Some economies are generally meritocratic. Other economies are generally clientelist. In a meritocratic economy, you usually make purchases because someone is providing a good or service that a.) you need and b.) is better than (or provided in a way or for a price that’s better than) all competing services and products that meet your need. In a clientelist economy, you usually make purchases because someone is providing a good or service that a.) you need and b.) you have a kin/clan/patronage relationship with the provider. Whether an economy is meritocratic or clientelist is driven by culture.

The paper was a gross over simplification (hey, it was a 101 course) and touted the benefits of meritocratic economies of clientelist ones. If I remember correctly, it basically used the comparison to explain the so-called “triumph of the west.” Ugh.

Anyway, it’s a staggering oversimplification, but I do remember being struck by the experience when I was visiting Taiwan. I wanted to eat a particular kind of noodle, and my friends wouldn’t let me just go get the noodles I wanted. We had to go across town to where my friend’s cousins ran a noodle place. The kin relationship, not the quality of the good, was paramount. This same kind of thinking kicked in when I needed to replace my suitcase. I wanted to go comparison shopping and get the best suitcase I could find at the best price. The pressure to instead buy it from a friend of a friend was intense. It was a cultural shift that took some getting used to.

Obviously, I’m talking about general trends here. There are plenty of people in overall meritocratic economies who buy things based on kin/friend relationships. There are plenty of people in clientelist economies who buy things based on merit.

But that paper was my first real thinking about economics, and oversimplified and ethnocentric as it was, it stuck with me. I always assumed that I lived in a meritocratic economy, and that was that.

So, I’m visiting my mom for mother’s day this past weekend, and we walk past an independent bookstore in her small-town community of intellectuals and artists. There’s a sign in the window (this is not an exact quote — I’m paraphrasing from memory): “Our store is run and staffed by local artists and writers. We are the people who live and work alongside you. We buy your kids’ girl scout cookies and sit beside you in church. We are the people you see every day. Please remember this when you consider shopping at amazon.”

The argument isn’t, “We provide a better good or service at a competitive price.” The argument is, “You know us. You like us. Support us.”

It’s an argument I see more and more. And I see it the most in the arts, particularly in those sectors of the arts where the Internet has made end-products “non-excludable” (to quote Cory Doctorow). The meritocratic argument falls to pieces in the face of an Internet where any book, painting, movie, song or TV show you want can be had for free, or at an insanely-low “loss-leader” price from an outfit like amazon.

These are the things I think about when I consider Tor’s most recent decision to abandon DRM (of which I strongly approve). In the end, .pdf and .epub files of every book Tor publishes will be available all over the Internet for downloading at a single click. Sure, some will be on sketchy, virus-laden sites, but plenty will just be made available, clean and easy.

For free. If folks are going to pay for them, that’s going to be a conscious choice.

I spend a lot of time obsessing over the fate of publishing and the impact of the Internet on *my* little corner of the economy. Seeing that sign got me to pull the camera back a bit. It’s not just publishing. It’s not just the arts. It’s everything. It’s the whole foundation of how we value things, of how and when and where we chose to spend our money.

And the speed of that foundational change is increasing.

They are all amazing writers whose work has fundamentally changed my life.  The Scar, Ender’s Game, and The Dark Knight Returns are some of the most important books in my memory. They’ve shaped me as an artist and a person. They are always at the back of my mind whenever I sit down to write.

But Mieville, Card and Miller are also vocal about their politics and religious views. They aren’t shy about stepping out in public and taking a hard line, conscious of the feathers it will ruffle and not caring (at least on the surface).

In a perfect world, art would be judged strictly on its artistic merits. I firmly believe that’s how it *should* be. But that isn’t how it *is*. The fact remains that the personal views of these three writers have colored my impression of their work. I cannot pick up a work by any of these artists without remembering who they are *as people* and what they believe. This taints my experience, interferes with it. It makes me wish I’d never gotten to know them.

There are so many momentous changes in this country right now. I want to talk about them. Hell, I want to shout about them. The words are burning a hole in my palette.

But I won’t.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I won’t *here*. You can bet your ass my friends will get their ears chewed. And should you catch up to me at a con hotel bar and share a drink with me, I promise you’ll get an earful. But I’m not going to take to social media to express myself on this issue.

It’s tempting. I’ve said many times in the past that I’m no Emily Dickenson. I got into writing because I’m an extrovert. I want to communicate. I want to influence. I want to have impact.

But I keep coming back to an old thought. I’ve said this before in interviews: when you go on a job interview, you generally wear a suit and tie. Why? Not everybody looks their best in that outfit. You do it because, in our cultural mileu, that clothing is invisible. The interviewer sees it, makes a mental note that you are dressed appropriately, and then focuses on what’s important: your qualifications. I want the same for my writing. I don’t ever want people to read me (or not read me) because I am liberal, or conservative, or champion a particular cause.

I want them to read my work because it’s *good* and for no other reason. I want my stories to be judged on their merit, and not based on the personal positions of the man who wrote them. I try really, REALLY hard to do this with Mieville, Card and Miller, with limited success. I don’t want to risk doing that to others who read my own work.

I have a further complication: I am a uniformed representative of the United States government. That means that *everyone,* no matter what their political views, has to feel like they can trust me to represent their interests. I can’t have a conservative feeling I’m not going to dive into the water to save him because of something I said on my blog. I can’t have a liberal be afraid to comply with me when I try to enforce maritime law because of a political tweet. My subordinates and superiors alike have to have full confidence that I will fulfill my duties without prejudice of any kind, at risk of my own life, if necessary. I can still vote (and by god I WILL), but I am subject to limits on free speech imposed by the UCMJ. There’s article 88. There’s the Hatch Act.

I read the blogs of John Scalzi, Chuck Wendig, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow pretty regularly. Those folks have never been shy about expressing their political views, and almost always come across as real reasoned, even when they’re snarky. They’re brilliant. I admire the hell out of them. I pretty much always agree with them.

But I doubt I could do it as well. I think I’d come across cack-handed, sowing more discord than I resolved.

Part of me wonders, am I a coward? Am I abrogating my responsibility to speak out against injustice, to use my one ability (writing, communicating) to improve the world? Maybe I am. I wrestle with that question all the time.

But in the end, the primary purpose of my bully pulpit is to tell stories. Fiction. I don’t want to dilute that experience, especially when I see the John Scalzis of the world doing it far better than I ever could.  I am trained as a lifesaver and a warfighter, and I have stood in the gap twice since I first donned the uniform, dropping my life and heading off to handle a major oil spill and a major hurricane. I understand that’s a very *different* way to help people than wading into a public debate, but it’s still a way, and I comfort myself with the thought of doing that much.

Wanting to be a writer isn’t enough. I have to know the type of writer I want to be. Paul Krugman is a writer. So is Mark Steyn.

But political punditry wasn’t what got me through childhood and adolescence. Religious polemics didn’t show me the person I want to be.

Science fiction and fantasy did that.

You start out on an exercise program. You have an image in your mind of what you want to look like, the reward you want to reap. You step into the gym or onto the track encouraged, hopeful, ready to work. You know it’ll be hard, but so what? You’re committed, you’re locked on, let’s do this.

And you start. And it’s hard, just like you expected.

But here’s what you didn’t expect: You don’t improve. Your muscles don’t grow, the fat doesn’t come off, your blood pressure and resting heart rate don’t change.

How long was this supposed to take, anyway? The latest issue of Muscle & Fitness clearly says that if I follow this workout, I should start seeing results in two weeks! Three weeks roll by, then four. Why am I bothering? Where’s the return on my investment? I am spending time I could be using on writing, or cooking, or cleaning my apartment. I’m too busy to be doing all this work for no results.

And there’s the temptation, the resistance: Quit. Because the Return-on-Investment isn’t worth it. Sure, you were willing to work hard, but you’d be a fool to work hard for NOTHING.

Writing is *exactly* the same way. You pour hours, days, years of your life into project after project. Short stories, novels, networking, keeping up on the news. And what for? All you ever get are rejections. You can’t even swear that the manuscript you just finished is any better than the ones you were turning out three years ago. Yeah, maybe you get a personal rejection or a heartfelt, complimentary email from an agent, but it still equals ZERO, right?

Wrong.

You live in your body every day, you see it in the mirror all the time. It’s hard to see the minute changes that happening at a glacial, but steady pace.

But the people around you are noticing. They’re not going to come running up to you shouting, “Wow!  Are you losing weight!?” Because talking about another person’s body is a social faux pas. And your body may be different. Maybe the magazine workout article said it would take two weeks to see results, but for you it takes six months. You STILL see the results, eventually.

But only if you keep going.

The same is true of your writing. I pushed and sweat for nearly fifteen years without a book deal, then, suddenly, I got one. If you’d asked me a week before it happened, I would have told you that I had no confidence in it ever happening, that I wasn’t sure that my current work was all that much better than my old stuff. I couldn’t see myself getting better.

But as with exercise, I *was* getting better. Those years laid the baseline that took me over the top. The difference between success or failure at your goals is usually the final quarter-second. You are building a fifty mile high mountain under the sea. You won’t see a shred of it until the summit breaks the surface.

But you have to believe it’s there. You have to believe it’s working.

Otherwise you quit, and then you lose.

Nobody stands still if they’re truly trying. Your pace maybe slower than you’d like, but you’re improving.

So shut up and keep going.

To that end: Yesterday, April 21st 2012, marked my first year as a full time writer. To mark the day, I sat down and took a look at my finances.

Once I’d tallied up all my expenses (*everything* from rent, food and utilities to business expenses like going to cons, printing up business cards, maintaining my website) and all of my income (3 sources: Writing, odd jobs and the military reserve) and I came out almost exactly $1,000.00 in the red.

My original plan was to give myself 3–5 years to make this writing thing work financially, and I saved a nest egg/budgeted a lifestyle that would accomodate that time frame. If future years are like this one, I can sustain this lifestyle (full-time writing, part-time military service) indefinitely.

That said, there are some things that make this year unusual:

1.) I was activated for roughly 2 months, and earned a full-time salary as a Coast Guard Lieutenant (jg) during that time.

2.) I got a substantial tax refund this year. That will likely not be happening next year, as I no longer have mortgage interest to write off.

Here’s the other problem: I’ve blogged before about how I live in a lousy apartment in a dangerous neighborhood. I have almost no disposable income. In the one year I’ve lived in Flatbush I’ve been attacked once, threatened three times, been offered crack once, been “bracketed” (two guys working together, trying to hem me into a corner) once, and a lot of other stuff that keeps my situational awareness at Baghdad levels every time I leave my apartment. It’s exhausting to live like that.

While I can *sustain* this lifestyle indefinitely, I don’t *enjoy* living like this. I don’t need to make a lot more money, but I’d like to make enough to afford a small crappy apartment in a neighborhood where I can let my guard down for thirty seconds.

Here’s what I figure I need to do to build my career into something financially self-sustaining in the next year:

- I need to get more foreign rights deals for my books. I can’t control that. I have the best agent in the business for that, and it’ll either happen or it won’t.

- I need the books to earn out/start producing royalties. Again, I am controlling what I can there. I go to cons, I guest blog, say yes to interview invitations, try to be interesting and nice and keep my name in the public eye. I wrote the best books I could and promote them as best I know how.

- With the SHADOW OPS contract drawing to a close (it’s a trilogy. The first two books are done and I’m now writing the 3rd), I need to get another book or series under contract. I currently have five pitches written, which I’m mulling over, getting feedback on. The hope is that my agent will fall in love with one of them and I’ll be able to sell it.

- I need to diversify my writing income streams. And I mean in genre (I’m fairly confident I could get gigs in nonfiction writing on military topics, but that’s not the life I want). I need to find ways to write in the video-game and comic book industries. That’s rougher going. I’ve established some contacts, gone after some opportunities, even came close to a media tie-in gig (but had to walk away due to a contract I simply couldn’t sign). But in the end, there’s nothing to do there but keep trying to meet people, throw out pitches, generate interest in my work and hope something will happen.

All in all? The first year shows promise. But I’ll admit to also being very worried. My biggest fear is to have the writing not pan out, and find myself having to go back on the job market after having been away for many years, unhappy at having failed, and with my life’s savings burnt through. In that case, I think I’d be most likely to just try to get Extended Active Duty (EAD) contracts with the guard. That is, of course, a backup plan. I am hoping like mad it never comes to that. With the DoJ case and publishing buffeted from all sides, the future has never been more uncertain.

But what can I do? Stay hopeful and keep writing. This is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do with my life. I will *not* got to my grave wondering how it would have worked out if only I’d really tried.

Onward.

That’s money. Watching its power at work never ceases to amaze me.

But the one way in which you can really observe the UWS’ wealth is in its residents. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of working people living here. People room together in small apartments. Some folks moved here when the neighborhood was still up-and-coming and either own at cheap mortgages or pay rent-control rates they locked into in years past. Some people get lucky and find “deals” (by New York City standards. By every other place on earth, these “low” rents are INSANELY high).

But remember, I’m a day person now. I am on the street when working people are at the office. When I’m heading to the coffee shop or the library to write, or to the park to run, I’m mostly seeing the *super* rich,  folks so wealthy that their office days are behind them. There are exceptions, of course, but folks on the UWS (at least those rich enough to be day people like me) are amazing looking. They are, almost to an individual, incredibly fit. Their hair is gorgeous, their clothing fashionable. They lounge in the park or browse the shops at a leisurely pace, walking purebred dogs or grabbing a late brunch. They are, quite literally, beautiful people.

I’m realizing their money has purchased them something more than the upscale address. It’s bought this incredible leisure. Because staying in shape, taking the morning to stay on top of fashion, visiting a salon that will work on your hairdo for 2 hours, owning 3 beautiful dogs that you have to walk every day (if you don’t hire a dog-walker) … all those things require another commodity.

Thinking about it, I was briefly swamped by irony. I quit my full time job to free myself to to write. I’ve been kissing the poverty line ever since.

But my poverty and their wealth has purchased the same thing.

Time.

Fantasy Faction did an exclusive reveal of the cover of the British edition of CONTROL POINT the other day. It’s by the digital photography artist Larry Rostant, who also did the amazing cover of Peter V. Brett’s The Desert Spear, which is one of my favorite covers in fantasy. I’m also super fortunate to have Pete’s *awesome* jacket quote on both covers.

It has a totally different feel from the US edition of the book, done by another artist I greatly admire, Michael Komarck. Komarck has been illustrating book covers for many novels and also did a lot of the interior art in my favorite role-playing games (including Shadow Run and D&D).

Here are the two covers, side by side:

US Cover

UK Cover

I have to admit, I feel like I won the lottery with both of these covers. The Komarck image is action packed and exciting. The Rostant image is moody, evocative and iconic.

In both cases, the gear is right, with both artists willing to accept a *lot* of technical detailed guidance from me and able to reproduce it on the cover. I love that Oscar Britton is front and center for both. It’s so amazing to see a person I’ve known for so long on my imagination become flesh and blood through someone else’s art.

What’s really fascinating for me is the notion that different national audiences have different expectations for covers. British audiences may find the US cover too … comic-booky. US audiences may find the British cover too … staid. Or maybe I’m totally off base. The exciting part is this: the different covers remind me that my work is stretching across different cultures, reaching different sets of people with different sets of experiences and expectations, miles apart.

Here’s hoping they love the story as much as I love the artwork.

Um, no. I mean, it is, in part. I do believe that plenty of folks who make a lot of money work “hard” (by which I assume we all agree means “putting in a ton of hours and really sweating over the task at hand.”) But that’s not the point.

I’m in a kind of unique position here in that less than a year ago, I earned a 6-figure salary in a secure government job. I am now a full-time artist (and part time military reservist) with an income hovering just above the poverty line.

And here’s the thing: I work … maybe 3–4 times as “hard” as I did when I was wealthy.

The issue isn’t hard work. The issue is monetization of that work. I won’t even make the moral judgment of society valuing or not valuing the things that I do. I believe that society feels that military service (particularly domestic first responders like the Coast Guard) are incredibly valuable. I also believe that society feels that the arts are valuable (and a few artists are richly rewarded).

Why some work is monetized well and why some isn’t is an *enormously* complicated question, and is something very smart people could take years to document, and then you know other smart people would come along and debunk the old theories and propose new ones.

Well, I’m not all that smart, but I do know this: I spend hours upon hours writing, brainstorming, marketing my writing, interacting with fans, doing signings and on and on and on. The ratio of work to my old office job is at least 3:1. And everyone in the military knows that we work countless unpaid hours, which, were we in equivalent private sector jobs (and even some public sector ones, cops make overtime, as do many civil servants), would have us rich on time-and-a-half hours.

In both cases, I’m glad to do it. I *love* being a writer and I *love* being in the guard. Beyond enough money to feed, clothe and shelter myself (not there yet), this is really all I need.

But when I hear someone in a well-monetized career equate hard-work and riches, it bends me out of shape a little. Because it implies that the firemen, teachers, taxi-drivers, poets, NGO workers, Autism researchers and everyone else who are breaking their backs for survival wages are barely keeping their heads above water simply because they aren’t working hard enough.

And that’s just not the case.

(Keep in mind, I’ve done no actual statistical research here, I am MUSING. I am thinking out loud. If you’ve got hard numbers to prove me wrong, please do so. It would actually make me feel a lot better).

I just got off a mini signing tour (I hit Pandemonium in Boston and Flights of Fantasy in Albany, supposedly with Tobias Buckell, but he was taken ill at the last minute). In Albany, I had the opportunity to chat at length with Joe Berlant, who has (like my dear friend the late George Scithers) led a life in fandom and been the organizing hand behind many cons.

The conversation turned (as it always seems to these days) to the future of publishing. Maria Perry (who owns Flights of Fantasy) talked a bit about how all the major publishing houses were cutting back on sales staff (most importantly the reps who come out to stores like hers to pitch titles) directing folks to websites instead. We wondered if the Peer Comparison Model for executive salaries is part of the problem for major publishing houses (it sure is for many other big businesses), with the people who actually do the work of making/selling the product (sales reps, marketing and publicity staff, editorial and art staff) getting cut in order to afford higher and higher executive compensation in the face of shrinking profits. We talked about amazon’s predatory business style, the rise of ePiracy, the increasing competition for reader time and dollars in more sophisticated video games and better, cheaper and more readily accessible video entertainment.

The light at the end of the tunnel, we hoped, was the voracity of readers. And here’s where I got really sad. We agreed that the key was young people doing what I had done in my youth: discovering science-fiction and fantasy, getting addicted to it, and becoming committed to reading pretty much everything I could get my hands on for the rest of my days. We talked about examples of that and I began to think I  might be witnessing a trend.

Just as there’s a streamlining/centralizing of businesses providing books (only ONE book superstore — B&N, and only SIX major publishing houses, and only really ONE or TWO major places to buy books online), there seems to be a streamlining/centralization of the things people are fans of. I remember being a very broad reader inside genre even in my youth, typically following as many as twenty authors at once. I didn’t care if it was a blockbuster or a midlister. I didn’t wait for Oprah or the Today Show to start buzzing about a book. I explored on my own. It was the *genre* I was committed to, and I couldn’t wait to read every story that existed in it.

So, yeah. Kids are reading. But are they reading *more* than Stephanie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins and now *maybe* George R. R. Martin? Are they using these as jumping points to move on to Steven Gould, or Greg Van Eekhout, or Sam Sykes, or rediscovering Piers Anthony, or Steven R. Donaldson, or Robin Hobb? And sure, they’re eating up the recent blockbuster franchises in the cinema (Jackson’s Lord of the Rings flicks, the Spider Man and Iron Man movies, Frank Miller’s 300), but is that leading them to read paper comics or their digital equivalent, and once they do, are they moving on to the more obscure titles? Garth Ennis? Warren Ellis? Bill Willingham? Mark Smylie?

Maybe someone out there has done a statistical study on this. I’m not sure, and it troubles me.

Here’s something else. I grew up in fandom. I was a fan LONG before I was a pro, and I still go to cons (now for work) with the same wide-eyed wonder I did in my youth. My very first con was Lunacon in Rye, New York, and I remember running around the halls of the Hilton LARPing a game based on Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept series. I just went to that same con again. I had an absolute blast (meeting Howard Tayler and listening to his keynote speech was the highlight of the con), but I had to admit that the event was much smaller and much … well … grayer, than I remembered. Joe (who has got a few gray hairs himself, lord love him) nodded sagely at this point and agreed. You see it at all the major city cons, Philcon, Balticon. He pointed out that Albacon 2011 had been cancelled due to a lack of members.

I remember attending Arisia and Boskone roughly a month apart. Both were in Boston at the exact same hotel. Boskone is a literary con, and it showed the same signs of shrinkage and age that the other city cons I just mentioned did. Arisia was vibrant and bustling by comparison, but it wasn’t literary at all. The primary focus of the con seemed to be anime, sexual kink and the sort of rampant celebration of geekdom that you get at the major “professional cons” (for-profit cons organized by pros, instead of fan run events — I’m referring to SDCC, NYCC and maybe DragonCon, does ICon fall into this category as well?). What little literary programming there was played second fiddle to the other stuff I was seeing there. Here were the young people, the next generation of SF/F fans, and I wasn’t convinced they were reading beyond the blockbusters.

All this worries me. The SF/F genre and community are my lifeblood. They reared me, drove me, sustain me even today. It’s my tribe and my home. And a tribe is only as vibrant as the next generation coming up within it. I understand that I can’t say that SF/F fandom is dying any more than I can say that publishing, bookstores or print media is dying. But I do think it’s *changing* just as those other arenas are.

I just hope that it’s changing for the better, and that there’ll be room for dinosaurs like me in the new order that evolves.

And now, just a few days later, I am stumping for a project.

It’s not exaggeration to say that John Joseph Adams has the strongest editorial reputation in short form SF/F. His anthologies have run the gamut of genre topics from

JJA’s Armored anthology

zombies and vampires to dystopias to interstellar empire.

Now, JJA has put out his latest anthology, ARMORED, a collection of short pieces by the biggest names in the genre all dedicated to one of my favorite topics in science fiction: powered armor. I’ve been a huge fan of powered armor stories from the Iron Man comics to the Space Marines in Warhammer 40,000 to the giant fighting robots in Macross, Mechwarrior and Battletech. To think that there is now an entire anthology dedicated to the topic makes me  … ahem … apoplectic.

I said before that I stump for projects that I wish I had written. Well, I wish like hell I had a story in this anthology. My powered armor story Blood and Horses won the Writers of the Future contest and launched my writing career. It is a topic near and dear to my heart and I am so, so, so looking forward to seeing it resonate with the larger fan community.

In addition to majors like Tanya Huff and Brandon Sanderson, the anthology features a story by my favorite military SF author, Jack Campbell, author of the incredible Lost Fleet series.

I highly recommend you check out ARMORED. You can find out more about it at the anthology’s website here.

Hopefully folks remember that I put on a t-shirt collection giveaway contest a little while back. In it, I showed off my own collection of t-shirts and invited fans to send me their own for a chance to win fabulous prizes. Well, I’m happy to announce that I got some great replies and have picked my winners. They are:

1st Prize: Drew G. for his collection of US Army t-shirts!

Drew’s collection of US Army shirts

Congratulations Drew! You win a signed hard cover Sci­ence Fic­tion Book Club edi­tion of CONTROL POINT. If you already have one, you can claim one of the 2nd prizes listed below.

2nd Prize: Tanya K. for her eclectic collection of SF themed t-shirts (with guns!)

Tanya’s t-shirt collection — Nerdtastic and mildly military

Congratulations Tanya! You win your choice of either a signed copy of the mass market paper­back edi­tion of CONTROL POINT, or a signed copy of the of THE BOOK OF FINAL FLESH (fea­turing my short story SHOUTING DOWN THE MOON), or a signed copy of WRITERS OF THE FUTURE VOLUME XIX (fea­turing my short story BLOOD AND HORSES). 1 prize only.

2nd Prize: Katherin G. for her collection of wolf themed t-shirts!

I think maybe she likes wolves

Congratulations Katherin! You win your choice of either a signed copy of the mass market paper­back edi­tion of CONTROL POINT, or a signed copy of the of THE BOOK OF FINAL FLESH (fea­turing my short story SHOUTING DOWN THE MOON), or a signed copy of WRITERS OF THE FUTURE VOLUME XIX (fea­turing my short story BLOOD AND HORSES). 1 prize only.

Congratulations to all the winners! Please email me at myke (at) mykecole (dot) com with your choice of prize and mailing address and I’ll get them out to you as soon as possible. Thanks to everyone who entered!

I’m always trawling for new contest ideas. If you’ve got a suggestion for a contest I could use as an excuse to give away books or challenge coins, or anything else, please email me and let me know.