Love in Dark Settings

"As for the future, computers offer publishers two possibilities: to streamline the process of transforming raw text into print, and to go beyond print into the realms of publishing material on disks specifically for use with computers. Such material is called software (as opposed to 'hardware', which refers to the machines themselves) and includes word processing programs. There is a lot of computer software available already - computer games, educational programs, business programs and 'on-line databases' (systems whereby people can subscribe and gain access to a central bank of information via a link to their own computer). Most of what is available now is not put out by publishers - and much of it is not sold in traditional bookstores, but in computer stores or department stores. It is a big step for traditional publishers to contemplate. But the market is wide open and publishing will have to change radically to meet the challenge. The future is already here."

--Geoffrey Rogers: Editing for Profit (1985).

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

How I reply to comments at this blog.


*** 13 July 2009. Writing: Back to the future: computers and publishing in 1985.

I've been reading Geoffrey Rogers's 1985 book for editors, Editing in Print. The section on computers makes for amusing and informative reading.

Mr. Rogers waxes eloquent about all the things that word processors can do ("Once the text is there, you can alter it as much as you like - without crossing out, using correction fluid, retyping sections or cutting up bits of paper") and accurately predicts that, in the future, book and magazine layout will be done on computers ("It will be like working on paper page proofs and seeing immediately what effect alterations will have on the page"). He also talks about the incompatability of most 1985 computers and word processors (gosh, yes, I remember those bad ol' days) and suggests that one solution is for the author and editor to install modems ("pieces of equipment that allow the computers to 'talk' to each other over an ordinary telephone line").

He points out that 1985 computers can't directly show bold or italic text and talks about a new coding system proposed by the British Printing Industries Federation, ASPIC. "Typesetting instructions for text and headings, for example are numbered [h1], [h2]; [t1] [t2], and the detailed instructions given to a key so they need not be repeated every time; [i] indicates italics, and [b] bold . . ." (I suspect that the federation was cribbing from the word processor creators; WordStar was already using [i] and [b] codes during this period.)

He goes on to gush about disk space ("Many word processors use floppy disks that can store up to 100,000 words each") and warns editors not to drop cigarette ashes on their disks. (As my apprentice put it, "The funny part is him assuming that everyone will be smoking at the office.") Be sure to keep the disks in their paper sleeves, he cautions.

He ends with a long section on computers and health, which includes a sentence that sends chills down my back, because I doubt that Mr. Rogers fully recognized the societal implications of what he was saying: "Using a computer demands a curiously intense kind of concentration, and it is easy to find that you have been working for hours hardly lifting your eyes from the screen . . ."

*** 14 July 2009. Writing: Publishing progress again; plus, excerpts from historical novels.

After being in a nobody-loves-me mood yesterday, I went online today and found that, overnight, I'd earned $37.

That's nearly half of what I learned in all of 2008. I don't want to sound greedy or anything, but . . . yeah, that was a big mood-booster.

In other news, I found a workaround solution to the problem that had been holding up my Rebirth layout. (The "workaround solution" should take me an hour to implement, but that's less time than I've already spent trying to figure out why InDesign is screwing up my layout.)

Also, the state interlibrary loan system very promptly sent me the books I'd requested: five mid-twentieth-century historical novels. Woohoo! I'm going to scan them so that I can read them next winter, when I'm in my annual hibernation.

This is on top of me visiting the Chevy Chase Library in D.C. a couple of days ago (chauffeured by Doug, who, in his middle age, has acquired the highly desirable characteristic of wanting to visit libraries) and discovering that it was one of those libraries where mid-twentieth-century books go to retire. Yes! I've been getting so tired of plowing through post-modern writing like this:

o--o--o

"Yes."

"Do you think so?"

Clunk!

"Let's go look."

[Scene change.]

"Wow."

"Yeah. That was . . . intense."

"Let's go look again."

[Scene change.]

"Huh."

[End of chapter.]

o--o--o

And those are the post-modern historical novels.

By contrast . . . Well, let me pick at random some passages from the books I borrowed.

o--o--o

"He had come home for the first time, and for a little she thought he was not changed at all. He wanted to do all the old things, to go sailing and birds'-nesting with her, to tease the hounds and frighten the maids, and climb up into the rafters to catch bats; but besides that there was a new bit of him that she couldn't quite get at. 'Did you kill anyone?' she asked."

--Naomi Mitchinson: "The Conquered" (1923).

"Then, as though Kosole's words had suddenly plucked aside a curtain that until now had but lightly swayed and shifted, a grey, ghostly desolation begins to unfold there in the barroom. The windows disappear, shadows rise up through the floor boards and memory hovers in the smoke-laden air."

--Erich Maria Remarque: "The Road Back" (1931).

"He might be affable and pleasant, not haughty like a baron, but he was something bigger and stronger than any of the men who went with rich armor and gay banners, and made working men kneel as they passed."

--Geoffrey Trease: "Bows Against the Barons" (1966).

"Happy was Norway under Eric Jarl; the happiest land I have ever seen. 'The land was glad of him,' the skalds say, and rightly - those skalds who still sing of him. Nowadays most sing of Olaf; it is his memory the priests praise in church. Olaf fought for the Faith, folk say, and Eric was lukewarm. Some even began to call Eric a rebel against God's anointed. I spit on their folly! Never had Eric sworn oath to Olaf, and hard it is to see what right but might any heir could have to the blood-built kingdom of Harald Fairhair. Men like Christian Olaf and heathen Fairhair got their crowns by being shrewd, lucky men of war; that was the way God anointed them. And this will likely be called treason as well as blasphemy."

--Evangeltine Walton: "The Cross and the Sword" (1956).

"'Never talk so rafty, brother! Dan Morphew's an upstart. Though he'm cousin to the Reeve. Our own grandfather's father were first miller hereabouts.' She was flushed and almost shrill. She wore her dark hair screwed back from her healthy face, so there was no hiding her feelings. 'Give over gawping!' she cried. 'And hold your tongue come I tell you.'"

--Barbara Willard: "The Miller's Boy" (1976).

"'Aye, I did cry for a night or two. But I learned a rare lot at sea - tales and songs beyond belief. And the chaplain, he learned me to read and scribe. And I had some good messmates. But my poor owd mam and dad, 'twas hard for them. They couldn't work the farm too well on their own, see, and then Dad stuck a pitchfork through his foot and lamed hisself. And the price o' food went cruel high. Ah, I reckon they both died of want.'"

--Joan Aiken: "Go Saddle the Sea" (1977).

o--o--o

Man, am I looking forward to winter.

*** 15 July 2009. Home and Writing: Little snippets.

The annual property tax bill arrived. It looks as though it's lower than Doug had expected, so I guess I won't have to sell myself on the streets. Darn.

Got a little more work done on the paperback layout. Things are going smoothly at the moment, though I'm expecting more problems to pop up. As I told the folks at the POD Publishers list, "I'm beginning to understand why book designers get paid so well."

I'm going to bed at four this afternoon in an attempt to convince my body to wake up at four a.m. for the Rogue Digital Conference.

*** 17 July 2009. Writing: Erotica versus pornography; Scribd versus Smashwords.

"I make no claim that the writing here is anything but pornography. For as long as I've been involved with pornography, there's been a great deal of pressure to disown it. As I gained some stature as a writer, critics and friends invited me to classify my sexual stories and novels as 'erotica.' There is an attempt to somehow separate out some sexual works as being aesthetically or politically more acceptable than other works. People would try to say that my sexual writing - or Samuel Steward's or someone else's - was 'too good' to be discarded as pornography. I disown that distinction completely. Pornography and erotica are the same thing. The only difference is that erotica is the stuff bought by rich people; pornography is what the rest of us buy."

--John Preston, from the foreword to his anthology Flesh and Word, which primarily reprinted stories from skin magazines. The anthology was published by a mainstream press and (despite what he wrote above) was reviewed in the mainstream media as "erotica."

I'd written to Scribd to ask about their policy on adult content, since it wasn't clear whether they are willing to distribute erotic fiction of the sort I write. They responded that they make a distinction between textual erotica and textual pornography, and that if the text could be published by Ellora's Cave, it's all right to sell it at Scribd, but if the text would appear on alt.sex.* . . . probably not.

Heh. The person who answered my question obviously has no idea that I market my erotic romance stories to both the Ellora's Cave crowd and the alt.sex.* crowd. It reminds me of the threads I've participated in at slash forums, where I try to explain to people that the audience for slash stories and the audience for Nifty stories are not mutually exclusive.

But this response looks good, from my point of view. The only e-book I have whose blurb smells of alt.sex.* is Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers, and that collection includes a story that won an "erotic fiction" award (as the long version of the blurb shouts). Besides, I'm not planning to PDF "Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers" any time soon.

That was why I was enquiring - to see whether I could sell the PDF version of Rebirth at Scribd. Scribd is receiving a fair amount of attention at the moment, because it managed to lure Simon & Schuster into selling their e-books there, so I figured I'd pick up a few more readers at Scribd than if I sold the PDF e-book at Lulu. (Not that I'm abandoning Lulu. It's the perfect place to sell my omnibus editions.)

I had a look tonight at both Scribd and Smashwords, which are two of the leading multi-format e-book stores at the moment. Of course, there's also Fictionwise, but it's not open to most self-publishers.

Am I crazy, or does Scribd have no index pages devoted to fiction genres? It has tags and a search engine, but I didn't find them very useful in locating gay books.

By contrast, it's easy to find gay erotic fiction at Smashwords: it's right there as a subcategory in Erotica. Gay & Lesbian non-erotic fiction is hidden a little more effectively - it's a subcategory in Literature. But in either case, the gay categories make for easy browsing.

In addition, Smashwords has tag clouds, which makes it easy to find related tags.

So overall, it's a thumbs down for Scribd and a thumbs up for Smashwords. A shame, because I'd like both sites to flourish.

Meanwhile, layout of the "Rebirth" paperback is going smoothly. Tomorrow I tackle the task of making sure that I don't have any widows or other obvious monstrosities lingering before scene/chapter breaks. Once that's done, I should be able to send the PDF file off to the volunteer proofreaders. While they're looking it over, I'll get started on the cover.

*** 17 July 2009. Writing: Barnes & Noble's e-reader and e-bookstore: We Are Not Impressed.

Barnes & Noble's new e-bookstore opened overnight. It looks to me like Amazon Redux. It has the two most-criticized features of Amazon: DRMed e-books and storage of e-books on its own server. In other words, the readers of Barnes & Noble e-books don't really own their e-books, any more than the readers of Amazon Kindle e-books do. (As shown by a certain Orwellian episode recently - and hey, wouldn't you just love to be the Amazon staff member who said, "Let's go delete our customers' copies of Animal Farm and 1984!" I mean, really, was he asleep during high-school English class? Or, more plausibly, was he assiduously taking notes for future reference?)

To be perfectly fair to Barnes & Noble, it does offer two improvements over Amazon: its e-reader can be freely downloaded onto a number of platforms, and the e-reader can read DRM-free ePub e-books.

Supposedly. I opened the e-reader on my offline computer, tried to open a DRM-free e-book on my computer--

--and was promptly shut out by the e-reader, which refused to let me read any e-book unless I connected in with Barnes & Noble's server. I guess a lot of people were taking notes during their high-school English class.

*** 22 July 2009. Writing: Amazon shows once again how much it loves self-publishers; plus, not enough hours in the day.

I've been spending more time this week than I would have liked trying to figure out which e-book formats to publish in from now on, and where to distribute them. In the midst of this all, Amazon helped with my decision-making by stripping the discounts on all my Kindle e-books.

It wasn't just my e-books; the Amazon DTP forums were filled with cries of anguish from self-publishers. Me, I just quietly removed the Kindle editions of "Whipster" and "Blood Vow" from sale. Without a discount to the customers, I can't afford to sell my novels at Kindle. (For those of you who don't know, Amazon takes two-thirds of the profit of each self-published Kindle e-book.)

My short fiction is still at the Kindle bookstore - that introduces new readers to my writings - but I've been making so little money from it that I'm not really interested in pursuing Kindle publication from this point forth, unless matters change drastically there.

As for alternatives: I still face the problem of my Internet addiction flaring up every time I go through the publishing process online (as it is doing right now, while I go through the Lightning Source publishing process). Given what I'm hearing about the sales numbers at Scribd and Smashwords, I'm not convinced that it would be worth my while to publish there regularly, given that it would exacerbate my addiction. I might toss a free short-fiction e-book onto Smashwords to attract new readers, and likewise I'll give Scribd a try with the "Rebirth" PDF, but other than that, I think my best course of action is to continue to bring out new editions of my omnibus edition and depend on the paperbacks to bring in money and new readers.

Speaking of which, I'd sure as heck better make some money from "Rebirth" in paperback, because here is my task list for bringing out the paperback (as I reach the one-third-finished point in the process):

--Send PDF file to proofreaders.
--Start Scribd account.
--Download Nifty guidelines.
--Compile list of reviewers.
--Check whether there are other sites I could submit the e-book to besides the ones listed below.
--Use proofreaders' comments to finalize PDF file.
--Once LSI application is accepted and page count is determined, download cover template and create cover.
--Send cover to david to run through Adobe Distiller.
--Upload book to Lulu, order Lulu proof copy, and proofread.
--Ask LSI to set up iPage account for me.
--Once the proofreading corrections are
made, upload PDF file to LSI.
--Order LSI proof copy.
--If the LSI proof copy is okay, publish.
--Check iPage account.
--Submit title to Bowker.
--Once the books is up at Amazon, submit to various Amazon forms.
--Submit PDF to Scribd.
--Lay out HTML e-book and plain text e-book.
--Revise and upload series page to take into account all of the above.
--Revise and upload press page to take into account all of the above.
--Announce book at LJ/lists and send plain-text e-book out.
--Submit PDF to Google Books.
--Submit e-book to Nifty (serial-fashion).
--Submit e-book to Manybooks.net.
--Lay out and submit braille/DAISY e-book.
--Submit book to reviewers.
--Submit book to contests.

. . . and in between, I have to publish two other e-books and a new edition of the omnibus.

Fortunately, Transformation is ready for layout; I anticipate getting it published and announced tomorrow.

Yes, you read that right: It takes me a single day to publish and announce an e-book, once I reach the layout stage. Having struggled for a month now to get the "Rebirth" paperback laid out - with another month or two ahead of me of undergoing the actual publishing process - I have a whole new appreciation of how much easier it is to publish electronically than it is to publish in print.

Mind you, a lot of this is beginners' pangs; now that I've figured out how InDesign works, it should take me less than a week to lay out my next paperback. Even so, I'll be watching with interest to see how much money I make from "Transformation" in comparison to "Rebirth." Will the amount of time I'm investing in paperback publication - and the extent to which I'm being pulled into an Internet haze - turn out to be worth it, in terms of money and bringing in new readers?

As it is, I'm alarmed at how little time I have left in the summer to do research, correspondence, and general upkeep around the house and garden. What I'd like to do is hang up my publishing hat at this point for the rest of the summer - and indeed, I've set myself a deadline of getting all of this year's remaining online fiction and e-books published (except for the "Rebirth" PDF) by the end of the month, namely a week from now. But that still leaves me with far too much time spent on "Rebirth" during the next two months. I simply assigned myself too many things to do this summer.

(I said this to my apprentice tonight, and his reply was, "You said the same thing at this time last year, Sir.")

*** 23 July 2009. Simplicity: What I can learn from television addicts.

I've spent several years of waiting futilely for the local public library to buy more than one book on Internet addiction. I've never in my life encountered a compulsive behavior that gets so little serious attention from the media. (As opposed to the media poking fun at Internet addicts; I feel the same way that alcoholics must have felt in the 1940s, when being continually drunk was thought to be a proper topic for comedy.) This lack of media attention can't be because excessive Internet usage is an uncommon behavior; I once stumbled across a survey of romance readers which revealed that the survey takers spent an average of ten hours online each day. I'd really, really like to think that most of those folks were online all day for work reasons, but comments from other folks I've encountered on the Internet suggest otherwise.

By contrast - I've just discovered - television addiction has received a lot of media attention. I brought home from the library Marie Winn's "The Plug-In Drug" (originally published in 1977), which, while heavily dependent on anecdotes, offers some useful information. I especially like how the author emphasizes that the problem isn't quality TV versus non-quality TV; the problem is excessive quantity and compulsive usage.

I was fascinated by the fact that the author devoted one of the final chapters to describing families that don't watch television. I don't think I've ever encountered anything similar in media articles about Internet usage - no suggestion that maybe, just maybe, someone might be better off without the Internet. (Even the television addiction articles often say, "Instead of our children watching TV, we persuade our children to go on the Internet!")

Thanks to my eye condition, which limits the number and type of moving images I can watch, I haven't watched television since 2000. (The only exception I can remember is on 9/11 and when I was covering Hurricane Gustav, though I watched the latter TV news programs via the Internet.) Giving up television turned out not to be much of a sacrifice, in the long run. I'd like to go back and watch tapes of "China Beach" and "Upstairs, Downstairs," plus a few other British historical dramas. (And let me just say here that I am seriously annoyed that - unlike British mini-series for adults, which mainly ended up on PBS in the U.S. - most British mini-series for children have never made it over to the U.S., either on television or on video/DVD. I wouldn't even know those shows existed if I hadn't spent a goodly amount of my teens in England.) But to be quite honest, I'd rather spend that time reading fiction.

Which brings me to my problem: I was able to easily give up television because my primary addiction is to text. Moreover, I'm dependent on the computer for my career. So I examined "The Plug-In Drug" and online articles about television addiction to see whether they had any new advice to offer on how to limit (rather than entirely eliminate) screen time.

They did, as it turned out. "No TV on School Days," Ms. Winn suggests. "That's it. No counting hours, no checking listings for one or two permissible programs. No bargaining and haggling: 'If I watch two hours today I won't watch anything tomorrow,' and so on. Eliminating television on school days effectively eliminates teleision as a competitor for more fulfilling activities (lively family meals, conversations, games, reading aloud and, of course, studying and doing homework) during a good chunk of the week. Then on weekends there is no restriction on TV viewing. It's the easiest of all the rules to live with."

I like this idea. For me, it's an easier rule than "go online once a week," because I have a tendency to nudge forward that "one day a week" till I'm going online every six days . . . every five days . . . every four days . . . Saying "only on the weekend" is a lot clearer.

Oh, by the way, you know how I said above that there aren't enough hours in the day to do everything I want? What I meant was, "There aren't enough hours in the day to do everything I want, because I've been spending an average of 25% of my waking hours online since the beginning of the month."

*** 24 July 2009. Simplicity: Reworking my schedule.

I decided to make Saturday the day I go online each week, and boy, was today a relaxing day, knowing that I wasn't going to go online. Setting a specific day to go online really does seem to help slacken the temptation.

I had a look back at my monthly schedules to see how many days a month I've gone online since I committed myself to a life of simplicity. Here's what I found:

12-07: 5.
1-08: 8.
2-08: 10.
3-08: 17.
4-08: 10.
5-08: 15.
6-08: 17.
7-08: 13, until I stopped counting on June 19. No record for the next three months, because of my mother's death.
11-08: 5.
12-08: 19.
1-09: 17.
2-09: 13.
3-09: 15.
4-09: 13.
5-09: 11.
6-09: 13.
7-09: 16 (so far).

Since my goal for a while now has been "online no more than once a week," and since I'd hoped to go online no more than once a month last winter, those figures are . . . disturbing.

Well, I'm going to try to do something about this problem.

In the meantime, I've revised my yearly schedule. I've decided that a lot of the difficulty I've encountered this spring and summer has come from me trying to multi-task. With my one-track mind, it's really quite hard for me to edit and do layout and publish e-books and online fiction and publish paperbacks and market and research and garden and prepare nonfiction/directories and sort my two billion belongings . . . all at once.

So I've decided to split up the year this way:

Year-round: Edit and do layout.

Fall/winter: Compose fiction.

Spring: Publish and market e-books and online fiction, and prepare paperbacks for the printer.

Summer: Research, prepare nonfiction/directories, sort my belongings, and do any remaining publishing and marketing of my paperbacks.

I'm a month late, but I'm sort of ready to go into my summer season. "Transformation" should be finished tomorrow, while I should be able to get the rest of my fiction (except "Rebirth") published the following Saturday. Then I can devote myself to the activities on my summer list.

I've decided not to try to finish the retrofuture research this summer. There's just too much of it to do before the end of September, and it seems unlikely I'll get to the point of writing the 1960s-era stories in Prison City next winter. Instead, I'm going to try to finish up the Chesapeake research.

*** 24 July 2009. Simplicity: Anniversary.

I seem to have missed the anniversary of my mother's death. I thought it was a week from now.

What have I accomplished in the past year? Well, mainly I seem to have awakened to the fact that my life is even more of a mess than I'd thought. I suppose that self-knowledge is good.

I haven't done much in fixing the problems, though. I'm still as addicted to the Internet and to library-browsing as I was a year ago, and I've made only marginal progress in getting my surroundings in order, spending more time with family and friends, sticking to a schedule, exercising more, and doing housework regularly. Deeper simplicity seems as far away now as it did when my mother died.

So let me look back at 1999 instead. Back then, I was online 365 days out of the year, from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed. Since I could easily rationalize my time online (I was doing journalistic research), I was only starting to become dimly aware that I was addicted to the Internet. I hadn't yet noticed that I had far too much physical clutter around me, which was only matched by the amount of digital clutter I was accumulating. If anyone had suggested that I'd be better off with a schedule, or that I wasn't spending enough time writing fiction (I finished writing exactly one story in 1999, eight thousand words long), I would have looked blankly at them, wondering what they were talking about. The idea that my addiction to library-browsing might be dangerous would have made me laugh.

That recollection makes me feel better.

*** 28 July 2009. Simplicity: Getting rid of books and magazines.

UNCATEGORIZED BOOKS

Definitely keep: 9.
Definitely give away: 59.
Read to decide whether to keep: 17.

A lot of these are books I'd already decided to give away, so I'm not being as simplicity-oriented as it might look from the figures above. Many of the books will end up on the trading table at the next Con.txt con. Most of the rest ended up in my growing collection of "children's books to give to a university library."

UNREAD FICTION

Definitely keep: 17.
Definitely give away: 21.
Read to decide whether to keep: 239.

Um, yeah, I find it hard to give away novels. In my defense, these books are stored in Doug's study, which means they're mainly behind other objects; I couldn't do more than count most of them. However, I do intend to go through them with greater care this month and at least put them into categories (potentially Muse-friendly, etc.).

OVERSIZE

Definitely keep: 4.
Definitely give away: 5.

MAGAZINES

Definitely keep: 61.
Definitely give away: 31.
Read to decide whether to keep: 193.

What I kept was mainly Episcopalian magazines. What I put in the "read" pile was mainly magazines of or about children's literature (I have 84 issues of Horn Book), as well as a few issues of American Heritage. Fortunately, I didn't have to agonize over whether to get rid of my two zillion issues of Smithsonian Magazine; Doug has taken those over.

MYTHS, LEGENDS, FAIRY TALES, FOLK TALES, FOLK SONGS, AND HOLIDAYS

Definitely keep: 125.
Definitely give away: 9.

An easy category to decide, actually. The mythology/folk section is mainly made up of picture books that I put on periodic display. The holiday section is heavily used.

MUSEUMS, SOCIOLOGY, MEDICINE, AND TECHNOLOGY

Definitely keep: 11.
Definitely give away: 5.
Read to decide whether to keep: 33.

This is one of those underused sections where I found myself saying, "I didn't know I owned that." Among other things, I discovered a 1965 book for children on telephones that included a chapter on exciting new developments (touch-tone! beepers! teleconferencing! videophones!).

HOUSEKEEPING AND CLUTTER CONTROL

Definitely keep: 20.
Read to decide whether to keep: 3.

The three books were on fashion. The other books . . . yeah, I need these books right now. You hadn't guessed that, had you?

WORLD FAITHS, PLAIN LIVING DENOMINATIONS, DREAMS, SIMPLICITY, MYSTICISM, AND MONASTICISM

Definitely keep: 87.
Definitely give away: 18.
Read to decide whether to keep: 35.

The magazine issues distort the figures; I was actually getting pretty picky in this category.

HUMOR

Definitely give away: 5.
Read to decide whether to keep: 35.

BRAILLE/AUDIO CATALOGUES

Definitely keep: 4.
Definitely give away: 51.

DOCTOR WHO

Definitely give away: 61.

Yes! Five feet of books cleared in one fell swoop!

I'd been considering selling the 1970s Doctor Who novelizations that I inherited from my brother - I suppose they must be worth something by now - but really, I'd rather that there be a prolonged squee from some Doctor Who fan who finds them on the trade table at Con.txt. (Last year, I put on the trade table a Phantom Menace darkfic zine, came back a half hour later, and found that it had already been snatched up. Obi-Wan in bondage is obviously a hot item.) (Um, I mean in terms of popularity.)

FAVORITE FICTION
CARTOONS
BOOKS BY ME AND MEMBERS OF MY FAMILY
BOOKS BY DANTE

Everything in these categories is "definitely keep," so I'm not going to bother to count them.

GENERAL FICTION
TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY FICTION
FICTION PICTURE BOOKS
ILLUSTRATED BIBLE BOOKS
POETRY
LEATHER FICTION AND NONFICTION
PRINTING AND WRITERS' MARKETS
MEMOIRS

Everything in these categories is either "definitely keep" or "read to decide whether to keep," so I'm not going to bother to count them.

GREAT BOOKS, i.e. my college books

Fortunately, Doug has taken these over, so I don't have to agonize over whether I'll be betraying my intellectual heritage if I get rid of Locke's Two Treatises of Government. (Well, actually, I'm getting rid of the extra copy. And what does it say about me that I own two copies of that book?)

*** 28 July 2009. Simplicity, Mentoring, and Writing: E-mail, Torchwood, and The Eternal Dungeon.

Well, I managed to eliminate 200 of the 600 e-mails in my inbox simply by deleting the spam and filing the list posts in a separate folder.

That still leaves me with 400 posts to answer (not counting the 122 replies to my comments at blogs, which are in a separate folder). But you know what? As of July 25th, when I took myself offline, I'd spent 61.75 hours online this month. (Pageaddicts was underreporting my hours, it turned out.) That's an average of nearly three hours a day. I think that, with all the spare time I have on my hands now, I can begin to make a dent on my inbox.

I'm already spending more time with my apprentice. He needed that time this weekend.

"I am never going to watch anything by Russell Davies again," he announced without preliminary a few days ago.

So then we had a nice, long talk about warnings (did Torchwood foreshadow sufficiently the plot twist?), mood shifts in drama (did Torchwood betray its earlier tone?), the purpose of drama (my apprentice said, "I watch television for pleasure viewing, not angst"; I responded, "Angst is my pleasure viewing"), to what extent political analogies in science fiction need to be underpinned by non-political plotlines (I passed up an opportunity to cite Dante's explanation of the nature of allegory), the difference between realism and amorality, and the difference between grey-area characters (a mixture of black and white) and grey-area morals.

Along the way, I asked my apprentice how, if he couldn't stand Russell Davies's brand of darkfic, he managed to get through The Eternal Dungeon. He said that I give sufficient warning, through the wording of my Website, of the darkfic nature of my writings.

Besides, as he put it a few days earlier, "I always figure that Elsdon will fix everything."

*** 29 July 2009. Simplicity: New approach to trimming my book collection.

I've concluded that I need a new approach to trimming my book collection. Since I began culling at the beginning of the month, I've set aside 321 books and magazine issues to get rid of. Which is admirable, except that this leaves me with 5000 books and magazine issues.

If I were able to read one book or magazine issue every day for six months out of the year (which is unlikely; the days when I whizzed through three books a day are long gone), it would take me 27 years to read 5000 books and magazine issues.

So I need to come up with a better culling plan. Not only because I have more books than I can read, but because I don't have enough room for my other belongings, such as the books I actually do read. I need the space that is currently taken up by books that have been languishing unread on the shelf for thirty years.

To give a sense of how bad things are: In order to reach my records/tapes/CDs, here's what I have to do.

* Clamber over the boxes that are sitting in the middle of the floor of my study because I don't have enough closet space for them, because part of my closet space is taken up with books from the public library.

* Stand on a stool to reach the records that are at the top of a nearly-ceiling-high, jammed-with-books bookcase in the entryway. There are two other bookcases there too, both filled with books.

* Browse through the records that completely cover the kitchen hearth, other than the ones that are inaccessible because they're behind one of the two zillion kitchen tables that Mother left us, but don't get me started on our too-much-furniture problem.

* Kneel on the dining-room floor to get to one of only two bookshelves that are filled with records rather than books. The other four bookcases in the dining room are crowded with books.

* Lean over the stacks of books-to-discard to get to the tapes that are sprawling across the coffee tables in the living room. There's no room for the tapes in the seven bookcases in the living room; those are all filled with - you guessed it - books.

* Push aside the ironing board that's blocking one of the bookcases in Doug's study, because he doesn't have enough room in his study, because I have six bookcases in his study, all filled with books.

* Did I mention that I have four bookcases in the hallway, with an overflow of books in the bedroom and bathroom?

So you see that a tad bit more room would be helpful.

The gentleman who runs the Zen Habits blog (whose name I'm going to need to look up one of these days) lists his Four Laws of Simplicity in this manner:

o--o--o

1. Collect everything in one place.

2. Choose the essential.

3. Eliminate the rest.

4. Organize the remaining stuff neatly and nicely.

o--o--o

He sums up these Four Laws by saying: "Which [things] do you love and use? Get rid of the rest."

I've decided to try a variation on this technique.

First of all, I've set aside four sections in my library: Favorite Fiction, Cartoons, Desk Reference, and Books by Me and My Family. I don't normally get rid of books in those sections, because those are the books I actually read/consult/love.

Then I cleared out space in one of my bookcases. This space is for "Recently Read" books. At the moment, the space is divided into three sections: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Picture Books. Everything else - most of those 5000 books - is now designated the Temporary section.

Whenever I read a book (and by read, I mean completely read, unless it's a reference book, anthology, or magazine), I decide whether I'm likely to read/consult this book in the next five years. If the answer is Yes, I put it on the Recently Read bookshelf (or in Favorite Fiction, if it turns out to be that good). If the answer is No, I put it in the pile of books to discard. If the answer is "Um . . . maybe?" I put it back in the Temporary section. If the answer is, "No, no, no! I can't get rid of the joke book I cackled over at age twelve!" . . . well, maybe I'll have to start a Sentimental Value section.

Periodically, during the spring and summer, I'll do a mini-purge in the Temporary section, getting rid of more books, ones that fall into the category of "I'm never going to get around to (re)reading that, and anyway, I've got more important things to read." Whenever I do that, I'll remind myself of two facts: (1) if I really need to read these books again, I can obtain them through interlibrary loan, and (2) neglected books deserve to be passed on to owners who will care for them. (My apprentice came close to whimpering when he thought I was suggesting that I considered some books unworthy of my company. Quite the opposite is true; I don't consider myself a worthy caretaker of books that I haven't picked off the shelf since my teens.)

I'm hoping that the net result of this plan is that (1) I'll steadily cull from my library books that are mere deadwood to my collection, (2) I'll do more reading of books from my own library rather than books from the public library, (3) most of what I read will be old favorites or stuff that looks as though it will become a new favorite, and (4) most of the rest of what I read will be stuff that I can read once and then send on its way, so that other readers can read and appreciate it. Recycling rules OK.

I started today by collecting together the books that I've read since the beginning of spring. Here's the full list.

Reference (mainly local tourist guides): 12.

Nonfiction: 3.

Fiction: 6.

At that rate, I'm sure as heck not going to read 5000 books and magazines in 27 years.

The new spare time I have is likely to help the situation. Now, whenever I want to go online to entertain myself, I tell myself to go read a book instead. But I think I'm still likely to discover, as time goes on, that I have so little time for reading books that I need to exercise triage, keeping at hand only the books that I'm most likely to read or consult.

(You guys do realize, I'm sure, that one reason I haven't read more fiction books this summer is that I've been too busy reading the online fiction of Maculategiraffe and Poisontaster and Jane Carnall and M. Chandler and Heartofslash and Parhelion. Online fiction rules very OK.)

Later:

I went through my Favorite Fiction section and realized that there were books there that I haven't read since my teens.

So I collected together the novels I've read since the beginning of last fall and labelled them as the Recently Read Fiction section. Those books took up a respectable two shelves; I read a fair amount last fall/winter. (I read the novels in electronic form, of course, fall/winter being the time of year when I can't read standard-sized print, but I like to keep print copies of electronic fiction in case I encounter indecipherable typos. And because one can't smell the bindings of electronic fiction.)

Everything else that had been in my Favorite Fiction section I designated as an extension of the Temporary section, though I'm expecting that most of those books will move rapidly back into the Recently Read Fiction section. And this way I can easily see at a glance which books are eager to be read.

My home library is beginning to feel more and more like a public library.

I think this was a really good idea, me choosing this week to go through my books. Not only did it satisfy my browsing itch, but it also made me aware of how many good books I'm not reading because I'm busy surfing the Web. I mean, really, given a choice between reading articles linked from Google News and rereading a Robert Heinlein juvenile novel . . . it's no contest.

Did you know that reading Heinlein's Have Space Suit, Will Travel convinced me to take Algebra II in high school? (In the novel, the protagonist's father grouses about the mathematics-poor education that the protagonist is receiving at his high school.) Without that course, I might not have been accepted into my alma mater, and if that had happened, my own novels would have ended up themantically thin. That's the power of fiction to change lives.

*** 30 July 2009. Simplicity: Scything my way through my inbox.

Well, I spent seventy-five minutes on my inbox today and managed to get through one week's worth of e-mails and one month's worth of post comments. That leaves me with 430 e-mails and comments to reply to . . . plus whatever is awaiting me when I go online on Saturday.

I'm pleased. Since the beginning of the week, I've gotten through about three hundred e-mails/comments (because I don't have to respond to most of the e-mails; hello, nonfunctioning spam filter), which means I should have my inbox cleared by the end of the summer, if I stick to this schedule.

And I'm getting lots of other stuff done. Today I did laundry. (I think my clothes nearly fainted when they discovered that I was doing laundry for a second time in two weeks.) I scanned one of my library books for winter reading. I reread several picture books (Georgie the Ghost! Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel!). I started reading Molly Cone's Only Jane (1960) and marvelled yet again at what utterly one-dimensional lives teenage American girls were expected to live in that era. I'm up to page 81, and so far the only things to happen is that the fifteen-year-old protagonist cried because she didn't get a horse for her birthday, persuaded her mother to buy her a formal dress, cried because she was a wallflower at a party, saved her money for high-heel shoes, cut her bangs, put lemon in her hair (for highlights), put egg on her face (for a better complexion), put her hair in curlers, plucked her eyebrows, curled her eyelashes, put on lipstick, cried because she didn't have a date for the club dance . . . Well, you get the idea.

"No matter how reasonably she tried to view it, not being invited to the club dance was serious. It was perhaps the most serious thing that had happened to her, next to not receiving a horse for her birthday."

Why do I have a horrendous desire to ship the protagonist off to be a nurse in Vietnam?

Tomorrow, if I can drag myself out of bed in time to hitch a ride with Doug, I'm going up to D.C. for the day. The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History has an exhibit about the Chesapeake, and the National Museum of American History has some sort of maritime exhibit, so I can pretend I'm visiting them for the sake of research rather than because I like to museum-hop. Plus, it's been far too long since I visited the Air & Space Museum.

*** 30 July 2009. Writing: Monthly totals.

Since I'm sure I'm not going to go online tomorrow, I can offer some conclusions now about this month's work.

I did a respectable amount of editing and layout this month. Overall, though, I'm disappointed that I didn't get more out this publishing year. I published two novels (both of which had previously appeared in list editions), one expanded version of a previously published novella, two novellas (both of which had previously appeared in list editions), and a new piece of flash fiction. I'd hoped to publish more than that.

This year I de-railed myself by trying to multi-task. Next year I'll be better organized. I can say with certainty that, if my Muse coughs up a remaining two scenes of a novel over the winter, I'll be able to post three Three Lands novels at the beginning of the publishing year.

Internetwise, the month would have been a total disaster if I hadn't gotten myself offline this week. As it was, my Internet hours were no worse than they've been all summer . . . that is to say, they were horrendous.

However, the fact that I've been able to stay offline this week exactly as long as I planned to? Very good news. I actually have some hope for August.