obvious noob questions from a writer

[TheodoreBonn]

Stumbled across Orion's Arm a couple days ago and I'm blown away. The depth of this Universe...the quality of the ideas that are here...wow. Just wow.

I'd love to play. But I'm not sure I can.

Real short version: I'm an author. I've got two novels, one completed, one about 75% completed, that I've been seeking a happy home for. One I started in the '90's, the other I started in 2006 and have just recently finished. Neither were written in the OA universe but my primary influences were William Gibson, Vernor Vinge, John Varley, Robert A. Heinlein, and Norman Spinrad...you can probably guess there's more than casual parallels in my works to the OA universe and these novels could easily be adapted...here's a link, for instance, to one that I just recently started putting up on authonomy.com....
http://authonomy.com/books/56169/the-verse/

I went through the OA submissions agreement and I'm a little hazy on the following:

Contributing writers apparently own the copyright to any work they submit within the OA universe...but anything you submit, OA can modify or reprint, or even assign to another writer. How does this work? Also...if I adapt these novels to OA, and they sell, how is the payment divided? Because these books were a labor of love and all...but love also don't pay the rent, if you get my meaning, and considering I've poured a significant fraction of my adult life into writing them I'm more than slightly leery of third-party ownership getting involved.

Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.

[Drashner1]

Hi there - Welcome to OA

Please see my responses to your specific questions below...

Stumbled across Orion's Arm a couple days ago and I'm blown away. The depth of this Universe...the quality of the ideas that are here...wow. Just wow.

I'd love to play. But I'm not sure I can.

First, thank you for the compliment - it's always nice to be appreciated

And we always like to have new friends to play with - as such we're generally pretty motivated to try and find ways to let people play in our sandbox. Please see below...

I went through the OA submissions agreement and I'm a little hazy on the following:

Contributing writers apparently own the copyright to any work they submit within the OA universe...but anything you submit, OA can modify or reprint, or even assign to another writer. How does this work? Also...if I adapt these novels to OA, and they sell, how is the payment divided? Because these books were a labor of love and all...but love also don't pay the rent, if you get my meaning, and considering I've poured a significant fraction of my adult life into writing them I'm more than slightly leery of third-party ownership getting involved.

Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.

Ok - to me it looks like there are two questions here - so will answer as such.

a) The submissions agreement - Basically the submissions agreement is primarily intended to deal with content contributed for the purpose of expanding/adding to the OA setting itself - the Encyclopedia Galactica primarily. Because the project is ever evolving and based on real-world physics, we have found it necessary from time to time to update or even remove EG entries because the group's conception of OA has changed or real world developments have made an entry dated or even flat out wrong/obsolete. When this sort of thing happens our preferred approach is to have the original author update the content - however, they aren't always around anymore or there may be other issues. So the OAUP reserves the right to update/remove content as we see fit within the setting.

Whenever possible we try to make such updates either minimal (changing a term) or additive (adding additional content to what was first written) and to continue to credit the original author while also adding the names of the authors who contributed the additional or updated ideas. You may see articles in the EG that credit an author and then say something like 'with updates by author(s) X, Y, and Z. We also have a fair bit of multi-author content that starts out that way.

Regarding works of fiction - while we do technically reserve the same rights re making updates to keep a story current, we are generally loath to do that. If we must do it, it would be in a situation where a concept that is in a story has been removed from the setting (ex - we used to have something called femtotech) and we cannot reach the author to do an update. In such a case we would aim to make the change as minimal as possible (changing femtotech to godtech say) and the author would continue to be credited as the sole author.

Truthfully, when the submission agreement was first put together, I think we were mainly thinking about EGs and not stories. We may want to go back and re-examine it to see if we want to modify it to better handle (or at least more clearly address) fiction and the concerns that you raise - our goal is to encourage people to write stories set in OA, not discourage them (jots mental note to discuss with the Board).

Note that all of the above applies to stories published on the website and/or in our ezine. We currently have one hardcopy story compilation out there and are working on another. In the case of these works, any edits along the lines of those mentioned above for stories would take place before publication (and preferably would have been worked out with the authors from the get go) and once the book is published, it's published. We've yet to have a need to do a reprint or updated edition, nor do we have plans to do so at this time. So it probably won't be an issue in the foreseeable future.

For stories published independently, we ask that you include an attribution to the Orion's Arm project. We would need to discuss the details of the wording but it would be pretty minimal - something to go in the front or back of the book or the like - essentially saying something like 'this story is set in the Orion's Arm universe (our URL).' If you were doing a non-OA story but wanted to use a bunch of our ideas/content we would ask for a differently worded attribution, basically saying that the story included concepts from the OA universe (our URL) and that they are used with permission. Either way, exact wording is something we could discuss and a contract laying out exactly what we are all agreeing too would be produced and signed by you and an OA representative.

Beyond that, the book/story is yours and any changes that may come to the setting after it is published are something we all just live with until/unless you want to do a reprint and would like to update the story to match the 'current version' of the setting.

b) How payment works - Basically, if you publish a work independently and provide proper attribution, it's your work and you get all the proceeds from sales. All OA gets out if it is the attribution, which we see as free advertising for the project. We'd also appreciate it if you would say nice things about us while promoting the work, but that's totally your choice. In at least one case I was able to throw together a fly design for an author who was doing a book show for our current published work. She paid for printing out of her pocket - it was sort of an ad hoc request.

If you publish a work with OA - on our website/in our ezine/whatever and we then do something (such as including it in a compilation of OA stories or working to publish on your behalf) that gets it out in the world and has it making money, the pay breakdown currently works as follows:

OA gets 50% of all revenues made after expenses.

Author(s) get the remaining 50%

If you are the only author you get half the money made after expenses. If you are one of multiple authors, the 50% author portion would be divided up evenly among all the authors.

Note that I said that this is the current set up - If you were wanting to publish a work with a somewhat different pay breakdown, we're quite willing to listen to your proposal.

Note that OA is a non-profit corporation that is basically 'staffed' by volunteers. We have no paid staff and nobody gets a paycheck (in fact our managing board/senior members (including myself) pay an annual fee to help support the project). The money that OA gets goes to pay expenses (server fees, domain names, etc.) and for prizes for contests and such for the members (we haven't done a lot of those yet and are kind of feeling our way, but hope to do more over time.)

Ok, I think that about covers it. If I've missed something or you have further questions, please don't hesitate to ask for clarification or additional info here.

Thanks!

Todd

[Drashner1]

Just read the blurb on authonomy for your book - it certainly sound interesting and like something from early in the OA timeline

Couple of thoughts here:

a) Could you tell us more about how Authonomy works? I don't think we've heard of it before and it might be something we'd like to play with or encourage our authors to play with.

b) Would you be amenable to providing some feedback on how well the OA project does in terms of encouraging authors to write stories in the setting? Both in terms of the pay structure, but also just as a setting for an author to play in. Many of us have been part of the project for a long time and its often useful to get an outside perspective to point out issues or problems that the 'veterans' don't notice.

All the above is purely voluntary of course. Feel free to decline or even ignore the request if you wish - it won't have any impact on any future conversations or business dealings or whatever Just something I thought to I'd ask.

Thanks!

Todd

[TheodoreBonn]

Just read the blurb on authonomy for your book - it certainly sound interesting and like something from early in the OA timeline

Couple of thoughts here:

a) Could you tell us more about how Authonomy works? I don't think we've heard of it before and it might be something we'd like to play with or encourage our authors to play with.

b) Would you be amenable to providing some feedback on how well the OA project does in terms of encouraging authors to write stories in the setting? Both in terms of the pay structure, but also just as a setting for an author to play in. Many of us have been part of the project for a long time and its often useful to get an outside perspective to point out issues or problems that the 'veterans' don't notice.

All the above is purely voluntary of course. Feel free to decline or even ignore the request if you wish - it won't have any impact on any future conversations or business dealings or whatever Just something I thought to I'd ask.

Thanks!

Todd

Well...okay then. Quite an amazing response, really.

So basically...I can rape and pillage at will, lift all these great ideas, and all OA wants...is an attribution?

Well...yeah. I can do that.

Consider me on board.

In response to your questions,
a) authonomy is sponsored by HarperCollins, a largely Brit-based publishing house...essentially the way it works is, you post your works, and they're reviewed by other authors...usually in exchange for read-swaps and critiques of their works. Through some Byzantine system of vote collection I won't even pretend to understand, once you've gotten your work on enough "bookshelves" you can apparently also get your stuff reviewed by a HarperCollins editor...which allegedly takes at least a year. I wasn't really interested in that aspect - it seems more than a little like a twitter-follower contest, and it definitely seems to reward social activity a lot more than quality, which I really don't have the time or honestly the inclination for - I mostly wanted to talk to other authors and get some feedback on my story. And there do seem to be some pretty good writers in there.

b) As far as providing feedback...yeah, I'd be more than happy to do that. I did a little digging and didn't see the pay scale stuff, but I can tell you that the first thing I saw is that the sheer scale of your Universe presents some interesting problems for a prospective writer. I'm a hard-core geek (or at least, I thought I was), and I've read pretty much everything from Gibson, Sterling, Vernor Vinge, Heinlein, Spinrad, Vonnegut, Varley, all the way back to Asimov. Which means I've got a pretty firm backing on not just modern SF but the precursors to the modern genres...and I was still overwhelmed (and still am, honestly), by the sheer volume of terminology and ideas-atop-other-ideas Babel stack you've got going here. Reading some of the Encyclopedia Galactica, I'm pretty much having to cross-click links incessantly for definitions and chew slowly and digest in increments...and I still get the idea it'll take months to get totally up to speed. Which is cool (and honestly, exciting, it's a treasure trove!)...but it also means the macro scale of the OA Universe seriously needs to be broken down into micro lumps for dispensation.

The thing that I saw, clicking on some of the fiction here, is that the macro scale of the Universe was overwhelming some of the narrative sensibilities of the authors. You click on some of these stories and you get an overpowering fire-hose blast of geekdom square in the face. Which is cool if you speak the lingo...but when even a Gibson/Vinge/Niven guy like me doesn't know what the fark you're talking about, what it means is you're talking some obscure dialect of geek that's completely inaccessible not just to the masses (which I know is not your target audience), but also to the reasonably well-educated...and that is a problem.

The most obvious thing I saw was: this universe could badly use some windows into it. The obvious parallel is Linux...Linux was a shared collaborative geek endeavor that was once largely exclusive to the uber-geeks because it didn't have a user-friendly GUI (which rendered it inoperable to all but the true technophiles)...but add a user-friendly interface and all of a sudden you've got Ubuntu running on hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide. This division of your boards so that the right-brained can talk amongst themselves...seems wise, on your part.

Like I said, OA is an obvious treasure trove. The trick, at least from where I'm sitting, is going to be delving into it...with moderation, keeping the scale micro. And keeping stories character-driven...while keeping in mind what the OA-savvy know...and what the prospective target audience probably doesn't, and making sure there's a idea-dispensation rate that an uninitiated brain can process without tuning out.

Thanks for your thoughtful responses. It's certainly a lot more than a noob expected to get. [/i]

[Drashner1]

Well...okay then. Quite an amazing response, really.

So basically...I can rape and pillage at will, lift all these great ideas, and all OA wants...is an attribution?

Basically yes. Although if you'd like to also become a member of the OA community and a contributing member of the project, we certainly wouldn't complain Did I happen to mention that one of the other hats I wear is Associate Editor of the ezine? And I'm always on the lookout for new stories for an upcoming issue (the next one will be coming out in late Jan or early Feb sometime).

Well...yeah. I can do that.

Consider me on board.

Nifty Welcome aboard!

a) authonomy is sponsored by HarperCollins, a largely Brit-based publishing house...

Thanks for this - perhaps some of our authors might like to play there. Anyone?

b) As far as providing feedback...yeah, I'd be more than happy to do that. I did a little digging and didn't see the pay scale stuff, but I can tell you that the first thing I saw is that the sheer scale of your Universe presents some interesting problems for a prospective writer.
<snip>
Reading some of the Encyclopedia Galactica, I'm pretty much having to cross-click links incessantly for definitions and chew slowly and digest in increments...and I still get the idea it'll take months to get totally up to speed. Which is cool (and honestly, exciting, it's a treasure trove!)...but it also means the macro scale of the OA Universe seriously needs to be broken down into micro lumps for dispensation.

The pay scale stuff is currently located here:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-p...ioncontest

We used a different process for the first book, but decided to move to this one because we think it will let us get more money to our authors faster in the long term.

Re your other points...certainly no argument here Trying to make the setting more generally accessible is something I think we'd all like to do. Both to give you an idea of what we have so far along these lines, and to help you with getting your arms around the setting, here are some resources for new members that we currently have on hand:

Illustrated Backstory:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-backstory

The OA Primer:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-p...primer_toc

OA Canon:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-p...=gen_canon

FAQs:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-faq

Glossary:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4b816f633b041

Note that we are also open to improvements to these resources as well. Also any suggestions you might have for other ways to make the setting more easily dispensed. Once we get the current book project completed, I think we're going to be spending some time on various improvements to the project, including some consolidating and reorganizing of various things.

The thing that I saw, clicking on some of the fiction here, is that the macro scale of the Universe was overwhelming some of the narrative sensibilities of the authors. You click on some of these stories and you get an overpowering fire-hose blast of geekdom square in the face. Which is cool if you speak the lingo...but when even a Gibson/Vinge/Niven guy like me doesn't know what the fark you're talking about, what it means is you're talking some obscure dialect of geek that's completely inaccessible not just to the masses (which I know is not your target audience), but also to the reasonably well-educated...and that is a problem.

This is definitely a challenge for us. There is a strong tendency to want to try to include every setting element in a single story. Which can lead to 'laundry listing' of elements and infodumps. We do have rather a tendency to create neologisms as well

The most obvious thing I saw was: this universe could badly use some windows into it. The obvious parallel is Linux...Linux was a shared collaborative geek endeavor that was once largely exclusive to the uber-geeks because it didn't have a user-friendly GUI (which rendered it inoperable to all but the true technophiles)...but add a user-friendly interface and all of a sudden you've got Ubuntu running on hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide. This division of your boards so that the right-brained can talk amongst themselves...seems wise, on your part.

'Windows'? Could you expand on this a bit, please? Any suggestions on this front would be welcome.

Thanks for your thoughtful responses. It's certainly a lot more than a noob expected to get. [/i]

Thank you for your thoughts and input If you have any other questions or concerns or just thoughts and ideas, please feel free to share them.

Todd

[TheodoreBonn]

Get back to you on some of the other stuff...but I do have a story that came to mind that I wrote about ten years back, "Her Faceless Thousands"...real short version is, it's in a similar vein (though a much different approach and ending) to one of Bowers' stories I saw...the first colony ships likely to be launched from Earth are going to arrive after more advanced ships depart...in my story, it had gotten trendy in the next few decades for third-world nations suffering from rampant overpopulation to "clear" their slums by stuffing their huddled faceless masses into cryogenic freezers, and then, as the resources became available, send them out on really crudely-built colonizer ships to "make a new home in the stars". They'd also managed to con quite a number of celebrities into making a cause celebre out of these starfaring Indian reservations. In my story, one of these crude Arks - I had them as continuous-fusion-vessels - crawled at maybe 0.1c towards the Hyades Cluster (which is the home of a future-universe story arc I've written more than a few stories in) only to discover that the Bussard ramscoops launched by later, more-advanced generations, had blown right on by at very close to the speed of light and built colonies and then advanced civilizations at the worlds these early colonizers were aimed at...centuries before these creeping Arks arrived. Whereupon these uneducated, poorly-equipped Latecomers, as they were known, discovered they had crossed the stars only to be as welcome at their brave new destination worlds as rabbits in Australia.

In "Her Faceless Thousands", a Brazilian colonizer that had cleared 60,000 refugees from the Rio favelas finally arrives at a Hyades Cluster world, only to be met by an advanced patrol vessel...with orders to shoot down any Latecomer that tries to make planetfall. Which is a problem, since the colonizer is pretty much falling apart at the seams after its thousand-year voyage and has exhausted its tritium fuel. Adding a layer of complication, on board the colonizer is Bella Royalle, the most famous media goddess since Marilyn Monroe, who paid for the voyage out of her own pocket and then departed Earth at the height of her fame, becoming enshrined in cultural memory as firmly as John Lennon or Mickey Mouse.

Sigh. Obviously the tech I presented is going to need some updating. (Reading through Encyclopedia Galactica's section on ramscoops, it's obvious this story's science is not exactly cutting-edge, anymore, truthfully, I based it on an article from a real old issue of Amazing Stories, I think, about the various propulsion systems.) But if I can get the story in canon, I think it would probably work for you...I always did think it was one of my better ideas, though it's obvious people here have had the same similar great idea.

[stevebowers]

Whereupon these uneducated, poorly-equipped Latecomers, as they were known, discovered they had crossed the stars only to be as welcome at their brave new destination worlds as rabbits in Australia.

A vaguely similar thing happens in my Starlark blog. The colonists on the Starlark come from the crowded slums of Tyr, in Martian Orbit (these people are themselves refugees from the failed Martian colony). When they arrive at Epsilon Indi they are regarded as inferior beings by the existing colonists, not even particularly useful as slaves to a society that has plenty of robots.

Your story is quite different, however, of course. We can give you advice on how to adapt a story into the scenario if you wish; there are plenty of options open for stories in a wide scenario such as this.

[Drashner1]

Hmm. Off the top of my head, I'd suggest the Ark leaving sometime after the Great Expulsion (lots of ships were leaving about then), although there are certainly opportunities before this as well. At .1c it'd take about 1500 years to reach the Hyades Cluster. Note that in OA the Hyades might not be a healthy place for biological intelligence, depending on when they arrive. The Hyades is the home of the Taurus Nexus:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48e8a9ebbbdb7

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4675eb1f8688f

On a related note, we probably need to take a look at these two entries. They don't seem to quite sync up in various ways and also one mentions neutronium, which we've removed from the setting. It's also not clear how the TN went about making wormholes or who the transapient ruling power(s) was/were (probably because this dates from early in the project when lower S-levels could make wormholes or the like). Removing the neutronium reference or replacing it with magmatter is a quick-n-easy fix, but perhaps a more detailed and extensive update is in order? Theodore, if you'd like to set your story there (And the timeline can accommodate it - with or without minor tweaking), then perhaps you could take part in the update discussions as both a creative input and to familiarize yourself with the setting a bit more? The result could let the story 'meet the setting in the middle' with a part of the setting or the like.

Just a thought,

Todd

[TheodoreBonn]

Hmm. Off the top of my head, I'd suggest the Ark leaving sometime after the Great Expulsion (lots of ships were leaving about then), although there are certainly opportunities before this as well. At .1c it'd take about 1500 years to reach the Hyades Cluster. Note that in OA the Hyades might not be a healthy place for biological intelligence, depending on when they arrive. The Hyades is the home of the Taurus Nexus:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48e8a9ebbbdb7

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4675eb1f8688f

On a related note, we probably need to take a look at these two entries. They don't seem to quite sync up in various ways and also one mentions neutronium, which we've removed from the setting. It's also not clear how the TN went about making wormholes or who the transapient ruling power(s) was/were (probably because this dates from early in the project when lower S-levels could make wormholes or the like). Removing the neutronium reference or replacing it with magmatter is a quick-n-easy fix, but perhaps a more detailed and extensive update is in order? Theodore, if you'd like to set your story there (And the timeline can accommodate it - with or without minor tweaking), then perhaps you could take part in the update discussions as both a creative input and to familiarize yourself with the setting a bit more? The result could let the story 'meet the setting in the middle' with a part of the setting or the like.

Just a thought,

Todd

Yeah...I read that, and have been chewing it over. The thought I had behind choosing the Hyades was that I wanted a star cluster (the Hyades have about 300+ stars, two-thirds of which are packed into a volume about 17 light-years across, and a huge chunk of them are F, G, and K-type stars, which allow for a lot of Sol-like systems) which would in turn allow for a true empire-type setting...at relativistic speeds. At the core of the Hyades, too, there's a quartet of B-type stars and, if memory serves, eight white dwarfs...which would all be attractive to transapient intelligences. The basic structure of my universe was that the higher godlike intelligences pretty much stuck to the Hyades core...leaving the smaller stars to the less-evolved hominids...though these deities have a tendency to dispense god-tech artifacts to their favored lesser followers. (Who then usually proceed to enthusiastically blow each other to smithereens with them.)

Lot of possibilities, there. Not sure if it fits with the canon, though.

Definitely open to suggestions on how to merge my 'verse with OA. I'm not married to the Hyades, just the essential structure - somewhere close enough, cosmically speaking, that humans from the day after tomorrow could realistically get there...a central core where transapient intelligences gather, a volume where worlds are usually less than five light-years apart, and a couple hundred stellar bodies. The idea here is that there's a structure micro enough for people to get their heads around...no more than 4-5 really developed planets, with a bunch of less-developed colony systems around the fringe (some of which are hot messes due to strife between competing factions), and plenty of empty space for pirates and isolationist fringe groups to make themselves scarce in.

One thing I'm really committed to, in my stories - and this goes back to my earlier "windows into the Universe" comment - is that my viewpoint characters need to be from a time close enough to our own that they can serve as the eyes of the reader, like astronaut Crichton from Farscape. Now, IMHO, the situation that allowed Crichton bounce through a wormhole right onto a living ship that just happened to be carrying a bunch of convicts escaping prison was, shall we say, overly contrived...but I still really liked having a guy with a modern perspective sort of Forest Gump'ing his way around in a futureverse.

What occurred to me is, while all this futuretech could be quite a ways in the future, cryogenics probably isn't...and people from just a few decades from now could probably "freeze" themselves and just...wait for this glorious future to come to them...sort of a one-way time machine. (I was actually reading Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Baron, which centered around the political debate surrounding the Foundation for Human Immortality, where basically $150,000 bought you a freeze when you died, and it occurred to me: what kind of future would these frozen Ordinary Joes wake up to?) There were similar themes in Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, but the tech required to "bobble" someone in stasis seems a whole lot further off than cryogenics. Whatever...with cryo, you've got the ability to freeze a cross-section of folks from all across the recognizable near future...and transport them into a much less recognizable far future.

Any suggestions on how to make this work...within the canon?

[Drashner1]

I'm my iPad ATM so limited typing.

I think we could probably make this work, and let you continue playing in the Hyades, while remaining in canon. Biggest challenges I see are:

A) people from something near our time playing a role. OA has cryogenics and other stasis tech being developed, but not until the early 24th century CE. People from that period might be too strange to make proper 'windows', even if presented as slum dwellers living in the most primitive conditions (meaning like average people live now - which ought to blow a fuse or two in your readers mind). Or maybe that could be workable (thoughts?). I wasn't able to find a date for when revivable cryogenics were developed, just vitrification. I'm not one of our history experts, so we need input from them. If they were frozen early enough, they might greatly predate even the first starships and were just loaded on an Ark w/o being woken up. There are some other...stranger options as well.

B) the early AIs in the Taurus Nexus. This is mainly just a matter of scheduling so that the ship doesn't get there until they've vanished. Just need to run the numbers.

C) the limited lifetime of the TN civ that comes after the first one. Still it's at its height for something like a thousand years and there are still people there up to the OA present. Is that enough room to play in?

D) the wormholes left by the first TN civ. I suspect they will be more of a feature than a bug for you, but obviously I don't know all the details of your story ATM.

Overall, and at first blush, I think this can be made to work. Need to get input from other members and buy in from the other senior members, but can float that easily enough.

My 2c worth,

Todd