Graham Storrs » The Credulity Nexus

Interview Monday

Graham Storrs — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 23:19:28 +0000

Interviews are clearly like buses: you wait ages for one and then two turn up at the same time. That’s what happened today.

An Interview with Alaskan Bookie

You will remember the Alaskan Bookie site recently gave my time travel thriller, TimeSplash, a five-star review. Well, afterwards, Dorothy, who runs the site, asked me over for an interview. You can see the result on the Alaskan Bookie website. This is a particularly good interview in a couple of ways. Firstly, the questions were really enjoyable. I’m not sure quite why, but each one sparked a little excitement – which you might notice in my enthusiastic responses Secondly, I am very impressed with Dorothy’s professionalism. You can see some of this just in the way the interview is laid out. It is one of the best-organised interview formats I have ever seen, with all the right information available but presented in a very palatable format. Again, I’m not quite sure why I think this. I will have to sit down and analyse my aesthetic response to what Dorothy has done here. Anyway, if you want to see me in excited and enthusiastic mode, talking right at you, visit the Alaskan Bookie today.

An Interview with Kayelle Press

As part of the continuing launch and publicity efforts for the Hope anthology, Kayelle Press is running a series of brief author interviews with each of the contributors. Today is my turn and you can find my interview on the Kayelle Press blog. For me, this series of interviews is very interesting. Hope brings together some of my favourite Australian writers – including at least three I’d call friends – so it is nice to get a quick peek at what they say about themselves and the story they have contributed. You might not have the same level of interest, but if you want to hear from over a dozen writers, all at different stages in their careers, talking about a particular piece of work, it is a fascinating snapshot. And while you are over at the Kayelle Press site, why not pick up a copy of Hope? It is full of good stories and interesting articles. It is there to raise suicide awareness, something our society needs. Besides, Christmas is not far away and a book is always a great gift.

Writing Novels Is Hard, But I Enjoy The Struggle

Graham Storrs — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 06:22:54 +0000

I’m 24,000 words into my new novel and I can’t help thinking about the process I’m going through as I hammer this story out, word by word.

Novels take a long time to write. Well, they take me a long time. Some people bang out several in a year. I’m happy if I can write just one. The last novel I finished was a sci-fi comedy called Cargo Cult. From beginning to end, it took me more than ten years. Even when it just takes a year, it’s far too long to plot it in detail and then just write what you plotted. In a year of living with a group of characters in your head and a particular set of ideas you want to explore, you are going to find that things develop. Your initial plot can seem shallow and weak by the time that year is up, same with your initial characterisations, and your initial thoughts on your main themes. I’d go so far as to say that, if these things don’t develop, mature, improve, deepen, and evolve while you write the book, you’re just not thinking very hard about what you’re doing.

Day-to-day, of course, nothing much happens. The actual mechanics, the craft, of putting words on screens is absorbing and takes up most of my resources. The choosing of every word, the structuring of every clause and sentence, the building of every paragraph, section, and chapter, are all such massive tasks with so many possible alternatives, that it is a miracle a mere human brain can do the job at all. Probably it can’t. Sometimes I find myself ‘satisficing’ (as the brilliant Herbert Simon once put it) when I’d rather be optimising, but I’m limited by what my brain can do. I suspect the mark of genius in writing is the degree to which optimisation is possible for an individual writer.

The majority of thinking about the story, its characters and ideas, for me at least, goes on outside the periods of actual writing. I just don’t have the capacity to do both well at the same time. Sometimes the need to understand some element of the story is a prerequisite to proceeding. I become lost in a miasma of ignorance and stupidity as I grapple with some important idea without which the story cannot proceed. Sometimes this is a technical issue – how long the tether needs to be for a Lunar space elevator, for example, or how the Polish secret service processes interviewees – and these are the easy ones. They can usually be solved with a half-hour of research (and some maths revision). Much harder are questions of how a character should develop – what’s realistic, what’s likely, and what’s best going to serve the story? Or what the future will be like. I spent several days doing nothing but charting likely developments in science, politics, economics, society, healthcare, various technologies, etc., and their tangled interactions, over the next fifty years, before I could write my novel TimeSplash. And then did it all again, pushing it out an extra thirty years for The Credulity Nexus.

The hardest problems of all are the ones to do with concepts. For my novel Time and Tyde, I spent scores of hours reading books and papers on the physics of time travel (none of which appeared in the book, but I needed to get it straight in my mind before I could be confident I wasn’t going to write something stupid). For Emissaries, the first book of my first “Omega Point” space opera, I agonised over the physics of space-warping in a similar way. Again, little of it got into the text, but I have to know that what is there is completely consistent with the science. Yet the hardest concepts of all are the ordinary human ones – love, jealousy, fear, dependence, and so on. For a recent short story which is to appear in an anthology called Hope, I decided I needed to understand exactly what hope is before I could start. Have you ever wondered? It took me a whole month to get my feeble brain around that one. A month in which I did nothing constructive at all and drove my wife crazy as I tried out new “insights” on her day after day. It’s a kind of writer’s block, I suppose, but one that always, always leads to a better story in the end.

Right now, I’m grappling with an old friend: the antipathy between empathy and psychopathy and how far a character whose nature is dominated by one can be led by circumstances towards the other. This conundrum and I went twelve rounds during the writing of my last-but-one novel, Mindrider, in which my protagonist was a rather unpleasant, alien brain parasite. I think I won on points, so I suppose it’s hardly surprising it is demanding a re-match in my new work in progress, The Sentience Machine.

Writing a novel is such a long way from catching words as they float by and pinning them to the page. It is a massive decision-making process on multiple levels, coupled with a huge effort to understand at least some aspects of the people we are and the universe we inhabit, together with the presentation of all this work in a form that will stimulate and entertain. It is by far the most difficult, most satisfying, and most enjoyable work I have ever done.

May the Fourth (3 GWC) Be With You

Graham Storrs — Wed, 04 May 2011 07:49:04 +0000

Yes, it’s that time of year again. For the many people who weren’t around on May 4th 2008 when I posted my first “hello world” from my brand new writing blog – that is, all of you – May 4th 2008 is the date from which I reckon my writing career began. So as 3 GWC (Graham’s Writing Career) draws to a close, it’s time to take stock once more and reflect on all that has happened since 2 GWC drew to a close.

Well, maybe not. Oh, alright, but just one paragraph. It was a busy and complicated year – essentially the first year of my first novel – and it ended (near enough) with me having found a wonderful literary agent (Ineke Prochazka) to call my own. There were a few story sales along the way and lots of other writerly stuff. In all, it was a year of good, solid progress. I started writing three novels in 3 GWC too – and finished one of them. I hope to finish the other two in the coming year. It was also the year that Jodi Cleghorn and eMergent Press came into my life and Big Bad Media came and went (literally – it has now wound up). I went to Worldcon. I went to Supanova. A couple of my friends did amazing (publishing-related) things (that’s you, Emma, Marianne, Joanna and Joanne) and I got two new computers!

And all the other things that I forgot to mention.

On the agenda for next year are another novel sale – or two – (which is now your department, Ineke), more shorts sales, finishing my comedy sci-fi novel “Cargo Cult” and possibly a couple of other books, maybe going to the Brisbane Writers Festival (haven’t quite decided yet), and seeing “TimeSplash” finally appear in print (and maybe audio – how’s that going, Em?) I think it will be another busy and complicated year. At least I hope so.

There are a couple of shorts of mine appearing soon in anthologies for you to look out for (please!)

In Situ – a spec fic anthology from Dagan Books, ed. Carrie Cuinn. It contains my story “Salvage”. Expected publication date is 15th May – pre-order it via Goodreads.

Hope – a spec fic anthology from Kayelle Press, ed. Sasha Beattie, with a great cast of Aussie writers. It contains my story “The God on the Mountain”. Expected publication date is “real soon now”! I am especially stoked that two of the other contributors are friends who shared the QWC/Hachette retreat with me in May 2008 – the event that I believe kicked off my professional writing career.

Nothing but Flowers: Tales of Post Apocalyptic Love from eMergent Press, ed. Jodi Cleghorn. It contains my story “Two Fools in Love” – the first time I ever sat down to write a love story and actually did it. This is already available as an ebook but should hit the streets as a paperback any second now.

You all have a good 4 now. Happy New Year.

The Book Harvest Literary Agency to Represent Graham Storrs

Graham Storrs — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 07:25:50 +0000

A big tick in the box

Remember what my 2010 end of year report said was the one thing 2011 would be all about? Or when I tried to find a single word to describe my hopes for 2011?

Yes, this was going to be the year that I got myself a literary agent, someone who would represent my work to the big-league publishers, someone who would promote me in circles I simply cannot reach, someone who would talke my writing career to a new professional level. Well, just two months into the year, I have found that agent. We haven’t quite signed the contract yet, but I am very, very pleased to let you know that brand new, Sydney-based literary agency The Book Harvest has agreed to represent me, particularly, that Ineke Prochazka, is my go-to guy at the agency.

You might think that signing with an agency that hasn’t made a single sale yet is a bit of a risk. You may also remember that I recently turned down an offer from another agent because I didn’t think they could do enough for me, even though they did have an actual track record of sales. Well, yes, of course it’s a risk, but Book Harvest has two very important things going for it.

The first is that the agency is positioning itself at the top of the food chain, aiming to sell to the big-name publishers. Events may prove that they couldn’t make it, but their ambitions and mine line up nicely and the idea of being paired with a new agency has always appealed to me. We’re both hungry for this and we’re both going to go flat out to make it happen.

The second is Ineke Prochazka herself. She comes highly recommended by someone whose judgement I trust, she’s got a background in the retail side of the book business (the side of the business, in my view, that it is absolutely vital to be across these days), and, in my dealings with her so far, she seems like a nice and approachable person, someone I’ll be happy to do business with.

Of course, that contract isn’t signed yet and there’s many a slip, etc., but I am very pleased with how this is going so far and hope to get the paperwork out of the way very soon.

Wish me luck!

On Pushing One’s Career Off a Cliff

Graham Storrs — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 19:40:21 +0000

Not for the faint-hearted

Will somebody please say something comforting? Or pass me a chocolate eclair. No, make that a double.

You see, today I had an email from an agent about my book, ‘The Credulity Nexus’. It seems they had read the MS in a single sitting, thought it was “a wonderful book”, and now want to represent it for me.

And I turned them down.

Hitting the send button on that rejection email was like pushing someone off a cliff . Whatever regrets I might have about this in the future, the deed is done and there is no snatching it back. I now have to face the future knowing there is a body lying down there among the rocks, one that will haunt me if things don’t go well.

Anyone who has heard me whining over the past few months on Twitter about how few agents there are left in the world who want to handle science fiction any more, will probably wonder if I’ve lost my marbles. Any writer who has ever spent years trying and failing to hook an agent in any genre, will probably be printing out my author photo right now so they can throw darts at it.

Yes, I know how hard it is these days to get an agent. We’ve all seen the agent websites that say they are closed to submissions, their lists are full, they are no longer representing our genre, or they have dropped fiction altogether. (My favourite is this one, currently displayed by a Florida agent, “We are currently giving priority to authors published by major houses.”) So why did I just turn down someone who, despite every trend in the industry, really wanted to represent me?

Well, I’ve thought about it long and hard. (It is now 4:30 am. There will be no sleeping tonight.) And the answer is: ambition.

When I looked closely at the sales this agent had achieved, I was disappointed. There were some decent books placed with one mid-sized publisher and many more with small-to-micro presses. I asked myself if I would be happy with the best this agent seemed able to achieve, and the answer was ‘no’. Seven months ago, when I first queried this agent, the answer had been ‘yes’.

Since then, I have learned that I can reach and negotiate with publishers of this size on my own. I realised that I don’t need an agent to get published. I need an agent to get me into the big-name publishers who won’t even look at an unrepresented manuscript. I need an agent to open doors that were slammed shut on writers several years ago and are not even open to the majority of agents. That’s why I want an agent, because I’m ambitious. And that’s why a poorly-performing agent won’t do.

Of course, I realise that by taking this attitude, I’ve just made my life so much harder. So hard, in fact, that I may never get the kind of agent I now know I want, and never get the chance to see my work pitched to big-name publishers. I also know that hubris is ambition’s evil twin. However, I also realised something else while I was soul-searching and failing to sleep. I am actually happy with where my writing career is at the moment. I’m working with some great people who are bright and enthusiastic, creative and highly motivated. I’m getting my work out and enjoying the company. If I ever do take a quantum leap into publishing’s stratosphere, that will be very cool, but it’s pretty good at ground level too. Not a bad place to be while I wait.

Placid Point and the Rules of Self-Publishing

Graham Storrs — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:03:44 +0000

Over the past year or so, wisdom has been accumulating in the blogsphere about who should self-publish, what they should self-publish, and when. The advice seems to amount to this:

If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it was commercially published once but is now out of print, or it’s new but your agent can’t sell it) AND
It is good (which you can tell because it was once commercially published, or your agent has been trying to sell it) AND
It has been professionally edited (this is harder to judge, but if you paid someone who works as an editor and you both agonised over the text for weeks or months, getting it to the point where the editor was satisfied, you’re probably OK) AND
It has a good cover, designed by a professional AND
You are willing to spend hundreds of hours promoting it, or thousands of dollars paying a professional to promote it THEN
You should self-publish.

If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it would only be interesting to your immediate family) AND
The quality doesn’t matter (because your immediate family will only be looking at the pictures anyway) AND
You don’t care at all if only five people ever see it THEN
You should self-publish.

Nevertheless, with self-publishing being so easy these days, and ebook publishing not necessarily having any up-front costs (except cover design) it is very tempting to give it a go.

Strangely, the temptation is probably higher for published authors than for not-yet-published ones. Published authors have already had (on average) ten years of being rejected by agents and publishers. They have already felt the frustration of having the publisher, agent, and retailer between them take 90% of the sale price of each book. They have already felt the strain of running themselves ragged to promote a book when no-one else in the food chain seems to care. They have already gnashed their teeth over their lack of control over the pricing, positioning and presentation of what used to be their own property, the product upon which their whole future depends.

Yet commercial publication is still the best option for the new writer. (Joe Konrath may be demonstrating that, for established writers, or writers with a huge ‘platform’, it no longer is.) If it all goes well, it is by far the best – and easiest – way to make sales and establish a reputation. If it all goes well.

And this is all by way of a preamble to the announcement that I have just self-published a small collection of short stories. Some of them have already been published in magazines, some have not. What links them is that they are all set in the same ‘world’ and all belong to the unfolding story of a group of transhumans who inhabit a virtual world called Placid Point.

The collection is called “Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity” and is available in all popular ebook formats from Smashwords (over the next few weeks, it will also be available through Amazon, B&N, the iBookstore, and other major retailers.) I’ve set the price at $1.99, which I hope you’ll agree is reasonable. I don’t actually intend to sell bucketloads of this collection (unlike my debut novel, TimeSplash, which I do want to sell lots of) but I want these stories out there because they are in the same world as the novel I have just finished writing (The Credulity Nexus) and, if that is ever published, it would be nice to be able to point readers to a book of related short stories.

Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity - A collection of short stories by Graham Storrs

Time Dilation is Not a Writer’s Friend

Graham Storrs — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:19:41 +0000

Look out! It's BP!

G’day mates. It’s a bright and sunny winter’s morning as I write, Independence Day in the US, and just another gorgeous 5th July here in Australia. Since I’ve been neglecting my readers lately, I thought I’d throw in a simple update on my writing life just to keep things moving along.

My head has been buried in my netbook for the past few weeks as I tackle my latest novel, Loner’s Deep. It’s part 1 of a three-part spce opera (and a sequel to another three-part space opera of mine). I’m just about at the half-way mark on my first draft and it is rolling along quite nicely, thank you. The structure of the story is one I haven’t really used before – several groups of characters whose story arcs are leading them inexorably to one point in space and time, where they will all meet and resolve everything. It’s fun but very much complicated by the scale of the piece. It is set in a far-future time when we have colonised stars out to about 50 light years around the Earth, but we don’t have faster-than-light travel. Yet the story visits many different planets and the characters travel huge distances. This makes the timings and the interactions rather complicated. One of the main characters, for example, has a journey of 55 light years, during which she ages about seven years. Another character, whom she will meet, travels just 8 LY and ages about one year. Yet both their stories unfold side-by-side in the book. I’m not sure I can make it clear to the reader that events in their stories are not simultaneous until the very end. Time will tell.

Meanwhile, I’ve been doing some plumbing around the house – the perfect antidote to time dilation calculations – and trying to find an agent for ‘The Credulity Nexus’ – also rather mind-numbing.

Over on Smashwords, they’re having their Summer/Winter sale. I put a children’s story there a few months ago (the picture of the dog on the left is the cover) so if you want to pick up a copy for free, July is the time to do it. Smashwords is a company I have a lot of admiration for. They seem to be doing everything right and I wish them huge success in the future.

So, a happy Nice Winter’s Day to everyone, and, for those still celebrating Independence Day, maybe you should have kicked the Brits out of the Gulf of Mexico while you were at it.

Transhumanity on My Mind

Graham Storrs — Wed, 26 May 2010 10:23:43 +0000

I’ve become obsessed with a place in my imagination. It’s called Placid Point and it is a space station, packed to the gunwhales with computers, and inhabited by a huge number of uploaded human minds. It started life on Earth before moving into Earth orbit, then to solar orbit (at L1) and then around another star as it moved farther and farther away, leaving Earth behind.

I first began writing about Placid Point in mid-2008, when I wrote the short story “In the Dark of Second Sleep”. It was about an alien race having a very strange close encounter with transhumans who had left Placid Point. Immediately, the transhumans I had created invaded my imagination. For a while I thought about nothing else but where they had come from, where they were going, and what might be the many individual stories that marked their journey.

Every now and then, one of those stories demanded to be written. I realised, as I elaborated this world, that becoming transhuman would not be the slick transition some futurists imagine, that we would take with us into this new way of being, much of what ties us to our past, and that the Universe would continue to shape and mould us in the same way it always has, that the economics of survival don’t care what form your body or mind might take. More than this, it seemed, the pioneers of transhumanity would face difficulties as emotionally challenging as any human has ever faced, as they pried themselves free of their ancient biological heritage.

After ‘In the Dark of Second Sleep’, I wrote ‘Last Christmas’, leaping from the middle of the story to the end. Then ‘All the Way’, groping my way back to the beginning, a time when Placid Point was known as Omega Point. With ‘Jim’sWorld’ I finally had my creation myth, along with a couple of characters I knew would be appearing again and again. Martin Lanham in particular would play a key role. He became an important character in my first novel set squarely in the Placid Point universe, The Credulity Nexus. ‘The Whispering Dead’, another story from the early days, features Lanham, although his name is not mentioned, and the narrator in ‘Murathera’s Orgy’, set far into the future, is probably not him, although it could be.

I have written a number of novels in the same future ‘world’ – whether Placid Point features largely in them or not. The Credulity Nexus, set just seventy years from now, I have already mentioned. My Emissaries series, set three hundred years in the future, is in the same ‘world’ but barely mentions Omega Point (as it was called then). However, the transhumans of Placid Point play a much more prominent role in the sequel to that series, Deep Fracture, set ten thousand years in the future.

Maybe I should put all these shorts in a collection and self-publish them?

The Real Writer’s Desktop

Graham Storrs — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:40:57 +0000

The Queensland Writers Centre is touring blogs again. This time the tour has a theme: Writers’ Desks. For some reason writers’ desks are fascinating and pictures of same are hugely popular. So QWC is probably onto a winner here. However, when they asked me to put up a picture of my own desk as part of the tour, I was painfully aware that I’ve only recently done that.

Fascinating as my desk is, I can’t keep posting pictures of it. It’s not as if it has seasonal changes or anything. So I’ve taken the opportunity to correct a glaring omission from my last picture and show you my computer ‘desktop’. This should be just as interesting as the wooden one since, for me at least, the computer is where 95% of the work gets done.

The desktop that really matters

For those without broadband (or using Telstra NextG, which is almost as bad) I apologise for the size of this picture. Even so, it isn’t big enough for you to recognise all the icons. That’s why the animation provides labels for the following groups.

Group A: Various mobile device managers (phone, camera, MP3 player and so on.)
Group B: Internet stuff (browser, email, Skype, Twitter, and FTP client)
Group C: Office software (mostly Open Office but also PowerPoint)
Group D: Music score editing software. (Yes, I write music. It’s a little hobby of mine.)
Group E: Image editing software (Paint Shop Pro, IrfanView and IconEasel)
Group F: Media players (Windows Media Player and WinAmp)
Group G: HTML editors (HTML Kit and Komodo Edit)
Group H: Sundry utilities (antivirus, encryption, DVD writers, backup, 3G wireless client, and Celestia, which lets me view the universe from various perspectives)
Group I: Various ebook readers and ebook creators.
Group J: Stuff to do with my current writing project (the Open Office file itself, my multifunction tracking sheet, and a program called StoryBook that I’ve been trying out as a way of organising the background info – I’m not getting along well with it.)
Group K: Games (basically, the only computer game I ever play is Freecell – a patience-style card game.)

I should also mention the background picture. I change my background quite often and it is usually an astronomical theme. This one is a long-exposure shot of the space shuttle taking off in Florida last year. I love pictures of astronauts on EVAs, Hubble deep field shots, and the ISS. Images like these help keep me inspired.

This post is part of the Queensland Writers Centre blog tour, happening February to April 2010. To follow the tour, visit Queensland Writers Centre’s blog.

Work In Progress

Graham Storrs — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 05:09:04 +0000

As my previous novel, TimeSplash, eases its way through the editing process at Lyrical Press, I am busily at work on a new novel – another near-future science fiction thriller called ‘The Credulity Nexus‘. Here’s the pitch as it currently stands:

A struggling PI takes a job to transport a small package for a very rich man. He soon discovers that several very powerful groups are determined to stop him delivering it and grab it for themselves. When he finds out what is inside the package, he decides it’s best that none of them gets it. But by then, he has lost the package, and his friends and relatives are being tracked down and killed. Swimming with some very big sharks, his only way out of the mess he’s in is to join the hunt.

I use the term ‘busily at work’ losely, since I’ve had a very disrupted schedule in the past month and have fallen well behind the targets I’ve set myself. To get this book finished before the end of the year, I’m going to have to step up my productivity considerably. Yet signing a book deal for TimeSplash has sent me into a complete dither. Ever since I heard, I haven’t been able to get back to the new book – not in any sustained way, that is.

So, to help me stay focused (as opposed to, say, blogging and tweeting) I’m going to have a go at Merrilee Faber’s Novel Push Initiative. This is an extremely gentle regime where you post each day the number of words you’ve written on a particular project. The targets are nice and low – suitable for working mums, farmers during harvest time, and procrastinating dilettantes who take long lunch and tea breaks and fill the time in between with reading blogs and pestering their editor for hourly progress updates. (I won’t say which category I belong to.) Anyhoo, it starts on the 5th of this month and runs for a mere three weeks. I see it as someone holding me by the saddle to steady the wobbles as I get pedalling again.

Wish me luck.