Jason Sanford

The Art of Adam Pizurny

2013-05-16T18:47:00-04:00

Adam Pizurny's illustration for "Heaven's Touch"

As an author, there are two big fringe benefits to having your stories reprinted around the world—you get to meet new readers, and you discover new and exciting artists when they illustrate your work.

Illustration for Allen M. Steele's "The Emperor of Mars"

Adam Pizurny is a Czech artist living in Prague and he illustrates stories for the magazine XB-1. I love Adam's black and white illustrations, which are designed to fit in a single vertical column of the magazine. At right is his take on my story "Heaven's Touch," which appeared in the April 2013 issue of XB-1. The story focuses on a stranded astronaut whose space suit is infected—or haunted, if you will—by the ghost-like proxy of her dead crewmate. I think Adam did an amazing job capturing the essence of the story.

Another of his illustrations I really like is for Allen M. Steele "The Emperor of Mars." The space-suited face is what draws me to this illustration. The art both tells the story of what is happening and draws the reader deeper into Steele's story.

As you can imagine, Adam is a big fan of science fiction, and says he has loved the genre since childhood. Other samples of his XB-1 art you should check out includes illustrations for Nina Allan's "The Silver Wind" and Gregory Benford's "Immersion."

Adam doesn't only do black and white illustrations. He works full time in graphic design and has a long list of impressive design and illustration credits, including music art, movie posters, and advertising murals. You can check out more of his illustrations here.

Do authors' obsessions with daily word counts result in bad stories?

2013-05-08T18:21:00-04:00

A few years ago I wrote about how long it took me to write a typical short story. Long story short (I know, bad joke) I'm a slow writer, taking around 20 hours to create a 5,000-word short story. I continually write and rewrite and edit, these different creative aspects of fiction writing merging and mingling until I often do all three within seconds of each other. But as that post also makes clear, other writers have different processes. For example, John Scalzi stated that with "20 hours of butt in chair, I wrote and did the initial edit of 'The God Engines,' which is 30,000 words."

Since that post, my glacial pace has not increased or slowed. But compared to other writers, I might as well be literally turning into a giant hunk of ice. I mean, it sometimes seems like every author I know tweets or posts Facebook updates about how many words they wrote today. 1000 words. 2000. 5000. The other day my Facebook news feed even proclaimed that someone wrote 10,000 words in a single afternoon, which is astounding (or a big lie, or a joke, it's sometimes hard to tell with author's Facebook feeds).

But—be warned, here comes the rant—enough is enough. Come on authors. Stop the bragging. Or if you're going to brag, mention the total fiction writing package, not merely word count. Mention the hours you spend rewriting and editing, or plotting out and contemplating your novel. Mention how you gave up on a story and returned to it three years later.

Don't get me wrong. I've bragged about my word counts before. I also realize word-count crowing is how many writers motive themselves. Hey, I did my 2,000 words for the day! Time to tell the world so I can keep my bonafide author credentials for another 24 hours! But here's the question I'm pondering: Does an obsession on word counts hurt writers more than it motives them?

I mean, cranking out words doesn't matter a bit if your words don't make sense. Or if they're a jumble. Or if you write a 5,000-word digression which takes the reader out of your novel.

Despite this, it's still word counts we authors brag about. In fact, the highest profile fiction writing event each year, National Novel Writing Month, is built around word count alone. They even brag about participating authors writing more than 3.2 billion words in November 2012. The premise behind NaNoWriMo and our obession with producing daily word counts is that cranking out words indicates a productive writer. It's a belief that the hard part of writing is in the initial creative process. Once you bring words into existence, so goes this line if thinking, you can always go back and rewrite to your heart's content.

But what happens if that rewriting never happens?

I've talked to a number of authors in recent years who say they hate rewriting and editing their stories. That's possibly how many authors have always felt, but I also wonder if our obsession on word counts is making new authors believe rewriting isn't as important as the initial spurt of creation. But here's a truth for you—without rewriting and editing, odds are the suck level of your precious story will be rather high. While creating words may be more fun, rewriting is what ensures your story will actually be read by people.

Because when you get down to it, readers don't care how long it took an author to write a story—all they care about is if the story's worth reading. And without rewriting and editing, odds are a story won't be worth much at all.

The Gordian Knot of the Night Shade Books Deal

2013-04-04T19:49:04-04:00

This is a hard post to write. I'm a big fan of the novels published by Night Shade Books, which has published such groundbreaking works as the Hugo and Nebula Award winning The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. However, NSB has a history of not paying their authors on time, a trend which has intensified in recent months as the publishing company came under financial pressure.

A few days ago came word that NSB would be selling their assets — ie, books under contract — to Skyhorse Publishing and Start Publishing LLC. The deal will only go through if a majority of NSB authors agree to the new contract terms for their works.

Unfortunately, it appears the contract is a bad deal for authors, as Michael Stackpole details. You can also view a leaked copy of the contract on Scribd (assuming it isn't deleted in short order).

Night Shade Editor in Chief Jeremy Lassen claims "This is the last chance to make sure all of my authors get paid" and that otherwise these author's contracts will get tied up in bankruptcy for months and years to come. But I wonder about that, and about other aspects of the deal which are now emerging.

Know this — I don't have a dog in this fight, aside from the fact that I'm an author and support the rights of my fellow authors. But the more I learn about the proposed NSB deal the more this seems like a Gordian Knot which simply can't be untied without cutting everything apart.

There are so many unanswered questions. For example, as was posted on the blog Brillig, Jarred Weisfeld is evidently tied in with this deal through the companies trying to purchase NSB assets. However, Jarred also is tied in with a literary agency called Objective Entertainment, which was mentioned in a SFWA Writers' Beware post. That immediately sets off warning bells, as does Michael Stackpole's previously mentioned analysis of the contract.

In my opinion, this asset deal is a way to cherry-pick the NSB's lineup, a view Stackpole shares. And as Stackpole adds, "Skyhorse and Smart are not buying books here, they’re buying Intellectual Properties, and at a bargain price."

The contract terms, and the fact that Objective Entertainment is, if not directly involved at least possibly tied in with the deal, leads me to suspect that the intent is not to publish NSB authors but to have their secondary rights to those books, which could then be sold to anyone and everyone.

Perhaps I'm wrong. But when a deal is so convoluted and non-transparent as this one, who can say. It appears NSB authors are screwed if they agree to this deal, and, since many of them are owed large amounts of money, also screwed if they don't.

Which is a damn shame.

End the Hugo Award 5 percent rule

2013-04-02T06:53:40-04:00

The 2013 Hugo Award nominees have been announced and overall it's a strong list. I'm particularly pleased to see so many authors I know and stories I love make the final ballot.

However, there is one irritation — only three short stories are Hugo finalists in that category, while all the other categories have five finalists. This is due to the Hugo five percent rule, which states

3.8.5: No nominee shall appear on the final Award ballot if it received fewer nominations than five percent (5%) of the number of ballots listing one or more nominations in that category, except that the first three eligible nominees, including any ties, shall always be listed.

Cheryl Morgan has an excellent post about the rule and why it was established. She also invites the SF/F community to have a discussion on if the rule needs to be changed.

I personally believe the rule does need changing. This is the second time in the last few years where the short story Hugo category has run afoul of the rule (the other being in 2011). The changing nature of short story publishing — where there are more short stories being published in many more online magazines and venues — means it's harder for any particular short story to meet the five percent rule. It also wouldn't surprise me if other categories begin having similar issues with the rule in the coming years.

The Hugo Award are intended to promote and honor the best works of the SF/F genre, not be a slave to statistics and rules from three decades ago. I know the rule was well-intended when it was created, but it is not helpful in this current age.