Robert J. Sawyer

This was drawn to my attention this evening: a nice review of my Mindscan at Blogcritics. org.

A life lesson for wannabe writers: it pays to have money in the bank. Because you know that check you’re expecting? Money you’re owed for work you’ve done? It can take an awfully long time to show up.

My editor at Tor accepted the final revisions on Rollback on Thursday, April 27. That act — acceptance of the manuscript — triggers a contractual payment for a major portion of the advance.

My agent just emailed me today to say that finally the check from Tor has shown up at his office (in the same city as Tor) … 133 days, or 19 weeks, or four and a half months later. (And of course, I don’t have the money yet … my agent still has to process the check, take his commission off, and send me a new check for the remainder.)

Meanwhile — and I’m not grousing, just observing — it seems I spend half my time dealing with complaints from authors whose books I’ve bought for my imprint through Fitzhenry & Whiteside, the company that publishes my imprint, about the late issuing of contracts and advance checks by Fitzhenry … so it’s not just Tor; it’s endemic throughout publishing. But, sheesh, what a way to try to make a living!

Just got a congratulatory email from my friends Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, who saw the Variety piece about my deal with Snoot Entertainment for “Identity Theft,” and I see it’s also written up here and here.

So, I sometimes get asked why I bother editing my own little line of books. After all, it’s often frustrating, it’s time-consuming, the pay is miniscule, and on and on.

But the answer is obvious to me when one of the new books arrives hot off the press. Today, I got my first copies of Terence M. Green’s novel Sailing Time’s Ocean, the latest release under my Robert J. Sawyer Books imprint. And it’s gorgeous. A beautiful package, a brilliant book — and I brought it to market. It’s very satisfying … :)

Down below, in my blog entries from August 31, 2006, through September 4, 2006, I describe the first-ever Mississauga Write-Off, a writing retreat held at Carolyn and my place over the Labour Day long weekend, with these participants: Carolyn Clink, Al Katerinsky, Herb Kauderer, Val King, Randy McCharles, Robert J. Sawyer, Elizabeth Trenholm, and Hayden Trenholm.

It was very productive for us, and I thought I’d share a few photos:

Rob worked from his usual La-Z-Boy in his office.

Liz found a comfy couch in Carolyn’s office …

… while Val stretched out on a couch in our sunroom.

Randy scored the recliner in the living room …

… and Herb did a lot of work out on the balcony.

Al preferred the kitchen table …

… while Hayden took a little time off to read and enjoy a beer.

On Sunday night, we all gathered in the living room for readings.

Carolyn kept everything running smoothly all weekend long.

From the Tuesday, September 5, 2006, edition of Variety, the Hollywood trade paper:

Snoot plans grand ‘Theft’
A new ‘Identity’ for Calder

By Pamela McClintock

Keith Calder’s frosh financing and production company, Snoot Entertainment, has bought the film rights to Robert J. Sawyer’s acclaimed futuristic novella “Identity Theft.”

Story revolves around a private eye working on Mars who is hired to find a beautiful woman’s missing husband. Calder will produce with Snoot’s Jessica Wu.

Project marks the first live-action feature for Snoot, which is in production on the CGI animated pic “Terra,” voiced by Evan Rachel Wood, Brian Cox, David Cross, James Garner, Danny Glover, Rosanna Arquette, Ron Perlman and Danny Trejo.

Snoot intends to turn out two to three live-action pics a year and one animated pic every two years. Films, each costing up to $30 million, will be aimed at a broad aud.

Calder said Snoot is backed by a combination of private financing and outside equity investors.

In a move to make animated pics at a reduced cost, Snoot has teamed with visual effects company MeniThings. The two partners are in the process of creating a vfx studio for films, television, commercials and musicvids.

Other projects in development at Snoot include racially charged mystery “The Bone Orchard,” thriller “Leave” and horror comedy “After Midnight.”

Calder, who previously worked at Spyglass Entertainment and for Jeremy Thomas’ London-based Recorded Pictures Co., also is a founding partner of Occupant Films. Calder launched Occupant with Felipe Marino and Joe Neurauter. Production company is debuting “All the Boys Love Mandy Lane” at the Toronto Film Festival.

And the first-ever Mississauga Write-Off is officially over. Herb and Al drove back to Buffalo around 5:00 p.m., and Randy and Val took Carolyn and me out to dinner this evening, then took a 9:00 p.m. flight back to Calgary.

Although the company for dinner was fabulous, I have to say the food was not. We went to a steakhouse near the airport, and my filet mignon arrived severely overdone (I’d ordered it medium-rare, and it came well done). I would have sent it back — something I almost never do — but we had time constraints, since we had to get Randy and Val to the airport in time for their flight. Ah, well — at least I know one restaurant I don’t ever have to eat at again. And, anyway, the conversation and the companionship were terrific.

My day wasn’t as productive as I’d hoped — rule number one for future Write-Offs: don’t check email! — but I went back to the keyboard after Carolyn and I got back from the airport, and did manage to finally finish my 2,000 words by just after midnight.

It was a very productive long weekend for all of us. In descending order, our word counts of new material:

Randy: 17,000
Val: 10,300
Herb: 9,000
Hayden: 8,700
Rob: 8,300
Al: 6,300
Liz: 5,300
Carolyn: 500 (but of poetry!)

Total: 65,400 words!

By the way, my fleet of laptops was put to good use: although Val, Herb, and Al brought their own computers (well, Al brought a borrowed one), Hayden, Liz, and Randy all used various laptops I had lying around the house (and Carolyn and I used our usual computers). For those who flew in, it was much easier for them not to have to lug computers here.

Everyone got along really well (Val and Randy had never met Herb and Al before), and eight people seemed like the perfect number: enough to keep the energy level high, but not so many that we were getting in each other’s way, or on each other’s nerves.

I’d very much like to do this again at some point; it was truly a wonderful, and very useful, event.

Anyway, Carolyn and I are both exhausted — not just from the four consecutive late nights, but still from Worldcon last weekend, and all the travel before that — so it’s off to bed, with the telephone ringers turned down and no alarm clocks set …

I was too busy this past month with travel to provide regular Monday spotlights, highlighting documents on my website at sfwriter.com, but I hope to get back to doing so each week … and for this week, simply because I had to fix some broken code in it today, the spotlight is this guide to clips on my TV demo tape.

The names of the programs won’t mean much to non-Canadians, and it’s sad to see how many of these shows are now defunct (not, I hope, because they were foolish enough to put me on the air!), but it’s a nice trip down memory lane; my demo tape was produced in 1999.

Sadly, I don’t have rights to put the actual clips online.

And, look, I used to have (some) hair! :)

Well, it’s winding down. Hayden (who wrote 8,700 words this weekend) and Liz (5,300) have been deposited at the Toronto airport. Herb and Al are checked out of our condo’s first-floor guest suite (but are still here). Herb is writing on the balcony, but the rest of us keep rushing out to join him, since all sorts of military jets keep flying overhead; they’d been part of an airshow this weekend here in Toronto. Weather is cool and gray, but otherwise all is well. But I’ve only gotten 700 words so far today, so — back to it!

Well, as those who read my blog directly at sfwriter.com/blog.htm have doubtless noticed, I’ve been trying an experiment in having Google AdSense ads on my blog.

But I’m not sure I’m happy with the results: the ads seem to mostly be either from vanity publishers or authors of self-published books, or from fee-charging agents, and those aren’t things I’d recommend to people. Most web users are savvy enough, I’m sure, to know that the mere presence of AdSense ads on a site doesn’t constitute an endorsement of the goods or services offered by the advertisers by the owner of the site, but, still, I’m not sure I’m comfortable with them being here. Thoughts, anyone? (And, no, they’re not generating much revenue.)

There’s also an interesting twist to Google’s license agreement: to avoid getting paid for clicks you yourself generate, you, as the site owner of a page displaying AdSense ads, have to agree to NOT click on them yourself — so I’m not allowed to follow the ads to find out precisely what they’re for; I’m having to guess about the actual products beings sold, in most cases. (Although the Science Fiction Book Club is one of the advertisers whose AdSense ad pops up in rotation here, and I fully support them, and am glad to have books published by them.)

Hmmm ….

Today’s food was a brunch at our place in the morning, followed by an early dinner at Emerald Chinese, one of Mississauga’s best, and most authentic, Chinese restaurants (by the time our dinner was over, the place was reasonably packed, and we were the only non-Asians eating there). Liz and Hayden very kindly bought for everyone.

I got my 2,000 words done (total 6,000 so far for the Write-Off). At 8:00 p.m., we all did five-minute readings from what we’d been working on, which was great fun; the readings were fueled by Pillsbury chocolate-chip cookies.

After, we watched my favourite episode of the HBO TV series From the Earth to the Moon, which is “Galileo was Right.” In it, David Clennon plays a geology professor who teaches a bunch of Right Stuff-style astronaut jocks how to be scientists; I’ve never seen any SF work do as good a job of conveying the excitement of scientific discovery.

We also watched an episode of a Corner Gas, a wonderful Canadian sitcom (three words that, until recently, could not be used in the same sentence), since our American friends hadn’t ever seen it. We also watched parts of Silent Running, and Probe, the pilot film for the TV series Search.

And we had a fascinating discussion about the accessibility of modern science fiction, using these paragraphs, the opening of Chapter Two of Charles Stross’s new novel Glasshouse, as a springboard:

Welcome to the Invisible Republic.

The Invisible Republic is one of the legacy polities that emerged from the splinters of the Republic of Is, in the wake of the series of censorship wars that raged five to ten gigaseconds ago. During the wars, the internetwork of longjump T-gates that wove the subnets of the hyperpower together was shattered, leaving behind sparsely connected nets, their borders filtered through firewalled assembler gates guarded by ferocious mercenaries. Incomers were subjected to forced disassembly and scanned for subversive attributes before being rebuilt and allowed across the frontiers. Battles raged across the airless cryogenic wastes that housed the longjump nodes carrying traffic between warring polities, while the redactive worms released by the Censor factions lurked in the firmware of every A-gate they could contaminate, their viral payload mercilessly deleting all knowledge of the underlying cause of the conflict from fleeing refugees as they passed through the gates.

Like almost all human polities since the Acceleration, the Republic of Is relied heavily on A-gates for manufacturing, routing, switching, filtering, and the other essentials of any network civilization. The ability of nanoassembler arrays to deconstruct and replicate artifacts and organisms from raw atomic feedstock made them virtually indispensable not merely for manufacturing and medical purposes, but for virtual transport (it’s easier to simultaneously cram a hundred upload templates through a T-gate than a hundred physical bodies) and molecular firewalling. Even when war exposed them to subversion by the worms of censorship, nobody wanted to do without the A-gates to grow old and decrepit, or succumb to injury, seemed worse than the risk of memory corruption. The paranoid few who refused to pass through the verminous gates dropped away, dying of old age or cumulative accidental damage; meanwhile, those of us who still used them can no longer be certain of whatever it was that the worm payloads were designed to hide in the first place. Or even who the Censors were.

All in all, a wonderful, stimulating, productive, enjoyable (but fattening!) day.

Progress has been slow for me today — stayed up too late last night, plus I’m at the difficult stage in which I’m defining characters’ voices; once I have those down, my pace tends to pick up.

It’s still overcast here, but it’s not raining today. Hayden has gone for a walk, Herb is now working out on my balcony, and I’ve got the door from my office to the balcony open to let in fresh air.

Well, back to work!

Nick DiChario, the author of A Small and Remarkable Life, which I published, is having a party — come one, come all:

SPECIAL PUBLICATION EVENT

Robert J. Sawyer Books Publication Party
Saturday, September 9, 2006, 2 p.m.

Q & A Session and a Celebration of Noted Rochester SF Authors

Our own Nick DiChario, author of A Small and Remarkable Life -– official launch of his first novel!

Marcos Donnelly, author of Letters From the Flesh -– official launch of his paperback edition!

Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award winning author and editor of Robert J. Sawyer Books –- signing his award-winning novel Mindscan!

Join our guest authors for a Q & A session and their official publication event!
Coffee and light refreshments served. Books available for purchase. 2-4 p.m., Saturday, September 9. Free and open to the public.

The Write Book and Gift Shop, 19 North Main Street, Honeoye Falls, NY 14472.

I got my 2,000 words by the end of the day. Dinner was here at our place: hot dogs, barbecue chicken, fried chicken, salad. Eight is a lot of people around our kitchen table, but miraculously nothing got spilled.

Evening included watching stuff on my 50″ Sony Grand WEGA TV: the classic Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror,” the fan-made Trek film “In Harm’s Way,” plus a bit of Saturday Night Live.

We’re all having a blast, although Hayden and Liz ran out of steam early in the evening and went to bed; the rest of us are just retiring now (about 1:00 a.m. Toronto time). Tomorrow’s our last full day …

We’re all back from lunch at Montana’s, a roadhouse-style chain restaurant. It’s a cold, rainy day here in Toronto, and the disadvantage of having a penthouse with lots of floor-to-ceiling windows is that if it’s dreary outside, it can seem dreary inside. But I’ve put on a fire in the living room, and that’s cheered the place up. Everyone is back at work, and being productive. I got 1,000 words before lunch, and intend to get another 1,000 this afternoon …

See here and here.

All went well. My personal goal was 2,000 words — and I got 2,189. Most everyone else met their goals, too.

We went on mass to Swiss Chalet (Canadian barbecue chicken franchise) for lunch; dinner was pizza (from Pizza Nova, for those who know Toronto pizza chains). Lots of great work done, lots of great conversation. In the evening, everyone but Carolyn and me participated in a critiquing session for manuscripts by Hayden and Randy. (I’m critiqued out, having done 16 at Odyssey, and having eight to do for my Banff group this month, and then a couple of dozen to do while I’m writer in residence at the Kitchener Public Library this fall.)

Later in the evening, we all watched the just-released 20-minute Writers and Illustrators of the Future documentary, which features many winners and judges, including me. It’s quite a nifty documentary, and really captures the excitement of the awards ceremony and the workshop associated with it.

We’re all going to bed before midnight tonight. Looks like rain tomorrow; maybe I’ll put on a fire in the fireplace …

For a limited time, the Analog website has the first seven chapters of my next novel Rollback online. You can read them here.

Analog is serializing Rollback in four parts. At the end of the online sample, it says that the story will be concluded in the next issue; that’s wrong — it runs over four issues: October 2006 (now on newsstands), November 2006 (which subscribers are just now receiving), December 2006, and the January-February 2007 double issue. Also, the part online is only a portion of what’s in the October issue, which actually contains the first 12 chapters.

Enjoy!

… for the Mississauga Write-off. Much food has already been eaten (“it’s like locusts,” said Carolyn); we’ve clearly underestimated how much we’ll need.

We’d intended to go to bed earlier, but the conversation was too good. :) Now, at 1:30 p.m., we’re calling it a night. Tomorrow, the writing begins!

… by design. Two and half years ago, I started attending the twice-yearly “Write-Off” weekends hosted by Danita Maslan (aka Danita Maslankowski) for Calgary’s Imaginative Fiction Writers’ Association (IFWA). A bunch of writers — 15 or 20 — hole up for a weekend in the rec center at Danita’s townhouse complex, bringing laptops along, and they write, write, write all weekend.

And this long holiday weekend is the first-ever Mississauga Write-Off. Carolyn is off at the airport making the first round of pickups: Hayden Trenholm and Elizabeth Westbrook-Trenholm, who are flying in from Ottawa. Later, Randy McCharles (chair of the 2008 World Fantasy Convention in Calgary) and Val King arrive on another flight; they’re coming from Calgary. And later still, Herb Kauderer and Al Katerinsky are showing up from Buffalo, New York, by car. I became involved with IFWA in 1996, when they hired me to facilitate a workshop for them; Hayden, Liz, Val, and Randy were all in that workshop, and Herb (a massively published poet) and Al are frequent guests in our home during SF cons, parties, and so on.

All of them, plus Carolyn and I, will be writing our hearts out over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, plus part of Monday (the Labour Day holiday here in Canada). Carolyn and I have a very large penthouse apartment, with lots of comfy chairs and couches for people to curl up in with their laptops. Our building has a guest suite, which is where Herb and Al will be sleeping, but everybody will be writing in our apartment (or out on the large balcony).

We’ll walk out to restaurants for lunch each day, and either order in or go out for dinner. The goal, of course, is to get as much writing done as possible (and Sunday night, we’ll all do brief readings of samples of what we’ve written). We’ll see how it goes. I’ll keep y’all posted …

A papal summit will debate the Catholic church’s stance on evolution, says New Scientist.

I’ve put four 4.1-megapixel pictures of the latest prototype of the MasterReplica’s 33-inch Enterprise model from Classic Star Trek up on my website, for those who, like me, are thinking of getting one. Only 2,000 are being made, and they cost US$1,199 each (or more, with autographs).

The photos are: here, here, here, and here.

These photos were taken last weekend at the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles.

… at L.A. Con IV, the Worldcon in Los Angeles:

Me in a Star Trek uniform

Carolyn in the Batmobile

Boarding the Enterprise, the 40th-anniversary Classic Star Trek essay collection edited by David Gerrold and me, is now out from BenBella Books; I’ve now seen it for sale in stores, and it was flying off the BenBella dealers’ table at the L.A. Worldcon.

You can read my introduction to the book here.

And there’s a nice review over at Trek Nation, and another nice one at The Log Book.

Buy it at your favorite local store, or from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble Online.

A message that just showed up in my inbox:

Dear Robert,

I expect you get asked by a lot of people to finish their story….

Mine really isn’t such a sloppy idea… I really just am too busy and thought you might help??

That’s as far as I read. Sheesh! I’m rather busy myself, ass-face.

Volume 22 of L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future is now out. This volume contains writing essays by Hubbard, Orson Scott Card, and myself, plus one on art by Bob Eggleton; mine is called “Eight Things New Writers Need to Know.”

But the meat of the volume is the award-winning stories from the latest year of the Writers of the Future contest. I was a judge for the grand prize this year (helping select the year’s overall winner from the four quarterly finalists), and I was simply blown away by the quality of the stories, every one of which was first rate.

You can buy the anthology here, or at your favorite bookstore.

And you can find out about entering the contest — which has helped make the careers of such writers as Stephen Baxter, Dave Wolverton, James Alan Gardner, Eric Flint, Sean Williams, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Robert Reed, Howard V. Hendrix, and 2006 Hugo winner David D. Levine — here.

Calgary World Fantasy ALL-U-CAN-EAT BBQ!

Saturday September 16th, 12 – 4 PM
Pearce Estate Park (east downtown)

$10 gets you all the burgers and pop you can handle + an assortment of amusements: Music, nature walks, games and much, much more.

Award-winning author Robert J. Sawyer will lead a discussion on how near-future technology can save mankind.

There will also be an ENORMOUS BOOK RAFFLE! Hard covers. Trades. Paperbacks. Galleys.
Ivan Dorin will be running a book exchange table, so bring along any books you’d like to swap.

Visit www.worldfantasy2008.org for more information.

Happened to come across a few of the stats for the 1996 Hugos — the ones given ten years ago, at the exact same venue (the Anaheim Convention Center) as this year’s Hugos; the ones ten years ago were given at L.A. Con III.

Back then, the nominees were Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (which won), my The Terminal Experiment, Stephen Baxter’s The Time Ships, David Brin’s Brightness Reef, and Connie Willis’s Remake. But what’s interesting is that ten years ago, 734 ballots were cast in the best-novel category, and this year only 567 ballots were cast — that’s close to a 23% reduction, which is yet another sign of the declining readership of SF, and the shrinking of fandom, I suppose.

On the other hand, back in 1996, it took just 27 nominations to make the final ballot: (Stephenson had 76, I had 58, Baxter had 47, Brin had 28, and Willis had 27), whereas this year it took 45 (Stross had 90, Wilson had 76, Martin had 47, MacLeod had 46, and Scalzi had 45.)

Net’s Largest Science Fiction & Fantasy Forum Created by Chronicles Network Acquisition of Ascifi.com.

The chronicles network has purchased Ascifi, and successfully merged the forums from both sites, to create the internet’s largest general science fiction and fantasy forums.

Read more

Sunday, August 27, was the final day of L.A. Con IV, the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles.

I started off with a meeting with Scott Danielson from SFF Audio, then did my autographing, which was well attended, and my reading, which was not (just four people — the readings venue was hidden off in one of the hotels, instead of the convention center; I hate it when cons do that).

I read “The Eagle Has Landed” from Mike Resnick’s DAW anthology I, Alien, and spoke rather passionately about the societal role of science fiction. After that, I ran into actress Karen Black outside, as I was heading from the hotel to the convention center; I remembered her remembered fondly from Capricorn One and other movies; we had a very nice chat — she’s still quite lovely.

Next up was a group photo on a mock-up of the bridge of the Enterprise from the original Star Trek, posing with wax figures of the original crew, with me, Susan Forest, Heather Osborne, and Kirstin Morrell dressed in classic Trek uniforms. Once I get a copy of the photo, I’ll post it here. (As it happened, my editor walked by just after I’d put on my gold Enterprise tunic. “That’s your new author photo, Rob,” I was told.

Dinner was with Analog editor Stan Schmidt and his wife Joyce; very nice. After, Carolyn and I joined the Calgary contingent and headed off to watch the fireworks at Disneyland from a parking lot (Disneyland is only a short walk from the convention center). We then attended a bit of the dead-dog party, ran into Robert Charles Wilson and his wife Sharry over in the Marriott as they returned from Disneyland, and had drinks with them before calling it a day.

All in all, it was a very pleasant Worldcon. But it was small, as these things go; just 4,950 warm bodies on site, from what I heard; that’s only 2/3 of what was expected.

My theory: the presence of the 110,000-person San Diego Comics Con — which has evolved into a general pop-culture media convention with a very large science-fiction component — just last month in nearby San Diego may have siphoned off a lot of the potential traffic for L.A. Con IV. Or, it may be that World Science Fiction Conventions are generally in decline. Next year’s attendance figures in Japan won’t tell us anything, because that’s such an unusual location for a Worldcon (the Worldcon has only once before been in a country where English isn’t the principal language), but the 2008 con in Denver will be a significant test.

Anyway, I had a great time, and did a lot of useful business. And I’m now back home after 20 days on the road, a trip that took me to Calgary for a wedding; to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California; to San Diego for Writers of the Future; and finally to L.A. for the Worldcon. I wish I could say the rest of my year won’t be as hectic, but I’ve got trips to Banff, Denver, Montreal, and two trips to Vancouver coming up … Still, it’s a great life! :)