Love in Dark Settings

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen."

--Henry David Thoreau

Topics in this post: Anniversary, self-publishing, slavefic, summer schedule, permission, orders, Internet round-up, sexual consent in fiction, examination of conscience (examen), one-track mind, reviews of Naomi Novik's Victory of Eagles and Manna Francis's Quid Pro Quo, sleep, lectio divina, my online fiction, flagging your relationship status, fitness and religion, minimalist home, overwhelmed with work, switching to a task-oriented schedule, another Internet round-up (self-publishing and leather), plus my rant about gatekeepers in the publishing world.

I've been dividing my daily-life entries into three topics for a while now: writing, mentoring, and simplicity (and I'm now hereby adding a domestic section for home/family entries). I did this so that visitors who were only interested in one of those topics wouldn't end up reading about another topic that made them bored or uncomfortable.

However, I'm finding it impossible to continue separating my daily life entries this way, partly because of time factors, and partly because those three aspects of my life keep overlapping.

So instead, I'm starting a new system: I'll provide tags to each individual entry within each post, showing the subject matter. Hopefully, that will help folks skip over topics they're not interested in.

For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.

*** 25 May 2008. Mentoring: Anniversary.

My apprentice sent me the most beautiful e-mail in honor of our first anniversary. It helped get me through the drudgery of publishing Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers. If I ever need to discipline him again, I know just how to do it: I'll make him upload six editions of an e-book - plus an audio book - through Lulu's user-unfriendly publishing interface. He'll be good forever after.

*** 26 June 2008. Writing: Self-publishing, slavefic, and summer schedule.

I'm estimating that I only have three-and-a-half hours left of listening to MP3 files of Whipster before I finish proofing it by ear. But then I have to transfer my handwritten corrections onto the manuscript file; I'm not sure how long that will take. Obviously, I'm a bit worried because June is almost over, and the CreateSpace offer of free set-up only lasts till the end of July.

At this point, I really do need to finish up the darned book template. I've been putting it off because that requires me to relearn InDesign's arcane methods of doing things. I mean, really, people who write software like this should be condemned to the level of hell where they're required to use software designed by the Devil.

On an up note, though it's been several years since I wrote the three sections of "Whipster," I'm pleased with the results. That's a relief. One reason I got impatient and decided to self-publish the Three Lands series was that the first novel I wrote in it, Blood Vow, was written (counts on fingers) thirteen years ago; I wanted it to be published before I ended up feeling apologetic over it. As it is, there's one novel in the series that I'm going to have to virtually rewrite from scratch.

I've spent the last few days dwelling with pleasure in maculategiraffe's Slave Breakers universe. I do love finding a good series by a prolific author.

I tried taking a break from the series by reading another slavefic by a different author, but while that other story started off in a nice hook-tease fashion, it had a scene where a character said, "Oh, la, get a load of that jeweled inlay!" Darn Roger Zelazny and his corrupting influence on fantasy dialogue.

In other news, I'm definitely visiting my apprentice in late September and early October, and then I'll be attending Gaylaxicon in the same week I get back. I've scheduled complete collapse for the following week.

What this means is that my summer schedule (proofreading, publishing, and marketing) will end in mid-September, while my winter schedule (research, writing, and editing) will begin in mid-October. I expect my winter season to end at the end of March.

As to how the rest of this summer goes . . . Well, currently I have scheduled for print publication Bard of Pain, Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers (maybe), "Whipster," and "Blood Vow." Of the four, I'm most eager to publish "Whipster," which is why I'm worrying myself over the proofreading of it, rather than doing the sensible thing and laying out one of my already-published books. I'm not sure at this point how long it takes to lay out and publish a print book; once I know that, it will be easier for me to estimate how many books I publish this season. I'm more than a little worried about the fact that I haven't been getting books out as quickly as I'd have liked. The proofreading is what jams the process; it takes a long time, and is very boring, so I don't do as much of it daily as I should.

*** 29 July 2008. Mentoring: Schedule.

I'm now supervising my apprentice's schedule. When I check to see whether he's done the work he scheduled for the day, I'm going to feel guilty as heck if I don't do my own writing-related work. "Suffering in unison" is the way I put it when he told me that his chosen chore for this evening was cleaning his refrigerator.

*** 30 June 2008. Mentoring: Permission, orders, and schedule.

My apprentice tells me he was happy that I told him I was forwarding a letter to the author whom he had been discussing in his letter. His happiness arose from the fact that I told him I was forwarding the letter he sent me; I didn't ask him.

"You know what my vision is of the leather world?" I replied. "On one side of the room, a bunch of sirs are asking, 'You should I do this to my boy?' On the other side, a bunch of boys are saying, 'Do it! do it! do it! And don't ask our permission!'"

He laughed, but the fact is that I see a very clear line in acceptable behavior on my part: my apprentice's initial consent. Once he's given that consent - as he gave me his consent long ago to quote him without asking permission - I'm happy enough to act, whether the proposal is mine or his. But if he's unhappy about something I've proposed, I'll stop and reassess the situation. I say "unhappy," because I've never actually gotten a flat no from him. Instead, when he disagrees with me, he'll say, "I'm not sure . . ." Or he might even give an unenthusiastic "Yes, Sir." I've learned to pay greater attention to his tone of voice than to his words.

Sometimes the reassessment will show that I simply wasn't clear about what I was proposing; once the matter is clarified, he'll be in agreement with me. Other times, he'll supply me with information which shows me that the matter should be handled differently.

But there have been a few times - a very few times - when he said, "I'd rather not," and I'd rather that he did. Once I was sure he knew what he wanted, I dropped the matter. He is an adult, with his own conscience, and I have no intention of trampling on his conscience, if only because I'm fallible, so that he might be in the right in any given disagreement between us.

(This doesn't apply, I should mention, to situations where he's temporarily off-balance mentally - for example, if he's gotten himself into a highly panicky state where he can't make a measured decision. In cases like that, when it looks as though he might do something harmful to himself, I'll take control temporarily, just till his mind's back in order.)

Differences of opinion don't happen very often between us. Much more often than not, my apprentice is willing to give a try to what I propose, even if he's not sure of the outcome. He has that sort of trust in me, which I find both thrilling and frightening.

I ran across a passage in a story recently that summed up my feelings on this matter: "Luck like being loved by Bran [the protagonist's boy] came with responsibility."

Concerning more mundane matters: As you can see from my entry yesterday, my life of simplicity is now overlapping with my mentoring life, which really isn't surprising, since my simplicity entries deal partly with my attempts to keep to my schedule, and I've been helping my apprentice keep to his schedule since last fall. This week we began a joint effort at schedule-keeping: he calls me whenever he's finished with a task, so that I can give him a pep talk to help him into the next task (clearing out the refrigerator was the exciting job he faced last night), and I can thus receive encouragement - well, okay, be prodded by a desire not to feel guilty around him - into sticking to my own schedule.

*** 5 July 2008. Writing: Internet round-up and sexual consent in fiction.

I have some online articles to recommend:

maculategiraffe'sWarning: the following entry was manufactured in a facility that also processes feminism, where she talks about the nature of m/m stories for women, and why women write them.

An excerpt:

"I kind of loved the part of that essay about how women writing erotic stories about men to turn other women on is lesbian. (Which, I thought we were laying our fannish works at the feet of the male creators in self-subjugation, but anyway.) Not that I have crushes on a number of straight female writers of boyporn... and not that I want to flirt with them, or anything. Just, um, *clears throat* I hate to see my, um, my sisters in oppression clinging to the heteronormative chains of... hetero... ness. Is all.

"But in all seriousness, I think it's healthy to express your sexuality in an arena where there's no necessary expectation of it being acted on, or of being paired off. Women need homosociality too, dammit."

As I wrote to her: "So this is where all the girls went when their boarding schools shut down."

Ways to tell you've arrived, as recorded by maculategiraffe and an anonymous poster. Here's the full list:

"1. People squee over getting first comment [on your story].
2. People write fanfic/do fanart of you.
3. People announce that they are new when they comment for the first time.
4. People comment on you announcing that they cannot see why you are getting so many positive comments on this total dreck you are posting.
5. People cry over your fic, repeatedly.
6. People stay up til 5 am reading your fic and proudly boast about it."

And here's a sensitively worded post by thefrogg on fandom tropes, consent, and boundaries. An excerpt:

"I'm not asking for anyone to stop writing rape-recovery fic. Or sex pollen stories. Or pon farr stories. . . .

"What I'm asking for is this:

"First, that authors be a little more aware of what is and is not consent within our social norms (legally and socially). Second, be aware of the social framework within which a given work is set, and the shift in perspective on what is and is not consent that may occur. But most importantly, to be aware that boundaries exist, and that if your story is going to poke holes in or disregard those boundaries, you'll have to be able to redefine them to support the situation you're trying to present."

I might add that a lot of the stories I've written have come about as reactions to stories I read in which I felt that the issue of consent was handled badly. The Fool, for example, was written when I'd read a whole string of rapist-turned-lover tales. The Slavefic Plot Creator was - all too clearly - my way to safely vent my frustration about certain tropes I kept encountering in slash slave fiction. Leather in Lawnville was partly my way of screaming, "There are too many stories in leather literature in which the protagonist gets away with dubious consent without anyone noticing!" - with humor added, on the theory that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. First Lesson took a leather trope - rough sex - and peeled away its layers to reach the darkness that lay within. Twenty Thousand Gold Stars was not so much a reaction to fiction as a reaction to discussions of real-life issues, but I keep hoping that it will be read by certain fiction writers who will remain nameless. And finally, Debt Price was written after I'd read a slash story in which the protagonist was raped at six in the evening and forgave his rapist at eight the next morning. And then had sex with him.

I hope that my wording above doesn't leave anyone with the impression that my way of writing a story is to figure out first which bit of propaganda to push. In none of the above cases (well, except for "The Slavefic Plot Creator") did I set out with a message in mind. It's just that I was irritated by the poor manner in which consent issues were handled in some authors' otherwise enjoyable tales. (Bad fiction I can shrug off; good fiction with a major flaw drives me up the wall.) And so, when I wrote my own stories that dealt with the same types of scenarios, I wrote them in such a way that they themantically addressed the consent issues that had been passed over in those other tales.

What it comes down to is that I'm an ethics slut. A story that fails to address (whether themantically or through the characters) what seems to me to be an obvious ethical problem in the characters' behavior irritates me in the same way that a fade-to-black scene irritates hardcore porn readers.

I'm also a slut for stories where human behavior is realistically depicted. thefrogg is careful to indicate that she isn't attacking authors who prefer that their stories not be realistic. I would certainly echo her comments about how the societal framework of the story's setting changes how ethical issues are dealt with, but with that caveat in place, my own preference is for realistic stories. Realistic stories within the framework of distant, imaginary lands are especially pleasing to me. So, in the hopes of writers producing more of the type of fiction I like (a legitimative motive, right?), I recommend thefrogg's essay.

*** 11 June 2008. Simplicity: Examination of conscience.

I've stumbled across St. Ignatius of Loyola's steps for "examen," or examination of conscience, which I like a lot. He has two types of examen: general and particular. Here's the general examen, as described in his Spiritual Exercises (1535-1548):

* * *

The first Point is to give thanks to God our Lord for the benefits received.

The second, to ask grace to know our sins and cast them out.

The third, to ask account of our soul from the hour that we rose up to the present Examen, hour by hour, or period by period: and first as to thoughts, and then as to words, and then as to acts, in the same order as was mentioned in the Particular Examen.

The fourth, to ask pardon of God our Lord for the faults.

The fifth, to purpose amendment with His grace.

* * *

The particular examen consists of deciding to work on not committing a particular misdeed. You keep track at mid-day and at the end of the day as to how many times you've committed the misdeed, then resolving to do better.

All this fits very neatly in with my schedule-keeping tendencies, and also with what I've been doing with lectio divina. I'd like to find a way to combine these activities.

*** 12 June 2008. Simplicity and Writing: One-track mind.

A problem I'm facing is how to balance my writing life with my simplicity life. In theory, this shouldn't be a problem, since my writing is one of the ways in which I act out my principles of simplicity. In practice, it's becoming a big problem.

Here's how the swing cycle I'm finding myself in goes:

*Watches film about monks spending their structured day praying or doing manual labor. Reads blog entries about nun spending her structured day praying or doing manual labor. Reads book about hermits spending their structured days praying or doing manual labor*.

Me: "Do lectio divina! Clean the house! Make sure that I keep to my schedule! . . . Oh. I haven't gotten any editing done."

*Listens to writers chatting about their favorite stories. Reads blog entries by writers linking to their favorite articles. Reads memoir of writer talking about the science fiction conventions he attended.*

Me: "Post about my favorite stories! Follow links to download articles! Find out what cons I can attend! . . . Oh. I haven't gotten any editing done. I also haven't gotten any housework done, and when was the last time I did lectio divina?"

My darned one-track mind - as well as my tendency to do whatever I see other people doing - is driving me crazy. If I could find some nice contemplative fiction writers . . . But that hasn't happened. All the writers I come into contact with are in the World, and when I try to follow the example of unwordly people, I forget about editing and publishing my stories, because those unworldly people are not, for the most part, writers.

I think things will be a lot easier this winter when I devote most of my time to reading fiction. My Muse always turns up when that happens. But trying to balance editing/publishing with simplicity activities is turning out to be very difficult.

*** 13 July 2008. Writing: Review of Naomi Novik's Victory of Eagles.

Naomi Novik's new Temeraire novel is out. For those of you who don't know the series, think Master and Commander, but instead of captains on ships, you have captains on dragons. Ms. Novik posits the existence of an aerial corps during the Napoleonic Wars, with dragons as airships. The series is friendship fiction, describing the love between a captain and his dragon.

The previous novel ended with the protagonist in mortal peril. It's hard to know what to say about the latest novel, Victory of Eagles, without giving away the plot, because the surprises begin in the first chapter. I'll content myself with saying that Ms. Novik has a wonderful way of melding action, character development, and theme so that they all dovetail at the end of the book. The relationship between Will Laurence and his dragon Temeraire is just as touching as in the previous books: an idealistic, honor-bound officer paired with a young, commonsensical dragon. In his own way, Temeraire is as much an idealist as his captain, but only in such a manner as to bring himself into trouble with authority. By contrast, Laurence has a strong desire to adhere to the demands of service and loyalty to his country. In this novel, as in the previous one, this desire brings Laurence into conflict with his conscience. Laurence's deepening agony and Temeraire's increasing anxiety over him are beautifully portrayed.

Oh, and I guessed beforehand what the end of the novel would be. Ha.

I was thrilled when I reached the acknowledgments and discovered that it includes a tribute to the fan community. Ms. Novik really has become the poster girl for fan fiction - such a shining contrast to all those professional authors who try to hide their literary origins. (On an e-mail list recently, a fan cheerfully revealed that a professional author's protagonist first appeared as an original character in a fan fiction story written long ago by the author. The author - who posts regularly on the list - was noticeably silent in response to this observation.)

*** 14 July 2008. Home: Spiders.

When I lived downstairs in this house during college, a spider made its home in my bathroom. When one of my cousins was scheduled to come visit, my parents proposed getting rid of the spider.

"But maybe he likes spiders," I argued. My parents grudgingly agreed to let my cousin decide the matter.

The moment my cousin (whom I hadn't seen for ten years) walked through the door, I buttonholed him. "There's-a-spider-living-in-your-bathroom-and-you-like-spiders, don't you?"

Faced with a question phrased in this manner, my polite cousin had no choice but to agree.

As you can gather from this, I'm a spider fan. (I also like bats and worms. I'm a sucker for anything creepy-crawly.) Having a spider around the house is like having a cat - it's free pest control.

I'm not sure, though, how long our latest spider resident will last, because he's a bit dim-witted. First he tried to weave a web between our kitchen door and the screen door. When Doug broke that, the spider simply moved two feet inside and began weaving a second web. In plain view, right above our kitchen trash can.

I watched him weaving tonight; it was quite interesting. Dim-Witted Spider showed no concern as I dropped a banana peel into the trash can shortly thereafter.

*** 14 July 2008. Writing: Review of Manna Francis's Quid Pro Quo.

I finished Manna Francis's new original slash novel in print, Quid Pro Quo. It features Val Toreth, a sociopathic investigator/interrogator (yes, that's a euphemism) who becomes a top in a BDSM relationship with a man who's a firm opponent to torture.

Here's Toreth in one of his BDSM sessions:

* * *

Toreth fished the new toy of a pocket before he took off his jacket and dropped it on a chair. The paper wrapper crinkled as Toreth opened it. A printed notice warned of the asphyxiation hazard and cautioned against use on unsupervised prisoners in the absence of an appropriate damage waiver. The grey plastic strap had a fastener and a central guard to hold a prisoner's teeth apart and stop them from biting themselves or anyone else. Single use, disposable and sterile. Not many workplaces offered such entertaining opportunities for stealing office supplies. . . .

"You don't want to hear about interrogations, you don't like the idea that they're happening at I&I, right now, and yet you're fucking a trained interrogator. Am I the only one here who thinks that's a bit strange?"

"If the situation bothers you, you are welcome to leave. I believe the terms of the bet have been fulfilled."

The arrogance, the effortless tone of command from someone in such a vulnerable position, made Toreth feel suddenly overdressed and impatient. "No, I don't think so. Just making an observation."

"Good." [The other man] lowered his gaze, waiting, breathing slowly.

* * *

I'd already read online all the stories in the collection except the title novella, which is new. As with the other stories in the series, the volume offers a chilling portrayal of the mindset of a sociopath. This is mixed in with dark humor, sex (much of it playful rather than dark), friendship, and family ties, as well as strong feelings by Toreth for his sex partner that are not easily defined (as shown by the endless debates over their nature by the series' readers). In short, this series is unusual and powerful.

I have to admit that the novella "Quid Pro Quo" won't go onto my favorites list, because it's a mystery novella, and I'm not much of a mystery reader, unless the mystery plotline is mixed in with character development or relationship entanglements or something else along those lines. But thanks to Toreth being such an interesting character, the story kept my interest from beginning to end and was more than worth the price of the book (which is quite reasonable, only $15).

As a bonus (like those old-time commercials: "And that's not all! In addition to this fabulous novella, we'll also send you . . ."), the volume also has five other stories, all very good reading. If you like m/m stories, and you like reading them in print, I highly recommend Quid Pro Quo, as well as its predecessor, Mind Fuck.

*** 15 July 2008. Writing: Internet round-up.

Internet round-up, part two:

An interesting article on the recent promotional efforts of the SF/F press Tor: Did Tor’s free ebooks affect sales?

*** 15 July 2008. Simplicity and Writing: Schedule, sleep, lectio divina, examen, my online fiction.

Well, some sacrifices work, and some don't.

My attempt to keep to a fixed-hour schedule for all my activities was successful in certain ways and unsuccessful in others.

The way in which it was successful is that it taught me that I need to do activities in a particular order, for set amounts of time. This has proved to be a big breakthrough in helping me to get tasks done.

However, my attempts to go to bed and rise at set times just didn't work, because it didn't take into account the nights when I had insomnia. And I was having a lot of insomnia, because I was trying to cram too many activities into each day, and I was constantly watching the clock to make sure that I didn't go past the hour set for a particular activity. I quite literally got to the point where I was waking up each morning and evening with Billy Joel singing in my head: "You have to learn to pace yourself. Pressure!"

When my guide sends Billy Joel to scream at me, it's time to listen.

So I made two alterations to my schedule: I don't have to finish all my given tasks on any one day. (Can't finish them, actually, since I've revised my schedule to allow me more time for various activities that were getting short-changed in my previous schedule.) And I go to bed when I'm tired, and get up when I've stopped being tired.

I'm still doing my activities in a particular order (spread over several days), and I'm still doing them in set amounts of time, though I'm being a bit more flexible about what that set amount is. If it takes me fifty minutes to finish sorting one of Mother's boxes rather than the thirty minutes I've scheduled, that's no great crisis.

On the other hand, I'm really sticking hard to the set times for my reading during meals, my leisure time (which now includes my time for personal correspondence), and my online time. Those are the three activities where I still haven't learned self-control.

As is shown - *cough, cough* - by the fact that I spent five hours today drafting a single post for a fiction forum.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that the reason why I'm not getting much self-publishing done is that I haven't been reading about other people doing self-publishing. *Duh*. I'm such an imitative animal.

So I've added a daily reading on self-publishing. I've also come up with a neat new way of combining lectio divina and examen, and of devoting one session each to the two types of readings I'm doing. Here's how it works, using spirituality/ethics readings as an example:

* * *

Lectio: Read the particular text for the month. [This month it's Listening, a Query & Advice from the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. "Queries and Advices" are the nearest thing Quakers have to a creed - they're questions intended to make individuals or meetings examine their consciences.]

Lectio: Read the general text for the day. [This always comes from the Vitae Patrum, which I'm slowly working my way through. On July 12, the passage included this apt advice: "Speak only if you are asked to. Otherwise stay silent." However, usually the general text will be on a topic different from the particular text.]

Examen, using the particular text: Note how many times in the day I've failed to listen to others, and check whether I've improved since the previous day.

Meditatio, using the general text: Think about the Vitae Patrum text.

Oratio, using both texts: Express whatever hope for improvement is raised by the above.

Contemplatio: I'm not in charge of this part. Whatever images come to me might or might not relate to the evening's texts.

* * *

Lectio/examen using authorship texts is just the same, except that I use texts on authorship for my particular and general texts. At the moment, the book I'm using for my general text is James Charlton's The Writers' Quotation Book: A Literary Companion. My particular text comes from Julia Cameron and Elizabeth Cameron's How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy), an amusing cartoon book "advocating" all the ways in which you can avoid doing art. My particular text for July is: "Watch T.V. instead of the movie in your mind."

This is a rather complicated way of doing lectio divina. We'll see whether my one-track mind can cope with it.

On a separate topic: If anything would convince me of the worth of lectio divina, it's the fact that I chose this passage as my general authorship text two days ago, having chanced upon it in The Writers' Quotation Book:

"I write what I would like to read - what I think other women would like to read. If what I write makes a woman in the Canadian mountains cry and she writes and tells me about it, especially if she says, 'I read it to Tom when he came in from work and he cried too,' I feel I have succeeded." --Kathleen Norris

Ms. Norris is the author of one of the most popular books on monasticism, The Cloister Walk. It's frightening how different parts of my life keep coming together.

At any rate, here are the thoughts that I recorded in my lectio divina notebook after contemplation that night. (I won't bother to record all the contemplative images that spawned these thoughts; it takes a weird mind like mine to connect a vulture's shadow over the Air & Space Museum with issues of literary executorship.)

"Obligation to readers, possibility of death, need for regular sleep."

The sleep bit I dealt with above. The possibility of death is my recurring fear that, after I die, the half-finished and completely finished novels on my hard drive won't be passed on to my readers.

However, the first thought was most pertinent. The reason I (or my guide, strictly speaking) was concerned about my obligation to readers was that I'd reached the point where I'd realized that (1) my online readers are my most faithful readers, (2) I'd been frustrating them by keeping some of my writings offline for a long time, and (3) I was doing this partly for the sake of filthy lucre (i.e. so that I could sell more books when the books were published).

Six months ago, I wouldn't have thought twice about putting considerations of money first. I really (repeat that "really" one hundred times) need money. Doug just got the property tax bill, and it's nearly twice what it was last year. Since we've been barely making enough money to pay the monthly bills, in order to pay the property tax we're going to have to pull money out of his pension fund for the fourth year running.

So yes, I need money. But after reading texts for six months on the virtues of poverty and generosity, I've decided that I don't need money that much - not enough to cause suffering, however small, to my online readers. (I periodically get fan mail along the lines of, "I cry whenever I reread this story. Please please please post the sequel soon.")

On the practical side (there's always a practical side), reviews of my writings have dwindled in the past year. I think this is partly due to the fact that I took my longer stories offline, and partly due to the fact that I haven't put much new fiction online because I've been putting most of my efforts into preparing e-books and print books. At this point in my writing career, I need to be finding more readers, not losing potential readers. So I'm going back to my old policy of assuming that Free Online Fiction Is Good For A Writer, regardless as to whether it competes with a forthcoming for-sale project.

Being even more practical, this will free me up in a wonderful way to be able to start posting works-in-progress on my Website, or novels that haven't undergone their final proofreading, something I'd been reluctant to do while I was taking the Professional Approach that I must not put unfinished novels online because readers might - *gasp* - find errors in them.

Maybe they will, and maybe they'll tell me. Hallelujah - I could use more editorial eyes than I currently have.

To be completely and utterly practical: I wilt as a writer if I don't get periodic feedback. That's more important to me than all the crown jewels.

I made this decision to free up the writings on my hard disk on the same evening that I made the decision to loosen up my schedule, and the result was powerful: I felt incredibly free, both in terms of my daily life and in terms of my creativity as a writer. For too long, I've been thinking in terms of what is Professional and in terms of my hypothetical future print readers, rather than in terms of what works for me and for my online readers, who certainly deserve more of my devotion than hypothetical readers.

Of course, I still plan to get as many of my books into print as possible. My online readers have made clear that they would like to have print copies of some of my novels.

*** 16 July 2008. Mentoring: Flagging your relationship status.

My apprentice mentioned to me that he's become more aware than in the past of the diversity of relationships, thanks to his participation in the leather community.

"Well, yes, all those hankies," I replied.

So then we started speculating on what types of hankies vanilla couples should wear to signal their relationship preferences. "A hanky to flag: 'I'm not a morning person,'" I suggested. "The hanky color symbolizes, 'I'm not awake before eleven a.m.' And then you go looking for someone else who's flagging that they aren't a morning person."

What color should such a hanky be? Midnight blue?

*** 16 July 2008. Simplicity: Fitness and religion.

I browsed through the fitness section of the library today. Yoga, T'ai Chi, martial arts . . . After a while, it began to look to me as though the Easterners had the monopoly on mind-body connections.

So then I went digging in the library catalogue. Eventually, I turned up books on Christian prayer-walking, on a "Christian alternative to yoga" (yoga positions, but given Christian names, with corresponding verses from the Bible), and Messianic Jewish dancing.

*** 17 July 2008. Simplicity: Minimalist home.

From last night's lectio divina text, Vitae Patrum V.x.70:

"There are those who through hard work amass worldly goods however great the perils of the sea. And when they get rich they want even more, reckoning nothing to what they already have, but bending all their mind to getting what they don't yet have."

I've hermitized my bedroom.

I took out the furniture there I didn't need, put necessary objects in drawers or in other rooms, put unnecessary objects in the "give away to charity" box or in the trash (including a dozen pairs of shoes I haven't worn since college), took out baby blankets that have been in storage since my baby years and used them to cover up the ugly dresser tops, discarded unnecessary items in my closet, ordered necessary items in my closet, put up children's books on display (Kate Greenway's illustration of July, and Anne Ophelia Dowden's illustration of Holy Land fruits), dusted the bedroom objects that needed dusting.

What's left to do: Buy a dustmop so that I can clean the floor, buy a new shade - one that I can actually pull up - and go through my "clothes to mend" box that contains items that have been sitting there since the early 1990s.

The inspiration for all this was the altar on my tallest dresser. (I'm going to call it an altar for lack of a better word.) It has a white lace cloth on it, covered by a green gauze handkerchief folded in half so that the resulting triangle will leave room to see the lace beneath. (Green is for summer. I'm horribly liturgical in my color schemes.) Atop it is a vase with a seasonal plant arrangement: English ivy, which I've been cutting from the lawn.

The result of this arrangement, with the shadows of the ivy vines curving against the wall, looks like Japanese Zen in its simplicity and beauty. Yet it was surrounded, until two days ago, by the most dreadful clutter. I just had to do something about it.

I'm planning to hermitize the entire house. Doing my study will take ages, because of all the boxes there.

When I first committed to my quest for simplicity last winter, I felt guilty because my surroundings were cluttered, but I didn't feel the impulse to tidy them. I realize now that I was going at things the wrong way round. I had to unclutter my mind somewhat before I would be ready to unclutter my surroundings. Now, in a cyclical manner, I trust that my uncluttered surroundings will help to still my mind.

*** 17 July 2008. Writing: Overwhelmed with work.

"It sounds as though you have too much to do," my apprentice remarked after I told him that I was simultaneously trying to edit and/or lay out Noble, Blood Vow, the third story in Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers, The True Master, and Whipster.

Well, yes. Blood Vow's publication is necessitated by time restraints; if I'm to get it out before I leave to visit my apprentice at the end of September, I need to start serializing it now. "The True Master" (like Blood Vow) is a gift to the orig_slavefic comm and is part of my effort to break my online fiction bottleneck, Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers is the monthly update I'm already committed to, Noble just happens to be the on-its-way-to-publication novel I'm working on this month, and Whipster . . . Whipster will be published before the end of the century, I hope.

It's a hellishly long list, even if I divide it into two Internet visits, as I plan to, and even not taking into account that I plan to spend my next online visit mirroring my InsaneJournal blog at LiveJournal and finally visiting MySpace now that my anti-virus software is installed.

I say hopefully. Installing the anti-virus software is the next task on my list after all this editing and layout.

At any rate, this strengthens my conviction that I must take myself offline on October 18. (I'll give myself a week to calm down from Gaylaxicon before I do so.) After that, I'll stay offline, other than picking up e-mail and Friends pages, downloading an occasional story, answering my e-mail (most of which I hope will be personal correspondence rather than business correspondence), and maybe posting a story or two on the gen/slash lists. My time will be devoted to reading fiction and turn-of-the-century narratives, writing fiction, and editing what I've written, because heaven knows that I don't see hide nor hair of my Muse these days unless I dose him with large amounts of fiction reading. Which I can't do at the same time I'm publishing my fiction.

Oh, and before I leave to visit my apprentice, I have to get an issue out of True Tales - which means I have to start working on it once the July update of my Website is posted, because it always takes times to chase down stories. Where does the time go?

Later:

Well, I've had another look at the calendar and have concluded that it's too late to get "Whipster" into print this season.


I have two months left before I end my publishing season. In that amount of time, I'd have to buy the ISBNs, finish proofreading, do the final edit, finalize the book template, lay out the text, lay out the cover, submit the results to CreateSpace, correct any errors if CreateSpace rejected my submission, wait for the proof copy, correct any errors that show up in the proof copy, resubmit the results, wait for CreateSpace to post the book, announce the book online, send the book out for reviews, and serialize the book online.

No.

My poor readers have been waiting forever for the third part of Michael's House, so as soon as I've finished proofreading and doing the final editing of "Whipster" (which should be soon), I'll begin serializing it online. Then I'll see whether I can get it and Rebirth into print at the beginning of my next publishing season - that is, next spring. Those two novels are my best hope for obtaining print readers; if they don't sell in print, none of my work will.

Darn it. I really did want to appear in print this year. But at least I know where the logjam is in the publication process: proofreading, which takes weeks for me to do. I'll try to figure out a way to resolve that problem over the winter.

*** 17 September 2008. Simplicity: Switching to a task-oriented schedule.

I wrote above, "I'm still doing my activities in a particular order (spread over several days), and I'm still doing them in set amounts of time, though I'm being a bit more flexible about what that set amount is."

This seems to be working really well, especially when combined with the idea of my setting the goal of accomplishing certain tasks. ("I will put my bedroom in order.") As long as the task takes no less than two hours, then I don't worry overly much about what the stopping time is of the task. Thus I'm left with a feeling of accomplishment after each task. ("I can see the color of my bedroom closet floor again!")

Just in case that feeling of accomplishment isn't enough to rein in my desire to spend all day writing e-mails, I'm not letting myself go online till I've finished the full cycle of activities:

Sort belongings in boxes. Proofread. Household duties involving labor. Publish (that is, lay out text, design covers/booktrailers, and prepare publication announcements). Household duties involving reading (including old correspondence). Heavy editing.

When you add in my daily acitivites (eating/reading, exercise, lectio/examen, journal-writing, and schedule keeping), as well as my half-day commitment to care for my mother every second day, the above schedule works out to about a week's worth of activities, I calculate - which is how long I want to stay offline currently.

As you can see, I'm altering writing-related work with household tasks. This type of switching seems to work well too.

*** 19 July 2008. Simplicity: Internet addiction measures.

Where my Internet addiction is concerned, it always seems to be a case of "out of the frying pan, into the fire." I no sooner manage to tear myself away from posting daily at writers' forums than I find myself addicted to posting at orig_slavefic.

Well, at least it's clearer to me at this stage that half-measures won't do. I've set up a bunch of Internet rules aimed at stopping me from starting new threads (unless I'm seeking information for my writing, etc.) and stopping me from posting to people who aren't posting in response to one of my posts (unless they're talking about me amongst themselves, if I felt I could add something to the conversation).

In other words, no more hours spent responding to posts linked from metafandom or its IJ equivalent. And no more hours spent compiling links for me to post on forums. That should free up a lot of time, as well as conform better to my more-time-in-solitude lifestyle.

If I want to get to know someone better, than I can darned well write them an e-mail.

Later:

I totted up my hours for the week. Seven hours spent getting my writings edited and published, twenty-seven on leisure time, mainly online posting. Oy vey.

*** 19 July 2008. Writing and Mentoring: Internet round-up (self-publishing and leather), plus my rant about gatekeepers in the publishing world.

Top Ten Self-Publishing Myths, by April Hamilton at the ever-interesting TeleRead blog. It's the usual hype on self-publishing, but I point to it because Ms. Hamilton several times makes the important point that what has worked for authors/publishers in the past isn't necessarily what will work in the current day. And I like how she counters the comment, "There's no quality-control system in place to help buyers ferret out the best self-published books," by saying, "Why waste time and effort pursuing elaborate self-pub rating or quality control systems, when you can simply reach out directly to readers and let the work speak for itself?"

Indeed. If all those people screaming for gatekeepers to every published book ("Publishers need to exist to stop the bad stuff from being published!") had had their way at the beginning of the Internet, can you imagine what the Web would look like today? The very virtues of the Web - its social networking possibilities and its ability to appeal to every special-interest group - would have been stripped from it. There would be no Wikipedia, because what publisher in their right mind would have started a user-created encyclopedia? There would be no citizen journalism, no YouTube, no Flickr, no MySpace - all of those sites would be banned because they permit bad art to be published. There would be very little gay fiction online, not much erotica, no fan fiction, and almost no quirky little literary works that appeal to a select group of people. And for heaven's sakes, there would be no blogs. I mean, you need gatekeepers to prevent that sort of trash from being published, right?

I prefer a world where I can make up my own mind about what to read. And as for finding the good stuff, that's what reader recommendations are for.

Getting back to the topic (Internet round-up), Ms. Hamilton links to a Random House / Zogby poll of readers. Among the interesting finds (for me as a self-publisher):

"82% said they prefer to curl up with a printed book over using the latest in reading technology."

"More than half (52%) admit to judging a book by its cover."

"Respondents said they most often buy books online (43%) or at chain bookstores (32%)."

Meanwhile, the Leather Archives & Museum has added a lot of new online material in recent months, including the Aubrey's Playroom interviews with notable leather people (including leather authors), a book catalogue, resources, an LJ, online exhibits, and (intriguing for anyone who writes about gay history) 1960s gay porn films. (The latter page keeps crashing my browser. But I suppose that's appropriate.)

ACTIVITIES SINCE MY LAST DAILY LIFE ENTRY

Fiction written and edited:
--"Forge" (The Eternal Dungeon).

Fiction edited:
--"Whipster" (Michael's House).
--"On Guard" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Emergency Call" (Leather in Lawnville).
--"Elevator" (Leather in Lawnville).
--"Triad" (Life Prison).
--"Rebirth" (The Eternal Dungeon").
--"Noble" (Princeling).
--"The True Master" (Master/Other).

Fiction sent out to be betaed:
--"Pleasure" (Master/Other).

Fiction laid out and published:
--"On Guard" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Noble" (Princeling).

Submitted for publication:
--"Unconventional Service," to Simply Service.

Fiction read:
--Clara Swift: "Bleak Aspect" (crossover historical AU slash fan fiction).
--maculategiraffe: "The Slave Breakers" (original slash).
--pierrot_dreams: "The Golden Bird" (original slash).
--david stein: "Carried Away" sequel (unpublished novella, for beta commentary).
--Naomi Novik: "Victory of Eagles."
--Manna Francis: "Quid Pro Quo."

Simplicity reading:
--Elaine St. James: "Inner Simplicity: 100 Ways to Regain Peace and Nourish Your Soul."
--"Washington Window" (newspaper of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington).
--Kathleen Kenna (with photos by Andrew Astawicki): "A People Apart" (Old Order Mennonites).
--Donald B. Kraybill, Steven M. Nolt, and David L. Weaver-Zercher: "Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy."
--Henri J. M. Nouwen: "The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery."
--Assorted articles on cleaning clutter.
--Amish country catalogue.
--Julia Cameron: "How to Avoid Making Art (or Anything Else You Enjoy."
--Anne F. Grizzle: "Reminders of God: Altars for Personal and Family Devotion."
--Sage Bennet: "Wisdom Walk: Nine Practices for Creating Peace and Balance from the World's Spiritual Traditions."
--Jennifer Leigh Seligh: "Thinking Outside the Church: 110 Ways to Connect with Your Spiritual Nature."
--Laurette Willis: "Basic Steps to Godly Fitness."
--Linus Mundy: "The Complete Guide to Prayer-Walking: A Simple Path to Body-and-Soul Fitness."

Leisure reading (nonfiction):
--"Smithsonian Magazine."
--Susan Jonas and Marilyn Nissenson: "Going Going Gone: Vanishing Americana."
--"Great Photographers" (Life Library of Photography).

Films watched:
--"Into Great Silence" (film about Carthusian monks).

Books bought:
--Naomi Novik: "Victory of Eagles."
--Sylvia Engdahl: "Stewards of the Flame."
--Manna Francis: "Quid Pro Quo."

Events attended:
--Smithsonian Folklife Festival in D.C.
--Greenbelt Fourth of July fireworks (watched from the window of Doug's study).
--Benedictine Cell in D.C.