Football and My Son’s Future

The Great American Pasttime is not baseball, it’s watching baseball on TV with your kid, or watching football on TV with your kid and looking at that cute little person and hoping they are so good at something they because wealthy and famous and can support your future retirement.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I don’t know why, but I’ve really been into watching baseball this year and I took Spenser to his first Tigers game already and tomorrow we’re going to a minor league baseball game in Lansing (it’s sad that I can’t remember if I already wrote about just getting interested in baseball this year. It sounds like something I’ve written but I haven’t posted much recently and I don’t think it was one of the few posts that I remember. I’m also to lazy to go and check the archive so we’ll just assume I already did and move on).

Even more exciting than baseball is the coming of football season. The Lions start training camp tomorrow and they have an open practice at Ford Field next Saturday that I want to take Spenser to. This is the best time to be a Lions fan. Nothing but potential. Oddly enough, this is the worst time to be a Michigan fan because we’re so eager to get on with the next season and get the stink of last year out of the air.

Last year was great because I got to watch a lot of football with Spenser, particularly college football. On Saturday mornings Becky would sleep late and I’d get up with Spenser and we’d watch ESPN College Game Day and then whatever good matchups were on. I’ll watch any college football game anytime. The plan was to take Spenser to a Lions game at the end of the season but that didn’t end up working out. Hopefully mommy, daddy, Spenser, and the new baby will get to go to a game this year. Gotta take advantage of that Under 2 Are Free loophole as long as we can.

So through all of this, I’ve been thinking about Spenser’s future. The Lions #1 draft pick quarterback Matt Stafford was interviewed in the Free Press this week and he talked about growing up watching Florida State football with his dad and I just think all of that is so cool. I hope I don’t end up pressuring Spenser too much one way or the other about his passions and his career choice, but I just hope he and the new baby share some of my own passions and none of my failures.

Needles and Kindles

I’ve been thinking about a few things and I’m not sure how much detail I want to go into until I start writing so that should be fun for you. If it turns out to be a truly excessive amount I’ll probably break it up into a couple posts.

First, Paul Guyot is always telling me to get my priorities straight so instead of leading with one of the two writing issues on my brain, I’ll start with the parenting issue: vaccines. With one baby under our belts and another quickly on the way, Becky and I have been receiving recommendations regarding vaccinating or not vaccinating our new baby. My initial reaction was, eh, y’all are nut jobs. The doctors treating my child are almost always parents themselves and if they thought there was any danger in it they’d let me know. Also, the hospital where our kids our born (and where I work) is always at the front of the pack when it comes to pediatric research. But some people made me feel guilty or made out like I was a bad parent if I didn’t research the topic a bit so I did.

It didn’t take long to reinforce my initial reaction. Almost all of the material supporting vaccinating children comes from peer-reviewed scientific journals, respected pediatric hospitals, and government agencies. With little exception, the stuff against vaccination came from nut jobs, non-medical experts, family members, celebrities, and disgruntled scientists using amateurish web pages with names like vaccinesarethedevil.com or dontmurderourchildren.com I won’t go into all of the specifics here but in summary, vaccines are safer than they’ve ever been, show absolutely no link to causing autism, and are the best bet to keep your child from suffering from some unholy oldtimey disease like whooping cough. If you’re interested in more research I direct you to the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia or the Vaccine Safety Page for Every Child By Two.

Now to the writing issues. First, I have a new short story out called “Word Games” in the anthology UNCAGE ME edited by Jen Jordan. It doesn’t seem to be in any bookstores near me but I got my contributor copy in the mail and that’s always a cool feeling. I had a little promotion going to try and build up some interest in the anthology, and my story specifically, but that seems to be dead in the water after getting only about six requests. This, mixed with my failures in the Great Kindle Experiment, has got me thinking about the future of writing. I do believe that e-books, and electronic publishing and all that new technoblooey is eventually the future of the publishing industry but there seems to be a catch. To truly make the most of the techno future of e-publishing you need to be established in traditional publishing first.

Almost everyone who has had any measure of success experimenting with the Kindle or electronic publishing did so because they already had an audience built through good old fashioned traditional publishing. Right now, and even more so into the future, any writer looking to make a good living from writing is going to have to have a platform that they can extend into a variety of other fields. And right now, the platform that still works best is to have novels published by traditional publishers. Once you have a book out there, even if you only get a miniscule advance for it, you can parlay that validation into gigs writing comics, or television, or movies, or video games or whatever other venue offers more financial incentive than book publishing.

From a writer’s standpoint, the best thing traditional publishing has going for it is respect. I suspect this will change in the far future, but I don’t see that change coming too soon. You can really see it with playwrights. It’s become nearly impossible for a writer to make a full living writing for the stage, but the bulk of the top names in theater bring in other income by writing for more lucrative, if not prestigious, mediums. It won’t be long before the same is true of novelists. Like I said, I really don’t know what sort of business model will emerge to compensate prose writers in the future once the weight of traditional publishing’s decades long stupidity finally causes it to collapse in on itself, but I know that for me, and writers of my generation, the best bet is to pursue a traditional publishing contract through traditional means and build a traditional audience, and then use that platform to branch off into more experimental or more lucrative markets.

Win A Date With Me and Scott Phillips…Sort Of

The new anthology from Bleak House Books UNCAGE ME is out this week. Edited by the lovely Jen Jordan, it features a stellar lineup of crime fiction all stars…plus me. I feel like Brandon Inge. Unfortunately, because I arrived late to the party, my story WORD GAMES didn’t appear in the galleys that were sent around to reviewers. So to make sure my story is given the full opportunity for the ripping I’m sure many are certain it deserves, I and Jen have devised a plan.

The first 25 people to email me at bryon (dot) quertermous (at) gmail (dot) com will receive a free copy of the pdf file of entire anthology that includes stories from Scott Phillips, Allan Guthrie, Christa Faust, Victor Gischler, J.A. Konrath, J.D. Rhoades, Declan Burke, Brian Azzarello, Steven Torres, Stewart Macbride, Simon Kernick, Patrick Bagley, Greg Bardsley, Stephen Blackmore, Tim Maleeny, Nick Stone, Martyn Waites, Talia Berliner, Maxim Jakubowski, Gregg Hurwitz, Blake Crouch, and more.

And what do you have to do to earn this free gift? Horrible, unspeakable things, right? Nope. Just review my story and one other story in the anthology on your blog or website or myspace or FaceBook or whatever electronic substitute you have for interpersonal communication and send me the link. I’ll post the links on my blog and FaceBook page which should also send traffic your way because I’m really very popular. The reviews don’t have to be happy happy ribbons and jelly beans, but if it devolves into slander I reserve the right to remove it.

Any questions? Get to requesting. Oh yeah, go out and buy a physical copy too. It’s just the right thing to do.

P.S. For those who already own the anthology, if you post a review of my story and one other story from the anthology, send me the link and I’ll put all of the names into a hat for an Amazon.com giftcard.

How To Succeed at the Kindle Without Even Trying

I think I can safely say my experiment in online publishing was a failure. After a couple months of availability on the Kindle I sold 10 copies and four copies of the PDF version. This isn’t very unexpected. Other than announcements on Twitter, FaceBook, my blog, and a couple of the Kindle forums, I didn’t do much else to promote the thing. I appreciate all of the people who posted on their blogs and retweeted my posts, but I just don’t think this thing was destined to work. Short stories seem to be the worst possible sellers for the kindle which surprises me a little. I think short stories and novellas seem to be ripe for electronic publishing more than books.

But all of this got me thinking about what else of mine might be profitable for the Kindle. I still don’t want to put up any of my unpublished novels (even though this seems to be the area where people have had the most success) but I thought my blog might be a possibility. I’ve mentioned here before that I started a blog because I always wanted to be a newspaper columnist and that seemed to feed the urge for me. Well, most columnists build a nice little cottage industry around publishing collections of their best columns and I wondered if publishing a collection of my best blog posts would be a good idea. So I went through and read through five years of blog posts and came to a couple of realizations:

1) Blogging, more than any other writing I’ve done, seems to be my most natural form to work in. The words flow smoothly and I think I have a good style and narrative tone.

2) My blog reads like a novel. There’s plenty of recurring characters, a few subplots, and a dramatic arc as I go from single writer struggling to make it in a college town to married man then a father trying to juggle family life with the real world and with my dreams.

3) My writing and my life are tied very closely together. I initially thought about separating out the writing posts from the other posts about the daily hoo ha in my life but I found that in almost every writing post I related it back to something going on in my life at that time, and that in a lot of my regular life posts I talked about being a writer or some such thing. I think this is reflected in much of my fiction that is heavily season with tidbits from my real life.

4) I miss blogging. Even if nobody read the blog it’s nice to have a record of everything that’s gone on in my life over the past five years. I suspect that once I’m done with the book I’m working on now I’ll pick up blogging again more regularly.

Who knows if I’ll do anything right away with the collection. I don’t really have the time or desire to go through and polish it up enough to be worth anyone paying money for, but once I eventually get a foothold in the industry publishing novels and such it night make a neat little collection to publish.