Blog - Extrapolated Worlds

Publishing: Self vs Trad

When I told one of my friends that I had finally finished my science fiction novel THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN, they replied that at least the hard work was over. And then we both laughed, because writing a novel is a lot like hunting moose. You go out and spend a week or so in the hills, having a nice time doing just about exactly what you like doing. Getting up early to hike, sitting under a spruce tree listening to the wind blow and glassing the hills around you, calling from a tree stand at dusk with a friend who has brought a little something to take the chill off. And then the moment comes: you’ve found a legal moose, and he’s close enough to shoot and not too far to haul, and you finally pull the trigger. And that’s when the fun is done and the real work begins, because it takes a lot of effort to turn a moose in the field into meat in the freezer. Those things are huge. I can’t even carry a hindquarter anymore; that’s what kids are for. (Thanks Sam! Thanks Max!)

So that’s where I’m at in this process. It’s time to turn this beast of a book into something that sustains me and my family. It’s time to publish. And that requires making a decision: should I self-publish or go the traditional route? I’ve dreamed about seeing my books on store shelves since I was a kid. So traditional publishing has a lot of pull for me. And I was fortunate to get some attention early on, right up to getting a contract offer. (Thanks Stoney! Thanks Walt!) That was such a rush. I had my finger on the trigger! But times have changed since I was a kid. Only 2% of traditionally published authors make over $100K a year. The next 8% make between $60K and $100K. It falls off pretty rapidly from there. The bottom line is that the vast majority of published authors need side gigs and hustles and maybe even full time jobs, because otherwise they simply can’t make ends meet.

That sucks.

It is also a relatively new phenomenon. It used to be that “midlist” authors could actually make a living at their craft. But over the last few decades, there has been a tremendous consolidation of the publishing industry. Which is of course the same story as in many other industries. Because capitalism! So as all that power and money accrues to a tiny number of publishing houses, what happens? Well, basically the producers (that would be me!) get screwed.

Here’s an interesting number: 2000 hours. That’s how long it takes to write a typical novel. (Mine is a bit of a honker, so probably more like 3000 hours, or really 4000 if I’m being honest because I spent a lot of time in revisions.) 2000 hours is also the aspirational American work year (8 hrs/day x 5 days/wk = 40 hrs/wk, 40 hrs/wk x 50 wk/yr =2000 hrs). So if you hold down a full time job and write a novel in a year, you worked 16 hours a day. I’m old enough to have a realistic sense of what I’m capable of, and 16 work hours a day ain’t it. So let’s do the math. Say I can tolerate an honest 50 hour work week. That’s 40 for the Man and 10 for writing. So at that rate it’ll take about 4 years to write the next novel. By which time I’ll be 67. Damn. Also, are any readers I manage to attract going to remember me four years after they finish my epic science fiction novel THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN? Ha! I think not.

So what does this have to do with self-publishing versus traditional publishing? Thanks for asking! These days, if I self-publish a novel on Amazon or Apple Books, instead of getting single-digit royalties like I would for a printed book, I get about 70% of the retail price. I also get a world-wide market. And I don’t have to thread the needle of finding an agent who finds an editor who works for a publisher who is very interested in minimizing their risk and maximizing their profit. Which could take years.

What I don’t get with self-publishing is marketing. That’s all on me. But as it turns out, as a noob it’s mostly on me in traditional publishing as well. And advances are thing of the past. Things that make you say “Huh,” right? So the question becomes one of values: do I want to make a living out of writing, or do I want to be part of the club? Make no mistake, I have as much vanity and ego as anyone. Probably more. I’d fucking love to be part of the club of traditionally published authors. They are my heroes. But I need to make a living at this, or I need to do something else with my time.

So there you have it: wants versus needs. That’s not such a hard decision after all. And who knows, maybe after I self-publish my awesome epic science fiction novel THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN, I’ll get an invite to join the club. In the meantime, with a little help from friends and family, I’ll be hauling my own meat, Alaska-style.

Prostate Cancer – Part 2

In which my misadventures with prostate cancer lead to medical tourism in Germany…

A couple years after my initial diagnosis and adoption of a “watchful waiting” approach, my PSA test scores started to creep up, and I started looking for treatments that didn’t involve willful destruction of my basic plumbing. There were all sorts of semi-experimental procedures that attempted to do the job, like high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) and cryotherapy where they stick needles in and freeze the tumor, but at least at the time none were much better than a good old-fashioned prostatectomy. I was really hoping for the male equivalent of a lumpectomy.

Somewhere along the way I stumbled on hyperthermia, which involves jacking up the temperature of the rotty bits just enough to kill the cancer cells whilst leaving the healthy stuff intact. It seemed plausible, so next thing you know I was on a plane to Germany with my wife. Our destination was Klinik Marinus am Stein, there to submit myself to the tender ministrations of Dr. Axel Weber.

The big idea was – essentially – to microwave my prostate, which is an organ roughly the size of a walnut, without cooking anything else. So the way Dr. Weber did this was with a machine of his own invention. The process involved placing a balloon inside my bladder that anchored a microwave emitter a fixed distance downstream, as it were, hopefully in the middle of said walnut.

Now, there’s really only one way into a person’s bladder that doesn’t involve a sharp knife, which is through the urethra. Which in guys, exits the body through – you knew this was coming – the penis. So there I was, feet in the stirrups, with Dr. Weber leaning over me with a well-lubed microwave emitter roughly the size of a mechanical pencil, saying in a heavy German accent, “Look into my eyes!” while my wife looked on. It is a moment burned into my memory.

Yeah. Good times.

As a palate cleanser, I went off and trekked in the Himalaya for three weeks, which was a truly amazing experience. And also speaks to the degree to which the procedure was not destructive. But was it effective? Hard to say. My numbers went back down and stayed down for half-a-dozen years, so I thought it was a good spend at ~$8K all up (none covered by insurance, of course, because America).

But nothing lasts forever, and about the time the COVID-19 pandemic got rolling, my PSA scores reached the inflection point of the “hockey stick” curve and threatened to go vertical. Not a good sign.

More to come in part 3!

Gray Lies

When writing “Gray Lies,” I was thinking about how a transformative technology like World War 2’s surface ships versus aircraft could come about in the context of interplanetary warfare. Thanks to Larry Niven I was obsessed with Bussard ramjets and I settled on the scenario of old-guard fusion torchships – fusion rockets – being trounced by interplanetary ramjets. (This was before critics calculated that a ramjet would produce more drag than thrust.) I was also thinking a lot about Von Neumann probes – self-replicating space probes that could sweep through the galaxy in fairly short timeframes as these things go. Oh, and the idea of being able to upload minds into computers. It was a lot to pack into one short story.

I wrote it while obsessively listening to the 1990 release of Best of Van Morrison. Which is odd for several reasons; I’m more of a Pink Floyd / Grateful Dead kind of guy, and I usually don’t listen to anything with words while writing. Regardless, Best of Van Morrison was what got me into the groove, and is probably why the story has such an optimistic, or at least kind, ending.

The universe the original story imagines is immediately adjacent to that of THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN. I always enjoyed the works of authors who had created a somewhat consistent but large universe – again, Larry Niven in his Known Space universe, and much earlier, Robert Heinlein. Though it was sometimes hard to see how the pieces all fit together in Heinlein’s case! In any case, it would not take much of a rewrite to nudge “Gray Lies” over. The main discrepancy is the war between Pallas and Confive; in THE EXTRAPOLATED MAN, the main conflict is between Earth (or proxies thereof) and Mars. And I’ve largely moved on from ramjets to more esoteric drive technologies, so that might have to be adjusted. But these are minor fixes – surface details that are easily reworked.

So enjoy the original here; odds are good by the time it gets to Amazon it’ll be polished up to present the illusion that I’ve known what I was doing from the beginning!

– Magazine cover art by Peter Peebles

Prostate Cancer – Part 1

Back in 2012 my employer was eager to get ahead of healthcare costs, so they launched an annual biometrics program where employees got screened for all sorts of things. The theory was that early detection would reduce the need for expensive treatment later. Oh, and of course, lead to better health outcomes for the employees, though it’s unclear to me whether that was a key driver of their decision making process.

In my case, there were two red flags, which are interesting case studies of what went well and what did not. Good news first: I had moderately high blood pressure. Not the kind of eyeball-popping blood pressure that puts you in the ER, but the kind that takes years off your life in the long run. Something like 150/110.

I am very interested in living a long time (with certain caveats, like being healthy and able to engage with the world more or less on my own terms). So taking years off my life was definitely not okay. After a few pharmaceutical experiments, I settled on a cheap medication that knocks off 20-30 points without noticeably affecting my quality of life. Note that experiments were necessary; the first couple drugs had side effects that made me question whether those nominal extra years of life were worth it. (If you find yourself in a similar situation, I advocate not sticking with the first shitty hand your doctor deals you.) So, good news, right? Problem found, problem solved.

Now the second red flag: a high Prostate Specific Antigen (aka PSA) score. A high PSA score indicates a man might have prostate cancer, or as I fondly think of it, root rot. There followed many very expensive, painful, and in one unfortunate case, life-threatening diagnostics. That last was a doozy. Everything was pointing to, “It is very likely you have cancer Mr. Franklin, but the only way we’ll know for sure is by taking a biopsy.” So the way they take a biopsy of a guy’s prostate is by sticking something kind of like a mini nail gun up the ol’ poop chute and punching a needle through the wall of your rectum, through various other layers, and on into your prostate. Twelve times.

I’m a standard-issue cis guy, so I didn’t have a lot of a priori experience about how sensitive prostates are, but lo all these years later I’ve had many things inserted into me and can tell you, as my gay brothers already know, that it is quite sensitive. Getting core-sampled with a nail gun through your poop chute twelve times produces an altered state I hope to avoid in the future. It also has the side effect of ramming whatever shit soup is still coating your gut deep into your tender bits. (This after drinking 80 ounces of yummy Moviprep strands you on the toilet overnight waiting for your big date with a nail gun.) The docs anticipate this problem and give you a huge oral antibiotic right before getting busy with their nail gun. I’m told it works for 99% of the folks involved. If you happen to be part of the unlucky 1% like me, you get sepsis, go down the proverbial drain, and get to be on a first-name basis with the staff of your local ER.

But really this is all a long aside, because after all that fun, it turned out that my specific kind of prostate cancer was likely to grow very slowly, and could probably be safely ignored for years to come. Take note: they can actually do genetic tests on cancer these days, but you have to ask for it specifically, in advance. Even though my particular flavor of root rot was just barely on the evil side of benign, the docs were very keen on taking my prostate out as soon as fucking possible to eliminate any risk. Or to pay for their fancy robotic surgery suite, because capitalism.

There followed a period of intense research on my part, because it seemed unreasonable, if my risk of dying of prostate cancer anytime soon was quite low, to have a procedure that would likely have life-long consequences ranging from incontinence, to not being able to have an erection without some kind of pharmaceutical or mechanical assistance, to not being able to have one at all. My read at the time was that 1/3 of men who get their prostates removed need diapers, and 2/3 were not going to have a normal sex life after treatment. That’s like putting two to four rounds in in my trusty Smith & Wesson .357 revolver and playing Russian Roulette with my junk.

Now… I know, sex isn’t everything. And sure, I’ll give it up before I give up life itself. But if I don’t have to? If giving it up is OPTIONAL? I have friends who were in the same boat and now swear by Cialis. It was driving them crazy, sitting on a ticking time bomb whose fuse was lit, but the length of which was only sort of statistically knowable. I get it. But the saying goes that most men die WITH prostate cancer, instead OF prostate cancer. Root rot comes for all men in the fullness of time. And sex is one of my very favorite things in life.

So I said no thanks, I’ll just wait this out. Which drove the docs nuts. They could cure me! “You, with the intact prostate! Get on the table right fucking now!” But no. It must be frustrating to know you can fix some guy’s problem for good, and have him refuse. As it turned out, I was on the forefront of a wave of refuseniks, so much so that these days a guy with my numbers wouldn’t have even had a biopsy. They’d probably wait until the PSA was much higher, or there was some kind of detectable growth or readily noticeable problem like you can’t pee. (Detectable with a finger – which is delightfully and misleadingly called a digital exam.)

But the problem remained that I had cancer. I knew it. It was in there. So I couldn’t just completely ignore it.

Stand by for part 2, wherein I have medical adventures in Germany…

The Transformative Ethic

“The Transformative Ethic” was the first short story I sold, and I am forever indebted to Charles Ryan for taking me on, and to David Cherry for his amazing artwork – both the cover and the interior! Aboriginal Science Fiction was a class act.

I finished “The Transformative Ethic” way back in 1990, while I was working – and living, four weeks out of six – at Cominco Red Dog Mine. Red Dog is the world’s largest zinc producer, and it’s located above the Arctic Circle. That far north, the sun sets for a month in mid-winter. The mine site is a self-contained village, with pre-fab living quarters and office buildings built on stilts to keep from melting the permafrost and diesel generators running twenty-four hours a day. It’s a bit like living on the moon, or an asteroid perhaps. Think Outland without the gun fights and sex-appeal of Sean Connery.

An amusing factoid about the office buildings is that they were constructed in the Philippines, and as a result had two undesirable features: a small population of large tropical insects, and a complete lack of air-conditioning. Because if you live in the Philippines, you’d think it’s always cold above the Arctic Circle, right? Makes sense. But in high summer the sun never sets, and it actually gets quite warm. And there are many, many, many mosquitoes who find the CO2 wafting out of open doors and windows just so deliciously appealing. As one of two on-site IT guys, I had the relative luxury of being able to retreat to the server room, just about the only cool indoors place to work in the summer.

Red Dog is the polar opposite (sorry, couldn’t resist) of the research bases down in Antarctica, dedicated to ripping one of the building blocks of civilization-as-we-know-it out of the Earth instead of improving our understanding of it. I cannot even imagine what its carbon footprint must be, not that we were thinking much about that in 1990. An uncomfortable tension of living in Alaska, one of the most beautiful places on the planet, is that it’s all paid for by the ugly business of resource extraction. “If you can’t grow it, you have to mine it,” the saying goes. Or pump it.

But one thing I learned about open-pit mines from direct experience – and subsequent monitoring of various catastrophic events around the world – is that they are intrinsically dirty operations that are inimical to the natural environmental. We tried hard to be good, really. I’d say Red Dog is (or at least was – no clue about current management) an ethical operator that tried to do the right thing. But here’s the deal: when you rip the “overburden” off the top of an ore deposit with ginormous machines, you expose everything underneath to the elements. There used to be a big old hill covered with tundra. Now there’s a big old pit instead, and that pit absorbs snow and rain, and that water has to go somewhere. It used to mostly just roll off into the nearest stream. Now… it seeps through a bunch of toxic metals into the nearest stream. And kills it. And kills the next, bigger creek downstream. And so on.

And then there there is the tailings pond, where all the sludge from the extraction process goes. As far as I know, Red Dog’s tailings pond dam has held up, but many others have not. And when they go, it’s a real disaster both for the environment and for any communities that are in the way, or rely on that environment for “services” like water. Or food. This is especially a problem for mines that become insolvent, which means the operator can’t pay for maintenance, much less remediation.

So my main takeaway from all this is that yeah, mining is 100% critical to civilization-as-we-know-it, and it is also a dirty business that is, in the long run, extraordinarily destructive of the natural environment. Which – make no mistake! – we depend upon to survive. That’s why people in Alaska are so adamantly opposed to Pebble Mine, which would wipe out an entire fishery if (or more likely when) it has a problem. Not to mention that all the profits from Pebble would go out of country to fat cats in Canada. I mean… it’s really a lose-lose-lose proposition for the folks who live here.

But I digress. Here’s my optimistic sci-fi author perspective: yeah, in the short term we need to mine it, and pump it. And that sucks. So let’s account for the actual full life-cycle cost (instead of unloading that onto future generations), and use that cost to drive toxic operations off-planet (I’m looking at you Psyche!) and build the infrastructure to meet our needs with non-toxic alternatives.

/rant