The State of the Ward

In a word: Busy.

Every since Memorial Day, I've been up to my eyebrows organizing and formatting the collection of stories, art, nonfiction and historical photographs which will make up Unconventional Fantasy--the huge, five-volume ebook anthology celebration of forty years of World Fantasy Con. The first four volumes are with the proofers, and I'm finishing up the fifth.

Note: I said "finishing". I ain't done yet, and all the final files have to be with the company making the thumb drives by October 1 to be ready for distribution at this year's World Fantasy Con.

Nervous?  Me?

I'm practically vibrating. On the other hand, that could just be the caffeine.

But I had to take time out to let everyone know that two of the books I've been waiting for all summer have finally arrived at real and virtual bookstores near you.

First out of the gate, the paper version of Athena's Daughters, the 22-story anthology of stories about strong women by strong women, is now available for sale by all the usual suspects: Indiebound, Amazon and Barnes and Noble. In addition to my story "The Gap in the Fence" which holds the coveted last story spot (user buffs nails and hums with pride), Athena's Daughters features stories by Mary Robinette Kowal, Sherwood Smith, Gail Z. Martin and Diana Peterfreund AND an introduction by astronaut and space shuttle commander Pam Melroy. Can't beat that.

But I'm going to give it a shot--a photograph, to be precise of The Management inspecting copies of that other book I've been waiting for: Clockwork Universe: Steampunk vs. Aliens. It's got Steampunk. It's got aliens. It's got my story, "The Wizard of Woodrow Park", starring a chicken secret agent in a human suit, academic politics and Chihuahas. What more could you ask?
Excerpts?  Well we've got them right here:

"The Gap in the Fence"

"The Wizard of Woodrow Park"

But obviously new releases and encyclopedic anthologies weren't enough to maintain my full operating level of madness. I had to get involved in another Kickstarter, run by Zombies Need Brains, the same folks who produced Clockwork Universe. 

Temporally Out of Order features gadgets, timey-wimey and seven amazing anchor authors--David B. Coe, Laura Anne Gilman, Faith Hunter, Stephen Leigh, Gini Koch, Seanan McGuire, and Laura Resnick--authors I pre-order, which is a very small number indeed. The stretch goal authors ain't too shabby, either--Juliet E. McKenna, Jack Campbell, and me!

To say nothing of all the wonderful swag you get on top of the perks of pledging. For example, the first 400 backers will receive A Rain of Pebbles, an ebook containing all the short stories in Stephen Leigh's Alliance Universe. And there will be more special incentives as the Kickstarter continues. To say nothing of its awesome cover painting by Justin Adams of Varia Studios.

Check it all out here.
But that still wasn't enough for me. The weekend of September 26-28 I'll be at the Baltimore Book Festival. When I'm not participating in the SFWA programming track, you can find me at the Silence in the Library Publishing and Dark Quest Books tables doing my best to shill books. 

Come and check it out...and bring more caffeine!

Jean Marie Ward

Crowdsourcing Part Two: Platform, Platform, Platform

"Don't you know she's pooped?!"
(Madeline Kahn as Lili von Shtupp in Blazing Saddles)

Yeah, I know May is supposed to be "The Lusty Month" here at Beyond the Veil, but I'm not in the mood. I'm too tired--the principal cause of lost libido across all sectors of society, according to a study I read some time ago, which I'm too tired to look up.

The cause of my exhaustion is six weeks spent pitching, hawking, shilling and strong-arming people into supporting Monkeying Around for a Good Cause, the Indiegogo campaign to help fellow SF/Fantasy writer and beloved curmudgeon CJ Henderson in his battle with cancer.

I don't regret a minute of the time or the effort. As always when the writing community pulls together for one of their own, I'm awed by the kindness of strangers and how a writer's reach can extend far beyond their words. I'm also so grateful to my fellow bloggers at Beyond the Veil for letting me pimp the campaign here, when most of them don't know CJ. BtV's own Sheryl Nantus was even in line to write a story for one of the stretch goals.

But we didn't get there. We did great by most measures. The final tally was $10,000, 33 percent above our fully funded level, but when you compare that with Athena's Daughters, which funded at five times it's initial level...

Which brings us to the meat of today's blog. The determining factor in the two campaigns was not the product. The anthology built around CJ was awesome. The campaign was packaged by the same team, and had the same crazy band of hucksters pounding the social media. No, the determining factor was the platform.

Indiegogo has less than one-tenth the reach of Kickstarter.

So why didn't we go with Kickstarter? We couldn't. Despite having a guaranteed deliverable, Kickstarter called it a charity and wouldn't touch it. Silence in the Library Publishing argued against this every which way. But Kickstarter would not be swayed.

As someone later explained to me, Kickstarter wants to see itself as the ultimate boutique emporium, the place for the rare and rarefied, patronized by all the Cool Kids. But its users are all about the bargains. They want to buy in cheap on the ground floor of something that will later give them bragging rights. Charity falls outside the emporium model. Charity means funding an intangible, which might as well be giving something for nothing.

With that outlook, it's not surprising Kickstarter won't touch what it defines as charity. (How it defines all those "deliverables" that never show up is another matter, but I digress.) I wonder if the founders realize their stance is essentially saying: Charity Isn't Cool. I also wonder if they'd care.

It didn't help that in the middle of the campaign Indiegogo faced its own deliverables crisis, and muffed it royally. But that, too, is a digression, because even before the kerfuffle hit, our numbers were still below our Kickstarter numbers by a factor of three.

So, the takeaway? If you're looking to crowdsource a product, hie thee to Kickstarter. You'll start out in a better place and stay there. However, if for some reason you need to go to Indiegogo, Go-Fund-Me or some other platform, offer to decapitate someone by name in your next story. The crowd will go wild.

But that, my sweets, is a story for another day. Can't you see I'm pooped?!

Jean Marie Ward

Days of Future Publishing

This month's theme at Beyond the Veil is (insert trumpet fanfare): What's next in publishing?

Wait.  You're asking me?  Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire--mean, writer!

I am the last person to pay attention to what's trending on editors' desk. It's not just a matter of writing too slowly. The publishing landscape is changing so quickly, chasing today's anything is a certain guarantee of obsolescence.

But there does seem to be one trend likely to continue through 2014, one with the potential to change the very nature of modern publishing: crowdfunding.  More and more creators of every stripe--as well as publishers, community organizations and other enterprises--are funding their projects by appealing directly to the public.  It's a lot like Pledge Week on public television, only instead of funding programs pre-selected by someone else, you target the projects you wish to support--or create your own. 

Nerds like me have been worshipping at the altar of Kickstarter ever since the successful funding of Veronica Mars. (Which will be released this spring--Squee!)


But that's just the head of the proverbial pin upon which angels dance. According to Kickstarter, in 2013, three million people pledged $480 million to fund 19,911 projects ranging from skateboard parks to Happy Canes (I don't make this stuff up, folks) to a human-powered helicopter. Meanwhile, the Kickstarter-funded indie movie Blue Ruin won at Cannes.

And Kickstarter is only one crowdfunding platform.  There are dozens, and more set up shop every day.

Given the explosive growth in crowdfunded publishing, I thought BtV readers might be interested in what a successful Kickstarter campaign looks like from the inside.

Regular readers may remember my December 10 and December 14 blogs about the Kickstarter-funded anthology Athena's Daughters, which includes my short story, "The Gap in the Fence".  The Kickstarter succeeded beyond our wildest expectations, collecting over five times the amount needed to fund the anthology. To make that achievement even more remarkable, of the original cast, only BtV's old friend Gail Z. Martin qualifies as a bestseller, though there are several award-winners. 

How did we do it?  The short answer: a lot of hard work on the part of everyone involved. 

The first thing we had going for us was a killer concept: a book about strong women by women, illustrated by women, edited by a woman and introduced by Colonel Pamela Melroy (USAF, Ret.), the second woman to command a Space Shuttle. There hadn't been anything to compare since Marion Zimmer Bradley's old Sword and Sorceress anthologies.

The second was the well-thought out Kickstarter plan developed by our publisher, Silence in the Library Publishing.  From the start, we had clearly defined goals--including goals for funding above and beyond the  original request--and a lot of great incentives for backers.  By the time the Kickstarter ended, backers at the $5 mark were in line for over a dozen ebooks in addition to the electronic version of Athena's Daughters, a CD download and two audiobooks.  Backers at higher levels will receive even more.

Even so, it was a good thing there were so many of us involved.  Generating the necessary buzz meant each of us pushing out multiple mentions every day on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and newsletters.  Then there was the GoodReads page, which demanded its own blogs and responses to all the folks who submitted comments and questions.

It was a tremendous time sink, even when we powered past our original goals and began funding secondary projects, such as Apollo's Daughters--stories about strong women written by some of the biggest names in the Star Wars franchise, among others. 

The guys, bless 'em, gave it their best, but frankly they couldn't compete with the tagging and hashtagging prowess of the women.  Tagging is critical for promotional social media purposes, because it's the only way to beat the algorithms used by the big sites to elevate the visibility of monetized posts (i.e., paid advertising).  On the flip side, it was SitL publisher and editor Bryan Young who snagged us mentions in i09 and other big-name blogs.

From a marketing standpoint, the interesting thing was most of our contributors didn't access the Kickstarter from these articles and posts.  They sailed in from the Kickstarter homepage, attracted by our position as one of the most popular projects and by the concept.  Again and again, comments on the project celebrated the fact Athena's Daughters was by women and about women, in contrast some recent big name anthologies edited and populated almost entirely by men.

We had a few trolls, too, but we ignored them. It proved to be a great strategy. They generated more talk and more contributions.  It must have driven our detractors crazy to realize they not only helped fund an all-woman anthology--in ebook, trade paper and hardcover versions--but a second woman-centric anthology and the basic costs of a sequel, which unlike the invitation-only original will reserve some slots for open submission.

Another interesting aspect was the sensation of running a marathon. The numbers became mileposts, and on the last night of the Kickstarter, all of us began obsessively refreshing the page. We got so hyper, friends and family members started throwing money at it to calm us down.  And when it was all over, we found ourselves elated and exhausted.

And winners all--writers and readers alike.  I can't wait to read the anthology, now with seven extra stories and extra illustrations, thanks to the additional funding.  Athena's Daughters is scheduled for publication by August.  It seems a long way off.

But then, so did January 8 when the Kickstarter opened December 10.  :-)

Jean Marie Ward
JeanMarieWard.com

(For those of you who'd like a taste of what's to come, I've posted a short excerpt of "The Gap in the Fence" here.)
 

Characters in Conflict with Themselves

Sometimes you eat the blog topic; sometimes the blog topic eats you.

Autumn Frederickson's illustration for

C.A. Verstraete's "Songbird" in Athena's

Daughters. I haven't seen the picture

for my story yet, but between the wood

and the birds, I figured this fit the theme.

I was pretty sure December had it in for me as soon as I read this month's Beyond the Veil topic:  "Gifted or Cursed: Making your Characters' Greatest Strength, their Greatest Stumbling Block".  Uh oh.  Am I supposed to do that?

The first thing that popped to mind was a writing book I read so long ago I can't remember the title, much less the author.  The book recommended creating characters by picking a principal personality trait (or two) and throwing a person with that trait against their polar opposite.  Bad against good.  Hero against coward.  Crowd-pleaser against agoraphobic.  You get the picture.  It was, according to the author, a foolproof a recipe.  You take your sweet and mix it with your sour, and baddaboom, you got yourself a book.

The second was something William Faulkner said in his Nobel Award acceptance speech: "The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."

Naturally, I don't agree with either of them.  Not entirely.

I'm sure by-the-numbers character creation works for some. After all, I know people who use spreadsheets to write their award-winning books. But for me, it would only result in fake people in artificial conflicts.  No one and nothing in my world is entirely one thing or the other.  Everything in my universe is a double-edged sword.

I'm better with Faulkner...if you ditch the aging lion's complaint about all them young whippersnappers.  People in conflict with themselves--like Death in Kimberley Troutte's Soul Stealer --can make for powerful stories, but...

But.

But!

But what about Bram Stoker's Dracula?  The Transylvanian dude isn't in conflict with himself at all.  He wants blood, and he's going to do whatever it takes to get it, without guilt or second thoughts.  Everyone else in his story is simply a means to an end.

Consider Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.  She wants something that no one can take away from her, and she'll do anything to get it.  Her problem is she doesn't know what that something is until the very end.  But once she figures it out, she's going after it.  No guilt.  No apologies.  No angst. 

Likewise, Rhett Butler isn't her opposite. He's her mirror.  Her greatest strength doesn't cause her to stumble, either.  Her strengths are wit and determination.  All her problems arise from applying her wit and determination to unworthy goals.  The problem isn't her strength.  It's the application of that strength and the consequences it entails.

Consequences--that's the key for me.  It doesn't matter if the character is operating from their strengths or weaknesses.  Their actions have consequences, and those consequences drive the conflict.

In "The Gap in the Fence", my story for Athena's Daughters (inserting plug for the Kickstarter here :-) ), ten-year-old Ana's greatest strengths are her determination and her empathy.  They aren't stumbling blocks, but they do force her to act in certain ways.  Those actions bring her in conflict with her best friend's mother, a powerful fairy, and ultimately, the friend she was trying to help. 

But those character traits aren't stumbling blocks.  They're necessary to her sense of self and agency.  But they do have consequences.

Likewise, the other characters aren't her opposites.  None of them are, for example, bad or weak-willed in opposition her goodness and strength.  But their own needs entail consequences, consequences which bring them into opposition with Ana.

For me, it's all about consequences.  And heart.  And creating characters who act like people, not emoticons.

And if they wind up in conflict with themselves, well, that's fine, too.

Jean Marie Ward

PS, For those who are interested in reading a taste of "The Gap in the Fence", you can either pop over to my website, or check out the blog I did on the Athena's Daughters Kickstarter.  You can even go straight to the Kickstarter.  It has pictures.  And a video.  And an astronaut...

The Gap in your Library You Didn't Know You Had

It's been a loooooong year on this side of the screen staring at the cover for The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity.

It isn't that I don't love the book--and "Fixed" my story in it.  I do.  There are scenes in that story that still make me giggle.  And I can't begin to describe my delight at sharing space in the table of contents with writers like Seanan McGuire, Barbara Ashford, Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake and Jim C. Hines. But "Fixed" was my last story to to see print or pixels, and it was published in February 2012!

It isn't that I haven't been writing.  I have, and I've got the callused fingertips to prove it.  It isn't that I haven't sold stories. Or signed the contracts. Or done all the things writers are supposed to do.

No, the fault lies with the vagaries of the publishing stars.  Anthologies that were supposed to appear in 2013 were pushed back to 2014.  Meanwhile, more recent stories have been slated for--you guessed it--2014 publication dates.

Finally, 2014 is almost here, and I can draw back the curtain on one of those projects, a story called "A Gap in the Fence" in the 2014 anthology Athena's Daughters from Silence in the Library Publishing. Yes, there will be an excerpt, but first I want to tell you about the project.

The participating authors include friend of Beyond the Veil Gail Z. Martin, multiple award-winner Mary Robinette Kowal, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Sherwood Smith, Janine Spendlove, Vicki Johnson-Steger, Cynthia Ward (no relation that I know of, alas), and that other Ward girl--me!  Veteran editor and bestselling author Jean Rabe will be doing the editing honors (and she may even add one of her own wonderful stories).  Not only that, we're going to have a real, live astronaut writing our introduction: Colonel Pamela Melroy, USAF (Retired), the second woman to command a space shuttle!  How cool is that?

Almost as cool as the ideas behind Athena's Daughters.  The stories are all by women, about women, celebrating their strength at every phase of their lives, from ten to eighty.  Not just physical strength either, but all the ways women show their strength.  Wit and grit.  Determination.  Adaptability.  Empathy.  Courage in the face of overwhelming odds.

In addition, the anthology seeks to help women find their strength.  A portion of the of every book sold will go to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the nation's largest anti-sexual violence organization.  RAINN created and operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline in partnership with more than 1,100 local rape crisis centers nationwide, and operates the DoD Safe Helpline for the Department of Defense.

Athena's Daughters also marks a publishing first for me.  This will be my first post-submission crowd-sourced project.  Silence in the Library doesn't solicit funding until they've assembled and readied a project for production.  As a result, the folks who contribute know what they're getting in advance.  They know the book will be published and can see how great it will be, because it's already almost done.  For a $5 pledge they are guaranteed an electronic copy in the format of their choice.  And it gets better from there!

As the stretch goals are reached, you get signed postcards and additional ebooks from the contributing authors--and the anthology adds more stories.  Bigger pledges net paper copies of the anthology (including a very special hardcover edition), Tuckerizations (a character named in your honor in one of the anthology's stories) and original art.  Yeah, art.  Did I mention every single story will have its own original illustration?

All for a click and a pledge.

Not sure, yet?  Well, how about this: my story, "The Gap in the Fence" features two little girls, three special dogs, and one box-obsessed cat.  The jacket copy reads: "Ten-year-old Ana will do anything to save her best friend's dog from being put down--even braving the fairies who live behind the Gap in the Fence."

Finally, here's that excerpt I promised you:

The corners of the fairy’s eyes crinkled, like he was hiding a smile under his beard, but it didn’t last.  “Nothing like that.  I’m sorry.  I can’t stop anybody from dying.  There’re some things you just can’t fix.”

“Then what can you do?  There’s got to be something.”

All the birds and Gurt seemed to gasp at once.  Even the leaves seemed to hold their breath.  The man’s bushy eyebrows lifted.

“What do you want of me?”

His voice sounded different somehow.  It was still slow and gravelly, but there was something sharp and cold underneath the words that brought back all my fear.  Me and my big mouth—Mom always said it would get me in trouble.

He waited for me to say something, staring at me from under his eyebrows with eyes as hard as his voice.  “What do you want of me?”  

A cloud passed overhead, shadowing his face.  Gurt ogled us with big saucer eyes.  Her head turned from side to side to keep us both in view.

What I wanted was for him to save Willy from dying, but he said he couldn’t.  At least I thought he did.  I wanted to be smarter, so I’d know what he meant and what I was supposed to say.  But this might be my only chance.  My head whirled with all the bad things about to happen—Willy dragged away from the people who loved him when he was sick and hurting, Shari waking up to find out her mom… I couldn’t finish the thought any more than I could face her and tell her what her mom was going to do.

“What.  Do.  You.  Want?”

The breeze roared into a wind.  My hair skinned away from my face.  Branches as big as my whole body shook.  The grass bowed flat.  The fairy hadn’t moved, but he seemed to have grown until he was too big to see without lifting my head.  I almost peed my pants, but I knew if I broke and ran, he’d be on me in a second.  Then I’d be dead.  There was only one thing to do.

Now you want that link, right?  It's the Athena's Daughters Kickstarter.  And we've got an astronaut!

Jean Marie Ward