2011 has been a remarkably productive year, and the last four days are going to be some of its busiest as I hurry to package a few new short stories, finish up two books, and put together a kickstarter video.

But the best part, the part so many of you have been waiting for, has already started:
The recording studio is back up and running. We’re recording audiobooks for Free Will (which will be podcast), for the Clarke Lantham books, and for a few other things that we’ll announce later on. And today, we’re also recording new episodes of Apologia.

I can’t tell you how excited I am to have it all ticking over again.

More soon. Until then, have an excellent year’s end!

In vino, veritas. Pliny the Elder nailed it: Wine tells the truth. It doesn’t make you do things so much as it lets you do things. You can learn a lot about yourself, and about your friends, by watching what happens when they’re well-buzzed.

National holidays can do the same thing to people–and not just because of the amount of alcohol people tend to consume given half an excuse. Like all things, love of one’s country can come in a lot of flavors. Soviet dissidents, for example, loved their country while hating its system–they loved its culture, its geography, its weather, the shared history in which their identity was rooted. Members of totalitarian systems, on the other hand, are trained to identify the system with the country, and to see non-conformity as so unpatriotic as to deserve death. Some people are patriotic about countries where they’ve never lived, so much so that they’ll move across the world to live in them, because they’ve fallen in love with the ideology, or the people, or the culture of that country. You can learn a lot about a person by watching the flavor of their patriotism.

Writing a political thriller series these last few years, I’ve carefully watched the political micro-climates around the world and studied how they relate to the version of love of country I carry around in my own psyche. Call it a love affair with the Jeffersonian vision of freedom: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

This year has been an amazing year around the world for the struggle against different forms of tyranny, and as an Americans it’s been more exciting than I can say to watch the most action-packed year of calculated struggles against tyranny since the late 80s and early 90s (it’s also more than a little embarrassing how little my home culture seems interested in carrying on their struggle on the home front, but that’s a topic for another time). It’s quite possible that the Arab Spring, the Iranian struggles, and the other protests and revolutions around the world will all come to bad ends in the same way that the revolutions of the twentieth century almost all ended in dictatorship, civil war, and genocide; still, I have a thin hope that some of the people who are laying down their lives–for reasons as simple as the next loaf of bread or as idealistic as bringing democracy and universal suffrage to cultures where such notions are without precedent–may have read history and learned from the missteps of the last hundred years.

Because of that, in celebration of the first revolution that actually worked (if imperfectly), I’ve dedicated Free Will (my new book about revolution) as follows:

This volume is dedicated to the men and women
Who sat in Tahrir
Who crossed the Wall in Berlin
Who fell at Tiananmen Square
Who bled in the streets of Tehran
Who lost their lives in Boston
And all those like them before and since.
To them we owe a debt we cannot repay
Save that we make their dream come true
For Everyone
Forever.

I’ll be seeing you soon, with the rest of the book. Have a safe weekend–and spend it however you want to. The ability to make that choice is a remarkable thing in the history of the world.

In between times, you get harassed by salespeople both fabulous and incompetent, pushed to spend more money than the Harvard students spend on pizza in a year, and–just occasionally–get to test drive a car that leaves you breathless. The weight balance is just short of perfect, the clutch is tighter than a smuggler’s sphincter at a customs checkpoint, the gearbox goes up to six, and the power band is as wide as a ten-lane highway.

You sit at the base of the entrance ramp on your test drive, having established through driving surface streets that it handles well in irritating city traffic and making sure the ergonomics are comfortable, the ride quality good. The light turns green and you punch it ever so slightly, just to see what it can do around the 45mph-rated cloverleaf to get on to the freeway. Then, when you’re about to come out of the leaf, you shift into sixth and glance down, and notice that you’re already doing over 90, and the car has a long, long way to go. You take the merge ramp at 110, then let the engine slow you down to a more socially acceptable 80mph in case any cops are waiting on the other side of the berm.

You put it through its shakes in the next twenty minutes. The thing seems to be glued to the ground. You can’t kick it out without trying like hell, you can’t make it lean out of a curve, you can’t make it stop trying to eat the road up like cotton candy–and yet when you’re cruising at 80 in 6th, the tach isn’t even at 3,000 and the on-board computer shows you making better than 32mpg.

You weren’t actually in the market for a sports car. It’s been a decade since you owned one, maybe more. You were looking for something small-but-fun. Maybe a slightly overpowered sedan, or a 2-door around-town coupe–something with a bit of cargo space and room for passengers. You just took the test drive because the thing was on the lot where you were already looking, and you just don’t let chances to drive cars that nice pass you by.

Except that now you wish you could get it–but thankfully, you’re too responsible to consider it.

Still, to cope, you remind yourself that the kind of cars you’re likely to fall in love with will be impossibly expensive to maintain, a bitch to insure, hell on fuel, and best left in the world of pipe dreams. You re-watch Gone in 60 Seconds to take the edge off. You try to remember that you’re an adult now, and driving is only supposed to be fun on special occasions.

Then you start researching the cars that are making your short list, and you sneak a couple of the cars that are making your inner performance driver sweat like a junkie three days into detox onto the list. What you find doesn’t help. Turns out the world has changed in the sixteen years since you went car shopping. Prices aren’t what you thought, and since you have a spotless record your insurance rates for the new supercar would be less than what you paid for your first VW Bug. Reliability profiles of all brands have changed–build philosophy has changed. After talking to several mechanics at length you’ve realized that maintaining them is well within your capabilities as a mechanic.

Then you find out that the cars you’ve been eyeing with “someday” envy are only one or two thousand out of your price range, and you’ve got some articles at hand that need selling. And your partner points out that there are no kids in the household, and there’s still one cargo car in the driveway. She misses having a fun car as much as you do, and all this one really needs to be able to do is road trips and commutes.

“Did you say road trips?” you think, “This six-speed wet dream was built for them.”

And ooh, boy–that’s when things really get interesting.

On the other hand, there is Powell’s. And The Montage. And the other things about Portland that keep me coming back for a visit every now and then even though the weather is appalling and the streets are paved with potholes and designed according to arcane 1950s theories of traffic control that bear as much resemblance to the patterns of human travel as does spontaneous human combustion to real-world thermodynamics.

These are the kind of thoughts you have after a ten hour drive up from San Francisco with the always entertainingly snarky Gail Carriger in search of a novel con-going experience.

It was novel–or, at least, a chapter and a half of a novel plus a short story. I write a lot at cons during the downtime, and OryCon had some very comfortable seats in the bar (and in the panel rooms) that were well-tailored to the task of keeping my ass affixed to them. As cons go, it was uneventful — low key, some interesting bits of programming, lots of wifi, but in general it had that Portlandy vibe, with which I have an infamous love/hate relationship.

After all, I did live here for a couple years, and in that time I grew to love the landscape, made some very good friends, and had a marvelous time, discovered some wonderful restaurants, venues, and cultural hotspots, all while growing to hate the weather, the politics, and the general dreary-perpetual-fight-against-depression-and-oppression feel of the place. I’m a spoiled Bay Area native–you can tell, can’t you?

So, I’m forced to admit that, by the end of the con, I was exhausted. It’s hard to be simultaneously having a good time and irritated to death, but Portlandiness does that to me, and in the midst of admittedly good and productive times, it wore me down.

Powell’s, which is possibly the greatest book store chain on earth, is a Portland-area legend, and for good reason. Walking into one has for me the same pornographic appeal that walking into a teddy-bear outlet has for a Plushie. I had to resist, very diligently, the urge to pluck the uncorrected galleys of Glory Road off the shelf and take it home with me. Last night, they had an uber-signing: 31 (or so) science fiction authors packed the Beaverton branch for an hour-and-a-half marathon session. (I wasn’t signing, I was off to the side writing another chapter).

I’ve always thought the best part of cons are the unexpected meetings, and this one was no different. In this case, just after the signing, I walked into a bar with Gail Carriger, M.K. Hobson, and a handful of other young-and-hungry Steampunk authors and their entourages, only to see before me a table peopled with authors who I recognized, all of whom were a generation older.

My policy when engaging in shop talk: go for the experience. I introduced myself, they remembered me from my occasional blog comments and invited me to join them for dinner. I spent the next three hours talking shop with Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Dean Wesley Smith, and Adrian Phoenix, along with con-organizers John Lorentz and Ruth Sachter. This alone was easily worth the time the trip took–when people who have been in an industry long enough to know its rhythms (and who are very deliberately feeling out the tech and legal trends that acre currently wreaking creative destruction) are willing to discuss their thoughts, entertain debate, and gab about aspects of your business that are difficult to research, you make time in your evening for it.

It was also fabulously entertaining–a whole table full of folks whose sense of humor is more twisted than mine. Not often I run into that, but boy is it fun when I do!

So, recommendations for OryCon:
Their panels on violence are world class, no kidding. They are a must-attend for any fiction writer (though if you have a weak stomach, you might need to look away from the slide show screen from time to time). The people who run it (and evidently it’s a yearly fixture) are some of the acknowledged world experts on the physiology and psychology, and other panelists are trained killers. I went for research concerning the upcoming book on firearms, and left with a reading list for prep work for book 2 in the firearms series.

Likewise, the panels on costuming and particularly on bodypainting are very well-run. I get the sense that this is a core competency of the Portland fan community, and if your interests run in these directions, you’d be well served to attend.

Also, if you value your palate, As con food goes, the food at OryCon is passable, but not great, while the prices are too high for what they’re selling compared to even the Bay Area cons (which, being in the Bay Area, have far more business being pricey, yet are mysteriously more reasonable on the food). The con hotel sits in the midst of a number of excellent restaraunts–a short walk will be rewarded with gustatory satisfaction without undue pain on the wallet.

Now, back to writing. Maybe I can knock out most of the rest of a novel before SteamCon…?

…between the execrable puns that had me wailing in pain and laughter simultaneously (“Not with a whim, but a banker” — you should be utterly ashamed of yourself in the best possible way. I doubt I shall ever have the guts to do *that* to my readers), and the glorious moments of beauty and mourning, it is the best read I’ve had in quite some time, and will, I daresay, be one I re-read just as I do the rest of the best Heinleins on my shelf.

I discovered Robert A. Heinlein when I was twelve, literally on the day he died. I caught my father crying on the porch – not something he was given to doing in public. I asked him what the matter was, and he told me that Heinlein had died – and then he stared at me slack-jawed when he realized I hadn’t a clue who the man was. He took me to the garage, had me pull a box off the top shelf, opened it up, and produced Tunnel in the Sky. He thrust it toward me and said “Read. And when you’re done with this one, read the rest of them in this box.”

I found in Robert’s books exactly the kind of bitch-slap I needed to begin learning to take responsibility for myself, and the beginnings of my formal training in critical thinking, as well as permission to fall in love with life without embarrassment. It felt like mourning the passing of a well-loved uncle when, in 2001, I closed the page on The Star Beast and realized that there was nothing new left – I’d read them all, even Grumbles and Tramp Royale.

For the last few years, I’ve had Variable Star and For Us, The Living sitting on my shelf, waiting for a rainy day. Two weeks ago, after a long stretch of 12-18 hour work days, I took down Variable Star and nursed it for as long as I could, savoring all the echoes of my favorite author coming through the pen of the man he, from what I understand, considered his best successor.

It was a fabulous duet.

Thank you, very much, for having the courage to take it on. There’s one song left on my shelf, and I’m saving it for another rainy day, but for my money you’ve produced a near-perfect elegy in Variable Star.

Damn you for having the balls to quote Ulysses at the end. And thank you, so very, very much, for giving me one last grumble to treasure.

-Dan Sawyer

[Correction: MWS chimed in in the comments to correct my misapprehension of his current attitude toward podcasting, which is considerably more complex than the paragraph above makes it seem. My apologies for inadvertently misrepresenting him.]

The two of them are generation one podiobookers who appeared in the space hot on the heels of the three founders, and seeing them throw in the towel has a lot of other creators wondering: “Are we all just being idiots giving stuff away for free?” And it’s got a lot of fans wondering “What’s going to happen now? Are all my favorite writers going to give up?”

The Gospel of Free has been pinging around the internet for a while now, it’s even got its own official book. There are folks in the fiction space – like Doctorow and Sigler – that have made it the cornerstone of their publicity strategy and turn a consistent profit at it. The use of free content in career building is a well-established promotional strategy, but it’s a difficult tool to use, and suffers from the reductio ad absurdum that most people hear when they first encounter the message, no matter how subtly it’s preached: “If you build it, they will come.”

So if I just put my stuff on the web I’ll find an audience? Well, no. You might find an audience, if you get yourself seen by the right people (and by “right people” I mean people who are prone to telling everybody they know about their latest new and great thing). You might even find a good audience – but you have to bear in mind, “Free” doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Let’s take what I do for free (well, free to my audience): I use a segment of my professional time as a writer and as a sound engineer to produce full-cast audiodbooks. I pay for this – billing my professional time out at normal rates, and factoring in what I pay my actors in trade (whether they’ve collected on it or not), my cost (not including what I should be paying the author) is in the neighborhood of $10-15k. Now, am I out of pocket that much? No. I do go out of pocket a little bit, but not a lot – however, that’s all time stripped out of my life that I could be billing at that kind of rate. If you’ve wondered why I do less in the way of publicity than some other podiobooks authors, now you know – the time is my main expense, and I have a life and a business. I intend, eventually, to have my writing income make up a greater-than-fifty-percent share of my household budget, but I’m not there yet. I’m nowhere near. This is what is called a loss-leader.

In business terms, a loss-leader is the bait on the hook – the hook is what gets the audience to spend money. Matching the right bait to the right hook and fishing in the right water is a learned skill set, and it relies somewhat on how fast one learns from experience, how lucky one is, and (in the writing game) how good a lawyer one is and/or has. There’s a reason more than 75% of authors wash out of the game after their first book contract runs out, and why only a minuscule percentage of people with authorial ambitions ever get even that far – being a good writer is not the same as being a successful author. It’s even possible to be a successful author without being a good writer (for example, Dan Brown), but I wouldn’t bank on it and I know damn few successful authors who would, particularly over the term of a career. Craft does matter – it’s just not all that matters.

If podcasting is your loss leader, what’s your endgame? If all you’re trying to do is get your voice heard, podcasting or blogging your novel is a perfectly fine idea. If you’re looking to get published, it might help, or it might be a distraction or a detriment, depending on your approach and a host of other variables. If you’re looking to build a sustainable long term career as a professional author, it’s time for you to stop and think about a few things before you go into podcasting:

1) What will podcasting give me?
2) What is my professional time worth – and if I were to bill myself for this, how much of a loss will I be taking?
3) What kind of author do I want to be?
4) Why do I think “getting published” is a worthwhile goal?

Why should you stop to think about these things? Because I guarantee you that your answers to at least one of those questions is wrong enough to set you up for some serious disappointment.

What will podcasting give me?
Podcasting will, if you stick with it and actually produce a decent product with broad enough appeal, give you an audience ranging anywhere from a few hundred to maybe twenty thousand regular listeners. If you’re very innovative in evangelizing your product beyond the established fiction podosphere, your chances for good numbers go up. If you host in a high visibility place like Podiobooks and leave your content there for a few years, your numbers will climb over time due to the long tail effect.

Podcasting may also help you learn the market in terms of audience. This is the primary reason I started fiction podcasting: Market research. I was looking to find out what kind of people would enjoy the stories that I’m interested in writing, so that I could figure out how to find and deliver to that market that, in the long term (and I’m talking about a time scale of decades) I will be able to consistently turn a profit on. Notice I said “stories”, not “books” – that will become important later.

Podcasting may give you a creative community – this isn’t something I was looking for, but I have made some friends through the process as well as more than a few good business contacts that have been helpful along the way.

Podcasting (if you’re good at it) will win you respect and accolades as well as the adoration of at least a few fans along the way, and this feels really good. Just remember that, as encouraging as it can be, it’s a limited kind of street cred. Audience tastes change, and what they love about you today they may hate about you tomorrow. Glory feels wonderful, even in small doses, and can put an extra bit of shine on a life well lived, but it will never make up for insecurity or the need for the kind of relationships you can only have with people who really know you.

Podcasting may give you pleasure – if you enjoy the process and enjoy interacting with people, it’s something that you might like even as a hobby.

But unless you are supremely lucky and very canny, there is something podcasting will not deliver: a paycheck of any substance. If you’re expecting to be have your audio audience put you on the bestseller list once you get that book deal, good luck to you. A few people have pulled it off. Those people are, without exception, people that – by chance or by cleverness – wrote exactly to market. They were selling stories that resonated perfectly (or at least well enough) with the public that a larger-than-average segment of their fan base wanted to own a physical copy, and the same larger-than-average segment went out of their way to pimp the shit out of the books to their friends, family, and strangers who might not even own iPods. A few others have pulled it off by their books being noticed on a site like Podiobooks, and subsequently selling film options.

If you want your book to perform well enough to get to your next contract, you need a publishing house that will throw its weight behind you, a print run that is realistically scaled to your book’s performance, and a property that is going to sell in the current market. If you don’t have at least the latter two of these three things, then (again) good luck to you. You’re going to need it.

How Much Is My Time Worth?

I hate to sound like a schoolmarm (or worse), but time that you’re podcasting is time that you’re not doing four other things, all of which are arguably more important. It’s time you’re not making money at whatever your profession is, it’s time you’re not spending with friends and family building the memories that make life with living, it’s time that you’re not learning, and it’s time that you’re not writing.

If you intend to write fiction for any significant fraction of your life, you need to be doing all of those things. You have to write to grow as a writer, and you have to make money to be able to live while you’re writing. But if you have a life that isn’t worth living – say, a life without significant relationships or learning and enrichment – then it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to have anything interesting to write about (and you may be too depressed to write about anything at all, except stories about depression).

Every hour you spend podcasting is billable time – somebody’s paying for it, and it isn’t always just you. Don’t cheat on your mental accounting sheet – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Even in a down economy, your time has a dollar value attached to it – figure
out what that value is, and then keep track of what you’re spending. If nothing else, being aware of the cost will help you keep from feeling cheated at the far end if you wind up not getting a good return on your investment, because you’ll be spending on purpose.

What Kind of Author Do I Want To Be?

If you’ve been in and around the writing business for any length of time, you’ve heard the old saw “you can’t make a living as a writer unless you’re in the top 1%.” This bit of conventional wisdom is what lies behind the blockbuster mentality on the part of authors: you want to have a brand name, you want to be the biggest thing ever, and you must relentlessly self-promote (the blockbuster mentality of some publishing houses is another animal entirely, and Charles Stross and Dean Wesley Smith have both covered it very well on their blogs recently).

If you’ve heard that and are still intent on trying, then you are either mind-numbingly stupid, a heroically-minded risk junkie, a hobbyist, or someone who actually has a clue about business and doesn’t listen to the conventional wisdom of creative people (in which case, good for you).

So you want to be the next Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer? You’d be better off going to Vegas – that kind of trend really is a game of chance, and depends largely (though not entirely) on unforeseeable market forces. That said, there is a whole swath of writers who make a living on their names, which they worked very hard to establish, and who aren’t blockbusters (and yes, Scott Sigler is one of them. He might be a blockbuster by our standards, and his ambition is to be the next Stephen King, but by broader market standards he’s a respectable front-lister, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that).

But blockbusting is not the only way to win this game, and here’s why:

Most authors who make a living at it don’t make a living on their book advances. Oh, the advances help, but they’re not even close to the whole pie. Subsidiary rights sales, foreign rights, royalties from the long tail, article sales, and commissioned work for other commercial ventures (such as being tapped to do a Star Trek or a Dragonlance novel) make up a large part of the income flow, with investments helping keep the rent paid during lean years. These authors generally (though not always) sit solidly on the mid-list, and some of them write under a variety of names for different markets. I know and have known (personally) at least a score of authors who make their living with their words, and the two qualities that distinguish them from the authors I know who haven’t been able to pull it off are: 1) insufferable, bloody-minded perseverance, and 2) continual growth in craft and breadth. In other words, these authors actually treat it like a career, rather than a brass ring.

The truth is that most people who get counted as “authors” in surveys of author incomes are people who publish a single book, or who have a book they haven’t sold. They’re not career writers. They don’t count screenwriters, ad copy writers, stage play writers, or other such folks. In other words, this bit of conventional wisdom is horse shit because it counts every dilettante, aspiring amateur, and washout as an “author.” Authors such people may be, but professionals they ain’t. Some of them will become professionals (I must hasten to add, I’m on this tier — I’m not prolific enough or churning enough cash enough yet to be called a professional, but I’m heading deliberately in that direction) – others are hobbyists. I daresay that if such a survey were taken of all the auto mechanics in the world, with hobbyists and people that change their own oil counted with the same weight as ASE certificate holders, the numbers for auto mechanics wouldn’t be dissimilar to what we hear about with writing.

If you’re looking to do this for a living, writing is a professional business (i.e. a business that relies on being an expert in a particular domain), with all the problems that implies: It relies on individual expertise, a broad skillset, at least a vague awareness of market dynamics, a certain legal acumen, the ability to adapt to contingency, a high tolerance for risk and uncertainty, and a little bit of luck. You know, just like any other non-franchise business.

Why Do I think Getting Published is a Worthwhile Goal?

More than any other question, the answer to this gets to the heart of the matter for an author who is thinking of podcasting their work, because in answering this you’re probably going to answer a significant portion of all the other questions.

My answer to this one is simple: It’s a step on the road. I got a huge thrill with my first short story sale – now, after only a couple more, it’s an exercise in contract negotiations and another tick on the scorecard. It’s fun and exciting, but it’s not the life-affirming experience that the first sale was. Why? Because my sights are on the next set of goalposts, and I need to get to those so I can see the next set, and so on.

But my self-worth is not wrapped up in this. This is business. If I can’t make it work one way I’ll make it work another, and if, in the end, I turn out not to have the chops, I’ll shift my focus and continue writing as a hobby to whatever extent I can justify it. Yes, I am one of those rare people who will write no matter what – it’s the reason I’m making a go of turning it into a profession. But that doesn’t mean that everything I do will be available for free. Some things will, some things won’t – just like, right now, some things are and some things aren’t. My time is billable hourly, and my free stuff is there so that I can 1) build my audience, and 2) learn how to navigate in my marketplace(s). It’s an investment I’m making because it seems sound to me – I know what it costs, and for me the price is right.

Is the price right for you? Think hard about it. I daresay there will always be hobbyists in the podcast fiction space, but if you’re a pro or an aspiring pro, look at it as a business investment. It’s not a magic bullet, and it’s not a shortcut. Even podcasting’s biggest success, Scott Sigler, doesn’t see it as either of those things. Scott needed a platform to prove that there was a market for cross-genre horror, so he essentially invented one. His focus now is on figuring out where the next place to grow his audience is, and what books will be best to write next. There’s a reason he’s made this work, and it goes a lot deeper than “he writes in a popular genre” (although that also is very important).

Wrapping It Up

The Gospel of Free is a pernicious little meme that’s burned out some talented people and seriously burned others, but it’s not a new one. Every get rich quick scheme, every investment bubble, every motivational speaker that comes along has the same basic blend of bullshit and wisdom: “Look at this new thing – it’s no-lose! Look at its merits! Imagine how much you could do with this!” Network marketing, real estate flipping, dot com stocks – there’s always something, and it nearly always takes a pretty clever idea and isolates it from all good business sense.

Don’t fall for it. Free has always been with us, and it’s always been good business when done right. New tools, new media, and new toys are great, but excitement about the opportunities they present can easily obscure the most basic thing about business: supply and demand must meet, and they must trade. If they don’t, then at best what you’ve got is a rewarding hobby, and at worst you’re in a financial disaster. There is no such things as a fast buck except at the craps table, and there is never any such thing as a free lunch.

Me? I’m in this for the long haul. I’m building a business, with all the risk that implies. Right now, my business model includes podcasting. Will it in three years? It depends on what happens between now and then.

So, in sum, my advice to other writers and podcasters, for what it’s worth: Podcast what you will. Keep track of what it’s costing you. Cut your losses if it’s not returning what you need for it to be worthwhile. Above all, don’t buy the bullshit that motivational speakers and other sharks shovel. Celebrity status might be useful, but it’s like Monopoly money: not negotiable currency outside of the small circles that generate it.

For fans of mine and other’s podcast fiction: remember that while this is free to you, it’s not free for us. Your feedback, your cash in the tip jar, and your evangelism are much appreciated. We podcast authors know that we’re being wasteful and reckless – and not all of us will stay in this space forever. For now, I at least am getting what I want out of the bargain, and I do enjoy entertaining you all.

For everyone reading, remember: Life is precious. Don’t forget to enjoy whatever it is you’re doing, and treasure the memories it gives you. Treat your time like an investment, and savor what you buy with it. In the end, the moments are the only thing we have to make a life out of.

You that listen here regularly know Tee from his starring role as Amos in Down From Ten, or perhaps you heard his voice as Marian’s boss in Predestination or from the Predestination exit interview, but the story of Tee Morris is quite a bit more colorful. Tee invented podcast fiction, co-founded podiobooks.com, and is thus created the industry which launched the careers of myself, Chris Lester, Philippa Ballantine, Nathan Lowell, Scott Sigler, Christiana Ellis, Mur Lafferty, Nobilis Reed, and many others. He’s also directly helped many of us, and many others, with encouragement, advice, and lending his voice to our worlds. He’s also become a good friend to many of us, apart from a professional association.

Odd as it sounds, there are three things in this modern world that are more expensive than any other – being born, dying, and death. Natalie Morris’s death was sudden and unexpected, but it has left Tee with a raft of expenses he must meet immediately, and this as an unexpectedly single parent. Because of this, I have a special request for you – if you were planning on sending me a tip in the next week or three, send it to Tee instead.

Below you’ll find a widget for the chip-in account that Philippa Ballantine has started to help get Tee and Sonic Boom through the crisis time to calmer waters. Please click on it and toss a couple bucks in if at all you can.

— — — —
Earlier this year a brilliant Vancouver surgeon, Dr. Andresz Busczowski,
helped Hugo- and Nebula-winning science fiction writer and zero-gravity
dancer/choreographer Jeanne Robinson beat back a rare and virulent form of
biliary cancer. But it¹s so rare even he can¹t say how much time heŒs bought
her, how soon it might recur‹and her latest blood tests have been so
discouraging they¹ve now decided she needs to start chemotherapy as soon as
possible. Besides the prescription drugs to counteract the chemotherapy, she
needs special therapies and supplements, counseling, and extensive diet and
lifestyle changes, to reduce her stress level and the strain on her liver to
as close to zero as possible. All those things are expensive…and like many
artists today Jeanne and her writer husband Spider Robinson were already
running on fumes financially.

But Jeanne, a Soto Zen monk, has been spreading love and kindness in all
directions for a long time. So her Buddhist sangha in Vancouver, her
neighbors on Bowen Island, and friends as far away as Florida have all
spontaneously come together to raise funds to help keep her around as long
as possible. Your participation is welcomed. A Bowen benefit concert, ³WE
DREAM FOR JEANNE,² will be held at Cates Hill Chapel at 7:30 PM on Friday
Sept 18 details here; goods or services can be donated for eBay auction by
contacting Jan Schroeder at , and PayPal donations
can be sent to this website.

You can read Jeanne¹s recent blog entry, The Third Act, to get a sense of
how she¹s feeling at this link.

Jeanne and Spider both warmly appreciate your help, support, prayers or just
good thoughts. So does one of the newest visitors to this planet: their
first grandchild, Marisa Alegria da Silva. (seen at Jeanne’s blogsite.)
=====================

If you have a moment this weekend, rent one of the 210 movies Forry appeared in, read one of his stories that can be found in anthologies, or read a story by one of the writers he nurtured. Read some lesbian erotica – Forry was, after all, the author of some of the first critically respectable lesbian novels under the name “Laurajean Ermayne” and was named an “Honorary Lesbian” by the country’s first ever Lesbian Rights organization, Daughters of Bilitis. Watch a Ray Harryhausen or Ed Wood film (he was instrumental in the careers of both men), or a film by Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, John Landis, Steven Spielberg, or a show by Penn and Teller (all of whom he inspired and helped along the way). Go to a fan event – oh, I didn’t mention that Forry organized some of the first science fiction conventions, invented the term “sci-fi,” and won the only Hugo award ever for World’s #1 Science Fiction Fan?

I never got to meet Forry personally. I had the chance on several occasions, and always had more pressing things to do. Now I won’t get it again. I know him through the stories of several friends who grew up under his tutelage, whose careers he nurtured, and whose lives he touched. All of them tell the same story of a man who was too kind ever to make a serious enemy, and who was always nine years old at heart. He treasured his first ever issue of Amazing Stories, and never fell out of love with science fiction, or movies, or life, or his wife, or his friends. Few of us will ever be so lucky to be so well remembered when our time comes.

I’d wish Forry a peaceful rest, but if what I know about him is anywhere near true, then he’s probably sitting on the bank of the River Styx right now, scavenging for a sandal that Odysseus might have left behind, and dreaming of setting up the definitive collection of mythological artifacts for all visitors to the shores of the afterlife. When he does, he’ll sit out in front with a recliner, a good book, and a movie screen. When you walk up, he’ll greet you with a smile and, if you’re not careful, he’ll start telling you a story. You’ll never get away — but then…who would want to?

Here’s what this means for you all, my loyal readers:

I’m going to fix and drop Episode 13 of Antithesis tomorrow, probably late, assuming the congestion clears.

I’ll start blogging again, with reports from SteamCon and some other interesting updates, later this week.

The feedback episode will record Wed and drop on Thurs or Fri, after which I’ll slide back into my regular production schedule.

I have a backlog of other blog posts to write, particularly more from the Steampunk Education series and the Entitlement Mentality series. Those I’ll be hammering out between commissioned articles (which I now have a backlog of).

Soon, very soon, a calender will be available for purchase featuring my fine art photography. There will be two versions available – one worksafe and one definitely not.

So, if the Creeks don’t rise, I’m now back in circulation. Thank you all for your well wishes.

-Dan