SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Spangler, aka Brooke, is the author and artist behind the longstanding webcomic A Girl And Her Fed, as well as two spin off novel series related to that comic, and the Deep Witches series. She is also an editor, including the editor for Ursula Vernon aka T Kingfisher.

We're so excited to have the opportunity to ask questions directly of Brooke. Thanks for being here, Brooke!

Members, please leave your book-related questions here and Brooke will pop in throughout the month to answer us.

Cheers!

I haven't started the book yet, but hi Brooke and thanks for joining us! Also thank you for being an excellent editor, I especially enjoy your editing related back and forth with Ursula on Twitter, and of course when you and Shep torment her with capybaras! :)

(I'm always there for more capybaras.)

Hey folks! Thanks for having me. I'll check in on this thread once a day to answer questions and/or engage in sass.

To improve access for readers who want to join this discussion, I've marked down Digital Divide to $1.99 across all platforms for August. A list of places to purchase the book is available here.

I also have a longstanding policy of giving free copies of e-Books to readers who are in dire financial shape. If you have to choose between buying food or reading Digital Divide, you can contact me here. You don't need to describe your situation: life can get hard. All I ask is that you don't abuse this policy if you can afford a $1.99 book, as I need to eat, too. (And as this is the internet, I've also clarified why I have this policy.)

Anna: Our secret (aka: not a secret at all as we're very open about it) to threatening Ursula with livestock is that it's a sales gimmick for her self-pub books. Everybody seems to enjoy watching Ursula wear a wide assortment of baby goats as hats, including the baby goats. But I am a huge fan of capybaras and would totally help Shep raise an entire meditation of giant friendship hamsters for no other reason than WOO GIANT FRIENDSHIP HAMSTERS!!!!!

100% agree on all things capybara, but I will try not to take over this thread with capybabble :)

(I'm backing away slowly now, so I won't alarm any sleeping/bathing capybaras, and to leave room for the actual Q&A.)

So a fling with the Smithsonian Dinosaurs at night. Fantasy or Personal experience?

Hiya KB. I'm about 80% through the book. Where did you get the idea for the over-all concept?

Erin: Neither. It's flavor text.

[deleted user]: tl/dr version is life gets very interesting when you simply hurl technology around without thinking about how it might land, especially if the setting is a police procedural.

As for the too long version...Remember the G.W. Bush Administration? (I did say this would be long.) Around 2006, the U.S. government started opening my international mail. I was furious, mostly because I was a law-abiding woman in her 20s who lived in suburbia. I felt that if the government was going through my mail, then we as a country had absolutely reached rock-bottom and we had no values left.

(I later learned from a friend at the FBI that my mail was flagged by drug-sniffing dogs as the sender was high as a freakin' kite when he mailed things to me. Ah, well.)

At the time, I was looking for a long-term project, and I was heavily into webcomics. I started poking at the idea of what might happen if the ghosts of the Founding Fathers appeared and saw what we had done to their country. I added a layer of unknown technology, as Americans are always slapping on tech before we've asked ourselves the hard questions about how and why it should be applied, and started the A Girl and Her Fed comic.

The general premise has remained the same, but the details of the characters, the setting, and the scope of problems has evolved over time. Rachel Peng was introduced as one of the background characters in the comic. I always knew that one of the cyborgs would be blind, but would be able to substitute visual sight via their cybernetic implant. I also had this unexplained gap between the first and second parts of the comic in which one of the main Big Bads is eliminated. So I took the idea of a former detective who has taught herself to use her cybernetic implant as an assistive device after an accident, and threw her at the villain who created the cyborgs. Shenanigans and cold-blooded murder ensues. [ETA: I'm much better as a writer than an artist, and when the time came to transition from comics to prose, I started doing a happy dance and can't stop, won't stop, words are both friends and food.]

Rachel Peng's story will require a seven-book arc. These are all plotted out and I was running one book per year. I should be done with them by now, but I finished the final draft of Brute Force, the fourth book, on November 5, 2016. A few days later...uh...some...stuff...happened...that made it almost impossible to write political fiction set in Washington, D.C. I kept plugging along on the drafts, but then more...stuff...kept happening...and I'd have to delete an entire week's worth of labor while yelling "WHAT KIND OF DRUNKEN MONKEY IS WRITING THIS TIMELINE?!" The next two books will likely be released Q4 2021 and Q1 2022, and then the series will be wrapped in 2023 as Rachel Peng finally brings down her last big enemy.

Thanks for joining us, Brooke!

May I ask why Digital Divide isn't available on Google Play Books? They're always giving me credit but I rarely find the indie books that I want to read there. The GPB boycott is some kinda open secret that I don't know the history of.

(Not that it matters as I bought Digital Divide from elsewhere)

I see you already approached a big aspect of this, which is privacy. The American "right to privacy" is horrifyingly nonspecific and also full of weird stuff that is very isolated in its usefulness. I think your 4th Amendment considerations are some of the best I've ever seen! How did you do your research for this, and what did you use to extrapolate to cyborg tech?

Ryan: I'll have to look into GPB. As far as I'm aware there's no boycott on the self-pub end, but I miss a lot of discussions within the indie publishing world, and I know from navigating some of Google's other management-side services that there are often barriers to entry.

Allison: The answers to your questions would require an entire book. I'm not going to do justice to them in this condensed format, but I'll try. Forgive me in advance if I don't address them in the full detail they deserve.

Back in 1999 when I was a little baby academic, the then-CEO of Sun Microsystems blew up the tech sector by saying, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."

He said that in 1999. He said that last millennium. And if you read a little further in that article I've linked, which is also from 1999, you bump up against the line:

"Sun Microsystems is a member of the Online Privacy Alliance, an industry coalition that seeks to head off government regulation of online consumer privacy in favor of an industry self-regulation approach.

Two decades and monumental changes in accessibility (mainly due to revolutionary innovations in pocket computers and apps) later, how's that policy working out for us? Let's take a moment to pause and appreciate the wholesale spread of misinformation on everything from politics to pandemics for the clicks and the bucks.

The central issues I introduce about privacy, technology, and the cyborg collective aren't new. They're historically old: if I dug around, I'd probably find a pithy quote from a Gutenberg contemporary about how the invention of the printing press would lead to societal ruin through the degeneration of the written word. Just because these issues are old doesn't make them any less valid. We're constantly becoming increasingly tolerant of invasions into our personal privacy. Imagine telling the 1999 version of you that a company called Google would take photos of your house and make them public for everybody to see! 1999-me would have been horrified. Now I log onto street view when I want to remember how my front garden was doing last October. I don't like it, but it's the current state of the world, so what am I going to do about it?

When faced with this slippery slope of one loss of privacy leading to another, a single person's options are pretty much nothing but adapt or be broken. As the last frontier of uncharted privacy is what we keep in our heads, I decided to play around with what might happen when we lose control of the contents of our own minds. The cyborgs in the OACET collective were initially broken from this process, and are very gradually putting themselves back together to form a functioning hivemind. They're the first of their kind. Nobody is there to help them find the path. They either adapt or they stay broken.

I'm not saying I enjoy or approve of any of this. I'm currently working on the final draft of the fifth Rachel Peng book, and it's quite a bit of self-insert wish-fulfillment in the form of a villain who has decided that everything related to technology and privacy is broken and the entire system needs to be burned to the ground before it gets worse. And it will get worse. We get no substantive help from our own government on privacy issues. Companies have proven themselves willing to define us as a source of revenue rather than...oh, I dunno, let's use the purely hypothetical example of proactively responding to misinformation to reduce the impact of a freakin' global pandemic.

But.

But even with all of the harms caused via technology, the elimination of privacy, and the commodification of personal data, we are experiencing countless wonders. For example, my husband's Master's thesis was to screen Twitter data from Hurricane Irma [ETA: oh crud it was Hurricane IRMA not Irene and I am going to get an EARFUL when he gets home], and apply this to software that local emergency services could use to identify real-time problems in future emergency situations. And I think it was someone on tumblr who noted that if Vesuvius blew during an age of social media, you might not spend your last moments feeling so alone as the ash cloud blew towards you.

We adapt or we break.

<3 Thank you so much

(I still haven't started the book.)

K.B. wrote: "And I think it was someone on tumblr who noted that if Vesuvius blew during an age of social media, you might not spend your last moments feeling so alone as the ash cloud blew towards you."

On the other hand, in the event of a local catastrophy, I could die instantly and blissfully unaware that anything was happening, but instead my phone will go nuts and tell me doom is coming to make me super anxious in my last moments. I know anxiety wasn't invented in the social media age, but sometimes I really do think ignorance would be bliss. Not total ignorance obviously, but a well curated (social) media feed with acceptable levels of doom for me, please!

Thank you Brooke for coming to meet with the community.

I've never seen a drug sniffing dog but I guess it makes sense, they don't have thumbs to shoot up properly.

Anna, what humors me is the individuals who are complete opposites of you. The ones that stand outside and try to take their last selfie. Me and Visuvius. Then they do this fake running pose. Where your anxiety might grant you moments of panic that could lead to safety. Others addiction to social media will most likely be their downfall. Like those Russian that try to pose in dangerous locations and fall.

[deleted user]: tl/dr version is life gets very interesting when you simply hurl technology around without thinking about how it might land, especially if the sett..."

Wow, that's a lot. Yeah stuff kicking off in 2016 would make things difficult. Thanks for the answer. I was the Deleted User. I realized that I had two GR accounts. oops.

I finished the book on Monday and I'll definitely be continuing the series. I really enjoyed it.

Popping in to ask if anyone has any new questions about the book, or editing, or self-pub!

Meredith had a question about how Rachel sees, I think

(I still haven't started the book, I'm sorry! Eye-reading is a struggle right now, I can't see properly with or without my glasses.)

Since you opened the floor up for questions not relating to the book, I do have one! I actually just a few days ago thought about asking about supporting self-pub authors in the Authors' folder. I know that word of mouth and all sorts of promoting helps, but what about ratings on book seller platforms? I see self-pub authors saying that if we want to support them, please *review* the book on the platform where you bought it. I don't review books, so what can I do to help? Does rating on the book seller site help at all, or only if it's 5 stars? My rating on Goodreads is for me, I don't think I'm hurting an author by rating (on GR) below 5 stars (I know some would disagree), but a 5 star (GR) rating is very rare for me, so would I actually be hurting the author by rating 4 or even 3 stars on Amazon, etc.?

And then I guess this is both an editing and self-pub question. I once asked Allison, but she didn't know, so maybe you do! Sometimes when reading a Kindle book I notice an error that's not a typo. If I "report" it through the Kindle typo feature, how does it show up and does that do anything? I actually saw Ursula tweet about how one should never report typos through that feature at all, because it might result in Amazon taking the book down, but I also can't imagine emailing an author something like "Heyyy, so I noticed a continuity error in your book." Should I pretend I'm reading a physical book, in which case the error is there and that's fine, or should I contact the author about it? I'd feel like an enormous dick approaching an author and fansplaining their own book to them!

Brooke,

I feel the majority of questions from self publish authors after finalizing their book is, what to do next. What do you feel is a good timeline in continuing to released written works in order to maintain a reading fellowship?

What advise would you give to self published authors with limited income towards marketing?

Are there some website/reviewers to wait in line for or others to avoid that you had any experience with?

Did you partake in any local author book signings? If so was your overall experience a positive or negative one?

Anna: The thing to remember about all online platforms is that we never get to peek behind the curtain. What we "know" is based on observation, guesswork, and scraps of data gathered from everything from official sales reports to statements by random self-important weirdos (hi!). Our best guess is what Andres describes, where reviews help train the algorithms to recommend a specific book to customers who have made similar purchases. If this is true, a 5* review would help the book by training the algorithm to recognize that this particular author/book/series is recommended by customers with similar interests.

I have often heard, and personally believe, that written reviews accompanied with a 5* rating are most likely to have the greatest weight with the algorithms. I have zero proof of this.

I have MANY THOUGHTS about commodification of reviews and how we're all mere data points in the great big algorithm in the cloud, but as a fellow human being? Review books honestly, using a system that works for you. If that's a 3* for an average book or a 5* for that rare life-changer, then you're being honest with yourself and others.

When shopping for new books, I am much more likely to pick up a new title or series based on word-of-mouth and whether a friend likes it than on a ranked rating system. Part of this is because I've heard that readers who also publish via the same account or via sockpuppets are considered biased and are either gaming the system for their friends or tanking it to hurt their competitors. However, again, zero proof. But this means I'm a rabid reader who rarely rates books or leaves reviews, just in case I accidentally hurt the authors/books I'm trying to lift! I compromise by recommending the ones I really enjoy on social media.

Anna and Andres: This one I can answer! When you flag a book as having errors, the author gets an email which says something along the lines of "Hi! Problems, errors, etc, log in to find out more." When you do, you learn that ITEM X has been marked as erroneous.

There's no vetting process for this. ITEM X might actually be an error, or it might be a problem that is perceived as an error. For example, many of my books were flagged as having multiple typos as I had forgotten to add quotation marks at the ends of some of my paragraphs! This would have certainly been an actual typo...if the same character wasn't continuing to speak, and closing quotes to transition between paragraphs weren't needed. When Ursula said not to do this, it's because of this lack of vetting, and because it's been rumored (yet again, no proof!) that this process can be weaponized to get books removed due to quality control issues. Enough people complaining about errors in a specific title might get that title yanked from sales, or dropped in the ranking algorithms.

But this is also exhausting. Writers are human beings, and if we're self-employed, that means we're hustling nonstop for survival purposes. I'm working from the moment I get up until I crash, and I honestly don't have time to do a lot of extra work. Andres is correct in that "Its a very simple process to make a correction and upload the new manuscript" but (1) It's one additional simple process in a workday that's already the labor equivalent of a high-pitched scream; (2) I'd need to make this change across four different digital platforms, and then address the print version; and (3) A lot of the time, it's a perceived error rather than a factual error. For example, I sometimes get emails saying that I introduced Santino's core color as an ultramarine, but by the end of the book it's described as cobalt blue. The reader making this observation has focused on the colors and skipped over the text of the life-changing event which permanently altered him.

Rather than addressing these issues in real-time, I keep a Word file with notes sent in by readers, and once a year during the January lull I make necessary updates to all books across all platforms. So to build on Andres' wonderful analogy, I have spinach in my teeth for twelve months and by the end of the year I'm the Hag o' the Woods who's woefully in need of a long trip to the dentist, and probably a margarita.

Thanks! I didn't think about the fact that the tiny change in the ebook needs to be uploaded again to all platforms, it's not just the one edit. So if it's not a major thing, probably best not to bother the author with it. And it's good to know that enthusiastic gushing can be enough, because I don't think any review written by me would help anyone sell books.

Andres: My path towards building a self-pub audience is to start a webcomic back in 2008, work exclusively within that community until 2013, and then put out my first book. I came to self-pub with a built-in audience who were willing to take a risk on my long-form prose.

I...well, I really can't recommend this strategy for anyone else. In the first place, it was simply brutal in terms of labor and lack of sustained, dependable income. In the second, time travel.

I have never participated in book signings, [ETA: forgot to address comment about book review sites] nor have I waited in line at a review site. However, I have gone to many conventions. If you get someone talking and they like your words, they're likely to take a chance on your book. If you're an extrovert, or can at least play one for fourteen hours across three days, look into getting a table at a convention. Many of the attendees are there specifically to discover new creative projects.

As for advertising and reasonable timelines, I think this answer is heavily dependent on the author in question and the nature of their audience. These days, I feel that you can't simply "disappear" between books. You have to be active somewhere so people recognize that you are still alive and typing. Social media is a good place for this, as is continuing to develop your own creative projects that aren't specifically books (e.g.: a webcomic). This is because books take a long time to write, and today's readers need a little more immediacy in terms of investment payout. But there's no magic lasso which is guaranteed to rustle up either a large number of instant sales or long-term readers. As John Rogers, the creator of LEVERAGE, likes to say on Twitter, "Put in the work."

Anna: Enthusiastic gushing is the single best way to sell books (I would give someone else's kidney for one of my books to pop as the book of the week on TikTok). I'm willing to bet you've sold more books by doing what you're doing than dozens of 5* textless button clicks.

How did this Q&A come about?

that feels more like a me question, Ryan! I started as a fan of the webcomic and then realized I was her husband's friend. the internet is a strange world. anyway, I now occasionally tease Brooke on Twitter, or ask professional favors like this via her spouse. (the story behind not knowing that someone I spoke/speak to almost daily is married to a webcomic artist I enjoy is convoluted and uninteresting).

please feel free to correct or amend Brooke!

Coolio! Unfortunately I can't think of anything to ask.

I do find it interesting that a focus of the story is techs infringement on citizens privacy and there's been discussion in the thread about how clueless we are as to the effectiveness of Amazon's usage of the data they collect. There's a very USian preoccupation of individuality and privacy linked to fear of the state that I don't know how to appropriately broach.

Coolio! Unfortunately I can't think of anything to ask.

I do find it interesting that a focus of the story is techs infringement on citizens privacy and there's been discussion in the thread about how clueless we are as to the effectiveness of Amazon's usage of the data they collect.

Ryan: Sometimes I gaze off into the middle distance and wonder if Amazon is reporting my sales data accurately. They say they have up-to-date reporting on purchases, but how do we know this is true? Wouldn't it benefit them to lie? And who could catch them in the lie if they did?

Well, since no one else asked, I will, Brooke, can you share with us a little more about how Rachel sees the world?

Last call for questions!

I don’t have a question, actually, but I’m only about 2/3 into the book. I am loving it though. Thanks for writing this, Brooke, and taking us on this journey. I shy away from long series as a general rule because I read rather slowly and my time is limited and there are so many books I want to read. But, that said, this is a series I’m fairly sure I’ll continue with. Thanks for marking down the price, it was definitely the impetus for me giving this book, and you as an unknown author to me, a chance. Not to mention that the premise sounded too cool. I’m glad I did.

I was interested in how Rachel sees things, especially the emotional-state colors. Early on, I thought of them like an overlay, on top of the persons features (like an aura, I suppose). But as the story progressed and we learned more about the range of things Rachel could see and that she is blind, I thought she might only see the colors and not the person's features at all. Or choose to only receive the 'colors' and not bother with the features at all.

I thought this aspect was really interesting and I wound up thinkig a lot about it. It even made me think more about how characters in a different book I read recently "see". In The Lost Steersman there are characters who "see" via sonar, and I started thinking more about how that would work and what it meant for the input they received from objects. (If this is too spoilery for that book, I can hide it)

Thanks, DivaDiane! I'm glad you're enjoying it. That means a lot!

Allison and Meredith: Rachel's "vision" is half science, half handwavium. As it's currently open on my desktop, here are three paragraphs from the next novel (draft form, not edited, here there be typos).

Being blind still had its challenges, but her cybernetic implant helped her navigate most of them. Through the microscopic computer implanted in her brain and the devices hitchhiking along her optic nerves, different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum registered as something similar to sight. There was no single frequency which mimicked the abilities of the human eye. No, that would be too easy. Instead, Rachel’s sight required her to flip back and forth between different frequencies to use the ones best suited for the task at hand. Her go-to frequencies allowed her to navigate the environment with the fewest problems. In those, stationary physical objects were the easiest for her to perceive. Buildings, for example, stood out as clear as day. Moving cars and other objects that kinetic energy stored within them gave off little jittery signals which required her to concentrate to make out their details, but they were still relatively solid.

People? People were complicated. As people were always in motion, they carried with them a rich wealth of energy which nipped away at her version of visual clarity. Faces were almost always moving, constant twitches of muscle which reduced them to featureless blurs with rough facial expressions. But people also carried emotions, and to Rachel’s senses, emotions registered as colors. Running a particular frequency through her implant caused these emotions to bloom into a complicated rainbow, one in which color was a primary indicator of mood. These colors moved and shifted around the body, and Rachel had gotten pretty good at reading their meanings.

Beneath these surface emotions was a singular core color which identified each person better than their faces ever could. Santino’s was a smooth cobalt blue, while Becca’s was a rich jade green. Her own core color was the distinctive blue-green of Southwest turquoise, something she had realized only after she wondered why it kept popping up in surface colors when people mentioned her name.

The science part of this is that human eyesight is a complex process. We've got this big orb of goo which takes light and sends it to another orb of goo, which then translates this light into signals which represent physical objects. We're getting closer to adaptive devices that can achieve this translation without involving the eyes, but in their current state they're extremely rudimentary. See: www.sciencealert.com/a-new-brain-impl...

The handwavy part is that there are empaths in the comic, and the technology used to build the cyborgs' implants was based on supernatural tech. So by turning her implant into an assistive device, Rachel accidentally turned herself into the world's more accurate empath. However, she's self-taught and is learning about this as she goes, so the readers pick up more knowledge about how she develops her skills along with her.

In terms of character and plot, Rachel is also an unreliable narrator so sometimes she goes "A-HAH!" about a new discovery and this epiphany is actually wrong. I try not to use this technique too often, but new technology is full of holes and sometimes we fall into them without meaning to.

Thank you Brooke, for that extra information. I really enjoyed reading about the cyborgs, their abilities and backstory. Adding them into a procedural-thriller really, really worked for me. I enjoyed the book a lot and I'll be continuing the series for sure.