Tolkien and John Carter

Why Tolkien could not finish the Silmarillion takes a look at how research into creativity helps explain J.R.R. Tolkien's inability to finish The Silmarillion.

Update on John Carter of Mars movie recaps some of the recent news surrounding the Disney/Pixar film adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars.

Horsham school used as John Carter set rounds up the latest John Carter news with an excerpt from a news story about a boarding school. This thread includes some pictures of the school.

If you know why the "John Carter of Mars" movie was being filmed there, I would be very interested in hearing about it.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

Yahoo! Search Brand Now Officially Dead

Yahoo! and Microsoft finally won regulatory approval in both the United States and Europe for their radical approach to reducing competition in the Web search industry: Yahoo! is abandoning its search engineering capabilities and Microsoft is buying up as many Yahoo! engineers as it can get its hands on.

Yahoo! will replace its custom search results with Bing search results. Microsoft will replace its advertising network with Yahoo!'s advertising network.

The net result for consumers is that they will lose a distinctive search brand and algorithm that have provided them with choice for years. In fact, when word of the deal was first announced last summer Web marketers began mobilizing their resources en masse to start replicating their Google search results on Bing. That means that in another year or so what you find in Google you'll also find in Bing. When you don't find what you are actually looking for, you'll have to turn to other search tools like Ask and Cuil (AOL simply rebrands Google search results).

For the science fiction fan site community this will prove to be a hard blow because fan sites have already been pushed out of many relevant queries by commercial entertainment sites that publish relatively inarticulate fluff. These sites have the kind of "brand" value that Google feels searchers should find: minimal content, lots of advertising, and generally unoriginal thinking.

The science fiction fan site community will need to start looking at ways to promote content-friendly search services by using their tools and widgets for site search. Ask.com is the next leading search algorithm provider but truth be told fans may want to look at resources like Cuil.com instead, assuming Cuil gets its act together and starts promoting its service through search boxes and other tools.

If you want to know more about the Yahoo!/Microsoft deal hurts consumers and advertisers, then head over to SEO Theory and read Good-bye Yahoo! Search.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

SF-Fandom supports Idealist.org drive for funds

Thousands of non-profit organizations pay full-time employees to perform the administrative functions and specialized tasks that often cannot be performed by volunteers. When those organizations need to hire someone with professional experience and training, they often turn to Idealist.org, a jobs network for non-profits.

This morning I learned that Idealist.Org is struggling to make ends meet because the Great Recession has forced non-profit groups to cut back on hiring. The commissions that Idealist earns on placement ads have therefore declined.

Although the non-profit world can surely find employees without a dedicated jobs resource like Idealist, I think it's important that people reach out and help an organization like this -- which is also a non-profit group -- keep its doors open.

Here is an excerpt from The Daily Tell, which carried a story about Idealist's call for donations:

A large percentage of Idealist.org’s budget comes from small fees the website charges organizations for job postings. Not surprisingly, the economic meltdown of 2008 has had a devastating effect on this portion of Idealist.org’s budget. Nonprofit groups went through extensive hiring freezes, and cut back on posting job listings. As a result, Idealist found its budget nearly cut in half, leaving them in the red for $100,000 a month. For sixteen long months, Idealist.org has managed to survive on a leaner budget, but they are now at a fiscal breaking point.

Idealist.org is now reaching out to the community that they have assisted for more than fifteen years. The organization is calling on anyone whom Idealist has helped find a job or volunteer opportunity, or has simply been inspired to make a difference in this troubled world. Idealist has set a fiscal goal of $500,000 to stabilize the website. The team at Idealist is seeking to diversify its revenue stream so it will never face this fiscal crisis again. But Idealist cannot achieve this goal without your help. To date, more than 6,100 Idealist supporters have stepped forward, raising an impressive $200,000.

People like us can help with donations and/or by spreading the news that Idealist is looking for support from the large community of people who believe in giving to others. SF-Fandom is supporting the call through blog posts and a forum announcement.

I encourage you to at least do the same. Get the word out through your own blogs and forums, your mailing lists, even by telling people where you work.

This is a worthwhile effort. The non-profit organizations should have a reliable jobs network to help them fill critical staffing positions when the improving economy brings back their funding support.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

PageRank Sculpting is not good for your site

If you operate a fan Website and you try to practice search engine optimization, under no circumstances should you attempt to use the sham SEO technique called PageRank Sculpting.

PageRank Sculpting involves hiding your internal navigation links from search engines. Google announced to the search engine optimization community last year that -- because many Websites were hurting their search visibility by attempting to sculpt PageRank -- it had changed the way it calculates PageRank assignment to disable the technique.

Unfortunately, some people in the SEO industry decided to circumvent Google's fix. They have been preaching new methods for hiding internal navigation links from search engines that Google, Bing, and Yahoo! may not be able to detect and defuse.

I have written about this at more length in the Best SEO Blog article Internal Links SEO: PageRank Sculpting Hurting More Sites.

The bottom line for anyone in the SF community who is trying to learn or practice SEO: Don't resort to PageRank Sculpting. It will only hurt your site.

As far as I am concerned, any SEO who sells PageRank sculpting services or consulting is cheating people out of their money. I strongly advise against doing business with any SEO consultant who advocates the use of PageRank Sculpting.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

Scientists create crate-sized waste water treatment

This is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Wired is carrying a story about a bacteria-driven waste water treatment unit designed at Sam Houston State University. Two units are being sent to Afghanistan and another may be sent to Haiti.

These crate-sized units use common ground bacteria to clean waste water in about 24 hours without producing any toxic byproducts. Modern waste treatment plants don't even come close to that kind of efficiency.

Once commercial production begins for this technology, it will probably be used on planes, trains, buses, ships, and in remote outposts. But it could also be combined with other technologies such as drawing water from humidity that harvest moisture even from desert air. Desert communities and homesteads can be built that work somewhat like Star Wars' "moisture farms" on the arid planet Tattooine (where Anakin Skywalker was born and his son Luke was later raised in secret by Owen and Beru Lars).

Numerous proposals have been put forward for decreasing salinity in salt lakes and using waste water treatment to produce electricity. Water desalination and treatment is expensive, time-consuming, and requires a lot of energy.

Solar-based and bacterial initiatives may help reduce the costs of producing or recovering potable water from waste and salty water sources (lakes and seas). The military and disaster-recovery markets will probably lead the way as they have high demand for low-cost water production and management technologies, but eventually there will be industrial, residential, and even perhaps ecological benefits from the technology.

I believe firmly that we should be transforming our deserts into habitable lands for ourselves and wildlife. Southeast Australia, one of the greenest areas of the southern continent, began drying out 15 years ago.

In a matter of decades, environmentalists will no longer be charged with preserving natural desert habitats -- they will be mandated with creating new habitats to keep our ecosystem alive. That transformation cannot begin until people change the way they think about the environment and how man can and should interact with it. We're not going away any time soon (I hope), and we are part of the environment, not outside of it.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

Robert Sawyer says don't self-publish SciFi novels

In a blog post that has sparked some discussion across the Web, Sawyer wrote: "...if you want advice on the questions you're asking, find someone who has successfully gone the self-publishing route with an SF novel, and ask him or her. The point is: no such person exists, and so you won't be able to find him or her."

Well, Stephen King comes to mind but let's not quibble over the orders of magnitude between Stephen King and the rest of us. In principle I agree with Mr. Sawyer. I don't think you'll get your money back if you self-publish a science fiction novel.

If it were that easy, we'd all be able to easily name someone other than Stephen King (or Mark Twain) who could pull it off.

Now, there are other types of books you can self-publish but they don't come with any guarantees of success. The best route to self-publishing success, in my experience (as a successful self-published writer) is to build an audience that is eager for your work before you self-publish.

Which means you should get published before you self-publish. Now, the Internet once made that easier than it is today. Unfortunately the online freelance industry collapsed almost ten years ago. There are still some opportunities but they are not what they once were.

People turn to self-publishing out of a sense of frustration. The traditional publishers are only willing to put out so many science fiction books each year (and, quite frankly, a lot of those books are not very good). So the traditional publishing industry has built up a lot of stigma with wannabe authors, many of whom don't understand the ins and outs of navigating a manuscript through the contorted channels of publishing.

And let's be fair here: many wannabe authors don't understand the ins and outs of good writing. Did I say the traditional publishing industry puts out a lot of bad books? They reject far worse and in much larger volumes.

Some bad books do get through the process because editors have to manage resources in a somewhat strategic way. That is, if they don't publish something in the right place at the right time, they may not be able to publish something else later. That has been the publishing industry's dirty little secret for many years, but whenever the publishing industry goes through a contraction, eliminating editorial positions and book slots, fewer bad books slip through the cracks of the quality control process.

Still, when you pick up a book in a store that was put out by a major publishing house and you just want to gag at the awful writing that some editor let slip through, you can stand there asking yourself, "Why can't I get published?"

And there are plenty of reasons why you can't get published. They usually have nothing to do with your personality (although I've heard that a few people who went toxic after being rejected pretty much got themselves virtually blacklisted). You need to be at least a competent writer but you also have to be imaginative.

I would love to get my Tolkienesque fantasy novels published some day. I'm still waiting for traditional publishers to beat a path to my door demanding the right to publish the kinds of stories we all grew up on. In the meantime, well, I'm still waiting.

And so are you.

Another reason why you don't get published might be that your resume is empty. There is something to be said about the difference between writing a short story and a novel. But a really good writer should be able to do both. I once submitted a short story to a writing workshop. I won't go into the story behind the story but Marion Zimmer Bradley threw my manuscript on the table and said, "This is a novel masquerading as a short story."

She was right. I had taken a mostly fleshed out novel plot and tried to skin it down into a short story. No professional with years of experience would have been fooled by that kind of trick. One of the points Ms. Bradley made to me that day (and which has been echoed by other people in the field in the years since) was that if you're going to write something, you have to make up your mind what you're going to write. It cannot be many things to many people.

It's easier to write a short story than it is to write a novel. If you learn to write good short stories you'll find there are more markets for them than there are for your novels. Rack up a few sales in short stories and you'll have a writing resume that just may get you past the slush pile at every agent and editor's office.

There are no guarantees you'll ever be able to publish a novel if you sell even 100 short stories. I'm just saying you'll have a better chance at getting someone in the publishing industry to take you seriously if you follow their guidelines and work your way up the ranks the way they ask you to. Hundreds of books have been published that explain the system.

And make no mistake about it: there is a system, one that has been contrived and honed through decades of contractual negotiations, lawsuits, and business deals worked out over dinner, at conventions, etc. Some people broke into traditional publishing by finding themselves in relationships (friendships, partnerships, whateverships) with established writers who helped nurture their inherent talents and molded their undisciplined skills into acceptable publishable craft.

Some people just end up in the right place at the right time. You occasionally hear about someone who writes a pitch letter to a traditional publisher and makes a huge sale -- all without any writing experience, sometimes even without any writing to sell. It happens. Some people are just born to be kings and millionaires, too. The rest of us have to build our kingdoms and our fortunes the old-fashioned way.

The Internet has been touted as a great opportunity for self-published writers. In fact, I do help self-published writers promote their books with some free resources. But I don't suggest to them that the world will beat a path to their doors because they list a book with my service. I'm just giving them a little free exposure.

If you want to use the Internet to promote a book you need to build an audience that will have an interest in that book. It doesn't matter how the book was published. No audience = no sales. You can hire a publicist to work with you but a good publicist will tell you that selling science fiction novels is not easy. Book stores rarely take the self-published science fiction novel.

Print-on-demand technology makes it less expensive to self-publish books. Because I was successful in reprinting a collection of essays through POD technology people have asked me through the years why I don't use that to self-publish one of my novels. The answer is always the same: I don't have an audience for the novel, whereas I did have an audience for the essays, which I had originally been paid to write anyway.

There are a lot of people who want to be published -- more than will be published by the traditional publishing industry. Some very good writers will go unpublished because they stop submitting their manuscripts too soon, because they write the wrong material, because they submit to the wrong agents or publishers, etc.

If you want to self-publish and use the Internet and POD technology to cut your costs, understand that you're not cutting your costs. You still have to market yourself. Traditional publishing should provide you with some marketing help (it doesn't always work out that way). Publishing short stories in anthologies and magazines at least gets your name out there. That's marketing yourself.

If you have a Website that gets 100,000 visitors a month, maybe you can self-publish a science fiction novel. Maybe 1% of those people will buy your book. Maybe.

If you have anything less than that to work with then your chances of selling even 1,000 copies of your book are pretty slim. A typical self-published book sells between 50 and 100 copies. And that's usually based on the author going out and doing signings, hawking their book at small shows and flea markets, etc.

If you're not prepared to do the marketing and build the audience, there is no reason for you to self-publish a book, much less a science fiction novel. Self-published places the burden of marketing all on you. It doesn't confer any credibility on you. Book stores and science fiction conventions are more likely than not to ignore you and your book because they have never heard of you.

That's the real difference between Stephen King and me: far more people have heard of him than me, so far more people are inclined to buy his self-published book than mine.

And that's just how it works.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

Xenite.Org interviews Craig Horner

Xenite.Org was invited to interview Craig Horner, star of Legend of the Seeker, and you can now read the article here.

And SF-Fandom has a forum discussion about the Craig Horner interview. I hope you drop by and share your thoughts about the article.

In addition to the interview we added a Legend of the Seeker Web Directory to the site. I was having trouble finding fan sites and noticed they don't have many links to other fan sites. I think this is currently the largest list of Seeker fan sites on the Web but I cannot be sure.

And I also wrote "On Interviewing Craig Horner" at the other SF-Fandom blog, where I relate all the chaos and mishaps that led up to the actual interview and followed in its aftermath.

I sincerely hope you enjoy the article (and the directory).

And I want to thank WKT Public Relations for inviting Xenite to participate in the latest round of interviews.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

A final word about SciFi and Green Police

A friend mentioned to me today that there is a concise explanation of the "broad range of grass roots movements" around the world that have been labeled Green Police. Last week, in a series of articles on the SF Fandom Wordpress blog as well as here, I explored the "green police" concept from my limited perspective. I have been aware of the growing environmental movements around the world for some time and realized that science fiction (and fandom) have played their parts in developing the message.

Here is a concise list of the articles I wrote on both blogs:

SF-Fandom Wordpress Blog Environmental Series

• Are the Green Police Real Enough?


• Galactic Green Police


• Should man change his environment?


• One last word about Green Police

SF-Fandom Blogger Blog Environmental Series

• How green are your police?


• Green Lantern to the environmental rescue


• Who Are the Green Police?

BTW -- Black Oak Arkansas fans might think that second article title is familiar. It was inspired by the goofy song "Jim Dandy to the rescue". Sorry -- my resistance was futile.

I opened a discussion of these articles at SF-Fandom. Please feel free to drop by and leave your thoughts there if you don't want to comment on either of the blogs: SF Fandom blogs and environmentalism.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

Legend of the Seeker fan site now live

Because we now have a Legend of the Seeker Forum at SF-Fandom, and because we'll soon be publishing an exclusive interview with LOTS star Craig Horner, Xenite.Org has launched a new Legend of the Seeker fan site.

The interview with Craig is not yet live but it should be published sometime in the next 2-3 days. We'll post announcements across our network when the article goes live.

I think Craig Horner fans will enjoy the read.

SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.