“Apocalypse Sex” Now Available

[amazon-product align="right" bgcolor="#99CCCC" height="240" width="120" frameborder="1"]B003QP4F0W[/amazon-product] Circlet Press’s new anthology, Apocalypse Sex, is now available on Amazon and Smashwords. It contains a new and improved version my novelette Buried Alive In The Blues, which some of you may remember from its appearance on Erotica A La Carte last year. Now you can take it anywhere with you on your handy-dandy e-reader!

Don’t delay — read for yourself the story of the woman who loved the Blues so much that, when the world ended, it was the only thing she still wanted.

Me? I think I’m going to go celebrate. Where is that Leadbelly album?

Principles of Contracts: The Narrowness Principle

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Previous Chapter: The Third Cousins Rule
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“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.” Matthew 7:13, NIV

Seldom, if ever, have the words above been truer than when negotiating a contract. In a contract, the narrower your wording, the better off you are. Why? Because (with a few exceptions which I’ll get to later) you cannot be obligated to actions that are not specified in the contract – and neither can the other party.

As we learned in The Third Cousins Rule, a well-written contract will define terms to minimize confusion.

This is its chief corollary: It’s not enough to define your terms, you must also be careful to use the correct terms. Doing so is one of the key things that makes a difference between an artist who makes a living off her work, and one who perpetually gets taken for granted.
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Back in the Podcasting Saddle with Guns

Those of you following the Balticon and Contracts series on the blog have probably been wondering where the hell I’ve been – and those of you following the podcasts are really wondering.

Well, I’ve been writing and producing an album. Wish there was a sexier answer, but there it is. And it is fun

I’m going on pod later today to record some special episodes – one will contain Down From Ten bloopers!

The other one is the occasion for the post. I’m going to be recording a special episode about guns. Particularly, about how to deal with guns in fiction, geared for people who don’t have extensive first-hand experience with them. I’m going to be covering vocabulary, safety, different types of firearms, popular myths that come from movies, and other stuff that can shoot your credibility in the foot. To this end, if you have questions, please post them to the comments here, so I can be sure to answer them.

See you on pod soon! And fear not. The Balticon Adventure and Principles of Contracts both return next week.

The Balticon Adventure pt 4

The Saga Of The Hat

At this point in the narrative, I’m forced to chose between one of two roads. I could go along the chronology, skipping the boring and blackmail-worthy parts along the way, or I could chose a theme and tell its story…or I could jump back and forth between each as my fancy strikes me.

Guess which one I’ve picked?

It wasn’t until my appearance on Litopia last December that I began to realize the Power of the Hat ™. First, there was the encounter I recounted last time with Kim the Comic Book Goddess (who insists she’d have recognized me without the hat, but I have my doubts). Then there was the fact that Scott Roche and Sidfawu accosted me based solely upon the Power of the Hat, and we wound up sitting in the bar for several hours on Friday night talking Down From Ten, writing, and what passes for politics in my demented corner of the universe.

But before all that boring stuff, you’ll want to hear The Good Parts.
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The Great Ass-Moving Experiment

As a writer, like most writers, I have one giant terror point. For some people it’s the writing. For some people it’s showing your work to friends, or to strangers. For some people it’s marketing in general. For me, it’s marketing fiction to editors. I don’t have a problem with nonfiction (as my bibliography demonstrates), but when it comes to the giant black box world of terror there’s very little that can beat marketing fiction to New York.

It’s scared me since I was 12, when I read Writer’s Digest religiously at the library every day (which, in retrospect, was my first mistake). To my twelve year old mind, it described a world full of arcane rituals, secret handshakes, nepotism, and strange protocols – and a game at which nobody made a dime to boot.

Of course, I’ve learned better in the meantime, but the terror never quite went away. For years I’ve coped by doing other things I needed to do anyway in order to go pro – focusing on craft, learning to network at cons, podcasting and learning about how to interact with an audience, building my platform, and romancing the occasional agent, but I’ve hit the point in my career where I’ve got a hell of a backlist piling up (at least, for someone at my point in their career), and a handful of fiction sales that prove that my terror (which is largely born of the sense that I don’t understand a goddamn thing about the fiction publishing culture) is well past the point of being about 75% bullshit.
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The Balticon Adventure pt 3

Scuba Gear

I normally travel with carry-on baggage only, but it’s not because by the end of a plane ride there’s nothing that gives me greater relief from coach seat-cramp syndrome and DVT than sitting down in another small seat in a moving vehicle. Nor is it that the prospect of walking around an unfamiliar building filled with carousels from deSade’s worst dreams fills me with nauseating dread.
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The Balticon Adventure pt 2

Air Trek

I’ve often suspected that “JetBlue” is so named because of the color your legs turn in coach. Turns out that, like so many other things in the universe, I was completely wrong. They had more leg room than I’ve experienced on any flight in years – so much that I didn’t even get bruises on my knees from the seat in front. All this for the cheapest available tickets? Luxury, I say!

They also had personal televisions mounted in the back of each seat, ostensibly piping in Sat TV for our viewing pleasure. It was a special kind of SatTV, though, one designed to be suitable for children. Attempting to watch the G-rated cut of Fight Club was probably the most surreal experience of the entire weekend (which, in any weekend that contains people like Tee Morris, is saying a lot).
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The Balticon Adventure pt 1

The Trek

As a die-hard Monopoly fan I found the notion of Balticon rather tawdry. Baltic Ave is one of the two smallest, cheapest properties on the board – of course, wielded well, that little dark purple property set can leverage the whole game. Any con named after Baltic must be a chintzy affair – or it’s named after the Baltic Sea, in which case I was unlikely to pack enough SCUBA equipment to properly enjoy the experience (ironically, SCUBA gear did turn out to be a terrible omission, but more on that in a later post).

On the other hand, there is BALTICON, which the podcastery part of my brain expected to be the grand land of golden microphones forcibly pried from the fingers of Rush Limbaugh and re-purposed for nobler ends, filled to bursting with legions of immortal vocal talents, new media devotees, boundless opportunity, and rampant hedonism.
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