That was my publisher’s note to me when we learned that Exit Black cracked the top ten best sci fi audiobooks in 2024 at Discover Sci-Fi. I’m super stoked: while I would have loved for Exit Black to take the #1 spot, of course, there’s no shame losing out to the likes of Adrian Tchaikovsky narrating his own book and Jeff VanderMeer having his work read by Bronson Pinchot. Carolina Hoyos is a hell of a reader, and I was very lucky to have gotten to work with her.
I loved every step of this project with Blackstone Publishing, and to make my Captain Obvious Statement of the Day: Blackstone knows audiobooks. Thanks so much to all of you who voted and all of you who listened. And, if you haven’t listened yet, if you ever feel a hankering for a tale about a bunch of techbros getting their comeuppance, Exit Black couldn’t be more timely.
The title says it all, really. White Oak Books is one of my favorite new additions to the Uptown Village neighborhood of Vancouver, Washington. I spent a long time living just up the street from their spot when I moved to the Northwest, and there were some years that I would have given my eye teeth to have such a cool bookstore in the neighborhood. I’m happy to support them, and I’m honored that they want to help me publicize my work.
Vancouver friends–and Portland friends willing to have your minds blown by crossing the Columbia River–come hear me read from Exit Black, my new SF thriller from Blackstone Publishing, on Thursday, August 29, at 6:30.
White Oak Books 1700 Main Street Ste D Vancouver, WA 98660-2660
I was invited recently to present a workshop at one of Oregon’s wonderful creative writing conferences–the Compose Creative Writing Conference at Clackamas Community College (perhaps the hosts tried to come up with a seventh word starting with c- for the title, but six must have been all they could fit in). After the honor of being invited wore off, I realized that I would have to actually, you know, present something at the CCWC at CCC.
I decided to present a session on reducing infodump in speculative fiction. Did I choose this topic because I’ve been widely praised for my taut, sleek stories? I wish. Actually, if anything the opposite is true: during the early years of my fiction career, I got so many rejections along the lines of “this story is well-written, but it takes forever to get to its point. There’s so much infodump here that I was barely able to get to page 8.”
The best thing I can say about infodump in my writing is that editors don’t complain about it in my stories nearly as often now. So I figure that I’ve either learned to deal with it or editors are just tired of giving me notes on it.
As you probably know already, infodump refers to bogging down the flow of a story with tedious explanation. And, while writers of any genre can fall into the habit, it’s an especially common problem in speculative fiction. If you’ve ever read a bad fantasy novel (or watched a bad sci fi movie), you have surely seen some infodump along these lines:
Scientist: I sequenced the DNA sample you brought me. Whoever provided it has some snips that I’ve never seen in a human genome before.
Captain: Snips?
Scientist: ‘Single nucleotide polymorphisms.’ As you know, captain, all sexually reproducing creatures on Earth–including humans–inherit two copies of each gene, one from the mother, and one from the father. These genes determine everything from eye color to explainexplainexplain continue explaining for four pages explainexplainexplain I hope you did well in middle school biology…
For me, infodump is even worse in fantasy than in science fiction. In SF, there’s at least the possibility that what’s being infodumped actually will teach you something real about how planetary motion works or what the principle of competitive exclusion is. In fantasy, the infodump often amounts to nothing more than 20 pages of the author’s fever-dream journal entries about a fictional queen who lived 800 years before the story takes place and what she did to curse the elven sword that is the McGuffin for this whole heptalogy of novels…
What causes infodump? Why should you be wary of the phrase “as you know” in your writing? And how do you reduce infodump in your novel? Well, if you want the whole story, come see me at the CCWC on Saturday the 18th! Or, if you’re not a Portland person, drop me a line: I’m always happy to talk F/SF with book clubs, writing groups, bookish nerds, random drunks, and people on a secret mission.
For now, I’ll just say that two factors that contribute to infodump are 1. writers’ mistrust of the reader’s ability to follow along, and 2. writers who get lost for hours (or months, or decades) in worldbuilding before they ever get around to actually writing their story.
I may say more on the subject soon, but as you know, I have been working on reducing my infodump.
I’ve been hunting for years for a better book recommendation system than Goodreads (and its corporate owner, Amazon). One site that I think really shows promise is Shepherd: it’s better-curated, less compromised, more values-driven. And I’m honored to announce that I have been invited to make a Shepherd recommendation myself. Mine is called “The best fantasy-science fiction books that explore class and inequality,” and I’d love to have people take a look at it.
I’m grateful to have a website taking on the Goodreads/Amazon juggernaut. Goodreads is one of those ideas that struck me as having so much promise when it came out: it seemed (at first, anyway) a place where everyone could share ideas about the books they love. But, far from being a democracy of bibliophiles, Goodreads is a crass book marketing system that has proven easy to game and to abuse, from review bombing to pay-for-reviews to careless and anonymous one-star reviews just for the lulz.
And, while my Goodreads reviews for Exit Black have been decent–more good reviews than bad, and a number of reviews from people who must have actually read the book–I am a little suspicious of a review site where The Martian has a higher rating than Madame Bovary and where only 42% of Anna Karenina reviewers gave that book 5 stars. Seriously?
Cartoon credit: Kate Beaton, Hark! A Vagrant
I accept that for better and worse, Goodreads and Amazon are the ways that authors have to market their books. I don’t have to like that state of affairs, but I do accept it. However, I’m always on the lookout for something better, something more humane, something not yet made grubby by millions of people on the make for a quick buck or trash-talking for the dopamine hit of a bunch of likes. Shepherd might not last. But for now, I really like the way they approach books and the people who write and read them. I hope you’ll go check it out!
I had every intention of publishing my interview with fellow Willamette Writer (and fellow community college teacher) Avis Adams when she published it almost two weeks ago. Then the end of winter term descended over me like a weighted blanket made of student essays and departmental emails. Now that I have finally wriggled out from under its sweaty embrace, I can give a little more attention to this blog, to promoting Exit Black, and to all things literary.
So, many thanks to Avis for cooking up some delightful interview questions and for offering such a warm reading of my book. Check out her review and my interview at her wonderful blog, Your Next Favorite Author.
One of the things I love most about a small bookstore is its point of view. There’s not enough shelf space to try and be all things to all readers: instead, a small bookstore announces its allegiances, however idiosyncratic, and it stocks the shelves with them.
I had my launch reading for Exit Black at my neighborhood bookstore: Broadway Books in Portland. Much like my publisher, Blackstone, Broadway Books is small, independent, a place of fierce good taste. And, while Broadway has a small FSF section, Exit Black fits there.
It’s like Where’s Waldo? but for my book. . .
It may be that my book barely fits there, that it’s on the shelf only because I am a local boy from just up the street. But they did make space for me on that shelf. And if someday, late in the game, I have the kind of readership that the FSF heavyweights have–the Ursula Le Guins and Octavia Butlers and Terry Pratchetts–I’d like to believe that Broadway Books will keep me on their shelves because my work is congruent with their values.
You can order Exit Black anywhere, of course, but you Portland readers, Portland visitors, and Portland passers-through can find a signed copy of my book at Broadway Books. Let me know if you’re in town; I’ll be happy to grab a tea and talk SF with you.
It’s publication day for my latest novel, Exit Black, and I was happy to see that the excellent and tireless arts and entertainment journalist Paul Semel chose today to publish our exclusive interview about the book. You can read the interview here: check it out to see why space tourism is the perfect metaphor for economic inequality, as well as who I would cast in an Exit Black movie! I’m still a little tickled that Paul calls it an “exclusive interview”–I mean, it is an exclusive interview, but he makes it sound like I’ve been playing hard to get all these years.
I self-published my first novel, Stranger Bird. That was an experience that I will always treasure: the feeling of putting a book together with a tiny group of friends and family, mostly newbies, doing our own copy editing and picking typefaces and buying ISBNs and learning how expensive it is to publish a book. I imagine the feeling is analogous to playing in an independent-label band, driving around the country in a van and playing a hundred bars and grange halls. And I know that even now, with a traditional publisher putting my book out, I am still a tiny fish in the big publishing ocean–I’m not the kind of writer who is ever going to win a Hugo (good thing, maybe, considering the latest scandal) or be on Reese’s book club list. But, even though I am most definitely small potatoes, I’m still a potato. And it is a sweet and oddly disorienting experience to have a team of people from a publishing house supporting your book. I couldn’t be happier with Blackstone, and I will have a good word for the folks there for as long as I live. Thanks to them, I am orbiting your reading list.
I’ll admit it: when I learned that my newest novel, Exit Black, was going to be published in trade paperback, rather than hardback, I was a little crestfallen. I grew up having inherited a whole raft of English major-y prejudices about what kinds of books are good and what kinds are trash. And, literally to judge a book by its cover, hardback books were the best kind of books.
I’ve written about this a little in Pacifica, which is in some ways a love letter to books, in my description of the semi-mythical Book Room:
Among good students at Sterne College, and even among lackluster ones, the Book Room was legendary. No acquaintance of Jude’s had ever reported having seen this inner sanctum of the library, where the leather-bound volumes of some donor’s bequest were shelved, not by Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress, but (according to college folklore) in the manner that had been used by Hypatia and Eratosthenes in Alexandria.
For better or worse, my real novels wouldn’t find shelf space in the Book Room. But, on getting the news from my publisher about Exit Black‘s being relegated to trade paperback status, I did at least feel like it was the right occasion to pull up an excellent old Beatles song, and one of my favorite Paul McCartney bass lines of all time:
So, dear Sir, Madam, or Mixter, will you read my book? It took me years to write; will you take a look?
A long, long time ago, children, before everyone was self-publishing books on Amazon, before millions of people were writing fan fiction on their smart phones and publishing it to Wattpad, the bookstore chain Barnes & Noble represented (to certain lefty NPR-listening types, anyway) everything that was wrong with the publishing industry. Barnes & Noble stores were proliferating across the strip malls of America like massive commercial toadstools, and many people saw the local Barnes & Noble as a kind of Wal-Mart of books: a destroyer of independent bookstores and hometown loveliness. (If what I’m describing sounds like a plot point from the old 1998 rom-com You’ve Got Mail, that’s because the bookstore mega-chain in the movie was a not-so-subtle portrait of the real Barnes & Noble of the time.)
Fast forward 25 years, and Barnes & Noble seems more like the underdog now, trying to reinvent itself amidst the moribund shells of America’s hollowed-out malls, hustling to stay alive beneath the crushing shadow of Amazon. I was no lover of Barnes & Noble back in the You’ve Got Mail days, and I still try to buy all of my books at the many fine independent bookstores of Portland, but I have to admit that I have a soft spot for Barnes & Noble as it holds on for dear life.
I hope I’ll be seeing Exit Black at a whole lot of Portland spots–can I interest you, Broadway Books? How about you, Annie Bloom? But there is an unexpected thrill to seeing my name come up on the website of that once-maligned mall standby, good old Barnes & Noble. If I get a chance to do a reading or a signing at one, I’m going.
The Subway Test 