Love in Dark Settings

My writings: E-books, online fiction, and online nonfiction.

  

This blog is intended for people who are permitted to read fiction and nonfiction in the adult section of their public library. Parental supervision is recommended.

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PROGRESS METERS FOR 2012

Wordage




E-books: new stories and novels




E-books: my backlist

This was a convention run by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), revolving around their annual awards. I'm not an SFWA member, and I didn't attend the awards banquet, but I thought it was a good opportunity to rub shoulders with the SF/F community.

My last pro con was the World Fantasy Convention in 2003, which was so large that the pro writers, semi-pro writers, and fans kept going off to separate social events. This made me feel uncomfortable, and not just because I was a semi-pro writer. The Nebula Awards Weekend was very different: only 260 attendees, mostly authors, and everyone that Noakes and I met was as friendly as can be. The day started with this gentleman chatting with us in the elevator, and went on from there.

( E-books panel )
( Panel on self-publishing and SFWA membership )
( Infectious diseases panel )
( Story bible panel )
( Economics panel )

The lack of attributions in the last panel report is due to the fact that I was flagging by that point. That was the end of Saturday's panels - I would dearly have loved to have attend the Alternative History panel on Sunday, but a second day of Metro fare would have broken my already-broken budget for the month, so Noakes and I went to the Greenbelt Farmers' Market instead, doing our part to support the local economy.

We both had a great time at the Nebula Awards Weekend. My special kudos go to the registration staff, who didn't have the record for Noakes - I'd made special arrangements for his accompaniment beforehand - but let him in anyway when I explained he was with me because I needed him to carry my belongings, due to my disability.

Just a reminder that next Saturday, 19 May 2012, I'll be informally attending the Nebula Awards Weekend (sponsored by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America) in Arlington, Virginia. If you're going to be attending too, and would like to get together, then just drop me an e-mail.

This was a mini-convention, held on May 11-12 in Maryland, and sponsored by Castle Griffin, a local leather family. It included a handful of panels on leather topics, but as a couple of attenders confessed separately to me, "I like the panels . . . but the library is the main attraction."

Ah, yes, The Library. It's an amazing collection. Its only rival in the United States is the fine collection at the Leather Archives & Museum, but unlike the library at the Leather Archives, the Carter/Johnson Leather Library travels.

I'd visited the library three times before and assisted at it twice (or was it thrice?). In fact, Vi Johnson boasts that I was the first person to sleep in the library. (My recollection is that I didn't do much sleeping. I was too busy scanning copies of early leather magazines.) Although the library's core collection is on leather and BDSM, the library covers a number of topics outside the mainstream, such as transgenderism.

The founding members of the library, Viola Johnson and Jill Carter, were mentored by leathermen in the 1970s. Some years later, they began meeting a new generation of leatherfolk. "Sometime during the weekend laughter, fun and food one of the kinklings invariably would ask if we had this magazine, or that book," Mama Vi reports at the library's website. "'Did we have pictures of this march or that event?' At least twice each weekend the three or four big boxes of books and magazines that we had saved got dragged into the living room so that the 'kids' could go through them. But just as often as not, I had to apologize for what was not in those old boxes. So very much had been thrown away with each relocation that we were missing far more than we had saved."

As Mama Vi put it at the mini-con: "[The younger generation] made me realize that my old stuff was their history, and they needed to be able to access it."

Spurned on by reports of leather writings being burned by people who objected to them, Mama Vi not only saved everything she could, she also began spending large amounts of money to rescue books, periodicals, artwork, and ephemera that might otherwise disappear from history. As the library slogan puts it, "Never again landfill. Never again flames."

The library carries everything from the latest books to rare nineteenth-century publications such as Lucifer the Light-Bearer. "Don't yell at me, Dusk!" said Mama Vi at the mini-con as she passed around pages of Lucifer the Light-Bearer that had been laminated so that they could be handled without damage. I told her afterwards that, on the contrary, I was delighted to encounter an archival library which understands that the purpose of publications is to be read.

The library is well worth a look if you're interested in queer literature, history, and art (including plenty of heterosexual queer material). And if you're a reader or writer who has a book, e-book, or periodical that falls within the library's scope, you might consider donating works to the library. Based on what I've seen from four visits to the library, I can guarantee you that any works you donate will be examined with tremendous interest by visitors to the library.


The friendship pin that Vi Johnson gave me on Saturday.

Topman: Online Writings by and about John Preston has been updated. Preston, for those of you who haven't heard of him, was a leading writer of gay leather fiction and gay essays. Really, guys, if you have any interest at all in John Preston, you're going to want to see this: it's photos of Preston in college. One of his college professors had described Preston to me as being "very good looking" at that age. Man, yes. (Not that Preston was at all shabby in later years.)

In other leather-related news, Aaron Travis - aka Steven Saylor - was kind enough to drop me a note to let me know that his gay erotic stories are now available as e-books. Travis was one of the stars of gay erotic literature in the 1980s. If you like dubious-consent BDSM stories (and possibly even if you don't; dub-con is definitely not a subgenre I usually read), I recommend starting with "Blue Light"; it's currently selling for 99c, which is a steal, considering that it's one of the all-time classics of gay erotic literature. Here's a review of Aaron Travis's stories that I wrote a few years ago.

New stuff in my latest website update:

* A map of the area surrounding Compassion Life Prison, which may be of interest to those of you who have read Men and Lads, in which the characters walk through that area.

* An index page for my new series, Commando. Don't worry - I don't plan to hare off in that direction, to the neglect of my other series. Commando is intended as a sequel series to Life Prison, once I've finished that series. However, a challenge fic I wrote in March begged to be placed in the Commando series, so I've set up the series page.

* Another series that is way in the future - but that I needed for layout purposes - is Hidden News. Its main character has actually showed up already, and will be playing a more-than-cameo role in another of my series.

* Shared Universes: Works set in Dusk Peterson's worlds by other authors and artists has been updated. Thank you to you writers and artists who borrow my characters to play with.

* I've updated the Boer War bibliography, for those of you who keep track of such matters.

* The Upcoming Fiction section of the home page provides new blurbs for stories that I'm planning to publish in the coming months.

* I've added last year's word counts to the Word Counts section, as well as updating the progress report on the status of my unpublished stories (as of February).

* On layout matters: I'm experimenting with a new left and right margins on the home page, to make the page easier to read on smartphones. (On the iPhone, at least, it's easy to zoom in on text, thus blowing up the text size if the margins are wide enough.) If you have any thoughts on the new margins, could you let me know, so that I can decide whether to use those margins throughout the rest of the fiction section of my website? (And why, yes, this is my first tentative venture into the strange world of CSS.)

* As always, general comments on the site's layout and navigation are welcome. Folks who point out typos and broken links may request a flashfic for particular characters and scenarios (the exact storyline being subject to my Muse's approval, of course). I had to update every frickin' page in the fiction section of my website - we're talking hundreds of pages - so your help is greatly appreciated.

* I'll repeat here an important notice from the home page: "Dusk Peterson's entire backlist is in the process of being published as e-books during the next few months. As a result, some titles won't be available temporarily, but they'll be back soon – promise! (If there are old stories you've read in the past that you want to keep a copy of, just drop Dusk Peterson an e-mail.) In the meantime, you can explore this website to find plenty of novels and stories that are already available as e-books or online fiction."

I'll be publishing the e-books one series at a time, starting with the Life Prison series. I'm going to be moving as quickly as possible to make my backlist available again, as well as bringing out new stories that have been accumulating on my hard drive.

"It used to be that I would clean the oven to avoid writing because traditional publishing was total bleakness interrupted by 10 minutes of happiness when your agent called to say she had sold your book. There followed a year of silence while the book was 'produced.' Publication was brief. The salesmen (you heard right) decided the print run and if it was in the low five digits, the book was DOA. Two years of your life had been eaten up. The Prozac months followed.

"Now I write avidly because I can publish what I write. Once written and edited, I can publish a book in a matter of minutes and sell it 24/7. I have satisfied my two passions: writing and commerce."

--Consuelo Saah Baehr, as qouted in David Gaughran's Let's Get Digital.


( What I wrote this month, and what story is coming next )
( Waterman research trip to Calvert County in Southern Maryland (illustrated) )
( Counselling )
( 10:10 challenge: Reducing my carbon emissions by 10% )
( Dusk's recipe for Vegan Chocolate Pudding )
( Health )

So I counted up how many e-books I'd have to publish to get my entire backlist into e-book format, and it added up to - oh, let's call it a round 100.

Um.

The only way I'm going to be able to do this is to give myself a challenge. So I hereby challenge myself to prepare one series each month for publication, until I get my entire backlist published. That's seven series, if I count "Sweet Suffering" and "Main Street Leather" as one series each, which I intend to do. So seven series in seven months, including the unpublished stories that have been sitting on my hard drive, whining for attention. On busy months, I'll publish the shorter series.

I'll start the e-book publishing in April. I've put a progress meter on my sticky post - the first time I've ever displayed one of those.

Seven series. Seven months. As of April, the clock is ticking.

(For some reason, this didn't get crossposted to LJ two weeks ago. I was wondering at the lack of response to the post. :) )

As I've mentioned in the past, I earn my living through writing. Up till now, virtually all of my living expenses have been paid for by a donor. However, that source of money is gradually going to be phased out. This year, the donor - and the small amount of money that Noakes can afford to pay me for rent - will pay for my necessities: food, shelter, and medical care. However, my writing income will have to pay for everything else: my transportation, my professional expenses (books, convention attendance, library subscriptions, computer expenses, etc.), my cat's vet expenses, and so forth.

I'm currently earning $50 a month from my writing. This is a problem.

( What this means for my readers )

To alert those of you who have not yet noticed: this is a day when many websites (Wikipedia, etc.) are protesting two U.S. government bills that could have a devastating effect on freedom of speech, not only in the United States, but throughout the world. As Dreamwidth Studios (which runs the Dreamwidth blog network) says, "Pending in the United States legislature are two bills, closely related, that are designed to grant broad, new powers to the government in the name of fighting piracy and theft on the Internet. These bills are known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, HR 3261, Wikipedia) and the PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA, S 968, Wikipedia). . . . We provide a space for the creation and sharing of legal content and in no way support or condone piracy or the theft of Intellectual Property. Laws like SOPA and PIPA, if passed, pose a very real and serious risk to the continued viability of sites like ours."

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it: "PIPA and SOPA . . . would drastically change the way we use the Internet (for the worse), and punish millions of innocent users who have never even thought about copyright infringement. . . . These bills must be stopped if we want to protect free speech and innovation on the web."

If you're a U.S. citizen, you can contact Congress through this online form or through this EFF site. In addition, Dreamwidth Studios suggests, "If you are not a United States citizen, you can still help. Spread the word about these laws. If passed, this will not just affect people who live in the US - it will affect everybody who uses web sites based in and/or owned by American businesses."

Wherever you live, please pass on the word, in the same manner that you would pass on the word if you heard that your favorite writer had been censored. These bills threaten the free speech of everyone.