X. Ho Yen's Author Newsletter (16 Jan 2023)
Greetings Dear Subscribers to X.HoYen's Author Newsletter,
* HNY & HCRD 2023
* Work-in-progress
* SFWA
* On the SelfMades of MSD
* Current reading
* The standard stuff
============ HNY & HCRD 2023 ============
I wish you ee gudde Rutsch an d'neit Joer, which in Luxembourg means “a good slide into the new year”. I’ll be using that phrase in Custodians of the Future, which features Luxembourgians! (it’s actually Luxembourgers, but some members of Janitor Squad 18819-FUJ suffer from mumpsimus!)
Also, Happy Civil Rights Day. Cherish it while it lasts.
How are you? Any news? Send me a note!
============ Work-in-progress ============
Work progresses on CotF. I’m past 22k words in the first draft. When I was writing Minimum Safe Distance, it took me years to crawl my way through minefields of self-doubt and basic crafting. For CotF it only took a couple of months after I returned to it after self-publishing MSD in Oct ‘22 — I had some experience to draw upon, and this time I was armed with a mine detector. I’m moving forward, and having fun with it. :)
It’s an interesting process. In the writing world there’s this myth that you either write by the seat of your pants (a ‘pantser’) or you carefully plot everything out before writing (a ‘plotter’). Standard either-or thinking, I’m sorry to say. But I believe every writer is a bit of both, it just comes down to how much of the plotting process has already been internalized, to what extent a writer trusts him/herself to fix problems after the draft is written, and to what extent your story is formulaic.
I was very much a plotter before, but now I’m able to do that trust thing. What I’ve learned is that the “how to be a writer” resources out on the interwebs are heavily geared toward formulaic writing. But I’ve seen that genre fiction simply does not have to follow stereotypical formula. It’s called a novel for a reason. I imagine this is somewhat akin to what musicians talk about with Jazz. Yes, as you can see, I still have haughty ambitions to something more. But I’m unable to think in terms of quilting tropes together the way so many other writers can, so I can’t compete with them anyway, and don’t wish to. I guess we’ll see how it goes!
I also used to actively erase my internal whiteboard whenever new ideas sprang to mind unrelated to my active project. I saw new ideas as distraction. But I’m no longer doing that. Now I just need to gain the discipline to record them for possible use later. :)
CotF will be very different from MSD. I’m working hard to get back in touch with my sense of humor. Yes, it’s sarcastic and sardonic, but there’s an audience for that, even in pop realms — 1997’s “Daria” and 2013’s “Rick and Morty” are fine examples. I’m sure there are many more.
============ SFWA ============
The launch of Minimum Safe Distance resulted in over a Ben Franklin in royalties within two months, and someone out there gave it 5 Stars (without a review). I can only hope that was an honest 5 Stars, but I’ll take it! Thank you all again!
Reaching that modest threshold allowed me to become a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), the group that does the Nebula Awards. It does many other things for authors, and opened membership to self-published authors only a few years ago.
Apparently, there are many indie writers out there who do the wrong things and don’t make a hundred bucks in royalties. Poor quality, unedited, formulaic writing, poor quality book covers, weak audience outreach, and lazy deployment seem to be common among indie writers, otherwise a Ben Franklin would not be SFWA’s membership threshold, I assume. (I’ve seen bad self-published stuff myself.) And maybe they don’t have such a great gang of ultrasupporters, either.
Last night I attended my first SFWA event via Zoom. It’s like a support group! It helped me continue the day’s research and socialize a bit with fellow authors. It also gave me an opportunity to help a fellow author with some Planetary Science — he’s working on something related to terraforming Mars and needed an introduction to planetary equilibrium temperature calculation and the topic of continuous atmospheric loss.
============ On the SelfMades of MSD ============
One of the several daring moves I made with MSD was to have the establishing chapters for the SelfMades be daunting in the way the SelfMades would be daunting. Their thoughts are long and complex, and it’s intentional that the reader experiences that directly. But it’s only in the establishing chapters, which also do a lot of the worldbuilding. One can’t impose too much of a burden on the reader, of course.
I don’t know if many readers will notice it, but the only chapter in the book that’s written in first person is one of the SelfMade chapters. This was very intentional, and I actually hope that most readers won’t notice.
As you learn what the SelfMades are, it would be all too easy to dismiss them as “just another AI,” but they are NOT AIs. It would be all too easy to think of them as diminished people, real minds squeezed into machines and thereby reduced to less-than-sentience. But they are not diminished at all, they are enhanced. Those easy assumptions are born of other bad assumptions, like the now completely obsolete notion that “the human brain is fundamentally special and the pinnacle of evolution.”
So I wrote that early SelfMade chapter in the first person in order to make it much easier for the reader to see the SelfMade as people, and much harder to dismiss them as “soulless calculating machines.” There’s a lot of personal reflection in those chapters, even some humor. This is fundamental to the story. MSD is all about stretching one’s idea of personhood while examining our inherited limitations. MSD turns upside down that old “humans are special/the pinnacle of evolution/made-in-god’s-image” conceit.
Work continues on the MSD audiobook. We’re into chapter 21. Some of these daring choices will make the audiobook challenging for some listeners, but that’s the way it is. :)
============ Current reading ============
Last year I tried a sci-fi book that I thought might interest me, but I had to give up on it. Tropes and contrivances are obstacles for me. This one stopped me cold when the writer contrived into existence a sentient race that by nature stupidly throws itself at gunfire like videogame Space Invaders, just to have videogamey combat in the story.
A few days ago I started reading another, “Delta-V” by Daniel Suarez. Right off the bat I have a great feeling about this one.
============ The standard stuff ============
Here’s a printable, one-page ad for MSD if anyone has a nice bulletin board/ad column nearby.
All purchase options can be found in the X.HoYen Author Store (https://XHoYenAuthor.com/store) or at GrandUnificationMonastery.com.
You can give Kindle eBooks as gifts: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200652260
Thanks for sticking with me! I hope it’s at least mildly entertaining to watch this author second career thing come together.
Please do share my page with fellow realism-based sci fi fans, especially anyone who enjoyed Weir’s The Martian, Older’s Infomocracy, Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, Mandel’s Station Eleven, or Corey’s The Expanse. I'm convinced Minimum Safe Distance would appeal to the same audience, because I wrote it for me and *I'm* in that audience.
Thanks for your support!
XHY
https://XHoYenAuthor.com