Michael Andre McPherson

Beyond the Slushpile

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A Monster Ate My Life

I’ve turned into one of those bloggers.  You know the kind: they start up, blog excitedly every day for a few weeks, then slip to twice a week, once a week, and stop all together.   I guess they thought a massive following would be instantaneous, or was deserved.

Believe it or not, I’m not one of those bloggers.  But a monster did eat my life.  I’d tell you all about it, but I learned from a wise man in the film industry that I don’t have to.

His name is Frank Polyak.  I was his camera trainee back in the early 90s on a show called Top Cops.  After I’d upgraded to Second Assistant Camera, he called to see if I could come out on Forever Knight.  I couldn’t make it and babbled my excuses.  He called me again a different night and I joined them for some fun film making.  He called me over to the camera during a break in shooting and said, “You know when I called you last time and you couldn’t make it?  Well, I don’t give a damn about your girlfriend or your promises or anything like that.  When people call you and you’re busy, you should just tell them you’re not available.  Excuses are boring and it’s none of our business as to why you’re not available.”

So here it is: I’m not available until January 7th.  This blog will be idle until then.

But I’m not one of those bloggers who fades away.  I like my writing too much.

Okay, if your dying of curiosity here it is: MY DOG ATE MY BLOG!

Happy New Year!

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The Last Meeting of The Crime Writers of Canada

I went to the Crime Writers of Canada Christmas/Holiday Party last night, a buzzing affair of food, drink, raffles and most importantly, chatting with dozens of published mystery and true crime writers.

I enjoyed the evening despite the headaches I endured organizing the party.  I somehow got drafted this year to be the CWC’s regional vice-president for Toronto, a position they asked me to fill since I’m a relative newbie.

The CWC swept me into their association five years ago because I wrote a murder mystery short story by accident.  When I went to the first meeting of this group of crime writers, I was surprised that I was pretty much the youngest person at the meeting.  I wasn’t surprised that there were no twenty-somethings, but I figured that thirty-somethings should be there.

It’s five years later, and I was struck last night by the fact that I’m still one of the youngest members in the room.  I know that there are one or two members who are younger, but for the most part it’s the same people as five years ago, and the new members who are joining are the opposite of young: they’re retirees looking to write and publish that book they never got around to during their working life.

This concerns me.  While membership in the CWC may be on the rise as the baby boomers retire and seek a creative outlet, it doesn’t bode well for the health of the organization.  Some members have already succumbed early to the inevitable.  Demographics could take a nasty toll on this merry band of writers.

If I’m lucky enough to live my full lifespan, it could be that twenty years from now I will preside over the last meeting of the Crime Writers of Canada.  The four of us will toast the boomers who started the organization and then shuffled off this mortal coil, even as we prepare for our own end.

Of course it doesn’t have to end that way.  But the demographics of the country are changing, not just in numbers, but ethnicity.  Perhaps we need some young Muslims who write murder mysteries? Is that likely?

Truth is that I wonder about the publishing industry as a whole in this demographic regard because I sense a sea change coming, and I frankly I want to know how to use this to further my goal of selling lots of novels.

And I better start thinking about where to find young CWC members, or that last meeting in 2030 will be more like a wake than a Christmas party.

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I Saw the Future — Yesterday

I chose physics as my major in university because it was my best subject in high school thanks to an excellent teacher, it seemed like an interesting field of study and I wanted to be a science fiction author and I thought it would help.

But by the time I graduated with a specialist in geophysics, I had stopped reading SF and was more interested in geo-politics than geophysics.

I think what turned me off SF was that as the moon launches faded and the baby boomers realized that they weren’t going to go to space, SF went distant, very distant.  Novels like Dune took us eons into the future and our planet had nothing to do with it anymore.  I loved Dune, but I missed the immediacy of Heinlein and the sense that this was all going to happen and very soon.

So I watched with fascination yesterday as history imitated fiction.  Elon Musk is the real life version of Heinlein’s D.D. Harriman, the fictional entrepreneur who started a rocket program to get people cheaply into orbit, not just to make money, but because he believed it was humanity’s destiny to go forth from this planet and explore.

Yesterday Musk’s company, SpaceX, became the first private company to launch a space capsule into orbit and return it safely to Earth, a feat previously accomplished only by countries, not companies.  Better yet, SpaceX intends to human rate their Dragon capsule.  Musk’s stated intention is to provide cheap access to space for anyone.

He’s the absolute opposite of the evil Hollywood capitalist.  He took the billion he made from Paypal to start a company to build electric cars and sunk everything else into SpaceX.  He wants to do things to make life better for humans, and he wants to make money doing it.  What a great combination!

So maybe I will write some sci-fi again one day, but my characters will be riding to space on SpaceX’s Falcon rockets, and they won’t be traveling through worm holes, or black holes.  I suspect I’ll be accused of having little imagination, but what I really see is the future.  I saw it yesterday.

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Better Not Trash My Sony E-reader Yet

While I’ve metaphorically trashed the Sony E-reader a couple of times when comparing it to the Kindle, a whole new world just opened up for the little device: Google has launched their new Google ebookstore, and they’re selling books in the e-pub format for Sony and Nook.

But the best news is that they’re making literally millions of public domain books available for free.  Want to catch up on your Sherlock Holmes–maybe Dickens for Christmas?  It’s going to all be there.

Better yet, Google executives have stated that while they don’t want to start a price war for the copyrighted works they sell, they do want them to be among the most competitive.

I predict a fall in the price of e-books with Amazon leading the way.

This will be fun!

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The Politics of Writers Groups

Writers are human beings, so unfortunately when three or more are gathered together they will break into at least two factions.  I know this because I belonged to a writers group for a few years.

It was an exciting time.  Most of the group were younger than me and eager, and all of them were good writers.  We shared successes and failures, brutally honest critiques, and we even encouraged one another to compete in the same short story contests.  We became friends, attended weddings, and went on road trips to parties and conferences.

Then one day the fun ended.  I was pulled aside by one member and gently informed that a clique had decided that another member should be evicted from the group.  He wasn’t writing enough.  Someone didn’t like his critiques.  His worst crime seemed to be that he nodded off to sleep a couple of times during an excessively long critique (not of his story.)

This left me in a quandary.  I had nearly fallen asleep a couple of times myself during that critique, but apparently I had been better at hiding it.  Would I be the next writer forced to walk the plank?

I suggested a better solution would be to limit the length of critiques to five minutes.  Only a few weeks before, one member had a valid complaint about one technical point in my story, but she went on about it for twenty minutes.  I had it solved in my head in two minutes, but the rules of our group were that I had to keep my mouth shut until she was done.  Surely a time limit would solve everything.

Nope.  Unlimited critique lengths were required.

Now I could have polled the other members of the group and put it to a vote.  I could have approached one or another member, using backroom politics to get my way, sort of what I saw going on already.  Instead I resigned from the group.  If I want politics I’ll pick up a paper.

It’s been years, but I miss my writers group.  We bonded over a common cause, shared the same dreams, and they understood me better than many of my university friends.  Most of us are still friends, of course, but its not the same as meeting once a month, bracing yourself for the round of criticism that will be unleashed on you in the politest manner.  I even miss the dreaded “but”  as in, “This was a great story, but…”

So I have to ask myself: would I join another writers group?  I think there is always more to learn, but I’ve never been much of a group person.  Even traveling I developed a preference early in my adulthood of venturing to very strange places by myself.  I’m not a loner, but I’m not a team player.  I like running, but not runners groups.  I like writing, and for a time I liked my writers group.

Perhaps that’s it.  Start a writers group with an expiration date, say one year.  Just enough time to get to know one another but not enough time for factions to develop.

After all, we’re only human.

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New York Times Conflict of Interest

I’m not actually suggesting anything shady is going on here, because I don’t want to be sued, but it do wonder what happens when the needs of a newspaper’s advertisers are at odds with the content.

Amazon has a great link to the 100 most notable books of the year as judged by the New York Times, and I’m sure that they’re all worthy books.  I certainly don’t see any preference given to a specific publisher, although it is weighted heavily toward big publishers, the kind that would buy advertising in the New York Times, so it makes me wonder if the reviewers are ever pressured.  Does an editor come up to one of the reviewers and say something like, “Thank God for advertisers.  Sales have been so bad this year that if it weren’t for them we’d all be looking for work.”

Far fetched, I know, and I’m sure the paper goes to great lengths to develop processes to prevent that kind of bias.  But as old print newspapers get more desperate, strange things could happen.

But like I said, I’m sure they’re all great books.

H/T to Fogel for the link.