Love in Dark Settings

"Writers of the past had absinthe, whiskey, or heroin. I have Google. I go there intending to stay five minutes and next thing I know, seven hours have passed, I've written 43 words, and all I have to show for it is that I know the titles of every episode of The Nanny and the Professor."

--Michael Chabon, as quoted by Wired Magazine.

Topics in this post: Internet addiction, partial sightedness, publishing print books, publishing e-books, text-to-speech software, audio books, MP3 players, publishing online fiction, memories of 1970s and 1980s music, mania, wordage, writing historical fantasy, slash fiction.

*** 2 March 2008

"You just earned yourself a year's pay," I told my apprentice two nights ago, when he called me up because he was "worried that you've been online for a while now."

For four hours, to be precise, but it would have been a lot longer if he hadn't called me.

I paid for the fruits of my sin the next day; my reading eyesight was completely out. That is to say, I had an acute pain in my right eye the whole day that could only be cured by pain relievers, and when I take pain relievers, I daren't read with my eyes, because the pain relievers mask any signs that I'm further straining my eyes.

So I went to bed. The day was a total wipe-out.

"Oh, dear," I thought to myself last night. "I'm going to have to switch over to Stage Three of my winter schedule: not reading with my eyes except when absolutely necessary."

My Muse was jumping with glee.

"Yes!" he shouted, punching the air. "Yes! No Web surfing! No skimming of badly written stories! No reading of pointless nonfiction! No rewrites that take twenty times longer than the original composition, just because it's more fun to rewrite than to compose!" He promptly made plans to take over my brain.

I woke up this morning and discovered that my eyes felt fine. The temperature outside had risen to sixty degrees.

Well, I began the day by reading an encyclopedia entry I didn't need to read, and then I read a badly written story, and then I started into what would undoubtedly have been another four-hour Web surfing session.

Then, abruptly, I shut down my laptop and started to think.

I've decided that it really shouldn't take a breakdown in my physical functions to make me adopt a schedule that my Muse likes. There are five weeks left before I was going to switch to my spring schedule (at the earliest). Surely I can manage to alter my schedule during that time. I can start by listening to books by text-to-speech rather than reading them with my eyes.

*** 3 March 2008

I wish it were summertime, when reading a novel consisted of taking the book off the shelf and opening it.

At the moment, reading a book means scanning it, OCRing it, saving it to a text file, opening the file in my word processor, checking that it came through okay, copy- and-pasting a chapter into my text-to-speech software, saving the audio output to an MP3 file, checking the file to see that it came through okay, and transferring it onto my MP3 player. Total time before I can hear a single word of the novel: ninety minutes. It would have been longer if I hadn't already scanned the first third of the book.

I'd just as soon skip the MP3 steps, but the headphone cord won't reach from the computer to the loveseat I lie down on while listening to books. I hope I don't hit the wrong button in the middle of listening to the chapter, because my MP3 player won't fast-forward or rewind through individual files.

*** 4 March 2008

Oh, my, MP3 players are fun. I've never before listened to a book while brushing my teeth.

I skipped the Walkman craze, so this is my first experience with a portable audio player. I can do anything while listening to it read aloud a book: fix a meal, eat a meal, wash my hands afterwards, prepare my heating pad and wet washcloth, lie down with the pad and washcloth over my eyes - all without touching the pause button. It's taken all the tedium out of preparing to do the latter. Once the weather gets warm enough, I'll walk around the lake while listening to books, thus combining my reading time with my exercise time.

Meanwhile, I've gotten efficient: I'm planning to record each of the chapters of Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave as audio files, so that I'll have them all loaded onto my player. Each recorded chapter is only half the size of a five-minute song, so there should be plenty of space for them on the player. I'm recording them as separate chapters because of that "no fast-forward or rewind" situation. [Later: On the Web, I learned what the MP3 player's instruction manual didn't reveal, that the player does allow you to fast-forward and rewind through files, albeit slowly. Thank goodness.] I record them to be played back slowly - I'm reasonably sure I have audio processing disorder, so it's hard for me to listen to quick speech - so each chapter takes twenty to thirty minutes to listen to. The recording of each chapter only takes a couple of minutes, though, thanks to my intelligent text-to-speech software. The result is that I can have an audio book of any book in the world, provided that I can obtain an electronic copy of the text or can obtain a printed copy to scan into my computer. (This particular text is scanned by me. I was able to get an electronic copy of the book through Bookshare.org, but it was full of scanning errors, so I made my own scan.)

Almost always, when people learn that I'm partially sighted, they say, "You must listen to a lot of audio books." If they're referring to books with a human narrator, my response is, "No, I don't listen to any." With a very few exceptions (John Cleese's rendition of The Screwtape Letters is one of them), I don't like getting a human narrator between me and my own interpretation of how the dialogue should sound. A computer narrator, with its regular rhythm, works fine for me. I use Microsoft's Mary speech engine, but with the pitch lowered to sound more androgynous. You can hear a sample of what that sounds like (except for the speed, which is faster than I listen to), because I used that same computer narrator for the audio book version of Bard of Pain.

My Muse is around today, but I'm still having problems with broken sleep, so I'm too sleepy to follow his commands. I'm going to take a nap shortly and see whether that helps.

Later:

My apprentice (in a pitiful voice): "Have you removed all your stories from your Website?"

Um . . .

My rationale for removing all the novellas was that I expected to get them published super-quick, so the online versions would have been back online soon. But that isn't happening, so I think I'm going to have to put the HTML versions back online (except for "Right or Right" and the Leather in Lawnville stories, which are currently being edited).

Which means, of course, that I've got to do a lot of layout by my April update of the domain. *Sigh*. Well, at least I'd already transferred those stories over to the new layout, so it's just a matter of fiddling with the layout details and resaving the pages and putting references to them in the relevant indexes. It should only take me . . . oh, hours and hours.

I'll do anything to keep my readers happy.

*** 5 March 2008

My father is of the opinion that my home is a Bermuda Triangle for electronic equipment. It's where electronic devices go to die.

In keeping with that tradition, the MP3 player he gave me has ceased to function. I've sent off an e-mail to the manufacturer's support center.

To work off my frustration, I spent today doing domain layout and editing. "Compassion's Keeper 1: Trial" (in the Life Prison series) is ready to post to the lists as soon as I finish posting Blood Vow. I received two fan mails today for "Blood Vow," hurrah. Obviously, the way to keep getting letters from readers is to keep producing new stories. Too bad that I learned this trick after writing stories became so hard. My Muse is still on vacation.

I also went to the library and pretended that I recognized the names of the rock groups in the CD section.

"Do you remember any of the names you didn't recognize?" my apprentice asked the last time this happened.

"Well," I said, "there was a group there with the catchy name of Boyz II Men."

My apprentice laughed. I take it that isn't a good sign.

I came home with a bunch of CDs of Billboard Top Hits from the 1980s (Blondie et al.), which is a depressing sign of middle age. What's really depressing is that I wasn't buying these songs in the 1980s. I was a fan of WHFS, which was D.C.'s progressive music station in those days, so I was buying albums by the groups I heard there and on trips to England: bands like Violent Femmes, the Waitresses, X, and XTC. (Somehow, progressive rock always seemed to end up in the lower part of the alphabet.) Blondie was beneath WHFS's notice.

Oh, well. Maybe the reason I don't recognize the current bands at the library is that I listen now to indy rock on Pandora.

However, Billboard Top Hits: 1975 is a different story altogether. That's the year that I began listening to the radio. "Sister Golden Hair"! "Island Girl"! "Sky High"! "Jackie Blue"! "Love Will Keep Us Together"! Yes, yes, yes, Captain & Tennille. That CD has all the bad old hits I remember.

Later:

Dusk goofing off instead of doing real work:

* Dipping into the Web. Briefly, but twice.

* Doing light editing on "Compassion's Keeper: Trial," which is sheer fun. For three hours.

* Spending another two and a quarter hours doing domain layout, which is my offline equivalent of Web surfing.

Dusk being rewarded for goofing off:

* A fourteen-hour workday. Usually I'm lucky if I do seven hours of work.

Okay, this just goes to prove something that drives me crazy: I'm extraordinarily productive (hourwise) when I'm in a manic state. But the only way I can get into a manic state is by doing things other than reading fiction - and reading fiction is the main way I persuade my Muse to stay around.

*Sigh*. Somehow I need to find a way to balance manic activities with Muse-pleasing activities.

The lovely people at Lexar sent me tech support right away, so my MP3 player is working again. Tomorrow I'll listen to fiction again. (In fact, this evening I listened to fiction again, nearly filling my daily quota.) But I will also edit and do domain layout tomorrow, and maybe I'll find the right balance there.

I remember the days when it only took a Muse from my visit to make me manic. *Sigh*. Now, that's really nostalgia. For those who haven't already seen them, here are my extraordinary statistics for 1995 (the year when I wrote "Blood Vow").

I began writing fiction in the middle of July of that year. I recorded only my writing hours that year, but since I know how many words the first draft was of the first novel I wrote, a young adult novel (the one that took me six days to write - I said I was manic, right?), I can estimate my wordage each month from that.

Wrote an average of 27 days per month. Five hours of writing per day (estimates include editing time). Approximately 4,600 words per day. 731.5 hours total. Approximately 600,000 words total.

That's enough wordage for five novels in just over five months. Darn it, I miss the 1990s.

*** 8 March 2008

For the sake of my records, and because I needed to update the appropriate notations in my domain update, I made a list of when I originally released my stories in any form whatsoever (e-mail posts, Web pages, etc.) - the original release, not later reprints. I'm lumping together novelettes and novellas, because I can't be bothered to go back and check word counts, but most of them are novellas. These figures don't reflect when I actually wrote the stories, since composition of any given story can occur over a period of months or years. However, in general, the more writing I'm doing, the more stories that I release.

2002-01: 1 short story.
2002-02: 0.
2002-03: 0.
2002-04: 2 novellas and 1 short story.
2002-05: 1 novella and 1 short story.
2002-06: 3 novellas.
2002-07: 0.
2002-08: 1 short story.
2002-09: 2 novellas.
2002-10: 0.
2002-11: 2 novellas.
2002-12: 0.

2003-01: 3 novellas.
2003-02: 1 novella.
2003-03: 0.
2003-04: 1 short story.
2003-05: 1 novella and 1 short story.
2003-06: 0.
2003-07: 1 novella.
2003-08: 1 novella and 1 short story.
2003-09: 0
2003-10: 1 novella.
2003-11: 0.
2003-12: 1 novella.

2004-01: 0.
2004-02: 0.
2004-03: 0.
2004-04: 0.
2004-05: 1 novella.
2004-06: 0.
2004-07: 0.
2004-08: 2 novellas and 2 short stories.
2004-09: 1 novella and 1 short story.
2004-10: 0.
2004-11: 0.
2004-12: 0.

2005-01: 0.
2005-02: 0.
2005-03: 0.
2005-04: 2 short stories.
2005-05: 0.
2005-06: 0.
2005-07: 0.
2005-08: 0.
2005-09: 0.
2005-10: 0.
2005-11: 0.
2005-12: 0.

2006-01: 0.
2006-02: 0.
2006-03: 0.
2006-04: 1 short story.
2006-05: 1 short story.
2006-06: 1 novella and 1 short story.
2006-07: 0.
2006-08: 0.
2006-09: 0.
2006-10: 0.
2006-11: 1 short story.
2006-12: 1 short story.

2007-01: 0.
2007-02: 0.
2007-03: 0.
2007-04: 1 novel.
2007-05: 0.
2007-06: 0.
2007-07: 0.
2007-08: 0.
2007-09: 0.
2007-10: 0.
2007-11: 0.
2007-12: 0.

2008-01: 1 novella.
2008-02: 1 novel.

*Ahem*, yes. Something of a decline there after 2003. I know what happened in 2005 - I got enamored with leather research and e-zine editing and forgot about writing fiction. But last year's figures are, um, unfortunate. I'm glad I'm releasing new works this year.

Later:

Well, this week was basically a wash-out. I got editing done on Compassion's Keeper, but that's basically it. I only wrote fiction for half an hour, and I'm distressed to see that I was online five days this week.

So I've put together a list of acceptable activities for next week, and I'm sticking to that list. We'll see whether that helps. That, plus putting my laptop back in a drawer.

The acceptable reading/writing-related activities consist of reading fiction (through text-to-speech), writing fiction, editing what I've written, and doing a bit of layout. I'm hoping that centering my schedule on fiction-reading will help.

I forgot to say that my enjoyment of the MP3 player is a major triumph, since it will allow me to do fiction-reading under circumstances where I wouldn't have before.

*** 9 March 2008

Finished the domain layout, except for the fiddly bits that I'll do later, and except for redoing the layout of The Leather Research Reference Shelf, which will take forever, because it has so many pages. Also finished editing "Compassion's Keeper 1: Trial"; tomorrow I'll lay it out for the lists, but I need to talk to my apprentice first about a technical matter in the content.

My Muse is still on vacation. I'm beginning to think he's vacationing on Mars. During the past two days, I've managed to produce a grand total of five hundred words.

Could have something to do with the fact that I've spent five-and-a-half hours on Web layout during that time, and only one hour on reading fiction. Obviously I'm going to have to put Web layout on my list of forbidden activities this week; it's far too fun. Tomorrow I play hardball with myself: Nothing's on my schedule except writing fiction, reading fiction, and list layout (the latter of which should only take half an hour). I just hope that my mind isn't frazzled after the dental appointment I have scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Medical appointments do that to me.

(Returns to a debate with my beta reader over whether "tooth-healer" is a hopelessly out-of-date term to use in a turn-of-the-century novel. "But 'dentist' just means 'tooth-guy'!" I cry.)

*** 10 March 2008

I hate it when novellas turn into novels.

So here I am, halfway through what is supposed to be the second novella within "Compassion's Keeper," and I check the word count on what I've written so far (including the first novella), hoping that it isn't as bad as I anticipate it being, and it is: 80,000 words. Almost novel-length.

*Sigh*. So I've split the volume in two, putting the first two novellas into a novel now called "Hell's Messenger," and placing the last four in a novel called "Compassion's Keeper." I'll just have to hope that those last four novellas don't get out of hand. I think that the end of the second novella is the proper place to split the volume in two, though, because the first two novellas cover three consecutive days, and then there's a long time break before the next novella takes place.

But of course this means that there has to be a stronger climax at the end of what was the second novella, except that I've now split it into two novellas (yet more complications) - in other words, there has to be a stronger climax at the end of "Hell's Messenger," which requires me to repace the story events somewhat.

Later:

My Muse finally turned up, handing me 1730 words today. And as a matter of fact, I've written for four days in a row now, even if my wordage has been pathetic for the last two days.

I've decided that I'm going to return to my habit of writing the moment I get up. I'd stopped doing that for a while because my eyes had gotten so bad that they needed to be fed right-this-moment-please when I got up. (My dry eye can be temporarily alleviated by meals.) But the weather has finally turned mild, and my eyes are accordingly in somewhat better than rotten shape, though it will take several months to get them back into really good shape.

Now that the weather is mild, I can walk to the library daily (to pick up CDs; my eyes aren't up to reading print yet). That will give me exercise. And now that I have an MP3 player, I can listen to books while I walk, killing two birds with one stone.

I'm heartened by the discovery that (due to my reordering of the Life Prison volumes), I'm two-thirds of the way through writing a novel, even if I did begin that novel in . . . um, February 2006.

That's not as bad as some of my Three Lands novels, which have been waiting over a decade to be finished. At any rate, three-quarters of what I've written so far in "Hell's Messenger" - sixty thousand words - has been written since last December. So obviously this discipline of daily writing is working, if not flawlessly.

*** 11 March 2008

Last night, after I'd written the above, I realized that, since I had recently finished the second novella within "Hell's Messenger," this was the perfect time to switch over to another manuscript. After all, I've been working on this one for three months now.

Ordinarily I'd work on The Eternal Dungeon, that being the series I'm most eager to complete, but as it happened, I was working on that last July, and so I've recently had betaed no less than three stories in that series. So instead I turned my attention to "Law Links," a prequel to "Blood Vow" in the Three Lands series. That novel is so close to being finished that I really would like to polish it off.

It's not easy plunging straight into writing a novel that one hasn't reread in half a year, but I managed to write a 250-word scene before breakfast, and I'll begin rereading the whole manuscript today.

Other than that and reading more of The Crystal Cave, I need to scan The Hollow Hills so that I can transfer it into MP3 format; plus, I need to do more editing on "Right or Right." And darn it, my e-mail's inbox needs to be tackled, though I may not be able to get to that today.

Later:

I give up. I scarcely recognize a single band name in the CD section of the library, so I simply came home with a bunch of CDs with names that meant nothing to me.

The second song I listened to was one I recognized. It was used in an Oz songvid I've seen. Come to think of it, songvids are probably the other major way I'm exposed to current hits.

However, the song didn't happen to be one I actually liked. In the space of writing this entry (yes, that's three paragraphs), I've sampled the five CDs I brought home and found that none of them are to my taste. Oh, well. I'll try again tomorrow.

Later:

I'm having no luck getting my Muse interested in "Blood Vow," so I'm switching over to trying to persuade him to produce more in Edgeplay in Mayhill, in the Loren's Lashes series. I also need to finish up the rewrite on Water in a Drought in that series, but that will have to wait till I've finished editing "Right or Right." In addition, I need to finish the editing of Rebirth. Editing in response to beta reports is my own private form of self-torture; I put that type of editing off as long as possible. Thankfully, "Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers" and "Blood Vow" (the other two works in the queue for publication) have already been edited, other than last-minute changes when I do layout - I always seem to catch minor problems at that stage.

*** 12 March 2008

I just love beta readers who beta a novel in two days . . . and apologize for the delay.

(I'm almost sorry to break the news to him about how long my average beta reader takes.)

However, what this means is that I went online last night. *Sigh*. This is so typical of me. I have five straight days of fiction-writing - and then I screw everything up with a seven-hour Internet session, just because I'm feeling a bit moody and know that going online will kick me into a manic high. The Internet really is my drug habit.

Later:

I have to leave. Now. I do not know how much more of Obi-Wan's solicitude I can stand.

First, he insisted that I share his room. Then he insisted on seeing me comfortably settled in his bed.

It has been little short of torture.

I once described the typical slash story as being one page of sex preceded by ten pages of characters angsting over whether to have sex together.

Iaga's Obi-Wan/Maul story, Knight Moves (which I quote above), has 34,000 words of characters angsting over whether to have sex together. It has the requisite, "No, I won't fall in love with him," the requisite, "All right, I love him, but he can't possibly love me," and the requisite, "Oh, Force, now I've driven him away, and he'll never love me."

It was a fun read. It reminded me of one of the reasons I started reading slash in the first place: because, no matter how many stylistic problems turn up in the stories (and in any large body of literature, the majority of stories are going have stylistic problems), you can almost invariably count on slash having good angst. In particular, you can almost invariably count on a good hurt/comfort scene.

Have I mentioned that hurt/comfort scenes make me go all warm and squishy inside? Maybe that's obvious from my own writings.

ACTIVITIES SINCE MY LAST WRITING LIFE ENTRY

Fiction written and edited:
--"Hell's Messenger" (Life Prison).
--"Compassion's Keeper" (Life Prison).
--"Law Links" (The Three Lands).

Fiction edited:
--"On Guard" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Mercy's Prisoner 2: Coded Messages" (Life Prison).

Fiction laid out:
--"Blood Vow: The Eyes of the Jackal" (The Three Lands).
--"Blood Vow: The God's Land" (The Three Lands).
--"Hell's Messenger 1: Trial" [formerly "Compassion's Keeper 1: Trial"] (Life Prison).
--Older online fiction being reposted.

Fiction read:
--Mary Stewart: "The Crystal Cave" (by text-to-speech).
--Hank and Nick: "Cutter Falls."
--maculategiraffe: "Comfort."
--heartofslash: "Army of Two."
--Patricia A. McKillip: "Ombria in Shadow" (by text-to-speech).
--Iaga: "Knight Moves."

Research literature read:
--William Holmes McGuffey: "McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader."

Leisure reading:
--"Encyclopedia Britannica: Ethics."
--Tito Colliander: "The Way of the Ascetics."
--Miss Manners: Various columns.

Podcasts listened to:
--"The Book Show: Gay Teen Fiction" (ABC Radio National).
--"The Book Show: Terry Pratchett" (ABC Radio National).
--"Audioscope: Robobraille" (RTE).
--"OpenSource: Fan Fiction" (National Public Radio).