Focus!

Life has not been letting me focus on writing--I assume this will only get worse as the holidays descend. But I've been reading some less-than-fully-enjoyable things that have caused me to think a lot about focus, or the lack thereof.

One of the things that separates the modern novel from the picaresque novel of yore is simply this matter of focus. In your typical picaresque novel your loveable lower-class outsider goes over here and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes over there and has an adventure...and then he goes home. The end.

In other words, there's not some larger storyline holding the whole thing together. You could break the picaresque novel up into its component bits, and each bit could stand alone without any trouble.

And it's really less satisfying, at least in my opinion as a modern reader. Nothing builds. There's no larger A plot moving things along and hooking your interest.

I can see the temptation to write a picaresque novel, especially if you've got a bunch of fantastic worlds going on in your head. But just spitting them out onto the page, one right after the other, with very little to connect them--well, it's like after they ran out the Kobol plot in Battlestar Galactica. You're basically asking me to gin up interest and become emotionally invested in an entirely new scenario every 50 pages or so, and that's hard for me to do, especially because your last scenario wound up not really meaning much.

Right now I'm reading a novel that I'm probably going to ditch because it's so unfocused--and I basically never quit novels without finishing them, so that should tell you something. In this case, the lack of focus affects detail.

This book is a blizzard of details. Every thought, every word, every gesture, every object is recorded in loving and extensive detail. The result is a book that is VERY long and not going anywhere. There's no filter and no focus.

You can definitely get deep within a character's point of view and tell me all that they're thinking--but there needs to be a reason behind it. I don't need all the thoughts and feelings of a random person making a minor decision unless there's something really interesting going on with that random person. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulker is a good example of that done well--you are intently within each character's point of view, and they are all desperately screwed up and sometimes quite terrifying people, so it's actually quite interesting.

If you don't have that sort of ambition--you just want to write a plot-driven adventure--then that's great! In that case, don't give me the entire stream-of-consciousness blow-by-blow thought process of someone as they get in a car and get dinner. It's not important.

And don't give backstory by having your characters sit around with nothing to do (a nothingness that is described in, you guessed it, excruciating detail) until boredom drives them to ask each other about their respective backstories. (And then they each discuss their backstory in turn, neatly combining the too-much-detail problem and the picaresque-plot problem.) If your characters are that bored, imagine how the reader must feel.

Signs of the times

MacMillan has decided to stop producing a print dictionary (via PV). Oh, and HarperCollins is getting rid of the last of its warehouses in the United States.

Just tossing that out there as a corrective for all those people out there arguing for one reason or another that this change isn't happening, or has stopped, or doesn't matter, or whatever. You don't stop change by ignoring it; you just set yourself up to get bit on the ass by it.

How Audiobooks Work

Things have been a little chaotic here--hopefully by Wednesday everything will have settled and I'll be able to write. Anyway, I did manage to read David Byrne's How Music Works, which was interesting to me on a lot of levels.

He has an entire chapter on the many different ways to distribute music nowadays (he uses examples from his own career, breaking out expenses and revenues--he's a very open guy). That section was of special interest because while I don't mind giving Trang away as a free podcast, I'd also like to have an audiobook that people can buy if they want, plus if I record the later titles I would want to do them as paid audiobooks and not as free podcasts.

A lot of the places he was talking about just do music, because the only way onto Amazon or iTunes if you are an audiobook is via Audible, and that means going through ACX. The issue with that is that they have pretty specific production requirements--I don't know if they are impossibly specific, though, mainly because I don't know what's involved in mastering. You also have no control over price.

The other option (actually, it looks like you can do both) is Bandcamp, which is a straightforward retail arrangement--no distribution included. They charge a percentage of your sales, but other than that it's free. You can set your price there however you want, which is nice.

Serendipitously, Erin Dolan of Unclutterer, a site I often read, has produced her own audiobook. In her case, she just put an E-Junkie shopping cart onto her Web site--a click on the link takes you right to PayPal.

That looks interesting, doesn't it? For $5 a month I could sell every e-book format plus the audiobooks directly from this Web site. Well, that's going into the Must Investigate in the Future pile.

There's no need to rush

I read two blog posts, one right after the other, by two writers who are both feeling SO overwhelmed by all the stuff they have to do. Just reading those things gave me knots of sympathetic stress.

I've written for a long time, and I think it's important to think hard about how writing is going to fit into your life--after all, if you do it right, writing is something that you can pursue well into old age.

Music is that way, too: You can enjoy music in all sorts of ways throughout your life, and you can do that without ever becoming a full-time professional musician. You can be a doctor who sings bass in a variety of choirs, as was my father, and no one blinks an eye at it.

There seems to be a resistance to approaching writing that way, I assume because of the myth that getting published is some marker of quality. And since self-publishing has rather suddenly begun to offer the possibility of turning writing into lucrative full-time work, people think that they must exploit that possibility. They feel like they gotta do their damnest to hit the jackpot. They gotta write write write write write write!!! and they gotta promote the hell out of everything all the time! Including when they're writing! You just write with your right hand and tweet with your left--don't be a slacker!!!

And don't do anything else! You have no other interests now--you're a writer! You can't possibly expect to get anywhere if, say, you're a doctor who, instead of singing bass in choirs, writes poetry in your spare time. That's just crazy: You can only be one thing!

There was a time where that kind of insane focus was totally necessary--go back and read some of Joe Konrath's pre-self-publishing posts if you don't believe me. But that time is past, and clearly it was yet another symptom of how dysfunctional publishing had become--it's not like things were going swimmingly for Konrath despite all his work.

The problem with the old paradigm was, you either had to sell like crazy, or you had no career whatsoever--your books would never see the light of day. For Konrath, it was scramble or die. But nowadays, if you're not a bestseller, so what? If your book just trundles along, occasionally selling a copy here and there (or not), it's not going to kill you. No one is going to stop you from publishing your next book because your current one isn't selling--believe me, if that was the case, Trust would never have come out.

The other thing is, in the old days, when a book had only a few months to make it, it made sense to scramble to promote it for that short period of time. But now there are no limits to shelf space, and no time limits on your book. So if you're scrambling, there's no end to it. E-books are forever. You will burn out long before your book ever leaves the store.

Which means you need to think long and hard about what you "have" to do to promote, since you'll be doing it for the foreseeable future. The thing I really like about Lindsay Buroker's approach is that she molds tasks to her own personal preferences--she doesn't spend huge hunks of her time doing unrewarding stuff just because someone else told her she has to. There's stuff she hires out, there's stuff she does in the most-efficient way possible, there's stuff she does in her own way, and there's stuff she just does not do, because she's not comfortable doing it. She always looks at these tasks through that paradigm: Do I want to be doing this?

Even writing tons of books--the go-to approach for people who don't like marketing--is only worth doing if you enjoy writing tons of books. Maybe you don't want to do nothing but write all day. Maybe you only have an idea for one book. Maybe you actually enjoy what other people sneeringly call your "day job." I've always preferred freelancing to regular full-time work, but mine is by no means the only way: Despite his fame, Harvey Pekar never left his dead-end job as a file clerk until he retired. His job didn't interfere with his art, and the structure of it helped keep him sane, so he sensibly held onto it.

We get it drummed into our heads that we have to have ambition, that we need to grab that brass ring, that when opportunity knocks, we'd damned well answer the door. What doesn't get mentioned is that after you get that brass ring and open that door, you still have to live your life. You're still you, and you can still be made miserable if you're not careful. Publishing has gotten a lot more flexible; there's no point in ruining that with your own rigid expectations.

Progress report

Well, I was kind of distracted by my shiny new toy today, and I recorded the first chapter of Trang instead of writing Trials. (Yeah, fine, beta tasks are supposed to be done only when alpha tasks cannot be performed. But it's a shiny new toy!)

Anyway, the recording went fine--my neighborhood is usually pretty quiet, and the cats didn't decide to freak out, so ambient noise wasn't an issue. Adjusting the input volume was easy to do, and I think I'm at a good sound range. When I flubbed a line, I just went back and re-read the paragraph. If I didn't like the way a paragraph sounded when I listened to the chapter, I recorded it again. I think the main issue in my delivery is that there are a number of breath noises.

So, I'll have to figure out how to edit all that together, and take out the breath noises. I get the feeling that's going to be the less-fun part, so maybe that will motivate me to, you know, actually write Trials.

Let's do it better!

Camille LaGuire made a good comment on the Passive Voice. The post was another one about the never-ending paid-review scandal, but LaGuire points out that "simple group behavior" can trip up an algorithm, too:

Let’s say there is a large forum frequented by authors who are all interested in promoting their books, along with some book bloggers who are into the same culture....

They all review more than your average reader. And everybody who reads their books and interacts with them on blogs or elsewhere hears again and again how important reviews are to authors, so they also have a “bubble” in their reviewing behavior. They also all submit to the same book bloggers. And they all have an overlapping readership, and even though they avoid mutual reviewing… the authors and their fans tend to read a lot of books from other authors in the same forum. And so their reviews are clustered in the same pool.

From the algorithm’s standpoint, it sure looks like a mutual admiration society, and in some ways it is. It’s not intentional, but people are using leverage to get an unnatural number of reviews, and the reviews are created with a different pre-conscious agenda than most reviews are.

And this pattern shows up really obviously in an algorithm....

Your best bet is to not to work against what the goals of the algorithm are. The goals of the algorithm is to NOT favor one book over another but to make every book equally available to the people who would most want it. Therefore, the best way to work with the algorithm is to work on good labeling, appropriate covers, titles, blurbs — and, of course, good content.

Or alternatively, you can just keep coming up with new leverage strategies when Amazon cuts off the old ones. That’s perfectly legit. Just don’t be all surprised when Amazon cuts those off too.

I liked this because I think there's a temptation for indies to revert to the clubby sort of reviewing that marks a lot of traditional publishing--after all, that's what we know and what appears to have worked for them.

But the clubbiness of that world actually limits the usefulness of those reviews--a lot of people don't bother with, say, The New York Times book reviews because they know that paper only reviews certain kinds of books, so if you like, say, potboilers or romances or erotica, you'll never find anything useful there. Amazon works as a retail outlet because it's good at getting things in front of people that they actually want--it doesn't worry about who's in the club, it just offers up the goods. And readers have clearly responded quite favorably to that, which benefits us all.

What life is not like when you are a woman

Yeah, I’m reading lowest-common-denominator sci-fi again. You know, the kind of stuff where an omniscient narrator tells me repeatedly that a female character is sexy and desirable, even though 1. I thought it was “show, don’t tell,” and 2. I am never, ever going to want to have sex with your female characters, so please stop trying to make me.

Anyway, I thought I’d toss a couple of reality checks out there:

Reality Check #1: Men will NOT make major sacrifices for a woman just because she is cute.

It’s one thing for a teenage boy to “loan” soda money to a cute girl. It’s another thing for an adult man to risk execution or give up enormous wads of money for a woman he barely knows just because she's pretty. Teenage boys (and teenage girls, for that matter) have the high hormone levels, poor impulse control, and lack of life experience that makes them vulnerable to all kinds of sexual exploitation.

Adult men, as a rule, have it a bit more together. Even if they are willing to trade favors, they tend to be more skeptical. The women I know who profit financially off male sexual impulses do not simply bat their eyelashes, because that stopped working back in high school. They put out, and they make it very clear that they are willing to put out in exchange for X and Y. It’s about as subtle as any other fee-for-service arrangement.

Also, think about what you’re having them trade, and try to keep it within reason. Call me cold, but I don’t think there are a lot of men out there who would be willing to risk a bullet in the head in exchange for a blow job.

Reality Check #2: Sexual abuse is NOT normal.

The first time I was sexually harassed, I was 12. The first time I was offered money for sex, I was 14. I’ve been sexually assaulted; stalked via phone, on-line, and by foot; and sexually harassed at work. I have dealt with all manner of perverts, from frotterists to Peeping Toms.

These are not everyday occurrences. If they were, trust me, I would never leave my house, which I would have long ago outfitted with large and sturdy locking metal shutters. It’s not the majority of men who do this sort of thing, or even a large minority—it’s a small minority of unfortunately quite industrious individuals. In fact, a lot of men (especially those without a lot of life experience) respond to stories of sexual abuse with utter disbelief, because they would never do that sort of thing and can’t imagine that anyone else would.

Which is unhelpful, but anyway, my point is that if you’re going to have a female character be sexually abused every where she goes, there needs to be a reason for it. She’s a hated outsider, the institution she’s interacting with is profoundly dysfunctional, something. Otherwise it starts to read like maybe you get your rocks off on that sort of thing.

Progress report

Yesterday was Halloween, and I wound up in charge of the kidlets, so nothing got done on the book. Today's pretty busy, too, but the microphone has arrived, I found my notes on that podcasting panel, and I got a book on podcasting from the library (five years old, so I'm assuming a lot of the technical advice is out of date, but advice on things like diction should still be valid).

The blog, if you haven't noticed, is being slow and buggy, which is presumably the fault of Sandy. I hope the Squarespace guys are staying safe and hanging in there!

False precision

When I was working as an encyclopedia editor (back when there were encyclopedias and dinosaurs roamed the Earth), one of the things the editors always got into a lather about was something called false precision. You know, stuff like "There are 1.24 billion stars in the sky"--where people would assign seemingly precise values to things when they could not possibly know what those values actually were.

They were ardently opposed to it, because the feeling was that simply by having a number (even if you noted that it was just an estimate), you distorted people's perception of what was possible. It's like anchoring--simply by my saying there are 1.24 billion stars in the sky, I have influenced what you consider to be the likely number of stars in the sky, even though we all know that I just made that number up.

Their opposition actually got kind of annoying--when the Hubble Space Telescope went up, for example, it drastically altered the estimated number of stars in the sky, but I wasn't allowed to write about THAT. But Dean Wesley Smith had a recent post that reminded me of why false precision is often a good thing to avoid.

Smith had posted earlier that e-books made up only 25% of the book market. People questioned that, so he cited other studies with similar results.

The problem is, a bunch of bad studies are not any more accurate than a single bad studies. And these studies are all bad, because the data is bad.

How is it bad? you ask. In two seemingly opposite ways!

Way 1: The data is too narrow. Smith is impressed by the fact that the Association of American Publishers responded to criticism of its methodology by reaching out to 1,200 publishers!

But that's a bit like being impressed by my survey, which I just conducted now in my imagination. I conducted a survey about who is going to be elected president next week.

Most people think it's going to be a close one between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. But my survey found a landslide win for Romney!

Of course, I only surveyed Republicans.

Oh, look at you complaining about my methodology. Fine. I'm doing my survey again--this time I'm going to survey many more Republicans. And I'm still finding Romney winning in a landslide! So there!

The problem is not the number of publishers the AAP surveyed. The problem is, they are publishers. I'll quote myself again, because I love doing that: "If Random House and Simon & Schuster lose e-book sales because all their writers have gone indie, the data will indicate that e-book sales have fallen, even if those newly-indie writers are selling e-books like gangbusters on their own."

But the AAP is including small publishers this time! (And moderate Republicans!) It doesn't matter. Why use a publisher in the first place? Because they are better set up to sell paper books to brick and mortar bookstores. That is an advantage most publishers continue to have over most indie writers. Surveying publishers is going to skew your results toward paper just as surveying indie writers (or Democrats) exclusively would skew your results in the other direction.

Way 2: The data is too broad. (I told you these would seem contradictory!)

There are certain kinds of books that, I think, will always sell in paper. Children's books, how-to books (I'm not getting The Complete Guide to Home Plumbing as an e-book, nor Auto Repair for Dummies), cookbooks (at least for the minority of us who actually cook with them), and art books will never move completely, or even just mostly, to e-books.

I'll go further and say that I wouldn't be surprised if an increasing number of publishers specialize in these paper-friendly genres, because paper is what publishers do well. 

Do I, as a writer of adult fiction, care? No. I'm not writing for people who aren't old enough to hold Mommy's iPad. I'm not writing for people who want a book that will stand up to hot grease and marinara sauce. I'm not writing for people looking for elaborate pop-up art.

Is there good data out there for me? No. But there are hints that suggest that the percentage of e-books in the market that actually interests me is much higher than 25%. For example, an unnamed publishing executive just said that e-books account for 30%-50% of adult fiction sales. And a recent story about HarperCollins said that, in the U.S. at least, e-books count for about half of that company's revenues.

So, now I've gone and given you another bit of false precision to glom on to--50%!--when what I really want you to do is to embrace the notion that we don't know what the real number is. We don't know. We also don't know what the future holds--although things are looking worse all the time for the national book chains.

And it wouldn't matter if we did know. No matter what percentage of the market is still paper, a paper book is harder and more expensive for an indie writer to create and distribute than an e-book. For most writers, that's what matters--what is what percentage of the book market is really an academic concern.

Revolution 8

Ruth Harris has a good post over at Anne R. Allen's blog on ways to improve your writing. Allen liked point #8, and I do, too:

8. Don't repeat yourself. Once is enough. This is a fairly common problem and not always quick or easy to fix because it involves actual thinking. Be on the lookout for places where you convey the same thought two or three times in different words. Usually, this kind of repetition means the writer hasn’t quite thought through what he/she is trying to say.

This has been on my mind a lot lately because I have little shorthand ways of describing my characters, but I'm thinking by book #3, I need to freshen that up and come at those descriptions from a different angle. In some ways, this falls under the category of Things That Are Different To Read Than To Write: A good deal of time may have passed for me between writing Trang and writing Trials, but for anyone who picks up the first book, likes it, and starts to plow through the other two--well, they're really, REALLY going to notice if I'm essentially cutting-n-pasting those character descriptions. I know this because Garrett did that on occassion in the Lord Darcy stories--I'm sure he thought it would work fine, because he wrote them over the course of several years, and it's not like they were even all originally published in the same place. But stick them all in an omnibus together, and...oops.

More on the merger--delusions ahoy!

This is a good backgrounder from the Wall Street Journal on the proposed Penguin/Random House merger. (There's also a follow-on here. Nothing about News Corp. coming back with a vengeance, but I'm not counting them out!)

Some interesting details: The talks began just a few weeks after the Justice Department filed its antitrust suit against Penguin and others. The companies could save costs by closing warehouses, so there are some economies of scale to be had. They're hoping that the deal could close by the end of next year, and Pearson doesn't want to sell Penguin because it would take a tax hit. And an unnamed publishing executive at an unnamed house said that e-books now account for 30%-50% of fiction sales, so any suggestion that e-books aren't such a big deal these days needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt.

So far, so good, but read on down and things start to get weird:

[Random House Chief Executive Markus] Dohle said the two companies were just starting to analyze the potential cost savings, including those in distribution, warehousing and information technology. But "this deal isn't based on synergies; it is based on future growth," he said.

[Penguin Chief Executive John] Makinson said the merger will allow the companies to invest more heavily in social media and other new technologies. With fewer traditional bookstores around, he said, "it becomes harder and riskier to take a chance on new writers because you can't be sure of finding an audience." Social media can help remedy that.

Wow. There's not a thing there that makes sense to me. They're merging so that they can Tweet better? I mean crazy me, I thought the purpose of merging was to cut expenses by consolidating operations, but according to them they haven't really thought that part through, except to decide that they aren't cutting any imprints. (Penguin not thinking things through seems to be a theme lately.) And what's this vague "other new technologies"? Don't they know that Calibre is free?

The end of the article spirals down into absurdist humor, including a quote from (you guessed it) Scott Turow, and a note that this joint venture could go public in five years! Sure! That'll happen!

Filthy, filthy promotions!

Passive Voice has a great rant today inspired by a pretty silly post bewailing how indie writers are devaluing their work with the 99-cent price point and freebies and giveaways in exchange for a reader promoting the book in some way.

The original post is very over-the-top and contains the hilarious line, "Traditionally published authors aren’t stooping to these tactics." (You know, like sock-puppet reviews and selling cheap books.) And PG comes back in a way I think is awesome, pointing out that if you actually value literature and reading, then the rise of indie publishing should make you very happy.

The funny thing is, the original post was written by a bestselling author who works as a consultant for other indie authors. And the other day I met a bestselling author who works as a consultant for other indie authors who has embraced things like the 99-cent price point and giveaways with equal if not greater stridency. And of course I can think of two authors right off the top of my head who credit their success in large part to the savvy use of freebies. (So, you know, there's a lesson about blindly following "experts" here.)

But the thing that really struck me about the original post was the writer's clear discomfort with the concept of promotions.

Which is odd, right? I mean, no one writes articles in Retailing Today that say, "For God's sake, DON'T PUT YOUR STUFF ON SALE!!! NO FREEBIES!!! DON'T OFFER YOUR CUSTOMERS A CHANCE AT A GIFT CARD IN EXCHANGE FOR LIKING YOU ON FACEBOOK!!! YOU'RE DEVALUING YOUR BRAND!!!!"

Sure, a company can devalue a retail brand via promotions, but it has to be a VERY high-end brand for that to happen (or the promotions have to be so terribly mismanaged that they make people feel like they're being ripped off). To be vulnerable, the brand also has to thrive on recognizability--if I have an Hermès bag, you know I paid a freaking arm and a leg for it. That is a major reason why people buy Hermès bags. Hermès does not put its bags on sale.

I don't know how an author can possibly create that kind of brand. If I'm reading Stephen King on my Kindle, how the hell are you supposed to know? If I'm reading Stephen King in a hardback, it's not like you're going to look at that and say, "Ooooh, that's a Stephen King book! Gosh, I wish I could afford one of those!" You're not going to sneer if I got it on sale or--shudder--at an outlet. That is completely irrelevant to your perception of the book's worth. (It's true that books can be status objects, but they are supposed to be indicators of internal worth--I read poetry because I am such a sensitive soul, not because I'm mad flossing.)

All that is why book consumers are somewhat insensitive to price--for most readers, avoiding a bad book is more important than saving a couple of bucks.

As a result, if your book lacks reviews and recommendations, dropping the price probably won't help much. But it's also not going to hurt your brand--people might look at a dodgy 99-cent/free book, think "Looks dodgy" and avoid it. But they're not going to associate that with your name and refuse to buy all your books forever because six months ago one of your titles was 99 cents or free. (I know I've spoken out against always having books at 99 cents, but that's because I think it causes the writer to devalue the financial worth of their business, not because I think it causes the reader to devalue the literary worth of the books.)

If someone likes your stuff, or is curious about you because other people like your stuff, or otherwise thinks your book might be worth reading, doing a promotion can tip them over into buying. Which is a good thing.

Believe it or not, some people will argue that getting more buyers through promotions is not a good thing. These are usually big believers in finding your 1,000 True Fans, who apparently will give you all their money and will spend all their time promoting you and will carve your name on their foreheads with a screwdriver and will hide in your bushes chanting your book titles until the police come and haul them away.

I think it's fine to focus your attention on cultivating (non-scary) fans (who respect boundaries)! That's great! Read The Gift of Fear while you're at it!

But in addition to your True Fans, there are other audiences out there you can sell to. I wouldn't spend big hunks of my time chasing bargain-hunters, because your margins are going to be lower with them, but if someone will only buy your book if it is 99 cents, aren't you better off getting that 99 cents from them than getting nothing at all? For every tech company like Apple or Intel that make money catering to True Fans who will pay a ton of money for the latest thing, there are a dozen companies that make money catering to the more price-sensitive people in the mass market. And unlike a tech company, you can 1. tap into both markets, and 2. convert the tightwads into True Fans--there are very few people out there who won't pay more for a book they know they're going to like.

The magic of limits

Since this week has been a lost cause (I slept last night--huzzah!--but had too much scheduled to do today for writing), I've been reading a book called Lord Darcy by Randall Garrett. Lord Darcy is actually an omnibus volume containing Garrett's various stories about a guy named--you guessed it--Lord Darcy.

It was very entertaining to me as a reader, but it was also really interesting to me as a writer, because the Lord Darcy stories are probably the only truly successful marriage of the mystery genre and the science fiction/fantasy genre that I've ever read.

The problem with most other attempts at amalgamating those two genres is that mystery novels are basically puzzles--here's a dead body, let's figure out how it got there. Puzzles work because of there are limitations on the puzzle-solver, who doesn't just know all the answers but has to sort it out using only partial and often unreliable information.

Science fiction and fantasy, however, are genres where human limitations are usually greatly reduced or utterly eliminated through technology or magic. So they usually don't mix well with mystery: The wizard waves his wand or the robot taps into the database, and the problem is magically (and boringly) solved!

So limits have to be put on these things. In the Vorkosigan Saga (which is not strictly mystery, but there are occasional crimes as well as a great deal of espionage), there's a truth serum called fast-penta. But it doesn't work in everybody, some people are deathly allergic, and some people have been made deathly allergic specifically so they can't be interrogated.

Garrett handles this issue by having the magic be extremely rules-based and quite limited--it is, in the alternative history of Lord Darcy's world, scientific. Magic that would be really inconvenient in a mystery novel, like teleportation, simply doesn't exist. Instead, much of the magic revolves around the principle that things that were once whole wish to be whole again. So, for example, a forensic sorcerer (yes, that's a thing) could take blood from the scene of a crime and blood from a suspect, smear them on the opposite sides of a dish, and cast a spell. If it's the same blood, it will pool together, and you've placed your suspect at the scene.

It's very clever because it lets the investigators know some things (whose blood is that, what gun did that bullet come from) without knowing all things.

If it sounds like forensic sorcerers aren't much more useful than forensic scientists, well, they're not. And Garrett goes even further: Because magic is scientifically understood, actual science--chemistry, physics, biology--isn't understood very well at all, so technology has suffered greatly. While the books are set in the years Garrett wrote them, the technology mostly comes from the previous century. Far from magic being something that solves all problems, magic is something that has effectively created more limits.

For example, at one point Lord Darcy is secretly searching a room at night with the help of "a special device."

It was a fantastic device, a secret of His Majesty's Government. Powered by little zinc-copper couples that were the only known source of such magical power, they heated a steel wire to tremendously high temperature. The thin wire glowed white-hot, shedding a yellow-white light that was almost as bright as a gas-mantle lamp. The secret lay in the magical treatment of the steel filament. Under ordinary circumstances, the wire would burn up in a blue-white flash of fire. But, properly treated by a special spell, the wire was passivated and merely glowed with heat and light instead of burning. The hot wire was centered at the focus of a parabolic reflector, and merely by shoving forward a button with his thumb, Lord Darcy had at hand a light source equal to--and indeed far superior to--an ordinary dark lantern.

That's just so wonderful on so many levels. Not only is a plain old flashlight a source of awe (you merely have to shove forward a button with your thumb!), but it's repeatedly compared with things the reader isn't familiar with (various lamps and lanterns), because of course in Lord Darcy's world, that's what used. My most-favorite bit is the fact that they solve the major engineering puzzle of the incandescent bulb--how do you prevent the filament from just burning up?--by using magic. Of course. Because that's what they use to solve all their problems. It just doesn't work that well.

Seeking beta

You know, after writing Wednesday's post on what to do when you can't write, it occurred to me that I don't really have any beta tasks going on right now--production on Trust and Trang is wrapped up, and while I have some marketing plans (I'll be moving Trang to KDP Select at the beginning of December), it's nothing that's should be very time consuming.

I had two potential beta tasks in the back of my mind: changing the layout of the paper books and producing a Trang podcast. Changing the layout is going take a lot of time, involve doing a lot of something I do not enjoy, and the end result (a paperback that costs $9 more than the e-book instead of $10 more) doesn't strike me as something that will move the needle on sales. Doing a podcast costs a little money, will take a lot of time, and may or may not be something I enjoy, but it has the potential to reach a new audience.

Long story short: Yesterday I ordered a USB microphone. The Blue Snowball is less than $70 now!