Touching base in September ... because

 

Spring woods at Manning Floral Reserve

Touching base in September, because it's already the middle of the month, and if I don't do it now, I'll lose contact with this blog again. And it's not so easy to pick up the threads. Not that there's anything in particular to report on a personal level. There's been no breakthrough on the writing front -- certainly no contracts or sales to report. What news there is has been so uniformly sad or lousy that I couldn't bring myself to blog about it. August 17th, the news broke that Back Caviar was dead -- and that was a heartbreaker. Just yesterday, James Earl Jones passed away, though he did live to be 93, where as "Nelly," to use her stable name, was a day short of her 18th birthday, which is young for a horse ... and her foal died a day later. I think she took him with her. Add to this, the last few months have been a blizzard of migraines, with the high point being four in eight days. I've spent a lot of recent time at the end of my rope, which doesn't make good blogging fodder! 

On the other hand, my romance with the Canon EOS continues apace, and I'll illustrate the main body of this post with photos that depict that romance, rather than just babbling about a camera and the places we've visited. In fact, we're going to all the same old places, albeit with a new camera. And even this was fraught with not-so-good luck. We were on our way back from Nangawooka just yesrerday. Bam! One hell of a bang, at highway speeds, and, just like that, we need a new windscreen. It was only this morning when we discovered (phew!) it's covered by our insurance. Praise RAA, may blessings be upon it. Now --

The main subject of this post is a ramble about books, writing, reading, publishing, and selling the dang things. Here we go.

Noisy Miner, Milang

Purple Swamphen, Strathalbyn

...It's worth reporting that I'm actually writing again. I'm at the treatment stage of a new novel that has the potential to either be huge or a trilogy, possibly both; and with about 25,000 words "on paper" at this point, it's safe to actually say that yes, I am writing again. This one is an SF piece called The Gift of Prometheus, and it's as far from anything I've written previously as could be imagined. Which might mean that it'll be the most saleable piece of writing I've produced in thirty years, lol. Sure, I had some genuine early success, circa 1990, but it wasn't sustainable -- not over the lifetime it takes for a writer to be successful unless s/he is going to sell millions of copies, which is highly unlikely. So...

Ripe brambles, Belair NP

...just lately, I've been listening properly to what people are saying about the books they love, and matching those remarks to the books themselves, and to the success of those books. Because the success of a book at market is a geometric measurement of its saleability, yes? Yes. By looking at YouTube, and reading Goodreads, and then actually buying and reading the books (!), I can say, without hesitation or fear of contradiction, that the quality of the writing -- the prose, the structure of the narrative -- has nothing to do with the success of a book these days. Perhaps in the past, it did, not now. Now, it's all about the story, plus how and why the central characters strike a chord with the reader, and how easy the book is to read. Ease of reading is more important, apparently, than good grammar. Characters with whom younger readers identify and empathize are more important than a well-written and well-structured book. O...kay.

McLaren Vale Visitors Centre

Like it or not, this is how the market shakes down in today's reading world. Publishers only exist to sell books, and they have to be able to sell them -- which means a writer has to be able to supply what readers will pay for (and this in a world where you would read forever without buying anything, because billions of words are archived online), which of course kicks back through the whole machinery, the train of reader - bookseller - publisher - agent - writer. It comes down to the inescapable bottom line: it's the reader, the end-user, who is driving the market. Publishers know this. They tell agents what they want. The agents select from a never-ending Niagara Falls of submitted material, choosing just what they think (guess; judge; hope) will woo the reader to spend $12 for this book in a year or two. So --

blossom, Strathalbyn

-- just what is it that this hypothetical end-user wants, and will spend a few bucks on? To answer that, you have to know who the end-user actually is. It might be a middle-aged man who wants a non-stop supply of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler. It could be a septuagenarian lady who wishes there were a hundred novels on Colleen McCullough's backlist. But if you want the real money, today -- the kind of royalties that come from millions of books sold, well...

canola, near Milang and Langehorne

...any one writer can't write to all of those marketplaces. A twenty-something woman who writes romantic fantasy (a cross between Harlequin Romance and Game of Thrones) probably can't write to Tom Clancy's readership with any hope of seeing the real money we all need to pay the rent, and vice versa. The writer is pretty much compelled to pick a marketplace and write to it. There's an old saying: "A writer must write of what she knows." (Yes, I know the original saying was "he," but I'm not a guy, and in today's world, everything is trending female.) So, being a female, I started to look at what women are reading, and which women are reading, and how much they're reading. Hmm. This is where it gets interesting.

full moon, stormy sky, from the backyard

It turns out that the big-success sellers among female readers are aimed at the New Adult market, or the late-late YA range, where kids are so close to grown that it's difficult to draw a line. I chased down three recent, real successes: the Leviathan trilogy (not so much this one, actually) the Hunger Games trilogy (this was big), and the ACOTAR series. A Court of Thorns and Roses ... the one that's being banned left and right in school and college libraries in the US. Yes, that one. 

Now, Leviathan was written by a middle-aged male, and after reading it -- and having various misgivings about the apparent "childishness" with which the mid-teen characters were written, I followed the book to Goodreads and -- whaddaya know? Young(er) readers are saying the same thing. Scott Westerfield is writing for the kids he remembers from 25 years ago, not kids as they are today. I thought Leviathan was really good, but it's the kind of book that a parent buys for their 12 to 15-year-old, likely not the book kids would buy for themselves. This isn't to say it's not a terrific read -- it is. But it would suit readers several years younger than the age of the main character, but 11 or 12 is not the lucrative marketplace where kids have bucks for books and are actively out there, looking for them ... hunting, in fact, for the books they're all talking about at school. But Leviathan is on the right track, centring as it does on a young woman coming of age and making her mark in a man's world -- in fact, in this context, a steampunk First World War scenario. 

Hunger Games, meanwhile, is the kind of novel that gives parents nightmares while mid-teens revel in it. Dark, dismal, cruel, violent, with a thread of awkward, dawning romance, hints of sensuality, though there's nothing overt in the first one, where the central character is 16. The violence and cruelty are deliberate, often heavy-handed. Suzanne Collins was definitely writing for mid-late teens, and knew her target audience. Really, seriously knew them. She was older than this at the time when these books were written -- I believe she'd have been 45-ish, whereas her readers would have been 16-23, either the same age as the female hunter/warrior who is central to the story, or just a little older and easily able to look back and remember being that age. Hunger Games was also filmed as a major movie trilogy, so, whereas Leviathan was on the right track, safe to say, Hunger Games nailed it. For a start, the first book sold 800,000 copies, which is getting up there, although nowhere near what can be, and has been done, by other writers in a similar vein...

Take it to the next level. A Court of Thorns and Roses has several things in common with these other two projects. It's aimed at young and very young readers (Hunger Games scored; Leviathan missed the target by a whisker but hit the parents and grandparents instead, meaning it would be gifted at Christmas and birthdays ... not enough to drive a monstrous bestseller, but not too bad at all). It's dark. It's violent. It's cruel. It's written in a prose style that is so stripped and bare, it's often gauche, clumsy, amateurish (and indeed, in ACOTAR, one finds a blizzard of grammatical errors, wrong-word errors, non sequiturs, incorrect word order ... the kind of mistakes a good editor should pick up and correct. This was not done, and one speculates that the sheer clumsiness of the narrative line is some kind of "youth speak," where this is the language in which one speaks to, and with, readers aged 16 to 23 -- i.e.., the work's target marketplace).  And a young girl is the central character: in ACOTAR, the action pivots on Feyre Archeron, who is about 18 or 19, and who tells the whole saga in first person, past tense.

A pattern emerges. 

Roo, Happy Valley Reservoir

Highly successful fiction these days tends to have female heroes. Young female heroes. Very young. They're hunters and warriors, fighting against the odds. They're mostly impoverished, borderline starving, underdogs, struggling against the current in a male world. It's a dark world, brutal, cruel, dystopian. War is either looming, is happening, or has happened. These teenage girls are without exception strong, athletic, also probably stunningly beautiful into the bargain, though they themselves don't (yet) know it. They're indomitable; they also appear to be indestructible -- which is a direct holdover from generations of movies and television, a trend that began with Leia Organa, continued through Ellen Ripley, Sidney Bristow, Peggy Carter, Rose Tyler, forged ahead through Daenerys Targaryen ... and the pedigree culminates in our own decade with the aforesaid Feyre Archeron and Katniss Everdeen. Young. Stunning. Indomitable. Indestructible. 

There is one more level that this archetype can be taken to, and Sarah J. Maas was the writer with the foresight and the guts to do it. Oh, it's been tried before, but the marketplace had to be juuust right before it was going to work like magic. You take the above formula, as explored by Leviathan (characters written too young, by a Dad figure who slightly misread his readers) and Hunger Games (the narrative explores romance; the writer pulls up short of crossing the line into more adventurous territory that might get the book(s) banned in school and college libraries), and yep -- you add sex. The explicit variety, which has been what teens have always really wanted, irrespective of what parents, teachers and priests have preferred to believe. Hey, I was a teen once myself. It was many, many years ago, and even then, my peer group was smuggling porn to school, albeit books and magazines whereas nowadays it's all about phone-driven images and videos, served by websites that may not even be legally available to younger kids. Legal or not, the stuff is circulating, and over the last decade, kids have lapped it up, with the result that teens are maturing faster and faster -- fast enough, in fact, for parents and teachers to be left behind and choking on their dust. Their kneejerk, in the US, is to ban the books. No surprise there 

(I'm not here to debate the merits of growing up fast, or at what age curious, hormone-driven teens should be legally entitled to access adult entertainment. I'm too old to intuitively know where teenage heads and hearts are today. Neither am I an educator, parent or even grandparent who has contact with them to learn where those hearts and minds are, and what they might want and need. All I would do is offer up an outmoded opinion, sound like the dinosaur I probably am (chuckles), while adding nothing useful to a debate that belongs to other, better suited individuals.)

You take Harlequin romance (the Mills & Boon style of frills and swoons love story). You hang it on an indomitable, indestructible, impoverished, starved, barely educated, stunningly beautiful 18 year old girl with a bow and arrow. Now, you set the story in a dark, dystopian, cold, muddy, male dominated future under the shadow of war. Last step: add sex. Did Sarah J. Maas invent this? No. People have forgotten than Daenerys Targaryen was about 14 when her brother sold her to Kahl Drogo. Sure, she went on to be the Mother of Dragons who burned down empires, but she began right where the others began, with such preplanning that it would be fair to say George R.R. Martin was the first who took fantasy to the next level ... except that A Song of Ice and Fire is not "frills and swoons romance." 

What Ms Maas did was to read her marketplace with genuinely awe-inspiring precision. Your readers are female, 16 and hormonal; they love Game of Thrones, Witcher, Carnival Row, Lord of the Rings; they're steeped in fanfiction, reading millions of words of largely-unedited amateur writing; this is their main source of sexy romance; unpolished prose speaks their language ... either that, or they honestly can't see the grammatical gaffes, the errors in the writer's craft. ZTF Zero Tolerance for Punctuation, yes? Your reader is looking for something that speaks their language, tells a vast, windmilling, fastasy saga about an 18 year old girl who's (!) indomitable, indestructible, impoverished, starved, barely educated, and whose feet are on the path that leads to tearing down empires. 

A pattern emerges. And it sells -- ooooh, a lot of copies. ACOTAR is five books long, and each volume has sold about two million, in 38 languages. Okay, so that's the formula. It's the formula devised from actually listening to readers, respecting what they say, and reading the books with an open mind. Sure, I can see every single grammatical and writing gaffe, and I'm not going to criticize, because Ms Maas is the one who has sold 38,000,000 copies while I'm still wondering if I can score an agent! I have no taste for sour grapes.

But I do wonder how The Gift of Prometheus should be crafted. Oh, yes, I do wonder.

And that's where I am at this point in time! Just finishing the treatment version of a novel, and beginning to wonder -- with a somewhat mercenary train of thought -- how it should be crafted to appeal to a readership that's looking for something "new but the same." One only writes for the sheer fun of it up to a certain point. Past that point, one has bills to pay. One would like to buy a house in the country! This particular one would like a facelift, lol, and there's forty grand before we launch ourselves off the starting blocks! So --

Vale Black Caviar. May you run forever where the stars meet the greenest grass ... thank you for the memories. It was ... glorious. Nothing short of glorious. 

Happy, happy new camera!

I've lost count of the number of years I've salivated over professional digital SLR cameras. So long, in fact, that DSLR technology has passed and gone. The pro cameras these days are mirrorless -- so I managed to miss an entire generation of technology. But --

There's something to be said for patience. The technology came of age, matured, had its bugs shaken out ... and the price came down. I won't say mirrorless cameras are cheap -- they're not, and they're never going to be -- but they're affordable enough, in a sale... 

...and at the same time, the technology matured enough for enormous, gallumphing devices (that's not a word, but it ought to be) of yesteryear to become small enough for a person with extremely small hands, like mine, to be able to manage the camera easily, comfortably. I like it!

It would be pretty fair to say that Dave got sick enough and tired enough of me moaning about the shortcomings of the Lumix FZ-80 to take the initiative: save up for six months or whatever, and get a Canon EOS R50 kit, which included the body plus two lenses. Now, I'm not going to knock the FZ80 too much. It is what it is: a superzoom bridge, with all that means. When you want a 1200mm zoom lens on a semi-affordable (read: under a grand) digital camera that is small enough to use 100% handheld while hiking -- well, when you ask for all that, and the Lumix FZ80is what you get. But. But...but...

The FZ80 has a phenomenal reach, at 1200mm, and it's light enough to carry, and it costs around $900. Those are the high points, and if you want a superzoom bridge at a price you can afford -- take the good stuff and accept the rest with a smile. But there's rather a lot about the camera that could have been better, and I have to wonder why Panasonic pulled up short of building a truly amazing camera. The processor is so slow that it takes a couple of seconds between shots. If you're photographing crashing surf or birds, this can be a serious problem, because the time lag is enormous, when the subject is moving so fast...

...and, sure, you can shoot on burst mode. But with several shots in the buffer, the time lag while the sloooow processor saves multiple images is painful. Your bird has flown away, gone, before you can get another shot. So, don't use burst. I would have to guess that putting a faster processor into the build would have added $200 to the price of the camera, and given the FZ80's other shortcomings, this might have made for marketability concerns. The second issue I have with the FZ80 is that the available, useful ISO is just not enough. So many times, I put the camera away because the day was too dim, or twilight had come on. Above ISO 400 -- forget it. The images are so grainy, you might as well not bother. Yet, at 400, in low light conditions, you end up with huge apertures and impossibly long shutter speeds. 1/8th of a second? That's too long, even for me. I can hold a camera steady at 1/15th of a second, but not 1/8th. Dang.

This shot, above, was done at 1/15th ... nice water blur, at Byards, two days after I got the Canon. And yes, the Lumix would have done this, but you'd have run into the last of the problems I have with is ... and it's not the Lumix's fault!! There's nothing Panasonic can do to change the laws of optics, and physics! To get a 1200mm zoom lens, you need to put a shedload of lenses in front of the virtual film plane, and this gives you a soft image. A very soft image at the best of times. Long shutter speeds and/or big apertures are going to exacerbate the soft-image problem. Result: yes, you'll get a picture, and I've done it many times. You'll also have a lot of work to do in Photoshop, to get a usable image, and sometimes, you just can't get one. Trying to photograph a dawn or sunset, for instance, all those lens elements fill the picture with pink beachballs ... lens flare. It could be the lens coating, but I doubt it; I'm sure it's just a trade-off for the extremely long zoom, and -- nope. Not even Photoshop can get the pink beachballs out of the shot.  So --

--so, why didn't Panasonic provide a useful ISO range? Something to do with the processor again? Some things, they can't change -- like the trade-off of swapping 1200mm of zoom for tack-sharp pictures. But a useful ISO range, and a faster processor, would have made the FZ80 a camera that was actually worth $1,100, whereas at $900, it tends to be a bit of a "one-trick pony." Meaning, its forte is longshots, birding, wildlife at a great distance, and in great lighting conditions, without a weight penalty or price penalty. That's what it was made for, and it does it well Take it off that work, and you might be left moaning and groaning as often as not, because it's a specialist, not an all-rounder -- ah! --

Yes. As I said, Dave was sick and tired enough of listening to the aforesaid moaning and groaning. Result: Canon EOS R50. Small enough to fit my hand perfectly. Powerful enough that ... if there is a weakness to it so far, I haven't found it -- aside from the unavoidable facts of photographic life: when you run  zoom lens to 100% maximum, you will soften the image. That's just how it is, and there's no way around it. Now, the R50 kit has two lenses, both modest zooms: 18-45mm and 55-210mm. Both useful ... and the wide-angle is pretty fabulous for landscapes ... the telephoto is not quite long enough to permit full-pro birding, unless the bird is pretty darned close. Like, sitting on the end of the lens! 

Having said that -- yes, of course I'm using it for birding. At 25MP, there's enough depth in the mages for me to crop deeply inside them, and I judge that, quality wise, I'm within 15% of what a pro would achieve with a looooong lens and good light. And because the mirrorless is a body + lenses, I have the option of adding on a longer lens. Ah! But not a zoom, which will run out to max and soften the images again, right? A fixed lens ... say, 400mm ... and a 2x or 3x teleconverter, which will take me to 800mm or right back to 1200mm, without a whole bunch of lenses in front of the virtual film plane. 

Well, that's for next year, or even the year after. I'm tickled pink to be able to get great landscapes again, and I will grab the FZ80 in its right time and place. When you're wanting to photograph birds, you want the long zoom. When you're looking at capturing landscapes, you want something like the 18-45mm wide-angle. All in all... oh, yes, I'm happy. Tickled pink. Happy new camera!! And thank you, thank you, to my one and only!

Catching up with with autumn -- in July. Ahem.

Is anyone else finding this winter way colder than usual? It's ... interesting. Trying to keep busy, I'm -- at last! -- unpacking the photos I took a couple of months ago (with the Lumix; this predates the Canon by months), and this little photo essay, I'll call "Wine Country Autumn." Poem and images are dated March 9, and this is July 3. Where did time go?!

Wine Country Autumn

Gold lies strewn to the horizon and beyond

As if some careless godling

Turned out the divine pockets and

Let the doubloons tumble where they may.

Fields of gold burn, lustrous in the westering sun

As evening settles ― but not for long.

In just a week or three, the next rapacious wind

Will gambol among these vines and loot the hoard

Till bare wood alone remains,

Enduring winter’s ire with never a hint

Of the transient splendour that was

These fields of gold.

 

...Dave and I were at Myponga the other day, and I field tested the 18-45mm lens on the new Canon. Nice. I have the images in Photoshop at this time. Its *not* that the photos look much (if any) better, just as they come out of the camera, than the shots I was getting from the Lumix, BUT -- when you come to enhance them, you find there is a zillion times more information in the Canon image than there would have been in the same picture off the FZ-80 Superzoom bridge. This means the image can be "driven" far, far further, and at the end of the process, the picture will have the characteristics you expect from a professional camera. Mmmm. It's all about a synergy between the camera and the software, and both elements have to be in place, to get the results. I Have a lot still to learn, but I'm getting there!

Merrie Yuletide ... and remembering Mom

 
A Yuletide Blessing

Long is the night and the stars are bright;
Cold is the wind, and sighing.
Bare are the trees -- there's snow in the breeze;
Silent, the land... but not dying:
Sleep is the cure when one must endure --
Lord, knight, lady and fool:
Here is the night when back comes the light:
Blessed be all, upon Yule.

ooOOooOOooOOooOOooOOoo

Merrie Yuletide to all!

This is such a bittersweet festival to me, because the Winter Solstice also marks the anniversary of Mom's passing. And this year, it's more significant than ever. I can't believe that it's been seven years since she passed over. Seven years. She was born just short of the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere, and she passed on the very eve of Yule, in the south. I told her story here, so in this post I'll just say that I miss her, and always will. Wherever you are, Mom, I hope you're happy.

This year, we decided to celebrate the festival properly, with a small tree and some little gifts, and a midwinter feast. Nothing vastly elaborate, but something to break up the winter, which is turning out to be very cold indeed. Most of the continent is in the grip of an acutely chilly snap -- temperatures well below zero in the early morning, as far north as Queensland --

Not my photo!!! Borrowed from ABC News, to make my point, because (duh) I don't live in Qld. 

 --a nd there's really no answer to that, is there? Well, actually, there are several answers, but most of them involve jokes and the practise of banana bending, and there's not especially appropriate. So.

It's been a very long time indeed since I posted to this blog, or to any of them. Life has been a bit rough, but I'll set down enough here to at least patch the gap a little. March and April saw me insanely busy, reworking my old art blog. I did a stupendous amount of work there, and as a consequence neglected this one. It still isn't 100% complete, so I'm not (yet) going to link to it. Then in May, Dave and I got Covid a second time ... and everything sort of ran off the rails. Long Covid is no joke, and there is no other explanation for what's going on with my health. I'm just exhausted, achy and confoozelated, most of the time. What can you say? I have eight tonnes of projects waiting to be tackled, and I don't have the energy, inspiration or creative zeal to sink my teeth into anything. No gumption. I hope this will change soon, but right now I'd have to say that the last four months or so have zipped past in a blur. It's not just this blog I've neglected ... I haven't posted a line to Facebook in almost as long!

In fact, Facebook is rather a sore spot for me at the moment. The AI driving it rubbed me the wrong way just once too often. I was getting time bans (which I believe they call Facebook Jail) for NOTHING I had done, including a lifetime ban from something they call the "FB Marketplace," for "contravening their community standards" -- which was a bloody good trick, because I have never in my life even SEEN the FB Marketplace, much less clicked a mouse on/in it. Huh. The last time, FB banned me for a day for something I did "yesterday," when I hadn't even looked at a ruddy computer for a week!!! I saw that cheerful little message when I turned on my phone to get the time at 7:05am, one morning in March ... and I walked away from Facebook. Should I go back? Maybe. Will I? Possibly. If I have a good enough reason

Actually, the good enough reason is probably sitting under the Yuletree right now, in wrapping paper. A new camera. Canon. Mirrorless, pro-level, with two lenses -- a digital revamp of the old SLR tech of yesteryear. This time, as a new chapter in my patchwork career as a photographer opens up, I intend to go out there as a landscape photographer, because I'll be able to capture wide shots in the equivalent of 4K resolution. The Lumix superzoom bridge cameras I've been using for the last five or six years are dandy for what they are -- I wanted to go birding at the time, and did -- but they have their limitations. I actually quit photographing landscapes, because the 1200mm zoom generally yields wide shots of such low resolution, in poor-light conditions, the work looks more like finger-painting than photography!

So ... if this pans out (and I'll soon know), I shall be able to go back to signing off and watermarking as "Jen Downes Photography," which is a luxury/arrogance I haven't permitted myself in years now. We'll see. But one thing is for sure: this is going to be fun.

So ... Merrie Yuletide to all!

And for myself, I should be making resolutions for the new year that begins as we pass the midwinter solstice. Get past the Covid blues ... be more creative ... write my own stories, as well as "just" editing for Mike (which is also tremendously gratifying, and a lot of fun) ... try and find some genuine optimism for the future ... get out there with the new Canon mirrorless camera, and capture this state in Ultra HD. 

There. Goals to strive for as we go forward.  

EDIT: Parcels were opened this morning, and here it is:

Suffice to say, I have high hopes. It took about an hour to go through the different system of doing this and that, but the similarities between Canon and Panasonic (ie., EOS and Lumix) outweigh the differences, and I should be quite at home with this little beauty in a few weeks. Sooner, if I can get out and about, and practise. Canon was good enough to supply a battery charger in-the-box ...now,  need a 2TB external hard drive to store a massive amount of data (this camera is shooting 25MP, not the 18MP I've been used to for years now, and the file sizes are consequently much larger). I'll also get a second battery. Dave got me a camera bag that will take both this and the Lumix (yay!), and in all the world, all I need now is a fixed 400mm lens and some teleconverters, and I could even go birding with this! Happy, happy, joy joy! That 400mm lens is another thousand bucks, so ... it'll take a wee while. Doesn't matter. this is going to be fun!