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[David Bird]

Ap 26:

Still sick as dog.

* DRIVE got cancelled, it seems. I'm
told they were in post-production
on ep 6 when the hammer came
down. Poor bloody Tim. He didn't
even get his 13 eps for a DVD this
time. I've only seen the first ep,
and I read the pilot script a while
back. I thought it was a solid start.
Goddamn shame.

* I dropped the following on the
Engine yesterday, and thought I
might do the same here.

Some months ago, it occurred to me
that it'd be possible to do a monthly
anthology book in the Image Slimline
format, which we used to call the
FELL format. 20pp of guts, plus
covers, USD $1.99, yes? I conceived
it on the assumption that it'd be
done at an Image-like company
where there are no advance payments
and all the money comes on the back
end, hence the particular structure
I envisaged. Which is:

1
5
1
5
1
5
1
+ 1 cover

wherein the 5s are five-page stories
or chapters, and the 1s are one-page
pieces. With each of the 5s done by
a different artist, and the 1s plus
the cover done by another single
artist. Hence, one writer and four
artists. Which makes it easy to
carve up the back end - 20% for
each of the five contributors.

(Because, trust me, you don't want
to involve comics publishers in
complicated splits. I don't have time
for all my personal examples of
such. Just trust me and move on.)

This structure leaves one page of
the guts and the inside back cover
loose for whatever you feel like.
It doesn't declare what any of the
units should do. Ultrashort stories,
serial chapters, something equivalent
to Brendan McCarthy's Artoons...
Whatever.

I know exactly what I'd do with it,
personally. But I'm never going to
get the time to do it. So I throw the
idea out there to all of you. An
affordable, easy-to-assemble
anthology format where, for
each artist, the whole monthly
commitment is 5 pages. Obviously,
it'd be a bit of a monster for the
writer. But that's what we do, right?

It doesn't solve everyone's problems
with the anthology format, of
course. But it means taking a chance
on a new anthology title is only
costing you some pocket change.
Which is a big hurdle taken care of
right there.

Not huge chunks of story, for a
monthly anthology, of course --
but then, neither were WARRIOR
or STRANGE DAYS, in the course of
things. And if you're going to aim,
aim high...

Anyway. I throw this idea out for
your consideration, since I don't
have time to operate it. This product
is freeware and not supported.
There is no help system. Buyer
beware.

-- W

[David Bird]

May 1:

Finally feeling a little better. Still
kind of blehhhh. Things:

* DEAD CHANNEL is still alive. People
have been asking. I still can't go into
serious details, and I'm still not at
the point where I can say, yes,
we're shooting the pilot. TV, like
books, moves veeerrryyy sllowwwly.
Where we are: everyone liked the
pilot, and I will soon be commenced
on the writing of a show bible. This
is an object that lays out the series:
characters, settings and stories.
Since DEAD CHANNEL was conceived
by me as six half-hour episodes in
the British style (despite my tv
company being the US operation
AMC), this shouldn't be too horrible.
And then we'll see where that step
takes us. Everyone is cautiously
optimistic. (Except me.)

* I am so sick of doing interviews.
And they're just piling on. I wouldn't
mind so much if I wasn't getting the
same ten questions all the time.

* Well, yes, I would.

* I need to kick the CASTLEVANIA
script into high gear this month.
I've got about a week's work to be
done on draft 0.5, which is where I
just rewrite/expand the outline and
get everything down in rough form,
and two weeks' worth of cleaning
it up into full first draft.

* By the end of the month, I'll be
deep into LISTENER, which is
currently at the one-third point,
for delivery towards the end of
July. It should in fact be the last
thing I send out before leaving for
San Diego and a week of hell.

* At which point CROOKED LITTLE
VEIN will be released in hardback.
Someone told me the other day
that the book is now listed to appear
on July 24. I should get the final
version of the slipcover to approve
this week, which will include William
Gibson's lovely quote: "Stop it.
You're frightening me."

* I think his SPOOK COUNTRY
appears at the same time. You
should buy it.

* I so want to go back to bed.

May 5 is Free Comic Book Day.

This year, I shall be freeing comic
books by running them through a
shredder and then introducing them
into animal feed all over the county.
Join me, won't you?

-- W

[David Bird]

May 5:

Someone put this in my head the
other day, and I don't really know
the answer: who pays for blogging
these days?

There's the Wired group, though I
think they may have shot their
credibility with their reaction to
the Todd Goldman nastygrams:
"Yes, we'll take down the posts
immediately, we do not support our
writers, please don't sue us we're
only a massive corporation."

There's the Gawker network, of
course.

And then I'm starting to go blank.
Blogs.com?

These are mostly groupblog
operations, of course -- but those,
in my limited experience, are the
ones that pay fees. Some of these
nets earn more than a million
dollars a year in ad revenues. I
know of one groupblog in this mode
that encourages its writers to post
up to eight times a day, paying $12
per post. Which sounds minimal at
first, but given five working days
that's nearly $500 a week. Nothing
you're going to get rich off, but
that's around $2000 per month
for sitting at home, which isn't the
worst deal I ever heard.

So who else is paying people to blog
these days? If people keep asking
me this, I'm going to need to tell
them something...

[David Bird]

May 11:

Well, a week sick turned into two
weeks sick, and now I'm late on
almost everything. Bleh. If I
haven't gotten back to anyone on
anything, that's why.

[David Bird]

May 12:

http://www.warrenellis.com/
main website

http://www.myspace.com/warrenellis
myspace

http://warren_ellis.livejournal.com
livejournal

http://www.the-engine.net/
my messageboard

http://engine.ning.com/
my messageboard's social network system

http://www.flickr.com/people/warrenellis/
flickr

http://www.last.fm/user/warrenellis/
last.fm

http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/c ... ren-ellis/
Second Life columns at Reuters

http://castlevaniadraculascurse.com/
CASTLEVANIA: DRACULA'S CURSE workblog

(These are the active ones: have previously had presences on places
like Xpeeps, Comicspace, MyNetSpot, Consumating, Suicide Girls,
but have pared things back to the ones that are personally useful
and/or interesting. Haven't got rid of
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500486523
Facebook yet, but am obviously going to because it's useless.)

Email is still warrene @ aol.com.

-- W

May 13:

So 2am on Sunday morning I get the weird email from Brian Vaughan
claiming that I won many Eagle Awards. He said 600 Eagle Awards,
but he was, by his own admission, quite bladdered. I couldn't find
anything online about it, and so ignored it.

Well, this is just fucking weird.

I just heard from Rich Johnston, who gave me the following list of
http://www.eagleawards.co.uk/
Eagle Awards given out in Bristol on Saturday Night:

Favourite Comics Writer
WARREN ELLIS

Favourite New Comicbook
NEXTWAVE

Favourite Comics Story published during 2006
NEXTWAVE

Favourite Comics Villain
DIRK ANGER

Roll of Honour
WARREN ELLIS


This is SO wrong.

Also, I believe you have to be dead or nearly so before you
get a Roll Of Honour award.

Which is worrying.

-- W

[David Bird]

May 14:

Finished work and went to bed at
4.30am. Woken up 9.30am by post.
Went back to bed. Woken up 10.30am
by post. Went back to bed. Woken
up 1pm by random arsehole. By
which point I am almost completely
blind and suffering early stages of
motor neurone disease. Am now in
pub, head exploding and eyes and
fingers refusing to obey brain. Not
going to be a good work day.

The thing that bothered me about
that Roll Of Honour award was that
it should have been a reason to
honour the memory of Tom Frame.
Only met him the once -- an
afternoon drinking session with him,
Steve Dillon and Garth Ennis. Tom
was funny, awesomely cranky, and
happilly admitted to monkeying
with scripts a bit as he lettered them.
It's a terrible shame that no-one
ever sat him down and got a history
of British comics 1970-2000 out of
him, as he was in the Fleetway/IPC
offices the whole time and saw it all
happen. (I still want someone to sit
Mike Moorcock down and get the
story from 1950-1970 approx.) He
was an essential part of the character
of British comics. I don't know how
the Eagles are voted for, but I don't
think anyone would have minded if
the numbers had been fiddled, and
the Comics Expo had taken a few
minutes to remember Tom Frame.

That said: apparently the award
object is big enough that I can kill
people with it.

I recall Alan Moore once expressing
his disappointment that an Eagle
Award was not in fact a large
raptor capable of carrying away
small children.

Oh, apparently Alan and Melinda
got married on Saturday. Go to
warrenellis.com and you'll find a
link to Neil Gaiman's page, where he
has photos of the event, and Alan's
frankly surreal wedding suit.

-- W

To save you a couple of links, here it is:

[/img]

Surreal? I would have worn it!
(Sorry about the size.)

[David Bird]

May 16:

People keep asking about my San
Diego schedule. I don't have a finalised
schedule yet, but here's how it's
going to be:

* Signing at the Avatar table,
because Avatar are flying me in and
have the use of me.

* In association with Avatar, I'm
signing the novel for William Morrow
for 4 hours on the Friday.

* I'm doing one of my talks/Q&A
sessions on the Sat night at a location
to be determined.

* When I'm not at the Avatar table,
I'll be doing press on the comics
stuff.

* When I'm not doing press on the
comics stuff, I'll be doing press on
the novel.

* When I'm not doing press or
signing, I'll be in media-related
meetings as scheduled by my agent.

* When not doing these things --
well, I'll be sleeping, because that's
the entire con sewn up.

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=4299

Fresh files as time and brainwrong dictate.

-- W

May 17:

* Been writing some PLANETARY.
Such hard fucking work. Took me
two hours to write a piece the other
day and I ended up with 500 words.
I can do 1000 words/hour when I'm
writing journalism or a novel. Bah.

* Cracked the one bit of the DEAD
CHANNEL bible that was eluding me
-- episode 5 -- so I should have that
out the door by Monday.

* Working up the next TBOLTS arc,
CAGED ANGELS -- that book sucked
up so much energy in the early
chapters that we're taking a skip
period. Much more tightly structured
than my usual stuff, that first arc,
with things tying up from eps 1 to
6 and thematic payoffs and all that
stuff. If you strengthen the internal
logic and get it all rigidly on rails, it
makes up for the little inconsistencies
that let the thing work. Sort of like
my approach to gardening -- the
plants will forgive you not fucking
around with things like hardening off
if you just stick to the basics.

* (and now I have a plastic mini-
greenhouse full of tomato and
cucumber plants, with lettuce
germinating and chives and mint
racing off.)

* I've got about half the CASTLEVANIA
screenplay in note form, and should
have that wrapped in a couple of
weeks. It's got to hit 80 minutes. A
screenplay should be roughly a page
to a minute, but animation tends
to run a little longer -- BUT but,
for the animation team to have fun,
I like to leave space for them to
open up. And, as an adult film, I want
and need to use silence too. So it'll
come in as 80pp, regardless.

* (And then, it seems, the real
work will begin.)

* Illness halted work on DEADSPOTS
-- thank God it's off-schedule -- and
that'll be back up and running next
week.

* Sending in half of FELL #9 tonight.

* DOKTOR SLEEPLESS runs
smoothly. I'm enjoying the odd
pace of the thing, and am tempted
to do another book next year that
takes that kind of pace and non-
structure further. A sort of
Pynchon/DeLillo endless informational
fugue. I'll be 40 next year, so that'd
be a good time to do something that
feels like an adult novel for comics.
Just drift off into senescent middle
age, muttering unintelligibly to
myself in print...

* (Like I don't do that already,
right?)

* I feel a few short rants about
comics coming on. I'll probably drop
them on the Engine at some point.

[David Bird]

May 17:

Wrote a two-part animation for the web for the TOMB RAIDER:
Re/Visioned project, all details here:

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=4304

-- W

[David Bird]

May 18:

Woke up tired, just rambling to
get my fingers warmed up so I
can type without making one error
per word, as I am right now:

* 40-odd days to the end of an
era. On July 1, smoking is banned
in pubs, and so I will stop coming to
the pub. Very sad. Although the
timing might work out: I've been in
the local paper again, apparently,
and people are starting to notice
me.

* I might briefly sling the seven-
minute version of "Atlas" by Battles
on the website later. The album
tends to slide into the free-jazz
bullshit foisted on the world by the
singer's father, Anthony Braxton --
google him and you'll find all manner
of wankers gobbing on about how
"galactic" the sound of him and
eight other idiots in bad clothes
playing arpeggios over each other is.
But "Atlas," I contend, will end up
being one of the great singles of
the year, and the probable
apotheosis of math rock. Ty
Braxton's voice -- and I'm sure he's
singing some bollocks about people
and sandwiches, but it doesn't
matter -- finally becomes another
instrument in the mix. Even vocoded,
it gives authentic human presence
to the awesomely complex
mathematical progressions of the
piece. There's ten seconds right in
the middle of the thing, around the
five minute mark, towards the end
of the fantastically deconstructed
bridge, where everyone finally
achieves the same time signature,
and it's magical.

* Another contender is possibly
"A Day Another Day" by The
Strange Death Of Liberal England.
Some hear The Arcade Fire in it. I
think maybe the Arcade Fire gave
them *permission* to explore
their approach, but "A Day" is much
more anthemic, looser and more
intuitive, less overwrought and more
passionate and inclusive. The end
of the song still gives me a frisson.

* I might have mentioned this
before, but
http://community.livejournal.com/theinferior4
is storming along lately. It's a
groupblog by four science fiction
writers. And, finally, it provides a
vent for the bizarre magpie mind
of Paul Di Filippo, the mad prophet
of Rhode Island. The other
contributors are very good, but it's
Paul who makes Inferior4 an
essential daily read.

* (See, that's what I'd do. Get a half-dozen or so people, run it on LJ as
a test-flight for six months, then
maybe go to paid hosting and try
supporting it on ads and merch. Ah
well. And while LJ is a terrifically
easy, no-stress way of doing it, I
also think it'd be really nice if in a
year the 4 moved to cheap hosting
like Media Temple and hooked up
with Federated Media or someone.)

* ...is it possible that Vladimir Putin
is commenting on a cricket match
on Sky Sports 1? Looks just like
him. Wouldn't that be creepy? "In
Putin Russia, sports news watches
YOU."

[David Bird]

May 21:

The local temperature's been up
and down like a yoyo over the last
four days. And, sure enough, my
knee folded when I left the house
today. I'll be back on the cane by
the end of the week, and probably
for the rest of the summer. Look
out for Limpy McFuckofffanboy at
San Diego this July.

This week, the FELL collection and
NEWUNIVERSAL #6 will be released.
NEWU will be taking a short break
after #6 -- sales are fine, I'm told,
it's just that we have some internal
stuff to reconfigure. The FELL books,
TPB and HC, turned up in the mail
this morning, and they're beautiful.

(And no, the old backmatter isn't
included. You should have bought
the singles.)

Stopped myself from buying another
bunch of URLs this weekend. (Might
have been a different story if
http://www.swing.it had been available!)
Projects occur to me, and then I
have to tell myself I don't have the
time.

Got a small rant/thought on the
Engine right now about comics
magazines -- it's in the Starry
Wisdom section, shouldn't be hard
to find.

Bit of a shock last week: looks like all
the ads for CROOKED LITTLE VEIN
will have the warrenellis.com URL
published on them. As does, it seems,
the back of the book itself. May
have to tidy the place up.

More in a bit.

I used to do a thing called
www.orderingcomics.com. Don't
really have the time for it anymore.
I'd get the new Previews catalogue --
or, more often, the plain txt version
off the Diamond website -- and go
through it looking for the books that
needed attention paid to them. I'd
then write a short bit explaining why
this book should be read, linking back
to the book's website wherever
possible, and include the ordering
information. Did it do any good?
No idea. The one metric I found was
that, of a sequence of AMERICAN
SPLENDOR books, the one I wrote
up sold a thousand more than the
others. I don't recall the exact
stats on the site, but it definitely
had several thousand people reading
it.

It was sometime after that, that
Peter Rose and I devised artbomb.net,
which was a huge success. It's now
a static archive site, and it still gets
a lot of traffic.

I wasn't the first to do an ordering-
comics-style project -- I think I
ganked it from something Johanna
Draper Carlson used to do on
Usenet. I know I saw a lot of people
doing it after I did. I don't think
they happen with the same kind of
detail anymore. Things changed,
evolved. Magazine sites broke up
into solo blogs, reformed into
groupblogs, concerns shifted from
looking for good work to...well, the
bloody nightmare of the comics-
related web of today. Which I still
find myself skimming from time to
time, out of some atavistic reflex.

I said on the Engine last night that if
five actual honesttogod writers
started a review site where they
each handled two single-book reviews
a week at 300 words a pop, it'd be
game over for the monkeymass of
snark merchants and fetal alcohol
cases who provide the lion's share
of writing about comics on the web.
And the reason why writing about
comics on the web is a subject of
any importance at all is that print,
as much as I love it, is a dead-end
game for writing about comics now.
The cost of entry is too steep and
the results are negligible at best.

(I tend to discount Wizard in that
because the volume of actual
*writing* in there is very small
-- these days it looks like the old
POP-UP VIDEO on VH1, it's all
little floating text boxes.)

Given the velocity of the medium,
I don't think it'd be murderously
difficult to find 10 books a week worth talking about. (Though I
may look at this week's list later
and check that.) You just wouldn't
know it from reading the lifeless
crap that passes for reports on the
medium in 95% of places right now.

Here is the link to his piece:

http://the-engine.net/forum/messages.php?webtag=ENGINE&msg=8847.1

So I went through the list of books shipping this week, pulling
out the ones that would clearly be at least interesting reads,
if not necessarily universally rewarding. And I ran out of
strength halfway through. (Also, I deleted my books from the
list.) Check this out:

DC
American Virgin #15 $2.99
Hellblazer #232 $2.99
Megatokyo Vol 5 $10.99
Other Side TP $12.99
Testament #18 $2.99

Image
Casanova Vol 1 Luxuria HC $24.99
Coyote Vol 5 TP $12.99
Elephantmen #9 $2.99
Gutsville #1 $2.99

Marvel
Criminal #6 $2.99
Wisdom #6 $3.99

A & J Books
Field Guide To Midwest Monsters GN $9.99

AiT/PlanetLar
Homeless Channel $12.95

Antarctic Press
Final Girl #1 $3.99

BOOM! Studios
Left On Mission #2 $3.99

Fantagraphics
Arf Forum SC $19.95
Things Just Get Away From You HC $24.95

General Jack Cosmo Productions
General Jack Cosmo Presents #1 $3.50

NETCOMICS
Lets Be Perverts Vol 3 GN $9.99

(Okay, that last one just has a title that amuses me.)

That's drawn from a little more than half the actual list
of shipping books. That ain't fucking bad.

-- W

[David Bird]

May 22:

So. Fucking. Tired. And the days
just get stranger. I'm apparently
supposed to be interviewing William
Gibson briefly for WIRED this week,
and I can't tell you how weird that is.
I suppose it's a measure of progress
-- less than twenty years ago, I
was in a bookshop selling people his
novels. Now I've got a quote from
him on the back of my novel, and
WIRED are rushing me out an
advance copy of his SPOOK COUNTRY
and then paying me to talk to him
about it. And that's not the weirdest
thing happening right now.

Two months until San Diego and the
release of the novel. Gah.

Funny thing Gillen said in an interview
the other day (while DUNK!, I
believe): he and McKitten set up
PHONOGRAM at Image because it
looked like the beginnings of a scene.
And I find myself kind of wishing it
had been. Missed opportunity,
maybe. If we'd been smart, a bunch
of us would have set up a joint
web presence and presented some
kind of united front.

The FELL collection is out from
tomorrow in North America and
Thursday in Britain. NEWUNIVERSAL
#6, too.

-- W

Dunk?

[David Bird]

May 23:

Colleen Doran.
Carla Speed McNeil.
Renee French.
Svetlana Chmakova.
C Spike Trotman.
Gail Simone.
Shaenon Garrity.
Rachel Nabors.
Becky Cloonan.
Serena Valentino.
Marjane Satrapi.
Jessica Abel.
Laurenn McCubbin.
Queenie Chan.
Lia Fiengo.

If your issue is that there aren't
enough female voices in the medium,
I completely agree with you, and
have been supporting female
creators of gift for years for
precisely this reason.

If your issue is that there aren't
any female voices in the medium,
then I commend this partial list,
composed off the top of my head
in two minutes, for your attention.

(I'd add Alison Bechdel and Arial
Schrag, but I haven't read them,
and I missed off others whose work
I don't personally enjoy)

If your issue is that there aren't
enough female voices writing your
favourite corporate-owned
superhero titles, then, frankly,
your problems are deeper and
broader than you think.

Keep fighting. Keep kicking. But
never, ever act like the women
already working in the medium
aren't there, just because they're
not writing Batman or Supergirl.

(Heidi's going to keep talking about
this at The Beat all week, I'm sure.
Heidi, as an editor, did the heavy
lifting when I wanted Colleen to work
with me on ORBITER, and got Pia
Guerra on Y. Of all the people going
off over the role of gender in comics
this week, Heidi's the one with
factory-floor experience.)

-- W

The Beat

[David Bird]

May 25:

Well, I imagine this Signal's reaching
less than the usual 10500 due to
the holiday shenanigans, which
only dawned on me yesterday.
It's a working day here in the UK,
but, of course, it's a four day
weekend in the US.

I cracked and got a Twitter account
last night. Its basic function is next
to useless for me, but last night I
turned up a mashup between it and
BBC news that'd be useful for
travel (the RSS emulator built into
my phone is good, but it's pull
rather than push), so I signed up.
And, of course, my worst fears
were realised: the site's half-broken.
The Curse Of Ev: he has these
brilliant ideas, that people flock to,
and then he can't scale the system.
Early Blogger all over again. (Odeo
still works like a dream for me, but
I have the feeling it's not as
heavily trafficked.)

Though you know what is beautiful
and working smoothly? Tumblr.com.
I first looked at it a couple of
months ago, and took 15 mins last
night to explore it properly. It's
a site that gives you a free
tumblelog, like Projectionist (google
it), and it is simple, rich and lovely.
The one thing I see it lacking is an
ability to run a group tumblelog
with author attribution. Which is
hardly necessary for most. It
took me literally four minutes to
set up a "planet" tumblelog that
captured RSS from my Twitter,
Last.fm and Flickr comments, while
also accepting email posts and
photo sends from my phone. All
as a test, mind you. There's not a
desktop client for Windows yet --
but if you're running a Mac, you
could post to a Tumblr site without
ever having to open your browser.

(As I think I said before, desktop
clients and bookmarklets are the
secret to making it look like you're
on the web at all times.)

I love tumblelogs. They are pure.

No idea what to do with one long-
term, of course, because I already
have a blog website (that took
a lot of its design cues from
tumblelogs).

Hm. This is leading to other thoughts.
More in a bit, maybe.

[David Bird]

May 26:

I'd like you to ignore, for a while,
anything that smacks of Web 3.0,
or even Web 2.0, or any of the other
dumb ideas that distract from
production of actual content on the
web. Instead, consider these simple
things:

* The hurdle to credible publishing
on the web, now, is the nine dollars
it costs to buy a domain name from
GoDaddy, which can be mapped on
to a free Tumblr or Blogger space.

* Monetisation through a
combination of ad programs like
Indieclick or Federated Media,
clickthrough systems like Amazon
Associates, and merchandise
operations like Cafe Press (which
I'm assured is much better now)...do
actually work.

* (The reaction to BoingBoing
becoming a "band-managed"
operation that paid its writers a
salary out of the ad revenue should
have been seismic. And it's so
obvious: what else is a groupblog
but a daily (free!) magazine run
according to the demands of the
medium of the web?)

* 365Tomorrows was an ideal
reaction to sf publishing in new
media, the concept of flash fiction
and the way the medium works.
100-word bursts of speculative
fiction, daily. JR Blackwell's gotten
herself a career out of it. And note
how 365 K kept producing and
fulfilled its mandate even as sf
sites and sf print magazines died on
either side of it.

* How far behind the curve is the
sf publishing community? When
International Pixel-Stained
Technopeasant Day came around,
hundreds of writers of gift and
ambition ran short work for free on
the web. This lead to an official from
the Science Fiction Writers of
America to call them SCABS.

* Comics Foundry retreated from
its position as a web "magazine"
(though it was aping print magazine
elements, rather than adopting
the medium of the web fully, as
I recall) to try and become a print
magazine. And was summarily
rejected for distribution by Diamond.
They're out time and money on a
project that would have seen them,
if successful, available in fewer
venues and read by fewer people
than if they'd stayed accessible
by anyone with an internet-ready
device.

* I love print. I love magazines that
commit and pay for long articles
and long fiction. The web rewards
neither approach. It's a packeted
medium, a surf medium. Short
bursts are the way to go. The web
isn't a replacement medium -- it's
*another" medium. That said, if
your concept of a magazine is
something designed in one-page
bursts, or three pages that only
carry 500 words due to the mass of
images, then, really, you're not
doing anything the web can't do
better, are you?

* Every day, millions of people
download single lumps of data that
take them three minutes to
consume. They're called mp3s.
It's a burst culture. Embrace the idea
for a while.

* Bursts aren't contentless, nor
do they denote the end of Attention
Span. If attention span was dead,
JK Rowling wouldn't be selling
paperbacks thick enough to choke
a pig, and Neal Stephenson wouldn't
be making a living off books the
size of the first bedsit I lived in.

* None of this is new thinking. None
of it. And yet, I've been waiting for
the other shoe to drop all year. But
time and again I've seen print
magazines that should have been
web objects all along launch and die --
and, in most cases, reconfigure on
the web. What was the point? Yes,
back in the 90s BoingBoing did it,
but web publishing was in its
infancy then.

* And just a thought: if you're an
sf writer grappling for space in one
of the fiction magazines for seven
cents a word or whatever the rate
is now -- what exactly are you
losing by teaming with writers of
like mind, going to the web and
convincing a friend to work out the
monetising bells and whistles for
you?

And...well, that wasn't a burst so
much as a hod of bricks, was it?
Oops.

-- W

Just out of curiousity, apropos of
nothing but suggested by the
other signal:

How many professional speculative
fiction writers are reading this,
these days?

* DON'T send me emails saying
"not me," you'll just get blocked.

* If you have to ask me whether
you count as professional: you're
not.

Speak, please.

-- W

Correction to previous, pointed out by two people, and
I'll use Charlie Stross' concise form:

"You got that one 100% back-asswards; International Pixel-Stained
Technopeasant day was a RESPONSE to Howard Hendrix calling everybody
scabs (not to mention coining "pixel-stained technopeasant" as a term of
abuse). He's an *ex*-official of SFWA, was speaking for himself when he
went non-linear, and IPSTD was a grass-roots reaction to his idiocy."

I discovered them the other way around, hence mistake. Move along,
nothing to see here.

-- W

[David Bird]

May 29:

Well, the weather's worked its
magic. Woke up to painful cramps
in my calves, and when I tried to
stand up...well, not so much with
the standing up, actually. So I'm
back on the cane. On top of that,
we had storms last night that were
strong enough to tip over the mini-
greenhouse and dump four inches
of rain on it. I think I lost maybe four
plants -- not sure yet, the pain was
clouding my vision. If the rain stops
today, I'll be able to assess the
damage better. Bad enough the
temperature's dropped enough to
put a check on plant growth and
the rain's damped out some of the
vegetable seeds. The climate in my
area is just insane now, totally
unpredictable year-on-year. If
this is going on up-county, it's going
to be a horrible year for the
winemakers (we do reasonable
white wines in Essex and Norfolk/
Suffolk now. Still can't grow a red,
mind you, though I expect that to
shift in ten years).

Oh, listen, I asked a friend what
the current rates for sf short
fiction were, just out of curiosity
-- trying to match creative costs
to sales, you know? And he told me
the current minimum rate to
qualify as a pro sf short fiction
market is $50 per 1000 words.
Amazing. Given that ANALOG, FSF
and ASIMOV'S are said to do between
15K and 20K on subscription sales,
and they cost around six dollars
each, even broad guesstimate
maths, subtracting wild guesses as
to editorial, production and printing
costs show that these things are
still showing a small profit.

Mind you, I'd still rather read Flurb.
(google it.)

Someone was asking: around 40
professional sf writers seem to
be receiving the Signal.