![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} duskpeterson wroteon April 7th, 2008 at 01:40 pm |
Writing life: Spending time with Parhelion's stories and my Muse
"When the female sea horse spots her mate each morning, they engage in an elaborate greeting ritual, wrapping their tails around a branch of coral or a blade of sea grass and rubbing their snouts together, seemingly quivering with joy over their reunion. Then they entwine tails and glide across the ocean floor. A biologist friend of mine once remarked that she wished her husband would be half that affectionate when he didn't want sex."
--Stephanie Coontz: Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage.
Topics in this post: Internet addiction, self-publishing e-books, writing fantasy, braille, history of transsexuality, history of marriage, text-to-speech, reading historical fiction, Easter, Digital Rights Management, wordage (and how), sneering at bad gay porn stories, admiring good gay porn stories, Earth Hour, history, writing historical fantasy, print-on-demand (Lightning Source and Amazon's CreateSpace), self-publishing print books, April Fool's Day, audio books.
*** 13 March 2008
It's refreshing to have a seven-hour session on the Web that I (1) planned and (2) loathed.
I figured that, if I was going to be click-happy, I might as well be productive and do the grunge work I've been putting off. So I spent two hours searching for Pagan book review sites to submit Bard of Pain to, with due warning to the reviewers that the story was part of an interfaith series. Then I spent an hour and a half struggling to submit "Bard of Pain" to the Amazon Kindle bookstore. (I hate technologically sophisticated submission software. So do my browsers.) Most of the rest of the time - while I was waiting to overcome a glitch at Amazon - was spent compiling a list of links to online DS-only stories (as opposed to DS stories that include bondage and SM), because a couple of the gals over at Romance Divas perked up when they heard that such stories were a specialty of mine; they asked me for recommendations. My list was fairly short, alas; where the heck are the DS-only writers hiding?
For that matter, where are the authors who are writing DS stories without sex scenes? You'd think, from the available stories, that DS folks, unlike most vanilla folks, were humping faster than aphrodisiac-drugged rabbits.
*** 16 March 2008
I suddenly got the impulse to do marketing yesterday. One of my stranger impulses.
On a separate topic: I find it amazing to live in an era when I can get a book into a major bookstore by the simple act of submitting it.
I'm referring to the Amazon Kindle edition of "Bard of Pain," of course. I don't know how many copies the book will sell - Amazon is being very close-mouthed about many Kindles have sold - but I'm struck with wonder at the democratization of publishing that Amazon's Digital Text Publishing program represents.
(Insert grumble about how this democratization comes at a healthy price; Amazon takes two-thirds of the profit of each book sold.)
Meanwhile, I've spent four days on marketing / manic Web surfing, and I'm more than ready to take a break. It's hard to believe that I used to do this sort of thing seven days a week.
*** 18 March 2008
Well, I thought I had a complete beta report of "Right or Right" on my hard drive to rewrite from.
(*Drums fingers.*)
Okay, Blood Vow gets bumped up in the e-book queue. That one only needs proofreading and a cover design before I start the layout. I already have cover art, and I finished the booktrailer a long ways back.
*Grumble*. I hate proofreading (which I do by ear). But hey, this was the week I set aside for grunge work. Proper penance for playing too long on the Internet.
Later:
Holy cow. The MP3 file for the first chapter of "Blood Vow" is an hour and a quarter long. That means the entire novel is . . .
No. Nineteen hours is too long to spend on proofreading. Let me try a faster reading rate. After all, I practically have the novel memorized; it's just a matter of catching typos and any stylistic problems that I haven't caught with my eye.
What this means, though, is that my chapters (at least, in this novel) are three times longer than Mary Stewart's. That's an interesting factoid.
(A pause.)
Fifty minutes for the new file. That means it will take twelve-and-a-half hours to proofread "Blood Vow" (not counting the time it takes me to correct the errors I catch). That's much more reasonable.
*** 19 March 2008
I'm feeling blue again today, but this time I recognize what it is: a post-Internet plunge, when I go from manic to slightly depressed. I'll weather it out.
I'm toying with the idea of publishing an e-book edition of "Noble" in the Princeling series after "Blood Vow." I have beta reports for it, I have a booktrailer, I have cover art. So it shouldn't take much longer than "Blood Vow" will to prepare.
A lot depends on how "Bard of Pain" does at Amazon. But I have to do something besides twiddling my thumbs, because I still can't figure out any way to raise the two hundred dollars for POD printing, other than to sell my writings.
(It's a good thing this isn't twenty years ago. I'm desperate enough to have wondered, in a fleeting manner, how much I could have sold my body for back then.)
Later:
Finally put together the accessible edition of "Bard of Pain." I'd been putting it off because, invariably, when I submit a book to Bookshare.org, it finds something wrong with it. First it didn't like my dashes, and then it didn't like me having more than one word in my file name, and then it insisted that my files must have page breaks (while my OCR software was meanwhile insisting that it would garble any text except the ones I translate into plain text . . . which doesn't have page breaks). I'm crossing my fingers that this submission makes it through.
*** 20 March 2008
I proofread the first scene of "Blood Vow" and turned up very few problems. This should be an easy proofing.
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of getting as many of my friendship fiction stories as possible into e-book format. But in the meantime, I really need to advertise for beta readers, because my lack of beta readers is currently the biggest stumbling block on my road to publication.
Later:
My round-up of Internet links.
Vampires of the Internet - Robin Hobb on the evils of blogging. She just loves to make new enemies, doesn't she? But it's a funnier piece than her rant against fan fiction.
In the category of "Is nothing sacred from commercialism?": What Rocky Horror has become in the hands of professionals. Sample quote: "Prop bags will be sold for $1 each."
Repeating news from my Mentoring Life entry: Jack Fritscher has posted online the galleys of his history of Drummer, the classic leather magazine. Mr. Fritscher was editor-in-chief of the magazine in the midst of its golden period, in the late 1970s, so the contents of this book ought to be a treat.
And finally: Everyone is doing Flickr these days.
Later:
I finished reading Joanne Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. An interesting book - a little dry in places, and clearly written from a particular perspective (pro-transsexuality), but not strident in any way. (Books on the history of gender or sexuality tend to be stridently written.) It seemed to present anti-transsexuality perspectives in a fair-minded fashion, and it gave me a good sense of the subject it was addressing. This is the sort of book that academia should produce more often.
I've switched now to reading Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, which, judging from the snippet I've read so far, looks as though it will be interesting in subject matter, though I can't say yet how good a treatment the subject will receive.
Meanwhile, my Internet addiction: I've switched back to the idea of disconnecting my mouse when I go online to check mail. It seems to work. I find my laptop's touchpad so awkward to use that I'm not tempted to stay online any longer than it takes to check my mail and do any absolutely necessary (but simple) Web work. For the last couple of days, I haven't spent more than twenty minutes online daily.
I'll save my mouse - and any consequent tricky Web work - for when I post my blog entries. Right now I'm telling myself that I should get "Blood Vow" ready for publication before I do that. But I'm going have to spend more than an hour a day on proofreading if I'm to keep that promise.
(A pause to curse Microsoft's speech synthesizer, which - I learned tonight after recording five chapters - doesn't know how to pronounce the name of one of my main characters. Fortunately, my text-to-speech software, TextAloud, is set up so that I can change pronunciations, but this means I'll have to re-record those five chapters.)
At any rate, I seem to have gotten myself out of my post-Internet doldrums; my schedule is beginning to be closer to ideal than it's been since October 11, when I began my Internet jag.
*** 21 March 2008
Marriage, a History is full of interesting anecdotes, such as this one:
"In the eleventh century, when the Chinese state began to determine entry into the governing bureaucracy through rigorous examinations, a lowborn man with exceptional scholarly talents might have a wife bestowed on him by a noble family that hoped the son-in-law had enough talent to rise through the ranks and keep the family in the governing circles."
Look! He has a pocket protector! Let's marry our daughter to him!
The author's thesis is that, while marriage has been entered into for a variety of reasons, one of the most common reasons - and one that can't be replaced by other arrangements - has been to acquire in-laws.
I must confess that this idea leaves me cold, and not because my own extended family lives on the West Coast, so that I grew up barely knowing my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. What leaves me feeling chilled is the author's description of the cold-blooded manner in which ancient and medieval parents traded their sons and daughters for the parents' own economic security.
Paradoxically, though, this passage (about the late medieval period) cheered me:
"For the growing numbers of artisans, craftsmen, merchants, and small urban manufacturers, as well as prosperous country yeomen, the everyday work unit became the married couple household, working alone or with servants or apprentices. A harmonious, well-functioning marriage was a business necessity as well as a personal pleasure."
I like the idea of all those medieval women saying about their prospective husbands, "Hmm, would he make a good business partner?"
I thought this passage also offered a pleasant vision of the world:
"A striking feature of village life in northern Europe from the Middle Ages to the early modern period was the frequency with which people shared labor and exchanged services with neighbors rather than relatives. Several households in a community would get together to build a water mill, put up a fence, buy a breeding bull, share a plow, or set up a blacksmith forge. In towns, too, people relied on neighbors for aid. To a greater extent than in most of the world, day-to-day interactions were likely to be with neighbors, servants, or community institutions rather than with kin. Demographer Ron Lesthaeghe argues that long before the development of the welfare state, families in northwestern Europe relied more on local poor relief committees and fraternal organizations such as guilds or corporations than on extended kin groups. Friends, servants, neighbors, and patrons were expected to offer one another the kind of support that in other times and places has been limited to blood relatives."
*** 22 March 2008
Parhelion's method of announcing site updates seems to be to sneak in at three a.m., upload the new stories, and then quickly tiptoe out in hopes that nobody has noticed.
So for those of you who missed the fact, Parhelion's site has been updated with new fiction.
Opening lines from one of the new stories, "Partisan Politics" (in the original fiction section):
"Looking back, I give myself some credit. When I saw Russ was naked I didn't even break my stride."
If you haven't encountered Parhelion's work, and if you like gay historical love stories (1850s to 1950s): run, do not walk, to that site. Someday, when we're all footnotes, I hope that this will be mine: ". . . and among Parhelion's beta readers was someone named Dusk Peterson."
Later:
My weekly totals are awful. Absolutely, totally wretched. I didn't even need to use a calculator to figure out the hours for writing/editing/reading fiction; you don't need a calculator to add up 0 + 3.25 + 1.5.
I've put my laptop back in the drawer.
It's frustrating, because I've finally figured out how I'm going to handle the 2008 publication year: I'm going to put as much as possible into e-book form.
I know that what has made a difference in my willingness to continue publishing e-books is my ability to have my e-books listed at Amazon. I still don't know whether I'll make any money there (Amazon has yet to add the categories and tags that would allow Amazon visitors to find my book; I've finally posted an enquiry at the support forum). But I think - from some slight evidence - that my book's presence there makes a difference in how some readers perceive my writings.
Odd, that. It's the same story, whether sold at Amazon or at Lulu or simply posted at my site. But I noticed this phenomenon with Manna Francis's work: She has a series of incredibly compelling stories available free on the Web, and she probably has more fans than any other original slash author. She certainly has more in-depth analysis done of her works than any other original slash author. (When you've got people heatedly debating on your blog whether totalitarianism is a suitable system of government, and whether the psychological profession is a scam, with the writings of medieval philosophers brought in to bolster arguments, you know you've got it made.)
And yet the professional reviewers have never paid her stories any mind. Yet the moment that she gets published in print, the exact same stories suddenly become worthy of reviewers' attention.
Oy vey. It's as though, in the eyes of reviewers, only a demand for money gives a story literary worth.
*** 23 March 2008
I'm having to go to bed with work unfinished today, not only because it's two a.m. (that's what happens on the day after an Internet jag keeps me awake till four a.m.), but also because my eyes are still sulking.
Of course, that didn't stop me from reading the second half of Parhelion's "Dead of Winter" in a single setting. Darn it, I should know better than to read "just a little bit" of Parhelion's fiction before bed.
*** 24 March 2008
"I hope you're having a good Easter," my apprentice said yesterday.
"My Easter celebrations consist of me boiling eggs," I replied.
This is the only time of year when I allow myself to eat eggs. I've had four egg-salad sandwiches since yesterday. I bought cage-free organic eggs this year - ones that flaunt visually how "natural" they are - which means that, as I put it to Doug, "The eggs came pre-colored." We both admired the brown coloring that Mother Nature supplied.
Today, while kids were hunting Easter eggs on the White House lawn, I hunted Easter eggs on the refrigerator door. Doug had hidden a bunch of magnetic letters on various spots of our cluttered refrigerator door, and I had to go find them.
*** 26 March 2008
Darn it, I'm going to have to take a break from Parhelion's stories, or I won't get any work done this week.
Last night, at three a.m., I told myself I'd read "just a little bit" of "Partisan Politics." I ended up reading the entire story.
Today, on the verge of starting the day's work, I told myself I'd read "just a little bit" of "Dry Bones." I ended up reading the entire story.
I'm going to switch temporarily over to authors who don't have such skill with cliffhanger endings to scenes.
I spent two hours today scanning the first half of Mary Stewart's The Hollow Hills - or rather, forty minutes scanning and an hour and a quarter tussling the text into a shape where it would be intelligible when I translated it into text-to-speech. Putting it into shape for reading by eye would have taken much longer.
This is the reason I usually confine myself to online fiction during the times of the year when I can't read with my eyes. I really, really wish that the major book publishers would wise up and sell e-books in cheap, easily accessible, DRM-free formats, because I'm tired of this type of chore; I'd willingly pay the major publishers to do it for me, if they sold their e-books in a reasonable manner. But I suppose I shouldn't complain, because most people who scan books would be green with envy to know that I have a scanner that can scan a 500-page book in less than an hour and a half.
Meanwhile, I give all praise to Torquere Press, which not only sells Parhelion's "Dead of Winter" in easily accessible HTML (among other formats), but also sells it at $2.50 for 20,000 words - that's $0.000125 per word. Their e-book prices are lower than any other press I know of that publishes gay romance. If all publishers were like Torquere, I'd be doing a lot of e-book buying.
*** 27 March 2008
I've read four more stories by Parhelion. This wasn't (simply) due to lack of will power; it's because my Muse was showing signs of perking up. Under such circumstances, I'll feed him any tidbits he wants.
Turned out I fed him the right tidbits; I ended up writing 2500 words today. I'd hoped that my Muse would show interest in "Law Links" in the Three Lands series, which is close to being finished, but instead he had me work on "Empty Dagger Hand" in the same series. Not much of a surprise that he would prefer that novel; that's the one in which the Lieutenant makes his first appearance.
My Muse completed a scene nicely, which is good, because it was the climactic scene of the novel. Doesn't mean I'm even close to finishing the novel, of course; I'm writing the scenes out of order.
Meanwhile, I get to continue to enjoy Parhelion's wonderful prose, which includes sentences like this (from the story "Nice"):
"R. J. ran to strong notions about confidentiality, an excellent trait in a research laboratory technician but a bad idea for a young man who'd just climbed naked into his employer's bed."
*** 28 March 2008
My Muse loves Parhelion. He has given me 3400 words so far today.
I'm almost finished reading Parhelion's original fiction (see the linked page for story blurbs), so I can offer a list here of my favorite stories - except for the historical fantasy stories, which I haven't reread yet. Compiling such as list is like being a professor trying to figure out the grading curve for a classroom of straight-A students.
1) Hurrah for Hollywood series. Agents, choreographers, stars, songwriters, and soldiers, 1920s to 1940s.
2) Verdict. Court officials, 1938.
3) Masks. Comic book store workers, modern day.
4) Pulp. Comic book publishers, 1931.
5) Dry Bones. Cowboys, 1896.
Usually what makes me like a story most is the characters or plot or theme, but Parhelion - who is excellent at all three - has a tendency to heighten the competition by providing fabulous period detail. "Pulp," for example, has characters that I don't go all gaga for, but, my god, look at this passage:
* * *
He could still remember the crowd in that picture house in Paris, the one that had been converted from an ancient theatre burlesque. After he had settled back in the tiny wooden seat, his shoulder pressed tight against Kevin's, he had passed the time before the four-reeler examining the naked Greek gods decorating the proscenium arch. It had struck him as the essence of wartime France that their chipped paint plaster was yellowed by the same cigarette smoke that was lazily curling up into the projector's beam of flickering light. You weren't supposed to smoke in there, but the place had reeked of gitanes and gauloises, unwashed cotton, and the garlic and sour bread smell of a crowd that wasn't eating enough and was using too many cheap spices to try and compensate.
After the rooster on film had silently crowed, he and Kevin had spent the reels that followed swapping rude remarks back and forth about the valiant Napoleonic French troops. . . .
* * *
I don't know whether anyone besides a fellow historical fiction writer has any idea how much research must have gone into writing those five sentences. Whenever I begin to think that I know something about writing historical tales, I look at Parhelion's stories, sigh, and return to learning the trade.
Meanwhile, I assigned my apprentice the task of tracking down online prisonfic that I might want to recommend at True Tales this year. He reports that, out of the sixty prison stories at Men on the Net, he only found four that were worth pointing me to. Poor guy, having to wade through all those badly written stories. I know from experience what it's like, because I went through the same thing last year with Nifty's military section, when I was preparing the military issues of True Tales. Out of the two stories there that I liked, one (Ruthless's Death and the Veteran) was from an author I already knew and admired, and the other (George Gardner's Poseidon's Fist) I had discovered during an earlier foray into that section for reading pleasure.
Which isn't to say that there weren't a handful of other good stories in that section; it's just that the other good stories weren't of the type I like. They were of the "wham, bam, thank you, sir" genre, and an author really needs to work hard to interest me in a passing encounter.
It can be done. I write in that genre myself. But my characters always learn something important about themselves as a result of the encounters; the encounters have themantic implications, as well as having impacts on the mind and heart. They aren't just moving body parts.
I know that there are other writers at Nifty who share this taste of mine for stories with wider vision - a fact that I keep trying to hammer into the heads of slashers who make dismissive remarks about Nifty - but darn it, their stories can be hard to locate. I wish that the world of online erotic fiction for gay male readers had as sophisticated a system of recommendations as the slash world does.
*** 29 March 2008
I just finished reading Parhelion's "Peridot," which features that wonderful family, the Jowetts.
"A typical Jowlett would rather scheme than argue, argue than fist-fight a sibling inside with the curtains open, fist-fight than fix a car previously disassembled on the front lawn, and fix that car than mow said lawn to the exacting middle-class standards of the day. Jowletts also liked floppy dogs and cowboy music, the sort with abundant yodeling, played loud. Three minutes after it appeared, they would discover rock and roll."
I also enjoy this story because of its courageous ending. I like how, just when I think I've discovered Parhelion's pattern, I get thrown a screwball.
Yesterday, I got 4800 words of fiction writing done. Woohoo! In just two days, I've managed to complete one quarter of my monthly quota. (Which is good, because in the first twenty-six days of March, I only completed twelve percent of my monthly quota.)
The sweetest part about this is knowing that, if I hadn't gotten myself offline on Monday, I'd be channelling all this creative energy into doing something really productive, like searching for search engines that search search engines. Virtue receives its due reward.
Later:
Doug and I celebrated Earth Hour tonight by sitting in the dark for an hour, discussing our interests. It was a case of "You say to-mah-toes, I say to-may-toes," with him explaining why he wanted to devote all his time to history lectures (and that he wasn't that keen on historical fiction), and me explaining why I wanted to devote all my time to writing historical fantasy (and that wasn't that keen on history lectures). We agreed that the harmony of the spheres is terrific, and that it's much easier to master knowledge of the classical era than of modern history, and he enlightened me to the fact that the Battle of Waterloo did not, as I'd assumed, take place on the water.
At least I've read contemporary newspaper accounts of Peterloo. So there.
*** 30 March 2008
And today's total wordage is . . . nine thousand.
So much for mid-life declines in creativity. I'm stunned. I don't know whether I've even written nine thousand words in one day before. Certainly I haven't since I started keeping wordage totals in 2004, and I couldn't possibly have done it back in my adolescent years, when I handwrote my manuscripts. So the only possible time period when I could have reached that sort of daily wordage was in 1995 and 1996, and I wasn't keeping word counts back then. (I was typing in WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS; I'm not sure whether it had a word count feature.) I was keeping hourly counts, but they combined my writing and rewriting time, so that doesn't help.
Today's writing time, incidentally, was five hours and fifteen minutes. I spent one hour and forty minutes doing a single rewrite of what I had written.
My Muse woke up this morning with a scene that I hadn't expected I'd be able to write, because I can't usually handle major changes to stories, much less major changes after I've plotted most of the story in my head and have all the foreshadows tying in with one another in a neat little web. But my beta reader for "On Guard" in the Eternal Dungeon series insisted - and I gloomily agreed - that I needed something to keep two very long lecture scenes from dragging down the plot. She suggested that I add another slice-of-life scene, providing glimpses of everyday life in the dungeon. My Muse apparently agreed, because that's what he offered me this morning, complete with three important foreshadows that I hadn't yet found room for in the story.
Then it was back to "Empty Dagger Hand" in the Three Lands series, where I completed another chapter. I'm working on the long, very complex ending to the novel, one that I've been writing over and over in my head since (*pauses to check original draft*) - since 1996, when I started this novel. Twelve years' worth of scenes, all written out of order, with a hundred different versions of each scene . . . My inner draft is a mess. So I need all the help from my Muse that I can get in putting this down onto cyberpaper.
I don't expect to write another nine thousand words tomorrow, but it would be nice if I could continue to produce greater-than-usual daily word counts for a while - my usual count being one thousand words. In fact, I tried to convince Doug to reschedule the back-to-back dental appointments we have for the 3rd ("My Muse is quite capable of wandering off to Tahiti during a two-hour appointment," I argued), but it was no go.
Just imagine: If I'd stayed online last week, I'd have written little or nothing recently. As it is, I've written eighteen thousand words in four days.
*** 31 March 2008
Four thousand words written today, which is a splendid day's work. I finished another chapter of "Empty Dagger Hand," leaving me with two or three chapters to go before I finish the final part. Which, of course, is not the final part to be written; I'll have written the beginning and end of the novel, with the sandwich filling still to be finished.
Alas, I checked the total word count today, and "Empty Dagger Hand" is 105,000 words so far, so I'm going to have to split the novel in two. Why do my novels always turn into mega-novels?
Later:
My March work-hour counts are nothing to write home about, thanks to my Internet addiction throughout the month, but the charts for my wordage sure look pretty. My total wordage for the month is 26,125; I haven't achieved those heights since 2005.
*** 1 April 2008
Thirty-seven hundred words today, which is very respectable indeed. I didn't quite finish the chapter I'm working on, though. I'm clearly over the peak of my Muse's visit: I'm continuing to write three or four times a day, but he's only handing me 1000- to 1500-word scenes now at each session. Hey, I'm not complaining; I'm usually lucky if he sends me any scenes.
However, I really do need to be working on the proofreading of "Blood Vow," so I'm going to try to sneak in one forty-five-minute proofing per day and see whether my Muse turns green-eyed, as he is wont to do whenever I do anything when he's around other than write fiction, read fiction, and dance. He's been letting me write these blog entries and phone my apprentice daily, though, so maybe he'll be able to cope with a bit of proofing.
The dental appointment on the 3rd was cancelled by Doug - not in deference to my Muse, but because we're working out financial issues - so it's clear sailing for my Muse till Sunday, when I have a family commitment. I'll admit I'm feeling a bit restless after six days straight of non-stop fiction-writing, but I'd like to finish off this part of "Empty Dagger Hand."
*** 2 April 2008
Still feeling restless, I went online to pick up my e-mail and Friends pages and to check on the Amazon Kindle situation, resolving not to stay online for more than an hour. Nothing could make me break my resolution.
Except, of course, a major crisis in the print-on-demand world.
Let me give a quick rundown on what Amazon did to e-book publishing. It used to be that you could pick any company you wanted to distribute your e-books. If the company had an arrangement with Amazon (as Lightning Source, a major POD printer / e-book distributor, did), you could get your e-book listed at Amazon. This meant that you could shop around until you found the best deal for e-book distribution. And that meant, if you were a self-publisher, you could price your e-books lower, which would make your readers happy.
Then Amazon decided that it would sell e-books from only one distributor: itself. With a monopoly on e-book distribution through Amazon, it was able to hike up the cut it took from presses and self-publishers. The result: higher e-book prices for readers.
The latest news - the one that is causing anguished cries of foul play from small presses and self-publishers - is that Amazon is requiring that any press or self-publisher using print-on-demand technology use its print-on-demand printer if the books are to be sold through Amazon. All for the sake of the customer, of course.
(*Insert prolonged cynical look*.)
I had planned till now to print through Lightning Source. I haven't yet decided what to do now, publishing-wise. But I know that I'll be doing all my online book shopping in the future from Barnes & Noble.
Later:
My favorite April 1st post: Library of Congress breaks ground on Lulu.com Wing. By the way, has anyone noticed how the Internet has revived what might otherwise have been a worn-out holiday?
Unfortunately (and predictably), six hours online fried my brain. I doubt I'll be able to get any fiction-writing done tomorrow. Fine; I'm well over my writing quota for this week (I made my quota during that five-hour session on Sunday, actually), and I have lots of proofing and editing and domain layout and business correspondence to catch up with. One of the business letters I have to answer, alas, is a plaintive enquiry from a fan as to when The Eternal Dungeon will be in print. "God only knows" is the only honest answer I can give. However, my plans continue for this year's e-books, and what with me working on "Empty Dagger Hand" for the past week, I'm even more in the mood to get "Blood Vow" published. So proofing that novel is top priority.
*** 3 April 2008
I've been working out again the numbers for CreateSpace (Amazon's POD self-publishing service, which turns to BookSurge for its printing). I say "again" because CreateSpace has already hiked its cut of the author's profit by ten percent since it opened last year.
Profitwise, it's clear that going with Lightning Source is the best. In terms of publishing when you have no money to start with, CreateSpace is the better option. However, if you want your book published under your own press's name, you do have to pay for your own ISBNs, which come in packages of 10, for a total of $275.
Which is $100 less than I currently have. So there's no need for an immediate decision on this; I need to sell more e-books before I can afford to have anyone print books for me.
*** 4 April 2008
I got the first two novellas in "On Guard" from The Eternal Dungeon rewritten, except for one icky problem I need to give more thought to; also, I've sent off an extra chapter in the first novella to my beta reader (who claims to be panting to see more; I hope she is, and that I'm not overburdening her). Next I tackle going through the latest beta report on Noble, in the Princeling series. In between all this I need to do that proofreading of "Blood Vow" that I've been avoiding.
Oh, and I also have to read a bunch of stories that I've either downloaded or had sent to me, lay out more of my domain, answer business correspondence, transfer files, call my mother and a friend, clean my humidifiers and my clothes . . . Tasks tend to pile up when I've been busy with my Muse.
Later:
I edited and laid out "The Slavefic Plot Creator" in the Master/Other series, laid out a review for Buried Treasure, did further domain layout, proofread a scene in "Blood Vow," read some of the stories sent to me by friends, read some potential stories for True Tales (ones that my apprentice found online), and laughed with my apprentice over how bad the latter stories were. That's what I call a productive day.
Tomorrow, I continue to read stories sent to me by friends, edit "Noble," proofread "Blood Vow," do a bit more domain layout, transfer and back up files, and . . . that's really enough for one day. I've been telling my apprentice not to overbook his schedule; I should take the same advice.
*** 5 April 2008
Ordinarily I consider my walks to and from the library and grocery store to be a horrible waste of time, but today, for the first time, I listened on the way to the audio files of Mary Stewart's The Hollow Hills on my MP3 player. The result is that I not only got my 45-minute daily quota of exercise done (by walking), but I got half my two-hour daily quota of reading done (by listening to the audio book). A wonderful way of killing two birds with one stone.
At home, I'm continuing to read Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, a History. Here's a passage that caught my eye:
"In England, the celebration of the love match reached a fever pitch as early as the 1760s and 1770s, while the French were still commenting on the novelty of 'marriage by fascination' in the mid-1800s. Many working-class families did not adopt the new norms of marital intimacy until the twentieth century."
Ha! So I got it right in "Transformation 1: Deception" (in the Eternal Dungeon series). My Muse is a wonderful magpie, picking up historical factoids everywhere.
I was interested by Ms. Coontz's account of how the ideal of the male breadwinner developed. She writes:
* * *
In earlier periods [before the Enlightenment], the household had been the center of production, both for its own consumption and for local barter. Storekeepers, merchants, and laborers received much of their pay in produce or services. But as wage labor and a market economy spread, people demanded money in payment for goods or services. Diaries and letters of the time reflected the growing realization that household production and informal barter could no longer meet a family's needs. "There is no way of living in this town without cash," Abigail Lyman complained of Boston in 1797.
But there was as yet no way of living on cash alone. Household production was still essential for survival because few commodities could be bought ready to use. Even store-bought chickens needed to be plucked. Factory-made fabrics had to be cut and sewn. Most families had to make their own bread, and the flour they bought came with bugs, small stones, and other impurities that had to be picked out by hand. As a result, in the early stages of the cash economy most families still needed someone to specialize in household production while other family members devoted more hours to wage earning. Typically, that someone was the wife.
Traditionally, middle- and lower-class wives had combined their productive tasks with child rearing and cooking. But as wage-earning work and commerce moved out of the home into separate work sites, this became more difficult. Many women worked for wages prior to marriage, but it was very hard to combine all the heavy work involved in running a household with the hours required to hold a job outside the home. For some families it became a mark of economic success and social status to have the wife concentrate on homemaking. But even for low-income families, who typically needed more than one wage earner, it made economic sense for the wife to stay home once the children were old enough to take jobs. A full-time housewife's work at home could usually save a family more than she could earn in wages.
As the division between a husband's wage-earning activities and a wife's household activities grew, so too did the sense that men and women lived in different spheres, with the man's sphere divorced from domesticity and the woman's divorced from the "economy." A historian of the German Enlightenment writes that in earlier centuries, when economic production was still centered in the household, "domesticity was a virtue shared by males and females, a shorthand term for thrift, hard work, and order." Advice books in the late seventeenth century still urged husbands as well as wives to practice domesticity. But "a century later, domesticity had tumbled out of the constellation of masculine virtues."
* * *
According Ms. Coontz, changing perceptions of gender roles and marital roles fit in very neatly with the politics and economics of the periods she writes about - for example, when absolutism ceased to be a popular political ideal in some nations, it also ceased to be put forward in those nations as an argument in favor of a husband's headship in marriage. Instead, new arguments were put forward, based on the ideal of male protection, which grew out of the above-mentioned change in household economics.
This is all fascinating. I'm glad that I'm having a chance to read this book.
I finished proofreading another scene in "Blood Vow," but that only takes me two-and-a-half hours into a twelve-and-a-half-hour proofing. I really must speed up my work if I'm to get "Blood Vow" published by the end of the month.
Later:
Despite my Internet time, it's been a fantastic week for fiction writing: eleven hours spent on writing, a record since I began tracking my schedule in September 2006. I also went over my quota for time spent on editing. I'm spending too much time writing blog entries, though.
Next week's big project is the "Blood Vow" proofreading, plus I need to get the cover art done for that novel. (I have the art; it's just a matter of laying it out.) I don't have anything else major going on in my life at the moment - just assorted editing, light fiction reading, household tasks, and family commitments.
*** 6 April 2008
Overnight, I figured out which e-books I'd like to get published this year. I won't list the titles here, because I have a history of changing my mind once I figure out that particular marketing tactics I've tried won't work, but I can say that my current plans are to bring out two Main Bookshelf titles (including "Blood Vow") and three High Bookshelf titles. I'd like to publish one e-book a month - I'm being optimistic here, but the only big summer distraction from publishing that I have this year is the M/s Conference in August, and I have a number of books already betaed and ready for a final rewrite and proofing. Plus, I have booktrailers and cover art ready for most of them.
If I succeed in publishing one e-book a month, that will take me up to around Labor Day. I'll be busy in September and October this year - I may be going out of town in September, and in October I have Gaylaxicon - but I might get another e-book out in late October or November, depending on how my eyes feel. After that, I'll have to take my usual winter break.
Paperbacks I'm still waiting for finances on, but they definitely remain in my plans.
Later:
Huzzah! I now have the money to buy the ISBNs.
Let it be recorded that my father is funding my print venture. Not intentionally, but between his latest gift and his Christmas gift, I have enough money to put my fiction into paperback, plus money left over for other expenses this year. (Doug's parents also gave me a nice cash gift for Christmas, which will come in handy.)
The question is whether I publish now or later. Financially, I really could use the added money that would come from print publication. However, the POD printing industry is in major turmoil at the moment, and I have the feeling that I'd exhaust myself if I was trying to put out my first print book at the same time I was trying to market some of my first e-books. I think a lot will depend on how well my e-books sell this year.
At any rate, the two books I'd like to get into print first are Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers (Leather in Lawnville) and Rebirth (The Eternal Dungeon), which are my two most marketable books. Plus, Rebirth topped the list of favorite series in my recent reader survey, which surprised me not at all - it's the book I've received the most fan mail for over the years.
ACTIVITIES SINCE MY LAST DAILY LIFE ENTRY
Fiction written and edited:
--"Empty Dagger Hand" (The Three Lands).
--"On Guard" (The Eternal Dungeon).
Fiction edited:
--"Right or Right" (Darkling Plain).
--"Blood Vow" (The Three Lands).
--"The Slavefic Plot Creator" (Master/Other).
Fiction sent out to be betaed:
--"Law of Vengeance" (The Three Lands).
--"Noble" (Princeling).
--"On Guard" (The Eternal Dungeon).
Fiction laid out:
--Braille/DAISY edition of "Bard of Pain" (The Three Lands).
Fiction read:
--Iaga: "The Long Way Home" (Phantom Menace slash).
--Rosemary Sutcliff: "Sword at Sunset."
--Nick and Hank: "Cutter Falls."
--Nick: "Dunnock."
--Assorted leather erotica.
--Parhelion: Far too many stories to list.
--Assorted gay prisonfic.
--Doctor Who genfic.
--Mary Stewart: "The Hollow Hills."
Leisure reading (nonfiction):
--Nichelle Nicols: "Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories."
--Randy Shilts: "Conduct Unbecoming."
--Joanne Meyerowitz: "How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States."
--Jane Chance Nitzsche: "The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages."
--Stephanie Coontz: "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage."
--Richard J. Foster: "Freedom of Simplicity."
--Pink Dandelion: "The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction."
Leisure reading (picture books):
--Harry Allard and James Marshall: "Miss Nelson Has a Field Day."
--Joan Walsh Anglund: "Cowboy and His Friend."
--Mitsumasa Anno: "Anno's Counting Book."
--Edward Ardizzone: "Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain."
--Edward Ardizzone: "Tim and Lucy Go to Sea."
--Jeannie Baker: "One Hungry Spider."
--Lorna Balian: "The Aminal."
--Norman Bates: "Who Built the Highway?"
Podcasts listened to:
--"Rear Vision: "'Rats with Wings': A History of the Urban Pigeon" (ABC Radio National).
Films/shows watched:
--"Rent."
Events attended:
--Memorial gathering for my step-uncle.
--Stephanie Coontz: Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage.
Topics in this post: Internet addiction, self-publishing e-books, writing fantasy, braille, history of transsexuality, history of marriage, text-to-speech, reading historical fiction, Easter, Digital Rights Management, wordage (and how), sneering at bad gay porn stories, admiring good gay porn stories, Earth Hour, history, writing historical fantasy, print-on-demand (Lightning Source and Amazon's CreateSpace), self-publishing print books, April Fool's Day, audio books.
*** 13 March 2008
It's refreshing to have a seven-hour session on the Web that I (1) planned and (2) loathed.
I figured that, if I was going to be click-happy, I might as well be productive and do the grunge work I've been putting off. So I spent two hours searching for Pagan book review sites to submit Bard of Pain to, with due warning to the reviewers that the story was part of an interfaith series. Then I spent an hour and a half struggling to submit "Bard of Pain" to the Amazon Kindle bookstore. (I hate technologically sophisticated submission software. So do my browsers.) Most of the rest of the time - while I was waiting to overcome a glitch at Amazon - was spent compiling a list of links to online DS-only stories (as opposed to DS stories that include bondage and SM), because a couple of the gals over at Romance Divas perked up when they heard that such stories were a specialty of mine; they asked me for recommendations. My list was fairly short, alas; where the heck are the DS-only writers hiding?
For that matter, where are the authors who are writing DS stories without sex scenes? You'd think, from the available stories, that DS folks, unlike most vanilla folks, were humping faster than aphrodisiac-drugged rabbits.
*** 16 March 2008
I suddenly got the impulse to do marketing yesterday. One of my stranger impulses.
On a separate topic: I find it amazing to live in an era when I can get a book into a major bookstore by the simple act of submitting it.
I'm referring to the Amazon Kindle edition of "Bard of Pain," of course. I don't know how many copies the book will sell - Amazon is being very close-mouthed about many Kindles have sold - but I'm struck with wonder at the democratization of publishing that Amazon's Digital Text Publishing program represents.
(Insert grumble about how this democratization comes at a healthy price; Amazon takes two-thirds of the profit of each book sold.)
Meanwhile, I've spent four days on marketing / manic Web surfing, and I'm more than ready to take a break. It's hard to believe that I used to do this sort of thing seven days a week.
*** 18 March 2008
Well, I thought I had a complete beta report of "Right or Right" on my hard drive to rewrite from.
(*Drums fingers.*)
Okay, Blood Vow gets bumped up in the e-book queue. That one only needs proofreading and a cover design before I start the layout. I already have cover art, and I finished the booktrailer a long ways back.
*Grumble*. I hate proofreading (which I do by ear). But hey, this was the week I set aside for grunge work. Proper penance for playing too long on the Internet.
Later:
Holy cow. The MP3 file for the first chapter of "Blood Vow" is an hour and a quarter long. That means the entire novel is . . .
No. Nineteen hours is too long to spend on proofreading. Let me try a faster reading rate. After all, I practically have the novel memorized; it's just a matter of catching typos and any stylistic problems that I haven't caught with my eye.
What this means, though, is that my chapters (at least, in this novel) are three times longer than Mary Stewart's. That's an interesting factoid.
(A pause.)
Fifty minutes for the new file. That means it will take twelve-and-a-half hours to proofread "Blood Vow" (not counting the time it takes me to correct the errors I catch). That's much more reasonable.
*** 19 March 2008
I'm feeling blue again today, but this time I recognize what it is: a post-Internet plunge, when I go from manic to slightly depressed. I'll weather it out.
I'm toying with the idea of publishing an e-book edition of "Noble" in the Princeling series after "Blood Vow." I have beta reports for it, I have a booktrailer, I have cover art. So it shouldn't take much longer than "Blood Vow" will to prepare.
A lot depends on how "Bard of Pain" does at Amazon. But I have to do something besides twiddling my thumbs, because I still can't figure out any way to raise the two hundred dollars for POD printing, other than to sell my writings.
(It's a good thing this isn't twenty years ago. I'm desperate enough to have wondered, in a fleeting manner, how much I could have sold my body for back then.)
Later:
Finally put together the accessible edition of "Bard of Pain." I'd been putting it off because, invariably, when I submit a book to Bookshare.org, it finds something wrong with it. First it didn't like my dashes, and then it didn't like me having more than one word in my file name, and then it insisted that my files must have page breaks (while my OCR software was meanwhile insisting that it would garble any text except the ones I translate into plain text . . . which doesn't have page breaks). I'm crossing my fingers that this submission makes it through.
*** 20 March 2008
I proofread the first scene of "Blood Vow" and turned up very few problems. This should be an easy proofing.
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of getting as many of my friendship fiction stories as possible into e-book format. But in the meantime, I really need to advertise for beta readers, because my lack of beta readers is currently the biggest stumbling block on my road to publication.
Later:
My round-up of Internet links.
Vampires of the Internet - Robin Hobb on the evils of blogging. She just loves to make new enemies, doesn't she? But it's a funnier piece than her rant against fan fiction.
In the category of "Is nothing sacred from commercialism?": What Rocky Horror has become in the hands of professionals. Sample quote: "Prop bags will be sold for $1 each."
Repeating news from my Mentoring Life entry: Jack Fritscher has posted online the galleys of his history of Drummer, the classic leather magazine. Mr. Fritscher was editor-in-chief of the magazine in the midst of its golden period, in the late 1970s, so the contents of this book ought to be a treat.
And finally: Everyone is doing Flickr these days.
Later:
I finished reading Joanne Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. An interesting book - a little dry in places, and clearly written from a particular perspective (pro-transsexuality), but not strident in any way. (Books on the history of gender or sexuality tend to be stridently written.) It seemed to present anti-transsexuality perspectives in a fair-minded fashion, and it gave me a good sense of the subject it was addressing. This is the sort of book that academia should produce more often.
I've switched now to reading Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, which, judging from the snippet I've read so far, looks as though it will be interesting in subject matter, though I can't say yet how good a treatment the subject will receive.
Meanwhile, my Internet addiction: I've switched back to the idea of disconnecting my mouse when I go online to check mail. It seems to work. I find my laptop's touchpad so awkward to use that I'm not tempted to stay online any longer than it takes to check my mail and do any absolutely necessary (but simple) Web work. For the last couple of days, I haven't spent more than twenty minutes online daily.
I'll save my mouse - and any consequent tricky Web work - for when I post my blog entries. Right now I'm telling myself that I should get "Blood Vow" ready for publication before I do that. But I'm going have to spend more than an hour a day on proofreading if I'm to keep that promise.
(A pause to curse Microsoft's speech synthesizer, which - I learned tonight after recording five chapters - doesn't know how to pronounce the name of one of my main characters. Fortunately, my text-to-speech software, TextAloud, is set up so that I can change pronunciations, but this means I'll have to re-record those five chapters.)
At any rate, I seem to have gotten myself out of my post-Internet doldrums; my schedule is beginning to be closer to ideal than it's been since October 11, when I began my Internet jag.
*** 21 March 2008
Marriage, a History is full of interesting anecdotes, such as this one:
"In the eleventh century, when the Chinese state began to determine entry into the governing bureaucracy through rigorous examinations, a lowborn man with exceptional scholarly talents might have a wife bestowed on him by a noble family that hoped the son-in-law had enough talent to rise through the ranks and keep the family in the governing circles."
Look! He has a pocket protector! Let's marry our daughter to him!
The author's thesis is that, while marriage has been entered into for a variety of reasons, one of the most common reasons - and one that can't be replaced by other arrangements - has been to acquire in-laws.
I must confess that this idea leaves me cold, and not because my own extended family lives on the West Coast, so that I grew up barely knowing my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. What leaves me feeling chilled is the author's description of the cold-blooded manner in which ancient and medieval parents traded their sons and daughters for the parents' own economic security.
Paradoxically, though, this passage (about the late medieval period) cheered me:
"For the growing numbers of artisans, craftsmen, merchants, and small urban manufacturers, as well as prosperous country yeomen, the everyday work unit became the married couple household, working alone or with servants or apprentices. A harmonious, well-functioning marriage was a business necessity as well as a personal pleasure."
I like the idea of all those medieval women saying about their prospective husbands, "Hmm, would he make a good business partner?"
I thought this passage also offered a pleasant vision of the world:
"A striking feature of village life in northern Europe from the Middle Ages to the early modern period was the frequency with which people shared labor and exchanged services with neighbors rather than relatives. Several households in a community would get together to build a water mill, put up a fence, buy a breeding bull, share a plow, or set up a blacksmith forge. In towns, too, people relied on neighbors for aid. To a greater extent than in most of the world, day-to-day interactions were likely to be with neighbors, servants, or community institutions rather than with kin. Demographer Ron Lesthaeghe argues that long before the development of the welfare state, families in northwestern Europe relied more on local poor relief committees and fraternal organizations such as guilds or corporations than on extended kin groups. Friends, servants, neighbors, and patrons were expected to offer one another the kind of support that in other times and places has been limited to blood relatives."
*** 22 March 2008
Parhelion's method of announcing site updates seems to be to sneak in at three a.m., upload the new stories, and then quickly tiptoe out in hopes that nobody has noticed.
So for those of you who missed the fact, Parhelion's site has been updated with new fiction.
Opening lines from one of the new stories, "Partisan Politics" (in the original fiction section):
"Looking back, I give myself some credit. When I saw Russ was naked I didn't even break my stride."
If you haven't encountered Parhelion's work, and if you like gay historical love stories (1850s to 1950s): run, do not walk, to that site. Someday, when we're all footnotes, I hope that this will be mine: ". . . and among Parhelion's beta readers was someone named Dusk Peterson."
Later:
My weekly totals are awful. Absolutely, totally wretched. I didn't even need to use a calculator to figure out the hours for writing/editing/reading fiction; you don't need a calculator to add up 0 + 3.25 + 1.5.
I've put my laptop back in the drawer.
It's frustrating, because I've finally figured out how I'm going to handle the 2008 publication year: I'm going to put as much as possible into e-book form.
I know that what has made a difference in my willingness to continue publishing e-books is my ability to have my e-books listed at Amazon. I still don't know whether I'll make any money there (Amazon has yet to add the categories and tags that would allow Amazon visitors to find my book; I've finally posted an enquiry at the support forum). But I think - from some slight evidence - that my book's presence there makes a difference in how some readers perceive my writings.
Odd, that. It's the same story, whether sold at Amazon or at Lulu or simply posted at my site. But I noticed this phenomenon with Manna Francis's work: She has a series of incredibly compelling stories available free on the Web, and she probably has more fans than any other original slash author. She certainly has more in-depth analysis done of her works than any other original slash author. (When you've got people heatedly debating on your blog whether totalitarianism is a suitable system of government, and whether the psychological profession is a scam, with the writings of medieval philosophers brought in to bolster arguments, you know you've got it made.)
And yet the professional reviewers have never paid her stories any mind. Yet the moment that she gets published in print, the exact same stories suddenly become worthy of reviewers' attention.
Oy vey. It's as though, in the eyes of reviewers, only a demand for money gives a story literary worth.
*** 23 March 2008
I'm having to go to bed with work unfinished today, not only because it's two a.m. (that's what happens on the day after an Internet jag keeps me awake till four a.m.), but also because my eyes are still sulking.
Of course, that didn't stop me from reading the second half of Parhelion's "Dead of Winter" in a single setting. Darn it, I should know better than to read "just a little bit" of Parhelion's fiction before bed.
*** 24 March 2008
"I hope you're having a good Easter," my apprentice said yesterday.
"My Easter celebrations consist of me boiling eggs," I replied.
This is the only time of year when I allow myself to eat eggs. I've had four egg-salad sandwiches since yesterday. I bought cage-free organic eggs this year - ones that flaunt visually how "natural" they are - which means that, as I put it to Doug, "The eggs came pre-colored." We both admired the brown coloring that Mother Nature supplied.
Today, while kids were hunting Easter eggs on the White House lawn, I hunted Easter eggs on the refrigerator door. Doug had hidden a bunch of magnetic letters on various spots of our cluttered refrigerator door, and I had to go find them.
*** 26 March 2008
Darn it, I'm going to have to take a break from Parhelion's stories, or I won't get any work done this week.
Last night, at three a.m., I told myself I'd read "just a little bit" of "Partisan Politics." I ended up reading the entire story.
Today, on the verge of starting the day's work, I told myself I'd read "just a little bit" of "Dry Bones." I ended up reading the entire story.
I'm going to switch temporarily over to authors who don't have such skill with cliffhanger endings to scenes.
I spent two hours today scanning the first half of Mary Stewart's The Hollow Hills - or rather, forty minutes scanning and an hour and a quarter tussling the text into a shape where it would be intelligible when I translated it into text-to-speech. Putting it into shape for reading by eye would have taken much longer.
This is the reason I usually confine myself to online fiction during the times of the year when I can't read with my eyes. I really, really wish that the major book publishers would wise up and sell e-books in cheap, easily accessible, DRM-free formats, because I'm tired of this type of chore; I'd willingly pay the major publishers to do it for me, if they sold their e-books in a reasonable manner. But I suppose I shouldn't complain, because most people who scan books would be green with envy to know that I have a scanner that can scan a 500-page book in less than an hour and a half.
Meanwhile, I give all praise to Torquere Press, which not only sells Parhelion's "Dead of Winter" in easily accessible HTML (among other formats), but also sells it at $2.50 for 20,000 words - that's $0.000125 per word. Their e-book prices are lower than any other press I know of that publishes gay romance. If all publishers were like Torquere, I'd be doing a lot of e-book buying.
*** 27 March 2008
I've read four more stories by Parhelion. This wasn't (simply) due to lack of will power; it's because my Muse was showing signs of perking up. Under such circumstances, I'll feed him any tidbits he wants.
Turned out I fed him the right tidbits; I ended up writing 2500 words today. I'd hoped that my Muse would show interest in "Law Links" in the Three Lands series, which is close to being finished, but instead he had me work on "Empty Dagger Hand" in the same series. Not much of a surprise that he would prefer that novel; that's the one in which the Lieutenant makes his first appearance.
My Muse completed a scene nicely, which is good, because it was the climactic scene of the novel. Doesn't mean I'm even close to finishing the novel, of course; I'm writing the scenes out of order.
Meanwhile, I get to continue to enjoy Parhelion's wonderful prose, which includes sentences like this (from the story "Nice"):
"R. J. ran to strong notions about confidentiality, an excellent trait in a research laboratory technician but a bad idea for a young man who'd just climbed naked into his employer's bed."
*** 28 March 2008
My Muse loves Parhelion. He has given me 3400 words so far today.
I'm almost finished reading Parhelion's original fiction (see the linked page for story blurbs), so I can offer a list here of my favorite stories - except for the historical fantasy stories, which I haven't reread yet. Compiling such as list is like being a professor trying to figure out the grading curve for a classroom of straight-A students.
1) Hurrah for Hollywood series. Agents, choreographers, stars, songwriters, and soldiers, 1920s to 1940s.
2) Verdict. Court officials, 1938.
3) Masks. Comic book store workers, modern day.
4) Pulp. Comic book publishers, 1931.
5) Dry Bones. Cowboys, 1896.
Usually what makes me like a story most is the characters or plot or theme, but Parhelion - who is excellent at all three - has a tendency to heighten the competition by providing fabulous period detail. "Pulp," for example, has characters that I don't go all gaga for, but, my god, look at this passage:
He could still remember the crowd in that picture house in Paris, the one that had been converted from an ancient theatre burlesque. After he had settled back in the tiny wooden seat, his shoulder pressed tight against Kevin's, he had passed the time before the four-reeler examining the naked Greek gods decorating the proscenium arch. It had struck him as the essence of wartime France that their chipped paint plaster was yellowed by the same cigarette smoke that was lazily curling up into the projector's beam of flickering light. You weren't supposed to smoke in there, but the place had reeked of gitanes and gauloises, unwashed cotton, and the garlic and sour bread smell of a crowd that wasn't eating enough and was using too many cheap spices to try and compensate.
After the rooster on film had silently crowed, he and Kevin had spent the reels that followed swapping rude remarks back and forth about the valiant Napoleonic French troops. . . .
I don't know whether anyone besides a fellow historical fiction writer has any idea how much research must have gone into writing those five sentences. Whenever I begin to think that I know something about writing historical tales, I look at Parhelion's stories, sigh, and return to learning the trade.
Meanwhile, I assigned my apprentice the task of tracking down online prisonfic that I might want to recommend at True Tales this year. He reports that, out of the sixty prison stories at Men on the Net, he only found four that were worth pointing me to. Poor guy, having to wade through all those badly written stories. I know from experience what it's like, because I went through the same thing last year with Nifty's military section, when I was preparing the military issues of True Tales. Out of the two stories there that I liked, one (Ruthless's Death and the Veteran) was from an author I already knew and admired, and the other (George Gardner's Poseidon's Fist) I had discovered during an earlier foray into that section for reading pleasure.
Which isn't to say that there weren't a handful of other good stories in that section; it's just that the other good stories weren't of the type I like. They were of the "wham, bam, thank you, sir" genre, and an author really needs to work hard to interest me in a passing encounter.
It can be done. I write in that genre myself. But my characters always learn something important about themselves as a result of the encounters; the encounters have themantic implications, as well as having impacts on the mind and heart. They aren't just moving body parts.
I know that there are other writers at Nifty who share this taste of mine for stories with wider vision - a fact that I keep trying to hammer into the heads of slashers who make dismissive remarks about Nifty - but darn it, their stories can be hard to locate. I wish that the world of online erotic fiction for gay male readers had as sophisticated a system of recommendations as the slash world does.
*** 29 March 2008
I just finished reading Parhelion's "Peridot," which features that wonderful family, the Jowetts.
"A typical Jowlett would rather scheme than argue, argue than fist-fight a sibling inside with the curtains open, fist-fight than fix a car previously disassembled on the front lawn, and fix that car than mow said lawn to the exacting middle-class standards of the day. Jowletts also liked floppy dogs and cowboy music, the sort with abundant yodeling, played loud. Three minutes after it appeared, they would discover rock and roll."
I also enjoy this story because of its courageous ending. I like how, just when I think I've discovered Parhelion's pattern, I get thrown a screwball.
Yesterday, I got 4800 words of fiction writing done. Woohoo! In just two days, I've managed to complete one quarter of my monthly quota. (Which is good, because in the first twenty-six days of March, I only completed twelve percent of my monthly quota.)
The sweetest part about this is knowing that, if I hadn't gotten myself offline on Monday, I'd be channelling all this creative energy into doing something really productive, like searching for search engines that search search engines. Virtue receives its due reward.
Later:
Doug and I celebrated Earth Hour tonight by sitting in the dark for an hour, discussing our interests. It was a case of "You say to-mah-toes, I say to-may-toes," with him explaining why he wanted to devote all his time to history lectures (and that he wasn't that keen on historical fiction), and me explaining why I wanted to devote all my time to writing historical fantasy (and that wasn't that keen on history lectures). We agreed that the harmony of the spheres is terrific, and that it's much easier to master knowledge of the classical era than of modern history, and he enlightened me to the fact that the Battle of Waterloo did not, as I'd assumed, take place on the water.
At least I've read contemporary newspaper accounts of Peterloo. So there.
*** 30 March 2008
And today's total wordage is . . . nine thousand.
So much for mid-life declines in creativity. I'm stunned. I don't know whether I've even written nine thousand words in one day before. Certainly I haven't since I started keeping wordage totals in 2004, and I couldn't possibly have done it back in my adolescent years, when I handwrote my manuscripts. So the only possible time period when I could have reached that sort of daily wordage was in 1995 and 1996, and I wasn't keeping word counts back then. (I was typing in WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS; I'm not sure whether it had a word count feature.) I was keeping hourly counts, but they combined my writing and rewriting time, so that doesn't help.
Today's writing time, incidentally, was five hours and fifteen minutes. I spent one hour and forty minutes doing a single rewrite of what I had written.
My Muse woke up this morning with a scene that I hadn't expected I'd be able to write, because I can't usually handle major changes to stories, much less major changes after I've plotted most of the story in my head and have all the foreshadows tying in with one another in a neat little web. But my beta reader for "On Guard" in the Eternal Dungeon series insisted - and I gloomily agreed - that I needed something to keep two very long lecture scenes from dragging down the plot. She suggested that I add another slice-of-life scene, providing glimpses of everyday life in the dungeon. My Muse apparently agreed, because that's what he offered me this morning, complete with three important foreshadows that I hadn't yet found room for in the story.
Then it was back to "Empty Dagger Hand" in the Three Lands series, where I completed another chapter. I'm working on the long, very complex ending to the novel, one that I've been writing over and over in my head since (*pauses to check original draft*) - since 1996, when I started this novel. Twelve years' worth of scenes, all written out of order, with a hundred different versions of each scene . . . My inner draft is a mess. So I need all the help from my Muse that I can get in putting this down onto cyberpaper.
I don't expect to write another nine thousand words tomorrow, but it would be nice if I could continue to produce greater-than-usual daily word counts for a while - my usual count being one thousand words. In fact, I tried to convince Doug to reschedule the back-to-back dental appointments we have for the 3rd ("My Muse is quite capable of wandering off to Tahiti during a two-hour appointment," I argued), but it was no go.
Just imagine: If I'd stayed online last week, I'd have written little or nothing recently. As it is, I've written eighteen thousand words in four days.
*** 31 March 2008
Four thousand words written today, which is a splendid day's work. I finished another chapter of "Empty Dagger Hand," leaving me with two or three chapters to go before I finish the final part. Which, of course, is not the final part to be written; I'll have written the beginning and end of the novel, with the sandwich filling still to be finished.
Alas, I checked the total word count today, and "Empty Dagger Hand" is 105,000 words so far, so I'm going to have to split the novel in two. Why do my novels always turn into mega-novels?
Later:
My March work-hour counts are nothing to write home about, thanks to my Internet addiction throughout the month, but the charts for my wordage sure look pretty. My total wordage for the month is 26,125; I haven't achieved those heights since 2005.
*** 1 April 2008
Thirty-seven hundred words today, which is very respectable indeed. I didn't quite finish the chapter I'm working on, though. I'm clearly over the peak of my Muse's visit: I'm continuing to write three or four times a day, but he's only handing me 1000- to 1500-word scenes now at each session. Hey, I'm not complaining; I'm usually lucky if he sends me any scenes.
However, I really do need to be working on the proofreading of "Blood Vow," so I'm going to try to sneak in one forty-five-minute proofing per day and see whether my Muse turns green-eyed, as he is wont to do whenever I do anything when he's around other than write fiction, read fiction, and dance. He's been letting me write these blog entries and phone my apprentice daily, though, so maybe he'll be able to cope with a bit of proofing.
The dental appointment on the 3rd was cancelled by Doug - not in deference to my Muse, but because we're working out financial issues - so it's clear sailing for my Muse till Sunday, when I have a family commitment. I'll admit I'm feeling a bit restless after six days straight of non-stop fiction-writing, but I'd like to finish off this part of "Empty Dagger Hand."
*** 2 April 2008
Still feeling restless, I went online to pick up my e-mail and Friends pages and to check on the Amazon Kindle situation, resolving not to stay online for more than an hour. Nothing could make me break my resolution.
Except, of course, a major crisis in the print-on-demand world.
Let me give a quick rundown on what Amazon did to e-book publishing. It used to be that you could pick any company you wanted to distribute your e-books. If the company had an arrangement with Amazon (as Lightning Source, a major POD printer / e-book distributor, did), you could get your e-book listed at Amazon. This meant that you could shop around until you found the best deal for e-book distribution. And that meant, if you were a self-publisher, you could price your e-books lower, which would make your readers happy.
Then Amazon decided that it would sell e-books from only one distributor: itself. With a monopoly on e-book distribution through Amazon, it was able to hike up the cut it took from presses and self-publishers. The result: higher e-book prices for readers.
The latest news - the one that is causing anguished cries of foul play from small presses and self-publishers - is that Amazon is requiring that any press or self-publisher using print-on-demand technology use its print-on-demand printer if the books are to be sold through Amazon. All for the sake of the customer, of course.
(*Insert prolonged cynical look*.)
I had planned till now to print through Lightning Source. I haven't yet decided what to do now, publishing-wise. But I know that I'll be doing all my online book shopping in the future from Barnes & Noble.
Later:
My favorite April 1st post: Library of Congress breaks ground on Lulu.com Wing. By the way, has anyone noticed how the Internet has revived what might otherwise have been a worn-out holiday?
Unfortunately (and predictably), six hours online fried my brain. I doubt I'll be able to get any fiction-writing done tomorrow. Fine; I'm well over my writing quota for this week (I made my quota during that five-hour session on Sunday, actually), and I have lots of proofing and editing and domain layout and business correspondence to catch up with. One of the business letters I have to answer, alas, is a plaintive enquiry from a fan as to when The Eternal Dungeon will be in print. "God only knows" is the only honest answer I can give. However, my plans continue for this year's e-books, and what with me working on "Empty Dagger Hand" for the past week, I'm even more in the mood to get "Blood Vow" published. So proofing that novel is top priority.
*** 3 April 2008
I've been working out again the numbers for CreateSpace (Amazon's POD self-publishing service, which turns to BookSurge for its printing). I say "again" because CreateSpace has already hiked its cut of the author's profit by ten percent since it opened last year.
Profitwise, it's clear that going with Lightning Source is the best. In terms of publishing when you have no money to start with, CreateSpace is the better option. However, if you want your book published under your own press's name, you do have to pay for your own ISBNs, which come in packages of 10, for a total of $275.
Which is $100 less than I currently have. So there's no need for an immediate decision on this; I need to sell more e-books before I can afford to have anyone print books for me.
*** 4 April 2008
I got the first two novellas in "On Guard" from The Eternal Dungeon rewritten, except for one icky problem I need to give more thought to; also, I've sent off an extra chapter in the first novella to my beta reader (who claims to be panting to see more; I hope she is, and that I'm not overburdening her). Next I tackle going through the latest beta report on Noble, in the Princeling series. In between all this I need to do that proofreading of "Blood Vow" that I've been avoiding.
Oh, and I also have to read a bunch of stories that I've either downloaded or had sent to me, lay out more of my domain, answer business correspondence, transfer files, call my mother and a friend, clean my humidifiers and my clothes . . . Tasks tend to pile up when I've been busy with my Muse.
Later:
I edited and laid out "The Slavefic Plot Creator" in the Master/Other series, laid out a review for Buried Treasure, did further domain layout, proofread a scene in "Blood Vow," read some of the stories sent to me by friends, read some potential stories for True Tales (ones that my apprentice found online), and laughed with my apprentice over how bad the latter stories were. That's what I call a productive day.
Tomorrow, I continue to read stories sent to me by friends, edit "Noble," proofread "Blood Vow," do a bit more domain layout, transfer and back up files, and . . . that's really enough for one day. I've been telling my apprentice not to overbook his schedule; I should take the same advice.
*** 5 April 2008
Ordinarily I consider my walks to and from the library and grocery store to be a horrible waste of time, but today, for the first time, I listened on the way to the audio files of Mary Stewart's The Hollow Hills on my MP3 player. The result is that I not only got my 45-minute daily quota of exercise done (by walking), but I got half my two-hour daily quota of reading done (by listening to the audio book). A wonderful way of killing two birds with one stone.
At home, I'm continuing to read Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, a History. Here's a passage that caught my eye:
"In England, the celebration of the love match reached a fever pitch as early as the 1760s and 1770s, while the French were still commenting on the novelty of 'marriage by fascination' in the mid-1800s. Many working-class families did not adopt the new norms of marital intimacy until the twentieth century."
Ha! So I got it right in "Transformation 1: Deception" (in the Eternal Dungeon series). My Muse is a wonderful magpie, picking up historical factoids everywhere.
I was interested by Ms. Coontz's account of how the ideal of the male breadwinner developed. She writes:
* * *
In earlier periods [before the Enlightenment], the household had been the center of production, both for its own consumption and for local barter. Storekeepers, merchants, and laborers received much of their pay in produce or services. But as wage labor and a market economy spread, people demanded money in payment for goods or services. Diaries and letters of the time reflected the growing realization that household production and informal barter could no longer meet a family's needs. "There is no way of living in this town without cash," Abigail Lyman complained of Boston in 1797.
But there was as yet no way of living on cash alone. Household production was still essential for survival because few commodities could be bought ready to use. Even store-bought chickens needed to be plucked. Factory-made fabrics had to be cut and sewn. Most families had to make their own bread, and the flour they bought came with bugs, small stones, and other impurities that had to be picked out by hand. As a result, in the early stages of the cash economy most families still needed someone to specialize in household production while other family members devoted more hours to wage earning. Typically, that someone was the wife.
Traditionally, middle- and lower-class wives had combined their productive tasks with child rearing and cooking. But as wage-earning work and commerce moved out of the home into separate work sites, this became more difficult. Many women worked for wages prior to marriage, but it was very hard to combine all the heavy work involved in running a household with the hours required to hold a job outside the home. For some families it became a mark of economic success and social status to have the wife concentrate on homemaking. But even for low-income families, who typically needed more than one wage earner, it made economic sense for the wife to stay home once the children were old enough to take jobs. A full-time housewife's work at home could usually save a family more than she could earn in wages.
As the division between a husband's wage-earning activities and a wife's household activities grew, so too did the sense that men and women lived in different spheres, with the man's sphere divorced from domesticity and the woman's divorced from the "economy." A historian of the German Enlightenment writes that in earlier centuries, when economic production was still centered in the household, "domesticity was a virtue shared by males and females, a shorthand term for thrift, hard work, and order." Advice books in the late seventeenth century still urged husbands as well as wives to practice domesticity. But "a century later, domesticity had tumbled out of the constellation of masculine virtues."
* * *
According Ms. Coontz, changing perceptions of gender roles and marital roles fit in very neatly with the politics and economics of the periods she writes about - for example, when absolutism ceased to be a popular political ideal in some nations, it also ceased to be put forward in those nations as an argument in favor of a husband's headship in marriage. Instead, new arguments were put forward, based on the ideal of male protection, which grew out of the above-mentioned change in household economics.
This is all fascinating. I'm glad that I'm having a chance to read this book.
I finished proofreading another scene in "Blood Vow," but that only takes me two-and-a-half hours into a twelve-and-a-half-hour proofing. I really must speed up my work if I'm to get "Blood Vow" published by the end of the month.
Later:
Despite my Internet time, it's been a fantastic week for fiction writing: eleven hours spent on writing, a record since I began tracking my schedule in September 2006. I also went over my quota for time spent on editing. I'm spending too much time writing blog entries, though.
Next week's big project is the "Blood Vow" proofreading, plus I need to get the cover art done for that novel. (I have the art; it's just a matter of laying it out.) I don't have anything else major going on in my life at the moment - just assorted editing, light fiction reading, household tasks, and family commitments.
*** 6 April 2008
Overnight, I figured out which e-books I'd like to get published this year. I won't list the titles here, because I have a history of changing my mind once I figure out that particular marketing tactics I've tried won't work, but I can say that my current plans are to bring out two Main Bookshelf titles (including "Blood Vow") and three High Bookshelf titles. I'd like to publish one e-book a month - I'm being optimistic here, but the only big summer distraction from publishing that I have this year is the M/s Conference in August, and I have a number of books already betaed and ready for a final rewrite and proofing. Plus, I have booktrailers and cover art ready for most of them.
If I succeed in publishing one e-book a month, that will take me up to around Labor Day. I'll be busy in September and October this year - I may be going out of town in September, and in October I have Gaylaxicon - but I might get another e-book out in late October or November, depending on how my eyes feel. After that, I'll have to take my usual winter break.
Paperbacks I'm still waiting for finances on, but they definitely remain in my plans.
Later:
Huzzah! I now have the money to buy the ISBNs.
Let it be recorded that my father is funding my print venture. Not intentionally, but between his latest gift and his Christmas gift, I have enough money to put my fiction into paperback, plus money left over for other expenses this year. (Doug's parents also gave me a nice cash gift for Christmas, which will come in handy.)
The question is whether I publish now or later. Financially, I really could use the added money that would come from print publication. However, the POD printing industry is in major turmoil at the moment, and I have the feeling that I'd exhaust myself if I was trying to put out my first print book at the same time I was trying to market some of my first e-books. I think a lot will depend on how well my e-books sell this year.
At any rate, the two books I'd like to get into print first are Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers (Leather in Lawnville) and Rebirth (The Eternal Dungeon), which are my two most marketable books. Plus, Rebirth topped the list of favorite series in my recent reader survey, which surprised me not at all - it's the book I've received the most fan mail for over the years.
ACTIVITIES SINCE MY LAST DAILY LIFE ENTRY
Fiction written and edited:
--"Empty Dagger Hand" (The Three Lands).
--"On Guard" (The Eternal Dungeon).
Fiction edited:
--"Right or Right" (Darkling Plain).
--"Blood Vow" (The Three Lands).
--"The Slavefic Plot Creator" (Master/Other).
Fiction sent out to be betaed:
--"Law of Vengeance" (The Three Lands).
--"Noble" (Princeling).
--"On Guard" (The Eternal Dungeon).
Fiction laid out:
--Braille/DAISY edition of "Bard of Pain" (The Three Lands).
Fiction read:
--Iaga: "The Long Way Home" (Phantom Menace slash).
--Rosemary Sutcliff: "Sword at Sunset."
--Nick and Hank: "Cutter Falls."
--Nick: "Dunnock."
--Assorted leather erotica.
--Parhelion: Far too many stories to list.
--Assorted gay prisonfic.
--Doctor Who genfic.
--Mary Stewart: "The Hollow Hills."
Leisure reading (nonfiction):
--Nichelle Nicols: "Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories."
--Randy Shilts: "Conduct Unbecoming."
--Joanne Meyerowitz: "How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States."
--Jane Chance Nitzsche: "The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages."
--Stephanie Coontz: "Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage."
--Richard J. Foster: "Freedom of Simplicity."
--Pink Dandelion: "The Quakers: A Very Short Introduction."
Leisure reading (picture books):
--Harry Allard and James Marshall: "Miss Nelson Has a Field Day."
--Joan Walsh Anglund: "Cowboy and His Friend."
--Mitsumasa Anno: "Anno's Counting Book."
--Edward Ardizzone: "Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain."
--Edward Ardizzone: "Tim and Lucy Go to Sea."
--Jeannie Baker: "One Hungry Spider."
--Lorna Balian: "The Aminal."
--Norman Bates: "Who Built the Highway?"
Podcasts listened to:
--"Rear Vision: "'Rats with Wings': A History of the Urban Pigeon" (ABC Radio National).
Films/shows watched:
--"Rent."
Events attended:
--Memorial gathering for my step-uncle.
(Read Comments)
December 2009
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