Category: Books

MSS for Sale, or Rent

UPDATE AGAIN: We have listed the remaining items (so far unearthed, I guess there could be more but I’m pretty sure I don’t have ’em.) which are four Vlad novel MSS.    I think Athyra is the pick of the litter, here, but they all look pretty good to me.  At any rate, information is now being deciminated from a new page on this site.    Please check there for current information.

This page is left as a reminder of our ways, long ago.


UPDATE: Last updated noon US/Central Friday Morning, August 29th, 2014.

Item Via Sale Price Time of Bid Auction Ends COUNTDOWN
MS, Paths of the Dead email $287.00 8/29/2014 8:55:00 8/30/2014 1:55:00 13:58:34
MS, Lord of Castle Black email $300.00 8/29/2014 11:26:00 8/30/2014 4:26:00 16:29:34
Gaimen, Punch (2 drafts) email $300.00 8/29/2014 7:45:00 8/30/2014 0:45:00 12:48:34
Hobb, Assassin’s Apprentice, Signed MS email $128.00 8/29/2014 11:50:00 8/30/2014 4:50:00 16:53:34

I am getting to have quite a number of manuscripts to sell for Steven Brust. The majority of the profits of these auction sales will go directly to him. With respect to any given item I am offering, we have not made any effort to digitize or photograph and will commit to do or not do this per the wishes of whomever buyer.

Here are the items with which we are parting soonest:

  1. Two Paarfi (read: Steven Brust) Manuscripts including The Paths of the Dead with handwritten notes from at least two sets of eyeballs, one of which is Steve.
  2. Robin Hobb‘s first novel, signed. (ZOMG.  I didn’t even consider keeping this. This is really why I’m selling stuff right away. Just found this. Feel a little guilt.)
  3. Two drafts of a novella by Neil Gaiman. (I’m pretty sure this is the foreword from Roger Zelazny, sitting here also. If the buyer doesn’t mind me taking a scan, I will. Not hand-signed that I recall.)

Aftersale

In the case of things handed to -rather than written by- him, all arrangements have been made by Steven in advance so please do not ask to me reach out directly to people for signatures or certificates of authenticity or anything like that.

Presale

Nope.  Probably not.  Oh, fine, I guess if you need photos or video of me lovingly caressing these objects you can let me know all about your fantasies.

To Purchase

Email will work best for you.  Send me want you want to pay, with the subject line Auction Bid and the item you wish to bid on.

Twitter:  dm me (or shout out to get me to follow, and then <–) with your bid @mplsCorwin, or @dragaera (which I co-run with Dad and the others who do Dreamcafe.com with him.)

Facebook:  Join the Steven Brust Fan Club group (I can’t make it allow others to approve you, so you pretty much have to wait for me.)

G+: yup, I’m there.  There’s a group called Dragaera.  Anyway, share your plan with me.  Any visibility you like is just fine so long as +Corwin Brust (mplsCorwin) can find it.

Sales are final after 17 hrs.  Okay, I know, but it’s about the right amount of time for a uniformly spherical someone to work, sleep, notice and reply back to me while checking personal emails.

You have 17 hrs to make payment arrangements   At least. I mean, I’ll work with you.  If there has been a hot auction I’d move as fast as I could.

All items start at $100

You must beat the existing bid by $20.

Shipping Is My Problem(tm) – if you live far away from the middle of the North American continent, and you are planning to buy both Paarfi novels… be kind.

And A Few More Notes

If I get seriously flooded, you will have to watch twitter #SKZB_AUCTION if you hope to keep up minute by minute.

I’ll reply if you are winning (and also if you are beaten but maybe not as quick), and begin updating others who may be concerned via email, blogs and whatever other social media I am currently plugged into.

If you know Steven and find it easier to comment on his blog, email him, etc, as long as you actually confirm that you have successfully communicated with him, that is fine and well.  That will get to me and things will happen.

Why Are You Doing It This Way

At the risk of starting the very meta discussion I hope to stifle, this is about putting money into Steven (and my) pockets because these things are just sitting in boxes about our homes.

With these factors combined, this approach provides for either the least amount to happen (without my actually shouting into a dark room), or alternately for me to personally arrange for as much as possible of the money trading hands to go to my father.

Current Progress

Skyler and I are fighting through revisions on the next Incrementalists novel (still not sure what the title will be), and I’m working on Vallista.  Vallista (set immediately before Hawk, which moves the story forward) is going slowly, but not badly.  On chapter 3 right now.

So, just for shits and giggles, if I were to write something not set in the Incrementalists world or Dragaera, what should I write?  I mean, what thing haven’t I done would you like to see me trying to do, so I can fall flat on my face and you can laugh pitilessly at my ineptitude?

 

 

 

Amazon’s Latest Crap

A good summary of Amazon’s most recent bullshit can be found here.  It’s a good enough summary.  I just want to make a couple of points.

A book–a novel–both is and isn’t a commodity.  It is in the sense that, given a stack of the same book, it matters not at all, to anyone, which one the reader buys, and it is produced for exchange.  It isn’t a commodity in the sense that it is subject to all of the strange combinations of changing tastes and fads and social dynamics of the moment as a film or a sculpture or a record or a painting, all mediated through the author’s skill, taste, and perception.  A publisher, therefore, is caught in an interesting bind.  In order to make a profit and continue publishing books, the book must be treated as a commodity–as a mass produced item that fulfills a human want and that has an exchange value.  In order to get a good product, the book must be treated in some measure as a work of art–authors are idiosyncratic, and a good publisher will fill certain positions with people who are skilled in getting the best work out of these strange beasts (having editors and production people who actively love the sorts of books being produced is kind of cheating, but it seems to work).

Here’s the thing: As consumers, we know that businesses exist to get us to cough up cash and don’t give a shit about us as people; that’s the nature of the beast.  But we don’t like to have our faces rubbed in it.  We would like the guy at the store or on the other end of the customer support line to least pretend he cares about us.  In the same way, as writers, we don’t like having our faces rubbed in the fact that, to make a living, we have to produce a commodity.  We (okay, I, but I’m not the only one) care deeply about the stories we tell, and believe that we can tell stories that will move and delight, and thrill and even sometimes enlighten our readers, and that this is, above all, why we do what we do.  We don’t like to be reminded that we’re just a piece of a massive money-making machine, and that while we and our agents negotiate furiously for how much of the pie we are going to get, above us are massive corporations that are arguing even more furiously, and nastily, and about how much of the pie they are going to get.

This is not, in my opinion, a moral issue.  Amazon is doing what it does because it is a corporation and only cares about the bottom line, like any corporation.  There are no heroes in this.  But it is very much a practical issue.  If Amazon succeeds, many writers who are, at present, making a living as writers, will have to augment their living doing other things, and this will mean they will write less, and I will have less good stuff to read.  It is also a personal issue; many of the people being fucked over, or in danger of being fucked over, are friends of mine.

I’ve stopped buying books from Amazon; I think this will make exactly no difference.  I have no confidence in consumer pressure against an organization the size of Amazon (I have even less confidence in the US Government’s anti-trust investigators).  So, no, I do not see a solution.  I hope I’m wrong, but it looks like Amazon can pretty much do whatever it wants, and readers and writers are simply going to have to deal with it.  Like I said, I hope I’m wrong.

 

Who Do You Write For, and The Effect of Good Criticism

One of the fun things to consider about writing is: who are you writing for?  My stock answer is that I’m writing to entertain an imaginary reader out there who just happens to like everything I do.  In fact, it is a bit more complex than that.  Sometimes people who are important to me get passages.  “I’m going to put this in there for Jen,” or, “Pamela will like this,” or, “This will make Will chuckle,” or, “Okay, Adam, here’s one for you,” or, “I wish I could see Emma’s face when she gets to this bit.”  Obviously, this is even more fun when collaborating: writing to delight your collaborator is a big part of what drives you.

That’s one of the things that makes writing fun and enjoyable.  And I make no apologies, because if Adam, for example, is going to be pleased when I make fun of elaborate, stupid dream sequences, well, I’m pretty sure some other readers will also be tickled.  And tickling the reader is good in at least two ways:  One, I like to make readers happy.  Two, a good tickle tends to disarm the reader, thus setting him up for a good, hard, kick in the ‘nads.

I now abruptly change subjects.

I adore good criticism.  By good criticism, I mean a piece of writing that makes me go, “Oh, man.  I hadn’t noticed that.  Cool!”  The platonic ideal of a critic for me has always been the late and very much lamented John Ciardi.  Of those working currently, one of my favorites is David Walsh of the World Socialist Web Site (he’s just written this, which I highly recommend).  Now, unfortunately, Walsh doesn’t often review Hollywood movies, which means he rarely discusses anything I’ve seen.   But, in the first place, his insights can be delightful even if I’m not familiar with the work, and, in the second, that makes it all the more fun when he covers something I have seen.  A good critic makes you think about how the creator achieved the effect, about subtleties that are obvious now that they’ve been pointed out, and about how this work fits into a broader context both within the genre and within the society that produced it.  This is stuff that I happen to enjoy, and is obviously useful, at a minimum in the sense of making you go, “Oh, hey, I know what I could do!”

And now we tie the two sections of this post together.

I’ve been reading Jo Walton’s essay collection, What Makes This Book So Great.  It is delightful on several levels, not the least of which is that I come in for a lot of ego stroking.  To semi-quote Twain, we like compliments. All of us do: writers, burglars, congressmen, all of us in the trade.  But with Jo’s book, I’ve noticed something else.  She keeps nailing me on things I did right, then backed away from.  I still remember writing my first book, Jarhead or whatever it was called, and thinking, “Why the hell can’t people write books with ongoing, happy romantic relationships where that is just part of the backdrop?  Fuck it, I’m going to do that.”  Then I didn’t hang with it, and Jo called me on that.  Or when I wanted to add a bit of revealing background by talking about how there weren’t carriages any more, now that teleportation was so common.  Then I slipped away from that, because I wanted a carriage in a particular story, and she noticed that (I’m working on a retcon for that one).  Critics who notice what you’re doing, like what you’re doing, and can point out things about your work that you didn’t notice, are incredibly valuable.

It just hit me today, as I was looking over the final draft of Hawk and considering the early chapters of Vallista, that at the moment I’m kind of writing for Jo Walton.  I can live with that.

A Brief Update from Texas

I’m in Texas until the end of the month. Skyler and I hope to finish up a draft of the next Incrementalists book. I’ve also gotten the line-edit on Hawk from TNH and should be doing a revision over the next week or so.  I’ve a start on Vallista, and might get a bit more done on that while I’m here.  Finally, there’s the Seekrit Project, that I expect to get a bit more done on pretty soon.