Month: January 2002

Sim Subs, Redux

By Evan — — Writing

I had a number of responses to the simultaneous
submissions entry. A couple of them mentioned that it’s acceptable to
put an “expiration date” on a submitted manuscript. That is, in your cover
letter you can state that after X weeks, the story is automatically withdrawn
from consideration.

I admit that this method is a bit more efficient than having to manually
send the editor a withdrawal letter.
It probably has psychological benefits, too — it sets a hard limit, and
thus prevents you from dragging things out too long. “Well, I know what
I decided back in February, but maybe just a couple more weeks…”

As for the root of the problem:
Tim Cooper sent me an excellent
letter, which provided me with the only cogent
arguments I’ve seen so far for disallowing simultaneous submissions.

First, he points out that editors send out acceptances and rejections for a
magazine at roughly the same time:

Suppose I have stories in my slush that I like, from Writer A, Writer B, and
Writer C. I only have the ability to buy one of the stories. So, after much
agonizing, I accept Writer A’s story and reject Writer B’s and Writer C’s.
The next day, maybe I choose to buy a very short piece from Writer D because
it works well with Writer A’s story. The day after that, Writer A writes back
to me and says “Oh, wait, I already sold it to Editor X.” At this point, I can’t
recover the stories form Writer B and C, which could very well be better than
anything I’ll get in before the issue comes up. And I now have a short piece
I’ve committed to buy that doesn’t fit with anything in the issue at all…

Which is fair enough: perhaps given a busy magazine’s schedule, it isn’t practical
to hold off on rejecting Writers B and C until you have confirmation from
Writer A. (I don’t see how book publishers could use this excuse, though.)

Tim also mentions that the no-simultaneous-submissions rule serves as a barrier
that limits inappropriate submissions.

If someone can send a story to every market in the field at once, quite a few of
them are going to do it, regardless of how appropriate the story is for that
particular market. If sending
Stan
Schmidt a high fantasy story isn’t going to cost
the writer anything, a lot of them are going to say “why not?”

And then there are authors who send cover letters that say
things like “I have finished over 250 stories” — with no sales. As Tim puts it,
“I know that if simsubs were ok across the genre, the moment I opened for submissions
I would have gotten every one of those 250+ stories. I’m going to get all of them
eventually, anyway, it seems, but at least they’re coming at a speed I can handle.”

I sympathize with this. Barriers are necessary. After all, isn’t that
why so many publishers still require paper submissions?

However, I suppose that again
this explanation makes more sense for a magazine editor than a book editor.
First, unless our author writes with demonic speed, he or she will not have an
outrageous number of unsold novels. Second, while a book editor’s
slush pile might be large if you count pages, my guess is that it is
relatively small if you count manuscripts. This means that the burden
of rooting out the inappropriate submissions should be lower for book editors.
Finally, novels are expensive and time-consuming to print out and ship — so again,
fewer submissions.

Finally, Tim makes a very valid point (jeez, why didn’t I just print his
whole letter verbatim?) about the responsibilities of authors. If authors
could be trusted to track their submissions and inform editors when a
simultaneous submission is accepted somewhere else, the rule would be
unnecessary. I couldn’t agree more.

The flip side is that publishers
should at least be honest about why they do this. The non-explanation in the
SFWA FAQ just doesn’t cut it.

Sim Subs: a Play In One Act

By Evan — — Writing

Today’s question about the SF publishing industry is:
Why do publishers disallow simultaneous submissions?

Any author or book on writing will say the same thing: don’t do it.
If you get caught doing it, you’re in trouble. But the question remains,
why?

Other than “we’re the publishers and we say so,” the only reason I’ve read
comes from SFWA, in their
FAQ for
Beginning Writers (scroll down to the middle of the page):

Q: What is wrong with simultaneous submissions? Why can’t I send out my manuscript
to all the markets at once, and save years of waiting time?

A: Some markets allow simultaneous submissions. The Literary Market Place and The
Writer’s Market tell you which markets these are. Other markets do not want
simultaneous submissions. Why? Because too many of them have been burned by authors
who, on being told that their story was accepted and had been put to press, informed
the editors that, “Oh, I sent that to another magazine and it paid more money so I let
them publish it first.” More than one magazine has found itself in the position of
having to redo its entire layout, at considerable expense, because of such a situation…

After reading this, I actually went back and studied the SFWA acronym.
“Science-Fiction-and-Fantasy-Writers-of-America”. Yup.
Still says “Writers”.
I keep rereading the explanation and it still baffles me. Hmmmm…
perhaps we can elicit the Truth by transforming the narrative… 



               PREMATURE PUBLICATION:  A PLAY IN ONE ACT


Editor:    Tra-la-la-la-la… Say, what do we have here in the slush pile?

           (he fishes a manuscript out of the pile)  Why… it’s a story!

           I like this one!  Yes… it’s perfect for this month’s issue!

           Minions! (claps hands) Start the presses, post-haste!


Graphic

Designer:  Aye aye, sir!


Layout

Editor:    Full speed ahead!  


All three

together:  Huzzah!


Author:    (pokes head in the door)  Ummm… ‘scuse me… but I ah… ummm…

           actually, your competitor down the street secured the rights to my

           story over a month ago.  Terribly sorry about that.


Editor:    Whaaat!  Minions!  (claps hands)  Pelt this miscreant, this tramp,

           with crumpled Coke cans.  And blacklist her, post-haste!


Author:    Aie, curse my impatience!  I am undone!  (retreats under the barrage)


Editor:    Well, the only thing left to do now is to redo our entire layout,

           at considerable expense, because of this situation. 


           (All three burst into tears)


               THE END

Well, perhaps that didn’t help quite as much as I had hoped.

Anyway, the point is: how the heck
does a submission equate to signing a contract?
I mean it’s one thing if the editor secures publication rights and
then the author tries to renege “because they got a better offer”.
But that’s not what’s happening here. The author hasn’t agreed to
anything yet.

Frankly, the more I read the FAQ the angrier I get. The sad revelation
of all those poor editors getting burned has to be just outright false. What
idiot is going to lay out his magazine based on manuscripts that
he hasn’t bothered to acquire yet? The other possibility is that the poor editors
really were criminally stupid. Either way, the whole thing stinks.

One more thing: notice how the long lead times are a direct result of
the no simultaneous submissions rule. If simultaneous submissions were permitted,
then any magazine that could read its slush pile faster would have a significant
advantage, because they could snap up good stories from unknowns long before
their slower competitors. Competition would force lead times to shrink dramatically.

Competition? Publishing? Bah, I live in a dream-world.

Vanquishing Evil

By Evan — — Culture

I’m fighting off a cold. It’s not helping that I have to be at work at the crack
of dawn to train my European colleagues on the software we’re releasing next week.

Not that I don’t appreciate German humor or anything. For example, I was explaining
a new module our software has, one which lets you create new benchmark centers
cost centers, and organizations. The German manager was duly impressed.
“So Evan! Ven I klick on ze button, do I alzo aquire ze budget
for ze new center? Ho ho ho!” The best I could manage at 7am was a feeble,
“Sure Ruediger, that’ll be in the next release, I promise.”

Even the French were better-behaved.

Since I don’t have cable TV, I’ve had to amuse myself in other ways. Recently
I’ve been plowing through the archives of
The Brunching Shuttlecocks. I swear, their
stuff is as good or better than The Onion. Take, for
example, the Everquest FAQK:

Q: But I can at least put myself into the shoes of an adventurer, righting wrongs and
fighting evil?

A: Sort of. The evil in question reappears in the world after you vanquish it, often
within mere minutes. and the world as a whole never changes because of anything you do.
So in that way it’s less like being a fantasy adventurer and more like being a social worker.

But I’m running out of Brunching. Fortunately there’s Andrew Sullivan, who,
after seeing Lord of the Rings for the first time, concluded that
George
W. Bush is Frodo Baggins. Which makes the United States the Shire. And
George Sr. is Bilbo, who “had his own little adventure with the dark forces, but poor
Frodo is stuck with the legacy.” Ah, I dunno. It made me chuckle.

Bay Area Football Nerds

By Evan — — Personal

This morning I threw caution to the wind and listened to
The Greg Kihn Show
instead of NPR, like a responsible fiber-eating person. Greg Kihn is
sometimes pretty funny, despite what Pat says,
and he has this great grizzled old rock star voice.
Anyway, during the show, Kihn mentioned that at his last Niners game, he and the
crowd chanted, “Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball!
Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball!”
Kind of like
“Fight Fiercely Harvard!“,
I guess.
Kihn, in true Dave Barry form, swears he is not making this up.
“The really cool thing,” he said,
“was that we did repel them and they did relinquish the ball.”

Hard to believe we’re 12-4.

Sunday pretty much stunk. I was trying to finish a story, but I had decided that
not only was I going to have an accelerating relativistic rocketship, but that the
timing of all the messages from earth were going to arrive at the correct times,
as opposed to merely sorta plausible times.

I had some initial successes in deriving some of the
equations
I needed, but then I got bogged down. My final answers were
were nonsense. I soon became obsessed, and wasted pretty much the whole day.

It was probably the inital success that sucked me in. If I had utterly failed
from the start, I would have been frustrated, but I would have given
up a lot sooner. And then I would have spent my time actually writing the story,
instead of indulging in physics snobbery. (“Ha! all those other rocketships move
at constant velocity! Mine accelerate at 1g!”) Sheesh.

Not only did I forget what was important about the story, but I also forgot
to eat, somehow. And so I was feeling pretty crummy around dinner time, when
I realized that not only did I have a ton of other stuff to do, but I was
supposed to be at my old roommate’s wife’s birthday dinner at 8:30 in
San Francisco. I just couldn’t handle staying up late and socializing on a worknight.
So I called them up and flaked. Then I felt bad about that, so the only
thing left to do was to drive over to my parents’ house and have them feed me homemade
vegetable stew.

It did the trick.

Briefcases of Money

By Evan — — Culture

M’ris is back from vacation, but she
seems pretty swamped with going through the
WIHA slush.
I sent her a non-WIHA related email, and her response began like this:

Thanks for sending this e-mail along, but I’m afraid it’s not for
me. Aside from a passing mention, it had nothing to do with aliens, much
less with hating them. Best of luck placing it elsewhere.

Oh. Sorry. You get into the zone, you know…

Speaking of M’ris, her January 4 journal entry is on
college and niche marketing.
Specifically, she’s talking about her alma mater,
Gustavus Adolphus College, and the
fact that they are eliminating “J-term”, which is a one-month term in January
where you take one course. I’m not sure if J-term is unique to Gustavus,
but it’s got to be reasonably rare, anyway.

M’ris is not in favor of the ditching-of-the-J-term. She says, rightly, that
it’s good that the thousands of different colleges and universities
in this country are so different from each other, and they should stay that
way. The more niches that colleges manage to satisfy, the better for students.

That’s all true. Although I’ve got one nit to pick: perhaps
because I am not a Gustavus alum, I’m a bit confused
about why J-term is so important for Gustavus’s niche marketing.
Clearly Gustavus has many many attributes that differentiate it from
Harvey Mudd, BYU, Simon’s Rock, Yale, Bob Jones, Duke, or Florida State…
is J-term really all that high on the list? Maybe for some. I dunno.

Anyway, the real reason I brought this up
was that M’ris does a spot-on job of describing the different types of
college students. For the heck of it, here’s my take on the subject:

The Three Types of College Students

  • Type A (The University as Glorified Summer Camp):
    The most common type. This student is there because he
    is a member of the middle or upper class, and in this country the rite
    of passage for staying in the middle class is going to college. Other than that,
    he isn’t quite sure why he’s there, other than Mom and Dad are paying. You can spot
    these folks easily enough: they are those who wax poetic about “The College Experience”,
    who drone on about how “the most important things I learned weren’t in the classroom”.
    A self-fulfilling prophecy — after all, you weren’t in class after the first week,
    were you?

    It’s unfortunate that we in the United States have chosen college
    as our rite of passage to middle class adulthood. Couldn’t we choose a less
    expensive ritual? Or at least a less time-consuming one. For example, maybe
    the kids could link arms in a circle around a bonfire while their parents
    stand behind them, symbolically tossing briefcases of twenty dollar bills
    into the blaze.

  • Type B (The University as My Ticket Up (or Out)):
    The next most common type. This student knows why she’s going to
    college. She knows that for some reason, you need
    a bachelor’s degree in this country. And she’s going to get one —
    and if she has to jump through hoops and put up with frippery that has
    nothing to do with her major, so be it.

    Many type B students are older people going back to college, first- or
    second- generation immigrants, or from low-income backgrounds. They are
    most heavily concentrated in pre-med, law, business, and engineering.
    Unlike their more slothful Type A colleagues, Type B students are
    hyper-aware of grades and finances.

  • Type C (The University as Palace of Learning):
    By far the rarest type. The Type C student is the kind of student that
    colleges like to claim that they serve in their glossy brochures. Type C students
    go to college because they actually like learning.
    Some of these pathetic throwbacks love only one field, such as physics; others
    are true polymaths who drink up literature, history, theater, chemistry… you name it.

    Although the number of Type C students is small, the group is still
    big enough (and academically monomanaical enough) to produce a
    distressingly large supply of professors. This has lead to exponential
    growth in the number of academic papers and books produced, which
    many
    pundits
    falsely
    equate
    with
    exponential
    growth
    in
    human
    knowledge.
    The oversupply of Ph.Ds sometimes even forces the metastasis of yet more
    colleges and universities, thus exacerbating the problem.

Different institutions have different ratios of Types A-to-B-to-C. For example,
Harvey Mudd was about 30-40-30, while UCSB (which I view as more typical) is
more like 70-25-5. At a place like
The University of Phoenix, the ratio might
be 5-85-10. There’s a lot of variation, but I’m pretty sure that overall,
C < B << A.

Here’s my modest proposal: Each school would shoot for having most of its
students in one column. The Type Cs would go to fancy-schmantzy academic
liberal arts schools, like Swarthmore. The Type Bs would go to trade schools or
engineering schools, like MIT. And the Type As would go to pure party schools,
like Stanford. We could even explicitly label schools as A, B, or C, to help
high school students choose.

The benefits are clear. Happier students. No more stupid debates over
football interfering with academics. No more pre-meds whining about having
to take Physics and English Lit. No more worrying about whether your kid
is getting the education he or she needs.

And just think how much more honest those glossy brochures and alumni magazines
would be. Anyway, just a thought.

Reverb

By Evan — — Tech

An alert reader informed me that some of the links to my fancy shiny new
Contact section were broken.

I knew that this contact section would come back to bite me in the ass.
Communication. Bleah. Highly overrated.

Just kidding, of course. I hate broken and misdirected links as much as
the next person. So feel free to tell me if you spot one here. It
actually makes me feel good to zap those things. Or if you don’t
think the navigation makes sense, it couldn’t hurt to let me know that either.

Now, criticizing my color scheme… that’s another matter entirely.

Back to Work

By Evan — — Personal

I’ve bowed to pressure. I now have a Contact page.
Of course, this pressure came from people who already have my email address.
Hmmmm…

After some deliberation, I’ve decided to hide my private email address behind a
script. I just don’t feel comfortable putting it out on the web for
anyone to grab (particularly a spambot). Maybe I’m being too cautious.
But the way I see it, my email address is like my phone number. Heck, maybe
it’s more important — after all, I’ve had the same email address for
three-and-a-half years, while my phone number has changed three times.

First day back at office, and basically I just made more work for other
people. Heh, my kind of day!

I still have a lot of unpacking to do. To avoid that,
I picked up a couple of books at the bargain rack at Waldenbooks. The first was
If
You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now,
by Sandra Tsing Loh. It’s… OK.
I like her language and her style. But let’s face it: she’s taking her shots at… Los Angeles.
How hard is that? Plus, I can only take so many sardonic comments and wry observations
at one sitting. Pot calling the kettle, maybe, but still.

The second book was The
Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. Hey, it was three bucks. And it’s not
without its charms. Take the cartoon sidebars. When the authors provide an anecdote, they
use a cute little cartoon of an astronaut pontificating, labelled, “As You Know, Bob”. When they want
to warn you about a publishing industry pitfall, there’s a cartoon of Robby the Robot,
with the title, “Danger, Danger!” How could you not love a book like that?

Mere Household Cleansers

By Evan — — Personal

Well, the move is over. Sort of. I’m still unpacking boxes, but things are starting
to settle down. We did some cleaning at the old house last afternoon with some
serious chemicals. That is, chemicals for cleaning, not chemicals for making the
cleaning process seem less burdensome.

Fortunately, my abortive career as a condensed-matter physicist ended up making me a
little more sanguine about dealing with harsh household cleansers. For example, take HF acid,
which will almost immediately start leaching the calcium from your bones. Now that’s
a hazardous chemical. Or photoresist, which (depending on the variety you use) can be
a highly dangerous mutagen, carcinogen, and
teratogen.
(Yes, I had to look up that word when I first saw it on the label.)
Anyway, as for household chemicals — bleach, Raid, weedkiller — bah! Milk of Magnesia,
as far as I’m concerned.

The funny thing about moving is that every time you think you’ve packed up all the
stuff, you open another cabinet or closet and look — more stuff! (So that’s
where Dave Smith’s staple gun disappeared to…) Eventually you
end up fighting over who should take what. I even got talked into taking an
old couch and a coffee table. Maybe all this extra furniture will lead to having
extra visitors.

Oh yeah, New Years: I had a very nice time at the Smith-Holy residence. (Not
the Holy-Smith residence, as previously discussed.)
We had some good wine and danced to some techno. (Or, I lurched around to the music
in my own off-rhythm way, content that only my friends could see how silly I was
being.) After midnight, we went out to the balcony and sang songs, as obnoxiously
as possible. It turns out that Nancy and Don know most of the songs to
Gigi, and Nancy and I managed a
stunning rendition of “I Remember It Well”. At least, I thought we were
stunning at the time.

Anyway, happy New Year to all. Just keep this in mind: no matter how your New Year’s
celebration went, it was probably
not
as bad as Andrew Sullivan’s. (If necessary, scroll down to “The Curse of 2001”.)