So I'm going to ReaderCon this weekend, which will be my first time attending a Science Fiction convention (or is that a Speculative Fiction convention). Expect a full report here.

As a side note: Is there anyone reading this going to the con who can pick me up at the train station in Boston on Thursday so I don't have to take the bus? I'll help pay for gas. And be your best friend. Haven't bought the train ticket yet, so time is negotiable. Contact me at ericr at ericrosenfield dot com please.

This article is the first part of a series about one of my favorite writers, Michael Moorcock, which will culminate in an interview with the man himself.

In the early days of Michael Moorcock's 50-plus-years career, when he was living paycheck-to-paycheck, he wrote a whole slew of action-adventure sword-and-sorcery novels very, very quickly, including his most famous books about the tortured anti-hero Elric. In 1992, he published a collection of interviews conducted by Colin Greenland called Michael Moorcock: Death is No Obstacle, in which he discusses his writing method. In the first chapter, "Six Days to Save the World", he says those early novels were written in about "three to ten days" each, and outlines exactly how one accomplishes such fast writing.

"You have to get rid of the self-consciousness, that particular egotism that stops you working, and stops you finishing work. When I started writing professionally, as a teenager, a lot of my effort went into developing the ability to keep working, to keep producing readable copy. I had to get used to thinking on my feet, and sophisticating things as I went along. You see, I wasn't writing for an editor, I was writing for a printer. The press was ready, waiting for my copy; and it would be ready for more copy tomorrow, and more this time next week. There was always the chance to do better tomorrow."

Michael Moorcock
Death is No Obstacle

More on Moorcock coming soon...

From Gear Diary via Three Percent

The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message “Cannot be sent to selected device”.

“Oh that’s the problem,” he said “if some of the books will download and the others won’t it means that you’ve reached the maximum number of times you can download the book.”

I asked him what that meant since the books I needed to download weren’t currently on any device because I had wiped those devices clean and simply wanted to reinstall. He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it’s five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. And, here’s the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again.

And to make matters worse there's no way to find out how many times you may download a book before you buy it!

Get a Sony Reader. Get a Cool-Er Reader. Buy your ebooks without DRM. For the love of God.

One of my favorite writers, Michael Moorcock, recently did an interview with the readers at BoingBoing, and just wow:

The reason for using newspaper reports and other quotes is not because I approve of those quotes but because they replace exposition and show the 'subject' speaking for itself. Readers aren't asked to agree or disagree with the quotes. The quotes demonstrate what I'm trying to get at. By setting a story about, say, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russia (from The Tank Trapeze, 1968) against a cricket match in Mandalay, I can make comparisons between various forms of imperialism and authoritarianism while also achieving a particular kind of distance.

Go read the whole thing.

For those of you who haven't been following my intermittently updated writing blog, here's my analysis of Pynchon's use of description. I plan to have more posts in the future in which I pick apart the techniques of my favorite writers.

Also on the writing blog: my analysis of the current fiction magazine market

This is my interview at BEA with Brian O'Leary of Magellan Media, who has been studying the effect of free ebooks and ebook piracy on publishing. (Please forgive my amateurish interview style.) The interview was filmed by Ed Champion, and his excellent analysis is available on his site.

Last month my beloved Sony Reader ebook device broke. I contacted Sony customer service and they told me that the warranty only covered manufacturer defect. (I honestly wasn't sure if I'd stepped on it or what.) They said I could pay $30, they'd send me a new device and I'd send back the broken one. Fine, and they charged the $30 to my credit card. I insisted and made very clear that they needed to send it to my work address, because I can't receive packages at home. They said it was no problem, and told me the device would arrive within a couple days. All good so far.

A few days pass. No device. So I call customer service and ask what's up. They said the package was "refused" at the address. I asked them what address they sent it to, and they said my home address. I patiently explained this was the wrong address, and once again gave them the right address. They said, no problem they'd send it to the right address.

Several more days pass. I call them back (note that there's lots of me waiting on hold through all this). They tell me I have to call their shipping center and give me a different number. So I call the shipping center. The man at the shipping center says it'll take 10 business days to get the device shipped to me. Fine.

Soon after this I get an email asking me to fill out a customer survey on my experience. I do, and tell them they got the address wrong etc.

A couple weeks pass. I get a post-card with a survey in it asking how my repair experience went. I write nasty, nasty things on the post card and mail it in. [EDIT: I didn't really write nasty things, so much as rated their support zero and explained my problem.] I call the shipping center again. After being on hold, a man asks me what my phone number is so that he can look up my account, puts me on hold and never comes back to the line. After 40 minutes, I hang up and call again. The lady I now talk to tells me I never called the shipping center and no one ever told me 10 days, like I was hallucinating or something. (Don't you just love it when customer service types ARGUE with you?) She then assures me the package will be sent out that day or the next.

It's now the next. I sure haven't received any UPS tracking number or anything to indicate my product has shipped.

At this point I'm getting close to asking for my $30 back and buying a Cool-Er reader or something. (The BeBook Mini still hasn't been released yet, and mysteriously there's no release date on their website, despite the fact that it was supposed to come out this month. But that's another story.)

The Kindle app for the iPhone/iPod Touch is easily the worst ebook reader I've ever tried to use. First and most annoying, the text is full justified, and there's nothing you can do to change that, which on the tiny iPod Touch screen makes huge, gaping spaces in between the words. Then, you can't change the font, only a limited number of font sizes, and the only options for coloring are black on white, white on black, or brown on sepia. There's no search feature to speak of. And worst of all, when you look to see how far along into the book you are, it says something like "169-172". Turn to the next page and it says "172-175". Huh? What does that mean. I tried to find some kind of built-in documentation, but the "help" button takes you to a web page (no help if you're not online, which frustrated me in the subway this morning) and on the webpage you have to navigate through a bunch of stuff about the Kindle device before you get to a FAQ page that tells you almost nothing about the app or what the mysterious numbers on the bottom mean.

After some creative Google searching I did find a page on the Amazon site that mentions that the Kindle uses "location numbers", but no explanation of what those numbers are actually supposed to mean.

What a piece of garbage. It wouldn't be so annoying if Sony wasn't dragging its heals about getting me a replacement Sony Reader after I broke mine (which deserves another post all by itself, WTF Sony?? It's been weeks! But I digress). This book I really want to read digitally is only available to me through the Kindle store or the Sony Store, and as Sony formatted books are basically useless without a Sony Reader, the Kindle won out. (Needless to say I would much much much prefer the book in an open, non-DRM'd format (cough ePub cough cough) that I could read on any device and with any program, so I could bring it into a real ebook reader like Stanza. But instead I'm stuck with this crappy software as the only way to read something I ostensibly own and should be able to to what I like with. Gah.)