Love in Dark Settings

"The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair."

--Mary Heaton Vorse.

Topics in this post: Weekly cycle. Pleasure and torture - design and finances. The art of avoiding the obvious (turn-of-the-century toilet paper). Editing and proofreading. A reason to love het: Mary Stewart. Overwhelmed. Not again. My Muse and death. Re-examining fundamental principles in my publishing work. Publication schedule redux. Victorian water engines and evil things to do with them. Changes in my diet. How to spend a holiday. Happy (late) Thanksgiving! Progress in scanning. Soaring upwards with writing counts . . . and staying there. Monthly totals. Bits of progress on chores.

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

*** 17 November 2008. Simplicity and Writing: Weekly cycle.

Two hours online tonight, same as last week. Most of that time was spent answering e-mail, so now my inbox is almost clear. (Well, except for that pre-November mail I'm still working my way through.) I'll finish clearing up my inbox tomorrow, hold another leather seminar with my apprentice, do some editing of old stories, and read some other authors' stories that my Muse doesn't like but I do. (That is to say, they're not great stylistically, but they're enjoyable to read.) I think I've done as much research as I need to do for the next two stories in Mercy's Prisoner, so I'm through with research for now. Editing is much more urgent; I've got six novellas and two novels to finish editing before next spring, not counting the stories I'll finish writing before then. And the only time my Muse seems to be allowing me to do such editing is in the brief period between the time I go offline and the time he grabs me by the throat again.

When I was looking at colleges to attend between my junior and senior year of St. John's (I needed a break; it was an intense program), one of the colleges that caught my attention - Colorado College, was it? - had a program just made for one-track-minded folk like me. Instead of taking four or more courses at a time, students took one. The courses lasted - oh, I don't remember how long, let's say three-and-a-half weeks. And then the students would be given a four-day break before the next course.

My Muse seems to work the same way. Write for a week, take a break of a day or two, and then get back to work. I know, I know, that's everybody else's normal work-week, but understand: I didn't go online today because it was one week after I last went online. I did so because my Muse suddenly abandoned me, as though he were pushing me out the door, saying, "Scat! Go do something else while I recharge."

On a different topic: I had wondered at the end of October whether I was setting things up properly for this year's hibernation (because I'd never done a full hibernation before). Would I find myself going online because I didn't have everything offline that I needed in order to get through the winter? Well, I seem to be well supplied in stories to read, so that's not proving to be a problem. (At least, not as long as my apprentice keeps downloading the latest installments of "The Slave Breakers" for me.) But I now know that I would have made two additional preparations: I would have done all my research beforehand (because I'm going to have to do a frickin' hard bout of research on steam engines further down the road this winter), and I'd have collected a bunch of cover art ahead of time so that I could design all of next year's e-books over the winter. I'm finding that - contrary to what I'd planned - I'm doing bits of Website layout at odd moments, as a leisure activity, without apparent detriment to my Muse. (Unfortunately, I can't lay out the stories themselves till they're proofread next summer.) Likewise, I can do cover design for next year, but I don't have most of the cover art on my hard drive for that, drat it. I do plan to do the finishing touches on some booktrailers over the winter.

It would be nice if I could lay out the print version of Whipster too, but for that, alas, I need to have my eyes in better order than they are in the winter. And I can't do the cover design for the print novel till I know how many pages long the volume will be.

I'd like to get as much prep work done as possible over the winter, because my schedule for next summer is so very tight - how tight I won't know till I see whether I can keep to a proofreading schedule next summer. I'm hopeful that this winter's writing schedule will train me to be more regular in my work habits.

(Gosh, you can tell I've been online tonight, can't you? I get suddenly chatty.)

*** 17 November 2008. Writing and Home: Pleasure and torture - design and finances.

Darn, I'd forgotten how easy it is to create book covers. I spent twenty-five minutes flat creating the cover for "Law of Vengeance" (The Three Lands). And I was being leisurely about it.

On a separate topic: Too bad I'm not a masochist where finances are concerned, because I spent this afternoon undergoing moderate torture. Mild torture for me is spending more than two minutes thinking about finances. Moderate torture is spending an hour thinking about it, but having nothing go wrong.

At any rate, I managed to open the bank account for my mother's estate. You can tell how long it's been since I had any money of my own from the fact that, when I was writing out the form for checks, it didn't occur to me to include my address. The last time I ordered new checks was, I don't know, probably in the early 1990s.

*** 17 November 2008. Writing: The art of avoiding the obvious (turn-of-the-century toilet paper).

I spent a frustrating quarter of an hour tonight doing searches through my bulging folder of Victorian and Edwardian prison writings in search of information on what prisoners used to wipe themselves with in late Victorian prisons.

Constance Lytton says in Prison and Prisoners (1919) that brown toilet paper was abundantly provided to female prisoners at Holloway Prison, where she was incarcerated in 1909. (Some of the prisoners used the paper as hair curlers.) Thomas Mott Osborne describes in detail in Within Prison Walls (1914) the Victorian system of using buckets for toilets, still in use when he was voluntarily incarcerated at Auburn State Prison in 1913 . . . but says nothing about wiping materials. Ditto Donald Lowrie in My Life in Prison (1912), writing about his arrival at San Quentin Prison in 1901. An article by Edgardo Rotman in The Oxford History of Prison says the first toilets in American prisons were installed in 1899.

All well and good, but that doesn't answer my question of whether toilet paper was being used by male prisoners in 1900. This was a period of rapid technology change, and there were also tremendous differences in how female and male prisoners were treated, and so I can't take for granted that a 1900 prison for men would have provided the same abundance of brown toilet paper as that 1909 prison for women did.

It looks as though I'm going to have to chase keywords at Google Books.

Why go to all this trouble over a minor matter? It's because real-life turn-of-the-century imprisonment was so much more colorful than anything my imagination could come up with. Who would have guessed, for example, that showers were used as torture devices in Victorian prisons? If those 1900 male prisoners were wiping themselves with something other than toilet paper, it's bound to be interesting.

*** 17 November 2008. Writing: Editing and proofreading.

I finally finished that blasted collation of the two files of The Breaking. Now I only need to finish up the final editing of Chapter Five, which should be easy. Since the novella is already proofread, I can then lay it out for the Web and for Kindleization.

Then I get to work finishing up the fiddling bits of editing Whipster. Alas, I still have to find a book reference for the historical note, and I can't do that till spring, when my eyes will be up to pawing through books at the University of Maryland libraries. But I can at least get the last two parts of the novel ready for publication, since they've been proofread.

So that will be three novellas ready for publication next year, hurrah. The rest will have to wait to be proofread during my publishing season, though I'm toying with the idea of doing a small bit of proofreading each day that my Muse doesn't demand my attendance. After all, I've been doing one to three hours of editing a day this month, and it doesn't seem to have slowed down my Muse. The more proofreading I can do during the winter, the less likely I am to expire from boredom next summer. (Did I mention that I really, really hate proofreading?)

But I have other editing jobs to squeeze in as well: Right or Right (Darkling Plain), From Hell to the Stars (From Hell to the Stars), Law of Vengeance (The Three Lands), the last five parts of Rebirth (The Eternal Dungeon), The True Master (The True Master), Edgeplay in Mayhill 1-3 (Loren's Lashes), and Water in a Drought (Loren's Lashes).

Plus whatever stories I end up writing over the winter. Where am I going to find the time to do all this?

Well, at least my Muse seems contented to churn out enough wordage that I'm likely to meet my writing goals for the winter (though he's currently taking a breather after my Internet spell). That's something I had not at all expected would happen; I'd thought I was being highly optimistic - frankly, cocksure - in scheduling myself for 150,000 words in five months. My total wordage for all twelve months of last year was less than 100,000.

As it is, I'm one-tenth of the way through my winter season and one-fifth of the way to my wordage goal.

*** 19 November 2008. Writing: A reason to love het: Mary Stewart.

Finished Rosemary Sutcliff's The Silver Branch, which is so full of jewels that I kept sending my apprentice passages from it. Here's one of them. The "Flavius" mentioned in the passage is a young centurion.

o--o--o

And then the Atrium door opened, letting out into the courtyard a soft flood of lamplight to set the white roses of the colonnade shining, and Aunt Honoria appeared, evidently drawn by the nearing uproar, and prepared if need be to do something about it, for she held in one hand a small flower-shaped lamp, and in the other an old uniform dagger.

Her gaze fell with the lamplight on the three tattered and panting fugitives, and she stiffened, her eyes widening a little. But Justin had been right in his judgement of her at their first meeting. She would never waste time in surprise or useless questions. She said in that husky, jewel-cut voice of hers, 'So, my Great-Nephews - and another.' Then, with a flick of her dagger-hand towards the clamour that rose with the unmistakable note of a hunt giving tongue, 'Is that for you?'

Justin nodded dumbly, his breath too thick in his throat for speech. Flavius said, 'Yes, Saxons.'

'Inside with you.' She stepped back, and next instant they were in the Atrium, and the door shut and barred behind them. 'The hypocaust,' said Aunt Honoria. 'Thank the gods it is summer and there's no fire.'

'You and I always thought alike,' said Flavius, with a breathless croak of laughter, his back against the door, 'but we thought the house was empty. Better put us out again through the slaves' quarters and let us run for it. We shall bring danger on you if we stay.'

'Flavius dear, there isn't time to be noble,' said Aunt Honoria.

o--o--o

I had a look through my "Favorite Fiction" folder tonight and had a hard time choosing the next book to read - there were so many good books there. I finally settled on this:

Mary Stewart: The Moon-Spinners. Heterosexual fiction, contemporary fiction, mystery, love stories, crime themes, prisoner fiction, race/ethnicity themes. ¶ Print novel. ¶ For teenagers and adults.

I owe a lot to Mary Stewart, and not only because I've unconsciously cribbed from her Merlin trilogy numerous times over the years since I first stumbled across her novels in my mother's bedroom, at age thirteen. I've also borrowed freely from Stewart's romantic thrillers. The clever narrative device she employs in The Ivy Tree (which I could not possibly describe without offering major spoilers to that novel), her persistent use of determined-but-vulnerable teenage boys as sympathetic characters, her combination of life-threatening action sequences and heterosexual romance . . . all of these features have crept into my own writings, without my being aware at the time of their origins.

The Moon-Spinners is classic hurt/comfort. A young woman who is touring Crete stumbles upon a young man who is badly wounded and is hiding from men who want to murder him. The tough Greek man who is tending the young man tries to chase her away. He should know better than to try to chase away a Mary Stewart heroine.

"Have you any food?"

"A little. I had bread, and some cheese--"

"And fine stuff it looks, too." There was a polythene mug lying in the dirt beside the bed. It had held wine, and there were flies on the rim. I picked it up.

"Go and wash this. Bring my bag, and my cardigan. They're where I dropped them when you jumped on me with your beastly knife. There's food there. It's not sickroom stuff, but there's plenty of it, and it's clean. . . . Fallen stones, what nonsense!" I turned [again] to Lambis. "What was it, a knife?"

"A bullet," he said, not without a certain relish.

"A bullet?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

"So you see," said Lambis, his surliness giving way to a purely human satisfaction, "you should have kept away. And when you go, you will say nothing. There is danger, great danger. Where there has been one bullet, there can be another. And if you speak a word in the village of what you have seen today, I shall kill you myself."

"Yes, all right." I spoke impatiently; I was scarcely listening. The look in Mark's face was frightening me to death. "But get my bag first, will you? And here, wash this, and make sure it's clean."

I thrust the mug at him, and he took it, like a man in a dream.

"And hurry up!" I added. He looked from me to the mug, to Mark, to the mug again, then left the hut without a word.

Go, girl.

The hero turns out to be as strong-minded as the heroine, which makes for some interesting interactions.

"Lie down," I said. "Come on, pull this up round you."

"You're cold yourself. You've got no coat." He sat up, seeming to come to himself. "Heavens, girl, I've got your woolly thing here. Put it on."

"No. I'm fine. No, Mark, damn it, you've got a temperature. Don't make me fight you every inch of the way."

"Do as you're told."

"I'm the nurse, you're only the patient. Put the beastly thing on and shut up and lie down."

"I'm dashed if I do. With you sitting there with nothing on but that cotton thing--"

"I'm all right."

"Maybe. But you can't sit there all night."

"Look," I said, in some alarm, for his teeth were beginning to chatter, "lie down, for pity's sake. We'll share the wretched thing. I'm coming in with you, then we'll both be warm. Lie down."

I did say this was classic hurt/comfort, right?

*** 19 November 2008. Writing: Overwhelmed.

Redid my writing progress report to show what stage every publication scheduled for next year is at.

It looks way intimidating, even when I collapsed the list so that multiple novellas within the same novel were listed on the same line.

Darn it, I have a lot of work ahead of me. And most of the work isn't composition, which is my main task for this winter.

*** 21 November 2008. Mentoring and Home: Not again.

Doug received an upsetting call tonight on a matter related to my mother's death. My mother - I explain for the sake of those of you who are coming into this story halfway - died unexpectedly last July after an illness following major surgery. Doug and I were in the hospital when she died, after the emergency team was unable to revive her.

Thirty minutes before that call, I received a phone call from my apprentice. His father had just died unexpectedly after an illness following major surgery. My apprentice was in the hospital when his father died, after the emergency team was unable to revive him.

And people wonder why I write darkfic.

My apprentice - not to my surprise, but much to my admiration - is keeping very steady amidst his grief. He not only has to grieve, he has practical problems, because he and his father were sharing an apartment as a way to pool together the slim disability benefits they both received. Now my apprentice has to figure out a way to survive financially.

Doug's comment, when I told him that one of my apprentice's current worries was over how he could pay next month's rent, was, "Wow. We had it easy after your mother's death, compared to that."

*** 21 November 2008. Writing and Mentoring: My Muse and death.

My Muse works like Layle Smith: he thrives on dark events. He delivered me three thousand words this morning (featuring Layle, of course), before I'd even had breakfast. That took me over my thirty-thousand-word goal for this month.

Meanwhile, my apprentice is arranging for a roommate to move with him, so the worst of his financial worries is lifted for now. I made a half-joke tonight about not correcting him this week when he forgot to call me Sir, and he replied, "Well, actually, Sir . . ." Turns out that what he feels the need for right now is discipline. I'm assuming that his "boy" instinct must work the same way my authorial instinct does: in the six weeks following my mother's death, the only ordered part of my life was my publishing schedule.

*** 22 November 2008. Writing: Re-examining fundamental principles in my publishing work.

Early this morning, I finished "Sweet Blood 1: Bonds" (The Eternal Dungeon) - 26,000 words in all. Even taking into account that I got distracted into working on other stories this month, and that I still have a week left before the end of the month, it looks as though I'll be producing roughly one novella a month. That adds up to roughly one novel by the end of March.

It isn't enough.

I've been looking at my publishing schedule, my bank account, my writing output, and chewing my lower lip as I examine them. I keep feeling that I've got my priorities wrong.

What are my priorities? Writing as many stories as possible. Making sure they're as well-polished as possible for my readers. Publishing the stories online and in print. Finding new readers. Getting financial rewards.

My present publishing schedule doesn't seem to encourage the above goals. I'm spending too much time on peripheral activities that don't do much to advance my primary goals.

So last night - one of those sleepless nights where I worried the matter over in my head for hours - I reached some tentative conclusions about changes I need to make in how I publish my stories. Here's the thoughts I had on what I should do.

My foundation blocks:

1) Spend as much time of the year as possible in writing, and as little time as possible on other writing-related activities.

Otherwise, I'll get to the end of my life and wonder why I still have so many stories bottled up inside me.

2) Spend a greater amount of time on publication methods that bring in more money.

Necessary, alas. I have bills to pay.

3) Make sure that all of my fiction is available online.

I'm adamant about this; I'm an online author, first and foremost.

4) Make sure that, if the computers of the world should get wiped out, my stories will be available in printed form.

Okay, so I'm paranoid. Or I just have a fetish for print.

The stones above the foundation blocks:

1) Spend less time on editing.

I'm still not sure about this one. I really feel that I benefit from my current editing system. But the way I have things set up, I'm spending about four times as much time on editing as on writing, with the greatest amount of time spent on "proofreading," i.e. listening to my stories through text-to-speech and making changes afterwards. At the very least, I need to consider whether I can find ways to cut time on the tasks I'm currently doing. At worst, I may need to consider whether I should be proofreading.

2) Spend less time on cover art and booktrailers.

I love doing cover art and booktrailers, but the fact is that they're time-intensive (in terms of collecting the appropriate art and music), and they aggravate my Internet addiction. I need to minimize the amount of time I spend on cover art and consider classifying the creation of booktrailers as a leisure-time hobby, because I have no real evidence that booktrailers are bringing me in many new readers.

3) Spend less time on marketing.

I already began to make cutbacks last summer in the amount of time I spent in sending out announcements of my new stories, but the problem continues: I've set my publishing schedule up in such a way that I spend six months out of the year marketing rather than writing.

4) Spend less time on Kindle e-books.

It was a noble experiment, but my experience with Kindle e-books has been the same as with Lulu e-books: I spend a lot of time on it and receive few rewards in return.

The only real benefit I've received from the Kindle e-books has been that I've been listed as a LibraryThing author - but I could simply have waited till I was in print for that. Rainbow Reviews has been faithfully reviewing my e-books, which is wonderful, but as it happens, Rainbow Reviews is one of the few review sites that will also review online fiction, so publishing in e-books hasn't helped any. As for financial rewards . . . My best-seller so far is Life Prison: eight copies, for a total of $11.20. Though I'm hopeful that money will continue to trickle in from my already published Kindle titles, this obviously ain't a way to pay the bills. Nor am I pulling in many new readers.

I might continue to publish Kindle editions of my short fiction, but not the installments of my larger works. Instead . . .

5) Focus my attention on two types of publication: online and print.

I'm not totally eliminating the possibility of publishing PDF versions of my print novels. But my only remaining hope to make money from my fiction is through print books. I remain committed to putting all my fiction online as well.

6) Focus on publishing whole novels rather than novella-length installments.

This is a big change. I write novella-length (and occasionally novelette-length). It's the length my Muse prefers, when he's not trying to convince me to write mega-novels. For this reason, and because I was focussing on e-book publication during the past year, I had thought it best to release my novels as novella installments.

But this winter, I redid my writing schedule in such a way that I ought to be able to have full novels ready for publication by the end of the season. More importantly, I can save an enormous amount of time if I issue a novel rather than five or six installments of a novel.

This totally changes how my publishing season would be run. Instead of a publishing schedule like this . . .

o--o--o

APRIL 2009
--Law Links 1 (The Three Lands).
--Rebirth 2 (The Eternal Dungeon).
--Mercy's Prisoner 3 (Life Prison).
--Whipster 2 (Michael's House).
--Edgeplay in Mayhill 1 (Loren's Lashes).

MAY 2009
--Law Links 2 (The Three Lands).
--Rebirth 3 (The Eternal Dungeon).
--Mercy's Prisoner 4 (Life Prison).
--Whipster 3 (Michael's House).
--Edgeplay in Mayhill 2 (Loren's Lashes).

o--o--o

. . . and so on and so forth, for six months straight, I could instead have a schedule like this:

o--o--o

SUMMER 2009
--Law Links (The Three Lands).
--Rebirth (The Eternal Dungeon).
--Mercy's Prisoner (Life Prison).
--Whipster (Michael's House).
--Edgeplay in Mayhill (Loren's Lashes).

o--o--o

That's it. I wouldn't have to spend six months out of the year on marketing. I wouldn't have to create six covers (for six separate installments of a single novel). I wouldn't have to create six blurbs. I wouldn't have to publish six e-books. I wouldn't have to update the same series site six times. I wouldn't have to announce six installments of the same novel. In other words, I'd be cutting the amount of publishing/marketing work I do by roughly five-sixths.

Oh, I forgot one more way to spend more time on my writing:

7) Stop composing journal entries that take me two hours to write and edit.

*** 24 November 2008. Writing: Publication schedule redux.

My Muse seems to have wandered off to a cruise on the Caribbean; however, I kept myself busy today with grocery shopping, cooking (frozen vegetables; I'm such a gourmet cook), Website layout, proofreading, and four hours of fiction-reading. The last is a desperate attempt to lure back my Muse.

Meanwhile, I had more thoughts on how to handle (1) my financial problems and (2) my crammed editing schedule.

In the pro world, publication often goes like this:

1) Hardback.

2) Paperback.

The idea, of course, is that you issue the most expensive edition first in hopes of getting money from readers who are too impatient to wait for the paperback edition.

In my case, the problem I have is figuring out how to raise money for the set-up fees for my paperbacks. I'd been considering using CreateSpace as my self-publishing service, which has no set-up fee for its basic version, but that would mean either making less money than I would through Lightning Source or having to go to the trouble of switching over to Lightning Source at a later date.
(Lightning Source is a POD printer connected with a major wholesaler that distributes to online bookstores internationally - and to bricks-and-mortar stores in North America and the United Kingdom, but that's unlikely to enter into the equation.) On the other hand, if I went with Lightning Source from the start, I could pay off the set-up fee and proof copy by selling only ten to fifteen copies of the book.

But I really want my books to pay for themselves beforehand, so that I don't have to keep dipping into my savings ('cause my savings are, *cough cough*, next to non-existent).

So this is what I have in mind for a publication schedule for my books:

1) HTML e-book edition, with Part One of the novel online. The HTML e-book edition would be distributed through Lulu.

2) Hardback and PDF e-book editions, once it's summer, so that my eyes can do print layout. These would also be distributed through Lulu; there would be no set-up fee for the hardback.

3) Paperback edition through Lightning Source, once I'd earned enough money to pay for the set-up fee and proof copy. At the same time that I published the paperback, I would finally put the full novel online, depending thereafter on print and PDF e-book sales to bring in money.

Under this publication schedule, every book would pay its own way, and I wouldn't spend any money to put a book into print until it had proved to be popular enough to sell copies. And I'd still be able to put all my fiction online - I just wouldn't do so immediately, the way I do now.

How many copies will I need to sell to put Whipster into print? Well, I don't actually know how many print pages "Whipster" is, but at a rough estimate, I'll say 200 pages. Lightning Source's set-up fee for a 200-page novel, as of earlier this year, was $80; plus, I'm required to buy a proof copy, which is something like $30 - let's say $40 to be safe. So I'd need to earn $120 beforehand. With the e-book selling at $6.99 (my e-book prices are according to wordage), I'd have to sell 17 copies to cover the paperback fees. That's really stretching it, by my current record of e-book sales, but maybe keeping the online edition offline for now will make a difference. And the hardback and PDF editions might help.

What this means, though, is that I'll have to publish the HTML e-book edition of "Whipster" now, if I'm to have any hope of publishing it in paperback next summer. Likewise, I'd have to publish each HTML e-book edition of my novels at the time the novels are ready to lay out in HTML, in order to give myself lead time to earn money for the paperback editions, which I can only publish in the summertime, thanks to my eyes.

Frankly, this is a relief. I've been feeling very intimidated by my editing schedule and haven't been feeling much incentive to tackle the twenty-seven stories and novel parts that are currently at the editing stage. It's my darned one-track mind again; trying to edit twenty-seven stories simultaneously is, um, beyond my primitive capacities.

Well, I still need to do a little bit of multi-tasking in editing, simply because my Muse multi-tasks in composing, but with this sort of round-the-year publication schedule, I could focus most of my energies on getting one novel at a time ready for publication. And I don't think it would overwhelm me, Internetwise, to announce one e-book a month during the winter, given that I only plan to announce the HTML e-book in a very limited number of locations - basically at a handful of LJ comms, plus at my Website and blogs. (And at e-mail lists, but I can prepare those announcements offline.) That should take me less than an hour, with maybe another hour devoted to actually uploading the e-book at Lulu. Very doable. Any really intensive marketing I'd save for the summertime.

(*I glance at my Muse to see whether he approves, but he's busy drinking a daiquiri.*)

*** 26 November 2008. Writing: Victorian water engines and evil things to do with them.

When my Muse isn't drinking daiquiris, he's bugging me at the wrong moments.

Here I was, all set to devote today to finishing the editing of "Whipster." I did spend a full hour working out the problems in the chronology - and I'm still not done! - but most of the rest of the time was spent thinking about Victorian water engines, which my Eternal Dungeon characters are going to make nasty use of.

Mind you, I can't blame my Muse. I've been promising him for four years that I'd finish up the research for this chapter, but the only thing I did was spend three hours in a hotel room with Parhelion and Sphinxvictorian, figuring out how to choreograph the events in that chapter. (The hotel bed served as a model for the rack.) Parhelion insisted (based on the setting I had) that I needed to use a water engine for that chapter, rather than a steam engine; I knew even less about water engines than I do about steam engines (which is saying something), so I put off the yucky bit of research I'd have to do.

Finally, my Muse gave up and sent me the opening dialogues of the chapter this morning. So I spent an hour on the phone with my apprentice this evening, asking him really intelligent questions like this:

"What's a boiler?"

"What's a rivet?"

"Is an electrical current an object or an operation?"

I must be the only physics minor in the world who would ask such questions. You're beginning to understand, I'm sure, why I flunked Junior Lab.

Fortunately, my point-of-view character knows even less than I do about such matters. Unfortunately, though, the Victorian science authors who wrote about water engines were more interested in techie talk than in telling me what an overshot water engine looked/sounded/smelled like.

Amidst all the dull reading, my spirits were lifted when I found online a Victorian newspaper account of the world's first electrocution (which was a botched job; it took the executioners eight minutes to be sure they'd killed the prisoner). I know, my spirits have weird tastes, but there's writing for you: a careful, minute-by-minute account of everything that happened, down to the smallest detail. If only that journalist could have been sent to cover water engines.

*** 26 November 2008. Home and Simplicity: Changes in my diet.

Just an update for the two or three of you who are watching, enthralled, my efforts to improve my eating pattern.

A reminder: I had an eating pattern earlier this year that I considered good, but not good enough. Here's what a typical day's diet was like.

o--o--o

Glass of orange juice.

Whole wheat sandwich with peanut butter and banana slices. Half a glass of milk.
Dessert: Whole wheat sandwich with cream cheese and jam. Half a glass of milk.

A mixture of chopped vegetables (mainly winter squash and greens) on whole wheat couscous, covered with shredded mozzarella. Glass of fruit juice.
Dessert: Whole wheat sandwich with cream cheese and pear slices. Half a glass of milk.

"Slaw" (minced veggies, mainly carrot) on whole wheat couscous, covered with spaghetti sauce and shredded mozzarella. Glass of fruit juice.
Dessert: Whole wheat sandwich with natural peanut butter and jam. Half a glass of milk.

Whole wheat sandwich with Cheddar cheese spread and broccoli sprouts. Half a glass of milk.
Dessert: Whole wheat sandwich with peanut butter and jam. Half a glass of milk.

Snack: Do I really have to tell you?

o--o--o

You can see the deadly pattern, I'm sure. I was overdosing on bread, cheese, peanut butter, and high-sugar forms of fruit, such as juice and jams. My calorie count, while not as bad as it could be, was higher than I liked.

I needed more vegetables, whole fruit, and beans. (Doug doesn't often put beans into his veggie mixes, because he eats a bean mixture on the side that I don't care for.) Most of all, I needed to find a way to satisfy my sweet tooth in a way that didn't involve eating a sandwich for every dessert. Unfortunately, just eating fruit wouldn't work. I find fruit on its own too sweet.

Here's a typical day now:

o--o--o

Glass of orange juice.

Whole wheat sandwich with veggie cream cheese, slaw, and broccoli sprouts. Finish off the above orange juice.
Dessert: Chocolate caramel piece. Quarter of a glass of milk.

A mixture of chopped vegetables (mainly winter squash and greens) on whole wheat couscous, covered with finely shredded Parmesan cheese. Lima beans. Apple. Water.
Dessert: Chocolate caramel piece. Quarter of a glass of milk.

Whole wheat pasta mixed with veggies and peas, covered with finely shredded Parmesan cheese. Pear. Water.
Dessert: Chocolate caramel piece. Quarter of a glass of milk.

Whole wheat sandwich with Cheddar cheese spread and chopped broccoli. Grapes. Water.
Dessert: Chocolate caramel piece. Quarter of a glass of milk.

Snack: Baked beans on toast. Glass of milk.

o--o--o

If you're screaming about that chocolate, you're not the only one. Doug had a fit when he discovered I was eating chocolate. (He considers it blasphemy to eat chocolate even on Halloween and Christmas. He has written on his forehead, "Simple sugars are pure evil.") But compare the difference between eating a sandwich for dessert and eating a piece of chocolate caramel. (I should note that the chocolate caramel piece - which is a one-inch cube - takes longer for me to eat than a sandwich. Hurrah for long-lasting candies.)

o--o--o

Whole wheat sandwich with peanut butter and jam:
--Calories: 450.
--Fat: 17.5 grams.
--Sugars: 13 grams.
--Price: Roughly 60 cents.

Chocolate caramel piece:
--Calories: 45.
--Fat: 1.5 grams.
--Sugars: 4 grams.
--Price: 13 cents.

o--o--o

"But you don't get as much nutrition from chocolate as from a sandwich!" Doug cried.

I sighed and patiently explained how many sandwiches per day I was eating before. I concluded by saying, "I really don't think I need that much bread, cream cheese, jam, and peanut butter in my life."

Doug remains dubious. However, as a concession to him, I did begin eating whole fruit with every meal. Other changes I've made:

* When I have sandwiches, they're mainly made up of vegetables. (And not those wimpy sprouts and onion slices and tomato sandwiches. We're talking serious vegetables.)

* I've added more beans into my diet.

* Other than orange juice in the morning, I'm drinking water rather than juice. (Remember, this is alongside that fruit.)

* I've replaced shredded mozzarella (fat content: 9 grams) with finely shredded Parmesan (fat content: 1.5 grams).

It won't have escaped your notice, I'm sure, that, other than the chocolate, I'm eating basically the same thing as before, just in better quantities and better forms. That's what makes this switchover a workable one: the only radical change (chocolate instead of sandwiches) is in a direction that my taste buds approve of.

Doug is keeping his eagle eye on me and the bathroom scale. We'll see whether this makes any difference to my weight. My guess is that it won't, except in terms of keeping me from getting heavier. The second half of the equation - me getting more exercise - is what will cause me to lose weight, if anything does.

I'm actually not much heavier than I was when I graduated from college, but with my frame, those few pounds make a difference to my appearance. What's more important is that the extra pounds seem to make me more sluggish. So, while I'm not a size queen - that is, I don't care what size and shape people's bodies are, as long as they're healthy (*wanders off to admire bear art*) - I'd like to be able to get back to my weight in my mid-twenties.

*** 27 November 2008. Writing: How to spend a holiday.

It looked as though this was going to be a bleak Thanksgiving, because everyone was inaccessible to me. Doug was visiting his family, whose phone service has gone dead. (He's been calling me in the dead of night with his cell phone, but he doesn't carry his cell phone around with him, so I couldn't call him.) My poor apprentice woke up this morning with muscle spams; he spent the day asleep from the medicine he took. My father and stepmother were in Baltimore with her relatives. My friend Katharine and her husband John were visiting her relatives. My only other real-life friends, Parhelion and Sphinxvictorian, might have been accessible by phone, but I didn't want to risk interrupting their turkey dinner.

So, after waking up gloomy in a house inhabited only by the ghost of memories of my mother (I've lived in this house since I was eleven; Mother was the one who always made Thanksgiving dinner here), I told myself I needed to spend the day profitably.

So I wrote a gift fic.

Part of a gift fic, anyway. Eight thousand words today, which is my second-highest word count since I began keeping records in 2004 (my highest was on October 20: 8400), but it wasn't enough to satisfy my darned Muse. Him and his fetish for longer works. However, if he cooperates tomorrow, I should be able to finish the story then.

I should explain about gift fics for those of you who haven't encountered them. The first way I stumbled across them was through Yuletide Treasure, a massive gift exchange of small-fandom fan fiction stories at Christmastime. (If you want to read a slash story about the broken affair between PC and Vista, there's the place.) Then I discovered that the professional science fiction author Susan R. Matthews (who, probably not coincidentally, has hung out in the fan fiction community) was in the habit of giving free stories to the members of her fan list during the holidays.

Before long, I was squeeing when I opened my inbox at Christmas and found gift fics awaiting me from Parhelion. And this year, Maculategiraffe (who always goes beyond the call of duty) has been presenting her readers with holiday-themed stories on the solstices and the equinoxes.

I don't have that sort of energy. But I'd had in mind now posting a story at holiday time for my readers. Last night I was betaing another writer's gift fic; today my Muse delivered one to me.

No, I'm not telling what it is. Then it wouldn't be a surprise, would it? :)

*** 29 November 2008. Home: Happy (late) Thanksgiving!

"My man," I said as Doug unpacked his luggage from the flight. "Reading Herodotus on the airplane!"

In addition to complaints about Herodotus' writing style, Doug brought home leftovers: turkey, stuffing, Brussels sprouts, creamed carrots and peas, and some sort of sweet bread - perhaps Sally Lunn. (Later: Turns out it's beer bread. Who'da thought?) It just so happened that Doug and I had an old can of cranberry sauce in the house, so the meal was perfect.

Well, except that there was no pumpkin pie. But you can't have everything.

Best of all, Doug brought back himself. I've comforted myself while he was away by writing cuddling scenes.

*** 29 November 2008. Writing and Simplicity: Progress in scanning.

It's taken me nearly eight years (not six years, like I estimated earlier this month - eight years), but I've finally perfected a system of scanning books that works for me.

Back when I started, in the spring of 2001, I had a slow scanner (courtesy of my father, who was kind enough to give me one after I unexpectedly became partially sighted) and a slow and not terribly accurate OCR system (also courtesy of my father) - that is to say, the type of software that translates images of printed letters into electronic text. This slowness and inaccuracy wasn't due to lack of generosity on my father's part; it was due to the state of technology in those days. Mid-priced scanners and high-priced OCR software just didn't work very well back then.

Gradually, things have improved. My father has continued giving me better OCR software (I use OmniPage, by the way), and a friend gave me a wonderfully fast scanner (three seconds per page, plus a two-second period to let me flip to the next page). As I mentioned earlier this month, I finally worked out the OCR settings problem that had been plaguing me with bad formatting which took a horribly long time to fix every time I scanned a book. And the edition of OmniPage that I'm using is incredibly accurate; I just read through a scanned book, and the printer who set the book's type produced as many typos as the OCR translation did. That is to say, there were virtually none.

My breakthrough during the last week has been realizing that I'm no longer tied down to scanning an entire book before I can read it.

It's been a long haul. With my first scanner, it would have taken me about ten hours to scan an entire book, if I'd even bothered to scan entire books. I didn't. With my second scanner, it took me three hours to scan an average-sized book - better than the previous scanner, but then it would take me another hour to format the text so that it was in a readable form. Since the formatting took so long, it was easier done after I'd scanned an entire book, so that I wouldn't end up repeating the laborious formatting steps over and over. Even after I got my current scanner, the formatting problems were still plaguing me.

So, until recently, I would wait until I had a spare moment to scan an entire book. Usually, that spare moment never occurred.

But now, when I want to sit down and read two chapters, I can spend five minutes scanning and fifteen seconds formatting. (The only formatting I still need to do is to insert paragraph breaks at points where the OCRed text merely has a hard return. My WordPerfect program can do that insertion easily, because it can do a search-and-replace at the code level.) Voila! Nearly instant electronic text.

Aside from allowing me to do more reading of my enormous print-book collection, the advantage of this method is that it discourages me from speed-reading. Speed-reading is the bane of my existence as a writer. The more I speed-read, the more likely I am to skip over the descriptive passages, which are exactly what my Muse needs me to read if I'm to produce any stories worth reading.

But when I know that I only have two chapters on my hard drive, and that, if I want any more, I'll have to pause for five minutes and scan, I don't automatically speed up my reading, the way I do when I've got an entire novel to gorge myself on, right there on the hard disk.

In other words, scanning in chunks seems to encourage simplicity.

*** 29 November 2008. Writing: Soaring upwards with writing counts . . . and staying there.

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine that you've been overeating rich food for a long while. The food tastes delicious, but your body is in such bad shape that you find you don't have the energy to do the activities you've always loved most.

You've had no luck trying to eat moderate amounts of rich food, and you can't contemplate giving up all this delicious food, so you make a compromise with yourself: you'll eat unlimited amounts of rich food for part of the year but adopt a highly ascetic diet the rest of the year. You hope that, by living an unrestrained lifestyle part of the year and an ulta-restrained lifestyle the rest of the year, you'll reach the golden mean.

After a while on the ascetic diet, you begin to notice the change. You have the energy to do all your old, beloved activities. You're doing more now than you've done for years. Eventually, insidiously, the thought creeps into your head: Would I really be missing anything if I stayed on this diet permanently?

That's basically the point I've reached after staying off the Web for a month. I wasn't even sure I could manage this no-Web regime for more than few days. I was quite sure that it would be painful.

But it hasn't been. Instead, I've found myself able to easily do my best-beloved activities: reading and writing fiction. I've also had more time for my second-best-beloved activities: interacting with family and friends.

It's been the writing of fiction that has really made the difference. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in the world as joyful to me as writing fiction. Sometimes, when I have to struggle over a scene, it's a bittersweet joy. But nothing else in life compares with it.

So to go from writing 1600 words per month (which was my average from June to September this year) to writing 50,000+ words this month is . . . Um, what was it again that I found so exciting about the Web?

Seriously, one of the advantages of this month off has been my realization of how much of what I thought was necessary Web time really isn't. I don't miss the blogs. I don't miss the online news articles. I don't miss the fiction communities. (I've already got half a gigabyte of stories on my hard disk, waiting to be read; plus, participating in meta discussions just can't compare, I'm afraid, to writing a Layle Smith angst scene.)

What few Web items I've needed, my apprentice has mostly supplied. I've only had to go on the Web for an extended period once: three hours spent researching Victorian water engines.

So for heaven's sakes, why not make my no-Web policy permanent?

Offhand, I can only think of six Web activities I'm not doing currently that I'd really want to do: gather cover art, publish stories, announce stories, check my sales statistics, locate references to my writings on the Web, and respond to IJ/LJ comments about my stories. Moreover, my recent decision to switch from publishing novel installments to publishing full novels means that I'd need to spend a lot less time on the Web doing publishing work than I've done in the past. I'd probably only be publishing one or two works per month.

There's more to it than that, of course: I would have to formally bow out of other Web activities, and I would probably find that there are certain Web activities which need to be add to the "allowed" list. But for now I'm being cautious. The reason that this past month has worked well has been because I took an extremely conservative approach to which Internet activities I allowed myself - basically, only sending and receiving e-mail and downloading e-texts that I planned to read immediately. I don't want to make the mistake of straying too far from a formula that has worked.

So for December, I'll only make two changes to my current no-Web policy. One is that I'll publish and announce two works: "Whipster" and my holiday gift fic. The other is that I'll drop the "I can't respond till spring to comments on my blog" tagline. (It's not as though I get many comments here, *cough cough*.) We'll see whether those two changes interfere in any serious way with my writing output.

Meanwhile, I had a superb week: nearly forty hours spent on my core activities of reading, writing, editing, and publishing fiction. Nine-and-a-half of those hours were spent on writing - a new weekly record. My word count for this week was 15,000.

Tomorrow I'll tot up my monthly totals.

*** 30 November 2008. Writing and Simplicity: Monthly totals.

My monthly totals are off the chart. I spent 33.25 hours writing. That may not sound like much, but my previous high since September 2006 was 15.5 hours.

My total wordage was . . . oh, my. See my progress report below. I nearly broke my record since 2004; that record was set in May 2004 when (surprise, surprise) I had limited Internet access because my computer had gone on the fritz. Virtually all of my remaining monthly wordages have been half or less of what I produced this month.

Unfortunately, I don't have the word counts for my record years: 1995, 1996, 2002, and 2003. But I can't imagine that I'll be able to produce many more words per month than I am now, because I need to find a way to squeeze in more time to do editing, publishing, exercise, and housework.

If I can keep my wordage around 50k per month, I'll be a very, very happy camper.

I've been vindicated in my belief that the main factors to producing fiction are staying offline, reading lots of fiction, and exercising (because when I don't exercise, I get tired and can't produce stories). But the time I spent on Thanksgiving Day and today in writing my holiday gift fic (which I finished today, by the way) taught me another factor: putting aside absolutely everything except reading fiction, dancing while plotting fiction, and writing fiction. (I did allow myself a bit of family time, but I dropped my usual practice of editing a scene immediately after writing that scene.) When I focus solely on those three activities, my productivity shoots up: I wrote 13,580 words during those two days. I notice I undertook a similar schedule pattern on October 20 of this year, when I wrote 8400 words.

Which leaves the problem of when to get other activities done. I'm particularly concerned about the editing; even though I spent more time on editing and publishing this month than I did on writing, I didn't get very much done in terms of getting novels ready for publication in the next few months. I think the best solution is the one I mentioned earlier: devoting the period between story compositions to non-composition activities. Research, editing, publishing, upkeep, and housework - those are the activities I should be trying to cram into the period between story compositions.

Which means now. Rather than go online immediately to post this, I'm going to stay offline for two or three days, doing as much proofreading and editing as I can during that time. Not to mention (*cough, cough*) my much-neglected housework.

Then, once I've caught up with my correspondence (online and offline), I'll do what I've been doing throughout this month: turn my attention to research. What that means, since I'm basically caught up with specific research for stories I'm likely to be writing in the immediate future, is doing background research, i.e. read turn-of-the-century prison literature. I really need to do more of that in the coming months.

My goal during the next couple of days is to get "Whipster" ready for e-book publication, finish editing "Rebirth 1: The Breaking" (I've very little left to do), and get as far as I can into the proofreading of "Noble" (Princeling), which I've scheduled as my January publication.

I also need to finish editing my gift fic and send it off to beta readers. (There's only twenty-three shopping days left till Christmas Eve, and fewer betaing days than that.) But that's light editing, so I can squeeze that in between the other activities.

Oh, and since you're probably wondering: My average monthly Web time since 1997, when my Internet addiction began, has ranged from approximately one hundred hours to (during one awful period in 2000, shortly before my eyes went on strike) approximately four hundred hours. (Yes, that's fourteen hours a day. That's my low estimate of how much time I spent online.)

This month, I spent nine hours online. Three of those hours were spent on historical research, and one-and-a-half hours were spent trying to resolve a family crisis. That leaves four-and-a-half hours, which I spent answering correspondence and trying to track down an e-text. Very nice.

Later:

Well, I'm glad I decided to create a period in which to do my non-composition activities. When I created a list this evening of the stuff I need to do, it was long - thirty tasks in all.

I'm not going to let this overwhelm me. I've scheduled five activities for tomorrow: editing my gift fic (it's just light editing, so I can do it while eating), proofreading "Noble," finishing a beta of another writer's story, calling a couple of slasher friends, and doing laundry. I'm hoping to make progress on the first three activities and to complete the other three.

*** 1 December 2008. Writing and Home: Bits of progress on chores.

Finished editing the gift fic; it's ready to send out to be betaed. Did a bit of laundry, did some needed sorting of computer files, and (since it turned out to be a warm day) walked up to the store and bought some needed eyedrops. Read some downloaded online fic and some Tor.com novels. Winced.

Tomorrow I'll do the stuff I didn't get to today; I'll also edit "Whipster 3: Blurred Lines" and clean the humidifiers. (Owning two humidifiers is like owning pets; they're always demanding my attention.) Oh, and I'll probably lead a leather seminar with my apprentice in the evening. Which means I probably won't get to everything on my list, but what the heck, I'll give it the ol' college try.

(Why isn't it "the ol' elementary school try"? Are only college students supposed to be persistent?)

PROGRESS REPORT ON MY WRITINGS: November 2008



Percentages below based on a goal of 30,000 words per month (1000 words per day). Averages do not count days or months on which I did not write.

2008

January: 23,780 (average 1699/day). Wrote 14 days. 79%
February: 18,760 (average 1563/day). Wrote 12 days. 62%
March: 26,125 (average 2612/day). Wrote 10 days. 87%
April: 17,610 (average 1600/day). Wrote 11 days. 59%
May: 5790 (average 1447/day). Wrote 4 days. 19%
June: 1055 (average 527/day). Wrote 2 days. 4%
July: 2190 (average 2190/day). Wrote 1 day. 7%
September: 3290 (average 1645/day). Wrote 2 days. 11%
October: 15,610 (average 5203/day). Wrote 3 days. 52%
November: 55,740 (average 3278/day). Wrote 17 days. 186%

Total average so far this year: 16,995/month, 2236/day. Wrote 76 days, an average of 8 days per month out of the 10 months in which I wrote.

Total so far this year: 169,950 / 360,000. 47% (Should be: 92%)

x = Worked on this month.
xx = Task completed this month.

Research:
x --On Guard 8 (The Eternal Dungeon).
xx --Mercy's Prisoner 3 (Life Prison).
xx --Mercy's Prisoner 4 (Life Prison).
--Hell's Messenger 3 (Life Prison).
--Short Sharp Shock 3 (Leather in Lawnville).

Continue/finish writing (next unfinished story in series):
xx --2008 Holiday Gift Fic (it's a surprise).
16,430 words written. Finished writing!
--Law Links 1-6, various scenes (The Three Lands).
x --Petty (Princeling). 1350 additional words
written.
--On Guard 4 (Ch. 10 unfinished) (The Eternal Dungeon).
--On Guard 5 (Ch. 12 unfinished) (The Eternal Dungeon).
--On Guard 7 (Ch. 16 unfinished) (The Eternal Dungeon).
x --On Guard 8 (Ch. 17 unfinished) (The Eternal
Dungeon). 1270 words written.
xx --On Guard 10 (Epilogue unfinished) (The Eternal
Dungeon). 2120 words written. Finished writing!
--Mercy's Prisoner 3-4 (Life Prison).
x --Mercy's Prisoner 5 (Life Prison). 1150 additional
words written.
--Honor and Hope (Michael's House).
--Triad (Triad).
--Edgeplay in Mayhill 4-5 (Loren's Lashes).

Continue/finish writing (future stories):
--Demon in His Lair (The Three Lands).
--Death Mask (The Three Lands).
--The Fire Before (The Three Lands).
--Touch Fire (The Three Lands).
--Unbound (The Three Lands).
x --The Golden Chain (The Three Lands). 2270
additional words written.
--Empty Dagger Hand (The Three Lands).
--The Long Night (The Three Lands).
--Unknowable (The Three Lands).
--Princeling (Princeling).
xx --Sweet Blood 1 (The Eternal Dungeon). 26,000
words written. Finished writing!
x --Sweet Blood 4 (The Eternal Dungeon). 3460
words written.
--Sweet Blood 5 (The Eternal Dungeon).
--Forge 1-4 (The Eternal Dungeon).
--Hell's Messenger 3 (Life Prison).
--Boundaries' Lover (Life Prison).
--Compassion's Keeper (Life Prison).
--Justice's Hammer (Life Prison).
x --Bloodplay in Mayhill (Loren's Lashes). 3150
words written.
--Stonewall in Mayhill (Loren's Lashes).
--Work-for-Hire in Mayhill (Loren's Lashes).
--Mainstreaming in Mayhill (Loren's Lashes).
--Short Sharp Shock 1 and 3 (Leather in Lawnville).

Edit:
--2008 Holiday Gift Fic (it's a surprise).
x --Mystery (The Three Lands).
x --On Guard 10 (The Eternal Dungeon).
x --Sweet Blood 1 (The Eternal Dungeon).
--Water in a Drought (Loren's Lashes).

Ready for beta readers, but hold till other installments are ready:
--Breached Boundaries (The Three Lands).
--In the Spirit (The Three Lands).
--Law-Lover (The Three Lands).
--On Guard 6 and 9 (The Eternal Dungeon).

Send to beta readers:
--Freezing in Hell (From Hell to the Stars).
--Hell's Messenger 1-2 (Life Prison).
xx --Edgeplay in Mayhill 1-3 (Loren's Lashes).

Edit from beta reports:
--Right or Right (Darkling Plain).
--Law of Vengeance (The Three Lands).
--Rebirth 2-6 (The Eternal Dungeon).
--Pleasure (Master/Other).

Proofread and do final editing:
x --Noble 1 (Princeling).
--Noble 2 (Princeling).
--Debt Price 1-3 (Master/Other).

Do final editing:
x --Rebirth 1 (The Eternal Dungeon).
x --Whipster 2-3 (Michael's House).

Ready for layout, but hold till other installments are ready:
[Nothing currently.]

Lay out for list publication:
[Nothing currently.]

Lay out for e-book/online publication:
[Nothing currently.]

Lay out for print publication:
[Nothing currently.]

Text ready for list publication:
[Nothing currently.]

Text ready for e-book/online publication:
[Nothing currently.]

Text ready for print publication:
[Nothing currently.]