Author: stephen

A few things in the news lately have got me thinking about the first books I read by Isaac Asimov – Caves of Steel, and its sequel, The Naked Sun.

In those books, there are two distinct cultures, that of Earth and that of Earth?s former colonies and superiors. The Earther culture is a low-automation, hardworking culture where technology is feared. Earthers are dirty, poor, and live in domes because they?ve become afraid of the great outdoors.

The spacer culture is one of grand wealth, and a strong embrace of the benefits of technology. The population is sparse, it?s uncommon for two people to be in the same house, nevermind touching each other. As such, even reproduction is a controlled, scientific event.

So what in the news brought this all to mind (books written in the 1950s, read in the 1970s)? There have been a few news stories recently that point towards the obsolescence of humans: McDonalds and Wendy?s are planning robotic stores; Amazon has discovered that replacing warehouse workers with robots saves time, space and money; an AI wrote a movie script; Truckers are worried what autonomous trucks will do to their livelihood, and the insurance industry can?t figure out how self-driving cars will impact your insurance premium (Who?s liable if there?s an accident, but no one is driving?)

Decades ago, I heard an old joke about how the computer industry compared itself to the car industry and GM?s rebuttal. It?s all urban myth, there never was such an exchange. But now we?re getting closer to cars made by software designers (google for one) maybe we should look at those two perspectives:

a) If Microsoft made cars, they?d get 1,000 mpg, and cost only $25.00 claims one side.
b) If Microsoft made cars, they?d crash twice a day, claims the other.

So there?s a couple of threads here, beyond the idea that computerized cars will be more self-sufficient. Apparently computerized transmissions are only now becoming as efficient as a well-trained manual transmission driver. So let?s set that aside.

So how do you insure self-driving cars? Can a passenger be liable for the car?s behaviour? Is the manufacturer liable? If the roads are safer, and accidents eliminated, how many insurance agents do we need? Or how much woud each make if they work on commission of policy sold?

Of course, Uber is one of the leading manufacturers working on self-driving cars, with its sites clearly on the taxi industry. It?s already testing cars in Pittsburgh.

Will self-driving trucks kill 3.5 milllion jobs n the US? The average truck driver makes $40,000 per annum. Retrofitting his truck to making it self-driving would take a one-off payment of $30,000. Human drivers are limited in the number of hours they can drive (the truck sits idle), so an autonomous truck could replace more than one driver and pay for itself in less than a year. According to the Guardian:

Mining giant Rio Tinto already uses 45 240-ton driverless trucks to move iron ore in two Australian mines, saying it is cheaper and safer than using human drivers.

in April, multiple convoys of trucks drove themselves from countries such as Sweden and Germany all the way to Rotterdam, Holland.

So what if each warehouse, distribution point, etc just needs to keep a few drivers around, to take over for the robots once the truck is in the yard. The modern-day ?Harbour pilots? would never have to go off property (and technically wouldn?t need a driver?s license, although insurance might demand that). That might spare a few thousand jobs, but not likely. Probably even that part of the trip could be automated.

Truck drivers are quickly becoming obsolete. I remember late night infomercials about how easy it was to attend Truck Driving School and get a lifelong career. Not any more.

Other workers are at risk too, McDonald?s and Wendy?s have reacted to new laws pushing the minimum wage to $15/hour by starting plans to convert restaurants to automated shops. In Wendy?s cases, it appears to only be the front-of-shop workers who are affected, not the cooks (yet). McDonald?s is going deeper into automation with the whole restaurant affected.

Amazon?s warehouses have been the subject of a number of journalists? exposés. Well, Amazon may have the perfect answer to the problem of their warehouse jobs not being fulfilling enough, or safe, in some cases). No more humans in the warehouse. Amazon has been leading the charge for delivery by drone (there goes the UPS jobs).

Now they?re starting to automate their warehouses, to great benefit for both the company and the consumer. With robots being four to five times faster than humans in fulfilling orders. Also, robots don?t need the aisles to be as wide, allowing for more rows of shelves.

?In theory self-driving cars would not create negligence liability for the passenger/non-driver/owner of the car.? Forbes quotes Marc Mayerson, a Georgetown professor and lawyer. ?One model would be to have the car manufacturer bear all the liability and impose that liability simply based on the autonomous car?s being a substantial cause of the injury,?

Where does this all lead, and why does it make me think of Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun? Those two books showed the eventual outcome of the two paths open to us. We could ban technology, preserve jobs for humans, or we could embrace technology as the great liberator.

For the first to work, we need to rethink our laws, redefine our society to protect jobs. We didn?t do it for bank employees when ATMs came along. We didn?t do it for the autoworkers when robotic assembly lines came along. So we probably won?t do it now for the other working classes.

For the second to work, everyone needs to be able to live, even as jobs disappear, and economies re-align. This could mean a guaranteed minimum income – something that has been trialled in under-developed countries and is now being experimented with in Canada.

The problem with this is it only works if it isn?t sabotaged. A guaranteed income can?t mean a rise in basic food necessities, or rent. It can?t mean that corporations (who already don?t pay their share of taxes) can push pricing higher because they seen wealth to collect. It means that people who have had easy lives – middle class and up ? may have to face some self-less decisions or face the consequences of armed, angry, unemployed masses.

A year ago I would have told you that I can?t write short fiction, that I need to write stories in the 100,000 word range (about a 350 page novel).

That was then, this is now.

A year ago, I was in a bad place, psychologically. I?d torn a tendon in my shoulder. I could barely type. I had a novel sitting at 123,000 words, feeling so close to done, and yet so far. I didn?t type anything for two months. By the time I could type again the universe of that long story had slipped a bit from my grasp, and trying to write inside it felt awkward and embarrassing, like I was intruding. I?m still struggling to get back into that universe.

I needed a change. So I looked at a list of story ideas that I?d been hoarding; Things I?d get around to some day. One in particular bugged me. It should be a hard science fiction story, something that could almost actually happen, maybe even today (Not quite, but it does involve DragonX and the international Space Station, so really grounded in modern science and engineering). But I wasn?t technically literate enough to write the story, not and get all the facts down in a believable form. I had specs, layouts, technical info that i could find? It made the whole story an unenjoyable project.

Then, while I was laid up, i read a book called Red Shirts by John Scalzi. It mocks Star Trek greatly, is self-aware, and does something magical – it ignores all technical issues. It just excises them from the story. How do our heroes travel back in time to modern Earth to re-write the myth they?re trapped in? Who knows. That just gets ignored. One minute they?re living in their time, the next they?re here, with us.

Holy Shit! You can tell a good story without technical detail!

I sat down and wrote the story I wanted to tell. It didn?t come out in one sitting, it took about a week for three rounds of revisions before it was ready. At 4,000 words it was one of the shortest stories I?d ever written. So I sent it to Tor, the largest publisher of science fiction. They can take four to six months to reject your story (That?s how I thought about it, how long until they reject it. Not how long until they accept it). It took them seven months to reject it. However, the rejection letter was not a simple templated rejection. It contained advice about some edits, and it contained massive encouragement, ?this is a good story. Keep sending it out and it will find a good home.?

Somebody liked it. Apparently not enough somebodies for it to get published, but somebody at Tor liked it. I took that as a win, and submitted it to some other publishers. Form rejection (A ?dear john? for writers) and form rejection again.

I?ve got the story out to a fourth publisher, another one that I?d be proud to have as a writing credit. They?ve had the story for four months. I queried them to see if they?d read it yet. Nope. They need another two months before they?ll even read it. Sigh.

In the mean time, the praise in the Tor rejection letter gave me confidence to try my hand at a few other ideas that had been bouncing around in my head. I wrote six 100-word stories and sent them to SpeckLit. They bought four.

I started writing other short pieces, some drawn from my slush list, some new ideas. A couple of those are now out to publishers. Every time I finished a short story I had this sense of both amazement that i?ve told the story in the space that I have, and a fear that I might never write another short story again.

Lately I?ve been having a bit of a creative boost. I wrote three short stories recently that I?m very proud of*. I already know where I?ll try to get them published. Hopefully they?ll find good homes. But even better, I have eight story stems – the first thoughts for eight more stories.

Best of all, I?m back in my novel, making it tighter, and making the middle darker and more foreboding.

???
*I?ve also written two short stories that I?ll burn before anyone else ever reads them – bad, bad, bad!

Long-Term Storage was the third of my four drabbles published on the site SpeckLit in 2015. It?s only 100 words long (that?s what ?drabble? means, apparently). The story is about how a group of humans flee extinction by flying into a blackhole. Please read it before continuing (contractually, I can?t post it here yet).

How on Earth does one come up with a story idea like that?

Here?s how?

One activity that I find helps my creativity a lot is swimming. I happen to live in a very warm climate: Kuala Lumpur is only three degrees north of the equator. There was a span, back in August, when I would often find honey bees floating, and probably drowning, in the pool.

There are always a lot of leaves floating in the pool too, so finding one to get under the bee and place the bee on land was usually easy to do. Usually. Except for the bee that immediately flew back into the water.

Yeah, that puzzled me. I got it back out, and this time it stayed. But our pool has gutters that are full of shallow water just as good as the pool?s. Why would bees go for the deep?

It got me thinking, but I didn?t have a specific story out of that incident particularly.

Then I read an article about Stephen Hawking?s new claims about blackholes*. They can store and preserve information, he hypothesizes.

Now I had a story idea and a bee puzzle. Was there some thing more in the pool that the bee was trying to get? What if technical information could be stored in a blackhole for future purposes? What if a race more advanced than us hid information in a blackhole? What if whichever species could retrieve it would gain some advantage over all others?

Maybe bees were trying to gain some information from the pool. Maybe they felt it was worth the risk?

The first draft of my story was over three hundred words (first drafts are always long) and threw you blindly into the middle of the scene – a captain asking what went wrong. The ship, attempting to glean information from the accretion disc of a blackhole had mysteriously bounced out, back to safe space. Was this a fluke of physics or a superior intelligence intervening – had someone scooped the bee out of the pool?

The only way to know was to try again and see if you got the same result. So the bee goes back into the pool. So the crew heads back in, to either die or gain prof of superior intelligence.

That was ?Honey Bees and Blackholes? but I didn?t like it – too much symbolism and layering for a mere 100 words to carry effectively. So I changed the premise, but not the locale. On the edge of a blackhole, a ship full of humans are about to try to touch the accretion disc, to meet the retrievable information, this time not with the intent of stealing info, but with the intent to join it, to find refuge from some great evil that was pursuing them.

And thus, ?Long-Term Storage.?

*I can?t find the original article, but this one appears to cover the same ground.

The hardest part of being a writer is finding the time to do a good job of it. Writing is much more than putting words down. It?s editing, it?s revising, it?s adding the details that make a story vivid, it?s removing the details that clutter a story. And it’s thinking.

Every storyteller wants to be a full-time storyteller, whether they?re in it for the love of stories or for the money. Those of us who are in it for the love of storytelling face the reality that if money doesn?t flow from it, writing will never get to be more than a hobby. For most of us, writing is our second, part-time job. What we want to do is reverse that so that it?s our full-time job and the other job becomes our second, part-time job, at least as an intermediate step toward becoming self-sustaining writers.

You?ve written your book. You?ve followed all of the advice that any new writer gets – both self- and traditional publish wannabes – and had it edited, beta-read and generally polished to within an inch of perfection. As well as years of your time, you?ve spent at least $1,000 with edits and revisions. So how do you get to that next level, being a full-time story-teller?

Well, there are two paths, two schools of thought – roughly categorized as traditional publishing and self-publishing.

Recently, literary agent Janet Reid was asked why well-established writers don?t self-publish if to do so means making more money per book sold. She had an interesting answer, but possibly not the best answer if applied to new authors.  Janet starts from the top-selling author perspective (as did the questioner, so that?s fair) and throws around numbers like $10 million, then shows that it?s not cost effective for such a writer to self-publish.

I?m not sure I agree with her math (I think she over-emphasizes opportunity cost and downplays rate of return), but will bow to her expertise there, so let?s accept that as given for the superstar authors like Stephen King.

But what about the little guy, the first-time author? What works best here?

Do you know how much a first-time author makes from a full-length book (90,000-120,000 words) published through a traditional publisher? The answer isn?t as much as you?d expect. Most first-time authors get ?advances? of around US$5,000. For each copy of the book that sells, the author gets between ten and fifteen percent of the cover price (with first-timers getting the lower end of that scale). Think about that – you spent $15 on a book. The author gets $1.50, slightly more if it?s not their first book.

Now, this isn?t on top of the original $5,000. No, the publisher keeps tabs, deducting the $1.50 from the $5,000 advance until the total crosses zero (this is called ?paying out the advance,? something that most books don?t do). Then, and only then, does the author get any money from each additional book sold (after selling the first 3,334 approximately).

Wait, wait, I forgot the author?s agent?s cut. A typical agent gets 15% of the author?s take, so the advance is reduced from $5,000 to $4,250 once the author finally gets it. The agent would also get 22.5 cents on $1.50 after the advance paid out, taking the author?s per book haul down to $1.275 per book sold from then on.

Can you live on that? Is that enough for you to be able to transition your full-time job down to part-time?

No. Of course not.

Please note that publishers aren?t going to publish more than one of your books a year – more likely one every two years at the beginning. They want time to judge how well your books sell and if they should continue working with you (The submission cycle: from author submission of completed manuscript to the book actually in stores is 8-10 months, cumulative sales figures [returns] is another six months. Then the process for book two begins, if your publisher still loves you) So $4,250 is all you?ll see for at least one year, maybe ever.

You can help your publisher (you will be expected to help) by marketing your book – publicity appearances on websites, podcasts, TV and radio if you?re luck, travel to conventions (either try to get on panels or have a booth for book signings), etc – all out of your own pocket. How far is that $4,250 going now?

What does the publisher give in return for their 85-90% take on the cover price? Printing, distribution, hopefully a good edit and a cover that you may or may not like, but you?ll have no say over (also, publishers can change the name of your book against your will). If your publisher?s sales reps love your book, they may push it hard on bookstores, but a first book probably won?t get much attention from either the publisher?s reps or the stores.

Let?s compare to self-publishing.

A good cover is going to cost you upwards of $500, including typography and layout/design. There are stock covers that you can buy for much less, but you may not be the only one using that cover. You want a unique cover. Ebooks only need to be created once, and there are many websites that will help you format a word.doc into an epub or mobi file (Scrivener, which is an indispensible $45 authoring suite, will also do this for you).

First off, you won?t be in physical bookstores, even if you have a physical book made through CreateSpace or Smashwords. So your market is smaller, but not by much. Amazon will be your main base, with other places, like SmashWords and Apple’s iBooks, adding a bit of coverage.

Amazon, by far the largest bookstore in any country and in the world, allows you to sell your self-published works in return for a percentage of the sale. As long as your book?s price stays above 99 cents, you retain 70% of the cover price.

So your hypothetical $15 traditionally published first novel is self-published on Amazon instead, at a cover price of $5.99 ($7.99, $5.99, $3.99 and $2.99 are all common prices). Seventy percent of $5.99 is $4.19 – that?s what you take home from each book sold. Not $1.27. If you were able to sell that same 3,334 books, you would bring home $13,979.46 instead of $4,250.

Now that?s a big if. Many self-published books sell less than one hundred copies (so do many traditionally published books, however the trad author keeps their $4,250 advance.) To get to those sale numbers, you?ll need to make publicity appearances on websites, podcasts ? everything you?d need to do if you?re traditionally published.

You?ll also need the things you control (quality of writing, cover) and intangibles that you don?t – people finding, liking, and giving positive reviews to your book. But that?s also the same for traditional publishing.

It?s not a lot more work on your part, but the take home is almost $10,000 higher for the same sales.

Also, Amazon doesn?t care how often you publish (but you should care – quality is key, and quality takes time). Some authors publish four or six books a year (I couldn?t do that, again, the quality issue comes into play for me).

So if a self-published author can achieve the same level of sales as a first-time traditionally published author, but can publish two books a year, said author should be making around $28,000 a year. Is that enough to switch your careers around, make writing full-time and your other job part-time? Maybe, that depends on how you’ve structured your life.

But, if you can do that, then perhaps you can redefine your life so that your part-time job is marketing your books, and your full-time job is writing them. You still have two jobs, but only one combined paycheque. This may be idealistic (some may say naive), but it?s something to aim for, or at least think about.

Responses?

There is a branch of fiction writing that is getting more and more popular: Flash Fiction. These are complete stories written to a predetermined length. This length can be quite short (6 words) or quite long (600 words), but most Flash Fiction is 100 words – exactly, no more, no less (well, sometimes less).

Lately I’ve been exploring the challenges of writing a complete story to such a short length. I’ve submitted a few to contests, and even submitted one for professional publication (but I can’t show that one here).

Here are links to a few of my 100 word stories:

Shakespeare’s Last Stand

Fortunate Waze

Uncertainty Persists

Toto Was Wrong

I grew up in Canada with the firm belief that borders were sacrosanct. You couldn?t treat them lightly. Then I moved to Africa? Namibia, specifically. My teaching post was about 10 kilometres south of the Angolan border.

The first friday that I was there, I got taken out drinking by my co-workers. We went to a shebeen (bar) in the middle of a forest, about halfway between our school and the Angolan border. There we met up with a larger group, including one very friendly giant of a man (I?ve lost his name now, sorry). On his arm was a scar from a recent cut of some kind, a very long and thin cut, as if from a knife.

He offered to smuggle me into the country to see where his friend had been killed by Angolan police

He told me that he stole cars for a living and that he could get one for me if I wanted.

Then he started on a long story about how his friend had died recently, just across the border. He offered to smuggle me into the country to see where his friend had been killed by Angolan police — right then. The border between Angola and Namibia isn’t open at night, and even if it was, my passport was safely locked away somewhere else.

He wasn’t going to listen to my objections, telling me that he would smuggle me across the border and not to worry. At the time this challenged my sense of propriety on a number of levels. You can?t just walk across a border. Also, he was pretty drunk – they all were. I was desperately holding on to sobriety so that I could drive us all home, if i could figure out where that was.

I guess I objected enough, as eventually he got bored of the topic and  moved on. Later, I did get us all home, but not without some ?fun? as the passengers kept grabbing the stick shift, trying to change gears on me.

A few months later I learned just how insecure the border between those two countries actually is. There?s a river called Kunene that runs through Angola and into Namibia at a scenic waterfall called Ruacana. The river then takes a sharp right and becomes the boarder between the two countries.

You walk through a hole in a small fence, and voila, you?re in another country.

The base of the waterfall, the Namibia side of the border, is infested with crocodiles. At the top of the falls there are some nice swimming holes. This is the Angola side. You walk through a hole in a small fence, and voila, you?re in another country. They even put a nice marker there for you to see. We all took our pictures at the marker, mine is above.

I think we went there four or five times in my two years in Namibia, not once worrying about entering Angola without our passports or permission. Further west, it?s not uncommon for people to wander across the border, as families often live divided by it. There may or may not be a police officer sitting at a table under a tree. If there is, you?re expected to check in, otherwise, carry on.

Near the end of my time in Namibia, i did some white water rafting on the lower Kunene River (crocs don?t live near rapids). Our hosts thought it?d be a cool experience for us to have lunch on the Angolan side. We were all ?phfft, been there.? They were disappointed.

Oddly enough, even though I was still hung up on borders when I arrived in Namibia, I?d crossed into a country ?illegally? once before. I walked into North Korea. It?s not hard to do, and relatively safe, as long as you do it properly.  Panmunjom is a small, deserted town on the border between what is now North and South Korea. During the Korean War, it was the location of a number of talks that lead to the signing of a ceasefire agreement (but not a peace treaty, it must be noted).

The building where these talks were held was arranged so that half of it is in each country. The main negotiating room is likewise set up, with small flags on the table demarcating the border between these two less-than-friendly nations. I?ve been in that room, and I?ve walked around that table, putting me in North Korea for perhaps a grand total of two minutes.

Later in my travels around southern Africa, I spent some time in Zimbabwe, visiting the beautiful Victoria Falls. Like the Kunene river, the falls starts in one country (Zambia) and ends in another (Zimbabwe). It also then becomes the border between the two. In this case, the river has cut a deep gorge and crossing it means walking a large bridge. So we did. At the other side, there?s a very typical guard hut and gate, but no guard.

So we walked in?

? About 20 metres before a guard opened the door of an outhouse, shouting at us to get back to the gate and wait for him. So we walked back, and kept walking across the bridge back to the Zim side.

The funny thing is, while considering writing this, I remembered that years ago I?d seen a tv show called TV Nation, and in it, Michael Moore had demonstrated just how insecure the Canada/USA border was by having a hockey team roller blade across the border. I?d forgotten about that until just now. Fortunately YouTube remembers it, and you can watch the clip below.