Fábio Fernandes's Blog: I, Reader

Do you know what Quarterreads.com is? The site was created a few months ago as a market for fiction, nonfiction and poetry. It's not exactly a zine, though: it's a very interesting initiative that seems to be in the middle of the way between crowdfunding initiatives and free reading magazines. Or, as the site describes more gracefully: "We like to think of ourselves as something in between the two extremes of tightly curated magazines and free-for-all self-publishing." The bottom line: micropayments for the writers.

Micropayments aren't a new thing at all, but I checked them and I liked what I saw: if you are a reader, you can login without cost and read one story a week for free. Of every other story you'll have only a preview. If you pay $5, though, you'll have the possibility of buying 20 reads (buying, not borrowing - the story you buy will remain open to you in perpetuity, and you'll never have to pay for it again).

Why did I say "possibility"? Because, ate the end of every story, you have the choice of tipping the author: you can tip her/him an additional, $0.25, $0.50, or $0.75, and all of the tips go to the author. (When you pay for a read, you pay $0.25, and of that quarter the author gets 88%, which is a a huge percentage. (It won't get any writer rich - not in the beginning, at least - , but it can't hurt either.

I experimented it as a reader and loved it. Then I submitted a few stories and got accepted.

Wish me luck - and, if you can spare a few cents, go check my stories there . There's unpublished stuff fresh from the word processor - and more to come very soon!

Well.

2014 sucked handsomely, didn't it?

I don't know about you, but for me things went really bad, with one of two huge exceptions.

On the personal side, my wife suffered an accident when traveling in the US last March. She's still there, awaiting for surgery. (Remember I live in São Paulo, Brazil, South America. This is approximately 4712 miles away from where she currently is.) She is fine now, but she's been through a very rough patch, and both of us experienced more distress and depression we thought possible.

On a less personal note, but still very important all the same, this year the writing community lost lots of good people. Some I got to know in person, like Jay Lake, others I only met via email exchange, like Eugie Foster (who was instrumental, in 2008, for me to enter the American market starting to write reviews for The Fix), and other I didn't know at all but admired at a distance, like Graham Joyce. Many others went gently into the good night, all of them too young, with many stories to tell.

I have no complaints regarding health and work: aside a case of the flu, I'm well and good, and started to lose weight again (no red meat, no refined sugar and *almost* no alcohol - doctor's orders, by the way, not a random diet). On the work front, I'm still at the university, and also translating a lot: in 2014 I had four books translated by me published in Brazil (among them China Mieville's The City & The City and Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire). I have several more good titles to translate in 2015 - more Mieville and Ann Leckie and John Scalzi among them.

I also published an academic book in Brazil. It was very satisfying, and I'm planning to write another one in 2015. But first, fiction.

I'm writing more in English now than I ever did - in fact, I haven't been writing in Portuguese for almost a year now. I didn't make an official count yet, but a guesstimate is that I wrote about 30.000 words - not much for a professional writer, but I'm improving slowly and steadily.

I only sold two stories - an SF one to Scigentasy, "The Woman, Long After" (http://www.scigentasy.com/the-woman-l...), and a noir story to Near to the Knuckle, "Nothing Hardcore to Me", using the nom-de-plume of Philip Casanueva (http://www.close2thebone.co.uk/wp/?p=...). I had approximately 70 rejections.

I have no particular New Year resolutions. I wish only good health (for me, my family, everyone - a particular shoutout here to my idol Pat Cadigan), because, as we use say here in Brazil, if your health is good, you can get all you want. Without health, the rest doesn't matter.

Oh, if I could really wish one more thing -

I would like to read more than I did in 2014. I didn't rise up to my Goodreads challenge, so I lowered the bar to 80 instead of 100 books. I want to read more than that, but I also want to write a novel, and I need to keep my expectations realistic after all.

2015, you better be good.

As many of you may know, today Clarion West is beginning its annual Write-a-Thon, an awesome initiative which is at the same time a fundraiser to help supporting our fellow writers at the Clarion West Writers Workshop and a good way to encourage us to keep writing all the way through the workshop - it doesn't matter where we are, what matters is the challenge we set to ourselves and do our best to take it to the end.

If you want to know more about my writing and fundraising goals, just click here - and consider sponsoring me.

Thank you!

For any of my Facebook friends who might be reading this: I deactivated my account there.

No particular reason - and yet, all the reasons in the world.

Too little time to waste discussing with trolls. And I need to write.

You can still find me on Twitter. I always found the discussions there more productive and less stressful.

Cheers!

Hi! How are you? Why, I'm fine, thanks for asking.

I've been absent from this blog (and from my other blog as well). But it's all for a good reason: I am writing. A lot. And daily.

Oh, I knew you would like the news.

I've been planning to write more. In fact, I've been planning to write lots of stuff related on how to write. But I decided, at least for now, it would be better just to write.

I've been writing more and more constantly since January. However, I seem to have set a steady pace for almost a month now. For a week I've been writing a bit more than 500 words a day (with the exception of yesterday - 397 words).

I never felt this good before.

And I'm reading a lot as well.

...The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Loved it! I couldn't help but go right to Amazon.com and buy the Kindle copy of the novel. First, I must say I checked the reviews here, and most of them were very nice! I haven't started it yet, but I strongly suspect I will start reading it tonight or tomorrow.

Meanwhile, almost finishing Chuck Wendig's Blackbirds and D. Biswas very good flash fiction collection, A to Z Stories of Life and Death. And having plenty of ideas to write.

A word to the wise: this blog won't be about writing. (For that, may I recommend you my other blog, Different Frontiers ? I hope you like it.) I want to talk about reading.

2013 wasn't a very good year to me, in many senses. I won't elaborate: let's just say I had too many on my plate and couldn't do many things I wanted (the only honorable exception being my six-week spree in Seattle as a member of the Clarion West Writers Workshop). Chief among them was reading: I'm - just like you - an avid reader. I can read whatever falls into my hands, from an instructions manual to a 20-volume (in physical form, not digital) encyclopaedia, out of boredom, or because there's nothing else to do, or because there's so much else to do but that's what I want to do. As simples as that.

Last year I found about the Goodreads Reading Challenge. I don't know if it existed before - I'm a Goodreads member since 2009, but after 2011 I pretty much stopped logging in - my mind was elsewhere. I came back last year, regretting that I was gone for so long. But the reading never stopped.

My personal annual reading record is around 150 books, a bit more than that. I used to make annual lists since 1984, first on paper, then on digital files. I lost most of this archives, alas. I vaguely recall I might have read around 170 books on a certain year, but I'm not sure. I'm sure I read 150, and I'll settle for that.

When I started making part of the Goodreads Reading Challenge in 2013, I proposed myself a modest but attainable goal: 50 books in a year.

I almost made it.

49 books read cover to cover.

I must have read twice this number, but never finished half of them, and I only put in my lists (as well as the Goodreads Reading Challenge only allows you to) the completed ones. I was humbled. But not frustrated. You see, I had done so much last year I was amazed I had time and the energy to finish 49 books.

This year, I don't know. 2014 is not starting in as fine a shape as I wanted to start, but I'll work with what I have at hand. And I have lots of books with me.

That's why this year I amped up my personal limit to 100 books. And I already started reading two: Transcendental, by James Gunn, and Blackbirds, by Chuck Wendig.

Let's see how many books we can read, shall we?