Ask Dr. Pretentious

And it's a good thing I set that up before sending the ebooks out to Kickstarter backers, because Amazon and Ingram are able to test ebook files for readability on a wider array of devices than book designers are. We were able to fix some problems with displaying the illustrations in the Kindle/mobi version that Amazon's online proofing system caught. All better now.

Kickstarter backers will still receive their files before anybody else, but if you aren't a KS backer and you want to order a Kindle copy for October 30, here you go.

A homeschooling cooperative asked if I'd be interested in teaching a class of high school age kids. They knew I would be good for creative writing, but they were always looking for literature classes. (They're always hoping to pick up new students, too.)

The more we talked about it, the more all of us got excited about the idea that turned into this official course description:

Survey of Literary Fantasy

This course will offer an overview of literary fantasy in English, from Sara Coleridge's lyrical Phantasmion, the first fantasy novel in English, to the latest crop of authors on this year's Nebula Awards ballot. We will read some of the landmark novels in the genre, to include Hope Mirrlees's Lud-in-the-Mist, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Ursula K. Le Guin's first three novels of Earthsea, and Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn. Most of the works on the syllabus will be short stories, so that we can explore as much as possible of the range, variation, and evolution of fantasy literature over its two centuries. In a few cases, we will read excerpts from longer works, such as the Mu Lan movements from Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, and fragments of unpublished works, such as the youthful fiction experiments of the Brontë siblings. Students will come away from this course understanding a microcosm of literary history, one that allows them to explore concepts of genre, lineage, influence, literary movements, and canon formation.

Books:
Tom Shippey, ed., The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories
Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore
Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
Assorted short supplemental readings, either handed out in class or available free on-line

Authors:
Sara Coleridge, the Brontës (Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne), George MacDonald, Andrew Lang, William Morris, E. Nesbit, L. Frank Baum, Lord Dunsany, Hope Mirrlees, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore, Mervyn Peake, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Peter S. Beagle, Jane Yolen, Angela Carter, Maxine Hong Kingston, Charles R. Saunders, Leonora Carrington, Neil Gaiman, Sandra Cisneros, Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni, Kelly Link, Catherynne M. Valente, James Enge, Nnedi Okorafor, Ken Liu, Carlos Hernandez

Instructor Bio:
Sarah Avery is a working writer and a longtime private tutor with a Ph.D. in English Literature and seven years of university teaching behind her. She won the 2015 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Tales from Rugosa Coven. Her short fiction has appeared in Jim Baen's Universe and Fantasy Scroll, as well as the Hugo-nominated online magazine Black Gate, where she has also written columns on teaching and fantasy literature. With David Sklar she coedited the themed anthology Trafficking in Magic, Magicking in Traffic. Her next book, The Imlen Brat, will be out this autumn. In her previous incarnation as an academic, she taught creative writing, literature, and composition. A parent who has homeschooled, she is delighted to make her return to classroom teaching in the company of homeschoolers.



If you guys out in blog-reading land know any homeschooling teens in the DC/Montgomery County area, feel free to spread the word.

The two of them together fit in the palm of my hand. I've needed them today, with all this news of the bleaching coral reefs. Maybe you need them, too.

Long ago, before you were born, extinction came to claim the American chestnut tree. Nearly a third of all the trees in the Appalachians were American chestnuts, and they were about a quarter of the forest trees from Ontario to Mississippi. Eastern settlers who headed west and wanted to make someplace new feel like home carried chestnuts with them to plant. Those isolated trees, far from their home range, helped keep the species from vanishing entirely.

My family tells stories of Uncle Arthur, thrice-great uncle to the youngest of us, a botanist who devoted himself to saving the American chestnut and otherwise lived childless. He came to Thanksgivings bearing enormous bags from the Yale nut research plantation. Every kind of edible nut that could grow in New England filled those bags, and the ancient primate activity of nutcracking kept the children out of the kitchen all Thanksgiving day, every year through the 1950s and 60s. For that matter, it kept Uncle Arthur out of the kitchen, too. He was a man of his time, and thought it funny to surprise whichever lady of the family bent over to baste the turkey. Maybe in another age he could have outgrown that creepy habit, maybe not. But the most human thing, the most redeeming thing about him in the family lore is how it broke his heart to watch the chestnut blight rip through the country. He and many scientists like him did everything they could, but his generation of American chestnut rescuers reached the ends of their lives believing they had failed. For decades, that was his story, and our story of the trees.

Now I get to tell my descendants a happier story, though I only learned it at a funeral.

If you have to be mortal, the best way to go about it is Uncle Jack's way. He lived to be 91, to know his many descendants down to a passel of great-grandchildren, and to help decades of kids as a school counselor. He knew the green world and the human heart could heal each other, so he got those kids out into the woods whenever he could. And when he retired from working mostly on the human side of that relationship, he devoted his later years to preserving and restoring forests. In particular, he gave his time to breeding blight-resistant American chestnuts, teaching young people how to gather and preserve the nuts to give them the best chance to become mature trees.

They're not a sure thing, these two sprouts I have. The breeders are not ready to go to the public calling for a wave of volunteers and say now is the time to bring the species back to its old habitat. But they took a chance on those of us who came to pay our respects to Jack. Maybe the love we have for him, the grief, the care for his legacy will make up for our lack of expertise. If we follow directions (test soil, add lime to ph 6, etc.), and we catch a little luck, maybe our children will get to see what few have seen in a century: American chestnut trees ten stories tall.

This weekend I'll be in Rye Brook, New York, for Lunacon. I'm looking forward to reconnecting with a lot of friends and colleagues who rarely travel as far south as my current stomping grounds, especially my much-missed New Jersey critique group, Writers of the Weird.

The program volunteers just sent me the current draft of my schedule. Here's where I'm likeliest to be:

Friday, 18 March
7:00 pm
Elijah Budd Room
Magic in a Sword, or Bottle, or Toothbrush
Other panelists TBA
Enchanting an object has been an age-old habit of story-tellers. How do they chose them? How do they keep them from turning into a MacGuffin, or a plot coupon? Why does a magic toothbrush make us all laugh?

Saturday, 19 March
10:00 am
Westchester Ballroom D5
Magical Masquerade
With Pauline J. Alama and Darrell Schweitzer, other panelists TBA
They lurk among us. Werewolves, vampires, Greek gods, wizards and witches, the Fae. Hidden between the interstices of our lives, the magic awaits. Why? Beside the obvious reason that without it, it would be an obviously alternate world. Still, authors from Heinlein onward have done alternate worlds with obvious magic in modern society. What do authors get from this concealment? And how can it be justified within story terms?

Saturday, 19 March
12:00 pm
Westchester Ballroom D4
Research for Historical and Fantasy Fiction
Other Panelists TBA
How to depict a realistic and consistent world in an imagined past? What kind of research can enhance your work? What kind of workaround work when history contradicts your fiction? How to create characters that aren't just modern people in funny clothes?

Saturday, 19 March
2:00 pm
Westchester Ballroom D4
Fanzines on the Internet
With Ben Yalow and Alex Shvartsman
How to turn your site into a hugo-eligible fanzine. Is a Blog a Fanzine? Is a Website a Fanzine? Which current internet fanzines embody the fannish tradition? Which fanzines are getting the new generation of fans excited?

Saturday, 19 March
3:00 pm
Bartell Room
Writers of the Weird Group Reading
With David Sklar, Alex Shvartsman, and Richard Herr

Saturday, 19 March
4:00 pm
Maple Room
So I've Just Finished My First Draft. Now What?
With Matthew Kressel, Gary Frank, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, and Ken Altabef
The first draft of your awesome novel is complete. What do you do with it now to get it ready to sell?

I'm on a big book reviewing kick at Black Gate. In addition to reviewing the first volume of Tim Akers's Hallowed War series, The Pagan Night, a few days ago, I volunteered to take a look at a trilogy being published all in one season, and another trilogy that's winding up. So the publisher for the latter is sending me all three volumes, hoping I'll review the whole series. It's a bigger gamble than they think, sending me all these review copies. I don't mince words when I'm sent a book I can't honestly vouch for.

I can vouch for The Pagan Night, though. If Hayao Miyazake were writing Princess Mononoke as a sword and sorcery novel set in a Shinto version of Western Europe colonized by outsiders whose cosmology looks a lot like modern Wiccan duotheism, it might come out like this Tim Akers novel. Although the result doesn't crack my personal top 3 books for the past 365 days, it's hovering somewhere in my top 10, pending how its sequels follow through.

Confirming this news has taken some time: The rights to Tales from Rugosa Coven have formally reverted to me. Yes, that's the one that won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.

The small press that published it, Dark Quest Books, is in a state of flux. I don't know what their current status and plans are, so I don't want to speak for them. At times it has looked like they were closing up shop, or changing direction, or shrinking the business to fit around the publisher's day job. Whatever the case is, my contract expired at the two-year mark. All I had to do to get the rights reverted is notify Neal Levin in writing that I would not be renewing the contract, and thirty days later the matter would be resolved. And so it now is. I've been holding my breath, and my blog posts, until I knew it to be so.

To make the press's transition -- whatever it ends up being -- a little easier on Neal, I'm accepting author copies in lieu of royalties owed. So I'll have enough stock to keep my commitments to my Kickstarter backers, a few copies to hoard for my kids, and maybe some extras to sell. We'll see.

Meanwhile, Amazon and the other online booksellers still have a few copies in stock. If you've been meaning to buy a copy, it would be a great kindness to me to help them clear their shelves. The more obvious it is that nobody has a claim on the rights but me, the easier it'll be to find a new publisher.

For me, this is actually a good development. Dark Quest Books was not in a position to help me put the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award to work to bring the book to a larger audience. It's one thing to end a contract with a press that shows every sign of having reached the end of its run, and another to ditch a publisher the minute your book wins an award and before the publisher has a chance to benefit with you. The latter ranges somewhere between tacky and unethical, depending on whom you ask; the former can be a mercy and a kindness.

Tales from Rugosa Coven is a single-author collection of novellas by a writer who, until August 3rd of 2015, had not yet proven herself. No big publisher would have taken such a book. For a major imprint, that would have been an insane business decision. The book only got into the position of outliving its press because there was a publisher who took a chance on it in the first place. I'll always be grateful to Neal Levin. Whatever happens with Dark Quest, it's the publisher of record on the Mythopoeic Society's award pages. I'm really happy about that.

Now that the Rugosa book has its award, some larger press will want it.

Not every imprint will have a slot in its line-up that makes sense for a reprint single-author collection of contemporary fantasy novellas. Even presses and imprints that would have such a spot might not have one in a time frame that makes sense for me.

Here's the thing, though: a spot in a publisher's line-up is a little like a spot in a parking lot. You don't need the whole lot to be empty. It's nice when you have a choice of good spaces, but ultimately, your one book can only take up one spot at a time. So, as long as the contract terms are fair and appropriate, you only need one.

The book is far, far from saturating its market. If my information's current, Rugosa only ever sold something on the order of 300 copies, including ebooks. Dark Quest started contracting before I'd even won the award. And considering how many people have begged me to tell them there will be more Rugosa Coven stories, it probably helps that I'm actively working on a sequel.

I'm optimistic -- and, now that things are official enough for me to make this announcement, immensely relieved.

I'd spent the last couple of days stalled out $600 short of the interior illustration stretch goal. For every new backer I gained (mostly friends and relatives helping me rush for that milestone), I lost another one (all people I didn't know who may have pledged because of the illustrations that were starting to look so unlikely).

I despaired. I found peace. I posted on Facebook about finding peace and then promptly despaired again.

(It's silly to despair. The book, the cover art, and the audiobook will definitely happen. They will all be awesome. What business do I have despairing when I get to make so much happen with -- I remind myself -- other people's money?)

When Jeff Mach, he of the 87,000 Facebook followers, offered to do some signal boost in the morning, I got all hopeful again and posted the project's link one more time.

Three stalwart friends rushed to pledge, outweighing the one illustration fan who defected.

Now we've got 12 hours to raise $440.

The pledge level that's attracted the most backers is $25. If 18 more people did that, we'd hit the current target.

While I wait out the suspense, I'm going to go look at Kate Baylay's sketch for the cover art. We made this possible. You guys made this possible. We'll get to see this one in color:

The World Fantasy Convention went beautifully for me. It had its logistical quirks, including its now-justly-internet-notorious lack of ramps for wheelchair-using panelists, but I accomplished almost everything there that I hoped to. John O'Neill has asked me to write a convention report for Black Gate, so I'll tell more there.

Meanwhile, check this out:

Tim Dodge, who hosts the Geek Side of Life podcast, recorded several panels at Balticon back in May. I got the chance to listen to the two I'm on, and they came out very well. You can find many more at his site.

Reading as a Writer
With Hugh O'Donnell, Mark Van Name, and Bugsy Bryant
There are some useful bits here about reading strategies for building fiction skill sets that don't come easy to us, as well as a long bit about reading mainstream literary classics as a writer of genre fiction.

What Can We Learn from Bad Writing?
With Alessia Brio, Meria Crawford, and Judi Fleming
This conversation developed a lovely, generous spirit -- given the title, it could have turned out to be a real snarkfest, but I'm proud and happy to have been part of what it became instead. We ended up with a long movement about rough drafts and juvenilia, and what writers at all stages of skill can learn from reading their own bad writing on the way to writing better.

I just posted my latest Kickstarter update. The short version: I changed the order of the stretch goals to put the easiest ones early (audiobook, black and white interior illustrations), then combined the two hardest into one (color interior illustrations and offset printing), and accepted that the hard ones almost  probably won't happen. Now I can stop putting energy into overthinking ways to reach the stretch goals, and concentrate on the basic goal, which is not a done deal yet.

Initially I included hardcover printing as a stretch goal, but it never really made financial sense, so I've cut it entirely. If you're one of the people who liked to imagine that for me, thank you for your kind thoughts. One day there will be a book like that. Just not this time.

I just got Betsy Mitchell's developmental and line edit of the manuscript. Her editing letter starts like this:

"The Imlen Bastard" was a delight! Thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to work on it. It’s very clean; I sprinkled some notes throughout but there’s nothing major to concern you. I can predict, though, that people are going to be looking for more of this story.... I almost growled when I realized there was no more.

One of the great things this means is that I'll be able to post an excerpt on my Kickstarter page later tonight!

A lot of you have been asking for an excerpt. I wanted to wait until I'd heard back from my editor first, so I knew I'd be able to find a passage that wouldn't change much before it went to press. Now I know I can give you the opening two or three scenes with just a minor brushing up.

All the minor glitches Betsy spotted in the manuscript would normally take a day or two to fix. Because Kickstarter outreach is my main daily task right now, the fixes will probably take a little longer.

Another wonderful implication of Betsy's feedback is that the manuscript itself should be ready to go to the book designer as soon as the artwork is ready to go with it.

Before launching this campaign, I made a list of known potential delays, mostly to satisfy my own curiosity. The first of these -- I worried that Betsy's schedule might be too full to take the manuscript before the winter holidays -- is crossed off as of today. The next one is my job to rule out.