My Superpower: Marianne de Pierres
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Marianne de Pierres to talk about how the power of resisting organization relates to Peacemaker. ——————————– So here’s the thing: I have an uncanny and deep-seated ability to resist being organised. It’s quite the talent. I mean I’ve written nearly twenty novels, raised three sons and worked at various day jobs. It’s hard to know how it was at all possible really, because the moment someone says, “Oh, you can manage that, no problem, you just need to be well organised”, a veil descends across my mind and my limbs become heavy. I begin to daydream and can find endless distractions in odd and obscure time-gobbling pursuits; my junk drawer needs sorting, the car needs a vacuum, I simply must read this article about prescriptivism versus descriptivism in linguistics, all the twitter feeds of people I don’t know, and my favourite advertising-riddled celebrity gossip blogs.
Business Time: Self-publishing vendors and ‘royalties’
One of my pet peeves as a publishing professional: the author’s 70% share on KDP is not a ‘royalty.’ It’s the author-publisher’s share. Royalties are paid when rights are taken by a publisher and that content is then sold through vendors. KDP isn’t licensing rights and creating an end-product to sell, it’s just selling end-product. The use of the term ‘royalty’ muddles the reality of the relationship between an author and the vendor. Self-publishing is a solid path to publication now, but let’s be clear what KDP, Nook Press and other vendors are: vendors. When you’re a publisher, you come to terms with vendors – how they’ll sell your product, what discount they get (which then informs their margin), whether they can return the product, and so on. Signing a KDP/Nook Press/etc. deal is signing with a vendor. The thing is that KDP and other vendors that court self-publishers hold a vast amount of power compared to individual small business of self-publishers, so those vendors feel empowered to dictate terms, and are unlikely to negotiate those terms. These vendors depend on volume of sales across a range of agreements rather than on securing a distribution agreement with any specific author (though I imagine they might care more about signing up each new Hugh Howey or Sylvia Day book, or the like).
My Superpower: Mur Lafferty
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Mur Lafferty to talk about how the power of giving nicknames relates (not quite) to The Ghost Train to New Orleans. ——————————————— My super power is dormant; I haven’t used it for years. Like most powers, I didn’t realize I had it until the power had gotten out of control. I have the power to give people nicknames that stick. I started with myself — totally unintentionally. My name wasn’t Mur when I went to college; it was just a pet name my parents called me. But there was another woman named Mary in our suite of eight, so I decided since very few people knew me, I could start introducing myself as Mur. It worked. Now only my aunts, bankers, and doctors call me Mary. Everyone else calls me Mur.
My Superpower: Jonathan Wood
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Jonathan Wood to talk about how the power of Multitasking and Toothpaste relates to No Hero. —————————————— When asked to write about my super power, I panicked. I am British and middle class. There’s my ability to consume staggering amounts of bland, flavorless food, but that doesn’t seem like exactly the right subject matter. So I did what I usually do when I am at a loss. I turned to my wife. She shrugged (which, in retrospect, was not the most encouraging sign) and said, “You could write about your multi-tasking thing.”
My Superpower: Steve McHugh
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Steve McHugh to talk about how the power of Having a Brain That Won’t Shut Up relates to With Silent Screams. ——————————– My superpower is a brain that won’t shut up. I don’t mean just one that’s always full of new ideas and stories, but one that just won’t let something go. Now, as a writer, 9 times out of 10, this is the greatest gift in the world. The ability to keep coming up with fresh ideas and stories is pretty much essential if I want to keep writing new books. Normally I’ll have an idea, a glimmer of a story or character, and then I’ll spend the next few days thinking on it, mulling it over and allowing it to evolve into whatever it needs to in order to grow. I discard the notions that don’t work, or file them away for use later, and see how far it needs to go before whatever gave me that initial thought becomes something fully formed and much more real.
My Superpower: Rhiannon Held
My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome Rhiannon Held to talk about how the power of Metaphor relates to Reflected. ———————————- I am proud to say that my superpower is the power of METAPHOR. I’ve had it all my life, but never realized it until I started writing and learned to nurture my metaphor in a conscious way to make my novels richer. My newest book, Reflected, has metaphor on a number of different levels, and I’m continually grateful that’s the superpower I received when such things were being handed out. Now, to forestall the few pedants and people eager to prove they were paying attention in junior high English out there, I’m going to talk about metaphor in a large, umbrella sense. When it comes down to sentence structure, there is indeed a terminology difference between saying “My heart is a lump of coal” and “My heart is like a lump of coal.” The former’s a metaphor, and the latter’s a simile.
