Love in Dark Settings

Daily life: Snowstorm watch in Maryland

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:10:54 GMT

"Wow! This is great!" I said, peering out Doug's study window at the snow.

"Until the electricity goes out," I added.

The power went out a half hour later. The situation at the moment is:

1) No cable modem, and none of the neighbors' wireless networks are working, which suggests that their power is out as well.

2) Doug's laptop doesn't have a battery, and my laptop battery is 20% down, so I'm only using my laptop for brief entries like this.

3) We have a battery-powered radio, so we're up to date on the latest news.

4) I haven't been insane enough to go outside - it's thirty degrees, with wind gusts up to thirty-five miles an hour - but the weatherman is reporting that our area has gotten twenty to twenty-five inches of snow, with five to ten more inches expected by the end of the day. Plus - he added in an offhand manner - we have another winter storm coming in three days.

5) The temperature inside isn't bad so far. I'm more worried about the tenants downstairs, but maybe the fact that they're under the snowline will help.

6) I'm cursing myself for not having bought a battery-powered humidifier before now. I'd put it off because I bought a new humidifier in the fall, and I didn't want to listen to Doug's grumbles if I bought two humidifiers in one season . . . but this is precisely the time of year when I need a humidifier on 24 hours a day. So I'm putting a wet washcloth over my eyes a lot.

7) I think I have enough eye drops to see me through this, but I'm being careful not to use too many.

8) We have a working landline phone, so I've been taking this opportunity to call friends to whom I owe phone calls.

9) On an up note, Doug and I put away the Christmas decorations a month before we usually get around to doing it. We've not much else to do.

(*Heads off to read braille book, having used up 5% of my laptop power writing this entry.*)

Later:

Our telephone line went dead at around two, when I was talking to Sphinxvictorian. I called my father on Doug's cell phone (which we only use for emergencies). Daddy's comment was, "This storm is stripping away all the amenities of civilization."

However, the power is back . . . for now. We'll see whether it survives the wind gusts. In the meantime, I'm posting this and refreshing my eyes with the humidifier.

Daily life: Looking back at the past

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:04:47 GMT

"I don't go around asking authors about their gender credentials to see whether they're straight women, in order to know whether I'm allowed to read their stuff."

--My gay male apprentice, an avid reader of gay romance, commenting on the controversy over whether m/m fiction is created solely by and for straight women.

"I wonder whether all those guys who are upset about m/m romance writers appropriating their culture are sitting around wearing pink triangle buttons? Because if they are, they've appropriated a symbol that means, 'Line me up for the gas chambers.'"

--My apprentice again.

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.

*** 22 January 2010. Mentoring: Refining my conversation skills.

I've been going through my e-mails from 2002-2003 this week, seeking old letters I can use in my e-book bonus material. I'm happy to say that my reaction to reading my old e-mails hasn't been to say, "Oh, let me just go shoot myself and put the world out of its misery." My letters - as far as I can objectively evaluate them - show me to have behaved in a reasonably nice manner during those years.

But man, could I have used some brushing up of my conversation skills. Typically, what would happen is that someone would send me a single sentence that I happened to disagree with, and they'd get back from me a ten-thousand-world treatise on why they were wrong.

Well, tonight my apprentice and I were having an argument on an entirely unrelated topic, on whether young children should be trained to use the Internet. (I was taking the Luddite view that kids' exposure to the Internet could be delayed till they'd learned other life-skills that Internet usage might interfere with. My apprentice was arguing that certain aspects of Internet usage were best learned at a young age, in the same manner that foreign languages are best learned at a young age.) I was congratulating myself inwardly on staying calm and not getting heated up during the conversation and not interrupting my apprentice repeatedly when he tried to talk, the way I would have if I'd held this type of conversation a decade ago.

Then the conversation took another turn, and I discovered that I'd totally flubbed it in a previous conversation.

I'd sent my apprentice both volumes of Syd McGinley's Dr. Fell series for Christmas, because they're the best BDSM novels I've run across for a long time. My apprentice had called me up and said he'd liked them. I'd told him what I thought was one of the more interesting aspects of the novel - that the manner of the BDSM references showed the writer's research sources. Then I'd waited for my apprentice to give me his impressions about the novel . . . and he hadn't, which had disappointed me, because I'd wanted to hear about his favorite bits.

At least, that was my impression of how the conversation went. From his perspective, he'd tried to tell me what he liked about the novel, and I'd overridden him with a ten-thousand-word treatise on all the things that I objected to in the novels.

Oh, dear. I definitely need to work on my conversation skills.

*** 22 January 2010. Writing: Hurrah! I can easily produce e-books for Kindle now.

Not that it was terribly hard in the old days. I just had to go into the source code of my HTML file and make a few changes to the code. But when I changed over to the ePub format, I thought that would preclude my being able to submit more e-books to the Kindle bookstore, because I was now working with multiple HTML files to create one e-book. The ePub format allows one to do that, and it's the main reason I switched over to the ePub format - because it's easier for me to lay out multiple HTML files (since that's how the text ends up at my Website) than a single file.

But when I ran my ePub edition of "Night Shadow" through Calibre's handy-dandy converter, I was able to easily turn it into a .mobi file that I can upload to the Kindle bookstore. In fact, the conversion was a lot easier than the conversions I used to make with Mobipocket Creator, the software that's specifically designed for creating .mobi e-books.

Man, does this open up new vistas for me. Provided that Amazon doesn't bungle the translation from .mobi to the Kindle format, .azw - which, admittedly, is a possibility - then I'll be able to easily convert all of my ePub e-books into a format that I can upload to Amazon. Not that I earn much at Amazon, but if I sell all of my e-books there, I'll be earning a heck of a lot more than I am currently.

Now if I could just resolve my problems with ePub distribution.

*** 22 January 2010. Writing: Kindle e-book royalties soar to 70 percent . . . but there's a catch.

Of course there's a catch. There always is.

The media is saying that Amazon most likely made this move in order to be competitive with Google Editions, and also with Apple, which is expected to be courting publishers when it reveals its new We're Not Telling What It Is gadget this month. The timing of this certainly seems suspicious: right before the Apple announcement, and the royalty change will take place in the same month that Google Editions opens its doors.

*** 22 January 2010. Writing and Home: Life in 2003.

I'm continuing to collect bonus material for my e-books, which requires me to read through (1) all of my private journal entries between 1995 and 2004, (2) all of my semi-private journal entries in 2004, (3) all of my posts between 2002 and 2004, and (4) all of my correspondence between 2002 and 2004.

Do you know how much wordage that is? Here's a hint: My posts for 2002 alone take up fourteen files. Two megabytes.

Here's another hint: In 2004 - just 2004 - I wrote 370 e-mails, many of them five to ten thousand words long.

To one friend. I was writing to nine friends that year. Plus my readers. Plus a zillion other individuals and organizations.

Good thing I'm a speed reader. What is frustrating is not knowing whether anyone will actually be interested in what I'm turning up. But this will at least ease my guilt over selling e-books of stories that are also available free online.

Here's the sort of stuff I've turned up, though this one I can't use in my bonus material, since it's not related to my writings. It's from an e-mail to Anne Blue of MAS-Zine during a period when the federal government was sending out warnings about the possibility of a biochemical attack on Washington, D.C., which I live next to.

o--o--o

Hazards of Everyday Life (9 September 2003)

Did I tell you that Doug's gone gaga over fruit? He hasn't quite become a fruitarian, but he's eating tons of fruit now. And of course he wanted to convert me, which was quite a job, because I've always hated eating fruit on its own. For one thing, I have a tendency to get mild rashes after eating fresh fruit; it must be some lingering allergy from childhood (when I was allergic to a lot of foods).

Then it occurred to me that, whenever I go to one of those stupid affairs where you have to stand up to eat, I always eat fruit rather than try to balance a drink along with my plate. I tried fruit with my meals, and ta da! it worked. And there was no rash afterwards - the other food must have counteracted whatever was giving me the mild allergy. (Of course, Doug then proceeded to tell me why it's nutritionally wrong to eat fruit with your meals.)

So tonight I thought I'd tackle a mango. I'd never eaten one, but I've drunk mango juice. Doug happened upon me as I was about to start and, in a very condescending voice, began to explain to me the laborious task of how to get rid of the mango stone.

"Why don't you just bite into a mango, like a peach?" I asked.

"Don't be silly," he said dismissively. "You don't eat mango skin."

"Why not?"

It turned out that this idea, like so many of his other ideas, was based purely on his certainty that You Just Don't Do It. I, being in favor of empiricism, bit into the mango. "Tastes fine to me," I said.

Doug gave up on me and went to his study. I decided to find the ultimate proof that he should convert to the empirical way of life; I started leafing through the books we have on The Joys of Eating Fruit. None of them mentioned eating mango skins, but none of them said it was wrong to do so.

Insatiably curious, I decided to check the Web. And there discovered that the mango is related to poison ivy.

"Ack!" I screamed, and began checking every Website I could to figure out what dire consequences come from eating mango skin. Here was one gentleman's report of what happened after he touched (rather than ate) mango skin:

"Every inch of my skin and scalp itched and my eyes felt puffy. I got out of bed and looked in my mirror. A red, deformed face stared back at me, with eyes so swollen that the lashes barely peeked out. Worse, an angry, red, itching rash, shining with tiny blisters, blanketed my skin from crown to toe. The worst of it covered my hands and wrists with an itch so intense that it drove me to my closet to comb my fingers down my hanging clothes for relief."

There's a passage in the Bible about this, isn't there? Something about pride going before the fall?

Anyway, my desperate search revealed that (1) eating or touching mango skin doesn't always cause a rash, and (2) you might be able to stop the rash from breaking out by washing the infected area with soap and water within the first ten minutes.

So I washed my lips with soap. And then I washed everything that I'd touched. My computer mouse objected to being washed, so I replaced it. I can't do a darn thing about my computer keys (which I am tapping away at right now); I'll just hope that my lips got the worst of it. Now I just have to wait 48-72 hours to see whether I break out.

And I was worried about biochemical hazards.

o--o--o

*** 24 January 2010. Writing and Home: Life in 2004.

I've basically finished combing through my posts and journal entries, but am continuing to go through my old personal correspondence. I figured I might as well read it through to the end because - with the exception of a flurry of e-mails with my apprentice on non-literary matters in 2007, and the occasional short-term correspondence - my personal correspondence ended in 2006. (One friend stopped e-mailing me in 2002, another friend stopped e-mailing me in 2003, another friend stopped e-mailing me in 2004, another friend stopped e-mailing me in 2005, and at that point I ran out of pen pals. Some people have a black thumb in growing plants; I have a black thumb in maintaining e-mail friendships.)

Anyway, here's a reprint of another e-mail, from February 2004.

o--o--o

After Doug had placed his usual mountain of food on the table, I started writing down what he was eating tonight. Here's the list:

Whole wheat pita bread
Whole wheat regular bread
Zucchini
Green peppers
Cauliflower
Garlic
Broccoli
Cherry tomatoes
Cucumber
Bean sprouts
Crunchy sprouts
Tofu
Unidentified greens
Kale
Collard greens
Onions
Savoy cabbage

I might add that (1) all of this was whole (Doug isn't into wasting time cutting green peppers or slicing tofu), and (2) all of it except for the last four items was uncooked (he just pops those raw garlics into his mouth).

After I'd finished the list, he said, "I have less than usual tonight. Usually I sprinkle coleslaw over everything."

"What's that made up of?" I asked. (Doug makes his own coleslaw - it has veggies and nothing else.)

"Purple cabbage, green cabbage, carrots, celery, and radishes," he replied.

Suddenly my potato pancakes and ketchup seemed a little inadequate.

o--o--o

*** 30 January 2010. Writing: Yet again, my e-mail offers interesting reading.

"The Leather Archives & Museum hosts a thorough exploration of pornography, kink, consent, and fine lines: GRAPHIC SEXUAL HORROR . . . Presented by Clarisse Thorn and the Sex+++ Film Series at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum--"

At what?

"The public dance halls filled with frivolous and irresponsible young people in a feverish search for pleasure, are but a sorry substitute for the old dances on the village green in which all of the older people of the village participated. Chaperonage was not then a social duty but natural and inevitable, and the whole courtship period was guarded by the conventions and restraint which were taken as a matter of course and had developed through years of publicity and simple propriety." --Jane Addams: The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909).

Poor Miss Addams. She must be rolling in her grave.

*** 31 January 2010. Writing and Simplicity: Wrapping up a moderately awful month.

From most perspectives, it's been a good month. Some readers posted nice comments about my writing, I had interesting correspondence with a few people (*waves at catana1*), I got the chance to be a guest blogger for the first time ever, some new folks Friended me, I published my first ePub e-book (though I'm still working on improving the formatting), I worked out some software problems, I got all of my Web tasks checked off my list, and if my inbox isn't in as good a shape as I'd hoped it would be, at least I got some long-delayed e-mail prepared to send.

Oh, and Bookshare.org is now offering full-text search. That's a major step, because it means I'll be able to do research using complete electronic texts of thousands of books that are in copyright (legally, I add, for the sake of those of you who haven't read my previous references to Bookshare.org). Of course, I've been able to do that before now in a limited way, but having full-text searching capabilities will allow me to track down a lot more texts.

But this month was dreadful from the point of view of Internet addiction. So far this month, I've been online for over a hundred hours, and I still have one big session left to do. By January 8th, I had written 24,960 words since the beginning of the month, yet I didn't get my 30,000-word quota done for this month. (An unintentionally humorous quotation I encountered from my 2008 blog: "I'm a bit nervous about whether I'll be able to get all my series done, thanks to my slowed-down rate of getting novels done - no more than two or three a year, even if I really work hard.") I didn't get any heavy editing done. I didn't get any housework done. And what was most awful from my point of view, I spent much of the month - as my poor apprentice can testify - in the Internet-addiction equivalent of being stoned. I had the attention span of a gnat. I was barely aware of my surroundings. If I don't have mobs coming after me for any of the messages I posted in haste during that time, I'll be very fortunate indeed. When I'm manic, I lose all perspective on what I'm saying.

Here's me corresponding with a friend in 2004 about addiction:

"It's not an issue of quantity but of controllability. If you routinely can't stop yourself from doing something, for however small or large a part of your life that may be, then it's {insert label here, but I call it an addiction}. For example, if I get up 30 days in a row, telling myself that I will not go onto the Internet, that I have other things to do that are much more important, and I go onto the Internet for every one of those 30 days, that's an addiction. (This is, alas, a real example.) If, on the other hand, I go onto the Internet for 300 days in a row because I'm a slash archivist and it's my duty and pleasure to be online that much, that's not an addiction."

So it's not just being in an Internet haze that bothers me; it's the fact that I can't stop myself from going online, and once I'm on, I can't get myself offline. I'll go online for what I intend to be a thirty-second visit, and six hours later I'll still be there, knowing I should get offline, but unable to do so.

Honestly, folks, it really is like being an alcoholic.

I did quite well in October and November in staying offline. That shows I can deal with this problem. It's simply clear, after what happened this month, that I need to take stronger measures against my Internet addiction.

*** 31 January 2010. Writing and Simplicity: Stronger measures against my Internet addiction (with an interlude on food).

In 1990, when Doug and I first met, my daily diet was as follows:

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread.
Tuna fish sandwiches on white bread.
High-fat canned soup.
Full-fat milk.
Juice.
Coke.
Oreo cookies and other chocolate desserts.

That was it. I ate that sort of thing practically ever day of the year.

Well, today I eat:

Whole-wheat couscous, home-cooked vegetables, and low-fat cheese.
Low-fat home-cooked soups.
Home-cooked broccoli sandwiches on wheat bread, with tomatoes.
Orange juice.
Apple sauce (only because I have TMJ at the moment; otherwise, it would be raw fruit).
Fat-free milk.
Cheerios with bananas and soy milk.
Flavored whole-wheat couscous for dessert.
Oh, and occasional peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and very occasional chocolate.

One of the reasons that I can keep to this routine is that I don't go "browsing" for new types of food. I don't need to, because I know what I'm going to eat each week; it's the same thing I ate last week. What small variations occur - a new vegetable, a new type of soup - I leave mainly to Doug to decide. So when I shop, I'm not in the dangerous mode of thinking, "What new thing shall I buy that I haven't bought before?" I just head toward the food items I always buy, and I get out of the store as quickly as possible. (Well, okay, after I've read the newspaper headlines and skimmed the newsmagazines.)

Now, I'm not saying I don't occasionally fall into old patterns of eating. (*Hides evidence of hot dogs in the refrigerator.* Not my fault, honestly - Doug brought them home.) But what's remarkable to me is that my shift to a radically different eating routine was so painless. Every step of the way (for I didn't make every change at once), I told myself that I'd suffer horribly if I gave up X in exchange for Z. And every step of the way, I found that I preferred Z to X. I wouldn't want to go back to eating the way I did in 1995; what I'm eating now tastes so good and makes my body feel so much better.

I've been going through a similar discovery, as I make changes in my life to deal with my Internet addiction, that change isn't as hard as I'd thought.

I now spend at least two weeks a month at home, offline, with no human contact except with Doug and my apprentice. No problem.

I no longer attend real-life social events, except occasional meetings with family members and close friends, and sometimes one or two conventions a year. No sweat.

Until my recent Internet fall, I hadn't posted regularly on Internet forums for over a year, except for vital professional reasons. I barely remember now what it was like to spend at least half of each day posting at forums.

I thought that I would die wretchedly if I didn't go to the library at least once a week during the warm weather. I found that I could survive without those trips.

Because of the above, I'm reasonably confident I'll survive the next step, which involves surgery on the heart of the cancer that is eating at me.

The cancer isn't the Internet addiction. That's merely a symptom of my uncontrollable acquisitiveness. A glance at my study would tell visitors that my acquisitiveness can take any form and shape. (Yes, I still have the pen caps that I saved at age fourteen. The only reason I don't have the toilet paper rolls I saved at age nine is that my mother threw them out.) But texts are the major danger area for me. Since my elementary-school years, I've had a compulsive need, not only to read (which has definitely had its benefits), but to possess the texts I read. In my childhood, that mainly meant bringing home more books from the library than I could possible read before their due date - and indeed, reading them wasn't the main point. Acquiring them was the main point.

These days, while library books remain a danger area, the main problem is the Internet. For example, during the past two days, I've downloaded 700 files. (A pause to let you absorb that number.) I don't want to tell you how many gigabytes that is.

The reason I keep failing in my quest to limit my Internet activities - though I've definitely made important progress - is that I haven't stemmed matters at the source: namely, my compulsion to acquire new things. It is this compulsion which causes me to go online on days when I hadn't intended to. It is this compulsion which causes me to stay online when I know I should go offline. And it is this compulsion that I intend to stop feeding.

As of the moment I go offline today, I'm instituting a policy of "Don't Seek New Stuff, Don't Add New Stuff." I've put together a short list of the Internet activities and offline browsing activities that are absolutely necessary for my professional and personal lives (such as posting at this blog, responding to new correspondence, and reading the writings produced by my favorite authors). I've provided for emergency expections. And I've designated four holidays during the year on which I can do other types of online and offline browsing and acquiring, as a treat.

Other than that, though, I'm not letting anything new be downloaded onto my computer. I'm not letting anything new enter my house. I'm not going to go searching for new material, whether or not I keep that material. Instead, I'm going to devote my time to sorting and enjoying what I already have.

In other words, I'm planning to treat online and offline browsing and acquisition in the same way that I now treat chocolate: as a treat to have in small quantities on special occasions, not as something I routinely gorge myself on.

Most people wouldn't have to take these strong measures. But then, most people wouldn't have to become part-time hermits either; nor would they have to confine themselves to eating chocolate on holidays. The strong measures I've taken in the past to protect my mental and physical health have had such a positive effect on my life - and, hopefully, on the lives of other people around me, including my readers - that I'm reasonably confident that, a few months down the road, I'll be asking myself, "Why didn't I do this earlier? This is fun!"

Reply to comments: British children's drama, Socrates, Plato, and language in historical fiction and

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:49:27 GMT

Hey, you guys know that you can reply to any of my Reply to Comments, don't you? One of the reasons I place my replies in a separate post is so that people won't miss seeing the conversations sparked by past posts.

How I reply to comments at this blog.

Reply to this comment by lusiology:

"I've always thought it's a shame the [Riddle-Master] series isn't better known here in the UK."

Well, we often don't get your good stuff either. I'm still frustrated beyond words that, during my entire childhood, really terrific children's dramas - mainly adaptations of wonderful novels - were being shown on British television, and none of them were shown in the U.S.. This, despite the fact that PBS had no less than three series that regularly broadcast British adult dramas.

Recently, I had a chance to watch again the ITV teen drama Press Gang, which I hadn't seen for twenty years, and my god, it was just as good as back when I watched it at age 27. I mean, it has nasty darkfic mixed in with stuff like this (from the episode I'd remembered, which was called "The Rest of My Life"; the characters are worried that one of the staff members, Spike, might have been the victim of a bomb blast):

o--o--o

Kenny: "Look, I am not going to let you fall to pieces while there's nothing to fall to pieces about."

Lynda (heatedly): "So what are you saying? I should go in there and edit a newspaper?"

Kenny: "Put it this way - what would Spike want you to do?"

Lynda: "The usual. Wear tighter clothes and show more cleavage."

o--o--o

Or this scene, where two of the characters are fighting over a girl:

o--o--o

Colin: "I'm warning you, Spike, just keep away from her."

Spike: "I'm trying to! And what are you going to do if I don't?"

Colin: "Spike, I don't want to get violent--"

Spike (shoving him): "Violent?"

Colin: "Well, rude."

Spike (shoving him): "Rude?"

Colin: "Well, a bit off-hand, certainly." (Spike grabs him around the collar.) "Well, more kind of reserved, you know - distantly polite."

Spike (incredulously): "So if I don't stay away from Ruby, you're going to get polite with me?"

Colin: "Yeah! And that's just for starters!"

o--o--o

The main protagonist was fetchingly familiar; turned out she was Julia Sawalha, the same actress who later played Saffron in Absolutely Fabulous (and played the same sort of character; poor kid was obviously being typecast).

And oh man, the scripts for Press Gang. My Muse took one look at the way the scriptwriter had interwoven parallel plots in "The Rest of My Life" and "Monday/Tuesday," and he promptly screamed, "It's mine! Gimme!" Then he dashed off to rewrite a story in Prison City.

He'd probably have been doing a lot more of that over the years if I'd had more access to British children's dramas.

So, now: Who's going to write me some Spike fanfic? Because he's a leather-jacketed, wise-cracking James Dean. Can't get better than that.

Reply to this comment by an anonymous poster at LiveJournal:

"It's said that Socrates never made any definitive statements about his beliefs or ideas"

Yes, Socrates was the one who claimed that. Over and over and over. Usually in the same dialogues where his argument would fall to pieces if it turned out that one of his axioms was wrong.

I'm a bit cynical about Socrates' self-assessment, if you can't tell. :)

As for Plato . . . oh, dear, here I show the deficiencies of my education. At St. John's, we didn't speculate about which parts of the dialogues and which were fictional; we simply treated Socrates the same way we treated fictional characters. That sort of thing always gave my father the literary historian a headache. (He's to blame; he was the first one to recommend St. John's to me as a college to attend.)

Reply to this comment (with mild spoilers for The Eternal Dungeon) by catana1:

Language is something I've struggled with, actually, and for the same reason that a lot of other historical writers do: because, until recently, I wasn't reading enough primary sources. Fortunately, now that I am, I find that I wasn't terribly far off the mark; language patterns didn't change terribly much between the turn of the century and the 1960s-1970s, when I was growing up. The slang was different, of course, but I think the stories that best survive the test of time are the ones that minimize the use of slang. I tend to use slang only for comic effect or when I'm writing about a particular community that uses its own vocabulary or when I'm writing dialect.

I'd still like to improve my use of language in historical fantasy - but in the meantime, here's two tips I absorbed long ago.

"Victorian writers, and even those of a somewhat later date . . . saw nothing ludicrous in 'Alas! fair youth, it grieves me to see thee in this plight. Would that I had the power to strike these fetters from thy tender limbs.' Josephine Tey, whose death I shall never cease to lament, called this 'Writing forsoothly.' A slightly different variant is known in the trade as 'Gadzookery.' Nowadays this is out of fashion; and some writers go to the other extreme and make the people of Classical Greece or Mediaeval England speak modern colloquial English. This is perhaps nearer to the truth of the spirit, since the people in question would have spoken the modern colloquial tongue of their place and time. But, personally, I find it destroys the atmophere when a young Norman Knight says to his Squire, 'Shut ip, Dickie, you're getting too big for your boots.' Myself, I try for a middle course, avoiding both Gadzookery and modern colloquialism; a frankly 'made-up' form that has the right sound to it, as Kipling did also. I try to catch the rhythm of a tongue, the tune that it plays on the ear, Welsh or Gaelic as opposed to Anglo-Saxon, the sensible workmanlike language which one feels the Latin of the oridnary Roman citizen would have translated into. It is extraordinary what can be done by the changing or transposing of a single word, or using perfectly usual one in a slightly unusual way: 'I beg your pardon' changed into 'I ask your pardon.'"

--Rosemary Sutcliff: "History is People" (1971), published in Virginia Haviland's Children and Literature: Views and Reviews.

That final sentence is one I've paid a lot of attention to, particularly in terms of metaphors, similes, and what would be cliches if I didn't take the trouble to change them a bit. When I reach the point of having to end a simile such as "His body looked as relaxed as . . ." it's an opportunity for me to offer some insight into the culture . . . or in this particular case in Rebirth, to offer a foreshadow.

Also, I tend to alter words slightly, such as documentwork rather than paperwork, which has caused half a dozen beta readers to inform me that documentwork isn't a word. :)

"In the third passage [she has just quoted Tolkien as an example of good language in fantasy], the speakers are quieter, and use a less extraordinary English, or rather an English extraordinary for its simple timelessness. . . . It has sobriety, wit, and force. It is the language of men of character. . . .

"Tolkien writes a plain, clear English. Its outstanding virtue is its flexibility, its variety. It ranges easily from the commonplace to the stately, and can slide into metrical poetry, as in the Tom Bombadil episode, without the careless reader's even noticing. Tolkien's vocabulary is not striking; he has no ichor; everything is direct, concrete, and simple."

--Ursula K. Le Guin: "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" (1973), an essay I heartily recommend to all writers of fantasy and historical fiction. It appears in her essay collection The Language of the Night.

Tolkien's approach (which I only know secondhand from Ms. Le Guin, but which I've seen successfully used by other writers) is the one I aspire to. I want the sort of language that can go from this--

"'You don't think I work for those bloodletters, do you? I work for the Codifier – not that that's much of an improvement, I'll admit. But at least I can prevent the Seekers from torturing prisoners whose health won't stand for that sort of treatment. When those deaf-and-dumb Seekers listen to me, that is.'"

--to this--

"What followed then he could not have expected; nor did he ever know what took place. But the immortals who watched him knew, and they saw how his blood gathered itself and was transformed in the world into new life. As a tree falls in the forest, and is covered in earth, and then changes its form to bring forth new vegetation, so too had this dying immortal learned the secret to rebirth."

--and then to this--

"He bought it, of course. I got to listen to him give another flowery speech about my rights as a prisoner – I didn't pay much attention to it, except for the part about how the guards could only punish me upon his orders. Then we got down to serious business."

--without the reader blinking an eye.

o--o--o

. . . and thank you to MightyMaeve, Clare London, sa_tsl, and slashbluegreen for your kind comments about "The Unanswered Question."

Historical Fantasy - Why Not Just Write Historical Fiction?

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:43:50 GMT

Clare London is holding her second annual blog month, in which she brings in other authors and readers to talk on any topic they wish. I had so much fun reading last year's contributions (including comments posted in reply) that I asked to participate in this year's fest. You'll find me over there today, talking about Historical Fantasy - Why Not Just Write Historical Fiction?

FIC: Cold Stars (Subtext)

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:55:28 GMT

The prince was told that he must find himself. But what if finding oneself means losing one's love?

Parental supervision is strongly suggested for this story.

"I thought that he would return once his wounds were healed. I would never have left him if I had known this would happen."

FIC: Revenge (Subtext)

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:51:01 GMT

Revenge is sweet . . . unless you are haunted by dark memories of your own misdeeds.

(This story is also suitable for Main Bookshelf readers.)

He had prepared himself for the possibility of death at the hands of the enemy. He had not expected his King to die in the moment of his victory.

duskpeterson.com update: New stories and new excerpts from upcoming fiction

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:41:45 GMT

—John had a way of speaking, softly and simply, words that were most chilling. ¶ A new Kindle e-book edition is issued of the friendship fiction novel Blood Vow.
—The darkness that Farsight had sensed during the past weeks was quiescent, perhaps driven into sleep by the light. ¶ A free edition of the suspenseful fantasy story "Night Shadow" is the first in a new series of ePub e-books.
—Reminding himself that he was not to kill anyone in this dungeon. . . ¶ A holiday gift story is posted at The Eternal Dungeon.
—He had prepared himself for the possibility of death at the hands of the enemy. He had not expected his King to die in the moment of his victory. ¶ Two stories are posted at a new series site devoted to rare litfic: gen, het, and slash.
—The Turn-of-the-Century Toughs bibliographies are updated.
—New blurbs, cover art, and excerpts are posted from upcoming fiction.

The details.

New editions: "Night Shadow" in ePub; "Blood Vow" in Kindle; plus, news about my future e-books

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:39:34 GMT

The following e-books, both from the Main Bookshelf, have appeared in new e-book editions.

New Kindle e-book edition:

Blood Vow (The Three Lands). He has taken a blood vow to the Jackal God to bring freedom to his land by killing Koretia's greatest enemy. But what will he do when the enemy becomes his friend?

New ePub e-book edition (free):

Night Shadow (Darkling Plain). A prince who could see beyond his borders but not see the people around him. . . . An enemy who would take any measure to get what he wanted. . . . And now a stranger has brought news to the prince of an approaching danger.

I'm in the process of converting my entire backlist into ePub e-books. Some of the e-books will have bonus material about the creation of the stories.

If you're not familiar with the format, ePub is the MP3 of the e-book world: a common e-book format that can be read by many e-readers and mobile devices. Since an ePub e-book is simply a bunch of HTML files collected together in a special way with a few other files, you can easily read ePub e-books in your Web browser, as well as in e-readers, mobile devices, etc. More information is available in Easy Ways to Read ePub E-books.

My first ePub e-book is now online: "Night Shadow." If you plan to read my e-books at any time in the future, I'd appreciate it if you'd download this free e-book. If you encounter any problems with the formatting or layout, please let me know so that I can correct them now, before I publish more e-books.

Daily life: Prison lit, Smashwords, ePub, and the m/m fiction community

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:26:36 GMT

"I am not a historian. And even if I was I wouldn't know everything about every era. So generally, if I'm reading a story about 1800's Australia, or 1920's Ireland, or Tudor England, my default mode is that I'm a little on edge. This is because I want to like the book, and I trust the author not to jolt me with glaring anachronisms. If there are small mistakes I won't catch them – and if the book is good enough – such as Dash and Dingo was, I can forgive the odd gaffe. We all make mistakes – hell we are human. But if the book unravels as I'm reading it, and there's glaring nonsense heaped on 'omg she didn't' then I know I'm NOT in a safe pair of hands."

--Erastes: A Safe Pair of Hands.

"I suppose I don't see what's so wrong about getting the facts right. No-one complains when mystery writers use the correct poisons or the right ballistics, after all. I don't feel I'm being preached at when I read murder mysteries, and I enjoy learning about things I didn't know. Just because something is romance, historical romance, doesn't mean that it should automatically be allowed to warp the facts. 'Oh I know cocoa powder doesn't have the same effect as belladonna' said Agatha Christie, 'but it's fiction, so why does it matter?'"

--Erastes, in the comments section of the same article. The whole thread is worth reading, because other historical novelists and readers chime in with their thoughts.

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.

*** 2 January 2010. Writing and Simplicity: Bunches of stats.

Lots of statistics to report today, thanks to the end of the month coinciding with the end of the year, which in turn coincided with the end of the decade.

First, my daily word counts for December.

o--o--o

December 3
3960: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 4
1530: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 6
770: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 7
1860: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 8
3800: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 9
2150: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 10
2440: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 11
2390: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 12
740: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 13
1040: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 14
2720: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 15
3480: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 16
2150: "The Unanswered Question" (The Eternal Dungeon).

December 18
1130: "On Guard" (The Eternal Dungeon).

o--o--o

Very nice. I like to see that sort of steady flow of wordage.

Next, my word totals from this year.

o--o--o

January 2009: 37,670 words written (average 3139/day). Wrote 12 days. 1 story reprinted.
February 2009: 37,650 words written (average 3137/day). Wrote 12 days. 1 story reprinted.
March 2009: 8440 words written (average 1406/day). Wrote 6 days. 2 stories reprinted.
April 2009: 3700 words written (average 1850/day). Wrote 2 days. 1 fiction collection published.
May 2009: 3500 words written (average 875/day). Wrote 4 days. 1 novel and 4 stories reprinted.
June 2009: 1330 words written (average 665/day). Wrote 2 days. 1 story published. 2 stories reprinted.
July 2009: 0 words written . Wrote 0 days. 1 novel reprinted.
August 2009: 9330 words written (average 2332/day). Wrote 4 days. 1 story published.
September 2009: 0 words written. Wrote 0 days.
October 2009: 25,610 words written (average 3201/day). Wrote 8 days.
November 2009: 38,350 words written (average 2950/day). Wrote 13 days.
December 2009: 30,160 words written (average 2154/day). Wrote 14 days. 1 story published.

Total for 2009: 195,740 words written. Wrote on 77 days. 1 fiction collection published. 3 stories published. 2 novels reprinted. 10 stories reprinted.

Total average for 2009: 19,574/month, 2542/day. Wrote an average of 8 days per month on 10 months.

o--o--o

I actually managed to surpass my wordage for 2008, which I never would have predicted in November. In fact, wordage-wise, 2009 was my best year since 2004. I'm hopeful that 2010 will be even better, since I plan to write on more days.

Now a decade's worth of wordage counts.

o--o--o

Total for 2000: 47,710 words written. Wrote on 18 days.

Total for 2001: 231,300 words written. Wrote on 61 days.

Total for 2002: 337,045 words written. Wrote on 134 days. 14 stories published.

Total for 2003: 276,175 words written. Wrote on 97 days. 12 stories published. 4 stories reprinted.

Total for 2004: 211,510 words written. Wrote on 86 days. 7 stories published. 3 stories reprinted.

Total for 2005: 62,190 words written. Wrote on 29 days. 2 stories published.

Total for 2006: 113,840 words written. Wrote on 67 days. 5 stories published. 4 stories reprinted.

Total for 2007: 95,700 words written. Wrote on 61 days. 1 novel published. 1 story reprinted.

Total for 2008: 194,810 words written. Wrote on 84 days. 2 novels published. 1 fiction collection published. 9 stories published. 8 stories reprinted.

Total for 2009: 195,740 words written. Wrote on 77 days. 1 fiction collection published. 3 stories published. 2 novels reprinted. 10 stories reprinted.

TOTAL for the first decade of 2010: 1,766,020 words written (or roughly 15 novels' worth). 3 novels published. (Um, more than that, actually. I missed something in my stats somewhere.) 2 fiction collections published. 52 stories published. 2 novels reprinted. 30 stories reprinted.

o--o--o

Not so good in terms of getting new stories out in 2009, in comparison to most years since I started distributing my stories, but I can confidently say that I'll be publishing more new stuff this year. And overall, a respectable total, considering that I was battling a raging Internet addiction during this decade.

As for my work-hour counts in December, here are the averages per day.

o--o--o

Write: .5 hours per day.
Edit/publish: 1.5 hours per day.
Read: 1.5 hours per day.
Exercise: .5 hours per day.
Upkeep/housework/simplicity: 2.5 hours per day.
Nonfiction (reading and writing): 1.5 hours per day.
Online business: 1 hour per day.

Overall total: 10 hours per day (because I rounded down some of the above numbers).

o--o--o

The writing total isn't bad, considering that I deliberately only spent half the month on writing fiction. I'd like to see the writing hours go a bit higher, though. The editing/publishing total is about where I'd like it to be. The reading total could be a bit higher. The exercise total is good, considering that my back pains prevented me from exercising during part of the month. There's no research total for this month because all of my research was online, other than the primary-source fiction reading, which was counted under the "reading" total.

The other total figures are very distressing. I can't even claim that I did more than a stitch of housework this month; that total was for relatively unimportant activities, such as . . .

. . . um, figuring out my stats. Okay, I'll stop here with the stats. But not before noting that my "total hours of work and useful activities" this month is higher than it's been since I started keeping records. I venture to say that it's higher than it's ever been.

I think I've got the composing part of my month in good shape. Now I just need to figure out how to shape up the rest of the month. In particular, I need to figure out how to keep from falling off the Internet wagon in the second half of each month.

*** 3 January 2010. Writing: Text-to-speech, braille, and my Muse.

I was editing one of my older stories recently when I ran across a particularly nicely phrased passage. It was too nicely phrased to be due entirely to my native gifts.

"Hmm," I said. "I wonder what I was reading when I wrote this."

I checked the original draft to find the date of composition, and then I checked my daily schedule for that date. Here's what I saw:

"READ: Mary Stewart: 'The Last Enchantment' (text-to-speech)."

"Oh, shoot," I said. "That's what I was afraid of."

No, I hadn't accidentally lifted my own passage from Mary Stewart (though I've done sort of thing in the past; her Merlin novels seeped into my bones when I was a teen because I reread them so often). The wretched news I'd anticipated and received was that I write better when I'm listening to other people's novels than when I'm reading those novels with my eyes.

It's not even as though I'm a good listener. I began to suspect that I had auditory processing disorder when I happened across a description of the symptoms a couple of years ago. The real evidence of the disorder, though, comes from my comprehension rate for listening to spoken material. As I put it in this blog a couple of years ago: "The default reaading-rate setting for my text-to-speech software is 170. For easy comprehension, though, I have to read much slower: 80-100." Actually, I have the rate down to 70 now. The number 70 represents the number of words spoken per minute. As a comparison, at the beginning of his recording of "A Child's Christmas in Wales", Dylan Thomas speaks at a rate of 147 words a minute.

So yeah, my comprehension rate for speech is lousy. That probably explains why I was decidedly not the life of every party I ever attended in my life. It also explains why my social life improved to an umpteenth degree when it went online.

On the other hand, I'm a speed reader. A compulsive one. Even when I try to read every single word with my eyes, I can't. I end up skimming eventually.

I discovered this the first time I read a text in braille. I don't have any comprehension difficulties with braille - my brain processes finger-read text the same way that it processes eye-read text - but because I don't read braille every often, I just can't skim it. I have to read every single character in order to be able to understand the text.

The first text I read in braille, back in June 2001, was George R. R. Martin's "The Hedge Knight," which I'd read with my eyes the previous year. At least, I'd thought I had. When I read the novella in braille, I was appalled to discover that I'd previously only read about a third of the text. Everything else I'd skimmed.

I still prefer reading with my eyes, in most cases. Because of my auditory processing disorder, reading by text-to-speech takes an awful lot of mental concentration from me, while I find reading braille to be physically exhausting.

But if I read with my eyes, I skim. And if I skim, I'm inclined to skip over the very passages that my Muse needs me to read, in order to influence his style - namely, the descriptions.

So I've gone back to reading Muse-friendly novels through text-to-speech. I read through text-to-speech at roughly one-fifth the rate that I read with my eyes, so an added bonus is that I'm not going to run out of Muse-friendly reading matter this winter. In fact, I'll be lucky if I finish the novel I'm currently reading (Rosemary Sutcliff's Rider on a White Horse) before the end of the month.

*** 3 January 2010. Writing and Simplicity: My writing schedule this month.

I'm all Eternal Dungeoned out after last month's writing session, and I don't want to switch back to Prison City till I can take another trip down to Calvert County in February or March.

So I've decided to see how far I can get in finishing up Mercy's Prisoner. I have three novelettes (I think that's what they are) in an unfinished state. My Muse being the backwards fellow that he is, he has set to work on the last novelette of the three. I'm 90% sure it's because he wanted to write another scene with Sedgewick in it. My Muse is shameless when it comes to picking characters he wants to work with; he always goes for the dark ones.

My schedule for the writing part of each month has settled into something that's actually workable, glory be. Here's what my daily schedule looks like currently:

o--o--o

First cycle:
--Write fiction (roughly 45 minutes).
--Scan book (15 minutes).
--Talk to Doug, then talk to my apprentice while preparing food (roughly 30 minutes).
--Listen to Muse-friendly fiction while eating (30 minutes).
--Read turn-of-the-century literature (30 minutes).
--Tidy (10 minutes).
--Dance while plotting (45 minutes).

Second cycle:
--Nap, then repeat initial five steps of first cycle.
--Leisure: write in journal, do simplicity reading, etc. (roughly 60 minutes).
--Listen to Muse-friendly fiction while eating (30 minutes).
--Lightly edit what I've written that day (roughly 30 minutes).
--Add up daily hours and wordage (10 minutes).
--Dance while plotting (45 minutes).

o--o--o

That adds up to nine hours, which is as much as it's safe for me to cram into a single day, since I'm a twelve-hour-a-day sleeper and I need time for little stuff like caring for my humidifiers, who demand to be fed and cleaned as often as babies.

What I love about this schedule is its monastic simplicity. It revolves around my old "write fiction / read fiction / dance while plotting" cycle that has served me well for so many years. Everything else is just little tidbits that I tuck in around the main course.

(Um. Not that apprentice is a tidbit. . . . Or rather, he is, in the sense of being a choice morsel. . . . I think I'll stop here before I get myself in more trouble.)

*** 7 January 2010. Writing: The Muse swoops in and takes hostages.

Oh, man, when my Muse is hot, he sizzles. He gave me half my monthly wordage in two days.

He's held me hostage for two days. I had to beg for bathroom breaks. He highly grudged me the time to fill my humidifiers and to let Doug and my apprentice know that I was still alive. Other than during those brief respites, he pointed the gun at me and demanded that I do nothing but plot, write, and refresh him with other people's fiction.

(Okay, sorry about the violent metaphors. He's had me writing prisonfic.)

As a result of this and my writing earlier this month, I've finished 23,600 words in six days, and only have 6400 words left before I reach my monthly goal of thirty thousand words. It's a good thing that I'd already decided to switch to a goal of thirty thousand words or fourteen days' work, whichever took longer.

Also as a result of this spurt of activity, I have most of the ending finished of the middle novella within the final novel of the Life Prison series, plus a couple of scenes in the third novel of the series. Drat my Muse; he was supposed to be working on the first novel in the series. I am quite sure it is no coincidence that he kept choosing scenes with Sedgewick in them.

My captivity ended today when Doug ~~parachuted~~ strode into my study and announced that we were going to the store in order to sort out my eyeglasses situation, because the receipt for the defective glasses expires on the 20th.

"I want to protect my investment!" he announced.

Then he added, "And your eyes."

*** 9 January 2010. Writing: Prisons in the 1910s (Life Prison research).

When doing a Web search on my hero, Thomas Mott Osborne, I stumbled across the fact that a documentary has been produced about his time as warden of a naval prison, TMO@The Castle. I wrote to the producer, and he told me that the documentary will eventually be available DVD, and there will be bonus footage: a silent film that Osborne made in the prison, using the prisoners as actors.

Just as interesting is a 1915 magazine that I downloaded from Google Books, called The Delinquent. It was published first by the National Prisoners' Aid Association, and later by the Prison Association of New York. It features articles by prison reformers, as well as articles by people opposed to prison reform; news about prison reform taking place round the U.S.; and, most interesting of all, reprints of articles from various prison newspapers that were published by the prisoners themselves. I've been dying to get my hands on such newspapers. What the excerpts reveal is that the prisoners back then wrote much better than the average journalist does today. :)

There was lots of information about Osborne and the prisons connected with him. Here, for example, is a quotation (courtesy of a New York Times article that The Delinquent quoted) from a film-maker, Katherine Russell Bleecker. She had worked on a film at the prison in Auburn, New York, where Osborne has previously been voluntarily incarcerated.

o--o--o

"There the men [i.e. prisoners] volunteered to pose, 100 of them, but were quite put out when we could use only forty of their number, as we had only forty of the old-time suits of striped garments. They were to pose to show the method formerly existing of punishing a man - how his head was shaved and those insulting striped outrages put on him, and then, if his spirit wasn't broken and he talked or violated any rules, how he was flogged. I hadn't the slightest idea that any one would come forward for that flogging scene, but a youth of 20 stepped up and said he was willing. You know, the punishment consisted of putting iron bracelets on the miscreant, hauling him up until his feet were several inches from the floor, and then beating him with a leather strap.

"I had a cardboard paddle made and gave the guard instructions to pull the victim up, then lower him gradually until his toes rested on the floor, but to appear to be holding tightly to the rope so as to keep up the illusion. Then at the signal I began to turn and the official beater began his part of the program, and in about a minute and a half I gave word for the guard to lower and told the youth to appear to fall into a faint as he was released. This he did, and was carried out, and I thought he was about as clever an actor as I had seen, and started out after him to thank him and found him in a real faint.

"The guard, in his excitement, had lowered the boy, but had gradually raised him again, and all that time the poor chap had hung by his wrists with his toes clear of the ground. He explained that he didn't want to spoil the picture, so decided not to speak for fear the guard would make a quick move and I would lose the film. . . ."

o--o--o

Man, every time that I think I'm writing turn-of-the-century prison stories that are too fantastic to be plausible, I run across something like this.

The article also revealed that there was a "Tom Brown" celebration at Auburn prison on the second anniversary of Osborne's incarceration (Tom Brown being the name that he had adopted as a prisoner). Bleecker reported, "It was a gala day, with a parade, races, a program of music and recitations, and, from 3 o'clock on, a wondrous banquet." This is the same prison where the prisoners had undergone brutal punishment until two years before . . . under one of the prison's better wardens.

*** 12 January 2010. Writing: One stick too many (e-publishing, print publishing, and Rebirth).

Did you ever play one of those games as a kid where you took turns putting blocks onto a pile - very, very carefully - until one too many blocks was placed on the pile, and everything crashed?

I've been doing that with my publication schedule.

This is my current monthly schedule (which I've obviously screwed up the order of this month, but I promise I'll be doing my second week of fiction-writing once I'm through with the current publishing):

First two weeks:
--Read Muse-friendly fiction.
--Read turn-of-the-century narratives for research.
--Write fiction.
--Do light editing.

Third week:
--Read turn-of-the-century non-narratives for research and do Web research.
--Do heavy editing.
--Lay out.
--Publish.
--Market.

Fourth week:
--Answer correspondence.
--Do housework.
--Do general upkeep.
--Read for leisure (especially fiction, to get myself ready for the following month).

Remaining two or three days:
--Out-of-town trips for research/health/family, simplicity activities, and general collapse.

Okay, let's look the third week of the month in more detail. Remember, the following time is available in which to accomplish these tasks each month: 7 days.

Block #1: Read turn-of-the-century non-narratives for research and do Web research.

(Sure! No problem!)

Block #2: Post at least one work of online fiction.

(Of course!)

Block #3: Do heavy editing of one or more stories.

(I'm right on it, man.)

Block #4: Lay out and publish one new e-book.

(Heh-heh. No prob.)

Block #4: . . . and at least one old e-book out of my backlist of twenty-five stories that need to be converted into ePub format.

(Um . . .)

Block #5: Announce all of the above stories at several dozen blogs.

(Wait, wait, did you say--?)

Block #6: . . . plus, e-mail lists.

(I - I'm not sure I can--)

Block #7: And lay out, publish, and market a paperback.

(*Resounding crash as all the blocks fall down.*)

I've gone over the numbers again and again, and something has to give. Wearing several hats as a self-publisher is one thing, but trying to do all of the above in the space of seven days each month is like trying to run all the departments of the federal government single-handed.

The main problem I foresee is that I spent over three weeks last year doing nothing except try to lay out the print edition Rebirth. I'm hopeful that the process won't be as bad the next time, since I've gotten past the learner's stage of print layout . . . but I still have to tackle the cover, which is going to be just as hard. (Laying out print covers only vaguely resembles laying out e-book covers.) So I'm thinking it'll take another three weeks to finish laying out "Rebirth," then another three weeks to publish and market the book, for a total of six weeks.

Under my current schedule, six weeks of print layout and marketing would mean that I would not be able to research, edit, lay out, publish, or market any other fiction for six months.

Alternative plan:

Get all of my backlist published in ePub format. Get all of my currently-finished fiction published (that's three novels, three novellas, and two shorter works - plus, whatever else gets finished while I'm publishing the current stuff). Once that's done, I'll have a lot fewer e-books waiting to slide onto the stage, I'll have lots of online fiction laid out and ready to post at my leisure, I'll hopefully have acquired a noticeable presence in the pro publishing world (which I don't have at the moment), and I'll be ready to tackle the next mountain, namely print publishing.

That's the plan I'm leaning toward at the moment.

(You can blame this on the computer manufacturers and book retailers, by the way. They're the ones who decided that 2010 would be The Year of the E-book, which made it vitally important that I get my backlist into ePub format.)

*** 12 January 2010. Writing: More from the prisons in the 1910s (Life Prison research).

I've begun reading The Joliet Prison Post, which I downloaded from Google Books. It's a 1914 newspaper published by the inmates at Joliet Prison in Illinois, and it's an amazing exercise in freedom of speech, filled with strong criticism of the treatment of prisoners (though not of the prison's new reformist warden).

It's also filled with anecdotes. Here's one.

o--o--o

The St. Louis Post Dispatch is authority for the story that one Jasper W. Rainey, served twenty years time at the Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing, and that after the first day of his imprisonment he never spoke until a few days ago, when he met Mr. Samuel Seaton, private secretary to Governor Hodges . . .

Upon meeting Mr. Seaton in the corridor of the prison, Rainey fell on his knees and with copious tears coursing down his cheeks he croaked rather than spoke, "Please let me out. My record is clean, they'll all tell you."

o--o--o

The Prison Post reported that Rainey received a pardon from the governor.

I was also intrigued by an article in The Delinquent (a periodical that I was exceedingly sorry to finish; darn Google for not making its half dozen other volumes of The Delinquent available for download). The article, written by Edward N. Klopper, is entitled "The Relation of Juvenile Delinquency to Street Trades." It explains how Klopper ran "Preston School" (which I take it was a juvenile reformatory). Here are some excerpts. The first one in particular struck a chord to me, since it echoes so strongly certain parts of The Eternal Dungeon.

o--o--o

To successfully train and direct a boy, you must start from his view point. It may be all wrong, and probably is, but it is his view of things, and either you must make your plans coincide with his views, or else change his views. In the beginning it is generally easier to do the former. . . .

Self-government starting with a boy's view, enables him to work out a civil and social order of his own, which he approves and understands. He has just as many opportunities for wrong decisions as for right ones, just as many chances to go wrong as to go right. . . .

o--o--o

Klopper describes how he granted self-government to the boys at his reformatory.

o--o--o

I wrote and placed in operation the first constitution and administered the first court, training the boys in a crude way. The constitution was intentionally very faulty. A casual reading carried the impression that a great deal of liberty had been granted, but in the court the judge, and out of the court the citizens, were very closely restricted when they came to study the document. This was intentional on my part. It was not long before I had a committee visiting me, asking for a more liberal constitution. This was what I was aiming at - the development of initiative. I prescribed certain limits, territories and restrictions and told them to do as they liked within this field. They did so. Within eighteen months we had four constitutions, each a great improvement over the former.

A difference of opinion as to the interpretation of the constitution gave rise to political parties; the confusion resulting in courts by reason of each company having different laws and penalties for the same offense gave birth to a house of congress; congressmen could not agree as to which laws should be abolished and which retained. This resulted in the formation of a commission to draw up a code of civil and penal procedure, and a body of uniform laws. This commission developed after its purposes had been accomplished, into a bar association . . .

I have never vetoed a law, reversed a judgment, altered or set aside any proclamation of the president, adjourned a congress, or declined to hear any kind of proposition whatsoever, nor have I permitted any of my officers to do any of these things. I am an honorary member of the president's cabinet, as well as a house of the member of congress, but I have no vote in either.

Every Monday at one o'clock in the afternoon, the president's cabinet meets, all the affairs of government are discussed. The attorney general presents reports from all the interior courts of which there are nine. The prison commission presents a report of conditions in the prison, which report includes the name and offense and sentence of every boy committed to them, and the work accomplished, the punishments inflicted, if, and other vital matters. Likewise, the civil service, bureau of naturalization, military commission are all discussed. . . .

o--o--o

(*Picture of Dusk gaping in disbelief.*)

Man, would that my own high school had been run along similar lines. At any rate, it's tales like this - for the same sort of thing was going on in a number of the adult prisons - that have made me aware that I've vastly underestimated the effects of the turn-of-the-century prison reform movement. Life prisoners being allowed to work in the countryside? With no guards watching over them? I never would have imagined it. Yet that practice was occurring in lots of places (and the reformers claimed that the number of escapes was low). Self-government and the honor system were the bywards of prison reform movement.

Fascinating stuff, and it helps me to shape the Life Prison series.

*** 12 January 2010. Writing: First, let's kill the lawyers. Then the software manufacturers.

Spent today struggling with software whose manufacturers assumed that nobody would be using their products who had Windows XP's Service Pack 1. (That's what I have on my main computer, for the simple reason that it's not connected with the Internet.) I finally got the software to work on my laptop, which has Service Pack 2.

This set me a day back in converting my first ePub e-book, but tomorrow I'll tackle that. I don't think I'm going to get two ePub e-books out this month, as I'd hoped, but unless matters go disastrously wrong in the conversion process, I'll be able to publish one e-book. A reprint; I don't have the final editing done on any of my latest fiction. I'd planned to do that editing this week, but I'm running out of time.

Well, never mind; this is the hard part. Once I've figured out how to convert my e-books, I should be able to shovel the e-books out almost as quickly as I can prepare stories for online posting, because the actual process of preparing the e-books for conversion takes very little time.

*** 12 January 2010. Writing and simplicity: Internet addiction thoughts.

Of greater concern for me than the e-book publishing process is my Internet addiction, which has come back with a vengeance. I've spent nearly twenty hours online in the past four days; more worrisome is the fact that a lot of that time was spent trying to drag myself offline, well after I'd finished the tasks I needed to do.

The same thing is fuelling my fall that fuelled it last month: doing research on publishing matters. I'm beginning to think that I'm going to have to simply confine my publishing efforts to the four distributors I've tentatively chosen so far - Lightning Source, Lulu, Smashwords, and Google Books - and stop looking for new places to distribute my e-books. Also, stop looking for new places to announce my e-books. Just stick with what I have for now, and concentrate my efforts on writing and publishing rather than on searching out new ways to sell books.

Later:

Well, of course, having said that, I had to go online and check whether "what I have for now" was enough.

It turned out that it nearly is. Following the links of a bunch of gay fiction authors, I could only find four fiction promo blogs at Blogger that I would be eligible to post at: Erotic Authors Association (which I already post at), All Gay Romance (which I already post at), Rainbow Reviews blog, and GLBT Promo. I sent off e-mails requesting to be able to post at the latter two. Since I know the people who run those two blogs, I'm hopeful that I'll be able to.

That seems to be it for Blogger. I didn't see any indication that the professional communities LJ/IJ/DW were being used extensively for promotion of professional m/m fiction. (As opposed to those of us who promote our pro m/m fiction there at amateur communities.) I took a lingering, wistful look at the Gay Readers/Writers list at Yahoo Groups, but I really can't let myself participate in a discussion forum, however well run. That leaves a few promotional lists that I'm already signed up for, plus the forums at ERWF and Romance Divas.

(Now to figure out whether I have enough review sites.)

*** 12 January 2010. Writing: Yet more interesting prison writings from the 1910s (Life Prison research).

This letter to the editor in The Joliet Prison Post interests me because it clearly wasn't edited to "clean up" the prisoner's writing to make it schoolbook-correct.

o--o--o

The day after my arrest I was brought to the office of the Maxwell Street Police Station before a number of people some of whom were newspaper reporters.

I was greeted by a gentleman, who said: "Why hello Tom" I answered "HELLO" he said "then you know me Tom McCall" I answered "I do not know you and my name is not Tom McCall" he answered "yes you are Tom McCall of the Pacific Slope, a train robber and confidence man," and I have forgotten what else he said I was. . . .

The next day and for a long time after I read in the papers that I was Tom McCall the train robber, etc., etc., etc.

I was tried by a jury of men who probably had read at the papers and at my trial not a word of evidence was introduced as to all the hocus-pocus I have described. I served in the army of the Potomac and was honorably discharged.

o--o--o

And here's a bit of prisoner-written poetry that exemplifies why the turn of the century is such a wonderful period for friendship fiction.

o--o--o

One time, somewhere in the world,
I held the hand that I would prize;
I knew that smile, the quiet eyes--
Falleth the voice as an empty song.
O, constant friend! I left your side,
Upon my strength alone relied,
Choosing the pathway, white and wide;
And now I grope for the something gone,
Still watching, as my way I wend,
To find and hold another friend
Somewhere in the world.

o--o--o

*** 12 January 2010. Writing: Smashwords improvements planned; plus, Smashwords versus Lulu.

I've been holding an interesting exchange of e-mails with Mark Coker of Smashwords. I happened to mention to him that I had trouble tracking down the Gay and Lesbian Fiction section at Smashwords (as opposed to the Gay Erotica section, which is easy to locate). His response was to say, Oh, we've been meaning to list that category on the home page.

By the time I read the e-mail (a few hours after he'd sent it), he'd listed Gay and Lesbian Fiction on the home page. As I told him, Man, that's customer service.

Here's some more examples of customer service:

He says that the "bypass the Meatgrinder" option will be the next thing they work on after they finish the current process of getting authors/publishers hooked into the retailer system.

He says that they plan to expand the number of words allowed in a blurb.

They plan to add a site map eventually.

They plan to work on the issue of Smashwords being listed as the publisher on record at some retailers.

I might add that he responded to both of my first two e-mails within an hour. I'm very impressed.

[Later: But he didn't respond to my third e-mail of questions. Darn it, the same thing happened to me with him last year, when I sent him a second e-mail with questions. Maybe I just need to space out my enquiries to him.]

I still have deep concerns about Smashwords's content policy, but I think it's worth my while to give them a try. Partly - I say in a mercenary fashion - this is due to the fact that I had a look at the difference in payment between Smashwords and Lulu for e-books. Here's what it looks like. (The Smashwords figures - which are only for e-books sold at their own site - are taken from their automatic calculator; the Lulu figures are from my own poor math.)

Author's profit on a $3.99 book.
--Smashwords: $3.04.
--Lulu: $2.00.

Author's profit on a $2.99 book.
--Smashwords: $2.21.
--Lulu: 80 cents.

Author's profit on a $1.99 book.
--Smashwords: $1.39
--Lulu: Pennies.

It's not possible to sell an e-book at Lulu for 99 cents, thanks to Lulu's $1.49 surcharge on e-books.

For heaven's sake, Amazon gives me a better share of the profits on a $1.99 e-book than Lulu does. So I've decided I'm not keen on selling e-books through Lulu (except HTML e-books, which don't fall victim to their surcharge). It's good to have Lulu as a backup in case anything goes wrong with Smashwords, but I wish there more major players out there for distributing self-published e-books.

*** 15 January 2010. Simplicity and Writing: Internet addiction and ePub creation.

My Internet addiction continues to rage out of control; today I got one hour of work done amidst nearly eight hours of mindless surfing.

Kicking this addiction has been a gradual - very gradual - process of giving up what I like and discovering that I can survive without it. I realized today that - until this recent outbreak of bad online behavior - my online life had become very simple:

Back up files.
Pick up and send e-mail.
Download Friends pages.
Download publishing-related blogs/issues.
Post blog entries.
Upload writings.
Upload booktrailers.
Announce writings/booktrailers at LJ comms, etc.
Send review copies to reviewers.
Gather cover art.
Gather research material.
Download e-texts.

That's it. Now I take a deep breath and give up reading publishing blogs/lists. Because they're what's been triggering my Internet addiction for the past three months: they're links-heavy, and I end up chasing links all over the place.

(Getting the e-reading software downloaded and working has been feeding my addiction too, but hopefully that will be a one-time headache.)

I've decided that I can get the information I need about major developments in the publishing world by downloading the entries at POD People and the Southern Review of Books every six months. No, I won't know about the latest news on e-publishing the moment that TeleRead breaks it (which, based on their current record, will be about five seconds after the news hits the Web). But I'll survive.

Meanwhile, I tackled the HTML-to-ePub conversion today. As I'd suspected would happen, it took some wrestling to get Calibre to do what I wanted to. But as I hadn't suspected would happen, I was able to get Calibre to everything I wanted it to. (Well, except the metadata. I'm going to have to put in a support ticket about that.) I'd thought that I'd have to use the Sigil ePub editor to clean up the file - in fact, that's recommended in Calibre's FAQ - but darned if I can see any way in which the ePub file I've created could be improved in any significant way. It shows up great in all of the e-readers I've tested it in.

I still have to run it through epubchecker, though.

I'd expected to have to spend two or three days wrestling with the ePub conversion; instead (while I'm waiting for the support ticket to be answered), I can now turn my attention to my Website update, which is close to being finished.

Next month, I hope, I'll be able to get my publishing done in a shorter amount of time. I won't have as many links dancing before my eyes, crooning, "Chase me! Please chase me!"

*** 16 January 2010. Simplicity and Writing: Another day of Internet addiction . . . but I'm ready to upload.

I've put in a support ticket at Calibre, but I'm not going to wait for a response; the metadata problem really is minor. Except for a few odds and ends, I'm ready to update my Website.

I'd hoped to get this done in a single day, but my Internet addiction took over again. Darn it.

I'm beginning to understand why monasteries banned newspapers for many years. (For that matter, so did my alma mater. There weren't any newspaper vending machines on campus when I was there. We used to have an international news summary in our college paper, just so that everyone would know if World War Three was about to be declared.) The basic problem I'm facing is that, if I'm reading posts where everyone is talking about Web matters - or talking about matters that I can only learn about via the Web - I'm going to get pulled in. It's not simply that I see interesting things taking place online and want more information. There's an "I want to be part of the crowd" impulse driving me.

Last summer, I tried doing a lot of surfing for simplicity sites, in order to remind me of my core values. And that worked, to a limited extent. But the only real solution, I think, is simply to take myself away from the online conversations. (Except for you guys on my blog and in my inbox. I'm not cutting myself off from you.) If I'm not part of the stream of current affairs on the Web, then I'll be less likely to lose my footing and be swept away.

As it is, matters have gone into the "red for danger" stage; I've started posting at forums again. So I need to wrap up matters tomorrow, then take myself offline.

*** 17 January 2010. Writing: Erastes on the history of gay historical fiction.

A few years back, I was contacted by an editor at the GLBTQ Encyclopedia. He'd seen my comment at my Web directory at Homoerotic Historical Fiction Links that the encyclopedia had no entry on historical fiction. He wanted me to invite to write such an entry. I had to decline; I simply didn't know enough about the topic. Instead, I referred him over to Erastes, who had recently started the Speak Its Name review site, devoted to gay historical fiction.

Well, now Erastes has written a short history of gay historical fiction, which makes for an interesting read.

She cites modern gay historical fiction as beginning with Mary Renault's historical novels (1956 onwards). The author of the article on historical fiction at GLBTQ Encyclopedia disagrees. It's an interesting question; I'd love to hear what others here think.

Perhaps for reasons of space constraints, Erastes didn't cover some topics I would have liked to have seen covered, such as the role of gay subplots in older historical fiction. (For example, Rosemary Sutcliff included gay subplots in two of her historical novels in the 1960s.) I think that, in all likelihood, many more readers of my generation were introduced to gay historical fiction in that manner than through "Gaywyck."

Also, probably for space reasons as well, Erastes touches very lightly on the topic of gay pulp fiction titles - a little more lightly than I would have liked, given my own interest in the history of erotic literature. To cite an example of a novel listed in Erastes's own list of gay historical fiction, Slaves of the Empire, by Aaron Travis aka Steven Saylor, had a major impact on gay erotic historical fiction at the time it was first serialized in 1982 - as big an impact, in its own way, as John Preston's Mr. Benson did on contemporary master/slave erotic literature. Although Aaron Travis didn't invent the abused-Roman-slave gay plotline - that honor probably belongs to Gore Vidal, who managed to slip gay references into his script of "Ben Hur" (1959) - Mr. Travis certainly did a good deal to popularize that particular plotline.

What I found most interesting about Erastes's remarks was her belief that one needs to expand the definition of historical fiction when dealing with gay literature. "In my opinion at least, events of the 50's and 60's are just as interesting and relevant from a historical perspective as was gay society in 1900 or 1800," she says.

I very much agree that what is "historical" differs from community to community. In the gay leather community, for example, "leather history" is generally regarded as beginning in the 1950s (when the first leather clubs appeared) and ending at the time that AIDS arrived. Any leather historical fiction would have to occur on or before the time that AIDS wiped out an entire generation of leathermen - that is to say, on or before the early 1980s. Loren's Lashes, set in 1985, just barely qualifies as leather historical fiction, mainly because of its flashbacks.

The end of Erastes's article focusses primarily on m/m historical fiction. For those of you who have missed the news, the mainstream publisher Running Press has been issuing a series of m/m historical romances, including a title by Erastes, as well as one by Lee Rowen, who Friends this blog. I think Erastes is right in seeing this as a bright sign for the future. To be quite honest, I don't think the problem with expanding the genre's readership lies so much with the m/m content as it does with the fact that, generally speaking, historical fiction just isn't a hot genre now, in the way that it was when Mary Renault began writing her Greek books.

But historical romances have never lost popularity, so they're currently taking a lead role in the popularizing of gay historical fiction. Perhaps historical mysteries (which are also a hot genre) can help to popularize gay historical fiction - Diana Gabaldon's Lord John series seems to suggest this. Hopefully, other types of gay historical fiction will become well known as well.

*** 17 January 2010. Writing: How do I find a place within the m/m fiction community?

I had honestly thought that I already had one. I began participating in the m/m fiction community in 2005 through posts at the Erotic Romance Writers Forum (which mainly consists of m/m writers) and later at the adult-fiction forums at Romance Divas (where a lot of m/m writers hang out). By the time I stopped posting at those two forums, around 2008, I'd racked up over two thousand posts. I'd also met quite a few m/m writers in other fashions, such as through MySpace or through the slash community. Although I'm a cross-genre writer - I've written everything from gay leather porn to children's nonfiction - I'd always considered one of the genres I write in to be m/m fiction.

(By the way, am I the only person who thinks that "m/m fiction" is an unintentionally deceptive subgenre label? When people say "m/m fiction," what they actually mean is "m/m romance." There's plenty of male/male fiction out there that isn't romance, but those titles are never discussed in threads about m/m fiction.)

And so I figured that I was part of the m/m fiction writers' community. But when I took a tour of the m/m fiction community recently, visiting lots of blogs and Websites, I found . . . Well, let me put it this way. Reviews by Jessewave, a major review site for m/m fiction, lists over fourteen hundred authors on its author links page. I'm not listed.

Of course, I don't know how the list was compiled. Maybe it consists of authors who were reviewed at the site, or who requested to be listed. But I did definitely get the impression, while looking round the blogs and sites, that I'm almost entirely unknown in the m/m fiction world. And when I looked at my Friends list for my blogs - which I hadn't done for a while - I realized that not many m/m writers are Friending me.

I'm not really sure what to do. As you guys know, the reason I'm not posting at forums any more, and the reason why I Friend very few blogs, is that I'm trying to kick an extremely serious Internet addiction. As far as getting to know new people is concerned, I've been depending mainly on e-mail and on comments posted by people at this blog. As for my professional work, I've been trying to get word of it to the m/m fiction community for two years now: I've submitted my e-books to Rainbow Reviews and Elisa Rolle's review blog (and they've been reviewed nicely in both places), as well as listing the e-books at the GLBT Bookshelf and announcing them at ERWF and Romance Divas and at LiveJournal forums where some m/m writers hang out. (I might add here that I've seen no sign that I bear any stigma in the m/m fiction community because I'm self-published. If anyone there thinks I'm "not really an author," they're keeping very quiet about their opinions.) I've just located a few more m/m sites where I might be able to announce my e-books or submit them for review. But beyond that . . .

Oh, darn it. This is what happens when one becomes a part-time hermit, isn't it? Doors begin to close.

Anyway, I'd appreciate any suggestions here. I've enjoyed getting to know the m/m writers that I already know; I'd like to figure out how I can get to know others, and not just for financial reasons.

(I fully realize, by the way, that this entry entirely contradicts my above-expressed desire to withdraw from online conversations. I am Dusk; I contain multitudes.)

The m/m fiction versus gay fiction battle

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 08:38:16 GMT

Parental guidance is recommended for this post; NWS links ahead.

I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about this m/m fiction versus gay fiction debate going on. (See the posts linked from mm_fiction_news and metafandom.)

See, this is me.

And this is me.

And this is me.

And this is me.

And this is me.

And this is me (scroll down to "True Tales").

I'm all over the place, in terms of literary communities. And I haven't even shown you the links related to my interfaith news reporting, history articles, and children's nonfiction.

As for women versus men? Straight versus gay? Not gonna go there.

So I'm a bit uncomfortable with this drawing of battle lines between genres and between genders and between sexual orientations, as though all of us belonged on one side or the other. I don't want to have to stop being this, just in order to be able to be part of this.

Daily life: Still worrying about e-publishing matters

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:22:52 GMT

"If B&N wants to maintain a 20th century business model, they should start selling sculptures. I figure they've got at least ten years before consumers get hold of 3D printers and scanners, and force them to invent new ways to make money on [Rodin] downloads."

--John, commenting on the LendMe feature of the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader.

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.

*** 21 December 2009. Writing: Rape, torture, and therapy (with spoilers for KatBear's "Jailbait").

I've been reading KatBear's Jailbait [archive warning page], a Phantom Menace slash story - or perhaps I should say, "reread," because the further I got into the story, the more I found myself saying, "Man, this sounds like The Fool." So I checked the Boys in Chains slash archive (which resides on my hard drive, heh-heh), and sure enough, "Jailbait" was archived there. It must have been one of the stories I read during those first, glorious months after I discovered slash.

I doubt that "Jailbait" was the only slash story I was drawing upon; otherwise, I would have credited it as a source for "The Fool" long before now. My vague recollection now is that the trope of "barbarian forces young man to serve as his sex slave in order to induct him into the tribe, and then can't figure out why he isn't grateful" was drifting around the slash community at that time, especially in the Phantom Menace fandom. [Later: Um, yes, it appears so.] I just did my own take on it and then promptly forgot that I'd borrowed the story premise from other folks. That's one of the failings of having an original-fiction Muse; he's convinced that everything he steals is his own idea.

KatBear's take on the trope is an intriguing one: she presents the misunderstanding between barbarian and youth as being due to culture clash (which I hinted at in my own story), but unlike how I approached the matter in "The Fool," she doesn't themantically condemn the barbarian culture. Rather, she presents the rape as being part of a mutual tragedy of two cultures interacting without either one being able to fully understand the other one.

That much I enjoyed about the story, but I began to gnash my teeth when I got to this part of the tale:

o--o--o

Mace looked at Obi-Wan thoughtfully for a moment, as if weighing his words carefully. "Padawan Kenobi, the Healers have also expressed concern about certain aspects of your mission report, in particular what they feel may be omissions."

"Yes, Master Windu?" Obi-Wan tried to maintain a stoic expression, but couldn't help the defensive tone of voice.

"You are not being censured, Padawan Kenobi. They are simply concerned for your wellbeing. The attitude of the general Junmek population toward Jedi is well known, as are the types of conditions normally encountered in the prisons for all beings, Jedi or not. Having read your report, they noted some issues which need to be discussed and resolved. They are not singling you out; most beings who have been through your experience need help to work through the emotional and physical aftereffects of those events."

"Master Windu, I'm sure things will be fine once the collar is off. I don't think I really need anything else, sir."

"It is not open for discussion. When you leave here, you will go to the Healers. There will be a preliminary examination, your master will be briefed on how to assist with your Force recovery, and they will remove the collar. You will be staying in the infirmary for a few days to monitor your recovery and during that time you will begin your sessions with the Soul Healers to work through your experiences on Junmek. Unless you have any questions, you may leave now."

"Master Windu, with all due respect, there's nothing wrong with my head. I don't want -"

"What you *want* is irrelevant. You will receive the help you *need*. Please report to the Healers, Padawan Kenobi."

o--o--o

And here's what happens when the Healers come on the scene.

o--o--o

"Denial is a perfectly normal initial response to the kinds of things that happened to you, but unless you can sit here, right now, and discuss *everything* that went on, how it affected you, how you feel about it and how you feel about yourself now, you will be coming back to see us until you can do that and are comfortable with yourself and your own selfworth again." She looked steadily at the apprentice.

Jumping off the bed, Obi-Wan stood and looked angrily at the Healer, hands fisted at his sides. He started to speak, but couldn't get words to come out. In the face of her unblinking gaze, he finally had to look away, face flushing.

"Padawan," she said in a kinder tone, "nothing that happened was your fault. It is my job to help you to come to terms with what happened and to understand that you are still a good person. It is not going to be pleasant, but I care enough for you that I am going to force you to work through the hurt. I know that right now you would probably prefer that I just ignore the whole problem and leave you alone, but I'm not going to do that." She smiled. "If you want to curse or yell or stamp around, please feel free. I'm used to that, too."

o--o--o

Oh, great. First rape, then forced therapy. "What you want is irrelevant." "It is not going to be pleasant, but I care enough for you that I am going to force you . . ." Those are the words of the Inquisition. For Pete's sake, what is it about slashdom's tendency to present psychologists as All Knowing and All Wise? Someday, I'm really going to have to write a story that hints at the connections between psychology and--

Oh. Right.

*** 22 December 2009. Writing: Google Book Settlement redux.

In case you missed the first round, Google Books came to an agreement this year with the American Association of Publishers that would allow Google to sell digital copies of every out-of-print printed book, unless the rights-holder opts out (in which case Google says that it will "voluntarily" refrain from selling the digital copy).

There was such an outcry against the original settlement that Google and the AAP revised the settlement. I've had a look at the revised version, and I agree with the critics: it does nothing to change the fact that this would place Google in a position of monopoly and allow it to take actions that only Congress has the right to regulate (for example, selling orphan works without permission from the rights-holders).

The Open Book Alliance, which is opposing the settlement, has posted a list of reasons why they think the revised settlement is a bad idea. They also have online their brief to the court (PDF file), which accuses Google and the AAP of continually lying to the public about the purpose of Google Books by claiming that Google Books was just a card catalogue, during the very period when those two groups had already decided to have Google sell digital copies of the books that it had scanned for the Google Books project. The accusation, if true, doesn't paint a pretty picture of either Google or the AAP.

Incidentally, one of the things the revised settlement does is extend the settlement to all books published in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., or Australia by January 5, 2009, a year later than the original settlement. The new deadline for opting out is January 28, 2010, if you haven't already done so.

*** 23 December 2009. Writing: More news on Google Editions (with my summary of the various options available to e-book self-publishers).

In related news, Google Books released more information about its upcoming digital bookstore, at least as it relates to its already existing Partner Program. See also this page on what file formats it will accept, which makes clear that Google Editions will initially be selling PDF and ePub e-books. It's not clear what will happen if a publisher is selling both PDF editions and ePub editions.

Someone with better knowledge of legalese than myself will have to evaluate the contract. The only problem I noticed was that Google Editions doesn't have to give you money till it has sold $100 worth of your e-books. I looked in vain for any indication of whether this was an exclusive or nonexclusive contract.

As already reported, Google's e-book approach is similar to Amazon's and Barnes & Noble's: the customer doesn't actually buy the e-book itself, just the right to access the e-book. However, Google Editions does offer a DRM-free option to publishers. The publisher receives 63% of the list price, unless the e-book is sold through "authorized resellers," in which case the publisher receives 45%.

I don't know how technically easy it is to upload files through the Partner Program, but I do know that it's a program that's very friendly to self-publishers.

I have decidedly mixed feelings about this announcement. On the one hand, I'm not feeling at all friendly toward Google at the moment, thanks to its behavior in the Google Books Settlement. And this is just one of a series of questionable activities on the part of Google; I think Google long ago lost the right to say, "We are not evil."

On the other hand, Google Edition's content policy is simply "nothing illegal." That's important to me. And quite honestly, Google is the last of the major players to enter the e-book retail game. All of the other major e-book retailers have already made agreements with either Smashwords or Lightning Source - except for Amazon, of course, which runs its own show. So if I don't go with one of those four players, I'm left out in the cold. I don't like any of the four options, but Google Editions appears at this stage to offer the fewest restrictions on how I publish my e-books, of the Big Four.

Here's a summary of how things stand:

Content policy: Amazon says nothing illegal, Google says nothing illegal, Lulu says nothing illegal, LSI says nothing illegal, Smashwords has a content policy that restricts or bans certain types of literature.

Distribution range: Amazon only sells at Amazon, Google will be selling at its own site and through "resellers": LSI distributes to five e-book retailers, Lulu sells only at its own site, Smashwords sells at its own site and through a handful of major retailers.

DRM optional? Amazon yes (Mr. Bezos has said that DRM is optional through the Amazon DTP program), Google yes, Lulu yes, LSI no, Smashwords doesn't offer DRM.

Formats: Amazon offers Kindle, Google offers PDF and ePub, Lulu offers PDF and ePub, LSI offers multi-format, Smashwords offer multi-format (but the self-publisher chooses the formats).

ISBNs for e-books? Amazon doesn't support them, Google doesn't require them (it's not clear whether it will allow ISBNs), Lulu makes them optional, LSI requires them, Smashwords doesn't support them and may be listed as the publisher on record for your e-book at retailers.

Self-publisher's share of the profits: Amazon 33%, Google 45-66%, LSI not sure but I'll bet it's high, Lulu 80% minus $1.50, Smashwords 45% list to 85% net.

Submission formats: Amazon requires certain types of formats that work with its converter, Google prefers PDF or ePub, LSI requires PDF or ePub, Lulu requires PDF or ePub or certain types of formats that work with its converter, Smashwords requires DOC or RTF that is specially formatted but will soon allow the submission of PDF, ePub, or MOBI.

Other problems? Amazon's uploading process isn't accessibility-friendly, Google won't pay till you've received $100 in profits, Lulu's uploading process isn't accessibility-friendly, LSI requires a learning curve and puts all e-books through a converter (though I think the PDF edition is sold as is), Smashwords requires you to mention them in your e-book and doesn't support ISBNs.

So, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the various possibilities, I wait to see how matters will play out in the e-book world. The only thing that's clear to me at this point is that, in some fashion or another, I'll be moving into ePub publication next year.

*** 26 December 2009. Writing: Summary of my sales this year.

A reminder that my sales last year were as follows:

o--o--o

KINDLE

Number of titles on sale = 6
Total copies sold = 26
Profit = 87.74 @ 35% = 30.71

LULU

Number of titles on sale = 3 (though 2 of the 3 were sold in various formats)
Total copies sold = 14
Profit = 53.46

TOTAL

Number of titles on sale = 9
Total copies sold = 40
Profit = 84.17

o--o--o

Here's my figures for this year:

o--o--o

KINDLE

Number of titles on sale = 8
Total copies sold = 118
Profit = 241.83 @ 35% = 84.64
Adjusted to Amazon's figures: 74.55

LULU

Number of titles on sale = 2
Total copies sold = 19
Profit = 253.41

TOTAL

Number of titles on sale = 10
Total copies sold = 137
Profit = 327.96

o--o--o

Conclusions:

I sold more than three times as many e-books as last year (partly because I lowered my prices at Kindle).

I made nearly four times as much money as last year (partly because I was able to sell "Love in Dark Settings Omnibus" for so much).

Lulu continues to be more profitable for me than Kindle.

Only three of my ten titles were new titles. The rest were e-books I published last year.

My bestseller was Life Prison (48 copies). "Life Prison" really took off in sales after I lowered the price at Kindle to 99 cents; lowering the price on the other Kindle e-books to 99 cents didn't have as dramatic an effect.

*** 26 December 2009. Writing: Reworking my monthly schedule again.

Jeez, how many times have I done this?

I've gone through these stages:

1) Tried to write and publish during the same time periods. Found it didn't work.

2) Tried to write and publish in separate times of the year. Found that I was spending too little time each year on my writing, and that the long breaks from my writing were having a nasty psychological effect on me.

3) Tried - during the last couple of months - to write and publish during the same time periods. Found it didn't work.

So I'm going back to the idea of having separate periods for writing and publishing and, for that matter, housework, but those periods will all be within a single month, so that I won't have long stretches of time when I'm not writing.

The way I envision my schedule is this:

First two weeks of the month (approximately): Writing and light editing.

Third week of the month: Heavy editing, layout, and publishing.

Fourth week of the month: Housework, upkeep, and research.

End of the month: Simplicity activities.

We'll see how it works, but I think my dreadfully one-track mind would prefer to work on only one or two projects at a time, rather than try to juggle half a dozen tasks each day.

*** 27 December 2009. Writing: Recommendation of Syd McGinley's The Complete Dr. Fell, Volume Two: Found.

Syd McGinley: The Complete Dr. Fell, Volume Two: Found. (Author's Website. Protagonist's Website, including online excerpts from the Dr. Fell stories.) Male homoerotic fiction, male friendship fiction, BDSM fiction, contemporary fiction, erotic love stories. ¶ Fiction books (collecting stories originally published as fiction e-books). ¶ On-screen sex. On-screen violence. ¶ Archive of my reviews.

Syd McGinley sent me Volume Two of the Dr. Fell series, and I saved it up as a Christmas gift for myself. Both volumes were also my Christmas gift to my own special boy. Appropriately so, it turned out.

Without giving away too much of the plot to anyone who hasn't read Volume One, I can say that this is BDSM domestic fiction. (One chapter is entitled "Curtain Fic.") The novel starts where most romance novels end: with the unsettling details of trying to get along with someone you live with day after day.

"Being a top really is a deeper submission," the top narrator comments at one point. A lot of that can be attributed to the boy whom the top has chosen.

o--o--o

"I love you, John Fell, and I want what's best for you. Especially when you don't know what that is."

I kiss him and grumble, "Remember who the top is here, boy."

[He] smiles sweetly. "Just trying to anticipate your needs, sir."

o--o--o

The novel sees Dr. Fell slowly getting his life straightened out, with the help of his boy . . . and a couple of female authority figures.

o--o--o

She inspects the thermometer while I control a pout.

"One-oh-one. Better than it was. Stay right there. I'll get you some soup."

One-oh-one - introduction to pneumonia. I snigger. Oh man. I'm losing it. Oooh, my soup is full of stars! I'm sorry . . . I'm afraid I can't do that.

"Eat your chicken and stars, Johnny. Don't just stare at it."

I blink. Mama P is sitting on the end of the bed, waiting.

"Yes, ma'am."

It tastes funny, but I eat it all obediently. Mama P takes the bowl and asks if I want the TV on. Shit, it's been moved it into the bedroom while I was asleep. I growl. I truly hate TV in the bedroom.

Mama P just laughs. "I want you to stay sitting up for awhile, Johnny. You'll breathe easier, and besides, your tummy is full." She turns on the TV and hands me the remote. "Now relax. I'll be right back."

I do not throw the remote at her, but I deliberately find a kids' show to sulk through. That bites me in the ass as I end up cackling at a sponge wearing shorts.

o--o--o

I e-mailed that passage to my apprentice. Sponge-Bob is the mascot of his leatherboy club.

Which just goes to show that fiction is no stranger than real life. As with Volume One, there is a wonderfully authentic flavor to the stories about Dr. Fell, leaving aside his magical ability to turn up lubricant on any occasion. "I like being able to stash lube wherever I want it" is the way he blandly puts it at one point. At least he draws the line at using engine grease when he and his boy set out to reenact "Lube Jobs and Grease Monkeys 2."

The only mildly irritating aspect of the novel is that it began as a series of separately published stories, which weren't edited at the novel stage to take out the repetition, so the reader is told the same backstories several times. On the other hand, the stories' overlapping timelines are part of the book's charm. And the novel has humor and it has mainly-outdoors sex and it has poignant moments, especially in the chapters "Teacher's Pet" and "Back in the Day." What more could one want from an erotic love story?

*** 27 December 2009. Simplicity: Getting my messed-up schedule back in order.

My Internet addiction has been slowly taking back ground this month. I was online for an hour in the first week of the month, for two-and-a-half hours in the second week, for four hours in the third week, and for nine hours in the fourth week. The numbers don't reveal the worst part, which is that I've begun to idly surf again because I can't pull myself offline.

Now that I have a better sense of how I should be apportioning my tasks throughout the month, I'm going to make the first two weeks of the month, while I'm composing, be Internet-free time. Hopefully that break will keep me from sliding back too badly during the rest of the month, when my professional duties force me to be online.

My whole schedule was a bit shaky this month because I kept trying to do too many tasks during each day, but next month I hope to be able to discretely apportion my tasks to different time periods. I've got three days left (!) in which to do all my housework for the month (aside from doing laundry and loading the dishwasher, which I do throughout the month), as well as answering some correspondence. Then I'll take a day off to devote myself to simplicity-related activities . . . and also, most likely, to attend my hometown's New Year's Eve celebration. After that, as 2010 begins, I'll plunge back into reading Muse-friendly fiction and waiting for the words to pour out. As Red Smith put it, "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein."

*** 28 December 2009. Writing: I've been bittorented.

The news turned up in a Google Alert: Transformation has been requested at a Website devoted to "untraditional download sources." (Here's a safe rule in life: Never trust a Website that engages in newspeak.)

My first reaction: "Thank goodness I made such a transaction legal. I've just done my part in saving someone's soul."

My second reaction: "Whoo-hoo!"

To make clear the source of my second reaction, let me quote a passage in this article by Eric Flint:

o--o--o

Someone asked me once, in a debate, how I'd react if I discovered that one of my titles—maybe all of them!—had become widely pirated. I started by posing the most extreme case I could imagine.

"You mean, I walk into a drugstore and see that the latest copy of Time magazine has my face on the cover, with a title that reads 'Works of Eric Flint pirated worldwide!' and an article on the inside that tells everybody exactly how to do it?"

"Yes," came the reply, demonstrating that my opponent was no wizard at the art of debate. "What measures would you take?"

"Well," I said, "the very first thing I'd do is get on the phone and call my friend Mike Spehar. He's a retired Air Force pilot, and I'd want his advice on which brand of private jet I should buy to be able to commute easily from the villas I'd be buying in southern France, the coast just south of Barcelona . . . Hm, maybe a penthouse in Manhattan and another one in Paris . . ."

o--o--o

Seriously. I've been hoping and praying for this moment ever since I began slapping Creative Commons licenses onto my e-books: the moment when someone would actually care enough about one of my e-books to send it spinning into the pirate network.

Mind you, I prefer to have people buy my e-books. They're my sole source of income. However, as many other folks have pointed out, the primary problem that most authors have to deal with is not piracy but obscurity. If having "Transformation" floating around the Internet will help bring me new readers, then for heaven's sakes, let it do the rounds.

(Oh, and those of you who are passing on my e-books to your friends, because you love my stories so much that you want to convert your friends into becoming my faithful readers? Bless you. You're part of the reason my Friends list keeps growing.)

Writing life: Plato, dialectic, story discussions, and fan fiction (Great Books discussion)

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:11:18 GMT

Doug and I went to a Friday night lecture tonight (December 4) at my alma mater, St. John's College in Annapolis, that was entitled "Why Plato Wrote." Friday night is the only time of the week when lectures are held at St. John's; all of the classes are discussion classes, in which the students and tutors (i.e. instructors) talk about the Great Books that everyone has read. So of course, immediately after the lecture, the lecturers are forced to undergo a Q&A session with the students and tutors.

In the Q&A, the lecturer mentioned Plato's Phaedrus, in which Socrates talks about whether writing can be helpful. Socrates has, you will see, a generally poor opinion of writing.

o--o--o

Socrates. You know, Phaedrus, that's the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive: but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words: they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing for ever. And once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever, it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn't know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill-treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.

o--o--o

For more along these lines, see Robin Hobb's rant against fan fiction writers. As various people pointed out at the time that Ms. Hobb published her rant, an author isn't necessarily the best interpreter of their own work. I think that's the great flaw in Socrates' argument in the Phaedrus: to assume that a good poet, in order to be of any worth, must also be good at analyzing their own writings. (Socrates makes the same mistake in Plato's Republic, assuming that any king worth his salt must also be a philosopher.)

Socrates addresses this question in a slightly different way in Plato's Apology:

o--o--o

I used to pick up what I thought were some of [the poets'] most perfect works and question [the poets] closely about the meaning of what they had written, in the hope of incidentally enlarging my own knowledge. Well, gentlemen, I hesitate to tell you the truth, but it must be told. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any of the bystanders could have explained those poems better than their actual authors. So I soon made up my mind about the poets too. I decicided that it was not wisdom that enabled them to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

o--o--o

Leaving aside the disagreeable fact that Socrates identifies "wisdom" here with "an ability to logically dissect a poem," I agree with him: a writer can't necessarily provide the best analysis of their own work. That's something Robin Hobb forgot when she declared her interpretation of her characters' actions to be superior to that of her readers' interpretations.

So what's the solution? In the Phaedrus, Socrates thinks he has one:

"If any of [the poets] has done his work with a knowledge of the truth [and] can defend his statements when challenged . . . he ought not to be designated by a name drawn from those writings, but by one that indicates his serious pursuit . . . 'lover of wisdom' [literally, philosopher]."

No, no, no! That's going back to the original mistake, of believing that the ability to analyze a poem is superior to the ability to create poetry, and that poets should therefore be encouraged to gain the ability to analyze their own writings. Socrates gets even more condescending in his next breath:

"On the other hand, one who has nothing to show of more value than the literary works on whose phrases he spends hours, twisting them this way and that, pasting them together and pulling them apart, will rightly, I suggest, be called a poet . . ."

*Sigh.* Well, what can you expect from the man who banned poets from his ideal republic?

Incidentally, the translator of the above passage, R. Hackforth, has this insightful comment to make: "Dionysius of Halicarnassus tells us that Plato continued throughout his life 'combing and curling' his dialogues [of Socrates], and that at his death a tablet was found with numerous variants of the opening sentence of the Republic . . . It is possible that the present sentence reflects the impatience of Plato the philosopher with Plato the meticulous literary artist."

Indeed. At any rate, I dispute strongly that the art of writing is lesser than the art of engaging in discussion about what one has written.

On the other hand, I think that Socrates is on the right track when he suggests that dialogue about literary works brings them to life. Which brings me to the topic of story discussions and fan fiction.

The reason I spend so much time encouraging story discussions and fan fiction about my stories - I realized tonight - is precisely because I graduated from a college that honors discussion as playing a central role in keeping books alive. When a reader posts a piece of Eternal Dungeon fan fiction, or when readers at my blog discuss my stories amongst each other (with me keeping out of the way as much as possible, because "any of the bystanders could have explained those poems better than their actual authors") . . . that is when my stories become, in Phaedrus's words, "living speech."

Any thoughts, folks?

Home life: Things are better on the health front

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 08:02:03 GMT

"Bad fortune, I think, is more use to a man than good fortune. Good fortune always seems to bring happiness, but deceives you with her smiles, whereas bad fortune is always truthful because by changing she shows her true fickleness. Good fortune deceives, but bad fortune enlightens. With her display of specious riches good fortune enslaves the minds of those who enjoy her, while bad fortune gives men release through the recognition of how fragile a thing happiness is. And so you can see Fortune in one way capricious, wayward and ever inconstant, and in another way sober, prepared and made wise by the experience of her own adversity. And lastly, by her flattery good fortune lures men away from the path of true good, but adverse fortune frequently draws men back to their true good like a shepherdess with her crook. Do you think it is of small account that this harsh and terrible misfortune has revealed those friends whose hearts are loyal to you? She has shown you the friends whose smiles were true smiles . . ."

--Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy (circa 520 A.D.) as translated by V. E. Watts.

I began posting here about my recent illnesses because I figured there might be others here who had gone through these illnesses too, so we could swap stories. As a result, I've been both surprised and touched by the really nice comments I've received, here and elsewhere, wishing me well in my quest for health. Thank you all for your kind thoughts.

The good news is that I'm well on my way back to good health, so I don't anticipate any major health crises in January.

For newcomers: Background to my home entries.

How I reply to comments at this blog.

*** 28 December 2009: More about my back.

"You must be dying," was the first thing my doctor said when I went to see him last week. "That's the only time I ever see you."

Last time I saw him, you'll recall, he diagnosed me as having a jaw joint problem. This time he said the problem was with another joint.

"I have sacroiliitis," I told my apprentice afterwards. I seem condemned to acquire illnesses with unpronounceable names.

"Oh, I know what that is," he said.

I sighed. "You know everything."

"Oh, no, Sir," he said earnestly. "It's just that '-itis' means 'inflammation,' and the sacrum is the bone next to the hip, so--"

"I said, You know everything."

So I trotted home from the doctor's with a set of instructions for caring for my hip joint that sounded suspiciously like the ones he'd given me for my TMJ, except that he also prescribed stretching exercises. The immediate result of that was that I got to listen to Doug say "I told you so" for a straight half hour. He's been trying to persuade me for years to do stretching exercises.

In the end, it turned out that it wasn't so much the stretching exercises I needed (though I'm continuing to do them, on principle of keeping my health up) as the diagnosis. Once I'd learned that my back pain was due to muscle strain rather than an organ problem, I set out to figure out what the heck had been causing my back muscles to stretch out of order.

Turned out that the evil culprit was my desk chair.

Do you remember me rambling on about my chair in earlier entries? It's been annoying me for a while now. For months it's been on its last legs, with three out of its four screws missing, which I basically ignored, because we really couldn't afford a new chair. Then my desk chair lost its last screw, and Doug tried to fix the chair. The "fix" consisted of putting in a screw that wasn't designed for the chair and that poked into my bottom. When I complained, Doug made "princess and the pea" remarks to me. So I piled cushions on top of the screw, but that put the backrest up against the part of my lower back that was hurting, which made my back ache even more.

All of this drama managed to distract me from the real problem, which was that my half-broken chair was slightly tilted to the left. And has been that way, for god only knows how many months.

The minute I changed chairs (which I did finally in desperation), my back stopped hurting. Instantly. That isn't to say that I'm completely cured - the hip joint is still enough out of order that it hurts when I walk or dance for more than ten minutes at a time - but my lower back is no longer under continual strain from the tilting chair, so I'm hopeful that my hip joint will heal in time.

My left buttock still gets a bit sore when I've been sitting for a while, though whether from the unpronounceable hip disease or from the aftereffects of the pointy screw isn't clear. I just try to pretend to myself that I'm recovering from an SM scene.

*** 29 December 2009: More about my jaw.

Saw the dentist yesterday. Turns out I don't need to look for a TMJ specialist, because that's my dentist's specialty.

He gave me advice on how to care for my TMJ, and his advice turned out to be everything that I was already doing. He offered to give me a night-guard to keep me from grinding my teeth, but I've been doing fine on controlling that through sheer willpower. And my TMJ is very nearly gone, so I didn't want to fiddle with the natural healing process.

I was mainly concerned as to whether the TMJ would come back, since it can be a chronic condition. It turns out that I'm predisposed to TMJ, because my bite isn't exactly even when close my jaws (thanks to some quirky front teeth that have never been any bother to me, even from the aesthetic point of view). My dentist offered a formidable list of things that he could do to fix that, but fortunately he didn't press me when I said, "No, thanks." Thank goodness I picked a dentist who believes in minimal intervension. From what he said, my TMJ is at its least-harmful stage, so provided that I teach myself not to clench or grind my teeth, and that I avoid eating too many foods that require lots of chewing, the TMJ might well go away and not come back.

At any rate, I'm now sleeping reasonably well (with the aid of no less than nine pillows; that's how many it takes to prop my various appendages into the right position) and have no jaw or back pain the daytime except when I exercise, in which case my back flairs up. I'm a bit worried about that latter problem, because part of my creative process comes from plotting while I'm dancing, but maybe by the time I start my composing cycle again - on January 1 - my body will have healed enough that I can do some dancing.

And man, is "good health" on my list of things to be thankful for as the new year begins.

FIC: The Unanswered Question (The Eternal Dungeon)

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 02:52:05 GMT

Reminding himself that he was not to kill anyone in this dungeon . . .

The remainder of "The Unanswered Question" is now online as my 2009 holiday gift story to my readers. With special thanks to my apprentice for doing a rush job on the beta report this week. (Amidst his Christmas preparations, he betaed my 36,000-word novella in three days and did online research for me on Victorian uniforms. He deserves a medal.) You can see the prompts from my readers that inspired the novella and my response to their prompts (both with major spoilers, so they're best read after you've finished the story).

Oh, and Telepwen, notice how neatly I've included the Bacardi.

Daily life: Working on my holiday fic and thinking about next year's e-books

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 23:01:36 GMT

"Damn, that man is perhaps the most forgiving in all history. He's nearly saintly. Well, except for that little murder episode."

--Catnotdead on a certain character in The Eternal Dungeon.

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.

*** 6 December 2009. Writing and Home: Trying to get back into the groove of my holiday fic; plus, it's a White Advent.

Well, I established tonight that I still don't have any self-control where e-mail is concerned; I ended up spending two hours reading and answering the latest. Between that and the Friday night lecture at St. John's, my concentration is shot to hell. I'm trying desperately to get myself back into the fiction-reading and fiction-writing modes.

The good news, though, is that, before all this happened, I'd breached the ten-thousand-word mark of The Unanswered Question - I've got more of the beginning and all of the end of the story completed. I'm not sure how long the story will be, because I haven't drafted most of the middle scenes in my head yet.

Also, I can post a Daily Life entry within ten minutes, so that goes into the growing list of tasks that I can do during my daily ten-minute visits.

Meanwhile, no less than three beta reports showed up in my inbox. I'm badly behind in editing. Now that I've finished the wordage count, I'm going to concentrate my extra time on editing and on de-cluttering this house.

It snowed here today, just in time for this town's Festival of Lights crafts fair. I came home empty-handed. I guess the days of one-dollar Christmas ornaments is long over.

*** 6 December 2009. Writing: Trying out ePub e-books on the EPUBReader add-on for Firefox.

[Note: Since I wrote this, a new version of EPUBReader has come out. I haven't checked yet what improvements have been made.]

EPUBReader allows Firefox to be used as an e-reader for ePub e-books.

Disadvantages:

1) I dislike the fact that (like Calibre) EPUBReader stores all your ePub e-books in a central location, rather than allowing you to store the e-books in any part of your hard drive that you want (as FBReader does).

2) EPUBReader doesn't allow you to bookmark within e-books currently, though it may in the future.

3) It divides each e-book into its separate HTML files (a minor inconvenience, I found).

4) Its e-book directory is pretty primitive.

5) As far as I can tell, there's no way you can search the entire e-book.

6) EPUBReader's Zoom In and Zoom Out features only work for the particular page you're on, not for every page in the e-book. (But see below about EPUBReader's accessibility.)

7) It doesn't have frills, if you want them. I don't.

Some nice features:

1) You can easily read ePub e-books online, just by clicking on the e-book link.

2) Since it uses Firefox, it's quite accessible to large print readers - just use the Firefox settings to change the font size.

3) Like Calibre, it provides a sidebar that allows you to navigate to each part of the book. You can slide the sidebar over if you don't want to see it, then slide it back when you need it. FBReader, alas, doesn't have this feature (at least, not in its Windows version, which is what I'm using).

4) EPUBReader allows you to use the space bar to page down (as an alternative to the Page Down key, which you can also use).

I use Firefox so often that it's nice to have a way to read ePub e-books directly in that browser. Plus, the creator seems quite receptive to suggestions for adding new features to the add-on.

I'm sure there will eventually be other ePub add-ons to Firefox; keep your eye on the epub tag at the Firefox add-ons site.

*** 8 December 2009. Home and Writing: TMJ, dry eyes, my Muse, and the side effects of hurt/comfort.

My jaw and my eyes are in conspiracy against me.

My TMJ had been gradually diminishing since I last wrote about it, though it never seemed to disappear altogether. Then the weather turned cold. And just as I'd feared would happen, my dry eyes, driven into their winter mode, are aggravating my TMJ.

The symptoms of my TMJ are an aching jaw (on the left side of my head), an aching temple (on the left side of my head), and sensitivity on the back of my head, the back of my neck, and the area around my shoulderblades.

The symptoms of my dry eyes, when they're in their winter mode, are an aching temple (on the left side of my head) and sensitivity on the back of my head, the back of my neck, and the area around my shoulderblades.

So my dry eyes and my TMJ have formed an alliance to make my life miserable. Since I'm forced, by my TMJ, to sleep on my back, it's inevitable that some part of the affected area - my head, my neck, my upper back - will end up being pressed against the mattress. As a result, I can only sleep two or three hours at a stretch before I wake up in pain. Once I'm awake, I only have time enough to write a scene, read a bit of a novel, edit what I've written, and exercise before I'm too tired to do more.

There are worse ways to spend one's days.

What this experience is teaching me is that the magical ingredients I've been seeking in order to write every day are exactly what I thought they might be: read fiction, write fiction, exercise, and do as little else as possible. Layle is coming along quite nicely for me, with no struggles. (And with Layle, that's saying something.)

I'm not quite sure what to do with this knowledge. Fortunately, I got Law Links sent off to the beta readers before this medical interval began, but I still need to get the editing done on the other two Three Lands novels I have scheduled for publication next year - not to mention clean the house, visit the Internet, answer correspondence, sort my computer files, and various other activities. Yet I seem to produce more wordage when I don't do any of that stuff.

One thing's for sure: I need this time alone with Layle, because I need to get my holiday story done before December 21st. I have a dental appointment on that day, and my Muse has a history of disappearing after health appointments. So, for now, I'm letting my Muse have his way with me. (Wait, that didn't come out right.)

As for my sleep problem, I'm continuing to hold out against taking pain relievers so that I can sleep through the night. Yes, it's annoying to wake up in excruciating pain after a couple of hours' sleep, but as long as I'm awake enough to do my writing, I don't want to mask the pain with pain relievers, because . . .

Well, I don't think I ever told you guys what happened when I was on pain relievers in early 2001, after my eyes gave out. I was bedridden for the first couple of months, before the weather turned to spring, because the ophthamologists hadn't identified what the problem was, so I wasn't taking any eyedrops, and even if I had, that wouldn't have been enough to help me back then. I was so bad off at certain points that I couldn't even open my eyes, because the light hurt my eyes. So I was in bed nearly all day, in great pain, unable to do anything except listen to audio books, which got old after a while.

I spent most of the time daydreaming. Hour after hour, dreaming my little hurt/comfort daydreams. (I'm guessing that The Eternal Dungeon was one of the daydreams I was having during this time.) And meanwhile, I'm taking Advil 24 hours a day, per my family doctor's instructions.

Pretty soon I end up at the doctor's office again, this time because of heart problems. He hooks me up with a meter to check my heartbeat and eventually confirmed that I was indeed skipping heartbeats. He also gave me a notebook in which to record the time of my activities during the day, so that we could synch them with the meter's records. We hoped thereby to figure out what was causing the skipping of the heartbeats. . . .

Okay, so maybe hair won't grow on your palm if you masturbate, but I can confirm that hurt/comfort daydreams combined with Advil are hazardous to one's health.

*** 12 December 2009. Writing: Favorite novels in March 1997; plus, story ideas during my teens; plus, where many of my current stories came from.

I found this list of favorite in an old notebook. This was during the period when I was transitioning from writing The Three Lands to becoming an interfaith news reporter.

o--o--o

1. Mary Renault, The Last of the Wine
2. Patricia A. McKillip, The Riddle-Master of Hed
3. Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shining Company
4. Dante, The Divine Comedy
5. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born to Be King
6. Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave
7. Sylvia Louise Engdahl, This Star Shall Abide
8. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
9. Ronald Knox, Let Dons Delight

o--o--o

Noticeably absent from the list are Guy Gavriel Kay and Diana Gabaldon, whom I discovered a year or two later. Also, at that time in my life, age 33, I had read only one genre writer of gay fiction, Mary Renault. I'd visited the local gay bookstore, Lambda Rising, quite a few times in my college years, but I don't think they had genre fiction sections in the mid-1980s. If they did, I totally overlooked those sections; as far as I knew, gay fiction equalled contemporary fiction.

That was why it never occurred to me to write down my gay fantasy stories; I thought there was no readership for them. You'd think that Ms. Gabaldon's gay subplots would have clued me in, but no - it wasn't until I discovered slash fiction in 2002 (initially in the form of Phantom Menace fan fiction) that I realized there were other writers of gay SF/F out there.

I found the above favorite-novels list while I was going through old notebooks, seeking bonus material for my e-books.
Here's another note, from August 1982, when I was nineteen:

"This goes in the why-did-I-think-of-this-at-the-end-of-the-summer-because-it's-going-to-take-months-of-fucking-research category. Zanzibar-style, the stories of the members of a sixties commune, including a draft-card-burning anarchic pothead and a sensitive, 'straight' homosexual. The former eventually becomes a business man; the latter becomes the only one to remain true to his sixties convictions. 'It's sort of about the sixties.' 'Yeah, man, I've been there.' [A quotation from Doonesbury.] I haven't, so this one'll probably never get written."

I think this plotline must have been inspired by the gay memoirs I began reading once I got access to the University of Maryland library shelves. At age nineteen, I hadn't yet read any gay fiction, other than what was available in the young adult section of the public library. (The plotline for gay young adult novels in those days was simple: Character realizes he's gay. Gay character is persecuted. Gay character dies violently. Straight character feels remorse. . . . Honestly, there just weren't very high odds of you surviving to the end of a novel if you were a gay character.) Perhaps I was also cribbing from the original version of the movie Fame, with its portrayal of the oh-so-lonely gay student who goes off and sings sad little love songs while his heterosexual friends make out. Or maybe from the brief reference to homosexuality in the movie M*A*S*H, which my mother had to explain to me at age thirteen. (And which caused me to understand why the teacher who edited my junior high's literary magazine had tried to persuade me to change the first line of my poem: "I dream that I'm a fairy.")

The above isn't typical; I didn't write much about sexual topics in my notebooks when I was a teen - partly because I was so embarrassed, but partly because I was too busy writing original gen prisonerfic and slavefic. Here are typical story ideas, from when I was sixteen:

"A boy who all his life has detested traitors suddenly finds that he has a choice on whether to become one."

"The Goat is the scapegoat of society - he must take orders from anybody, and is allowed no protection. But Amber, former slave grown to noble with ambitions to the throne, is determined to help the Goat - even if it means changing places with him."

Jeez, at age sixteen, I already knew how to write a blurb. ('Tis hardly surprising; my ambition at that time was to become a copywriter.)

But you know what? When I read that Goat blurb, I began bouncing up and down in my chair, screaming, "I know that one!"

Remember how I mentioned, a while back, that I can trace the origins of Prison City back to my junior high years? Similarly, one of my upcoming Three Lands novels, "Breached Boundaries," springs from a long series of daydreams that I can trace back to age thirteen.

Well, the Goat story is a daydream that stuck around till - oh, recently enough for me to remember it. Somewhere along the way it acquired a gay plotline.

This is why I have no idea when I began plotting The Eternal Dungeon. It came from a series of daydreams that I just kept weaving over and over, night after night, year after year. I've no idea when I began writing those stories in my head, because I didn't write down any of the stories till they'd been in my head for years. Before 2002, when I discovered slash, I didn't think there was any readership for them.

The True Master, which began as a stand-alone novella, was another of my recurring daydreams. I don't know how many times I reshaped it in my head before it got typed up.

I can trace the beginning of Michael's House to a definite date: August 17, 2002, when I began what was supposed to be a quasi-medieval fantasy story narrated by a man imprisoned in a brothel . . . but one of the minor characters, Michael, stole the show. (I now call that my "Evil Michael AU," because I can see, in retrospect, that it shows what Michael would have turned out like if Janus hadn't come along. But even in that story, Michael demonstrated that he had another side.) However, I'd been daydreaming prostitution stories for far longer than than that. They were total hurt/comfort pieces: protagonist is forced into prostitution before being rescued by his white knight (who sometimes abused him first before repenting). And yes, this means that Debt Price was one of my early daydreams - at least, the prison section was.

So the types of stories I write haven't changed in any significant way since I was a teen. What has changed (thank heavens) is how well I execute the basic premise. All of the stories I cited above were reasonably dreadful in their original forms. The original version of The Breaking, for example, was a Stockholm Syndrome story: hardened criminal is tortured and raped by equally hardened torturer; completely broken prisoner repents of his crimes and falls in love with his torturer; torturer graciously accepts the prisoner's adoration; they live happily ever after. (Well, as reasonably happy as they can be, because the torturer is about to send the prisoner off for a pleasant visit to the Hidden Dungeon.)

I venture to say that my final version of the story was a tad bit better. :)

*** 12 December 2009. Writing: E-book bonus material ideas.

I spent four hours today shopping - Doug's idea. The rest of the day I should have spent nurturing my Muse by reading lots of fiction. Instead, I instead spent on a more relaxing activity: gathering together bonus material for my e-books.

I've been uncertain for a while now how to make my e-books attractive to readers. One thing I've done (you'll notice) is delay the publication of the online edition. But that doesn't resolve the problem entirely. In the interests of fair play, I've felt that the e-book edition ought to have something extra that made it worth paying for, once the online edition was published.

So I took a look at what DVD movie manufacturers do.

o--o--o

From the bonus features for the "Chariots of Fire" DVD:

Documentaries: 'Wings on Their Heels: The Making of Chariots of Fire" and "Chariots of Fire: A Reunion."

16 minutes of additional scenes.

From the bonus features for the "Bend It Like Beckham" DVD:

10 deleted/extended scenes.

"The Making of Bend It Like Beckham" featurette.

From the bonus features for the "Brokeback Mountain" DVD:

"From Script to Screen: Interviews with Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana."

"Sharing the Story: The Making of Brokeback Mountain."

o--o--o

Okay, I think I'm seeing a trend here.

As far as deleted scenes go - alas, I don't have any. My "deleted scenes" (they aren't really deleted, because I never intended them to be in the story) either don't get written down (e.g. the sex scenes in The Three Lands) or else they're not written down in their original form, but they get expanded into becoming new stories in the series (e.g., Law Links"). I've never written a story and then taken out a scene.

On the other hand, I'm just overflowing with documentation on how I've written some of my novels.

So that's what I've been collecting together today: novel outlines, scene outlines, research notes, manuscript pages, correspondence, journal entries, writing schedules, for goodness' sake flow charts . . . anything that relates to how I wrote my upcoming novels.

I feel as though I'm about to show my underwear in public. And I honestly don't know whether any of this will be of interest to readers. But I know that, as a writer, I'm interested in how other writers create their stories, and judging from the number of interviews asking authors, "How did you come to write this story?" I'm not alone. So I'll try tossing this material into a few e-books and see how the readers react.

(Or maybe you guys could just make things simple for me and tell me what you think.)

*** 12 December 2009. Simplicity: Brief update on the computer file purge.

I've reached the point where I've purged most of the enormous files that I can (other than some old files of my father's that I'm still trying to access; this computer used to belong to him). Now I what I need to do is go through my Music folder, song by song, and decide which songs I want to keep. I already got rid of half a gigabyte of songs that way. (We're talking about songs that have been sitting on my hard drive without me ever listening to them.)

My hard drive is looking more and more organized, and I'm less and less inclined to add new material to it. This is good.

*** 12 December 2009. Writing: My holiday story is finished.

It's 35,000 words heavy. Man, am I relieved that it's done in time.

What's remarkable isn't that I got it finished in time; after all, last year I finished my 17,000-word holiday story in the space of three days. What's remarkable is that, without any great help from my Muse, I stuck doggedly to the task of churning out a bit every day (an average of 2235 words per day) till I got it done. Over the space of two weeks, I wrote on every day except one.

Looking back over my journal entries from 1995 has convinced me that there was never a time when writing was always easy for me. Granted, there have been particular days when the words poured out without much effort on my part, and those days were a lot more plentiful in the past. But there have always been days when I grumbled and groaned and cursed my Muse. The difference is that, in 1995, I didn't let that stop me from writing.

So I'm relearning to write the hard way.

Having said all that, this was a fun story to write. I learned a lot of things about my protagonist that I hadn't known, but which (in my Muse's usual sneaky manner) make perfect sense in light of other stories in the series.

I'm going to switch over now to working on the three half-completed chapters of the fourth volume of The Eternal Dungeon, because that's easier than starting from scratch the final novella in the third volume. I don't want my mind primarily on composing at the moment. Instead, I want to devote the rest of this month primarily to matters I've been putting off for too long: rewriting from beta reports, making holiday preparations, answering correspondence, and digging my way out of the clutter in my study and bedroom.

*** 16 December 2009. Simplicity: Adjusting my Internet time slightly; plus, a detour into Ptolemaic astronomy and base 60 math.

The ten-minutes-a-day-online rule has been working well, but I had a situation last week where I felt I needed more time online, so I went online for seventy-five minutes. Two days later, I fell off the wagon.

Back in the old days (by which I mean, before October), an Internet addiction fall would have meant twelve hours online. This time, I was on for another seventy-five minutes.

Still, that's not the sort of thing I want happening to me. I'm going to try going online for fifteen minutes a day; that way I can get through an hour's online work in four days rather than six, so I'll have less excuse to spend more than fifteen minutes a day online.

Also, it's easier to add up a bunch of quarter hours when calculating my Internet time. Darn those Babylonians and their sexagesimal system.

Did I ever mention that my great achievement in freshman math class in college - which I was flunking (for a second time) because I found my social life more interesting than Ptolemaic proofs - came when our teacher assigned us the task of proving a Ptolemaic proposition, using the figures he supplied us with?

"Book III Chapter 4 of Ptolemy's Almagest, given that there are 80 days from the spring equinox to the summer tropic and 100 days from the summer tropic to the autumn equinox. . . ."

Only he gave us the wrong figures. And me being too stupid to realize this, I spent fruitless hours trying to jiggle the figures so that they would work, until finally, in despair, I proceeded to improve on Ptolemy by inventing a whole new section of proof.

"Again, since the sun traverses arc KL in 100 days, therefore arc KL = 98°34'. And since arc LO = 1°17', therefore arc KLO = 99°51' and quadrilateral PN = 90°. Therefore KLO + PN = NK + 2KD + PO = 185°51'. . . ."

This required me to carefully calculate three pages of sexagesimal mathematics on paper.

"29°34'8" x 6 = 177°24'48" . . ."

Because, you know, this was 1983, so none of us kids had ever heard of calculators that could do sexagesimal math. Which meant - I add in case you never happen to have done arithmetic in base 60 without a calculator - that I was jotting down stuff like this:

29°34'8" (30 days)
x 6
= 174°204'48"
= 177°24'48" (180 days)
+ 4°55'41" (5 days)
= 181°79'89"
= 182°20'29" (185 days)
+ 0°14'47" (6 hours)
= 182°34'76"
= 182°35'16" (185-1/4 days)

(I think. Adding and multiplying in base 60 is no longer one of my skills.)

Those three pages saved me from flunking freshman math.

(Why, yes, I saved all my college papers - how did you guess?)

*** 19 December 2009. Mentoring: An exchange with my apprentice.

My apprentice: ". . . You were always concerned about whether you had enough experience to take care of an apprentice. Whereas I never worried about that."

Me: "I haven't said anything like that recently, have I? Now I have the experience."

My apprentice (cheerfully): "And what's better, your experience is with me."

Meanwhile, two feet of snow are predicted for the D.C. area this weekend. My Texas apprentice called me up, greatly concerned by that weather forecast. I didn't tell him that, in my birth state, Michigan, two feet is considered a mild snowfall.

*** 19 December 2009. Home: So now I've got back pain.

Look, just hire me out to some teaching hospital as the person who gets an illness once a week. At least I'll feel useful that way.

I looked up my symptom (lower back pain on the left), and it turns out it fits everything from back strain to life-threatening diseases. Wonderful.

It could just be due to the snow shovelling I did today. Or to the fact that my desk chair finally gave up the ghost, so that my back isn't adequately supported currently. Or that my TMJ is playing havoc with that side of my back.

But I first recall feeling pain down there last summer - or was it the summer before? And I think this is the back pain that's been waking me up ever since I started sleeping on my back (because of the TMJ). So I think this is chronic pain.

Shoot. And I already spent money we don't have in order to pay for my TMJ appointments.

Speaking of which, I have a dental appointment in two days, to get my dentist's advice on my TMJ. I also have eighteen inches of snow on our street. I called up the dentist's office tonight and left a message saying, "Um . . . are you dug out yet? 'Cause I'm not."

Writing life: E-book publishing developments at Smashwords

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:40:15 GMT

"Just like music, Hollywood's first reaction to [piracy] will be 'Well, that's just not fair. That's jumping the turnstile, that's breaking the rules. We have to shut that down, because if you remove that option [i.e. piracy] then people will be more patient.' You won't remove that option, and you're losing valuable time if you focus on removing that option at the expense of improving that option and bettering that option, beating that option.

"The music people used to say, 'How can you can compete with free?' And now you ask anybody in digital music and they'll tell you, 'I'm just trying to compete effectively with free.' They've embraced the very condition that up until very recently they said they would reject. I'm telling you, you are going to compete with free. Sometimes you're even going to win, once you make the commitment to living in the marketplace as it is and not as you wish it were or as it once was."

--Eric Garland.

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.

*** 11 December 2009. Writing: Terrific e-book self-publishing news from Smashwords.

Two days ago - in an intended blog entry that I'm now going to have to cut - I wrote:

"It doesn't look to me as though this will be the year when I make my great break-through with e-books.

"All I want is two simple things:

"1) To be able to submit my e-books to a distributor in ePub format.

"2) To have the e-books distributed without DRM."

I then went on to complain that Smashwords had a virtual monopoly these days on DRM-free e-book distribution from self-publishers to retailers, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, except that Smashwords "won't permit the submission of ePub e-books; instead, they have a complex style guide . . ."

Well, that's changed.

In a December 7 interview, Smashwords CEO Mark Coker says:

"In the next couple months we'll start allowing some authors and publishers to bypass Meatgrinder [Smashwords's converter] and upload their own perfectly formatted files for certain formats such as PDF, EPUB and .MOBI."

It's not clear who those "some authors" will be, but this is exciting news for me.

As a reader, I've liked Smashwords for a while now. It carries the genres I read, its Website is easy on the eye, and it offers DRM-free e-books. But as a self-publisher, I've had more mixed feelings.

On the plus side, Smashwords seems to be reasonably honest about what it is doing, and it gives a large portion of the e-books' profits to the self-publisher (85% of the net sales). Moroever, Mr. Coker has been energetic in his leadership of the project; he has been cutting deals left and right with retailers. Those retail agreements give Smashwords a sizeable edge over Lulu and other competitors.

But because Smashwords won't accept RTF or DOC files produced by my word processor of choice, WordPerfect (apparently, WordPerfect doesn't work well with Smashwords's converter), I'd have to paste a plain-text version of my e-book into Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, and then manually add back in all the italics. I'd also have to follow Smashwords's exacting instructions for formatting. And the results of all this work - since the source file would have to go through a converter - wouldn't be ideal.

What I've wanted to do is submit my own ePub files, which I can easily create by changing my WordPerfect files into HTML files and then turning them into ePub files via Calibre. That would minimize my workload and maximize my control over the end product. But Smashwords hasn't allowed me to do that up till this point.

Now that it will be doing so, I find the idea of publishing through Smashwords to be very attractive. They have distribution deals with Shortcovers, Barnes & Noble, the Stanza app for iPod, Sony, and Amazon. (The last deal doesn't interest me currently, since I wouldn't be submitting a Mobipocket file, but the deal will interest me a lot if Amazon begins selling ePub e-books in the future.) The money split from retail sales isn't stellar, from a self-publishing point of view; as Mark Coker puts it, "For B&N, Sony and Amazon, we pay 42.5% of the digital list [price]. For Shortcovers, we pay 46.75%." And Mr. Coker offers some suitably cautionary words on the potential size of sales through those retailers. But that's better than no distribution to retailers at all, which is what I currently have (except at Amazon, which I've stopped submitting to, because its DTP submissions interface is so accessibility-unfriendly).

The only thing that still worries me about Smashwords is the ISBN situation. Currently Smashwords doesn't support ISBNs, so if the e-book is distributed by a retailer that uses ISBNs for e-books, then the retailer assigns an ISBN, and Smashwords might be listed as the publisher on record. Smashwords says, "Some Smashwords authors fear this reduces their ownership, or threatens their copyright - not true." Maybe not, but it can cause sticky problems with book reviewers, who traditionally have steared clear of any book that is published by an author service. Smashwords says it's working on a solution to this problem, but it's not clear whether the solution will permit me to use the ISBNs that I've bought directly from Bowker (as opposed to ISBNs bought via Smashwords).

At any rate, if all works out, 2010 may well be my break-through year for self-publishing e-books.

*** 13 December 2009. Writing: More thoughts on Smashwords.

I took another look at the Smashwords site. I wish that Smashwords had more genre subcategories, such as historical fantasy and GLBT fiction. The relative lack of genre subcategories doesn't so much matter at Smashwords itself, which also uses a tag system and has separate sites devoted to genre subcategories, but I assume that the genre categories determine where the e-book is placed at the retailers' sites. I don't want my historical fantasy novels to be lost amidst a wealth of fantasy novels, and some of my gay romance titles just aren't erotic romance.

I also wish that Smashwords didn't limit e-book descriptions to 400 characters. That's much shorter than the typical blurb for a novel; as a reader, I just can't decide whether to buy a 120,000-word novel based on a 400-character description . . . and if I encountered a novel blurb that short at, say Barnes & Noble, I'd question whether the publisher was a professional.

Also, I have serious concerns about their adult content policy (scroll down to "policy").

But those were the only problems I noticed. The site is wonderfully easy to navigate around. Oh, and The Smashwords Book Marketing Guide (which is free) is a decent read. I've been promoting writings online since 1997, so I consider myself well-versed in that subject, yet I actually learned some new stuff from the guide about online marketing.

I found an illustrated guide to uploading files at Smashwords on someone's blog. My laptop is notoriously cranky about working with upload software, but at least it appears that the upload steps are easy and are clearly explained by Smashwords.

So now I'm just in a waiting mode till Smashwords begins allowing authors to upload their own ePub files. I'm hoping that will occur by the time my next novel is ready to publish.

Meanwhile, if any of you have published through Smashwords, I'd be interested to know whether you've had good experiences with them. Have you had any bad encounters as a result of their adult content policy? Did you have any technical problems in getting your e-books onto their site? How have your sales been?

Daily life: Lessons from my wordage

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 03:46:27 GMT

"I write every day for at least two hours, and I spend the rest of my time largely in the society of ducks."

--Flannery O'Connor.

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.

*** 22 November 2009. Writing: Looking beyond British boarding schools to American boarding schools (Prison City research).

I've just about finished up reading all the major turn-of-the-century British boarding school authors (and quite a few of the minor ones). I want to reread Alec Waugh's The Loom of Youth, since that was the first boarding school novel I read, and I'm sure I'll get a lot more out of it on a second read. But in the meantime, since I was going on the Web for my monthly visit anyway, I decided it might be worth my while to check online to see whether there were any turn-of-the-century American boarding school novels. I wasn't terribly optimistic that there would be, since boarding-school fiction is essentially a British genre.

I hit pay dirt within five minutes. The only American boarding school that currently replicates the British schools' House system - Lawrenceville School in New Jersey - was the subject of a series of novels from 1908 to 1922 by Owen Johnson, who had attended that school in the 1890s. Moreover, the novels were filmed twice, the first time on location at Lawrenceville School.

Oh, man, do I love the age of instant research.

I had a quick look through the school's present-day Website and leapt with joy when I realized that the school's landscape was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (yes, that's right, the man who designed Central Park) so that the main buildings surround a circle. Those of you who have read The Eternal Dungeon may recall that the circle has a special meaning in Yclau: "A circle [symbolizes] the turning cycle of rebirth for the old year and for the human souls who had died during the past year." And many other things connected with rebirth. Well, the same is true in the Dozen Landsteads; Prison City is just littered with circle imagery. (Incidentally, the 1960s was a decade when circles were really popular in architecture.) So Olmsted's landscape for Lawrenceville School will do quite well for my protagonists' school.

I won't know till I've read Owen Johnson's novels whether I'll be able to get anything out of them, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to pick up some appropriate student slang. Slang is central to most school literature (as anyone who has read the Jennings books knows), but I've been reluctant to include British slang in my Prison City series. Speaking as someone who attended a Maryland college with British-style academic features, I can testify that, other than a few academic words that my alma mater stole from Oxbridge, British slang was nowhere to be found on our campus. So being able to lift a few turn-of-the-century slang words from novels about a British-style American boarding school would be more appropriate.

*** 23 November 2009. Simplicity: Online time this month.

Assuming that I don't have any emergencies that take me online before the end of the month, I spent eleven and a half hours online this month: 2.5 hours earlier this month, when I was trying to figure out which mansions to visit for my Prison City research, 5 hours yesterday, and 4 hours today. The two days at the end were because I decided not to exhaust myself by trying to do everything on my Web tasks list in one day, like I did last month.

I think that setting myself a limit of ten hours online a month is a realistic way to handle things. I'll still try to cluster my Internet time to one or two days toward the end of the month. But if I have to go online earlier for important, time-sensitive matters that I can't pass on to my apprentice, then I'll know that the time I spend online is going to count to my monthly total, so I'll spend as little time online as possible.

I think I did fairly well with the Internet this month, though I can think of a couple of ways in which I could have cut back on my time. I still haven't reached the point of gathering cover art or checking new links for my Website, but I can do that in the coming months. I got everything else done on my Web tasks list that needed to be done this month. There were really only three tasks that took me a long time: trying (without success) to locate information on Lightning Source's new ePub option, tracking down more information on Lawrenceville School, and reworking my system for collecting blog posts (because I'd forgotten that the posts in the syndicated feeds at LJ & Co. expire after two weeks).

*** 23 November 2009. Writing: Kipling and the wonders of DRM-free ePub e-books; plus, my ideal e-book reader.

I had a squee moment while online, when I realized that Kipling had written additional Stalky stories that weren't in the 1899 edition of Stalky & Co.. (I must admit that I've become enamored with that bit of unintentional darkfic.) I found all but one of the additional stories online . . . but I really wanted that final story, so I went searching to see whether I could find a cheap edition of The Complete Stalky & Co. (since the book isn't available in any of the public libraries in my state).

It's available as a $1.75 e-book at Fictionwise, so I bought it in ePub format. It's the first time I've ever bought an e-book there, though I've downloaded a few of its freebies over the years.

The ePub edition had lines that didn't wrap, blast it. Calibre came to the rescue; I simply translated the file into plain text, did a search-and-replace on a few characters that my plain-text reader couldn't cope with, and ta da! An e-book I could read.

This is one of the reasons, by the way, that I won't buy DRMed books. I couldn't have made readable the e-book I'd paid for if it had been trapped in DRM.

I can't recommend Fictionwise's "Classic Literature" e-books, I'm afraid. The e-book in question didn't include the italics from the original printed text. Also, some of those Stalky stories are still covered by copyright in the United States, but Fictionwise didn't give the volume a proper copyright notice. This leads me to suspect that whoever was in charge of publishing the volume didn't have permission from the copyright holder to reprint those stories. That's rather sad, since Fictionwise is one of the best respected e-booksellers.

[Later: It turns out that this "complete" edition dealt with the copyright problem by leaving out the very story that I'd bought it for. Curse Fictionwise.]

Meanwhile, after spending too much time today trying to figure out how to transfer files onto my iPod without the aid of iTunes software, I've decided that, while the rumored Apple tablet will no doubt be nifty, what I really want to use as an e-book reader is a netbook. Netbooks aren't much larger than tablet PDAs, and they're about the same price - which, I hope and pray, will go down as time goes on, because I can't afford a netbook at the moment. But using a netbook as my e-book reader would give me all the advantages of mobility, along with a number of other advantages: not having to worry about problems in transferring files from my other computers (if the netbook had a Windows platform), being able to use software I'm already familiar with, and having a decent keyboard. And some netbooks are hinged so that you can place the keyboard behind the screen, effectively turning the netbook into a tablet.

So I've put "buy a netbook when I can afford one" on my wish list. It would be really nice not to have to sit at a desk when I read, as I currently do throughout most of the year.

*** 24 November 2009. Writing: E-publishing news on the Internet; plus, thoughts on Lulu's latest ventures.

News on the e-publishing front continues to pour out:

1) Lulu.com is now selling ePub books and has exanded its store to include non-Lulu e-books. My reaction at the end of this post.

2) Smashwords continues to grow. I'm still not interested in selling there, thanks to its difficult, WordPerfect-unfriendly style guide for submissions.

3) Lightning Source is now selling ePub e-books, but only with DRM. I've posted a plea for more information at the Self-Publishing Yahoo Group, but my general reaction is: Not till you make DRM optional.

4) The revised Google Books Settlement has been revealed. I didn't see what the court's reaction was, and I haven't read any of the commentaries on the revision, so I can't give my views on it in detail. My initial reaction is that the revision resolves some of the problems in the original settlement, but not all of them. At this point, I'm mainly interested in how the revised settlement is likely to affect Google's plans for its e-bookstore next year.

5) TeleRead says there's now a FireFox add-on for ePub e-books. I haven't tried it yet.

6) Here's a nice table of places where self-publishers can sell e-books, and here's a nice table of e-bookstores.

7) Lots of news articles are saying that e-book sales and e-reader sales are skyrocketing. Everyone's uncertain about the future of print.

What's that Chinese curse about living in interesting times? I hate this. I hate not knowing what the publishing market will be like six months from now; it's playing havoc with my ability to plan my 2010 publishing year.

Anyway, Lulu. Here's a summary of the situation, as described by Lulu author Paul Durrant:

o--o--o

Lulu now allows upload and sale of ePubs. DRM is optional.

Lulu have revised their prices. Lulu used to sell PDFs on a straight 20% margin. Lulu now sell both PDFs and ePubs on the basis of $1.49 + 20% of the remainder.

If you want to add Adobe DRM to your ebook, it costs an extra $0.99 PER SALE.

o--o--o

On the format front, I'm pleased with Lulu's decision. It was actually already possible to sell ePub e-books at Lulu, by using the Multimedia option, but this will make such e-books more visible to the consumer. Making DRM optional is also a smart move.

On the pricing front . . . Well, I understand the dilemma that Lulu is facing. An e-book could be priced so low by its author that its sale didn't cover the credit card charges that Lulu must recoup. But I'd rather that Lulu had required a minimum fee, not placed a $1.49 fee on top of the usual 20% fee. (Also, they've been plugging the fee-based DRM option so heavily that they've left some Lulu users with the impression that all Lulu e-books will have DRM. Not surprisingly, there's been an outcry of protest.)

As it is, this makes Lulu e-books not terribly profitable for the author. Suppose that the author prices their e-book at $5.99, which isn't an unusual price for a small-press e-book. Lulu will take $1.20 (20% of the total), plus $1.49, and the author will be left with just 55% of the profit.

The situation is different with high-priced e-books, of course. And, um, I haven't checked whether the multimedia option is still around, but if it is . . .

As far as opening up their bookstore to non-Lulu authors, I think that's a smart move. Very few people are going to go to an online bookstore simply to buy books and e-books by self-published authors. Those of us who do (*waves hand*) can still search the bookstore for only Lulu authors; Lulu's search engine permits that option. I think that opening up its bookstore to e-books by non-Lulu authors is one of the few possible ways by which Lulu could save itself from its current decline in importance in the self-publishing world.

It remains to be seen whether Lulu will succeed in attracting new customers. I hope it does; despite all its faults, I think Lulu is still the most honest and well-run of the self-publishing services.

I'm putting my money, though, on Google becoming the top destination for e-book buyers, since it must be one of the top destinations currently for downloading public domain e-books. (Amazon would have been my choice for top destination, but they screwed things up by selling e-books only in a proprietary format.) Whether Google captures the e-book sales market will depend on how well it puts together its online bookstore; I'm waiting with bated breath.

*** 24 November 2009. Writing: Post-online time and computer purge.

I managed to spend only one day reading my downloads this month (other than some research material). That's good; it means I can devote tomorrow to simplicity activities. Thursday is Thanksgiving, and Friday is when I begin trying to wrestle my Muse into coughing up the rest of The Unanswered Question.

After I'd finished transferring from my flash drives to my hard drive the downloads that I wanted to archive, I was once more left with one gigabyte on my hard drive (and I didn't even transfer the big files). So, after heaving a few sighs, I ditched nearly all of the podcasts on my hard drive. They've been sitting there since 2007, virtually untouched; it's unlikely I'll ever get around to listening to them, and if I do, there are plenty more like them online.

Having transferred my movies over to my newest flash drive, I now have (I hope) enough room free to defragment my hard drive. From this point forward, my rule is going to be: For every megabyte of files I add to my hard drive, I need to get rid of two megabytes' worth of files. If I follow this policy, then I'll eventually have enough room to cope with the occasional large files I need to store on my hard drive for research purposes.

*** 25 November 2009. Writing: Trying out ePub e-books on FBReader.

FBReader is an open-source e-book reader that will read a few basic e-book formats. All I need it for is ePub e-books.

I like it. The version I downloaded (which isn't the most recent version, I believe) doesn't have bookmarking abilities, alas; I'd have liked that. (It does save your place if you shut down the software.) But from an accessibility point of view, it works better than Calibre. I also like that FBReader reads ePub books from whatever files you direct it to; Calibre copies all of your e-books into its own directory, which means that you end up with duplicates of e-books if you prefer to file e-books in various folders, as I do. With FBReader, you can easily browse through the e-books by author or tag, and you can add your own tags.

It's not a sophisticated program, but it does what I want it to. I'll still use Calibre for translating to different formats - FBReader doesn't have that capability - but I like FBReader's simplicity and accessibility.

*** 25 November 2009. Mentoring and Simplicity: The computer purge and a DVD writer.

"I deleted six gigabytes from my laptop today!" I told my apprentice joyfully.

Silence on his end. Then he said, "Sir, I've been thinking. . . ."

There are advantages to having a packrat as an apprentice. He is so appalled at the idea of me actually having to throw out files to make space on my hard drives that he is very generously giving me his own DVD writer for Christmas. (He claims he doesn't use it. I let myself be conned into believing that.)

Of course, the evil part of me immediately whispered, "This means you don't need to throw out any more files."

No. No, no, no. I need a DVD writer in order to store big files like movies and - at last! - my own offline copy of Wikipedia. (One can download the files of the entire edition of Wikipedia; I just haven't had enough space till now to store them.) I do not need a DVD writer in order to create extra junk rooms.

So the purge continues, except now I know that I won't have to make any more big sacrifices like getting rid of my podcasts.

(Oh, and did I mention that I have a wonderful apprentice? Just in case you hadn't noticed.)

*** 28 November 2009. Home: A Thanksgiving Day exchange with my father.

Me: ". . . and so, now that I'll have a DVD writer of my own, I'll be able to download all of the files of Wikipedia so that I won't have to go online."

My father: "What do you mean, 'won't have to go online'? You'll have most of the Web on your DVDs."

*** 30 November 2009. Writing: A look back at what I was writing in March 2002.

Considering how many computers have given up the ghost on me over the years, I've lost surprisingly little fiction: only the beginnings of two stories, and one of them I recovered last night.

Original draft files are another matter. Last night I went on a quest to find the original drafts of several stories - in particular, Life Prison, which I wrote in March 2002 . . . I thought. All I had on my hard drive was a file saying that the story was completed on 9 March 2002. Since March 2002 was a particularly interesting month for me (more on that later in this post), I wanted to see the precise dates of composition, which would appear in the original draft.

This search involved going through a couple dozen Zip files and a couple hundred 3-1/2-inch floppy disks. Because, you see, in the bad old days, I didn't always label my backup files.

I turned up some interesting stuff, such as software from 1988 (!), my father's 1990 notes for his William Morris book, and a 1996 version of Netscape. I'd be tempted to see whether I could install the latter, except - *cough, cough* - I already have the 2000 version of Netscape on my hard drive.

What I did not turn up was the original draft of "Life Prison." Fine. So I started searching through all my correspondence and posts from that period. With a little deduction work, I managed to figure out that the novella was indeed written in March 2002, probably between March 4 and March 9.

As a result, I now have a complete picture of a quite extraordinary month in my writing life. During that month, I began, finished, or both began and finished the following stories:

* "Mercy's Prisoner 1: Life Prison" (Life Prison) - originally a stand-alone novella.
* "Master and Servant 2: The True Master" (Prison City) - originally a stand-alone novella.
* "A Sexual Minority Speaks Out" (Leathermen, Plain Vanilla Straights, and Other Rebels).
* "Rebirth 1: The Breaking" (The Eternal Dungeon).
* "Rebirth 2: Love and Betrayal" (The Eternal Dungeon).
* "Rebirth 3: In Training" (The Eternal Dungeon).
* "Rebirth 4: First Time" (The Eternal Dungeon).
* "Rebirth 6: Tops and Sops" (The Eternal Dungeon).
* "Transformation 3: A Prisoner Has Need" (The Eternal Dungeon).
* "Transformation 4: The Consultation" (The Eternal Dungeon).

My wordage for the month? Ninety thousand words.

But it's not just my wordage that impresses me; it's that I managed to launch three series in that month (albeit unknowingly in two of the cases), work on three of my most popular novellas ("Life Prison," "The True Master," and "The Breaking"), and toss off a short story.

March 2002 certainly was a golden month for me. However, I'm sorry to report that my wordage went down sharply after that. I think it's probably no coincidence that "Life Prison," like "Twenty Thousand Gold Stars," was written during a period when my eyes were nonfunctional. I had nothing to distract me from writing.

*** 30 November 2009. Home: Space Epiphany (from a letter I wrote on 1 March 2002).

"Please stay within the yellow line, or a solid rocket booster will hit you."
--A guard, deadpan, at the Space Shuttle launch viewing site.

Okay, here's what it's like to watch the Space Shuttle launch: You leave the house at 5:30 p.m. to catch the plane to Florida, and when you get to Florida you drive to Cape Canaveral, and then you pass through a series of unsmiling guards who act as though they're guarding Fort Knox, and when you arrive at Kennedy Space Center you discover that several thousand other people had the same idea, and all of you are corralled into the visitor's center complex, which isn't quite as tacky as Disney World but leaves you wondering why NASA has a budget problem since it's obviously making out like a bandit in the tourist industry, and you buy the requisite tourist goods and visit the exhibits designed for three-year-olds, carefully stepping over the dozens of people who are sleeping on the floor because it hasn't occurred to NASA after forty years of space flights to find a way to accommodate the young families staying up to watch a dawn flight, and then at 4:30 a.m. you're corralled onto a series of busses, and you end up in the middle of a wildlife refuge next to the ocean, next to the cold ocean with an equally cold wind blowing, and you discover that NASA hasn't spent any of its tourist money on buying benches for the lookout point, so you sit on the cold ground for two hours as the guard talks about the dangers of nearby fire-ants, and the NASA commentator on the speaker system is explaining how, if the shuttle blows up, you should go to the nearest air-conditioned building and stay there, and you know that the closest thing this site has to an air-conditioned building is its port-a-johns, and now the speaker is saying that the flight may be scrubbed due to a few clouds in the sky, and all you can see of the shuttle in any case is a tiny white blob on the horizon, and you're sitting there shivering and shaking and thinking, "Doug better enjoy this launch he's dragged us to, because if he doesn't, I'll kill him."

It was worth it. Some day I may see a volcano explode, or perhaps a comet will decide to spin through my backyard. I can't think of anything else that will match the experience of seeing a Space Shuttle launch. I had thought that all I would see was a bit of light and a bit of sound. Well, a sun is a bit of light, and an earthquake is a bit of sound - that's what we experienced. When the shuttle reached the clouds, it lit up the entire sky, and when the rumble of a thousand thunderstorms reached us . . . The closest I can come to describing it is that it's like when one listens for the first time to the slow build-up at the beginning of John Williams's "Duel of the Fates" in The Phantom Menace, and each new note is so exquisite that you're shattered of all thought except for the dumbfounded feeling, "It can't get any better than this . . ."

And then the chorus begins.

Dusk, proud owner of a solar system Christmas ornament

*** 30 November 2009. Writing and Mentoring and Simplicity: Word totals for October and November 2009, and how this affects my Internet time.

October 9
1770: "Law Links" (The Three Lands).

October 10
250: "Law Links" (The Three Lands).

October 12
4900: "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked" (Prison City).

October 14
2940: "Master and Servant 1: The Abolitionist" (Prison City).

October 16
1790: "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked" (Prison City).

October 21
5030: "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked" (Prison City).

October 23
3160: "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked" (Prison City).

October 30
5770: "Riddle 1: Head of the House" (Prison City).

October 2009 total: 26,610 words (average 3201/day). Wrote 8 days.

November 1
8010: "Riddle 1: Head of the House" (Prison City).

November 2
2260: "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked" (Prison City).

November 3
5290: "Riddle 1: Head of the House" (Prison City).

November 4
1380: "Law Links" (The Three Lands).
300: "Blackout 6: Escape" (Prison City).
(Total: 1680.)

November 6
2130: "Cycle 1: The March" (Prison City).

November 8
2010: "Law Links" (The Three Lands).

November 11
2640: "Master and Servant 1: The Abolitionist" (Prison City).

November 15
2930: "Blackout 5: Liege-master" (Prison City).

November 16*
1380: "Master and Servant 1: The Abolitionist" (Prison City).

November 17*
5370: "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked" (Prison City).

November 18*
370: "Blackout 4: Mistress" (Prison City).

November 19*
2750: "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked" (Prison City).

November 20
1530: "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked" (Prison City).

November 2009 total: 37,980 words (average 2921/day). Wrote 13 days.

o--o--o

November is an improvement over October, but I'm concerned by the fact that my Internet-related days (November 21-24) choked off all remaining wordage for the month. It seems that when I spend four straight days reading nonfiction (that's how long it takes me to read my e-mail, go on the Web, and read what I've downloaded), I scare away my Muse.

My poor apprentice has had to move yet again; he has the worst luck with roommates. He was already planning to move at the beginning of January but had to exit his current place quickly when it became clear that he was in a dangerous situation. So he's hopping from place to place this month.

Which means I'm left to my own devices in the meantime, as regards the Internet. I decided to take this as an opportunity to see whether I now have the self-control to only go online for ten minutes a day. I know that I've tried the daily routine in the past, and failed miserably at keeping control of my Internet addiction, but I have a theory that ten minutes online may be a small enough space of time to keep me from getting hooked, provided that (1) I download material without reading it, and (2) I don't read the material offline either. I'll put the downloaded files in storage (i.e. on my laptop computer) till it's time for my monthly Internet-related period. That way I won't be tempted to go online to grab instant reading matter, and my fiction-writing time won't be interrupted with nonfiction reading.

The plan has worked okay for the last two days. I'm still going by the "no more than ten hours a month" Web schedule, but I'm hoping that I can cut in half the amount of time I spend online during my monthly visit, if I do as much downloading as I can during these ten-minute daily visits. (Needed downloading, I emphasize.) Then I can save my big monthly visit for the stuff I can't do in quick forays: gathering information and posting.

As for my November work hours, they can be summed up simply: too much time spent on housework/upkeep, not enough time spent on reading/editing/publishing/research. That's partly the fault of my health problems, but once I'm finished with my wordage calculations, I'm going to try to spend as much time as possible on editing in December. I really need to get the three Three Lands novels off to their beta readers.

(And yes, my Muse knows that I have a holiday fic due in December. He's still miffed about me ignoring him in favor of the Web.)

*** 1 December 2009. Writing and Simplicity: Computer quest; Or, why I need to clean my house.

The floppy disk drive on my desktop computer decided to give up the ghost yesterday, after I'd stuffed a zillion disks into it in my attempt to find old original drafts. (So did my desktop computer's Zip drive. Trouble always comes in twos.)

Do you know what locating a working floppy disk drive involves in my house?

1) Scrounge through the computer peripherals drawers, the only part of my study that's actually in order, because I organized it last summer. Come up empty-handed.

2) Scrounge through the twenty-five boxes in my study closets till I find my Epson Geneva laptop (circa 1983). The Geneva's battery died long ago, but the floppy disk drive still works, glory be.

The Serial Out cable doesn't. It's designed to plug into 1983 computers.

2) Solicit Doug's help in locating the computer equipment box. In it, I find a Toshiba floppy drive.

It's designed to plug into Toshiba computers.

3) Scrounge through my study closets again till I find the bag with all of my past laptops. The Toshiba (circa 2002) doesn't work. The Sharp (circa 1992) doesn't work. The WinBook (circa 1997) does work . . . but its screen doesn't.

4) Try to decide whether I should hook up my 1998 computer monitor (currently on top of my six-foot-high file cabinet), my 2000 computer monitor (currently buried under boxes in the hall closet), my 2004 computer monitor (god only knows where), or whether I should simply see whether my extra hard drive works (rescued from a neighbor's curbside trash three years ago).

5) Scrounge half-heartedly in the peripherals drawers again and find my Iomega floppy disk drive. I joyfully plug it into my desktop computer.

It demands that I give it software.

I try to explain that I don't have its software.

It offers to go onto the Web to download the proper software.

My desktop computer doesn't have a modem.

5) I unplug the demanding drive, take it into the next room, and discover that, at some time in prehistory, I loaded the proper software onto my laptop.

Now I only had to deal with the floppy disks, half of which turned out to be corrupted.

*** 1 December 2009. Simplicity: The story of how my addiction to the Web began.

The story I've always told of how I became addicted to the Web is a simple one: My father gave me my first Windows computer with a Web browser in the spring of 1995. I ignored the browser for several months. When I finally went online, I discovered that there wasn't anything useful there for my historical research, so I continued to ignore the Web (except for an occasional glance at Episcopalian news) until the spring of 1997, when I made the fateful decision to start a magazine (later an e-zine) on interfaith news. At that point, I began to surf like mad for religions news on the Web, and I was hooked.

It turns out that the story is a bit more complicated than that.

What alerted me to the fact that I'd gotten the story partly wrong is that, when I was perusing carefully my 1995 pocket calendar in which I'd recorded how much writing and editing I did each day of that year, I noticed that there was a great big blank spot in my work schedule during the second half of October 1995.

All my alarm bells went off. I knew what a blank spot like that would mean today. But was there any way to check what it meant back then?

As it happens, there was.

"You have your bookmarks from 1995?" exclaimed my apprentice when I told him this tale last night.

Why, yes, I do. Doesn't everybody?

Oh, I guess everybody's not a digital packrat, like I am. Until quite recently, I used Netscape as my main Web browser, so I simply kept accumulating bookmarks on it, year after year. In 2000, after my eyes went out, I tried to clean the slate by starting a new bookmarks file (which quickly got packed in its turn), but I saved the old bookmarks file.

Netscape allows one to sort bookmarks by date, and it also records the exact date that a bookmark was made. So I set out to figure out, through the quantity of bookmarks I saved in each month, at what point I became hooked on the Web.

The answer is . . . on the very first month that I owned a computer with access to the Web.

Oh, not deeply hooked. The old tale I told was true: it wasn't till the spring of 1997, when I researched my magazine, that things began to explode completely out of control. But it's clear from the types of Websites I was saving in May and June 1995 (my first two months online) that I had already mastered the art of systematically going through the Web till I'd found every single major site on whatever topic I was interested in. (This is hardly surprising; it's a technique I learned when doing historical research in libraries.)

In fact, I think the only thing that saved me from becoming totally hooked in the first month was that this was 1995. There wasn't much on the Web in 1995. For example, one of the first things I did was try to locate every major archive of English translations of classical texts. (I was a history writer at the time, specializing in the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance eras.) I found a grand total of five Websites.

Here's what my descent into Internet addiction looked like, as recorded by the number of bookmarks I made.

o--o--o

May 1995: 4
June 1995: 9
July 1995: 3
August 1995: 0
September 1995: 0
October 1995: 0
November 1995: 1
December 1995: 9

TOTAL added in 1995: 26

January 1996: 0
February 1996: 0
March 1996: 1
April 1996: 0
May 1996: 1
June 1996: 0
July 1996: 3
August 1996: 4
September 1996: 6
October 1996: 20
November 1996: 9
December 1996: 6

TOTAL added in 1996: 50

January 1997: 2
February 1997: 0
March 1997: 0
April 1997: 27
May 1997: 14
June 1997: 38
July 1997: 21
August 1997: 8
September 1997: 45
October 1997: 22
November 1997: 17
December 1997: 50

TOTAL added in 1997: 224

o--o--o

I didn't try to record any numbers after that, because December 1997 is when I discovered the wonders of Internet forums. I was lost after that. By December 2000, I had 4300 bookmarks . . . and I was spending most of my time, not at Websites, but at online forums.

I have a leftover question that must remain unanswered: When did I become addicted to the Internet?

You see, the computer my father gave me in 1995 wasn't the first computer with a modem that lived in my home. Around 1993, Doug brought home from work a DOS terminal that had access to the Internet, by way of the computer system at his workplace. I think the computer system had a text-based Web browser; I have a vague memory of wrestling with the problems of a text-based hyperlinks system. (No back button, darn it.) Mainly, though, I remember using its telnet program to call up library computers - my father gave me their phone numbers - so that I could peruse the library catalogues in order to further my historical research. (My father had been using telnet for years; I remember him phoning me with great excitement around 1987 to tell me that he had managed to gain access to the electronic catalogue of a library that was a thousand miles away.)

I have no memory of getting hooked on this early form of the Internet. But then, I have no recollection of being online in the spring of 1995, though my bookmarks show that I was surfing the Internet then with frightening efficiency.

*** 2 December 2009. Writing: What my word count reveals. (Drum roll, please.)

I finally finished calculating all my daily word counts since 1995, which was when I began writing fiction that was publishable.

(Charts ahoy, ranging from 10 to 100 kilobytes.)

Words per month.

I could have wept when I saw that decline in my wordage between late 1996 and 2000, and again between the second half of 2004 and 2007. That's my Internet addiction at work, combined with nonfiction projects (history articles and religion news in the 1990s, leather history in the 2000s). I won't say "What a waste," because I think the nonfiction projects I did were valuable, but I will say, "What shortsightedness." I can excuse the 1990s gap; I was younger then and thought I was immortal. But by 2004, I knew that the clock was ticking away and that I needed to focus myself on my fiction. Instead, I dived into extensive leather research, under the excuse that I needed it for the Loren's Lashes series. (I always have an excuse.)

You'll see that there are some peaks in the chart. When I began writing fiction in 1995, it was after a long break from fiction-writing, so I poured my heart out. Same phenomenon in early 2002, when I discovered slash fiction. Early 2001 was when I couldn't read, due to my new loss of eyesight; I spent most of the time creating stories in my head, hence my high word count during those months. May 2004 was when my computer malfunctioned; I was using Doug's computer to go on the Internet, which (because of accessibility problems) was pretty much useless to me for anything except reading fiction, so that's what I did. As for the peak in November 2008, that was due to sheer hard work.

It turns out that the general trends in my writing are easier seen at the year-by-year level, so here's the same wordage information again, but organized by year rather than by month.

Words per year.

This is a very encouraging chart. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to produce the type of monthly wordage I was in 1995 - when I was writing an average of 67,924 words per month, for goodness' sake - but there does seem to be some possibility of regaining the yearly wordage I had in the past. 407,543 words (which is how much I wrote in 1995 - I began writing in July) is only 33,795 words per month, if extended over the space of 12 months. I think I could manage that.

You can see the same general picture as in the previous chart: peaks in 1995, 1996, and 2001, and shallows in 1997-2000 and 2005-2007. It's the years 2002 and 2003 that interest me the most, though. They occurred in the midst of my Internet addiction, yet their wordage is relatively high.

Of course, I know that my Internet addiction was taking a special form during that time: I was reading tons of online fiction. So my first thought was that there was a correlation between reading fiction and writing fiction.

I checked my reading and writing hours for 2006 to the present, and there's a rough sort of correlation between how much fiction-reading I do and how much fiction-writing I do, but not enough to explain what was taking place in 2002 and 2003. So I looked elsewhere for answers.

The thing I've been most worried about is the possibility that there's been giant dive, since 2002, in the average amount of words that I write each day. This has been the period when my creative powers have been waning, and I've been worried that my greater difficulty in creating stories has been affecting my daily wordage.

Average words per day.

Whoo! I'm safe!

Mind you, I know that this chart doesn't give the whole picture. I'm producing roughly the same amount of words per day as I was in 1996, but I know that it's twice as hard for me to do so. Never mind; as long as I get the same results, I don't care how much work it takes.

Note, by the way, that my average words per day went down during the times when I was doing extensive nonfiction research (including 1996, when I was researching history articles). I'll get back to that fact in a bit.

This chart raises an obvious question. My wordage is a multiplication of the words per day times the number of days on which I write. If my average words per day have stayed fairly steady over the years, what has changed?

Number of days of writing, divided by year.

There's the smoking gun. If you look again at the "words per year" chart, you'll see that it matches the "days per year" chart very closely. The biggest determinant of how many words I produce per year turns out be how many days I spend writing.

What none of the charts reveal - but what shows quite clearly in my daily word count - is that, the more time I spend on my fiction-writing each month, the more my daily word count goes up. I'll show you my October 2009 word count again as an example.

October 9: 1770.
October 10: 250.
October 12: 4900.
October 14: 2940.
October 16: 1790.
October 21: 5030.
October 23: 3160.
October 30: 5770.

Total: 25,610 words.

Compare those eight days with the eight days I spent writing between April and June of last summer, when I was only writing fiction sporadically.

April 2: 1770.
April 19: 1930.
May 4: 1070.
May 18: 1720.
May 26: 520.
May 27: 190.
June 9: 500.
June 19: 830.

Total: 8530 words.

Remember I mentioned earlier that my average words per day went down when I was doing extensive nonfiction research? I think the cause wasn't merely the fact that I was reading lots of nonfiction. I think the other cause was that, during these periods, I was only writing fiction sporadically.

In other words, the less often I write fiction, the fewer words I'm capable of producing when I do write fiction.

Let me put that in a more positive way: the more days on which I write, the higher my daily word count will be. Practice makes perfect.

Unfortunately, my life is more complicated than it was in 1995 and 2001. I'll give you an example of what a typical day in October 1995 was like, as recorded in my private journal back then. (From the looks of it, eight a.m. is when I went to bed from the previous day's work.)

o--o--o

8:00-10:30--Nap and plot.
10:30-12:30--Write "Breached Boundaries."
12:30-1:30--Eat meal and read Mary Renault's "The Last of the Wine."
1:30-3:30--Write "Breached Boundaries."
3:30-4:30--Eat meal and read Renault.
4:30-5:30--Go to library.
5:30-7:30--Nap and plot.
7:30-9:00--Write "Breached Boundaries."
9:00-10:00--Eat meal and read Renault.
10:00-11:00--Housework and other assorted non-writing activities.
11:00-1:00--Rewrite "Touch Fire."
1:00-1:30--Eat snack and read Gene Wolfe's "The Shadow of the Torturer."

o--o--o

First of all, this was a good day, wordage-wise: I wrote 4800 words. Spending roughly five-and-a-half hours on writing will do that. (Incidentally, that's 872 words per hour, which is a big surprise, because I produce an average of 1665 words per hour these days.)

[Later: I doublechecked this against the hourly figures for the first draft of Wizard of the Sun in August 1995, and my god, yes - I'm writing twice as fast as in 1995. Who'd've thought?]

Note also that I spent three-and-a-half hours reading fiction. My Muse has got to have liked that.

But notice two other things:

1) I spent a grand total of two hours on activities other than reading, writing, editing, and plotting.

2) I didn't seem to need any sleep.

I just couldn't function on that schedule today. I have an apprentice to take care of, I'm self-publishing my writings, I have to do research for my historical fantasy, I need more exercise than in the past in order to keep in shape, and I've got two zillions boxes to clear out of my house. Oh, and I actually sleep occasionally.

In comparison to most authors, I have very little to do besides write, but I just can't go back to the days when I did nothing all day except read, write, edit, and plot.

On the other hand, that's still my ideal (if you add exercise into the equation). And I'm trying to get as close to the ideal as possible. Right now, I'm trying to get my daily fiction-reading up from one or two hours to three or four hours. And I'm trying to write for at least two hours a day.

I'm not worried about the impact of time with my apprentice on my daily schedule. He's wonderfully flexible; barring the occasional crisis, he takes just as much time as I can spare him. On some days that, means two hours or more; on other days, I just give him brief calls when I'm preparing food.

Besides, the one aspect of 1995 that I don't want to go back to is my intense loneliness then.

Housework is more of a problem, especially since some of it involves reading nonfiction in order to sort my belongings. Likewise, upkeep matters such as organizing my computer files suck up time.

What I'm most worried about, though, is the amount of nonfiction reading and Internet activities that I need to do. Surfing the Web, posting story announcements, answering e-mail, reading articles on publishing, reading nonfiction works for my historical research . . . These are all necessary aspects of my current life as a writer, but figuring out how to fit them into my schedule without causing breaks in my fiction-writing is going to be a real challenge.

An interesting one, though.

If any of you writers who are reading this have analyzed your own word count patterns, I'd be interested in hearing what you learned from your analysis. Perhaps you'll have some ideas that will help me.

*** 3 December 2009. Simplicity and Writing: Changes to my schedule, as a result of my wordage research.

Some conclusions I've reached about how to improve my wordage, as a result of the above analysis of my word count over the years:

1) I need to establish a daily writing schedule for my fiction.

2) I need to spend more time reading other people's fiction.

3) I need to minimize the amount of time I spend daily on nonfiction reading and writing (including writing these blog entries, *cough cough*).

4) I need to avoid breaks in my fiction-writing schedule, especially if they involve extensive nonfiction reading (and Web time, which amounts to the same thing).

Hoo boy. Let's see whether I can achieve the impossible.

Currently, this is my daily schedule:

* Write fiction (one hour or more).
* Scan and OCR part of a novel if necessary for reading matter (fifteen minutes).
* Call apprentice while preparing food (indefinite amount of time).
* Read fiction while eating (one hour).
* Do housework (half hour).
* Garden/walk/dance (twenty minutes to one hour).
* Nap (however long I need).
* Write fiction (one hour or more).
* Call apprentice while preparing food (indefinite amount of time).
* Scan and OCR part of a novel if necessary for reading matter (fifteen minutes).
* Read fiction while eating (one hour).
* Dance (twenty minutes).

After that, my daily schedule gets a bit hazy, because I'm trying to figure out how to fit into the remaining hours everything else I need to do: editing, layout, correspondence, research, sorting belongings, nonfiction reading and writing, leisure activities, daily life entries . . . I have too much to do in my life. At any rate, I do more fiction reading every time I eat.

What I'm most concerned with is figuring out how to avoid Internet fatigue from spending too much clustered time on Internet-related activities (Web surfing, posting, downloading, reading/viewing downloaded materials, answering e-mail), because that kills my Muse.

The schedule I've been trying of going online for ten minutes daily is working really well. Ten minutes turns out to be the ideal time for (1) getting one or two activities done online and (2) escaping before my Internet addiction figures out that I'm online.

The ten-minute marker is also causing me to shrink the amount of overall time I spend online. For example, tonight I wanted to gather some information on the University Boat Race. (I'd read True Blue, giving one perspective on the 1987 Mutiny, and I wanted to see the other perspectives.) Ordinarily, if I'd scheduled this visit during one of my monthly Internet visits, I'd have spent an hour or more collecting links. This time I dashed in, spent one minute perusing an aerial map of Lawrenceville School that I'd pulled up during the previous day, spent eight minutes collecting articles on the 1987 Mutiny, spent a minute at the Con.txt Website, and unplugged the Internet cable when the timer chimed. My Internet addiction didn't have time to draw a single breath; by the time it even thought of tempting me to stay online longer, I had moved on to my next offline activity.

So I'd like to see how many of my regular Internet tasks I can achieve this way. For example, if I can't post this blog entry in the space of ten minutes, then I'm constructing my Daily Life entries in the wrong way.

I think that if I stick to this type of schedule, I'll gradually start discarding Internet activities that take too long. I know that I can't discard all of my more-than-ten-minutes Internet activities, but I can sure pare them down to the bare minimum.

I've also been spending ten minutes a day, immediately after I go online, watching previously downloaded videos I need for my Prison City research. (Hurrah to YouTube for establishing a ten-minute limit on its videos; I don't have to use a timer.) Not only do my eyes approve of me only spending ten minutes a day on video-watching, but this keeps me from getting hooked on video-watching.

I tried the same method tonight with reading some of the articles I downloaded from the Internet earlier this week. (Not the articles I downloaded this evening; if I did that, I'd start going online in order to have instant reading matter.) I tried to spend a half hour reading them and quickly discovered this was too long. So I'll establish a ten-minute daily limit for them too, which will encourage me to ask myself whether I really need to download an article on how high school students are reacting to the replacement of printed textbooks with e-textbooks.

I'm going to give myself a little more flexibility with turn-of-the-century nonfiction that I'm reading for research, and somehow or another I'll figure out a way to fit in time for leisure nonfiction, such as Wired articles.

Correspondence is another question mark in my mind. I haven't figured out yet how to handle it.

As for my publication schedule . . . Darn it, if I knew how to make money from my writing, it would be so much easier for me to plan how to do so. But I'm inclined to think that trying to publish all my new fiction at once in the spring is wrong, wrong, wrong from the point of view of avoiding clustered time on the Internet. It's also not good for my blood pressure, trying to get multiple novels and novellas ready for a single publication deadline. And there's no need for a giant spring splurge, now that I'm publishing year-round. It would make more sense, I think, for me to bring out one e-book at a time, month by month. But how to do so in such a way that I earn money . . .

Filthy lucre. I wish I didn't have to worry about it.

*** 4 December 2009. Writing: More thoughts on my wordage.

It occurred to me last night to add up all my wordage since 1995.

2,637,173 words. In 14 years, I've written the equivalent of 22 novels.

I suppose that's nothing to sneer at. As my apprentice put it when I told him that I thought I could manage writing thirty-five thousand words a month: "I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to write thirty-five thousand words a year."

So I hope I don't sound ungrateful to my prolific Muse if I say that I wish I'd produced twice that amount of wordage. I had the ability to do so; twice the wordage would have been 16,000 words a month, or a mere 500 words a day. I should have been able to manage that even while working at nonfiction projects.

No discipline. That what it comes down to. I'm hoping that will change now. Heaven knows that fighting my Internet addiction tooth and nail has taught me something about self-control.

Reply to comments: The Lammies again

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:36:21 GMT

Reply to this comment by lemursexbot (i.e. my apprentice):

Well, I was being facetious about accosting innocent bystanders to make them read my manuscripts. But I do plan to accost a few of the not-so-innocent bystanders - i.e., authors who have written about islanders and watermen. And yes, I'll only beg them to read the scenes set outdoors, not the ~~bedroom~~ indoors scenes.

Reply to this comment by dharma_slut:

"The thing about the 'we're endangered you aren't' argument is that queers are endangered before they ever set pen to paper."

But as I recall (I'm writing this offline, so I can't doublecheck), that wasn't the argument made by the LLF. My recollection is that their argument was that GLBT writers are threatened on the literary level. Specifically, they cited the Amazon episode. As several folks have pointed out, Amazon didn't go around checking the bios of the authors of GLBT books before they removed those books from their search engine. So in that particular episode, GLBT authors were no more threatened than straight authors were.

Reply to this comment by yonmei:

"I think this is a much better defense of your position than your initial angry posts were: I appreciate it."

Well, I appreciate your being patient while I fumbled my way to coherency. :)

Daily life: Counting my past wordage

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:35:13 GMT

"My biggest writing mistake is that I can't leave well enough alone. Even after the manuscript has come back from the various proof-readers I use, inevitably, the urge to pick a scab overrules all logical sensibility."

--C. Anne Gardner. Because, um, yeah.

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.

*** 8 November 2009. Writing: Wordage and my Internet addiction (a look at the past).

While skimming through my journals for entries on "Blood Brothers," I happened across an August 1980 entry that reported I'd written approximately 162,500 words in 1979.

By comparison, I wrote 193,140 words last year. These days, I'm a full-time writer with a computer. In 1979, I was a full-time student who wrote stories by hand.

The 1979 word count is impressive as heck. Coincidentally, last night I began doing the tedious but rewarding task of figuring out my wordage count for the 1995-2005 period (2006 being the year when I began keeping careful records of my daily wordage). This involves going back to the original drafts of my stories, checking the word count of each dated section, and recording the results separately.

Five hours of work yielded me the wordage for 1997-2000. I don't have any firm conclusions yet about whether my writing has declined in recent years, for my golden years of fiction-writing were 1995-1996 and 2002-2003. But I can see quite clearly the path of my Internet addiction, as reflected in the wordage. See for yourself; these are the number of days during which I wrote in each month.

o--o--o

December 1996: 12 days.
January 1997: 17 days.
February 1997: 14 days.

( February 1997 is when my Internet addiction began.)

March 1997: 0 days.
April 1997: 1 day.
May 1997: 0 days.
June 1997: 0 days.
July 1997: 0 days.
August 1997: 0 days.
September 1997: 0 days.
October 1997: 0 days.
November 1997: 0 days.
December 1997: 1 day.

January 1998: 1 day.
February 1998: 0 days.
March 1998: 0 days.
April 1998: 5 days.
May 1998: 1 day.
June 1998: 0 days.
July 1998: 0 days.
August 1998: 0 days.
September 1998: 3 days.
October 1998: 1 day.
November 1998: 0 days.
December 1998: 0 days.

January 1999: 1 day.
February 1999: 0 days.
March 1999: 1 days.
April 1999: 6 days.
May 1999: 1 day.
June 1999: 0 days.
July 1999: 0 days.
August 1999: 9 days.

(Beginning in August 1999, I evidently made an effort to pull myself away from the Internet.)

September 1999: 2 days.
October 1999: 6 days.
November 1999: 14 days.
December 1999: 3 days.

(In December, I let myself be persuaded to become Co-Webmaster of a flame-ridden discussion board that required 24-hour supervision. The Webmaster promptly absconded, leaving me holding the baby.</i>)

January 2000: 1 day.
February 2000: 0 days.
March 2000: 5 days.

(Notice that I keep having higher wordage counts around this time of the year. That's because I was giving up the Internet for Lent. Or trying to.)

April 2000: 0 days.
May 2000: 2 days.
June 2000: 0 days.
July 2000: 0 days.
August 2000: 9 days.

(In August, I quit as Co-Webmaster of the discussion board.)

September 2000: Wrote 1 day.

(And promptly volunteered to be a moderator.)

o--o--o

That's the end of my fiction-writing for 2000. In January 2001, I became partially sighted, and in January 2002 I discovered the glories of online fiction, which gave my Internet addiction a new form for a while.

Overall, I wrote 185,179 words between 1997 and 2000 - in other words, I wrote about as much in four years as I had written in 1979. But you know, the reason why I mentioned my previous year's word count in my August 1980 entry was because I also recorded my word count from January to August 1980.

Nine thousand words. Me slacking off is nothing new.

*** 11 November 2009. Writing: My ability to write descriptions.

It's becoming increasingly clear that my inability to write descriptions is due to the fact that I simply haven't paid attention to my surroundings for forty-six years. It's also becoming increasingly clear that this is clogging the arteries of my fiction-writing.

The two things that have made this clear is my visit to Hoopers Island and my visit to Riversdale Mansion (the latter of which I'll write about separately, next time). In both cases I came home and wrote scenes with relative ease. I say "relative" because, even in these cases where I was carefully scrutinizing my surroundings with the aim of writing about them, I found that I couldn't remember much about my surroundings afterwards.

There's a game you play as a child (or you do you have a decent education - or, in my case, a decent public library): You scrutinize a picture, memorizing everything you see in it, and then try to remember what was in the scene. It's presented as a game to children, but it's really an exercise to check children's ability to see and remember.

It's a game I find I'm returning to. I've been reading picture books for the last month - simply because their large print is the only type of print I can read at this time of year without hurting my eyes - and, while a lot of the illustrations are unmemorable, there are some that I found myself scrutinizing with great care. And the longer I scrutinized them, the more that I realized how little I see of a scene on first look . . . or second . . . or third . . . or tenth . . .

I think continuing to scrutinize artwork closely will help improve my powers of observation. But I need to do more exercises along those lines, because it's my inability to be able to imagine the sensory aspects of a scene that makes it so difficult for me to write down the stories in my head.

*** 11 November 2009. Simplicity: And the computer file purge continues.

I was down to less than a gigabyte of space on my hard drive, so tonight I did what I should have done a while back: I did a Windows search on my hard drive for all files above 10 megabyte, then started with the biggest files and purged everything that I no longer needed (or never did need) or that was a duplicate of something I had elsewhere on my hard drive.

I simply skimmed the list, and am only one-fifth of the way through it, but I've already cleared out a gigabyte and a half. The big problem really is with my research material for the 1960s/retrofuture portion of Prison City. A lot of that takes the form of videos or large images. All told, I have nearly six megabytes' worth of material awaiting me. And I can't view or delete any of that before next summer.

I really need extra storage space for ephemeral research material. My apprentice has his eye out for a cheap DVD writer for me, but he hasn't turned up anything yet.

In the meantime, this sort of purging is a good lesson in slimming down, even if it's frustrating that the files I least want to keep usually turn out to be 15 kilobytes in size, while the ones I most want to keep are half a gigabyte.

*** 11 November 2009. Writing: More schoolboy fiction.

I just finished reading "Fifth Form at St. Dominic's" (1887), by Talbot Baines Reed, whose sole crime, in the eyes of literary critics, seems to be that he was popular. As Frank Eyre dryly puts it, Reed brought school fiction "to a perfection of unreality that later writers could only copy."

I found the novel entertaining. Its theme wasn't deep ("Don't cheat"), but the plot was fast-paced, and the characters all had distinct personalities.

I was particularly taken with Pembury, the ironic editor of the fifth-form newspaper. Here he is, taking advantage of the ignorance of a new boy.

o--o--o

"Here, Tony," suddenly shouted Ricketts to Pembury, who was jogging along on his crutches a little way ahead, towards the school; "do you mind showing this kid the way up? I have to go back with Wren. There's a good fellow."

"Well, that's cool," replied Master Pembury; "I'm not a kid-conductor! Come on, youngster; I suppose you haven't got a name, have you?"

"Yes, Stephen Greenfield."

"Oh, brother of our dear friend Oliver; I hope you'll turn out a better boy than him, he's a shocking character."

Stephen looked concerned. "I'm sure he doesn't mean to do what's wrong," began he, apologetically.

"That's just it, my boy. If he doesn't mean to do it, why on earth does he do it? I shall be sorry if he's expelled, very sorry. But come on; don't mind if I walk too fast," added he, hobbling along by Stephen's side.

Stephen did not know what to think. If Ricketts had not addressed his companion as "Tony" he would have fancied he was one of the masters, he spoke with such an air of condescension. Stephen felt very uncomfortable, too, to hear what had been told him about Oliver. If he had not been told, he could not have believed his brother was anything but perfection.

"I'm lame, you see," said Pembury, presently. "You are quite sure you see? Look at my left leg."

"I see," said Stephen, blushing; "I--I hope it doesn't hurt."

"Only when I wash my face. But never mind that[,] Vulcan was lame too, but then he never washed. You know who Vulcan was, of course?"

"No, I don't think so," faltered Stephen, beginning to feel very uneasy and ignorant.

"Not know Vulcan! My eye! where have you been brought up? Then of course you don't know anything about the Tenth Fiji War? No? I thought not. Dreadful! We shall have to see what you do know. Come on."

Stephen entered Saint Dominic's thoroughly crestfallen, and fully convinced he was the most ignorant boy that ever entered a public school. The crowds of boys in the playground frightened him, and even the little boys inspired him with awe. They, at any rate, had heard of Vulcan, and knew about the Tenth Fiji War!

o--o--o

No more is said about Pembury's disability, though he's periodically depicted as walking lamely. It's a refreshing change from the sort of disability fiction I grew up on (and which, alas, still dominates), in which a character's disability is treated as the end-all of his existence.

*** 12 November 2009. Writing: The advantages of being blind, word-count-wise.

I just totted up my totals for 2001's wordage. Here's the totals for the months when I couldn't see print at all and (due to accompanying pain from my untreated dry eye) was largely bedridden.

February 2001: 50,700 words written (average 4225/day). Wrote 12 days.
March 2001: 46,320 words written (average 3563/day). Wrote 13 days.
April 2001: 65,830 words written (average 4389/day). Wrote 15 days.

Oh, man. It's almost enough to make me thrust pins in my eyes, a la Oedipus. (But not quite enough.)

My total for 2001 was 223,680 words written, which is more than in any other year I've recorded so far - this despite the fact that I got back Internet usage in May 2001, and my wordage practically disappeared after that. (I wrote on twenty more days last year than in 2001, but my average word count per day was lower.)

I still haven't calculated my wordage for what I've always considered my peak years: 1995, 1996, 2002, and 2003. I'll be interested to see how those years compare with 2001. At any rate, 2001 gives me a new record for words per day: 10,490 on April 8. I was working on Twenty Thousand Gold Stars that day.

*** 17 November 2009. Writing: Switching over to editing The Three Lands; plus, W. Somerset Maugham.

My Muse is continuing to throw me a crust or two from time, but at the moment, I'm devoting my primary energy to editing the three Three Lands novels that I'll be publishing next year. "Law Links" has to be readied for its beta readers, and I need to see whether "Law of Vengeance" and "Breached Boundaries" (which have been betaed already) need further betaing. I'd like to get all this done before I go online again.

Today I read some of W. Somerset Maugham's "On Human Bondage" (1915), which is supposedly a fictionalized autobiography. The schoolboy section - which was my motive for reading the novel - was so-so: stylistically polished, but otherwise no better than many other schoolboy stories I've read from authors who are considered to be lesser in quality. Perhaps the novel - which is supposed to be a classic - gets better later on; I gave up (temporarily, at least) at Chapter 41. By that point in the novel, the protagonist had cold-shouldered every boy at his school, made his adoring foster mother cry, failed to give any thanks to the headmaster who encouraged him in his studies, and abandoned a woman he'd slept with. Everywhere he goes, he's dissatisfied with the place he finds himself in; methinketh that the places he visits aren't the real problem.

*** 18 November 2009. Home: Fall leaves and gardening.

Doug and I had a ~~fight~~ stirring debate over whether the leaves on our lawn should be raked this year.

Dusk's position: We should leave all the leaves where they are in hopes that they kill our wretched lawn.

Doug's position: We should treat the leaves exactly the way that all suburban leaves have been treated since prehistoric times. (Well, that's what his position sounded like to me.)

Our uneasy compromise - which was reached by us getting too tired to argue any more - is that only the leaves in the east side yard will be left on the ground. The grass is already dying in that part of our property, and the east side yard is hemmed in on three sides by buildings and bushes.

I've pledged to go out in fifty-degree-below-zero weather to rake the leaves back into place if the wind blows them away. (I suggested mulching the leaves with a lawnmower, but Doug is of the opinion that our lawnmower is too wimpy for such a job.)

The weather is actually pleasant at the moment (what my Southern apprentice would describe as "cold": about sixty degrees), so I'm spending an hour a day raking elsewhere in the yard. I could use the exercise.

I'll be interested to see what happens to the east side yard over the winter. I've never actually paid attention to what forests are like after a winter with leaves on the ground. I'm assuming that the moss - which is plentiful there, hurrah - will survive, and that the mushrooms there will continue to pop their little heads up. Also, I'm hoping that the evergreen sapling will survive. But what else will grow there after a leaf-protected winter?

*** 20 November 2009. Home: Switching over to writing The Eternal Dungeon; plus, The Beta Reader Problem.

I finished writing the lighthouse scene in "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked." It was horribly difficult to write and will require a major revision, but at least I've got that story out of the way. So far (I still have two and a half scenes to write), "Unmarked" is 61,000 words long - almost more of a novel than a novella. I'm calculating that the novel as a whole will be about 150,000 words long. Good thing that I didn't try to squeeze four novellas into that novel.

I'm setting aside "Master and Servant" for now in favor of my holiday gift fic. First, though, I'm going to take my monthly visit online. That will allow me to get started on the holiday story right after Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was when I started writing last year's holiday story. The 17,000-word novella took me a mere three days to write. Alas, I can't hope for that type of wordage this year; my Muse is being very sluggish. So I'm going to need to work on this year's novella every single day after Thanksgiving if I'm to finish it in time.

Ordinarily, I'd wait till I had all of my currently edited stories ready for the beta readers before going online. But I've reached the exalted stage where I can send out e-mail without checking incoming mail. So I'll e-mail later the stories to be betaed. I'd rather get my trip to the Web out of the way now, so that I can tend fully to my Muse between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Meanwhile, it being fashionable to complain about The Servant Problem, I'm going to whine about The Beta Reader Problem.

I don't have enough beta readers to edit my Three Lands novels for this year. I may manage to scrape by in finding enough beta readers for "Master and Servant," but only by sending out a plea for help to a beta reader I haven't used for years.

In other words, I'm going to have to go on another hunt for beta readers, darn it. Finding good, reliable beta readers who can do more than proofread (you know who you are, and you know that I worship at your feet) is pretty much the worst literary problem I'm facing these days.

(Really, it's times like this when the M/s world looks so attractive. Just show me to the part of the M/s world where the beta reader slaves hang out.)

Daily life: Trying to figure out ways to improve my wordage

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:30:56 GMT

"Look, I do know this: stories matter.

"Sometimes they come to me in the middle of the night, I wake up and I know there was once a person with a name, a history, a life -- and sometimes they died a hundred years ago and sometimes they haven't been born yet, but they're so real, they're right there, like I can touch them. I write them, when I can, and grieve them often, in ways I've learned to be smart enough not to talk about.

"At times that bothers me, the silence I feel obligated to that comes with storytelling. It bothers me when I write, which is one manner of inhabiting a character, and it bothers me when I act, which is another. But I've learned to live with it because stories, and the people they are about, are, in the telling, more important than me.

"I'm just a translator, a medium, a canvass and a liar. Their stories matter so much that in the telling of them, all I can wish is to disappear.

"And I love them so much, the people I tell into being.

"Which means that when it comes to the business of awards my gut says, honor them. Not me. Not writers. Characters. Stories. Honor them."

--RM

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.

*** 26 October 2009. Writing: Man, oh, man, I'm offline for a month, and the entire e-publishing world changes.

Here's the latest news that I picked up while I was online. (Well, it'll be outdated by the time you read this, but maybe some of you haven't heard yet.)

* Barnes & Noble brought out its new e-reader, the Nook. Amazon promptly dropped the price on the Kindle. Bunches of other e-readers are coming out too, causing some commentators to call 2010 the year of the e-reader. Personally, I won't be impressed till someone brings out a good, inexpensive, tablet-sized, LCD-screen e-reader that doesn't require me to coordinate downloading through proprietary software (you listening, Apple?).

* Sony Reader is now selling Smashwords ePub e-books - i.e. self-published e-books. Smashwords is already making its ePub e-books available to the Stanza app for iPod. Alas, Smashwords has horrendously complicated formatting requirements for self-publishers.

* Google has unveiled the plans for its long-awaited online bookstore. The evil little secret none of the commentators are talking about: This is yet another proposal to sell e-books that the customer won't actually own. But there do seem to be some positive sides to the proposal.

* The Internet Archive announced that it has added the ePub format, added the DAISY format (a format used by the blind), made all its books available to the One Laptop Per Child project, and will be starting a new project, BookServer, to help people find any book ever published.

* And in case you missed the news earlier, Google Books is in the process of making its public domain e-books available in the ePub format.

So, exciting days for readers of e-books, but I'm still not excited as a self-publisher of e-books. Hopeful, yes, but I haven't read any news yet that makes me say, "This is how I'll be able to make money."

*** 26 October 2009. Simplicity and Writing: My time online; plus, the Prison City stuff I found.

Spent eight hours online today. I'm pleased. I'd been hoping that I'd be able to keep my Internet usage under ten hours a month over the winter, and that's what I did this month. I got nearly all of the tasks on my Web tasks list checked off, and I managed to spend only one day on the Web.

Tomorrow I read through the stuff I downloaded, then I take a day off for simplicity re-orientation, and then I get back to work. Probably on editing, as my Muse will have wandered away in the meantime.

While online, I found some nice images of locations I'm writing about, including a Flickr photo taken from atop the Calvert Cliffs. (I'm not going to ask how the photographer managed that.) I found an e-text of the tide tables for 1912, and if I failed to find the weather reports for 1912, it wasn't for want of trying. I'll have to make do with the 1910 report. I found some photos and layouts of old Calvert County houses at the Historical American Building Survey (one of the New Deal projects that's been posted at the Library of Congress site). And I found a 147-page PDF file published by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources Fisheries Services that maps the historical locations of oyster beds in the Chesapeake region. (Do you remember me mentioning that I love U.S. government freebies? I forgot to mention that I also love state government freebies.)

*** 26 October 2009. Writing: For your amusement, the Nautical Telegraph Code.

Online, I found someone's HTML edition of a 1920 book providing a nautical telegraph code. Each word of the code represents a sentence or sentences. Here are some samples from the translation of the code:

o--o--o

Queer! You have not had my letters. I posted to you a month ago.

I did not mean what I said in my last letter.

Come at once; be silent; owners need not know unless I tell them later.

Experienced a terrible cyclone. Crew and ship behaved well. Am all right.

Seas washed out my cabin. All clothing spoilt.

Have changed doctor, who gives better hope.

What shall I name baby? Please wire.

Don't you think -- would be a good name?

Glad beyond measure to hear the news; accept my kindest love, dearest.

It is impossible to describe in a wire how I feel. Rest assured that I am thinking of you and your future happiness. Will write to you (or see you) as quickly as possible. I am very anxious.

-- is engaged to --. What do you think?

Will you agree to marry me upon my return?

Verdict, temporary insanity.

I should be glad of your assistance. I am left penniless.

You must send me money to go on my holidays.

I have stretched a point this time, but it will be quite useless for you to make further demands.

Crew imprisoned.

Do you think -- is to be trusted?

Sorry to say ship caught fire last night; slight damage.

Sorry to say ship caught fire last night; serious damage.

Fire increasing; shall have to scuttle ship.

I am detained here by authorities under protest.

Please send me some underclothing.

Who is going to pay for these things?

Whatever the reports may be in the press do not be unduly alarmed. I am quite safe and sound. It may be some time before a letter reaches you, but there is nothing to worry about. It is quite possible an inquiry may be held here, in which case delay is unavoidable. Please do not take any notice of any alarming report you may read about in the newspaper. Will tell you all about it when I see you.

Am in trouble; will you see that I am represented by your solicitor?

o--o--o

Why is it that my general reaction to the coded messages is to be very, very glad I wasn't travelling by water in 1920?

*** 27 October 2009. Writing: The Lambda Literary Awards discussions in the blogosphere.

Spent much of the day reading offline a few of the posts linked from elfwrack's awesome Lambda Literary Awards roundup. Some of the comments I read were darkly amusing. (Apparently, any of us GLBT folk who disagree with the Lamda Literary Foundation's decision are "self-hating token queers.") And there were lots of intelligent, well-worded statements being made on both sides of the debate over the change of rules for the Lambda Literary Awards. (Here is my favorite of the opposing posts, and here - except for the final sentence - is my favorite of the supporting posts. Also, here's an interesting comment by the founder of the Lammies. And here is one totally cool post about the invisibility of bisexual characters. Oh, and I loved this comment by Victor J. Banis, whom I hadn't encountered before, but who apparently is pre-Stonewall and has the scars to prove it: "I'd make a guess that 80% of the people who write to tell me how much they've enjoyed my Deadly Mysteries are women. Good on you, girls. Fetishize me all you want. I'm yours.") So I enjoyed reading a goodly number of the posts that were written from either the pro or the con perspective.

Overall, though, my overwhelming reaction is one of thanks to you folks who post comments here.

Thank you for being polite. Thank you for expressing your disagreements with me and with each other in a civilized manner. There aren't enough people like you in the world.

*** 27 October 2009. Simplicity: Getting back on track.

Okay, so maybe downloading several dozen Lammie-related posts - in addition to pages from Wired, TeleRead, and the Southern Review of Books - wasn't a great idea. It's taken me sixteen hours to finish reading everything I downloaded yesterday.

Something to know for next time. But now I've finished reading all my nonfiction downloads (well, except for that lengthy Lammies thread from Dear Author), so I can devote tomorrow to simplicity-related activities. (Um, actually today. It's six a.m.) Then, on Wednesday, I can start reading the online fiction I downloaded, as well as the research material.

And at the same time I really need to get more editing work done, because I'm looking at my schedule for the winter and am realizing that I have five months left in which to (1) finish, get betaed, and do the final editing of all the fiction I'm publishing next spring, (2) create any needed covers, (3) create any needed story announcements, and (4) lay out all those stories.

So yes, I'd better edit now the stories that are already finished. I don't want to be doing anything in the spring other than publishing my e-book(s), beginning to post my online fiction, and taking research/leisure trips, because I want to devote the rest of my time in the spring to getting my first print novel published. If I could get two or even three paperbacks out next year, that would be fabulous.

Assuming my eyes are cooperative. They were very cooperative last spring, but they vary from year to year, depending on the seasonal weather.

*** 28 October 2009. Writing: Squee! My name was mentioned at Yule Treasure!

Parhelion told me tonight that my name turned up at Yuletide Treasure. Yuletide Treasure, for those of you who don't know, is an annual gift exchange of fan fiction from rare fandoms (i.e. books/shows/movies that don't attract a lot of fan fiction). Apparently, somebody requested that a fanfic story be written about The Eternal Dungeon. (*Glows.*)

Parhelion said that Remy's name was also mentioned, and that Manna was mentioned last year. It's an interesting indication of how original slash is developing as its own genre.

[Later: Somebody sent me a list of the other m/m and gayfic writers listed at Yuletide Treasure. Man, listen to the list: Ally Blue, Ginn Hale, James Buchanan, Jordan Castillo Price, Josh Lanyon, Laura Antoniou, Patrick Califia, Sean Kennedy, and Syd McGinley.]

So then I mentioned that the print publishing industry seems to be spiralling downward (it's a matter of some financial concern to me, as someone whose sole source of income is self-published writings), and Parhelion predicted that even e-published fiction writers won't be able to make more than peanuts in the future, and that authors will be hedged in contentwise by the requirements placed upon them by publishers, unless the authors became self-publishers, in which case they'd make even less money. . . . At that point, I asked Parhelion to change the subject. It was either that, or go find a gun to shoot myself with.

*** 29 October 2009. Home: What happens in today's society when you aren't geek central.

A telephone conversation between me and a customer service rep who is sorting out my dental health plan.

Her: "So I need you to print out the application--"

Me: "I don't own a printer."

Her: (Silence.)

Me: "I can print it out at the library."

Her: "Um . . . Okay. So then I need you to fax me the application--"

Me: "I don't own a fax machine."

Her: (Silence.)

Me: (Refuses to break silence.)

Her: "What about at work?"

Me: "I'm self-employed."

Her: (Silence.)

Me (taking pity on her and showing that I'm not so ungeeky after all): "I can scan the signed application and turn it into a PDF file that I'll e-mail you."

Her: "You can . . . what? What was that you suggested again?" (Begins taking notes to update her own geekiness.)

*** 31 October 2009. Reading: Recommendation of Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co.

Rudyard Kipling: Stalky & Co. Three schoolboys wage war against their schoolmasters. ¶ Male friendship fiction, class/rank themes, historical fiction (Victorian Era), military fiction, school fiction. ¶ Fiction books and online fiction. ¶ On-screen violence. ¶ Archive of my reviews.

[House master] Prout expounded to Beetle the enormity of money-lending, which, like everything except compulsory cricket, corrupted houses and destroyed good feeling among boys, made youth cold and calculating, and opened the door to all evil.

To hear some literary historians talk, one would think that subversive schoolboy literature was invented in the 1910s. That was the decade when a flood of solemn treatises issued forth which "revealed" to the British public that not all good schoolboys are noble, honest, friendly to schoolmasters, enthusiastic players of school sports, and admirably qualified to become prefects.

One can only conclude that these historians of school fiction have never read Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co. (1899).

o--o--o

"Well, you know, that little beast Manders minor saw Beetle and me hammerin' McTurk's trunk open in the dormitory when we took his watch last month. Of course Manders sneaked to Mason [a house master], and Mason solemnly took it up as a case of theft, to get even with us about the rats [the boys put in Mason's room]."

"That just put Mason into our giddy hands," said McTurk, blandly. "We were nice to him, because he was a new master and wanted to win the confidence of the boys. 'Pity he draws inferences, though. Stalky went to his study and pretended to blub, and told Mason he'd lead a new life if Mason would let him off this time, but Mason wouldn't. 'Said it was his duty to report him to the Head."

"Vindictive swine!" said Beetle. "It was all those rats! Then I blubbed, too, and Stalky confessed that he'd been a thief in regular practice for six years, ever since he came to the school; and that I'd taught him--a la Fagin. Mason turned white with joy. He thought he had us on toast."

"Gorgeous! Gorgeous!" said Dick Four. "We never heard of this."

"'Course not. Mason kept it jolly quiet. He wrote down all our statements on impot-paper. There wasn't anything he wouldn't believe," said Stalky.

"And handed it all up to the Head [Master], with an extempore prayer. It took about forty pages," said Beetle. "I helped him a lot."

"And then, you crazy idiots?" said Abanazar.

"Oh, we were sent for; and Stalky asked to have the 'depositions' read out, and the Head knocked him spinning into a waste-paper basket. Then he gave us eight cuts apiece--welters--for--for--takin' unheard-of liberties with a new master. I saw his shoulders shaking when we went out. Do you know," said Beetle, pensively, "that Mason can't look at us now in second lesson without blushing? We three stare at him sometimes till he regularly trickles. He's an awfully sensitive beast."

o--o--o

In a book that is now on primary-school reading lists (apparently, schoolteachers aren't reading the books they recommend to their pupils), Kipling presents to the world a supremely subersive trio: Stalky, the type of self-contained boy who smiles at you as he plots your destruction. McTurk, an Irish aristocrat for whom bad aestheticism is the worst crime. And, refreshingly, Beetle, a bespectacled poet. (His glasses are mended. As Kipling puts it, from his own experience, "The life of a poet at a big school is hard.") Their deadly combination wreaks havoc on any schoolmaster unwise enough to set himself in opposition to them.

o--o--o

"Not the least good having a row with a master unless you can make an ass of him," said Stalky, extended at ease on the hearth-rug. ". . . Now, my dearly beloved 'earers"--Stalky curled his legs under him and addressed the company--"we've got that strong', perseverin' man King [a house master] on our hands. He went miles out of his way to provoke a conflict." (Here Stalky snapped down the black silk domino and assumed the air of a judge.) "He has oppressed Beetle, McTurk, and me, privatim et seriatim, one by one, as he could catch us. But now, he has insulted Number Five [the study group made up of the three boys] up in the music-room, and in the presence of these--these ossifers of the Ninety-third, wot look like hairdressers. Binjimin, we must make him cry 'Capivi!'"

Stalky's reading did not include Browning or Ruskin.

"And, besides," said McTurk, "he's a Philistine, a basket-hanger. He wears a tartan tie. Ruskin says that any man who wears a tartan tie will, without doubt, be damned everlastingly."

"Bravo, McTurk," said Tertius; "I thought he was only a beast."

"He's that, too, of course, but he's worse. He has a china basket with blue ribbons and a pink kitten on it, hung up in his window to grow musk in. You know when I got all that old oak carvin' out of Bideford Church, when they were restoring it (Ruskin says that any man who'll restore a church is an unmitigated sweep), and stuck it up here with glue? Well, King came in and wanted to know whether we'd done it with a fret-saw! Yah! He is the King of basket-hangers!"

Down went McTurk's inky thumb over an imaginary arena full of bleeding Kings. "Placete, child of a generous race!" he cried to Beetle.

"Well," began Beetle, doubtfully, "he comes from Balliol, but I'm going to give the beast a chance. . . ."

The company [students who were rehearsing a pantomime with the three boys] retreated to their own neat and spacious study with expectant souls.

"When Stalky blows out his nostrils like a horse," said Aladdin to the Emperor of China, "he's on the war-path. 'Wonder what King will get."

"Beans," said the Emperor. "Number Five generally pays in full."

"Wonder if I ought to take any notice of it officially," said Abanazar, who had just remembered he was a prefect.

o--o--o

There is a dark streak of righteous cruelty to the boys of Number Five that comes through most clearly in the chapter entitled (unfortunately) "The Moral Reformers." This is, after all, a Kipling novel: right is achieved through might. But a childish sweetness also underlies the boys' pranks, as can be seen in this oblique reference to public-school sexuality.

o--o--o

"But do you never feel that the world--the [masters'] Common-room--is too much with you sometimes?"

"Not exactly--in summer, anyhow." Stalky's eye roved contentedly to the window. "Our bounds are pretty big, too, and they leave us to ourselves a good deal."

"For example, here am I sitting in your study, very much in your way, eh?"

"Indeed you aren't, Padre. Sit down. Don't go, sir. You know we're glad whenever you come."

There was no doubting the sincerity of the voices. The Reverend John flushed a little with pleasure and refilled his briar.

"And we generally know where the Common-room are," said Beetle triumphantly. "Didn't you come through our lower dormitories last night after ten, sir?"

"I went to smoke a pipe with your house-master. No, I didn't give him any impressions. I took a short cut through your dormitories."

"I sniffed a whiff of 'baccy, this mornin'. Yours is stronger than Mr. Prout's. I knew," said Beetle, wagging his head.

"Good heavens!" said the Reverend John absently. It was some years before Beetle perceived that this was rather a tribute to innocence than observation. The long, light, blindless dormitories, devoid of inner doors, were crossed at all hours of the night by masters visiting one another; for bachelors sit up later than married folk. Beetle had never dreamed that there might be a purpose in this steady policing.

o--o--o

The final chapters of this comic novel take an interesting turn - just how interesting is clear from this passage, in which the school's students are deciding whether they want to join the school's newly formed cadet-corps.

o--o--o

"Hullo," said Ansell of Macrea's, shouldering through the mob. "What's all this about a giddy cadet-corps?" . . .

"Don't know whether I've the time," said Perowne. "I've got no end of extra-tu [extra tutoring] as it is."

"Well, call this extra-tu," said Ansell. "'Twon't take us long to mug up the drill."

"Oh, that's right enough, but what about marchin' in public?" said Hogan, not foreseeing that three years later he should die in the Burmese sun-light outside Minhla Fort.

o--o--o

*** 31 October 2009. Writing: Monthly totals.

I wrote 26,610 words this month, which was less than half of what I wrote at the beginning of last year's composition season. Very disappointing. And it's not as though I wasn't trying my darnedest.

Looking at the hourly figures for tasks, I see that part of the problem is that I spent too little time on reading fiction and much too much time on upkeep. A lot of the upkeep was health issues; I've had two health problems and one dental insurance problem turn up in the space of just over a week. But I spent too much time on correspondence and reading downloaded articles this month.

My Muse is home; I wrote for over three hours straight before breakfast yesterday, for a total of 5800 words. Alas, one of those health problems is making it nearly impossible for me to sleep. No sleep, no further wordage. I'm hoping that I can get the health problem fixed tomorrow.

In light of my poor wordage this month, it looks to me as though I'm going to have to revise my schedule to allow myself to read and write more fiction in the spring and summer. Fortunately, I'd been heading in that direction already.

*** 2 November 2009. Writing: My Muse moveth.

My Muse has been showing signs of life recently.

5770 words on October 30. Before breakfast. "Breakfast" was at six p.m., or I would have written more.

5750 words yesterday. Again, before breakfast. Then another 2260 words in the evening, for a total of 8010, which ties my third-highest score for daily wordage since 2004. (I didn't keep score before then.)

Mind you, all of that wordage was for the wrong story; my Muse had decided to leap ahead to the fourth volume of Prison City. "I think I should give myself a deadline for the fourth volume so that my Muse will be perverse and work on the first volume," I told my apprentice mournfully. But today I managed to corral my Muse into working on one of the missing scenes in "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked."

*** 3 November 2009. Writing: My Muse really moveth; plus, Rosemary Sutcliff and P. G. Wodehouse.

I've managed to do a quarter of November's wordage in the first three days of November - and this despite a doctor's appointment yesterday.

Not that this streak will last forever. But I'm enjoying it while I can.

I finished reading Rosemary Sutcliff's Bonnie Dundee, which revealed (among other things) that Scottish Highlanders stripped naked for battle in the seventeenth century. Jeez Louise. I'm still reading P.G. Wodehouse's Mike and Psmith (1909), which isn't as funny as Stalky & Co., but which has its moments, to wit:

o--o--o

Mike unlocked the door, and flung it open. Framed in the entrance was a smallish, freckled boy, wearing a pork-pie hat and carrying a bag. On his face was an expression of mingled wrath and astonishment.

Psmith rose courteously from his chair, and moved forward with slow stateliness to do the honors.

"What the dickens," inquired the newcomer, "are you doing here?"

"We were having a little tea," said Psmith, "to restore our tissues after our journey. Come in and join us. We keep open house, we Psmiths. Let me introduce you to Comrade Jackson. A stout fellow. Homely in appearance, perhaps, but one of us. I am Psmith. Your own name will doubtless come up in the course of general chitchat over the teacups."

"My name's Spiller, and this is my study."

Psmith leaned against the mantelpiece, put up his eyeglass, and harangued Spiller in a philosophical vein.

"Of all sad words of tongue or pen," said he, "the saddest are these: 'It might have been.' Too late! That is the bitter cry. If you had torn yourself from the bosom of the Spiller family by an earlier train, all might have been well. But no. Your father held your hand and said huskily, 'Edwin, don't leave us!' Your mother clung to you weeping, and said, 'Edwin, stay!' Your sisters--"

"I want to know what--"

"Your sisters froze on to your knees like little octopuses (or octopi), and screamed, 'Don't go, Edwin!' And so," said Psmith, deeply affected by his recital, "you stayed on till the later train; and, on arrival, you find strange faces in the familiar room, a people that know not Spiller." Psmith went to the table, and cheered himself with a sip of tea. Spiller's sad case had moved him greatly.

The victim of Fate seemed in no way consoled. . . . "It's beastly cheek," [Spiller said]. "You can't go about the place bagging studies."

"But we do," said Psmith. "In this life, Comrade Spiller, we must be prepared for every emergency. We must distinguish between the unusual and the impossible. It is unusual for people to go about the place bagging studies, so you have rashly ordered your life on the assumption that it is impossible. Error! Ah, Spiller, Spiller, let this be a lesson to you."

"Look here, I tell you what it--"

"I was in a car with a man once. I said to him: 'What would happen if you trod on that pedal thing instead of that other pedal thing?' He said, 'I couldn't. One's the foot brake, and the other's the accelerator.' 'But suppose you did?' I said. 'I wouldn't,' he said. 'Now we'll let her rip.' So he stamped on the accelerator. Only it turned out to be the foot brake after all, and we stopped dead, and skidded into a ditch. The advice I give to every young man starting life is: 'Never confuse the unusual and the impossible.' Take the present case. If you had only realized the possibility of somebody someday collaring your study, you might have thought out dozens of sound schemes for dealing with the matter. As it is, you are unprepared. The thing comes on you as a surprise. The cry goes round: 'Spiller has been taken unawares. He cannot cope with the situation.'"

"Can't I! I'll--"

"What are you going to do about it?" said Mike.

"All I know is, I'm going to have it. It was Simpson's last term, and Simpson's left, and I'm next on the house list, so, of course, it's my study."

"But what steps," said Psmith, "are you going to take? Spiller, the man of Logic, we know. But what of Spiller, the Man of Action? . . ."

o--o--o

And so on and so forth. Psmith is what makes this otherwise middling novel worth reading, so I'm glad to see that Wodehouse wrote other novels about him.

*** 4 November 2009. Writing: My Muse slows down a bit; plus, turn-of-the-century romantic friendship fiction.

Despite the slow-down, I finished today one of the scenes in Law Links that needed finishing. So now I only have half of a scene left in that novel. Half of a long, complicated conversation scene. No wonder my Muse is shying away from jumping over that particular hurdle.

I've begun reading Horace Annesley Vachell's The Hill: A Romance of Friendship (1905), which, as its title suggests, is ~~notorious~~ famous for its portrayal of schoolboys' romantic friendships. So far (two chapters in) the novel has a boring plot, mediocre writing, and wonderfully detailed descriptions of the interiors of Harrow School. I feel like sending the author a thank-you note via time machine.

Later:

Oh, man, does turn-of-the-century school fiction have a habit of pushing my literary pleasure buttons. Here's a passage from The Hill, describing the protagonist's interactions with the Head Prefect of his House at school:

"After this John showed his gratitude by painstaking attention to fagging. Lawrence became aware of faithful service: that his toast was always done to a turn, that his daily paper was warmed, as John had seen the butler at home warm the Times, that his pens were changed, his blotting-paper renewed, and so forth. In John's eyes, Lawrence occupied a position near the apex of the world's pyramid of great men."

*** 5 November 2009. Writing: Triumph! The Turn-of-the-Century Toughs world is now the Mid-Atlantic.

It's taken me several months, but I've finally succeeded in fully transporting the map of the Turn-of-the-Century Toughs nations onto the map of the Mid-Atlantic region. (You knew there was a reason why I was doing all those Chesapeake reseach trips, right?)

It is frightening how well my Muse anticipated this day. To give just one example: I had decided last year to give Mip seven "seats" - districts that elected that republic's highest magistrates. Four of the districts would be in the "lowerlands," while three would be in the "upperlands" - that is to say, the mountains. (There were reasons having to do with an upcoming series why I wanted it that way.)

Well, I decided to place Mip in a region corresponding to two regions of the State of Maryland: Western Maryland and Central Maryland (west of Baltimore, because everything east is the Chesapeake region of Maryland, which I'd already claimed for the Dozen Landsteads). Tonight, I sat down to figure out how that corresponded to the county boundaries. (In the United States, counties are subregions of states.)

What I discovered was this.

Central Maryland, west of Baltimore (a region of low-lying hills): four counties.

Western Maryland (a region of mountains): three counties.

Oh, my. Ain't that convenient?

Similarly, the rest of Maryland is fortuitously designed for my purposes. That's where I'm placing the Dozen Landsteads, which, as its name suggests, is made up of a dozen landsteads.

The Eastern Shore has two counties that don't touch the Chesapeake Bay, which I didn't want to happen for the purposes of my stories, so I attached them to the adjoining counties.

I wanted the First Landstead to be big, and to extend up to where I live, so I attached three counties together.

Altogether, that left me with . . . a dozen counties.

Man, was I scorching now. Virginia became Yclau, Pennsylvania became Eastern Vovim (where Layle and Janus are from), and West Virginia became - heh, heh - Southern Vovim. New York State hosts the rest of Vovim. (I'm tempted to steal Ohio too, but that isn't part of the Mid-Atlantic, alas.) Delaware becomes Akbar (that tiny little nation mentioned in The True Master). There are more little nations up in New Jersey and New England. Presumably the rest of the continent is filled with humans too, but I don't say anything about that in the Toughs cycle.

The hardest task I had was to find a location for the Sea of Mip (which Compassion Prison is next to). Remember, I'd placed Mip in a region corresponding to Central and Western Maryland. Maryland, I need hardly say, has no seas. In fact, it doesn't even have any natural freshwater lakes, darn it.

I finally decided that the Sea of Mip must be the largest freshwater lake in Maryland: Deep Creek Lake, on the western end of Maryland. That lake didn't actually exist at the turn of the century, since it's the product of a twentieth-century dam. But for the purposes of my stories, it does exist. And - how convenient - if I were a Mippite picking an isolated, not-terribly-human-friendly place to build a prison, I'd place the prison right there. Did I mention that Deep Creek Lake is surrounded by swamps?

It took a lot of work on my part to put this together in such a way that I didn't have to go back and revise all my previous Toughs stories, but as it is, the only story I need to revise is Hell's Messenger. The initial scene in Chapter One doesn't quite fit the real-life location I picked for it today, and the compass points in that novel may be off. But otherwise, man, you'd think that my Muse was writing for the past seven years with the Mid-Atlantic region in mind.

*** 5 November 2009. Home: Reasons why I often feel I'm a conservative.

An entry I wrote in 2004:

o--o--o

I went to the young adult section of a public library this week, searching for books on Christmas in order to idle the time while Doug pawed through music books. There I discovered five books on body art.

"Oh!" I said. "Well, the young adult section has changed since I was young." And I picked up one of the books.

It opened to a page describing the Prince Albert [not worksafe link].

Suddenly the future flashed before my eyes:

A Teen's Handbook to Watersports.
101 Ways for Housewives to Beat Their Subs.
The Dummy's Guide to Fireplay.
Billy and His Daddy Go Dungeon Shopping.

Don't laugh; who'd have thought back in the sixties that schoolteachers would one day be reading picture books about homosexuality to six-year-olds?

o--o--o

I cite this old entry because, when I last picked up a copy of Time, it had an article on ecologically friendly sex toys . . . illustrated with a picture of dungeon whips.

May I go back to reading Go, Dog. Go! please? (No, it's not about puppy play.)

*** 6 November 2009. Writing: Not-quite-good-enough writing.

It's frustrating seeing a decent plot handled by an unskilled writer.

Horace Annesley Vachell's The Hill: A Romance of Friendship has what ought to have been the ideal plot for me: It's about a schoolboy's attempts to win the friendship of a boy he admires, while fighting off a despicable rival. That's the entire plotline; it's friendship fiction at its purest.

But the novel is badly handled. The villain - whom we're told over and over is subtle and refined in his methods - is made of cardboard (and I don't want to tell you how many times we're informed that his villainy arises from "low breeding" - i.e., his father was raised in the slums). The object of the protagonist's affections, whom we keep being told is admirable - and faithful! - spends the entire novel consorting with the villain and ignoring clear signs that he's hurting the feelings of the protagonist (to whom he has pledged friendship). Meanwhile, the protagonist - who is supposed to be exceptionally intelligent - does little more than twiddle his thumbs and wait for his friend to come to his senses.

It's a classic case of "show" contradicting "tell."

Very disappointing, especially since the novel continued to throw forth delicious passages. To wit:

o--o--o

The chief difficulty which besets a school friendship between two boys is that of being alone together.

*

This was almost the last holidays Caesar and he would spend together; and, afterwards, would this friendship, so romantic a passion with one at least of them--would it wither away, or would it endure to the end?

*

Warde [the house master] listened, holding John's hand, gripping it with sympathy and affection. The romance of this friendship [i.e. John's friendship with Ceasar] stirred him profoundly; the romance of the struggle for good and evil; a struggle of which the issues remained still in doubt . . .

*

Lovell went to the door and opened it.

"Bo-o-o-o-o-o-y!"

The familiar cry--that imperious call which makes an Harrovian [schoolboy] feel himself master of more or less willing slaves--echoed through the house. Immediately the night-fag came running; it was not considered healthy to keep Lovell waiting.

*

The privilege of fagging [i.e. fag-mastering] is not, however, unadulterated bliss. When Warde said to Caesar, "Well, Desmond, how do you like ordering about your slave?" Desmond replied, ruefully, "Well, sir, little Duff has broken my inkstand, spilt the ink on our new carpet, and let Verney's bullfinch escape. I think, on the whole, I'd as lief wait on myself."

o--o--o

It's worrisome to think that some readers are undoubtedly having the same reaction to my writing as I did to The Hill: "Why couldn't this interesting plot have been put in the hands of a decent writer?"

*** 6 November 2009. Writing: My unfocussed Muse.

My Muse - who has not the least bit of consideration for my publication schedule - continues to hare after later stories in the Prison City series. I'm letting him go whither he will; I'm just happy he's sticking round.

Life was easier before I started writing for publication. The Three Lands stories were written almost entirely out of order, with me dashing from story to story. That's why, out of the dozen-plus novels in the series, I've only finished three (and one of the three is a volume that got cut in two when I decided to check the word-count at the halfway point, and discovered that I'd already written 120,000 words). Through concerted effort in corralling my Muse, I've managed to persuade him to finish a fourth volume (except for that darned half scene), while another novel in the series is close to being finished. Other than that, though, the novels are tattered bits and pieces waiting for me to cobble them together.

I read with envy about those authors who can start at page one and keep writing chronologically until they reach "The End." I've sometimes done that, particularly with short stories, but writing a novel that way is next to impossible for me. Even if I draft a novel almost entirely in order, my Muse won't want to write it down in order - he'll want to write down the juiciest scenes first. More often than not, he'll get bored with my slow typing and try to lure me off to another scene when I'm halfway through the first one. I've learned to resist his lures as far as incomplete scenes are concerned (mostly), but I don't have enough control over him to keep him from writing stories in whatever order he likes. The best I can do is to beg him to let me please, please finish writing a goodly chunk in a particular series before he skips off to another series.

*** 7 November 2009. Writing and Mentoring: I've decided to make my winter schedule my year-round schedule.

The decision has been creeping up on me, due to a number of factors: the painfulness of being away from my fiction-writing for six months out of the year, my declining wordage (which makes it imperative that I be ready to drop everything whenever my Muse condescends to pay a call), my intense unhappiness at having to battle my Internet addiction during the spring/summer (it's been getting so that I dread the arrival of spring), and my gradual switchover to a publishing schedule that makes it easier for me to be offline most of the time.

The deciding factor has been my realization, in the past month, that I can stay offline for a whole month and still get everything done that needs to be done. Except for a couple of vitally important health matters that forced me to go online in the past month at times when I hadn't scheduled myself to do so, I didn't find it any great sacrifice to take a month off from the Internet. And I don't think that things would have been any different if I'd devoted some of my online time to publishing and marketing. I might have needed to spend one more day online last month, but that's all.

(I should add that this good fortune is entirely due to my apprentice. It's not that I didn't need to go online during this past month; it's that, every time I needed something done online that couldn't wait till my next scheduled Internet visit, my apprentice was there to do it for me.)

Now, granted, I know that my spring/schedule is going to continue to contain elements that my fall/winter schedule doesn't. I'll be library-hopping and taking trips to museums and conventions and research sites. But I'll be spending less leisure time away from home than in the past, I hope, because, having lived in Noah's Ark for a month, I've realized that I really don't need to be importing new stuff into my life or to be dashing off to exciting places elsewhere. I have plenty to keep me occupied at home.

Honestly, it's like going off to a desert island for a month and discovering that you can actually survive without 24-hour access to MTV.

(*Wanders away for a bit in order to look at the pretty shells.*)

The biggest difference between my winter and summer schedules will be my book publishing. There's a narrow window each year in which I can publish, because publishing requires my eyes to be in good shape. Likewise, I can't lay out paperbacks in cold weather because I need to be able to read standard-sized print when I do that. So I anticipate that my print layout/publishing and my e-book publishing will remain something that I do only in the spring and summer.

My plan for my online fiction, on the other hand, is to post a story or novel installment once a month year-round. That works out to the wordage equivalent of two novels a year - roughly a quarter million words. I hope that type of schedule will be okay for you guys. :)

So let's try this year-round. I'll be interested to see what effect it has on my Muse. So far (as of November 6), its effect has been 19,000 words of fiction since the beginning of the month: one-third of my monthly wordage.

Home life: TMJ, tennis elbow, and dry eye - the unholy trio

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:17:55 GMT

"In the midst of winter, I finally realized that deep within me there lay an invincible summer."

--Albert Camus.

I'm posting separately this entry some medical problems I've been having recently. (Don't worry, they aren't life-threatening, just painful and annoying.) I figure that people who are interested in reading my Daily Life entries may not want to wade through tons of medical stuff, and vice versa.

For newcomers: Background to my home entries.

How I reply to comments at this blog.

*** 2 November 2009: My doctor and my wallet.

This afternoon I go to the doctor's for a rather tricky exam I'm not looking forward to, since it may involve scalpels against my brain. (A cyst on the side of my head is pressing against the remainder of my head, causing me pain and nausea.) But at least it will be my usual doctor handling this; he has already successfully drained a cyst from the skin above my spine. (Cysts like me. I had another one drained a couple of years ago.)

Of course this will be out-of-pocket expenses for Doug and me. I see from the news that the latest health reform act in Congress (1) requires that health insurance be made mandatory in 2013 (with big financial penalties for anyone who doesn't buy health insurance), and (2) promises that health insurance will be made affordable for low- and moderate-income families in 2019. I love the conjunction of those two statements.

At any rate, 2019 is much too far down the line for Doug and me. I'm beginning to work again on the nonfiction book I'd been planning, not because I really want to be working on nonfiction during the fiction-composing time of my year, but because nonfiction may be my only hope for making serious money next year. (By "serious" money, I mean four figures.) We need enough money to pay for health insurance and to pay the annual property tax each year. Those are the only two worrisome points in our budget; otherwise, we do fine as a low-income household.

(Well, except that we don't have any way to put additional money aside for our old age. But thanks to the Great Recession, we're hardly alone in that fix.)

*** 2 November 2009: Well, whadya know. I have a stress-related illness.

"Your cyst is an innocent bystander," my doctor has declared.

Turns out that, in all likelihood, I have TMJ. ("Temporomandibular Joint Syndrome," explained my doctor. "You see why we call it TMJ.") To sum it up: My jaw joint aches. The pain is radiating out from my jaw joint, which was why I first thought that I had a toothache, and then thought that my head-cyst was at fault.

But when my doctor poked me inside my mouth in the general location of my jaw joint . . . Ow. Yes, that's the spot.

Ironically, my dentist had mentioned TMJ as a possibility almost the moment I walked in his door. But me being the chatterbox I am, I overrode him with a list of my supposed symptoms, which didn't fit the TMJ scenario very well, so he got distracted before I could ask him the sensible question, "What is TMJ?"

The mind is a strange thing. When I thought I had a toothache, I was sure that the pain was centered on one of my teeth. When I thought I had a growing cyst, I was sure that the pain was centered on my cyst. Now that I've been diagnosed with TMJ, it's quite clear to me that the pain is centered on my left jaw joint. (In my defense, I gather that this sort of confusion is fairly common, not only among TMJ sufferers, but also among their doctors.)

Fortunately for my pocketbook, the basic remedies for TMJ are all over-the-counter: pain reliever and anti-inflammation medicine (I was already taking Advil), eating soft foods (I was already doing that but am now doing more of that), no caffeine (ouch - there go the Halloween candies), proper posture awake and in bed (cue incredibly long thread at a TMJ forum about which pillows to buy), not opening the mouth wide (cue very sad thread at the TMJ forum about singers with TMJ), ice packs and moist heat (yes, both - I haven't figured out why they're both supposed to work), massage, certain types of vitamins and foods, and stress reduction methods such as meditation and exercise (oh, right - I'm already supposed to be doing that, aren't I?).

Second level treatment is moderate medical intervention such as prescription pain relief and tranquilizers, biofeedback, and a mouth guard to prevent grinding of teeth . . . but I hope I won't have to reach that level. Any treatments above the moderate level are scientifically unproven, according to the National Institute of Health.

According to the NIH, it's not certain whether TMJ can be caused by stress, but everyone agrees that it can be aggravated by stress, so I'm trying to be very, very relaxed now. Especially my jaw.

(Oh, and someone at the TMJ forum reported that prolonged talking aggravates TMJ. Ha. I knew there was a reason I taught myself to type.)

*** 3 November 2009: Pillows.

Last night (as I hinted above) I perused the wonderful forums at the TMJ Association. Yes, that means I had to go online off-schedule. There wasn't any alternative; the public library didn't have enough information on TMJ.

The TMJ Association had lots. It was started by some TMJ sufferers as a support group. The association expanded into education after it became clear that there was a lot of misinformation about the illness drifting around. The association's site links to the very helpful PDF document by the National Institute of Health on TMJ, which might as well be entitled Everything That You Thought You Knew About TMJ is Wrong.

The association's forums were where I found the pillows thread - or rather, threads, because this seems to be a topic of great interest to TMJ folk. Frankly, this is all deja vu for me; I went through all this at the time that I first acquired severe dry eye in 2001, when my head was so sensitive to touch that I could only sleep for a couple of hours at a time before I woke from the pain. It was then that I started using a down pillow, which is nicely soft, and which you can fluff into pretty much any position you want, high or low.

After I'd looked at the eighty-dollar pillows that were being recommended at Amazon for TMJ sufferers (basically, a very low headrest, accompanied by a higher neckrest), I said, "Heck, I can make the same sort of pillow just by squishing my down pillow into the right position." So I did.

The object of all this was to sleep comfortably on my back, which is apparently the position recommended for TMJ folk - at least, that's what the leaflet said that my doctor gave me, and people at the TMJ forum were echoing this advice. Sleep has been a problem for me recently, because I've traditionally slept in every position: left side, right side, stomach, and back. I shift as the night goes on. But sleeping on my back all night was no worse a prospect than sleeping all night in any other position, so I decided to give it a try.

It seems to be working out okay. It's not as comfortable as shifting around all night, but it hasn't caused me any sleeplessness.

The next trick, of course, is to stop grinding my teeth at night, since that's a major factor in aggravating TMJ. I now understand why my jaw has been feeling relatively good during the day and then feeling worse after a night's sleep. Theoretically, I ought to be able to stop unconscious teeth-grinding, since I've controlled other things I do in my sleep, such as rolling over or dreaming. So I'm working on it. I've never actually kept track of how often I grind my teeth - till now, it's been a trivial matter in my life - but I can say that, on the nights now when I don't grind my teeth, I wake up without any significant pain in my jaw.

The pain starts the moment I open my mouth to say hello to Doug or my apprentice. Darn it, and I was being semi-facetious in the last entry about talk aggravating my TMJ. I suppose this is the point in my life at which I learn to do more listening than talking.

*** 3 November 2009. Tiny food.

So I'm getting into the car after going grocery shopping this evening (with my left arm sore because of a tentanus shot I had yesterday), and I hit my right jaw on the car door. Then I rebound onto the car doorway, hitting the cyst on the left side of my head (remember that cyst?).

"At least this takes my mind off the pain in my left jaw," I told Doug ruefully.

My left jaw, which is the one that has the TMJ, is doing reasonably well. I've been nursing it carefully. I was at the grocery store because the food threads at the TMJ forum made me aware that food which doesn't require much chewing could make a big difference to my jaw. Resting my jaw and not opening it wide are two key ways for me to heal from TMJ.

Also, I needed a new toothbrush. My adult-sized toothbrush has soft bristles but has been causing me to open my mouth too wide when I brush the molars. So I bought an ages-two-and-older Sponge-Bob toothbrush. I'm sure my apprentice will be delighted; Sponge-Bob is the mascot of his club.

As far as food is concerned, I learned at the TMJ forum that steamed vegetables are good, since they don't require much chewing. Terrific; they're one of the staple items in my diet. I regularly eat them on whole wheat couscous, which is another plus, since couscous barely needs any chewing.

I had a look at the hot cereals, since they're tiny, but decided in the end to make do with whole wheat couscous, which works as a hot cereal and has six grams of fiber in each serving.

I needed a dessert item, since I can't eat cornbread-and-honey (too chewy) or jam on toast (too chewy) or chocolate (caffeine causes stress). So I bought tapioca pudding, which is fiberless fluff but tastes good. Then I mixed a dab of the pudding into couscous for a high-fiber dessert; popped into the microwave, it tastes especially good. Couscous is wonderfully adaptable.

Speaking of grains, sandwiches are a problem. I've been eating sandwiches two or three times a day - I'm sort of a sandwich fanatic - but they're chewy. So I'm limiting myself to one sandwich a day, filled with cheese spread, sliced tomatoes, and steamed broccoli. (No, I didn't make up that recipe for the sake of my TMJ. It's one of my daily staples.)

My other daily grain item - for the sake of my dry eye - is roasted flaxseed and a tiny bit of spaghetti sauce on whole wheat spaghetti. Spaghetti doesn't require much chewing, and lo and behold, I read somewhere that flaxseed is good for healing TMJ. I haven't found out why yet.

Soups are good for non-chewing, so I bought the ingredients to make broccoli-and-green-split-pea soup. (Or rather, so that Doug could make the soup, *cough cough*.)

Drinks are a real dilemma. This year, to increase my fiber intake and cut down on my simple sugars intake, I've been drinking water and eating fruit - mainly apples at the moment. But apples are on the big no-no list because of how wide one has to open one's jaw to bite into them. Sliced apples are theoretically okay, but really, I find that any fruit with edible skin is problematic, because fruit skin takes a lot of chewing. And as Doug points out, I'm just not the sort of person to patiently slice and peel apples.

I had a look at the sliced and pureed fruit at the grocery store, but couldn't find anything except unsweetened apple sauce that didn't have simple sugars added. (Fruit juice is a simple sugar.) So I bought whole strawberries to blend with milk to make smoothies, and I bought tomato soup because I like drinking that, and I already have bananas, which don't even need to be pureed to be soft enough to eat. That, plus my regular orange juice, should be enough.

Oh, and I took a look at the baby food aisle in case any of the pureed food there appealed to me. Man, what a racket. A dollar twenty-nine for as much food as I could eat in two gulps.

Last stop, the tea aisle. People at the TMJ forum had been talking about chamomile tea helping to relax them and put them to sleep. My usual concoction - on the rare occasions that I drink herbal tea - has been a chamomile tea bag, warm skim milk, malt, and cocoa powder. (Don't screech; it's my low-fat equivalent of flavored hot chocolate.) I'm going to drop the cocoa powder from the ingredients and see whether the malt alone makes the drink flavorful enough. I just can't drink herbal tea straight; it tastes like flavored water to me. (Maybe because it is.)

*** 3 November 2009: Less talking, more progress.

My jaw really does feel better. I'm less numb in my left cheek, the pain is virtually gone when I'm awake, and I'm sleeping relatively well (as opposed to last weekend, when sleeping was an act of torture).

This isn't to say that I'm out of the woods. A lot of my progress is being maintained by me not doing things. I'm not eating chewy or hard foods. I'm not eating on the left side of my mouth. I'm not sleeping without the aid of two Advils. I'm not sleeping anywhere except on my back. I'm not wearing my computer headphones to listen to music. I'm not brushing my teeth in my normal vigorous manner. I'm not talking very much. Obviously, I'd like to be able to resume most of my normal activities.

Especially the talking. Because you know what? I mouth words when I'm writing. I'd only been vaguely aware of that before, but now I'm acutely aware of it, because it adds into my permitted talking time.

Also, darn it, sleeping on my back all night exacerbates a left-elbow problem I've been having for several years now. (My left hand is the one that continually hits the Page Down button when I'm reading at the computer while eating with my right hand. I think that's what caused the problem with my elbow.) So while I've got less pain from my jaw, my elbow is feeling nasty. And my dry eyes aren't terribly happy either, because I'm not lying on my right side for most of the night, facing the humidifier.

If only I could get all my body parts to agree on the best sleeping position for me. But in the meantime, I seem to be doing a good job at eliminating my teeth grinding at night, which is a normal activity I do not want to resume.

*** 8 November 2009: Sleeping and posture.

"You know how I arranged to get TMJ in order to take my mind off the pain from my dry eye?" I told my apprentice. "Well, now I've acquired tennis elbow in order to take my mind off the pain from my TMJ."

My elbow really is the biggest problem at the moment. Despite my best efforts not to overuse it and to keep my arm posture proper, the elbow pain just isn't going away.

Turns out that the standard treatment for tennis elbow (so called because it's usually acquired by people who play tennis) is the same as one of the standard treatments for TMJ: ice packs, ibuprofen for the swelling and pain, and resting the affected part.

The difference is, my jaw is actually responding to the above treatment. I've reached the point where I no longer go into pain every time I brush my teeth, and the pain on the left side of my head is close to disappearing. The pain around the jaw joint is still a bit tender, enough that I'm avoiding wearing my regular headphones (the ones I use when listening to music on my computer). But it no longer hurts to wear my iPod buds.

The biggest problem I'm facing with my jaw is one that I'd predicted beforehand: my dry eyes don't like me sleeping on my back. The back of my head and my shoulder area is always tender in the winter because of my dry eye; as a result, I can no longer sleep through an entire night without waking up aching. And when I ache in the night, I'm more inclined to clench my teeth. After I woke up early this morning with back pain near my shoulder area and a pain in my jaw that told clearly that I'd been clenching my teeth against the pain in my back, I gave up and tried sleeping on my right side, at least for a while. I slept fine. So now I'm going to rotate between back-sleeping and right-side-sleeping. Left-side-sleeping is out of the question while the TMJ is bothering me, and I gather (from the stern words that doctors have to say about this practice, in connection with TMJ) that my days of falling asleep on my stomach are over.

My elbow, for a mercy, didn't bother me last night, though the only way I can keep it from feeling nasty at night is by dosing myself with Advil, placing my left arm on top of the down comforter, and stretching my arm out somewhat to the side.

If that position sounds cold, it is. I can't cuddle up to Doug's heat, my arm (even when under a light blanket I place on it) is cold, and I've got the darned humidifier blasting cold wind at me during all this.

(I've tried suggesting to Doug that we turn up the thermostat at night till I'm better. He growls about heating bills.)

Meanwhile, there's a conflict between my dry eyes and my TMJ over the best position for my computer monitor. My dry eyes say that I should be looking down at the monitor. (The lower the monitor, the more eye area your eyelids cover.) My TMJ says that, for proper neck posture, I should be looking straight ahead. What they both agree upon is that I have a lousy backrest on my desk chair. But there's nothing I can do about that; it's the only desk-style chair in the house.

I have decided that I need to get rid of the shelf beneath my desk in order that I can place my knees all the way under the desk, rather than be hunched forward in order to read the screen.

So posture, posture, posture. That's my byword for the day.

*** 9 November 2009: Desk posture.

I put my computer monitor on a stand today, so that it's head-level. "That's pretty high," said Doug dubiously. It remains to be seen whether my eyes rebel. But this is at least preventing me from continuing to hunch over to view the monitor.

(Also, I was able to place three pieces of pottery in the empty space under the stand: one holding my spare flash drive, one holding my eye drops, and one holding the water to wet my eyelids periodically. So now my desk is now less cluttered, and the items I need are closer to hand.)

Since all of the articles about tennis elbow are right next to the articles about carpal tunnel syndrome, I've handmade a wrist rest, using a towel and a piece of thin packing foam that I've been hanging onto for a couple of decades, under the theory that the foam would come in handy one of these days. There are advantages to being a packrat.

*** 15 November 2009: Now my glasses have decided to misbehave (but wow, once they behave, life'll be great).

Well, after I spent Monday getting my desk and chair positioned exactly right, I sat down on Tuesday morning at my new and improved desk . . .

. . . and my chair fell apart.

However, the good news is that my tennis elbow has largely disappeared. The change in chair height seems to be what it was demanding; once I met its demands, it stopped holding my elbow hostage.

My sleep pattern, while still far from ideal, is a little better; I've been able to stop taking Advil nightly. If I go to sleep in a relaxed state and sleep deeply, I don't wake up in (much) pain. So I'm getting as much exercise as I can, in order to fall asleep easily.

It turns out that raking leaves is compatible with plotting stories in my head.

The bad news concerns my new eyeglasses. I'd ordered a pair, then discovered, when they arrived, that they were for long-distance viewing only. Nobody had told me (including my ophthamologist, now my ex-ophthamologist, for that and many other reasons) that I'd been issued with a prescription that required me, for the first time in my life, to wear progressive glasses or trifocals. So I didn't ask for progressive glasses or trifocals at the optical department, and what arrived were glasses that only allowed me to see long-distance.

So I ordered progressive glasses - rather dubiously, because I'd read horror stories on the Web about what progressives were like. But the alternative was trifocals, and they didn't sound as though they'd be much better. I also discussed with the optical department clerk the possibility of getting glasses just for computer use.

The progressives arrived, and my goodness - you mean there's a world beyond arm's length?

I have to go backwards in time to explain. In 2001, as most of you know, I became partially sighted. In the space of a week, I lost my ability to read print; then my distance vision became affected. I remember waking up one morning in early 2001 and discovering that the distance vision in my left eye was beginning to disappear. Panicking, I called up my opthamologist (yes, the same one).

He said calmly, "Oh, that's to be expected."

So I hung up and waited for the rest of my distance vision to disappear. Within a week, it was gone.

Because of that stupid remark, "Oh, that's to be expected," it never occurred to me that I could correct the problem by getting a new prescription of glasses. I thought that my distance vision - and, as it eventually turned out, much of my intermediate vision - was simply gone, in an uncorrectable manner, and that I'd have to stumble through a blurry world for the rest of my life. After all, that was the verdict on my dry eye - that it was incurable.

For the past eight years, I've been unable to see people clearly at the front of a conference room, see dinner companions clearly at the other end of the table, or read street signs. These have been minor irritants compared to my problems with obtaining e-texts; I haven't given the matter much thought except when having to trot halfway down a city block in order to stand under a street sign, so that I can read it.

Around 2004, it occurred to me that I should probably order new glasses, for the same reason I did in the old days - because my eyesight slowly declines each year. But because of my lack of health insurance, I didn't get around to obtaining new glasses till this year. So what a shock it was to put on my new glasses and find all of my vision restored.

Darlings, I can now stand at one end of the Mall in Washington, D.C., and see the Capitol at the other end of the Mall. In clear detail.

This doesn't mean that my partial sightedness has disappeared, because that's affected by a different factor than my glasses - it's affected by the level of humidity in the air. To put it simply, my eyes don't have enough innate moisture in them to function properly under normal humidity conditions. They're only truly functional when the humidity is 80% or higher (which, thankfully, is often the humidity level in the D.C. area in the summertime). This means that, while technically I can see the Capitol from a mile away, trying to look at the Capitol from that distance during the late winter would give me a giant headache, because my eyes would have to strain themselves to function properly. Similarly, it doesn't matter how clearly I can see a printed book in the winter; my eyes rebel against having to read print at that time of year, because they don't have sufficient moisture. (There's a similar condition whereby someone with 20/20 vision can be so badly affected by light that they're effectively 100% blind, because they can't open their eyes without undergoing immediate pain.)

So I'm still partially sighted, but I'm hoping that finally getting an up-to-date glasses prescription will ease the strain on my eyes that's been caused by my trying to view objects that my current glasses couldn't focus on properly.

Alas, I think that the progressive glasses I was given have misaligned lenses, because I had double vision and problems with blurring all through Friday, when I tested the glasses out. I did a home test to check whether the lenses were misaligned, and that test's verdict was, "Yes."

So it's back to the optical department for a third time (and I haven't even dealt yet with getting the computer glasses). My schedule for tomorrow looks like this:

--Call customer service rep for my dental plan.
--Call the optical department.
--Call the medical test folk.
--Call my dentist.
--Call the local health clinic.

This is not the sort of schedule that someone with a phone phobia wants to have. And I think it's disgusting that I'm acquiring new medical problems at the rate of roughly once a week. It's beginning to appear that 2009 is going to be my Year of Ill Health.

(At least I don't have the swine flu. Yet.)

*** 15 November 2009: Yet another bodily complaint.

My right heel has decided that it doesn't like me lying on my back all through the night. In revenge, it is waking me up in pain each morning.

Only my right heel. My left heel is fine with the arrangements.

I want a new body, please. You can send it to my via UPS.

Writing life: A celebration of thirty years of The Three Lands

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:10:58 GMT

I pressed my Muse hard and persuaded him to finish writing Law Links (The Three Lands) today, November 8. I began writing that novel fourteen years ago, almost to the day: November 15, 1995.

By coincidence, this year happens to be the thirtieth anniversary of the original draft of the first Three Lands story I wrote, Blood Vow. In honor of that, I thought I'd show three versions each of two scenes from the novel, so that you can see how my writing has ~~ceased being absolutely dreadful~~ progressed.

o--o--o

DRAFT ONE: The Chara

[The beginning of my fantasy short story "Blood Brothers," written in 1979. Don't let your eye skip too quickly over the last sentence in the first paragraph. The part in the curly brackets was my later interpolation, when I evidently decided that the sentence begged for an explanation.]

Chara's first name is hereditary. Not Anthony, his second name, but Chara, meaning "Emperor." I often wonder who will carry on the empire when he is gone, for he is several years older than I, and {like many military men} shows little interest in women.

It was barely a year after he had freed me. I had been his slave for ten years, since fourteen, when I was taken prisoner by the old Chara's guards. Chara hadn't freed me before, possibly afraid I would return to Creita, my homeland, but affection for me won over, and by this time, I loved him so much that I decided to stay rather than to return home.

I came upon him one morning with a map spread out in front of him. Marked in blue were the provinces of the Empire: Ramjan, Pleiant, Thuul, and Tlak, the last with the Empire's capital, Emor, marked in red. The provinces the Empire had only partially conquered were marked in green: Loongai and Creita. In yellow were the nearby provinces that had only been invaded once or twice; they extended off the map. Chara had none of his father's strange goals of capturing the entire world; he knew, as the scientists had proven, that the world had no end.

He looked up as I entered. "Greetings, Andrew. How old are you?"

I was used to Chara's unusual questions; it's true that he's a genius, and as a genius, he has a different level of thought. "Twenty-four, m'lord."

"That means you've lived in Emor for ten years."

"Yes, m'lord." I wondered what he was getting at. Not the years of my servitude - Chara shies away from the subject.

"How would you like a vacation, Andrew?"

"M'lord?"

Chara beckoned me out of the doorway. "Come sit by me."

I walked over and drew a chair up to the table, staring at the map. I had seen maps before, of course - there is a mosaic map of Emor across the entire Great Hall floor - but they are a continual fascination to me; Creitians have no such things.

"Where's your home, Andrew?" Chara asked.

"If you mean where I was born, it's here, Kikou." I pointed to a small town on the map. "But Creitians are migratory people; they rarely stay longer than one year in a place - certainly not long enough to call any one place 'home.'"

"'They'?"

"I'm an Emorian now, Chara."

Chara leaned back. "Oh, then you wouldn't be interested in what I was going to say."

"What were you going to say?"

Chara continued as if he hadn't heard me. "Emorians are a lazy lot: they never stir out of their own city, and certainly never go to unconquered provinces - especially not such a beastly place as Creita."

"Are you going to Creita, m'lord?"

"What does it matter to an an Emorian?"

"Typical Emorian humor," I said dryly. Chara grinned lazily . . .

o--o--o

DRAFT TWO: The Chara

[The same scene re-written one year later.]

My master was at a black marble table, studying several maps. (Maps, after nine years, were still a novelty to me. I spent much of my time in the Grand Courtroom, where a mosaic of the Emorian Empire constituted the floor.) His hair, eyes, and skin, like that of any [member of] his family, were light, but black lines scarred his face: dark rivers of responsibility gained at an early age - he was barely seven years older than I. He pushed his hair back in that controlled, decisive gesture that governed all his movements, then, sensing somebody, looked up.

"Good morning, Chara," I said.

He smiled as he relaxed from his diplomatic posture. "Good morning, Andrew. Ah, you have the map. You hid it well."

"So I surmised from the state of your room," I said, coming forward and handing him the paper. "You should have woken me."

He looked down rapidly at the maps before saying, "You seemed to be having a bad night. I thought it better to let you sleep."

There is only one thing I ever dream about - my childhood in Creita - and that's the one thing Chara never wants to discuss. I said, "Dreams this morning too; perhaps you should have woken me. What is this map, anyway?"

Chara thrust forward another map. "Take a look at this. This is our occupation of Creita ten years ago."

I glanced at the map for three seconds before pushing it back to Chara. "Well?" he said.

"Getting rid of all the red might produce a more conservative answer of your occupation," I said.

He laughed, sitting back in his chair. "Forever a Creitian nationalist." He glanced at my face, and added, "Sorry. Draw up a chair."

"I'm Emorian."

"I know. It was a stupid joke. Sit down, for Delmm's sake." He got up and pushed a bench toward me.

I dragged it over to the table and sat across from the Chara. "And the new map?"

o--o--o

PUBLISHED VERSION: The Chara

[The final version of that scene, age 45.]

The Chara was standing a few spear-lengths from me, looking out one of the southern windows. He was dressed formally with his silver tunic and his Sword of Vengeance; his cloak was tossed onto a chair nearby. He was only twenty-six, but his face had the look of an older man: severe responsibility had gouged deep rivers of age into his skin. As the door closed behind me, the Chara turned his head and said, "I was just wishing that I could wander over the black border mountains right now. It seems a shame to stay inside on a warm day like this." I made no reply, and he added, "I see that you brought the map. I couldn't remember this morning where I had put it."

"So I surmised from the state of your sitting chamber, Chara," I said, coming forward and placing the map in his hand. "You ought to have woken me."

He turned and put the scroll down on the table nearby, which was already cluttered with a dozen maps. Without looking up, he said, "I thought that you might need the extra rest."

There was a pause as he unrolled the map and began examining it. I said, "I did not mean to disturb you, Chara. Perhaps I ought to sleep in other quarters."

"Don't be foolish." He leaned over, traced a line on the map with his finger, then sighed and allowed the map to roll up once more as his gaze drifted back to the view at the window.

I followed his gaze toward the tiny slice of scenery. I could see a portion of the capital city surrounding the palace, a sliver of the river-threaded fields beyond, and a patch of Emorian sky – which, for a change, was blue and cloudless. Towering above them all were the black border mountains that separate Emor and Koretia.

The Chara said, "I seem not to be able to keep my mind off the mountains. Perhaps I have acquired some of your Koretian blood."

I said rigidly, "Chara, I am Emorian."

A smile crept onto his face then, erasing the lines of worry and making him appear even younger than he was. "That fact," he said, "had not escaped my notice. I was joking. Now stop being so stiff and formal and come sit with me."

He waved his hand toward two chairs sitting under a small patch of sunlight falling through one of the northern windows. I felt the seldom-used muscles of my mouth turn up, and I bowed in obedience, before seating myself where he had indicated.

o--o--o

DRAFT ONE: Lord Carle

[The first appearance of Lord Carle, in a passing reference, as part of a flashback. This is from the age-16 draft.]

"You're from Creita? What part?"

Longing to kill him, yet not daring to move for fear of his guard's sword, I made no reply.

The Chara smiled. "Never mind. We'll get to know each other soon enough. Can I at least know your name, so I won't have to call you 'boy'?"

"Andrew," I replied shortly.

"Come here, Andrew."

I stepped forward obediently. Suddenly he frowned and said sharply, "Turn around."

I did so, puzzled. Thus far I had been allowed to wear my own clothes, so my back and the newly formed stripes on it were bared to him.

"All right, turn back," he said quietly. Then: "When did that happen?"

I made no reply. The guard offered, "This morning, m'lord."

"How?"

"The boy--"

"No, I want to hear his version."

Stumblingly, I explained, "I forgot to lower my eyes when Lord Charles passed."

The Chara didn't even look to his guard for confirmation. He said to me, "Go over to that room over there, and tell them I sent you. They'll have medicine to put on your back."

As I left, I heard him saying to the guard, "Go to Lord Charles. Tell him he's to come here immediately. . . ."

DRAFT TWO: Lord Carle

[The second appearance of Lord Carle. This is from the age-17 draft.]

As I pulled the curtain back, I heard a cry - almost a scream - and looked down the hall to my left.

It was Lord Charles, breaking in a new slave. The young girl he was breaking in must have been new, for Charles' slaves know he delights in screams. As I turned, he looked up, and a look of animosity flew across his face before he regained his composure and asked curtly, "Where's your master?"

His tone was as courteous as a muskrat's, but I said, my face as expressionless as the first day I met him, "In the Study, I should imagine."

"You imagine? Why aren't you with him?"

The blood in my head was pounding so hard I barely heard my own answer. "I'm not his slave - as you know."

Charles blinked, then gave a subtle smile. I realized it was the second time that week I'd lost my temper - and that had never happened since I had come to Emor, not even with Charles. I turned away abruptly, to a satisfied mutter by Charles . . .

o--o--o

PUBLISHED VERSION: Lord Carle

[The final version of that scene, age 45.]

The girl's cry was so piercing that, without thinking, I pushed my way through the door. The door opened only to a passageway that led to further rooms, so I did not expect to see anyone. But I found myself facing Lord Carle, who was in the midst of disciplining his Koretian slave-girl.

The girl had fallen to her knees weeping. I could see the red mark on her cheek where Lord Carle had hit her. He was bent over her as I entered, and as he looked at me, I saw a fire spark in his eyes.

He barely managed to contain the fire in his voice. "What do you want?" he asked abruptly.

Having no good reason to be in his quarters, I said, "I apologize for disturbing you, Lord Carle. I was searching for the Chara; I thought he might be with you."

He stiffened up and assessed me for a moment, leaving the girl sobbing at his feet. Finally he said, "You ought to know where your master is. Why are you absent from him?"

Something about the crouching girl, whose presence the council lord was ignoring, caused me to say coolly, "Because, Lord Carle, I am not the Chara's servant and so am not required to know his every movement."

Lord Carle stepped forward. As he did so, the girl stopped crying and began looking between her master and myself, as though she expected to witness a duel. Lord Carle stopped a few feet from me. Keeping his eyes fixed on mine, he said with malevolent softness, "If you are a loyal Emorian, Andrew, then you are his servant, as I am his servant and all Emorians are. If you do not believe this, then disobey the Chara's commands again and see what follows."

I made no reply, and found a moment later that my gaze had drifted away from Lord Carle's eyes. He turned away then, as though in disgust that he had wasted such a deep dagger-thrust on so unworthy an opponent. I took the opportunity to slip back to the corridor.

I stood there for a moment with my eyelids closed and my head tilted back, as though I had just emerged from red-hot fire. Then I walked the remaining distance to the Map Room.

o--o--o

JOURNAL ENTRIES ABOUT "BLOOD VOW," 1979-1995, with major spoilers.

27 April 1979 (Friday)

I haven't the slightest idea of where I'm going with the Chara story (except for a little undercover work for John), but I like the main characters, so I'm slogging it out.

13 June 1979 (Wednesday)

I hate it when I'm in a writing mood, and there's nothing to write. I'd like to restart "Chara" or "Sword," but I can't seem to get past where I am.

10 July 1979 (Tuesday)

I finally got "Chara" rolling Thursday, and got seventeen pages written before I got stuck at the climax: I couldn't figure how to get my characters out of their mess. Death lies in the last scene, and there are a couple violent episodes earlier on. My failure to finish "Chara" so depressed me that I immediately set out to find another fantasy project to work on.

26 May 1980 (Monday)

Another weekend wasted. Couldn't get anywhere with "BB," and got practically none of my homework done (everything in my locker came home). With "BB," the problem is simply that I don't feel like writing - haven't since "Wizard [of the Sun]," with the exception of "Ad Infinitum."

6 August 1995 (Sunday)

Last night, tired of spending my insomnia-ridden nights contemplating the same old dark fantasies [a reference to some daydreams with highly unethical plotlines that were drifting through my mind at that time], I reread some of my old stories. Previous to my junior year of high school, all of my stories are dreadful. However, I did write one story during my sophomore year, "Blood Brothers," which I think has possibilities. The main character, Andrew, is a native of Croetia (can't imagine where I came up with that name [2009 note: I guess Croatia must have been in the news in 1979]), a country under the control of the empire Emoria. Like all Croetians, he has a great hatred for Emorians. (I don't know what got me into writing about empires and oppressed nations--was I reading Mary Renault at the time? [2009 note: No, I first encountered Renault's novels in college.] Then one day Andrew is made a slave and taken to Emor, where he eventually becomes friend to the emperor himself, the Chara, and begins to consider himself an Emorian. The plotline of the story is that the Chara decides to take Andrew with him to Croetia, where the Chara is hoping to strengthen his empire's hold, and Andrew stumbles across his old blood brother and finds his loyalties in conflict.

The story is only nine thousand words long, and the rest of the plot is dreadful--the only good part was the beginning, which I rewrote at age eighteen--but I think it's an interesting premise. Perhaps I will work on it after I finish "Wizard of the Sun" [another 1979 story, which I began rewriting in July 1995].

After is the key word--I had told myself before that I mustn't reread my old stories till I was finished with "Wizard," lest I be distracted by another story, and this indeed has happened. It would be too easy to go through my life thinking up story after story, but never getting any of them completely down onto paper. I mustn't do that; surely I have learned a little self-discipline during the past few years. As for "Wizard," my initial inspiration has drained away, but I continue to plug away at it each day. I need to train myself to harness that ninety-nine percent perspiration if I'm ever to become, if not a genius, then at least a published novelist.

9 August 1995 (Wednesday)-10 August 1995 (Thursday)

Sunday evening, in a desperate attempt to chase away the dark fantasies which had been obsessing me every night for days, I tried writing the first couple of chapters of "Blood Brothers"--only to find that story turning pretty dark itself. It was as though my fantasies, after being kept effectively under lock and key for five years, were now determined to conquer new territory.

18 August 1995 (Friday)

Despite my best efforts to stave it off, ["Blood Brothers"] took over my life last week. I am now up to 40,000 words and the book is still half-written, so this is definitely an adult novel. I was frustrated at not knowing from the start what the full theme of the book was--it is very difficult to write a book when you don't know what every image and phrase needs to relate to--but I knew that it would kill the story dead if I tried to artificially create a theme, so I ended up writing the last three chapters first, and thus discovered that the story wasn't simply about loyalties to brothers and to lands and figuring out what to do when these come in conflict, but rather about an overarching loyalty above all these loyalties--in other words I brought in Religion. (Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.)

15 October 1995 (Sunday)

Just wrote the final words to what has turned into a four-volume series called Chronicle of the Three Lands. Not, of course, that that means I'm actually finished with any of the books. Blood Brothers is three-quarters done, Touch Fire is just started, Law of Vengeance is three-quarters done, and Breached Boundaries is one-fifth of the way through. At this rate, I can't hope to finish the series by the end of the year, though, if I get my wits together, I can finish off Blood Brothers.

I'm pleased with the final paragraphs--it's great when the Muse just hands me a whole passage, lock and barrel. Would that I could write the whole series in that manner.

Reply to comments: The Lambda Literary Awards threads

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:16:30 GMT

Exciting discussions! I'm happy to see that you guys have been busy in my absence.

Reply to this comment by yonmei:

"You want to identify yourself as '50% gay and 50% heterosexual' rather than bisexual - and therefore include yourself out of the category LGBT writer because you identify yourself as too heterosexual to fit inside it?"

Is that a hypothetical example, or did you think that was what I meant? I'm an LGBT writer by virtue of the BT part of the equation. "Bisexual" and "heterosexual" are overlapping categories, not mutually exclusive ones, just as "bisexual" and "gay/lesbian" are overlapping categories.

"Secondly: once a writer - or any public figure - is dead, however they chose to identify themselves in their lifetime, we their readership have a perfect right to discuss their sexual orientation / gender identity in terms that make sense to us."

We're straying from the topic, I think (though the topic you mention is an interesting one, and I'll be glad to discuss it if you want). My point is this: I was concerned when you seemed to be adopting the attitude that writers of LGBT literature must be assumed LGBT until proven heterosexual. That seems to me to strain credulity, given that we have tons of evidence in the current day that many very straight writers enjoy writing about LGBT characters.

If you want to label those past authors as "unproven either way," I'll readily agree with you. I think that, in most cases, it's difficult to ascertain the sexualities of people in the past. But that doesn't detract from the argument I was making, which was that the Lambda Literary Foundation, by refusing to give awards to anyone but out of the closet LGBT writers, was exiling most of the past classic writers of LGBT literature - and, quite likely, many of the future classic writers of LGBT literature. (Leaving aside straight authors of LGBT literature, there are still a heck of a lot of closeted LGBT writers.) So I really don't see much value in the Lambda Literary Awards as future indicators of excellence in LGBT literature.

"I get the impression from this discussion that you admire neither their courage nor their writing, but prefer to promote heterosexual writers."

I've promoted LGBT writers extensively, both as an editor and as a Webmaster. I've also written editorials that take a hard-hitting stance against prejudice against gay writers. In this particular thread, I didn't feel any need to defend the courage of LGBT writers because that hadn't been called into question by the Lambda Literary Foundation. The courage of straight writers of LGBT literature had been called into question, so that's what I wrote about.

"Why claim him as heterosexual if you're ignorant of his life and don't know?"

But I never said that I was ignorant of his life. I've read his memoir, I've read his fiction, and I've read biographical writings on him. That was why I was puzzled that you were calling his announcement he was heterosexual into question.

The only publicly known homosexual relationship by Alec Waugh occurred when he was a teenager at an English public school (where same-sex romances have been a rite of passage for many students who have gone on to live thoroughly heterosexual lives). He died in 1981, well after gay liberation made it easier to come out of the closet. Since that time, all those literary historians who are eagerly turning up evidence of his brother's gay relationships have failed to turn up any evidence of Alec Waugh having been gay. From what I can tell, he only wrote one barely-gay novel, about his experiences in public school. I say "barely-gay" because, in an era when it was considered quite legitimate to write at length about male romantic friendships, Waugh showed little interest in the subject of male/male love. If one compares Waugh's novel to E. F. Benson's David Blaize, which was published in the previous year, or Ernest Raymond's Anglo-Catholic novel Tell England, which was published five years later, the contrast is quite striking; male/male romantic love is central in the latter two novels in a way that it isn't in Waugh's novel. The literary evidence is that Waugh's homosexual relationship was a minor episode in his life that he probably would never have written about if he hadn't been thrown out of school because of it. (Which just goes to show that kicking a student out of school for homosexual activity is a really, really bad PR move.)

All of this suggests to me that, if Waugh was still stating near the end of his life that he was heterosexual, he probably was. There's no absolute certainty in any aspect of literary history, of course, but I think the odds are in favor of heterosexuality in this case.

It seems to me that, when someone states what their own sexuality is, the onus is on the person who is contradicting their statement to put forward proof. That's why I asked you to do so. So I turn your own question back at you: Why are you so upset at me accepting Alec Waugh's publicly stated self-identification of his sexuality when, by your own admission, you aren't familiar with his writings?

"That [the fact that Rosemary Sutcliff didn't say much about Alcibiades's gay life in her novel about him] if anything seems like evidence on the other side."

Well, it might have been if she hadn't included a gay subplot in that novel. :) If she was a closeted bisexual trying to stay strictly in the literary closet, she didn't do a very good job of it.

In any case, we're in agreement about the heterosexual evidence of her memoir.

"I'll e-mail your apprentice when the long story's done."

Yay! Because I gobbled up the other installments when I got offline and am now sitting at the edge of my seat, waiting for the denouement. (I assume it's a denouement?)

Reply to these comments by mightymaeave, dharma_slut, and Rose Red:

I haven't read yet the article that dharma_slut recommended, so the best comment I can offer on this interesting thread is that it's exceedingly difficult to place a solid line between minority and majority. Both mightymaeve and I have made the same point: How does one classify people who are partly in the minority and partly in the majority? For that matter, how does one classify people who have erotic fantasies that don't fit what is considered acceptable for their particular sexuality? There's a lot of discussion in the slash community as to whether being a slasher makes one, by definition, queer (as opposed to GLBT). I'd hate to apply that label to all slashers, because some slashers are the equivalent of those heterosexual guys who jerk off to lesbian porn and then go engage in homophobia. There is homophobia in the m/m writing community, alas. But I've also heard about a lot of cases where writing slash forced so-called straight authors to give greater consideration to the complexities of their own orientations and gender identities. (I'm one of those authors: entering the slash community helped to force me to come to terms with my gender identity.) Even if a heterosexual writer of m/m is simply the literary equivalent of a fag hag - someone who centers much of their life on people who are of a different orientation - they're treading ground that is often considered taboo for their orientation.

People who think it's always easy to write GLBT literature if one is straight . . . Well, I suspect that they just haven't talked to enough straight writers of GLBT literature about their experiences. And that's exactly the same mistake that most people who are prejudiced against GLBT folk make: they don't take the trouble to ask other people about their experiences before drawing broad conclusions about those other people's experiences.

Now, about Uncle Tom's Cabin. That would be the right analogy for straight writings on GLBT experiences in some cases. But I think that, in other cases, the right analogy would be a memoir by a 1960s civil rights activist who happened to be white. That activist might well have undergone brutal violence alongside the black civil rights activists. So if he chooses to write a tale about the black civil rights movement, he's in a very different position from Harriet Beecher Stowe, who never worked alongside the slaves she wrote about. His background won't be exactly the same as the blacks' - he won't have grown up in a society that condemned him for his skin color - but his experiences will have overlapped enough with the blacks in a particular sphere (civil rights activism) that he can tell an important part of their mutual story - and perhaps even provide a helpful glimpse of their story.

Another analogy - forgive the egotism here - is Twenty Thousand Gold Stars. I'm not a BL; I can't write from their perspectives. But I dwelt in their online communities for four years, so I can legitimately write from the perspective of a member of those communities. Likewise, someone who has lived amongst gays and listened to their stories and witnessed their experiences can tell readers what it's like to live in a gay ghetto as written from the perspective of someone who isn't gay himself. And that's no small gift. Much of the great literature of the world - including 99% of journalism and historical fiction - has been written from the perspective of sympathetic outsiders.

And honest to goodness, sometimes it's impossible to tell the difference between literature by minorities and literature about minorities by non-minorities, even when the non-minorities only have book-knowledge of the minorities they're writing about. Time and again, I've been defeated in trying to guess the gender and orientation of writers of m/m literature. Good m/m writers cover their tracks. :)

If we can't tell, by reading it, whether a gay novel is written by a gay author, what exactly is the point in giving an award to that novel only if the author says, "I'm gay"?

If one's purpose is simply to honor out-of-the-closet GLBT writers, then for heaven's sake, give out awards to the writers themselves. I would be delighted if the LLF started a set of awards honoring writers who have shown particular literary courage. But I think that is quite a different thing from requiring to know an author's orientation before judging whether their book is worthy of an award. I believe that good books stand on their own, without reference to the author's biography.

Reply to this comment by maevele:

"nobody is forbidding anyone from writing whatever the fuck they want, they just want the awards to be for queer identified people."

First of all, I'd appreciate it if you would go back and read (or re-read, as the case may be) "The Susan Rules" in the profile for his journal, particularly the last sentence in Rule 3. Once we know each other well, I can tell in what spirit your profanity is intended; but if you don't post here regularly, it's best for you to err on the side of netiquette.

Secondly, the awards, until now, have been for the best GLBT literature. Period. Straight authors have been honored by the Lambda Literary Awards in the past. So it's a bit disingenuous to say that the Lamda Literary Foundation folks "just want the awards to be" for out-of-the-closet GLBT writers. This is a massive change in the foundation's stated mission; they're excluding many of the best works of GLBT literature from an awards ceremony that is supposed to honor excellence in GLBT literature.

It would be nice to think that the LLF's decision will have no impact on the ability of straight writers of GLBT literature to write. But the fact is that a goodly number of publishing companies pay attention to awards when deciding which books to publish. If a certain book isn't eligible for a very prominent award in a publishing field, then that book is less likely to get published. And if a professional writer can't get a certain genre published (e.g. GLBT literature), they're unlikely to write in that genre. So I do believe that this decision by the LLF will have a negative effect on the ability of straight writers to produce GLBT literature.

I don't believe that the GLBT literary community's best interests are served by the LLF taking an action that is likely to discourage the writing of GLBT literature by straight authors. And I believe that a reason put forward by the LLF for this change - that GLBT writers face danger, and that, by implication, straight writers of GLBT literature don't - is horrendously wrong. Some straight writers of GLBT literature have undergone job loss and loss of friends and family as a result of their decision to write about gays and lesbians. I wouldn't be at all surprised (based on my own experience of being a reporter on sexualities other than my own) if some straight writers of GLBT literature have had their lives threatened. So I think that the "we're endangered, you aren't" argument has no legitimacy.

Daily life: Moving from research to writing

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:29:39 GMT

"The trouble is. . . that too many historical writers have been more in love with history than with writing. They are so fascinated by their discoveries (how well I know the danger!) that they are tempted to put them all in. So, as their knowledge increases, the story gets bogged down in detail. They describe and explain where they should be content to indicate. There is a good deal to be said for writing historical fiction in the depths of the Indian jungle. . . . But the more courageous way is to face your reference-books squarely across the table, and convinced yourself that you, not they, are going to write the story."

--Geoffrey Trease: Tales Out of School.

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.

*** 14 October 2009. Home and Writing: Wellness clinic; plus, steaming ahead with Prison City.

"I went to a wellness clinic today," I told my friend Katharine when she visited yesterday.

"Oh? How was it?"

"I keeled over."

Me and my stupid body. The first time this sort of thing happened was in high school biology class. We were supposed to prick our fingers and use the blood to test our blood types. I'd just pricked my finger and was staring in fascination at the blood. Oh, how interesting, I thought.

*Clunk.*

I honestly thought my body had outgrown its tendency to faint at the sight of needles, or I'd have asked Doug to accompany me when I had my flu shot. As it is, I made a bit of a spectacle. I wasn't terribly panicky, because I'd gone through all this before, but of course the nurses who gave the flu shots didn't know that I wasn't having a severe reaction to the shot.

Fortunately, I didn't pass out entirely, and equally fortunately, within sixty seconds, one of the nurses had thought to ask me the right question: "Has this happened to you before?" They were both very nice about me ending up flat on the floor next to their table, even though they had to fend off questions from concerned bystanders.

Between that and Katharine's visit, I didn't get any writing done yesterday, though I spent the evening giving the Hoopers Island chapter a thorough edit. Today, my Muse delivered to me, not the requested shantyboat scene, but the steamer scene. Good enough, especially since my eyes have been cranky over the change to cool weather.

Doug's gone off to visit his family for a few days. I suppose that means I should try to do a bit of housework while he's gone.

*** 16 October 2009. Writing: Slow progress with Prison City.

I haven't been reading enough fiction recently, so my Muse has slowed to a crawl. I managed to squeeze out from him two thousand words today, mainly of exposition, which I can do in my sleep. But if I'm to get any more, I need to crank up the fiction reading.

Thanks to the weather - it's been in the forties - I've reached the point in the year when I get a headache after reading standard-sized print for only a couple of minutes. My eyes may revive somewhat next week, when the weather is due to warm to the fifties, but in any case I'm trying to finish up the last of the research that requires me to read handwritten notes.

I also need to do some research online - my list of planned Web tasks has been lengthening - but no sooner than the end of this month, I've promised myself. Exactly when I go online will depend on my Muse; having some knowledge of his cycle, I'm guessing that he's going to get very excited toward the end of the month. No way will I break into that excitement in order to go online. But once that peak is well over, I'll visit the Internet.

I finished rereading Randall S. Peffer's Watermen, and got into one of those "What on earth can I read after that?" moods. (Not to mention one of my "When am I ever going to be able to speak to a waterman?" moods, but there's no cure for that. There just ain't no waterman hang-outs in D.C.) So now I'm reading William W. Warner's Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay, which I only skimmed for the oyster bits before. I prefer Mr. Peffer's book, which has more of the human drama, but Beautiful Swimmers won a Pulitzer prize, so it's likely to be worth a careful reading.

*** 17 October 2009. Writing: Inspiration and perspiration, or How I write stories.

I'm concerned by the fact that my composing season began three weeks ago, yet I've only written 12,000 words so far. Last year, I wrote 31,000 words during the first three weeks of my composing season.

Well, all I can do is keep reading fiction as much as possible, exercise as much as possible, and stay offline and away from other distractions. The rest is up to my Muse.

"I know writers who write only when inspiration comes. How would Isaac Stern play if he played the violin only when he felt like it? He would be lousy." --Madeleine L'Engle.

I wish I had one of those writing skills that could just churn out the wordage, regardless as to whether my Muse was around. I can certainly nudge my Muse by sitting down and forcing myself to write when I don't feel like it. But when I say that I'm "waiting for my Muse," what I actually mean is that I'm awaiting for the ability to translate the stories that are in my mind into scenes on paper. Inspiration I don't lack, ever. I have two zillion stories in my mind, queueing up to be written down. What I lack is description. All that the stories consist of, in my mind, is dialogue and vague images. For the rest - for the concrete descriptions of scenery and activity that are necessary for prose fiction - I need to ingest large amounts of other people's fiction and hope that their descriptive abilities rub off on my Muse.

If my Muse hasn't reached the point of being able to do description, then I can write down the stories, but the results are poor. To give you some idea of what my stories are like without those descriptive passages, here's a raw scene from "Rebirth 2: Love and Betrayal" (with major spoilers for "Rebirth 1"). This is what my scenes look like when I draft them in my head.

o--o--o

(Scene: Layle and Elsdon in the High Seeker's cell.)

Elsdon: "He was a sadist. That's the only word I can use describe him."

Layle: "Do you use the word 'sadist' in its restricted sense?"

Elsdon: "You mean, do I think my father derived sexual pleasure from beating me? I couldn't say. I suppose it wouldn't surprise me if he had. He was that sort of man - cruel beyond words, and always convincing himself that his cruelty was a form of love."

Layle: "If your father had found someone with whom he could direct his violent impulses in a manner that brought happiness to the other person, would that have made a difference to you?"

Elsdon: "Do you mean, would I think more kindly toward him if he'd only beaten masochists? No, to tell the truth, I'd have despised him more if he'd corrupted anyone into enjoying his sickening pleasure."

(There is a knock at the door.)

Layle: "Excuse me."

o--o--o

Obviously I should have been a playwright. If you compare that inner draft with the final version of the scene, you'll see the parts I had to sweat to achieve. In particular, I created a whole sipping-from-the-cup section at the typing-up stage, in order to add action to the scene (and also to permit a little darkly humorous foreshadowing of the revelation about Layle's nature). In the original draft, Elsdon and Layle simply talked about Elsdon's father until they were interrupted by a knock at the door. I couldn't even have told you whether they were sitting or standing. I certainly couldn't have told you what their surroundings looked like.

The only way I was able to eke out those descriptive passages was by immersing myself in the fiction of authors who actually know how to write description, till I reached the point where my Muse would write in that manner.

So my equivalent of the writer's usual exercise in self-discipline ("Just get it down on paper") is to read, read, read other people's fiction. While that might sound easy, I've reached the stage in life where reading fiction is harder for me than reading nonfiction. So that's where the self-discipline comes in.

Later:

While we're on the subject of how I create, I happened across one of my old scene outlines tonight. I'd used it as a bookmark, which shows how ephemeral my outlines are.

This is the outline for a scene in the third volume of The Eternal Dungeon. No need for spoiler notices here; as you can see, the outline is comprehensible only to me.

o--o--o

Bad week
Became torturer for fun
Lying thru truth
Diviner tale
L: T has honesty & some loyalty
T: Loyalty!
L: Right to search T
T: Get nothing but the truth from me
L: You've lied
Punishment

o--o--o

My story outlines are just as bad. This is a bit of an outline of an upcoming Three Lands novel; again, I have no fears of spoilering anyone here.

o--o--o

Talk with the Lieutenant on patrol
The Lieutenant arriving at the Commander's hut
The Lieutenant arriving back at tent
Talk with Captain about the Lieutenant
Imminent attack
Visit to the Blue Tent
Sleep
Talk with Captain
Offering the cup
Talk with Captain

o--o--o

I pity anyone who tries to reconstruct my unfinished stories from my outlines.

I don't write down outlines for every story, much less every scene. I only scribble down outlines when the plotline/dialogue has become so complex that I can no longer keep track in my head of what goes where. Or if I'm not sure whether any needed scenes are missing (since I usually plot scenes out of order). Or if I want to give myself encouragement by ticking off each scene as I write it.

One story that I didn't write down an outline for is Twenty Thousand Gold Stars. The reason that novel has no written outline is that I wrote the novel three months after I became partially sighted. At the time, I couldn't read anything, no matter how large the print. I didn't yet have text-to-speech software, nor did I yet know braille. So I typed up the novel with the computer screen off, keeping track of every blinkin' part of that novel in my head. Every scene, every piece of dialogue. There was no way to do rewrites either; if I thought of a better way in which to write a sentence, I had to type up the better version in a separate revisions file and pray that I would someday be able make revisions to the original file.

At the time - April 2001 - the ophthamologists weren't offering any promises that I would ever get my reading eyesight back, and I hadn't yet learned about the various forms of accessible technology that would allow me to make revisions. So writing "Twenty Thousand Gold Stars" - and Mystery, which I wrote in the previous month - was an act of faith.

"Twenty Thousand Gold Stars" had the best first draft I ever wrote. The knowledge that, at best, I might only get one chance to rewrite the novel made me pick each and every word with care. When it came time to rewrite the novel, I barely had to make any changes. (Well, except for correcting my many spelling errors. I'm not that great a typist.)

I wish I could return to that purity of writing - that ability to pour my heart into every single sentence, making it as perfect as I possibly can.

*** 19 October 2009. Reading: Recommendation of Evangeline Walton's The Cross and the Sword.

Evangeline Walton: The Cross and the Sword. In the eleventh century, a Viking warrior is caught in a bloody struggle between Norsemen and Englishmen over the fate of England. ¶ Heterosexual fiction, male friendship fiction, class/rank themes, family relationship themes, historical fiction (Middle Ages), love stories, military fiction, prisoner fiction, race/ethnicity themes, spirituality themes. ¶ Fiction books. ¶ References to topics of sexuality. On-screen violence. ¶ Archive of my reviews.

1956 was a good year for the Vikings. While Mary Renault dazzled the literary world with her first novel about Ancient Greece, other historical novelists turned their attention to Norsemen: Rosemary Sutcliff with The Shield Ring, Henry Treece with Viking's Dawn, and Evangeline Walton with The Cross and the Sword (published in Britain as Son of Darkness).

Walton's lyrical Mabinogian Tetralogy has been much praised, so it's a wonder to me that her 1956 historical novel has received so little attention. The reason for this, I fear, is that medieval fantasy is a favorite genre among today's readers, while the readership for medieval historical fiction has largely fallen by the wayside. The Cross and the Sword deserves more readers than it has received.

It is the tale of a boy turned warrior, outcast from his Viking family because his foreign-captive mother was considered a beguiling witch. His exile takes him overseas, where he finds himself caught between two cultures: the heathen Norsemen who plunder England out of greed, and the Christian English who maim and torture in the name of their God. Nowhere, it seems, is goodness to be found; yet Sweyn longs for something he believes cannot exist.

Past noon it must have been when, sometimes staggering, sometimes crawling on hands and knees, I came to a meadow where horses grazed. Wolf-like I crouched under a bush, a stone in my hand, until I had a chance to come up behind the horse-herder. I killed him then, strong as trapped rats are strong. I laughed when his blood and brains spattered the stones and me. Good it was to get my hands upon an Englishman; I told myself that he would be the first of many.

So it goes. Many wrongs the English had to avenge upon us; lifetimes of murders and rapes, of burnings and robberies. Not human did we Sea-Folk seem to them. I doubt if any man ever kills another who seems to him human like himself. Even to the robber, the man he slays may seem a menacing wolf, self-defense a threat. . . . So we keep the wheel turning wrong for wrong, and then fresh wrong to avenge that wrong.

*** 22 October 2009. Writing: Status report on how my stories are going.

Because I had to leave the house to deal with health matters, I missed prime writing time this morning. (I produced five thousand words yesterday.) But it was a nice day to be outside - in the mid-seventies - and I got a lot done during my tasks run. I visited the dentist (it's either a cracked crown or gum disease; we're going to assume for now that it's gum disease), and I re-ordered my glasses (the prescription got screwed up the last time because nobody at my opthamologist told me that it was a prescription for progressives, which I'd never worn before).

Meanwhile, here's how my stories stand at the moment. The "done" figure includes scenes written before this season. (In the case of "Law Links," we're talking about a novel I started writing fourteen years ago.)

o--o--o

Master and Servant 1 (Prison City): 13 scenes done, 9 to go.

Master and Servant 3 (Prison City): 14-1/2 scenes done, 2-1/2 scenes to go.

Law Links (The Three Lands): The novel's all finished except for two half-scenes.

o--o--o

I haven't worked on anything else yet. I'm particularly concerned about finishing The Unanswered Question (The Eternal Dungeon), since I want to post that as my holiday gift fic. But "Master and Servant" and "Law Links" are higher priority, since they're due to be published next spring. I need to leave extra time for beta reading, so I'm rushing to get as much written as I can before the end of the year.

If I only get "Master and Servant" and "Law Links" done, plus edit the novels and short fiction that are awaiting editing, I'll have enough material to go forward with publication next year. "Master and Servant" is going to end up very long; it's already 100,000 words (including "Master and Servant 2: The True Master," which is online now). The three Three Lands novels I'll be publishing will add up to about 430,000 words. The short fiction I've tentatively scheduled (from both the Main Bookshelf and the High Bookshelf) add up to 70,000. So we're talking about a total of 600,000+. I'll be offering, in one fell swoop, more than six novels' worth of wordage.

But I'm not only concerned about giving my readers their money's worth; I'm also concerned about getting series finished. Ideally, I'd like to get a novel or two finished in either the Eternal Dungeon series or the Life Prison series. In both those series, I have half-finished novels awaiting my attention. Even if I couldn't get those novels betaed in time for spring 2010 publication, at least I'd have a head start on the 2011 publishing season.

Everything depends on my Muse, who hasn't shown himself to be very cooperative so far. But he hasn't reached his peak point in his cycle yet; once he does, he may begin rolling out the wordage.

(Doug has been grilling me on why my Muse is male rather than female. I told him, "My Muse is a daimon.")

In other news, I had to go online for a half hour yesterday in order to deal with a dental insurance matter . . . but I was well-behaved and didn't download e-mail, because I knew that I wouldn't be able to resist reading the e-mail right away. As a result, I managed to wrest two thousand words out of my Muse that evening. My Muse is good about rewarding virtue.

*** 23 October 2009. Writing: My Muse continues to stutter out scenes.

Two scenes left to go in "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked." They're both complex scenes, but it would be nice to get them done by the end of the month, so that I could have a sense of accomplishment (to make up for the fact that my Muse has only delivered one-third of my monthly quota so far this month).

I'm pleased with how "Unmarked" has turned out, neat and orderly. I wasn't sure whether it would; it was one of those stories that I wrote with the scenes out of order, which always raises the risk of chaos. Let's hope that "Master and Servant 1: The Abolitionist" ends up as tidy.

*** 25 October 2009. Simplicity: Gearing up to go online.

Sheesh, I'm beginning to figure out how I've managed to spend so much time away from fiction writing during the past twelve years. Since my Muse seems to be stuck again, and since I have a horrendous number of research tasks building up on my Web tasks list, I downloaded my e-mail yesterday in preparation to going on the Web. Two hundred e-mails, but most of them were spam. There were only two e-mails and three blog threads that I spent any large amount of time replying to.

Took me twelve hours to prepare the replies. I just have no self-control where writing e-mail and posts is concerned. I write and rewrite and rewrite, till I've spent more time on a single post than I would on a short story.

The only positive news is that, this time through, I managed to make the final draft of one of my post comments shorter than the original draft. That sort of restraint requires tremendous self-discipline from me.

I'm wincing at the length of my current Web tasks list: 100 items. And that's not counting the research items in my Prison City notes file. Plus, some of the items are wonderfully open-ended tasks, such as "Search for 1910s first aid books at Google Books and the Internet Archive."

However, unlike my late-September Web tasks list, there's no immediate deadline for the items on this list. (Well, except to see whether there's a free version available of a medical test I need to take.) So I can concentrate my attention on journal updates and Prison City research, and let any other lengthy tasks slide over to my next trip onto the Web.

Because you know what? I'd really rather be spending time with my Muse than checking the current status of the tags at my blogs.

Daily life: Chesapeake watermen research

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 23:20:54 GMT

"When I was writing Trumpets in the West in the middle of India, with scarcely any reference-books, I discovered just in time that the stage-coaches in 1686 carried no outside passengers. It meant rewriting a complete chapter. Probably no child would ever have noticed the mistake, and perhaps no History teacher would have minded. . . . Similarly a whole chapter of Thunder of Valmy had to be rewritten when I discovered by chance that a certain morning at Versailles in May, 1789, had been grey and drizzly, not sunny as I had first pictured it. What does it matter, a pedantic detail like that? Just as much, or as little, as the workmanship which old-time sculptors and carvers put into figures so far from the ground that no human eye would ever appreciate it."

--Geoffrey Trease: Tales Out of School.

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.

*** 26 September 2009. Mentoring: An exchange between my apprentice and me.

"I'll be visiting a friend around noon tomorrow, so I won't be very available, Sir."

"Very available?"

"Well, I'm always available to you, Sir. I'm just not always very available."

*** 28 September 2009. Writing: #1 reason to love the U.S. government (Prison City research).

#1 reason to love the U.S. government: free government documents on the Web.

As you may recall, I had the notion of placing my protagonist's estate next to the coast of Calvert Cliffs State Park, but I wasn't able to figure out whether this was a plausible location, because I wasn't sure whether the depth of water next to the beach was suitable for a wharf or pier.

Well, my dears, here is what I was able to find online over the weekend:

A nautical chart showing the depth of water along the park's coast, prepared by the federal government's Office of Coast Survey.

A nautical chart by the same government body, showing the depth of water along the park's coast in 1908.

The 1908 chart also shows:

* The location of the oyster bars (i.e. where oystermen would be sailing).

* The location and length of piers.

* The names of towns.

* The location of rivers and marshland.

* The location of roads (paved and unpaved).

* The location of houses.

What I already had (but needed to examine more closely) was the U.S. Geological Survey's map of the area in 1904, showing:

* The names of towns.

* The location of rivers and marshland.

* The location of roads (paved and unpaved).

* The location of houses.

* The topography.

Taken together, these two maps are like a gift from the gods. They tell me that a house existed right about where I was planning to place my protagonist's estate, close to what is now the park beach. The two maps differ slightly on where the house was located, which gives me wiggle room to place the house where I want, but they both show that a road led up to the house.

(Understand, I could have placed an imaginary house there regardless, but the actual existence of a house there tells me that the terrain was suitable for such a house location. That's what I was trying to determine.)

Oh, and all that information I mentioned above? I also have it for Hoopers Island. I now know exactly where on the island my imaginary boarding school is located (next to the appropriately named Richland Cove, on a peninsula of land that has virtually disappeared, so I needn't feel guilty about not having visited it), I know exactly where my second protagonist would encounter marshland during his walk across the upper island (more or less where I encountered it, as it turns out), I know where the roads through the upper island were located in 1910 (almost exactly where they are today), I know the location in 1910 of the nearby Back Creek (whose exact boundaries have shifted slightly over the years), and I know where some of the watermen are going to engage in a firefight with rival watermen (in the part of Hoopers Island called Gunners, of course).

As icing on the cake, I found online various maps by the Maryland Geological Survey, showing shoreline changes in Maryland between 1848 and now. This will help me to correlate modern maps of Dorchester County and Calvert County with turn-of-the-century maps. One of those maps reveals, by the way, that the cove next to Calvert Cliffs State Park didn't exist in 1848 - it's a product of shoreline erosion since that time. No wonder the cove has no name. However, judging from the turn-of-the-century maps, the cove did exist by the 1910s.

I also downloaded from Google Books a copy of the 1916 edition of the United States Coast Pilot - published by the U.S. Department of Commerce - which includes deliciously detailed passages like this:

"Tar Bay is a shallow bay between Barren Island and the northern end of Hooper Island. A very narrow, crooked channel leads from Chesapeake Bay across Tar Bay northward of Barren Island, and through Fishing Creek into the northern end of Honga River. It has a depth of about 4 feet, is marked by two lights and by bush stakes, and is considerably used by small local craft, but local knowledge is necessary to follow it. The lights form a range for the approach, and in entering the first is left to starboard and the second to port. Fishing Creek [the creek between Hoopers Island and the mainland] is crossed by a drawbridge."

Getting back to the plausibility of anchorage in the unnamed cove next to Calvert Cliffs State Park: the answer is "just barely." Bugeyes and skipjacks - the Chesapeake-style boats that I'm planning to have in that part of the story - are shallow-draft boats (i.e. they don't go far down into the water), so I think I can get away with having them anchor there, especially since the water next to Hoopers Island - where I know that boats anchored in the 1910s - seems comparable. (I say "seems" because the Office of Coast Survey didn't provide exact figures on its 1910 map, darn them.) And there existed piers further up the coast in Calvert County, as well as a fishing station at Flag Ponds, on the coastline just north of Calvert Cliffs State Park (not to mention a nice long oyster bar in between). Just to be safe, I'll give the Calvert Cliffs cove a pier.

"I want the U.S. government to spend all my tax money on projects like this," I told my apprentice after I'd downloaded all this. I mean, really, this wealth of free information at government Websites is public service at its best.

*** 28 September 2009. Writing: #1 sign that it's time to stop gathering research material.

The revised version of my historical note for Master and Servant is 2600 words long.

*** 28 September 2009. Writing: Starting into my writing season.

I do not, alas, have the ability to turn my Muse instantly on and off, so I'm spending this week easing into my writing season: I'm reading the online fiction and e-books I've accumulated for the last couple of months, I'm sorting my computer files, I'm de-cluttering my study, and I'm catching up on phone calls to friends and family and on correspondence I can't put off till next year.

Vital correspondence and Daily Life entries left aside, I'm doing my best to avoid reading nonfiction. Sooner or later, my Muse will notice that I'm reading only fiction and then, beaming, he'll pay me a visit.

And not a moment too soon, as far as I'm concerned. I've missed him.

Meanwhile, my penchant for downloading has reached the point of no return: I now have 1% space left on my hard drive. So I'm trying to figure out easy ways to purge files.

*** 29 September 2009. Simplicity: Purging my hard drive.

As of the beginning of this evening, I had 1.7 GB free on my 56 GB hard drive. I needed 8 GB free, just to be able to defragment the drive.

I managed to get 1 GB free by going through my "To Read" folder and getting rid of files I obviously don't need. Then I scrutinized my Videos folder and concluded that I could get rid of another 8 GB by moving my full-length movies over to my laptop.

The question is where I'll find room on my laptop; I only have 4 GB free there.

Darn it, I need a way to save files onto DVDs.

*** 30 September 2009. Writing: Slugging away at the Prison City lighthouse research.

Spent today undertaking the dull but necessary work of skimming the period nonfiction works on lighthouses that I downloaded last week. I only have three e-texts left; then I can start on the period novels about lighthouses.

The most interesting publication I read was a 1908-9 magazine called "The Master, Mate, and Pilot," which was filled (among other things) with items like this:

"Popular novels and magazines are said to be the favorite reading of light-house keepers. Naturally these worthy men would go in for light literature. (Gaze steadily at this paragraph for twenty-three seconds and a joke will appear.)"

'Tis nice to see that bad jokes are a perennial favorite.

There's still no sign of my Muse, but I'm not impatient. I have a friend coming to see me on Tuesday, and the Sunday after that I'm scheduled to go to Dorchester County with Spiralred; I'd hate either event to occur when my Muse was champing at the bit.

*** 2 October 2009. Writing: The play Fishing Gone (Prison City Research).

Doug and I went to see a play about Chesapeake watermen at the Smithsonian last night, "Fishing Gone." The most interesting aspect of it was the actress, a native Baltimorean who now lives on Tangier Island (a Chesapeake island in Virginia) and who played herself. The play was framed around her giving us, the audience, a tour of the island. "The boat back to the mainland leaves at 4:00, not 4:01," she said sternly.

The playwright, Roger Vaugn, has good maritime writing credits, but I blinked when I got to the part in the play where a character was saying (unless I misheard him, always a possibility) that skipjacks were brought to the Chesapeake by New England fishermen and were the first boats that were powerful enough to dredge with. (Skipjacks were actually invented about eighty years after New England fishermen invaded the Chesapeake, they weren't the first dredge boats, and they were smaller than the first dredge boats.)

The other aspect of the play that bothered me was that there were a fair number of "dumb yokel" jokes in it - jokes that played upon the idea of the Tangier watermen not knowing as much as the audience did. In fact, the plotline revolved around better educated characters lecturing one of the watermen until he sees the light. Even a line about the tourists and watermen learning from each other couldn't disguise the fact that, in the play, the watermen were the ones who did all the learning.

"So basically what you're saying is that the play was a wash," my apprentice concluded after I'd given my report. He summed it up nicely.

*** 3 October 2009. Writing: Rugby, watermen's dialect, and steamboats (Prison City research).

I spent today trying futilely to find the videos I downloaded several months ago, showing rugby mauls. (You gotta love a sport where one of the official moves is called a maul.) I think I accidentally deleted the videos, darn it. But I went through the rest of my material on rugby history and did a corresponding brush-up on the football scene in Master and Servant.

Yesterday - despite my earlier conviction that I was done with library research for this year - I accompanied Doug to the Hyattsville Library and did another run on its Maryland Room (which, I may not have mentioned, is a reference room, so I can't borrow the books there). My eyes really weren't up for lengthy reading - and anyway, the library closed ninety minutes after we got there - but I wanted to skim Varley Lang's Follow the Water (1961), which was written by a teacher-turned-waterman. It turned out to provide evidence that, fifty years ago, watermen's dialect was essentially the same as it is today. Since Varley Lang became a waterman in the fifties, when watermen were still alive who had been following the water back in the 1910s, this is pretty clear evidence that the dialect hasn't changed much over a century's time. Larry Chowning, who fictionalizes interview material from watermen who lived back in the 1910s, implicitly offers the same evidence. This is good, because I can't find any turn-of-the-century books that quote watermen. In fact, as far as I can tell, Follow the Water was the first book specifically about watermen. (A factoid: Mr. Lang was a consultant for Katharine Paterson's Newbery-award-winning children's novel from 1980, Jacob Have I Loved, which is set on an imaginary island in the Chesapeake Bay.)

By "watermen's dialect," I'm referring simply to the traditional Chesapeake dialect. I'm sure that it varies from place to place, but its general features seem to be the same, no matter which location I look at - for example, a relative lack of complex sentence structures, and a tendency to drop the pronoun or article at the beginning of the sentence.

Oh, and a tendency for men to call other men "honey." I'm rather taken with that.

I also glanced through David Holly's Tidewater by Steamboat and some other books on steamboat history. I'd been having the worst problems finding information on steamboat history online, but Mr. Holly's book provided me with just what I needed: a layout of a steamboat's decks. That, and his description of what sounds could be heard on a steamboat, are enough to let me write that steamboat scene.

Because I was reading under a deadline, I kept sending Doug off to make photocopies for me. He finally joked, "Do I get credit in your book?"

"You're already in the acknowledgments," I assured him.

*** 4 October 2009. Writing: Playing around with EPUB e-books.

EPUB, as you may recall, is an open-source format for e-books; its creators want it to be the MP3 of the e-book world. Well, they seem to be succeeding. Everyone is jumping on the EPUB bandwagon these days: iPod (via Stanza), Barnes & Noble's e-book reader, Sony Reader, and Google Books. Only Amazon is left out in the cold. (Ha. That's what happens to businesses that try to conquer the world with a proprietary e-book format.)

So I experimented around, and I determined that I can use Calibre to convert a bunch of HTML and jpg files into a single EPUB book. Neat. This means that, next year, I can release all of my fiction works in a package edition, in two formats: EPUB and zipped HTML.

I have to say that, the more I look at EPUB, the more I like it. It has nearly all the advantages of HTML, combined with the advantage of built-in packaging of several files. Depending on the e-reader, you can also take advantage of features like a contents sidebar and bookmarks.

The reason I didn't initially like EPUB was because some publishers are using it to try to replicate the look of printed books. That just won't work. EPUB is basically a variation on HTML; if you try to do stuff like justify the text and include paragraph indents, the results are just as bad as if you tried to do that to an HTML document. (I don't want to tell you what a quarter-inch paragraph indent looks like when the reader is viewing an EPUB e-book in 28-point type, as I do. Just double-space between the paragraphs, please.) Treated as it is meant to be - an electronic document - EPUB is a perfectly nice format.

Because of EPUB's newfound popularity, I might eventually be able to find place to sell EPUB e-books besides Lulu.com. And I sure hope that Google Books's decision to provide EPUB downloads for some of its public domain books means that it will eventually support the EPUB format in its Publishing Partners program.

By the way, after looking at what files make up EPUB, I became curious, because the contents of an EPUB file (.opf and .xml) look awfully like the contents of a DAISY file (.opf, .xml, .ncx, and .smil) - DAISY being the text/audio e-book format used for the blind. So I checked, and sure enough: the DAISY Consortium is in charge of standards for the EPUB format. I'm not sure about all the implications for this, but I'm betting that it at least means that the DAISY Consortium is making sure that EPUB remains accessible to the blind.

*** 5 October 2009. Writing: Preparing my domain for next year; plus, novel-reading related to Prison City.

Since my Muse is still on vacation, I spent three hours today (so far) on Website layout. I think my new publishing plans - getting all of my fiction ready for publication/posting before the publishing season begins - is a good one, because it lets me do all the needed Website layout at once (other than minor tweaks when I put promised fiction online). There's a lot of layout to do; those three hours were spent on Darkling Plain alone . . . and I haven't even made the changes yet to reflect next year's publications in that series.

Doing Web layout is like eating candy to me, so I haven't felt any urges to go online. In fact, the idea of going on several times a week (as I did last winter) is beginning to seem . . . well, weird.

Meanwhile, I continue to read fiction in the hopes that my Muse will get the idea. Right now, I'm reading Katharine Paterson's Jacob Have I Loved, which I suspect I wouldn't have liked if I'd tried to read it as a kid (it was published when I was junior in high school), because it's heavy on exposition, and so far (five chapters in) not much has happened plotwise. But as someone who has just spent a whole summer on Chesapeake research, I'm impressed with how well Ms. Paterson mastered her subject matter; through her novel, I can really feel what it's like to live on a bay island.

Darn it, this is demoralizing; I'm not that good an author.

[Later: Finished reading the novel. Oh, man. I was in tears by the end.]

I must go; Doug just came in and said, "I tried. I really tried."

I waited patiently for him to finish.

"I tried not to make the eggplant lasagna as decadent as last time. . . ."

I'm off to eat decadent lasagna.

*** 5 October 2009. Writing: Speaking of demoralizing . . .

A very-not-worksafe passage from Poisontaster's A Kept Boy, with names changed in order to prevent spoilers.

o--o--o

"Can you come while being fucked?"

The effort to string together that many words is monumental . . . but worth it for the way the deeply-furrowed, blown-pupil look on Brian's face transforms into breathtaking head-thrown, sealed-lid, open-mouthed blissfulness, transcending the heated pearl-stripe of come and clench of Brian's body around him.

In you. I'm in you, Hank thinks, driving hard. Inside you. Always inside you.

The orgasm, when it comes, is like sliding on ice off a cliff's edge; an almost peaceful equilibrium point of utter, perfect stillness followed by the drowning, crashing crush, consciousness compacted into the liquid spill of his body into Brian's.

Mundane humanity returns too much later, Hank's back twinging as he goes from locked-rigid to noodle-limp, exhaustion licking him with black, greedy tongues.

o--o--o

Now, this is why I rarely write graphic sex scenes. I can't write sex that well. (*Goes offstage to whimper quietly.*)

*** 6 October 2009. Writing: 1910s watermen's dialect (Prison City research).

Still no sign of my Muse. I'm feeding him Marion Zimmer Bradley, whom I haven't read since the 1990s. She makes for good light reading.

Doug wanted to do something special today, so we went to the library. (I love a man who considers going to the library to be a special outing.) My eyes are in that early-fall transitional period when I can't read standard-sized print for long, but I can read it for a short time, so I browsed through Hyattsville's Maryland Room.

I stumbled across a treasure, one I'd ignored before because of its silly title: They Live by the Wind: The Lore and Romance of the Last Sailing Workboats: The Garand Banks Schooners, the Square-Rigged Training Ships, the Chesapeake Oysterboats, the Fishing Sloops of the Bahamas. Since the author, Wendell P. Bradley, died before finishing his manuscript, I'm going to guess that his publisher was responsible for that monstrosity of a title.

At any rate, beyond the awful title was pay dirt. The Chesapeake section of the book was written between 1953 and 1966. The author, who lived on Tilghman Island, describes life there. The centerpiece of his account is a passage recreating a day he spent sailing with "the oldest active captain on the Bay," who captained "the last gaff topsail sloop on the Bay." Captain Will Jones was eighty-four years old at the time and had followed the water since he was eighteen.

Bradley's experiences cover the same time period as Varley Lang's in Follow the Water (1961), and the book also overlaps in content with Randall S. Peffer's Watermen (1979). All three authors give essentially the same impression of Tilghman Island watermen, which - as a history writer and journalist - delights me. I love the evidence of multiple witnesses.

I am happy to report that the dialect of "the oldest active captain on the Bay" turns out to be essentially the same as today's Eastern Shore dialect. Mind you, he could have changed his manner of speech to fit with the times, or his speech could have been misreported, but I've now got three authors - Bradley, Lang, and Larry S. Chowning - who have all recounted watermen who were alive in the 1910s as using the same dialect in later years as is in use today. (Possibly four. I wasn't paying attention to ages when I read Mr. Peffer's Watermen.) It would be nice to turn up a 1910s document that actually quotes Eastern Shore dialect, but that would take me far too much digging to unearth.

Besides, I want my Muse to show up and make use of all this research, darn it.

*** 7 October 2009. Simplicity: Freeing up space on my computer.

As you may recall, I recently ran out of room on my 56-gigabyte desktop computer; I was down to less than a gigabyte of space. I need to free up at least nine gigabytes, so that I can defragment my disk.

After sorting a lot of unsorted computer files into their proper folders, I've managed to identify the sources of my space problem.

The problem doesn't lie with the files in my To Read folder (though that folder sure needs some weeding). Nor does it lie, surprisingly enough, with images. (I tend to collect public domain artwork a lot, for the sake of my booktrailers.)

The problem lies with videos, music, and PDF files from Google Books and the Internet Archive.

I can resolve the last problem easily enough: many of those e-texts can be replaced with EPUB or plain-text files from Google Books and the Internet Archive (or simply ditched altogether). The videos are a bigger problem. A heck of a lot of those videos are for research for my Prison City and Triad series; I can't discard them till I've finished my research for those series, which will likely be years from now. Nor can I afford to buy an external CD or DVD drive.

So I'm just going to have to systematically go through my hard drive to get rid of files I'm no longer using. I've already freed up nearly two gigabytes that way. So I've only got six gigabytes to go.

*** 9 October 2009. Simplicity: Freeing up space on my computer, Part 2.

I woke up this morning with the sharp realization: I don't need more storage space. I need fewer electronic belongings.

Mind you, I'd still love to have external storage space for my movies; a single movie takes up a third of a gigabtye on my hard drive. But for the rest of my files, the problem isn't that they're too big; the problem is that I have too many of them.

So my lack of external storage space is a blessing; it forces me to decide what I really need.

*** 9 October 2009. Writing: Turning over the slate.

I've been in a mild depression since my writing season began, nearly two weeks ago; my Muse has been nowhere in sight, and I haven't been terribly interested in the activities I've been doing in the meantime. (Also, I've been dealing with medical bureaucracy, which is enough to drive me to comfort activities.)

In past years, I would have resolved my depression by going online. One hour online is like a hit of cocaine to me. This year, I told myself firmly that I just needed to keep reading fiction, and sooner or later my Muse would turn up.

He's here.

"Seventeen hundred words!" I chirped at my apprentice this evening.

"I thought you were going down for a nap," he replied, confused.

"I did! I woke up again!" Then, as he remained silent, I felt compelled to explain, "Seventeen hundred words only took me an hour. I know that seventeen hundred words would be a twenty-four-hour marathon for you."

"Seventeen hundred words?" said my apprentice, incredulous. (He's quite capable of writing at a rate of one sentence per hour.)

Actually, I'll know I'm back in full form when I begin producing 3000 words a day, that being my average last winter. Right now, I'm still groping my way back to a decent style, but switching from reading Marion Zimmer Bradley to reading Evangeline Walton should help. (I'm about to reread her Viking novel, The Cross and the Sword.)

At any rate, my depression is gone. Did I mention that I only feel really alive when I'm writing stories?

By the way, "turning over the slate" is a reference to the double-sided slate that hangs from a nail on my study door. On one side, the slate is blank. On the other side is written the words, "Muse in. Do not disturb." I turn the slate over when I'm entering into a writing session, so that Doug will know not to interrupt me.

However, I can't turn my slate over entirely yet. I've received word from Spiralred that our trip to Dorchester County will take place as planned this Sunday. Plus, I have a few of those yucky health matters to get done. But at least I won't have to do all that in the midst of gloom.

*** 12 October 2009. Writing: My Muse moveth.

A day in Dorchester (which I'll write about in a separate entry) seems to have woken up my Muse: I wrote five thousand words today, despite the fact that I'm having to go to bed early in order to attend a wellness clinic tomorrow morning.

This is my total wordage for the 2008-9 seasons:

o--o--o

Summer total: 29,935.

Winter total: 178,100. Winter total average: 29,683/month, 3,124/day of the days on which I wrote. Wrote 57 days, an average of 9.5 days per month.

Total for 2008-9: 208,035 (139% of 150,000; 58% of 360,000).

o--o--o

My goal for 2008-9 was 150,000 words: thirty thousand words a month for the five months of my composing season. (Because of my mother's death, I was delayed a month in starting my composing season last year.) I more than exceeded that goal.

This year my goal is sixty thousand words a month for six months, for a total of 360,000 words. Since I don't plan to spend 72 days online this winter (that's the awful total for my online time last winter; note that it exceeds the number of days I spent writing), I'm hopeful that a goal of two thousand words a day will be achievable, since I average three thousand words a day on the days when I write; if I write on two-thirds of the days this winter, I'll achieve my goal. As an extra cushion, my summer total for this year was 16,660 words, so I've already completed 5% of this year's goal.

Setting aside the math and getting back to content: I've finished the Hoopers Island watermen chapter, though it's going to have to be heavily rewritten. Just in time; the Hoopers Island books I borrowed are due next week. Tomorrow I've got the wellness clinic and the delayed visit from my local friend. Then I'll get to work on the shantyboat chapter. The Calvert County watermen chapters are going to be the hardest to write, because I have much less information to work with. Though I do still hope that I can persuade Doug to revisit the Calvert Cliffs State Park next March.

Meanwhile, I'm immersing myself in watermen's dialect by rereading Randall S. Peffer's Watermen, which is well worth revisiting.