I just became a supporter of Vancouver writer Siliva Morena-Garcia on Patreon. I discovered Patreon recently and it’s pretty cool. It kind of works like Kickstarter, in that you pledge money to your favourite content creators. Rather than a one-time payment, though, you generally pledge a monthly payment to help your fave artist do their thing (although I think one-time payments are an option in certain cases). In return, you get access to the creator’s personal Patreon feed and various rewards. Here’s a video explaining how it works:

Here’s Silvia’s Patreon page. Check it out and pledge if you like what you see. Or check out some other creators using Patreon, like those crazy Postmodern Jukebox videos you’ve been seeing in your feeds or the Hijinks Ensue comics. Or, you know, make your own Patreon page and throw out a tip dish.

The nominees for the 2014 Hugo Awards have been announced, and I’m delighted to see Beneath Ceaseless Skies up for Best SemiProZine (Semiprozine? SemiproZine?). I love BCS, and not just because a few of my Angel Azrael gunslinger stories have appeared there. It’s a fine, fine magazine that champions literary fantasy, sic-fi and all sorts of speculative fiction (or just good writing, if you’re not concerned about categories). Or, as the BCS site puts it, “adventure fantasy plots in vivid secondary worlds, but written with a literary flair.” It’s the sort of magazine I think we need more of.

Of course, the Hugos being the Hugos, there is controversy about the list of nominees. I don’t really have anything to say about it myself — it’s the way of awards, after all — but if you’re interested in following the discussion, you can read more at John Scalzi’s Whatever or Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter Nation to get the basic idea of what’s going on and see who’s on what side, etc.

Although, really, your time would be better spent reading Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

I woke up this morning to find my feeds filled with the news that CanLit icon Alistair MacLeod had died. I didn’t really know the man myself — I’d only met him once in passing at a writers fest years ago — but I had taught some of his stories in university back in my grad school days. They were always the works that my students actually found themselves caring about, almost against their will (survey courses generally having a narcotic effect on undergrads). He was a writer who made people care, as is evident in the number of tributes being written about him even as I write this. He made a difference, and that is all we can ask of life.

Mark Medley has written a good summary of MacLeod’s life and legacy at the National Post, and Steven Galloway has penned a personal piece of his encounters with MacLeod for the Globe. Good reads all around.

My friend and fellow writer Brian Panhuyzen is writer in residence right now over at Open Book Toronto. He’s writing about DRM, otherwise known as digital rights management. It’s a contentious issue sure to sunder friendships and end marriages, but then what issue online doesn’t?

In his first post, Brian comes out in favour of DRM:

For me as a writer, DRM is a way of making it difficult to distribute my work without authorization. With the widespread distribution of music and movies and now books via the Internet, the public is clearly without conscience when it comes to disregarding copyright. In this climate, the worst thing you can do is make it easy. If I’m reading a book and loving it, I can email you and tell you that you must read it – but how much better if I simply attach the unprotected ebook to my email message, and in minutes, you can be reading it too. DRM complicates this process by inserting a critical step, a mild but important impediment, to the process: you need to software unlock the file, to remove the DRM. While it’s not terribly difficult to do, it does require a certain degree of technical savvy and comfort. And it’s illegal.

I’m usually all for consumer rights, but I lean more toward Brian’s side in this case. Almost everyone I know routinely downloads pirated movies or watches them on streaming sites. The same used to be true of music, but I’ve found that most of the people I know now pay for music. Why? Is it because it’s easier to buy than steal music? Is it the low price points, which movies have yet to match? (In fact, both movies and books are creeping up in price, which will probably lead to more piracy.)

I want it to be easy for readers to find my work online. I want it to be easy for readers to buy my work online. I want it to be easy for readers to read my works on whatever device they want, when they want. But I don’t want it to be easy for people to steal my work. It’s hard enough to time find time to write as it is. The less money coming in from my writing, the less time I have to write because I’ll have to work at other things to pay the bills.

Don’t like DRM? I’m afraid we’re stuck with it until people change their behaviour.

I just wrote a 5,000 word non-stop action scene. I feel exhausted and I think I need to nap now.

Over at my day job, I wrote a piece about Anne Rice and others signing a petition urging Amazon to stop allowing anonymous reviews. The issue isn’t negative reviews, it’s trolls using the anonymity to personally attack writers.

I’m not the type to worry about bad reviews — in fact, I think the idea of reviews at all for fiction is sort of pointless in our modern age of book previews. I suppose nonfiction is a different story, but that’s a different post.

Attacks on writers — or other readers or reviewers, for that matter — is a real problem, as the article points out. There’s a little too much nastiness on Amazon and Goodreads, and it gets in the way of meaningful commentary/discourse/discussion, as when Rice was attacked in a writing advice forum.

As with anything else online, there are multiple sides to the story, and probably multiple sites telling each side of the story, but the article will give you a general idea of the battle lines. It would be nice if someone called a truce.

I tend to stay out of the tradpub vs. indiepub wars. Each model has its pros and cons for individual writers, so I’m of the mind to suggest you do what works for you. That may even change on a book by book model. I’ll just point out the article I wrote about B.C. poet Shane Koyczan’s Kickstarter for his new poetry collection, which earned him just over $91,000 — when he only asked for $15,000. (Note the article says $82,000, but the Kickstarter went on for a day after the article’s publication.)