Well, that was quite the week. Mostly in a good way. I graduated from grad school! (Well, I officially got my Master's degree diploma. I'll be going to a different grad school for doctoral studies in the fall.) We had a big family celebration about it! My partner came over for 3 nights, yay! I went on a trip to a different city to hunt for apartments, and found a really excellent looking one, and kept not getting communications that the rental agent thought he had given me, and then had to get all sorts of paperwork to him RIGHT AWAY because it took so long for him to tell me what paperwork he needed that our time was already half up. And some other stuff happened. Also I've either have a mild cold all week or worse-than-usual allergies. Whatever.

Things are starting to slow down again, though. I hope.

Those of you who appreciated my post about Evil Girlfriend Media and their badly written contracts should also go read ann_leckie's post about Penumbra Magazine. It's a slightly different issue than the one I had with EGM; they aren't putting sneaky loopholes in their contracts (that I know about, anyway), but they're not being up front about the fact that they pay some people 5 cents a word and some people nothing. And they are apparently pretty unprofessional when called on it. (The "unprofessional when called on it" part is covered in a second post here.)

I think it is important for writers to share this information about markets, not because I am vindictive, but because I think that writers should look out for each other.

Meanwhile, I am pleased that my 2012 stories Mama's Sword and Sage and Coco are honourable mentions for the 2013 Imaginarium best-of-the-year anthology. And YAY to silviamg and several other Canadian writers I like, who made it into the anthology itself! You are great.

Just a note for all the people who follow this blog to learn about autism in SF.

In the past I have said things on this blog using functioning labels. For example, I have referred to my present and past self as "high-functioning".

Labeling people as high or low functioning in this way is actually really offensive. It's especially bad for the people who get labeled as low functioning, and it's also bad in a different way for the people who get labeled as high functioning. It's also inaccurate, because abilities and "functioning" are more complex than that. (Here are three different posts from other blogs about functioning labels.)

I didn't know this at the time that I posted, which is one of the problems that happens when you try to say things online about autism using only your own experiences (and all the medical texts written by NTs that you have read). Now that I'm reading a large number of other autism blogs regularly, I'm learning about this and other things, and am really embarrassed about some of my past posts. I'm not going to change those old posts, because that's not how the Internet works, but I want to make it clear that my views are evolving.

I am sorry for using functioning labels and will not use them again. If I slip up and you see me using them again, please remind me (especially if you are an NT reader who will not incur any emotional stress by doing so). That's all.

The autism news is coming a bit more slowly now that it isn't April anymore, but it's coming. For instance, in Massachusetts, they've been debating some bills about new services for autistic people. Lydia Brown, a prominent autistic blogger, gave testimony which you can read here. Alyssa at Yes, That Too was kind enough to liveblog the entire hearing and her comments on it:

• Part 1


• Part 2


• Part 3


• Part 4

The issue of "wandering" (going places without telling their parents where they are going) also made the news recently after the drowning deaths of three "wandering" autistic children. Here is a good news article about it. If you want to know anything or say anything about wandering, you should also watch this video by Landon Bryce, which isn't new, but says important things.

Other things to read:

• Bec Oakley on why knowing how to ask for help is complicated


• Alyssa at Yes, That Too on how she accomodates herself without outing herself


• Autism & Oughtisms on problems with the new DSM-V definition of autism


• Lydia Brown on a new documentary about the harmful effects of restraint and seclusion


• Joel from Evil Autie has helpful information about sensory differences


• Social Skills For Autonomous People on how to care for disabled children without teaching them that their bodies are wrong. (All the stuff in the post is useful for all sorts of disabilities, including but not limited to autism.)

So, I usually have a rule that I don't talk about sales here until I sign the contract. I broke that rule recently when I got a novelette acceptance from Evil Girlfriend Media. I'd written them a (solicited!) story for an anthology of theirs, and I hadn't signed the contract yet, but I was posting about other acceptances anyway and I was all excited, because novelette.

Then I went back and actually read the contract.

And.

Um.

Okay, I'm just going to summarize relevant clauses here. Exercise to the reader: Look at this summary first and see if you can tell what's fishy. Here's what's on offer:

• EGM buys anthology rights for a token amount.


• EGM also asks for stand-alone rights (the right to sell the story on its own, in electronic form, on their web site if they choose to). Stand-alone rights are exclusive until 1 year after the anthology is published. Then they become non-exclusive.


• You get 80% royalties on any stand-alone sales during the non-exclusive stand-alone period, plus a bonus if the anthology sells a lot of copies.


• As with most story contracts, there is an exclusivity period; you can't publish the story anywhere else in any form until six months after the anthology is published.


• If neither the anthology nor the story have been published within one year of signing, all rights revert back to the author.


• Also, there is a confidentiality clause; you agree not to discuss the contract terms or payment rates with anyone else without EGM's written permission.

[Note: It would be illegal for me to make this post if I had signed the contract with the confidentiality clause in it. Fortunately, I have not signed any such thing.]

So, let's take this apart. First red flag is the confidentiality clause. Technically, if I sell a story under terms I'm happy with, then a confidentiality clause doesn't hurt me... But I have literally never seen a story contract with a confidentiality clause in it before. Story contracts do not generally contain trade secrets, security risks, or other sensitive information for which confidentiality would be expected. EGM's contract mentions that pay rates, in particular, are confidential, which is especially weird; most SFF markets are very open about their pay rates.

Second red flag: Let's take a closer look at those pay rates. The payment for the anthology rights is on the low side, but there's nothing wrong with that, since it's the same payment they listed on their web site. Everybody knew about that one going in. What about stand-alone pay rates? You get nice juicy royalties during the non-exclusive stand-alone period...

And nothing (besides the anthology payment) before that.

So let's say the anthology and stand-alone version go up at approximately the same time. For the first year that your story is available as a stand-alone, you get nothing no matter how much it sells. And you can't tell readers to wait a year before buying, because there's that confidentiality clause. Whoops.

But it gets better.

Because there is no clause anywhere in the contract specifying when the anthology and stand-alone version are published, relative to each other. There's no reason the anthology has to be published before the stand-alone. And the exclusive stand-alone period dates from the first publication of the anthology... not the stand-alone. If the stand-alone happens to be published before the anthology, you'll be getting zero royalties for more than a year.

Or let's take this to its logical conclusion. What happens if they don't publish the anthology at all?

Well, first, you get a token payment anyway. Second, EGM still has stand-alone rights as long as they put the story up in that form within a year of signing the contract. But all the important dates, including the end of exclusivity and the beginning of when you actually get royalties, date from the first publication of the anthology. Period. So if there is no anthology, you don't hit those dates. You never get royalties. You can never republish the story in any form. Ever. It's EGM's story forever, and because of that adorable confidentiality clause, you can't even complain.

(And yes, there's a clause saying rights revert back to you if they're not used within 1 year. But this clause doesn't help you much, because it only kicks in if neither the anthology nor the story is published in that time.)

So basically this contract is bullshit and no one should ever sign it.

Now, I need to pause here and say that I am not drawing any inferences here about the intentions of anyone at EGM. The company's CNO (I'm actually not sure what a CNO is, but that's what she called herself) assures me that they have no intention of taking any author's story away from them. And that's fine. Maybe they don't. Maybe they're just blithely assuming, as many new publishers do, that all their anthologies will be published on schedule without a hitch, and they just haven't thought the timing issues through. Maybe this is all just sloppy contract writing that just happens to accidentally have huge exploitative loopholes because it was written sloppily. I've heard of stranger things.

(I also want to note that the editor who solicited my story is a freelance editor who doesn't seem to have any role in producing/negotiating the contracts, and she's been nice to me. I don't mean to cast any aspersions on her character, either.)

So, I don't know if EGM is actually going to use those loopholes. Maybe they aren't, and everyone who signed the contract is actually fine. That would be nice. But what I do know, because I tried it, is that EGM isn't interested in negotiating a version of the contract without the loopholes. The confidentiality clause, in particular, is non-negotiable.

And no one should ever sign this contract. It gives EGM official permission to exploit your story forever. They might or might not actually do it. But they're expecting you to give them permission to do it, and that is an unreasonable expectation. To put it mildly. No one should be doing business with a company that has these expectations.

...In the meantime, if anybody besides EGM wants a novelette about a Mesolithic vampire bandit who tattoos her followers, I guess you should drop me a line. :P

It really surprised me how relieved I was when I turned off all my social media to go on a 3-week vacation this month. Don't get me wrong, I love you guys... but I was relieved.

This lead to some deep thoughts about what social media is actually for.

For instance, what does "friending" mean? I get all sorts of lectures from people saying "Internet friends aren't REAL friends". This is BS. Plenty of people on the Internet are my real friends.

"Friending" on social media can mean a lot of things, though. It can mean:

1. You are my friend.


2. We are not friends yet, but I would like to get to know you and become friends.


3. We are not exactly friends, but we are acquainted in real life and refusing to friend you would be more awkward than friending you. (This appears to happen on Facebook a lot.)


4. I don't know you, but your posts are interesting / entertaining / useful / whatever and I would like to be able to see them whenever you make a new one.


5. You are an author whose work I enjoy (or some other sort of person who regularly creates interesting things). Most of your posts concern things I don't really care about. But you also post when you have a new story up, and I want to make sure I don't miss any of your stories, so I will read your posts.


6. I feel obliged to read your posts, because you post about "important" topics. Or, my friends say your posts are really great and I don't want to be left out. Or, other conformity related reasons.


7. I want to increase my perceived status by having a lot of people friend me, and I am hoping that if I friend you, you will friend me back.


8. You have done me a good turn online, and I would like to thank you by paying attention to your posts for a while.


9. You friended me and therefore I feel obliged to friend you back.


10. My posts are friends-only. We are not exactly friends, but you have asked to see my posts and I have no problem with you seeing them, so here you go.


11. I feel guilty or inferior because I don't have enough friends on this account, so I am going to friend a lot of people who seem vaguely interesting or appropriate somehow. Or the people that Twitter recommends to me.


12. You are experiencing technical problems making comments on my posts, and I can solve this by friending you, so why not.

Etc.

All these different functions and meanings are lumped together on social media under a word like "friend" or "follow", which can be confusing for a new user.

So here's what's happened with me: I would like for my social media to mostly be full of 1 and 4, with a smidgen of 2 (I can't handle too many different 2s all at once, but I can handle some) and an occasional 8. But instead, I realized I had filled it up with things I had followed for all of these other reasons. And it was becoming a huge chore.

(Even 5 isn't really a good reason to follow someone's blog. In most cases, there are other ways to get informed of an author's new stories. For instance, most authors have a web site where they list all the stories they have published. So I can check that web site every few months. If this feels like less of a chore than actually reading the blog every day, then it's probably a good idea.)

I feel a little guilty about this, because our culture values friendliness. Saying "I don't have the social energy to pay attention to you every time you post something" feels a bit weird. I have this feeling that the best and worthiest people on social media are the people who follow EVERYONE (and comment on EVERYTHING)... But I can't be those people. That's not how I work.

So I decided to rethink my social media and unfollow everything that wasn't actually improving my day.

The non-autism-related sections of my feed reader have now been cut at least in half. My Twitter feed is now 1/3 of its previous size. (And it is suddenly FUN AGAIN to be on Twitter! What a concept.)

I'm going to be slightly less aggressive with my LJ, but in the next few days, I'm still going to be unfriending some accounts that I don't really interact with. So if you see I unfriended you, don't panic, it's nothing personal. I don't think you are a bad person. I'm probably even still following your stories/poems, if you write those. I'm just trying to cut my social intake down to a size I'm more comfortable with.

In the meantime, I am going to continue posting about autism in SF, reviewing autistic SF books, and chattering away about my adventures in writing. If that interests you, I'm pleased to have you aboard. But if you unfriend me now or in the future, that's fine, too. I would be quite the hypocrite if I objected!

You are in charge of your own social media consumption. You do not owe following/friending to anybody. That is our lesson for today. Or maybe all of you already knew it, and it just took me this long.

I'm back from my vacation. It was a nice, mostly quiet time with family members I don't see too often. I also took a Segway tour, went to the zoo, ate a lot of good food and took in some excellent concerts.

While I was away, I got some excellent news! First, I've sold "The Mother of All Squid Builds a Library" (the FOMCC contest winner, dedicated to prezzey) to Strange Horizons. It will probably be published in late 2013. This is my third SFWA-qualifying professional sale.

Second, I appear to have sold a novelette for the first time. Not only a novelette, but a solicited novelette. (My first time being formally/officially solicited for a story, although there was that one time when Silvia Moreno-Garcia commented on my LJ saying "now go write a zombie story!") It's a pretty small market - definitely not pro - but still, I'm pleased. More on that later.

[I'm still on vacation, and probably won't respond to comments until after May 21, but I finished the book a few days ago and had a few spare moments so I thought I would stop by and post this.]

Today's Book: "The Meeting of the Waters" by Caiseal Mór.

The Plot: In ancient Ireland, the squabbling Danaan and Fir-Bolg tribes must band together to defend themselves from the invading Milesians.

Autistic Character(s): The author! Yay!

This is going to be a new kind of Autistic Book Party post. There won't be any "how to write autistic characters" advice, because nobody in this book is autistic. In fact, Caiseal Mór published this book (and 13 others!) while passing as NT. It's only with his 2007 autobiography that his autism became public knowledge.

It's important for me to highlight good books by autistic authors, even if they don't have autistic characters. Why?

First, because representation means paying attention to authors AND characters. If you want to combat sexism in spec fic, I sure hope you're looking at women authors as well as female characters. With autism or any other group, it's the same. Nothing about us without us.

Second, because autistic people are often told we can't write good stories because we don't have enough imagination, or enough empathy, or whatever. If a straight white NT dude has trouble writing convincing characters, he gets told to go to a writing workshop and build his skills. If an Aspie has trouble doing it, she is contractually obligated to question whether this is an "Aspie thing", and whether Aspies are capable of writing good fiction at all.

(Side note: Some autistic people have trouble with "pretend play" as children. They do not see the point of acting out a situation that everyone knows isn't real. But this isn't the case for all autistic people. An awful lot of us are known to retreat into imagination as a coping mechanism. Others - or the same ones - construct elaborate imaginary worlds as a special interest.)

So I've been itching to give you some examples of good speculative fiction by autistic people, and Caiseal Mór - a bestselling Irish-Australian fantasy author - looks like a good place to start.

"The Meeting of the Waters" is an epic fantasy with a large scope and many viewpoint characters. Yet the usual epic fantasy tropes - Chosen Ones, hordes of throwaway villains, long journeys and quests for a MacGuffin - are pleasantly absent. That's because Mór isn't using other epic fantasy as his model. He's gone back to primary sources and to a lifelong fascination with Celtic mythology.

Mór's take on this mythology may surprise some readers. In "The Meeting of the Waters", the Tuatha De Danaan have not yet become the immortal, capricious creatures of most modern fantasy. When we meet them, they are ordinary mortals. Here the Danaans, the Fir-Bolg, and the Milesians (ancestors of today's Irish people) are three human tribes descended from a common ancestor, each with rich musical and magical traditions, a cattle-based economy, and a carefully codified set of rules for war and justice. But each tribe's choices, as the story progresses, will set them onto radically different paths.

Mór takes a bird's-eye view of these choices. (Sometimes literally. Parts of the book are narrated by a man who has been turned into a raven.) He moves from character to character as he wishes in order to show us a larger picture. No single character carries the fate of all of Ireland on their shoulders, and no single character is always expected to garner readers' sympathy. Instead, what changes the course of history is a set of interlocking decisions from many characters. The major players are each interesting and distinct from each other, but none is immune from making terrible choices when pushed. Similarly, no one is entirely unsympathetic, though some characters (especially the Fir-Bolg king and queen) seem to be, for a while. Even the story's villains - a pair of manipulative Fomorians set on causing discord between the other three tribes - come off as clever and likeable at times, especially early in the story, before we've seen the worst consequences of their meddling.

The result is an overall voice which can be somewhat detached, but also very human and forgiving. It won't be everyone's cup of tea. But in a genre overrun by NT authors who think the whole moral and physical universe revolves around their Chosen One, I think Mór's balanced approach is the better one for teaching us empathy.

The Verdict: Recommended

For a list of past/future/possible Autistic Book Party books, or to recommend a new one, click here.

I keep forgetting to mention this, but if you subscribe to Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine you may have noticed I got a Dishonourable Mention in a funny little contest they did. And a free issue! So that's cool.

I'm actually just posting to say I'll be away on a family vacation from now until May 22. In theory, I will have Internet access; in practice, I'm not sure how much spare time I will have to actually use it, and if I do have that time, I want to spend it writing. So I'm going to make things simple for myself by mostly closing off social media. I'm probably not going to read my friends page. (If we're close enough for you to be on filters and stuff, I'll catch up on your journal when I get home.) I won't be on Twitter at all and probably won't look closely at anything on my RSS reader. (This includes autism blogs, sorry. There are just too many of them to make 3 weeks of catch-up reading feasible.) If you need to get a hold of me, I'll still be reading comments and emails, but maybe not responding right away.

If I have a publication announcement or finish an Autistic Book Party book (I've got a Tier 4 ebook by Caiseal Mór and it's good so far and I'm ALMOST done!), I might pop on briefly just for that, and then vanish again. Or I might wait and post it when I'm home. Whichever.

Stay awesome, everybody, and have lots of squid parties.

I've got a new poem up!

This one is a little magical realist ditty in Through the Gate Issue #3. It is called "Synchronicity".

I highly recommend the rest of the issue as well, especially "Navigations" by Mat Joiner.