Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Every year, the Las Vegas Book Festival takes place three blocks from my condo. Every year, I watch the tents go up for the outdoor presentations and the book sales, and every year, I think, Hmmm, maybe I should go.

A few years ago, I tried to get a ticket the day before to see one of the featured speakers, not because of a book he’d written, but because he’s a personal hero of mine. Unsurprisingly, since he’s uber-famous, the tickets had disappeared months before. (The festival is free, but you still need tickets to attend the big events.)

As you can probably tell, I don’t pay a lot of attention to the literary scene here in Las Vegas. There’s a writers institute here that focuses on traditional publishing. It condescendingly includes “genre fiction” in some of its programming, but the people it puts on panels wouldn’t make a panel at a major sf convention or comic convention. Maybe a small town sf convention in the 1990s that had no budget at all. Maybe. Because they just don’t have the credentials.

This year’s Las Vegas Book Festival has some good panels on romance and a rather silly “genre fiction” topic combining…wait for it…history, horror, and sci-fi. There is a worldbuilding panel with a few writers who actually build popular sf/f worlds. But for the most part, this festival still shows its literary and traditional publishing roots.

Which is why I keep forgetting about it, year in and year out.

I do keep an eye on the book programming of the various tiny local festivals, just to see if a friend will show up or to get tickets to see someone whose work I adore. Last year, a friend and I went to see Roxanne Gay as part of the Wave In festival (which included music and art as well as books). We sat outside in the heat at Springs Preserve to listen to her excellent talk, as well as the interview conducted afterwards.

My friend, also a writer, asked why I didn’t go up and introduce myself to Roxanne Gay before the event, when she was sitting alone. I didn’t for a variety of reasons. Usually those introductions are awkward. If the featured writer hasn’t heard of me, then they’re embarrassed or dismissive. If they have, and it’s through my editing, there’s a chance that I rejected them. If they have, and it’s through my writing, there’s a chance that they don’t read or like that sf (mystery, romance) crap.

Just better to let me be a reader-fan than it is to try to impose on their moment in the sun.

Besides, I’m keeping a low profile with the local literary scene, a decision that I realized was a good one when another friend with a long career in science fiction moved to the area. She was treated by one of the organizations like something that needed to be scraped off their shoes. That’s embarrassing too, but not as bad as being recognized.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

This past week, I had a fascinating text exchange with one of my very best friends. We have known each other for more than forty years. We met in college—and no, this friend isn’t Kevin J. Anderson. This is another friend. We worked in different professions, but we’ve been at each other’s side, either physically or virtually, for decades now.

He’s retired now. I met him while he was a late-returning undergraduate, looking for a new career. Then marched beside him through the milestones, from getting an advanced degree through marriages and divorces (his and mine), children (his), successes, failures, and the health challenges that we’ve both suffered over the years.

We talked about the life trajectory this week, because my one class per semester at UNLV keeps bringing up bits of the past. This week, I watched a couple of students bond on a project. Over the past month or two, I watched them get to know each other and slowly become each other’s support system. Whether that lasts another forty years—or even six months—I don’t know. But they’re working on it.

I’ve seen a few other friendships grow too. These kids are just beginning to figure out who they are deep down. Watching that discovery is great. I think I finally understand why my father, a college professor, got so inspired by his students. I’m seeing it in real time.

But my friend and I also discussed age. He has one of those time-markers—children—that I don’t have. So it’s easier for me to pretend that I’m the same as I was in my forties (I’m not; I’m healthier) or that time really hasn’t passed—not unless I look at my hands, and see how they’re aging. They don’t look like mine anymore. They have the same short stubby fingers that my grandmother’s hands had, and now I’m starting to get that same web of lines that she had.

Occasionally, articles hit me hard as well. One, a Buzzfeed clickbait piece, said, You’ll Never Guess Who Is In Their Mid-Sixties! And I thought: Sure, I would, followed by…Crap! I’m nearly to my mid-sixties.

That was a bit earth-shattering in the weirdest of ways. The societal message about growing older, which means in U.S. parlance that I’m becoming less relevant. My friend mentioned that he has a lot of time now because he’s retired, and he struggles with that, although he doesn’t want to return to his old job. It intrigued him thirty years ago, and left him battered by the end. He doesn’t want to return and he doesn’t want to reinvent himself…yet. I suspect he might, though.

It gets worse: I’m female, and the message in American society is that older women are not beautiful or attractive or even interesting. Except that there’s this undercurrent of Don’t mess with grandma, implying that women my age, particularly in non-white cultures, have a lot of strength and power.

I was raised by a weak alcoholic woman who constantly told me that I would have to bend my life to my husband’s (as she did) and who got progressively weaker as she got older. I became quite good at negotiating hospitals because my alcoholic parents had to be taken to the ER with startling regularity (don’t ask). I learned, as a teen, how to ask the right questions and get them in and out quickly.

The survival skills you acquire…

Anyway, my role models, except for my grandmother who was 69 when I was born, were not very good ones. And even my beloved grandmother wasn’t a good role model on aging. She would often go to the hospital herself and then we’d get a call: Hurry! We think she’s going to die! She didn’t. She outlived my father, a few grandchildren, and at least two great-grandchildren, dying years after her hundredth birthday.

For decades I held her up as a beacon, but she was lacking in a few other areas as well. She hadn’t had a career. She’d been a housewife and not the best one, since she really couldn’t cook. (She could bake.) She didn’t have a career to fall back on or one that interested her or kept her active. Neither did my mother. My father retired at 75 and died within six months, just like his father who, at age 69, retired in January and was dead by March.

My brother was deathly afraid that when he retired, he’d follow the Rusch male tradition and leave the planet a few months later. Thankfully, he lived another 15 years after his retirement and might have made it longer if it weren’t for the sacrifices he made for others during Covid.

Of course, no one else in my entire family had a career in the arts. Not a one. My mentors in the writing field were…mentors. They were people I knew and, in some cases, cared deeply about, but not people I observed in everyday life. I knew how long they lived and I also knew that almost all of them (with one exception) kept writing until the day they died.

Knowing that…and seeing that…are two different things.

I turned sixty during Covid, and then pretended that I hadn’t. I stuffed that birthday aside, and the next, and the next…during which I got sick, for the first time ever on one of my own birthdays. I had weird health problems this year, maintenance stuff that required minor surgery or some changes in habits.

Dean had a serious health crisis this past year as well. He’s ten years older and remarkably healthy, but he has age-related problems too. He said to me, in the waiting room of our third medical professional’s office last June (two for me; one for him), that we had better get used to this: seeing doctors was our future.

And that sent me into a mental funk. The word “future” and “doctors” became a nightmarish vision of all those ERs of my teen years, carting unwilling and belligerent adults around, driving without a license to get them to and from some kind of help that they didn’t want and ultimately never took.

I suddenly saw the next decade or two as a long slow decline with only death at the end of it. Most people would say I came face to face with my mortality, but that’s not really true. A few near-death experiences of my own, as well as losing my high school best friend to breast cancer at 36 and other friends throughout the past three decades, made it really clear that death comes for us all whenever it’s ready and not a moment later.

. . . .

I figured out that I am in the last third of my life, and that I’d better hop to so I can complete everything. That added to the doctors/decline panic I was already having. It didn’t matter how many discussions Dean and I had about realistic time. If this is the last third of my life and provided there is no cognitive decline, well then, thirty years is damn near (not quite) as long as I have been with him.

Wow, has a lot changed in that period of time. Wow, have I written a lot. Wow, am I underestimating what I can do.

But…

Those conversations weren’t helping. I intellectually knew that I had more than enough time to write everything and more, even with illness and life events. I had had more problems before I moved to Las Vegas, years when I had migraines 21 out of 28 days every month, and I still managed to get a lot done.

But nothing was getting through to that weird panic about the last third of my life. Then Dean and I had a very serious discussion about role models on the way to the second WNBA finals game on Wednesday. He pointed out that I really had no role models growing up—all that stuff I put above were things he helped me put together.

And then that game gave me a gift.

Midway through the game, two women helped an elderly woman into the nosebleed seats. Seriously, our seats are so high up that people who are afraid of heights have trouble climbing the very steep staircase.

These two women—obviously relatives of the older lady—helped her get up the stairs, but primarily, she did it on her own power. She was ninety-eight years old and fierce. She wanted to see her team in the finals.

She stayed until the final minutes, when the other two women—probably her granddaughters—insisted she leave before the crowd did. Fortunately for her, the Las Vegas Aces were so far ahead that there was no way they could lose as she headed down those stairs.

Still, she fought. She wanted to see the game through. But they convinced her, and down she went, watching the game more than the steep stairs ahead of her.

Determined.

She was going to see her team win, and she did.

At ninety-eight she had a dowager’s hump and looked a bit frail, until you saw her face. That fierceness and intelligence. That determination. She was in good enough shape to take the stairs six times (there was a pit stop).

She needed to see something that no one could imagine in 1925, the year she was born. I do not know her history. I couldn’t tell from her size if she ever had athletic ambitions, not that it mattered. She had no hope of fulfilling them born as she was in those years.

But she saw something amazing—a championship team, two female coaches who were as fierce as the woman before me, and some players (on both teams) who are so great they could go toe-to-toe with most NBA players and beat them.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris’ author page on Amazon. Check out her books if you’re intrigued by her thoughts.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I did not want to write this post. In fact, I would have skipped the topic altogether if maybe a dozen different people hadn’t asked me to weigh in. I also felt that I was one of only a handful of people who could explain some of what editor Sheree Renée Thomas went through this summer. She can’t be 100% honest without jeopardizing her job.

In brief, a U.K. author mentioned on his website that he had sold a story to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in July. Writer Christopher Rowe saw that notification and immediately asked F&SF why they were publishing this particular U.K. writer. Turns out he’s affiliated strongly with the National Front, a U.K. political party with horrible white supremacist views.

This all took place in public, putting editor Sheree Renée Thomas in the forefront of a social media shitstorm. Eventually, the acceptance was rescinded, which caused another shitstorm. She got no support in this at all from owner and publisher Gordon Van Gelder until he issued a very tepid statement at the end of August.

Before I go deeper into this, let me say that this sort of thing has happened hundreds of times before at many publications over the decades. In the days before the internet, it would happen in public after the story was published if the editor and publisher were unlucky. If they were lucky, they would somehow catch the problem before the story made it to print.

In those days, there was a grapevine among editors which worked about 50% of the time. The worst failure during my tenure at F&SF was when a male writer of great ability sent out his first few stories. When a male editor rejected him, he was all sweetness and light. When a female editor rejected him, this writer wrote a long screed in great detail about how he would rape the editor and maybe even kill her when he saw her next.

I got one of those. Every female sf/f editor got one.

The male editors thought our warnings were “exaggerations” and we were “overreacting,” even though the writer in question was a violent paranoid alcoholic who had been imprisoned for assaulting women in the past. The night of the 1998 Nebulas, during which his story lost, he got drunk at the event and tried to assault a friend of mine running the SFWA suite. Fortunately, others saw this and managed to stop the attack.

As I was looking up this man’s name, which I will not repeat, I saw a recent article by another male friend of mine asking if the writer was a victim of cancel culture because the man’s career only lasted until 2008.

Nope. He was published for a decade after that horrific event. A male sf editor even published another story even though he had been terrified by the writer, because he believed that no one should be judged by their behavior. Only by their writing.

He was wrong, as publishing learned with Norman Mailer and Jack Henry Abbott over four decades ago.

I have been quite reluctant to weigh in on the F&SF mess for personal reasons. I believe that rescinding that contract was the absolute right thing to do, and I will get to that in a moment.

But let me say this first:

I try very hard not to discuss The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I think Sheree Renée Thomas is a fantastic editor. She’s done a spectacular job at F&SF. I think she’s managed to honor the magazine’s traditions and bring it solidly into the 21st century.

I wish she had a better boss. But I have remained mostly quiet about Gordon Van Gelder. The transition between my editorship and his was ugly, with him sending a form letter to everyone with a story in inventory, telling them that the editing on their stories was poor and the stories needed to be re-edited. That was but one thing that he did when he came on board. The microaggressions continued for decades, including leaving me out of as much of the history of the magazine as possible (including the Wikipedia page, except as a name, until people complained).

The behind-the-scenes stuff got so ugly that a friend of mine, a big-name corporate lawyer, wanted to take my case for free because he said it was a textbook case of tortious interference. I did not let my friend or, later, another lawyer who offered, take the case because I was not going to edit any longer. I didn’t need editing work. If I had, I would have had to take them up on going to court.

But I was no longer interested in editing. I was more concerned with my fiction career. If Gordon and his friends managed to destroy my reputation under the Rusch name, I could—and did—write under pen names. I didn’t want to spend time in court, even though a few other lawyers (and one appellate court judge) who learned the story agreed that the case was a slam dunk.

But let’s just say that I have very little good to say about Gordon, and the lack of respect he showed, not just me, but most women in his orbit.

When he hired Sheree, I thought, Gosh, maybe being married and becoming a father helped him grow up. I was pleased that he hired a person I consider to be one of the best in the field. I was stunned that he hired a woman at all, given the crap he had said to me even before he followed me at F&SF. (He had bought The Best of Pulphouse from us when he was at St. Martin’s Press. That was…well, it’s another story.)

I thought of contacting Sheree directly when she was hired and warning her about my experiences with Gordon, but there was a distance of more than 20 years from my direct experience of the man to the start of her tenure. I thought that he had become a different person. After all, most of us change as we age.

But clearly, from his terse statements about a crisis in which he should have had Sheree’s back and did not, and from statements from Sheree’s predecessor, C.C. Finlay, Gordon has not grown up. He has just stayed mostly under the radar.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

PG had (and still has) a policy that basically boiled down to “Don’t work with jerks.” When he was practicing law, he wouldn’t accept jerks as clients. Even if they were rich.

Once, shortly after graduating from law school, he was working for a very, very bright man 35 years his senior who seemed like a wonderful guy when he asked PG to go to work for him. He gave PG a big bump in pay and PG was very pleased with his new job and the wide range of interesting new people he met in connection with his work.

All went swimmingly for a couple of years, then PG’s boss rather quickly evolved into a jerk. In short, he hired a curvacious woman with few job skills to be his secretary and spent quite a lot of time in his office with the door closed in meetings with his secretary. PG also knew his boss’s wife, who was a wonderful woman.

In short, a formerly nice guy had evolved rather quickly into a jerk.

PG skedaddled out the door at the first opportunity, and several months thereafter, the company collapsed. PG received a call from his former boss’s wife asking why he hadn’t told her what was happening with her husband.

So PG’s reactions to working with a jerk had caused him to behave badly toward the boss’s wife.

He can say that he only had to deal with one more jerk/boss in his life. A very nice non-jerk person had hired PG, but then the owners of the company fired the nice boss and replaced him with a jerk boss.

Fortunately, for the majority of PG’s working life, he was self-employed as an attorney and he worked hard to be a non-jerk boss for the people who worked with him.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

A series of articles have appeared over the summer about the ways that the pandemic affected us as human beings. One of the most obvious is that people have forgotten how to behave in public. Vox did a long article on this, citing various examples, including many that featured concert goers throwing things at performers and actually injuring them.

Here in Las Vegas, we hit a lot of this behavior earlier than other communities. We’re a destination entertainment site. Some of the behavior I witnessed during the pandemic from people who didn’t believe in it was quite appalling, from hitting security guards who wanted them to walk through metal detectors to throwing drinks at bypassers on the sidewalk. These were mostly on my early morning runs in the heat, when I wouldn’t go anywhere near the gym.

In 2022, at a musical, I shamed some guy in intermission. I was sitting in a great orchestra seat, with friends across the aisle from me. The guy behind me was cracking jokes at the top of his voice throughout the first twenty minutes, so I finally turned around and told him to shut up. He did for a little while, then started again before intermission.

Intermission hit and I got up. My friend across the aisle thanked me for shushing the guy, and I said in my loudest voice, “Well, it didn’t work. The idiot seems to believe we paid to hear his truly awful comedy routine rather than the performers on stage.”

He was blissfully silent during Act Two.

As Vox noted in their article, shaming works.

All of us ended up with behaviors and coping mechanisms and various means of surviving those years. One of my survival mechanisms is to pay attention to everything, which is probably why I saw those people fighting, worrying that they might get too close to me, or felt I needed to shut the idiot up at the theater. (Okay, full disclosure: I would have shut him up pre-pandemic.)

But being on that level of alert for me meant that I couldn’t sink into story in any form—not all the way, anyhow, unless I knew I was completely safe. When we moved to a different condo in 2021, I got an office that has windows all around me and a clear door that I can see through.

This little space made me feel safe. It felt almost hidden even though I could see everything around me if I wanted to. I was able to sink into my own storytelling and get back to writing things that required my full concentration.

But with very few exceptions, I couldn’t sink all the way into someone else’s story in written form. I didn’t realize that I had lost the habit of going all the way into someone else’s book until this summer, when I had to recover from two different surgeries.

I took a stack of books with me, sat on the couch, and lived in a very dark and funny version of London for days. I sank so deeply into Mick Herron’s Slough House series that I can’t tell you much of what happened in my condo, let alone Las Vegas, during that period of time.

Oh, did it feel good.

I have long believed that fiction writers need to read fiction in order to write fiction. Not just the fiction that they read growing up, but now, today, as they continue with their craft. Part of learning is to see what other writers are doing.

It doesn’t matter if those writers are producing fiction in 2023 or if they’re long dead and their books have lived beyond them. What matters is the act of reading itself, the act of sinking into the story and letting it take you somewhere else.

A writer friend of mine has said for years that he doesn’t have time to read fiction anymore. I keep waiting for him to tell me that the stories in his head have dried up. I know he’s having a rougher time writing right now, but that could simply be because of shedding his pandemic skin.

I have heard writers say that they slowed down or stopped writing as they got older. In the next breath, they would tell me that they had stopped reading for pleasure years ago.

One writer actively told me that he’d seen all the stories and all of the plots and there was nothing new for him.

I’m very sad about that. The best writers make everything new. I recently read a time travel novel that had me on the edge of my seat because I had no idea how it would resolve. I’ve read a lot. I too see patterns and know how many stories will end.

That doesn’t bother me, maybe because I’m a romance reader. Romance carries with it the expectation of a happily-ever-after ending, so we readers know the couple will work it out in the end.

The key to a great romance isn’t the ending. It’s the journey.

That’s the same for me in many other genres where I see the patterns. It’s the key for me in lots of other books.

Reading informs writing. We get to live different lives by opening a book. Right now, I’m reading a lot of fiction by writers half my age. Their world is different from mine, and their perspectives—while familiar—are a product of the time in which they grew up.

Granted, I get some of that by taking a few classes at the university every year, but it’s not the same. It’s not that visceral understanding of difference. Difference and common humanity.

But I don’t just read for difference. I still read for entertainment.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Me and the Google (as a friend of mine calls it) spent what I almost termed a “dispiriting” hour as I searched for the 21^st century’s superstars in a variety of fields. I say “almost termed” because, when I think of it, “dispiriting” is the wrong word.

Adult me, who loves this modern world of indie publishing and going directly to the reader, doesn’t mind the lack of superstars or “big names” as most people call them.

Teenage me, who was trained to figure out the coolest, latest, most “in” superstar (and to judge people based on who they liked and who they didn’t like), feels…well, not dispirited either. But at sea, maybe. Because it’s not as easy as it was fifty years ago to figure out who is guiding the culture.

That whole concept—guiding the culture—comes out of curation. And class-based curation at that. Hardcovers, considered permanent and as a result difficult to afford, were for upper class and/or educated readers. Paperbacks came out of World War 2, and became even more popular thanks to the GI Bill (here in the States) paying for the education of anyone who served.

Paperbacks were considered disposable, though, like the pulp magazines before them. So anything that was in cheap paper was considered cheap fiction, and not worthy of all the things we used to measure “good literature.”

Curation is an important part of the creation of superstars. Yes, the fans have to like what they see, but to get the maximum number of fans to like something or someone, there has to be an information funnel. People need to see that something or someone in very, very, very large numbers.

Even so, those numbers don’t mean a lot when you move across the globe. Global superstars were extremely rare, even back in the day, and were often only in the movies—especially action films that didn’t have a lot of dialogue. Global superstar writers really didn’t exist ever. Each language and/or country had their own stars and often those writers didn’t translate well into a different culture.

Instead, books became blockbusters across the globe, and I’ll get to that in a later post.

One of the many, many reasons that global superstars are rare has nothing to do with language or cultural barriers in the arts. The reason is that there were no curators worldwide. Here in the States, we had a tightly regulated curation system in the mid-20^th century, and it was all based on distribution.

There were only so many shelves in bookstores across the nation. Books that went into department stores (remember those?) were the cheap disposable kind (or as we knew them, the mass market paperback). Records had similar issues. There was a large struggle to get radio play, considered free advertising, and then record stores and yes, those department stores, clamored for the music that their customers came in and asked about.

Even then, nothing remained on the shelves long. There just wasn’t space.

Just like there wasn’t space in the movie theaters for more than a handful of films. The movie theaters expanded from showing one film for a month or two (the 1970s) to three or four films at the theater in the mall (the 1980s) to multiplexes (the 1990s), but even that didn’t make distribution easier.

Someone curated who saw what film, just like someone curated who heard what record, just like someone decided who read which books.

Television expanded outward faster, thanks to the arrival of cable, but the networks, which had dominated since the 1950s, held sway until we entered the new century.

Curators told us what to watch. We, the audience, chose among the curated product and accepted or rejected what we found.

Along the way, we found our favorites. Since the curators were nameless and faceless to people outside of the various industries, we couldn’t follow the curator, so we had to find a different way.

We followed the artist, the author, the actor. We couldn’t even follow the television program or the book series because the curators would often discontinue the television program or the book series for reasons that had nothing to do with popularity, and everything to do with contract negotiations or the difficulty of controlling the producers or other behind-the-scenes problems.

Because there was so little actual product out there, we had “watercooler” conversations in which everyone—and I do mean everyone in a particular country/culture—had an opinion about the latest bestseller, the latest movie, the latest album released.

Now, movies can appear and disappear without anyone noticing. It doesn’t matter if we make it to the theater before the movie leaves because the movie will eventually stream. Finding music that we like is as easy as picking a playlist on one of the streaming services, and in many ways, we curate those ourselves based on algorithms of things we have listened to before.

Books are similar. I’ve complained here before about the fact that I have to actively search to find a new release by one of my favorite authors. Many of those authors don’t have newsletters, not that I always open the newsletters that I get, letting them clutter up my inbox.

Distribution has changed, which is something I deal with on this blog a lot. Curation still exists, but it’s essentially worthless. It’s a dying profession in a dying corner of dying parts of the various entertainment industries. 

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I suspect spring in Las Vegas will always have reminders for me. In those first dark days of the pandemic, when we were wiping off our groceries and viewing our neighbors with great suspicion, when we were wearing cloth masks that were makeshift at best, and running out of toilet paper as well as hand sanitizer, I ran outdoors.

Very early in the morning, taking the stairs from our condo down to the street, actually crossing the street if I saw anyone at all. There was a group of us who were out at that time of day—a redheaded runner who lived on Fremont Street (and ran the same route, only going the opposite direction), a middle-aged woman who walked and was usually on the phone, and a man from my building who walked his three bulldogs every day at the same time.

We didn’t talk. We waved from a proper distance. All of us carried masks, but weren’t masked. We’d hastily put the mask on if someone came close. I actually wore a neck gaiter that I could pull up like a bandit.

This morning, I was sorting my clothes for the upcoming summer and found some cloth masks. I’d already noted last fall that I was unwilling to throw my cloth masks away, even though I haven’t worn any since late 2020. I’ve been wearing K95 when I need to wear masks.

I did stash the cloth masks, though. They’re in a bag I got from the musical Hadestown. I think that’s appropriate.

There are many things that remind me of that spring. Not people—I haven’t seen the first two from my early morning group since 2021. I see the neighbor often. I also see the spring changes.

Back then, I would run, and later in the day, Dean and I would walk, around the neighborhood. We looked at little round cacti that got their spring growth (and sometimes bloomed). At the pollen that littered the street three blocks down. At the spring flowers that had a moment just before the summer heat crushed them.

The neighborhood is different now—there’s been a lot of building and remodeling and growth—but some of those pockets remain. And at this time of year, the sight of those things immediately sends me back to those fearful days.

I like to think I got through them pretty well. I was as realistic about the pandemic as I could be. My history background both informed me and worried me. Dean stopped asking me when I thought the pandemic part would end because my answer was always, Give it three years. That’s when the pandemic started waning in the 1920s.

Here we are, three years later. Yes, I know, dear readers, COVID-19 is still with us. Friends have had it all through the fall and winter. A friend just had a bout last week. If I log onto Facebook, I see even more friends who are suffering with the virus, even if they’re vaccinated. That disease is pernicious and it wants to infect us all.

. . . .

Markus Brauer, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison teamed up with professors from the School of Journalism and Communication on a study conducted in the early days of the pandemic. The results were published recently.

It found that “higher media consumption—seeking out the news—was associated with more emotional distress.”  I read an article about it in the University of Wisconsin alumni magazine, On Wisconsin, and had a visceral reaction:

I wasn’t extremely emotionally distressed.

Denial much?

I even had trouble getting through the article. Then I found this paragraph:

The study doesn’t allow for causal conclusions. While it is likely that seeking out news updates about the pandemic led to emotional distress, according to Brauer, it is also possible that people who are distressed try to manage their emotions by checking the news more often.

The second half of that paragraph describes me and my coping mechanism. When I’m upset, I seek information. The more information I have, the calmer I become.

Although I doubt I was calm after March of 2020. I doubt I was calm for years.

. . . .

I knew how to survive minute to minute, hour to hour. I also knew how to calm myself in moments of political stress (which we had an abundance of in the U.S. that year). I had been a reporter for a reason. When something goes haywire, I seek information. I look for causes and solutions. I gather data. I check the data to see if it changed overnight.

I am very aware of these habits and actively sought them out.

What I didn’t realize was the impact this all had on my fiction writing and reading. I noted a few things. Such as…I couldn’t read romance novels at all. A part of me no longer believed anyone would ever get a happily ever after. I didn’t want to read certain types of mysteries either, because they were distressing.

Science fiction and fantasy provided a lot of escape, but I have a problem with those genres. My years as an editor made me highly critical of them, so I needed to approach them sideways—trying not to look too hard at what the author was doing.

I defaulted in my reading to a lot of favorite authors because I knew I’d get a reliable read. That was helpful, but my reading declined and as it did, so did my writing.

Or so I thought.

What really changed was this: I had become what I call outer-directed. When I’m threatened or in crisis, I focus on what’s around me, not on what’s inside me. I can’t get lost in a made-up world, because that’s just too dangerous. I don’t dare go through this world with blinders on. Something even worse might happen.

I struggled and wrote and read what I could. I found other things to focus on, though. Writing and reading didn’t give me an escape, but learning Spanish did. It took concentration and felt like I was feeding that outer-directed part of myself.

That lead me to taking school (which was online at that point) too seriously, something I had to work my way out of last fall. I am not a young student with a bright future ahead of her. I really don’t need these classes. They’re for me. So I don’t need to be anal about it, and I don’t need straight As. I’m taking classes for myself, not to get a career or figure out my future. I’m there to learn, and, sometimes, to have fun.

During lockdown, I had to start running in the mornings, which took my best writing time, because the gyms were closed. Those morning runs became a lifeline. I met a lot of (properly distanced) Las Vegans on those mornings—everyone from the security guards at a parking garage (imagine that job) to the street vendors who slowly returned to Fremont. There are a lot of people who glue Las Vegas together in the hours before 7 a.m, people you don’t see later in the day.

I was out there with them, earlier and earlier, because it gets so damn hot here, and no way in hell was I going to the gym and trying to exercise masked among people who felt they didn’t need to follow the rules. (Yes, it was that bad, even into late 2021.)

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

A theme of this year in review has been the hard split between indie publishing and traditional publishing. That split became clear in the numbers in 2021. The industry is no longer one industry. It’s at least two, maybe more.

But for now, we’ll go with two—indie and traditional. And one thing that has always separated these two industries is their willingness to grow and change. Indies are willing to change; traditional publishers are not.

One reason is that indie writers, in particular, are nimble enough to try new things and not have those things wreck their businesses or their business plans. An indie writer can take a book and make it exclusive in a new service for six months, and learn something. A traditional publisher has to make a legal commitment and usually cannot leave whatever service they’ve joined for a particular amount of time.

That makes sampling new tech and new software very difficult.

Also, much of the new tech is designed for the nimble indie, not for the big bloated traditional publisher. Which is why the new tools section is part of the indie publishing section of my year in review.

Many of these new tools are useless to traditional publishers. Others are impossible to sample, because the licensing agreements (contracts) those publishers have with their authors did not envision the latest, newest grandest thing. (That “any new tech anywhere in the universe” clause usually doesn’t cut it.)

. . . .

Bookstores

Generally speaking, the bookstores that survived that initial pandemic shut down from March to mid-summer 2020 are leaner and a lot more tech savvy. These stores, for the most part, are run by younger people. The older bookstore owners retired in that tough period or sold their stores. A lot of stores closed, particularly used stores. (Which is the position that Las Vegas is in. We had three used bookstores before March of 2020, and none now.)

Again, generally speaking, the new younger booksellers are more open-minded, a lot more willing to use the internet for everything from ordering to shipping, and receptive to local authors, even those not traditionally published.

All the information I have on this is either anecdotal or from the mists of my summer business reading. The good news here, though, is that indies who have paper editions can probably get them into a local bookstore, if only for a short time, provided the books look good (so many indie-designed paper books do not, even with all the best tools in the world), and provided the indie is willing to work with the store.

. . . .

One other U.S. bookstore development features Barnes & Noble, a company that seems to me like a mash-up between the Black Knight from Monty Python and The Holy Grail (“I’m fine”) and another Holy Grail sequence (“Not Dead Yet”). Barnes & Noble’s CEO since 2019, James Daunt, used the 2020 bookstore closures to remodel and remake the stores.

Then he did something rather brilliant—he returned control of each store to the local managers. They are now stocking books that locals ask for and want, rather than relying on corporate for ordering. Relying on corporate for ordering allowed B&N in the bad old days to get deep discounts on books, but it also meant that each store looked the same no matter where you went. And if a local author’s books were not in the store, nothing anyone could do would get them there. A special order only brought in one copy.

That’s changed, for right now anyway. Anecdotal reports are that the bookstores look bright and clean and full. The content is different from store to store, which makes the stores interesting.

From a writer’s point of view, suddenly the local chain store might be willing to order copies of a good-selling ebook or of a local author’s work for their local author section (if they have one). Writers actually have a chance to get their books into a brick-and-mortar store, at least one near their home.

Does all of this mean that B&N will stick around? Hell if I know. I don’t know if their balance sheet is good or bad anymore or what the changes mean.

But for 2022, anyway, the outlook is bright for anyone who wants to get their books into a nearby B&N. For what it’s worth.

Ebookstores

There are so many now that I can’t keep track. Companies here, there, and everywhere. Any indie who is not using tools like Draft2Digital to upload their books to very small e-retailers is missing an important cash stream. It seems that every time I go on D2D or, more often, use its referral arm, Books2Read, I see yet another store I haven’t heard of.

So the continual growth of e-retailers is something that has gone on for years now. But the biggest change on this front isn’t the retail companies. It’s the success of retail stores on individual author sites.

This is anecdotal, of course, because there’s no way to aggregate it. But the pandemic changed buying habits, introducing a lot of reluctant people to buying from sites other than the big retailers like Amazon and Walmart. That change in buying habits means that a lot of readers want to buy directly from the author.

So individual online bookstores went from being a silly waste of time to something that provides writers with their purest income—no one takes a percentage from their online store. The writers can control pricing, sales, and everything else.

It helps that online stores are easy to build now. There are a lot of tools that reduce the build to an easy upload, and a click or two. These programs also provide a secure checkout as well.

If you haven’t tried any of the online store programs for the past five years or so, then you’ll be surprised at how easy it all is for writer and consumer alike. I personally think this will be one of the major growth areas of 2022.

If there are only one or two things you can add to your plate this year, make designing and maintaining an online ebook store one of them.

Book Design Tools

Every few years or so there is a major improvement in indie book design. The last one I was aware of was the arrival of Vellum, a software program for Macs only. At first, Vellum was only for ebooks, and then it expanded to paper books. The Mac users swore by it, and I know that WMG changed a lot of its templates so that we could use Vellum, saving hours and hours of work on each book.

But, as I said above, Vellum is Mac-only. PC users bitched about that. There was a workaround—they could use Mac on cloud, but it had problems that made the workaround uncomfortable at best.

Now there’s Atticus, which works on all platforms, or so it says. The PC people are excited about it for that reason. But I’m also hearing that it’s a good design program.

Honestly, it really doesn’t matter if it’s good or not. Because next year, there will be another program, and two years from now, another. We’ve moved out of the stage where everyone who is publishing indie is using the same tools for the same work. We’re not even doing the same work—which is probably a topic for a future blog post.

As I’ve mentioned in this series, the longer we indies exist, the more companies try to cater to us. Or rather, to all of us in the arts. For a long time, Adobe offered the best platform to help with design and producing ebooks.

Other products either didn’t have the reach or the level of protocols. That’s changing. Affinity has become very competitive, and I know of several designers who prefer their ecosystem. I’m sure we will end up with more such tools as the decade progresses.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I realized this month that I have a weird form of pandemic PTSD. As those of you who regularly follow this weekly blog know, I order at least six paper calendars for the year ahead. In 2021, I added a calendar at Dean’s request that’s dedicated just to our runs. I also ordered an extra calendar when my usual exercise calendar (which I use for reading—go figure) kept getting delayed due to printing issues.

I’m usually extremely organized with my paper calendars. By this point in the year (and I’m writing this on December 20), I should have everything that I have scheduled for 2022 logged into the paper calendars.

Right now, I have many things that I know about for 2022 logged into the computer calendar. I’m anal about that thing, with its reminders and its messages and its notifications. If I schedule something, I log it into the computer that day.

However, I said “many” because I haven’t yet logged in my class dates and times. Which I just realized as I’ve been writing this post.

I’m really reluctant to look at my schedule for 2022.

For this one, I blame 2021. I filled out my 2021 calendar at this point in 2020. I was excited about the vaccines coming, excited that we might return to in-person everything in 2021, excited about having a sane president. I was hoping that we would be able to put the increasing insanity of the previous five years behind us.

I wrote a really upbeat blog about it, coming into 2021, which, if I remember correctly, went live…on January 6

. . . .

I’d get my feet under me only to be swept away by something that I truly did not expect. I probably could have foreseen all of it if I were willing to acknowledge how dumb some people are, how gullible other people are, and how venal a whole lot of people are. But I try to be optimistic about the human spirit. I really do.

. . . .

I went forward, sometimes with great disappointment. Sometimes with a shake of the head. And sometimes with complete stubborn determination.

I was just about to type that for me, personally, 2021 wasn’t a bad year. And then the back of my brain started listing the dead friends and family members who had been alive at this point last year, the sudden move, the continually changing exterior landscape and, yeah. 2021 was…well, it wasn’t the worst year of my life. Not even close. But I can’t say it wasn’t bad.

Dean and I survived just fine, but I do feel like we’re living in a rubble-filled crater from the year, trying to make the best of the times ahead.

. . . .

I did not realize the toll that 2021 took on my scheduler brain. Realize that I schedule everything. 2020—once we got through March or so—did not have this kind of impact. Everything was canceled or we expected it to be canceled, but that was not the case in 2021.

I thought things would be on. Not much would be canceled. Lots got canceled, even now at the end of the year due to Omicron. (Dammit.)

My calendars are a scribbled mess of changes.

As I typed that section in my blog about school, I realized what my hesitation was. In August, I signed up for the Entertainment Law class ahead of my planned schedule on taking it because the class would be in-person. A different class, one I need to take and had signed up for, went from in person to online, so I bailed.

Online learning has its place, but a lot of in-person teachers suck at it. I had a prof in 2020 who was a great raconteur in person. We moved to online in March…and he just drily narrated his notes. Clearly, he needed an audience.

If I’m going to pay a lot for school online, I’ll seek out people who can teach well online, not people who are doing their best poorly.

So I canceled out of a class and took EL, which ended up being a great decision, except that my Thursdays became nightmarishly long. I don’t want to do that again.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.