25 and gave up.
Downing half a cup of Mountain Dew to steady myself, I turned to Google and began to research. I’m human, and when disappointed (I had been looking forward to reading this book for a few weeks now), can have a disproportionately negative reaction. I also considered that I may not be in the target audience (despite the tagline proclaiming itself to be of the geek). These things in mind, I plugged in the book title and searched.
I discovered several things, one of which was the documented possibility that the first chapter may have been a misstep, as after that chapter the book drops into flashbacks for 250 pages.
I’ll let that sink in for a moment. It, in ~30 pages, sets up (albeit clumsily) a post-apocalyptic world, almost thirty characters and a conspiracy. Then all of that is completely dropped to explain how all of it came to be.
I can appreciate framing, but come on, that’s a bit rich. It could have been done in sections (Part One: The World, Part Two: The Gone-Away World, Part Three: The New World, Part Four: The Attack of the Killer Rabbits, etc, etc), or the flashbacks could have been done in the style of the “Coming to America” sections of American Gods - neatly detailing history without detracting from the main story. Cause…with that title, that’s got to be the main story, right? It’d be marketed differently if it was a character exploration piece, right? The marketing crew didn’t bend the book to meet their needs, right? (wait…).
Apparently, somewhere in those 250 pages, there are apparently a bunch of interesting characters, including a kung-fu master called Master Wu (and even though the pop-culture references are shallow, a part of me wonders if it is a deliberate reference to Woo Ping, the wire-fu genius - who would be familiar to a lot of people because of his involvement with The Matrix trilogy, and this is brought full-circle by Neo’s immortal line “I know kung-fu”). There are also mimes.
I judged this book on its own merits, I knew nothing about it until I started to Google for reviews and information after being disappointed. Several facts to note: Nick Harkaway is John Le Carre’s son - the author who wrote such books as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. That alone adds a shade to the story, the advance adds another. The Gone-Away world reportedly received an advance of £300,000.
In terms of book advances, that’s huge. For comparison, let’s use a book everyone knows. Reports do vary, but for the first Harry Potter book (stating what a phenomenon that book became would be superfluous, but keep it in mind) JK Rowling received between £1,500-2500.
Even if Harkaway becomes the new Kerouac or Vonnegut that some of the reviews are proclaiming him to be, it’s unlikely that this book will become the new Harry Potter phenomenon. (It’s interesting that some of these reviews decrying the book state that one should read the originals, that they do it better, with more passion, and in 200 pages less).
In the interest of keeping my honour intact I feel that I should point out that this isn’t about jealousy. There isn’t an author alive who wouldn’t like an advance that large, and if you’re writing and someone, somewhere isn’t jealous of you, you’re doing it wrong. (Small press authors want to be mid-list authors, mid-list authors want to be bestsellers, bestsellers want to be proclaimed modern gods, etc, etc).
So…nepotism. Many of us have probably used it in some small degree or another during our lives - used a family’s employee discount, gotten a child/sibling employed part-time, overlooked one of their mistakes if you happen to be their supervisors, organise for extra discounts, or face time with someone they need to talk to. That, that’s called life.
However, when it’s on a scale of this size, it can give the whole affair a bitter aftertaste. The one thing that immediately came to mind was Eragon.
Eragon is, as we all know, a book written by a teenage boy. It sky rocketed through the charts, and even became a movie. His parents published it. There, blunt, but true. The original runs of Eragon were done by his parents, who owned a publishing company. That, combined with an aggressive marketing strategy is what made it work. After Knopf bought the rights, they did an extensive edit (some reports that that up to twenty-thousand words were removed, along with numerous other changes).
The Gone-Away World could have done with a Knopf-style edit. Sad, considering that the author used to be a copy editor.
The marketing campaign also needed an edit.
“Part Adventure” I can give them this. Adventure is a nice broad term. “Part Comic Opera” that’s subjective. “Part geek nirvana” as stated before, this is where I have a problem.
In the 25 pages I read, nothing tweaked my geek meter. And I have a broad geek meter. If it’s the fact that it’s a post-apocalyptic setting, then…meh. If I want a geek-licious post-disaster world, I’ll go read Warren Ellis’ Freakangels, thankyouverymuch. Wait, sorry, there was one mention of Captain Ahab…and you’d have to get a very broad-mined judge to accept that as geeky.
There are mimes, there are ninja, I think there’s a pirate. These things are not geeky. Maybe if you had a monkeyrobot and a panel of mimes judging the “pirate vs ninja” (btw, ninjas!) argument, we could negotiate, but on their own, no, not geeky.
One review says that the geek is used as a functional shorthand - referring to people as Red Shirts (ala Star Trek) or acknowledging certain tropes (like the habits of mooks). For the Red Shirts, they’re pretty much a part of a public unconscious (there’s a motivation poster, “Kirk, Spock and Ensign Jimmy(?) beam down to a planet, guess which one isn’t coming back?), the same with the common action tropes - it’s the equivalent of saying “if we were in a movie, this wouldn’t happen” or even the dreaded “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”.
If I want ninjas, I’ll watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. If I want pirates, I go read Peter Pan. If I want mimes, I’ll play On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.
It’s sad, but if something is labeled “geek”, it’s going to sell. It’s not that we’re desparate, it’s not that we’re being misled like the readers of chick lit, it’s just that we like to be acknowledged. We are geek and we are proud.
And we don’t like it when someone uses the word for nefarious purposes.
I want my money back. And a cookie.
Serial Author Interviews -
Barbara Anne Belknap
My next guest is the lovely, and funny author of Chronos Chronicles. CC is one of the newer serials on the net (having only started in March), but it’s a welcome change - science fiction that doesn’t resort to <technobabble> whenever an explanation is needed.
I’ll stop <techno>babbling and let the author speak for herself…
