Entry tags:

daily life, links and reading recommendations

Daily life: Looking ahead
"The fears of authors that they'll get 'pirated' are almost always just plain silly. With the exception of a tiny percentage of very well-known authors like J.K. Rowling or Stephen King, the real problem authors face is that only a very small percentage of their potential customers have even heard of them - so how likely is it that the ravening hordes of electronic pirates are out there plundering their titles?

"About as likely as a piano singer in a roadhouse bar in Oklahoma discovering that a pirated tape of her performance is selling like hot cakes all over the country. Just like they did to Maria Callas! - a delusion of grandeur upon which she piles more folly by demanding that the management of the bar has to physically search every customer who comes in to make sure they aren't carrying concealed recording equipment.

"Sound silly - almost insane? Yet, that's exactly what DRM [Digital Rights Management] amounts to."

--Eric Flint, The Opaque Market.

Topics in this post: Reasons to write more and to organize better, sales!, the circular file, another e-book out of the way, and my Internet addiction sinks its teeth in, looking ahead with Loren's Lashes, one more e-book down - four to go, Internet round-up (publishing), next summer's publication schedule, easing into a regular schedule, review of Lucius Parhelion's "Acquisitions and Mergers: The Four of Wands," my old journals, bits and pieces of news, Kindle sales figures for June to September, reading original slash and DAISY/braille books, seminars for my apprentice.

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

*** 27 September 2008. Writing and simplicity: Reasons to write more and to organize better.

I put together a chronological listing of my stories, which was enough to make me whimper by the end, even though I already knew the bad news: that my fiction-writing virtually stopped after 2003. I had to check my files to reassure myself that, between January 2007 and April 2008, I wrote half a novella, two-thirds of a novel, and three-quarters of another novel.

I was writing an average of 22,000 words per month last winter. I'd like to see whether, with my new goal of minimizing distractions to my fiction-reading and fiction-writing, I can take that wordage up to thirty thousand words a month, or even more.

Later:

I put together a super-duper-deluxe chronological listing of all my writing-related activities during my life. Though it doesn't yet show my spurt of fiction-writing in 1995 (because most of those stories aren't published yet), I can easily see how my fiction-writing declined as a result of my Internet addiction from 1997 to 2000, and then spiked incredibly when I discovered the slash lists around the beginning of 2002. Seven Eternal Dungeon stories and a Master/Other story started in March 2002 alone. My god. And that's not even counting "Life Prison," which I was also writing that month.

In 2002 and 2003, I published twenty-six new stories, most of them novellas.

Then comes 2004, and my Internet addiction takes over again. In 2007, I only published two new stories, one of which I'd composed in 2001. It's really sad to see my addiction's effect in so graphic a form.

The good news is that 2008 looks a lot better. Now I just have to figure out how to balance my composition time with my publishing time.

*** 28 September 2008. Writing: Sales!

Woohoo! I've sold three copies of my new e-books: two of Whipster, and one of First Lesson, for a grand total of $3.50!

I'm not being sarcastic. Except for my stories for MAS-Zine (for which I received very generous compensation), I'd earned no money on my fiction till I put out first e-book last year. So learning that I've earned $3.50 in the space of a week is quite exciting. I just hope this isn't a "new title" peak, and that I'll continue to earn money on my e-books.

I also hope my buyers were satisfied with what they got. I suppose they must have been satisfied enough by the 10% pre-sale sample to take a chance on the rest. But I always feel a bit nervous when somebody pays to read me.

*** 28 September 2008. Simplicity and Mentoring: The circular file.

I finally tackled my inbox tonight. By mid-August, I had winnowed it down to one hundred e-mails. (That is, of the e-mail I needed to sort from last September onwards. I don't want to say how many e-mails are in my older inboxes.) Then Hurricane Gustav hit, and there was my mother's memorial events, and then Hurricane Ike, and in the midst of all this, I went wild and crazy on the forums . . .

Over five hundred e-mails confronted me tonight. And I haven't even transferred to this computer the e-mail from the last two weeks.

After a while, I realized that I was doing more deleting than reading, so I settled down to delete or file all of the e-mail that was from e-mail lists (mainly hurricane-related posts), was junk mail, or which I knew at a glance I had already responded to.

That left me with one hundred and fifty e-mails to read (again, not counting my mail from the last two weeks). That's much more manageable, especially since some of those will turn out to be of the deletable type.

I'd really like to get completely caught up with my e-mail by the time I go into my winter hibernation, so that, for the first time since - *cough cough* - 1997, I can truthfully say that I've dealt in an appropriate manner (respond to, file, throw in the circular file) an entire year's worth of e-mail. Then, next year, I can start plowing through any older mail that still needs to be responded to.

All of this energetic activity comes as a direct result of spending nearly an hour on the phone with my apprentice, discussing his own clutter-control problems. I really am an imitative beast, I'm afraid; if I'm not around people who are talking about tidying - or am reading about people like that - I tend to let things get out of control.

Which suggests I should get back to reading daily about simplicity.

*** 28 September 2008. Writing: Another e-book out of the way.

Uploaded Life Prison to Amazon tonight. I've reached the point where I can publish an e-book in three hours flat, not counting the time for proofreading and final editing (which was already done two years ago, in this case).

Tomorrow I do Coded Messages, and then, I'm afraid, I'll have to tackle the proofreading I've been putting off. I'm inclined to proofread the Rebirth novellas first, simply because those are the ones that need to be sent off to reviewers. I still have the feeling that Debt Price and Pleasure are too hard-edged for the romance reviewers. I wish to heaven there were more gay fiction reviewers. And more erotic fiction reviewers and slash reviewers and yaoi reviewers . . . Why does the romance world seem to have the monopoly on reviewers of m/m e-books?

*** 30 September 2008. Simplicity and Writing: And my Internet addiction sinks its teeth in.

Oh, dear. I've discovered LibraryThing.

Actually, I discovered it a couple of years ago, but I didn't have any professional excuse for starting an account there till my own books were available at Amazon, at which point I could add them to my my LibraryThing catalogue. (I had a delightful moment when I discovered that someone else at LibraryThing had already catalogued Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers.)

I've spent the better part of the last couple of days playing in my new sandbox. The number of readers there who are interested in original slash is exquisite. Enough, though. I need to finish "Coded Messages" and get it published tomorrow.

I did a Web search on my name tonight and was interested to see that sites are beginning to link to my e-books (in an automatic manner, through RSS feeds from Amazon), simply because my e-books have Amazon tags that the sites like. First Lesson, for example, showed up on a site devoted to gay bondage.

That's precisely why I wanted to get my writings on Amazon. (Well, not because of the gay bondage bit; it's rather startling to have the adult industry discover my books so quickly.) I noticed this phenomenon myself when I was collecting links to reviews at The Slash Skinny: when books were made available at major online booksellers, suddenly online references to the books multiplied dramatically. Subsidiary sites would pick up RSS feeds; readers would like to the authors at LibraryThing; reviewers would post reviews . . . It's as though authors don't exist until they are catalogued at Amazon or some similar bookstore.

Which is silly; some of my favorite writers devote themselves solely to online fiction. Oh, well. Maybe one of these days, the literary world will wake up to the glorious free treasures lying in their midst.

Meanwhile, Rainbow Reviews (one of the few review sites that is willing to review online fiction, incidentally) has sent me a reassuring letter, telling me to send all six of my new/upcoming e-books that over ten thousand worlds (which is their minimum word limit). I'd checked with them about that, because I didn't want them to get sick of seeing my name in their inbox.

Oh, and I contacted a romance reviewer(hat in hand, which is the only safe way to approach a reviewer) to see whether she would take review copies from an Unknown Author. Her response? "Oh, yes, I know of you, Dusk."

Despite that, she'll accept my review copies. :)

*** 30 September 2008. Writing: Looking ahead with Loren's Lashes.

Didn't get "Coded Messages" published today, but I wrote a brief scene and reordered another scene in Edgeplay in Mayhill - a tricky proposition, to supplement and re-order a portion of the manuscript that I'd thought was already finished. But it was due to my decision to issue the various parts of "Edgeplay" as separate e-books; what I'd already written had to be subtly altered to make the balance correct for stand-alone stories.

Don't know why it didn't occur to me in the first place to issue "Edgeplay" as a series of short fiction, in the same way that I'd issued the Turn-of-the-Century Toughs stories. As it is, I'm afraid that the readers are going to have to deal with cliff-hanger endings to each part.

I want to get another edit done on what I've written so far - the first three parts of the novel - because I want to search out beta readers for it at FetLife (not-worksafe splash page) before I go into my winter hibernation. It's such a relief to be able to have a resource like that. When I started writing this novel back in 2004, I didn't know anyone I could turn to for technical betaing of a leather manuscript (as opposed to regular betaing, which Parhelion was already doing). david stein did eventually agree to look at it, a miracle in itself (*picture of david chewing me out for getting my characters' bondage wrong*) (*picture of me hubristically defending myself to the man who used to write a bondage column*), but I really need to get the story critiqued by more leathermen. Now, thanks to FetLife, I'll be able to find other leather writers and readers.

I've determined that I only have eight scenes left to write in "Edgeplay," or roughly two novellas. I'm wondering whether I can get that done over the winter. But darn it, I have so much to write over the winter, and I'm still not sure how much wordage I'll be able to get done. If it's the same as last winter (20-25,000 words per month), I'll only be able to get about five novellas written - about a novel's length. And that's really not enough, considering that I need to make progress on the composition of five different series (not to mention that my Muse continues to nudge me on that retro-future series).

Well, the sooner I get this fall's e-books published, the sooner I can get started.

*** 1 October 2008. Writing: One more e-book down - four to go.

Uploaded "Coded Messages" to Amazon. It's ridiculous how little time it takes me to publish an e-book, once I've got the editing and proofreading done and have located cover art.

My eyes are definitely feeling the fall weather, though. On the one hand, this means I'm less inclined to surf idly. On the other hand, it cuts down on the hours of my workdays.

Well, at least I now plunge into proofreading, which I do with a warm, wet cloth over my eyes. (This isn't as contradictory as it sounds. I proofread with my ears, lifting the cloth whenever I need to scribble down a note. If I were really efficient, I'd take notes in braille. I'm not efficient.) I think I'll do "The Breaking" and "Love and Betrayal" first, simply because I'll be sending those two to reviewers.

*** 1 October 2008. Writing: Internet round-up (publishing).

Some of you may recall that I recently recced Copyediting Shakespeare, by Thomas Christensen. Someone posted a humorous comment in response to my blog entry, and I, being the skilled investigative reporter that I am, failed to realize that this was Mr. Christensen himself.

However, after I gushed over the printing-related comms listed at his LJ, Mr. Christensen was kind enough to provide me with the link to his Website.

Oh, my. What a wealth of treasures for anyone in the publishing industry. For example, there's his illustrated article providing details on how he designed an art book. Here's his blog, filled with amusing tidbits such as his entry entitled When kerning goes bad. (It helps if you know that kerning is the printers' art of placing space between letters.) Then I clicked on the innocently titled Tom's Glossary of Book Publishing Terms and found myself confronted with definitions like this:

o--o--o

ADVANCE: A secret code signalling to the marketing department whether or not to promote a title.

AUTHOR: A large class of individuals (approximately three times as numerous as readers) serving a promotional function in book marketing or providing make-work for editorial interns.

AUTHOR TOUR: A hazing ritual intended to make authors compliant to their publishers.

o--o--o

And so on and so forth. Go delicious it.

My favorites:

o--o--o

BOOKS IN PRINT: Beta version of amazon.com.

CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER BREAKDOWN: The progressive deterioration of a COPY EDITOR who is on a tight deadline.

KILL FEE: The cost of a contract on an author or editor.

NOVELLA: A short story that has not been edited.

PUBLICATION DATE (PUB DATE): A sliding holiday based on the phases of the moon.

TRANSLATION RIGHTS: The right to betray an author in multiple languages.

o--o--o

Back at his blog, I discovered a link to a new POD service for magazine publishers, plus Wordle, where I, um, played around.

(The fact that "Mr." is the most common word in "The Breaking" says that I'm a powerfic writer. Either that, or I'm channelling Jane Austen.)

*** 2 October 2008. Writing: Next summer's publication schedule.

I've begun working on The Breaking. After today's proofreading, I have only three more chapters to proofread before I can lay the novella out. (Or re-lay it, since it's already online.)

I'm beginning to a lot pleasure out of getting e-books published on schedule. I'm hoping that I can persuade my Muse to get the same pleasure out of composing on schedule. At any rate, I spent two hours today working out a composition schedule for the winter and a publication schedule for next summer.

A lot depends on what my Muse produces over the winter, but here are the stories I have tentatively scheduled for publication next year:

o--o--o

PAPERBACKS / E-BOOKS / ONLINE FICTION

The Eternal Dungeon: "Rebirth."

Life Prison: "Mercy's Prisoner."

Michael's House: "Whipster."

E-BOOKS / ONLINE FICTION

Darkling Plain: "Right or Right."

The Three Lands: "Law Links" (a prequel to "Blood Vow").

Princeling: Parts 1 and 2 of the novel.

From Hell to the Stars: Chapters 1-5.

The Eternal Dungeon: Parts 1-2 of Volume 2, "Transformation."

Life Prison: Volume 2, "Hell's Messenger."

Loren's Lashes: "Edgeplay in Mayhill" and "Water in a Drought."

E-BOOKS (these stories are already online)

Darkling Plain: "Night Shadow."

The Three Lands: "Mystery."

Master/Other: "What Slaves Do When They Aren't Cleaning Toilets," "The Slavefic Plot Creator," and "A Sexual Minority Speaks Out."

o--o--o

This is an awfully heavy schedule, and I'm not at all sure whether I'll be able to manage it. (It was even worse before I decided to drop two novels from the schedule.) I've scheduled myself to publish five to seven works of short fiction per month. Even though a handful of those works are short stories that can be proofread, laid out, and published in a single day, I'm still being, um, ambitious.

But you see, the nice thing about this schedule is that the world won't end if I don't stick to it. Except for the novels scheduled for print publication, which I'd really like to get released next year, everything on my list is categorized as "If I get to it, fine." That's the advantage of publishing novels that are split into novellas: if I run out of time, I can just wait till the following year to complete the serialization, as I did with "Whipster" this year.

*** 2 October 2008. Simplicity: Easing into a regular schedule.

In addition to the above-mentioned proofreading, today I got the humidifiers cleaned and readied for winter's use, I spent a half hour on business correspondence, and I read a bit of Parhelion's newest story, "Acquisitions and Mergers." Plus, I spent two hours working out my schedule, and I did my daily mentoring of my apprentice.

Now's the end of my day, because my sleep schedule is so askew that I'm going to need to go to bed nine hours after I got up, just in order to get my schedule back on track. (Otherwise, I'd be a total hypocrite, because I just told my apprentice to do the same thing, for the same reason.)

*** 3 October 2008: Writing: Review of Lucius Parhelion's "Acquisitions and Mergers: The Four of Wands."

In a genre where the only reason a male character is promiscuous is that he hasn't yet met the right man, slash fan fiction writer Parhelion was faced with a problem: Archy Goodwin. Archy is portrayed in Nero Wolfe canon as a man about town, dating women right and left, and presumably doing a bit more than dating as well.

The easy solution to this problem would have been to suggest that Archy was not really a serial lover by nature - that he was only biding time till Nero Wolfe swept him off his feet. Bravely, Parhelion sometimes refused to take this approach in his fan fiction.

Now Lucius Parhelion - who seems to have acquired a first name since the last time we saw him - has produced an original slash tale about a gay man about town, and in the process has offered a fascinating window into gay New York life in 1960.

One of the things I like about Parhelion's stories is his multilayered approach. Bob, a character in Acquisitions and Mergers [warning: spoilers in the Torquere blurb], is not just the man who will break into Trip's happy round of visits to the gay cruising zones of the day. He is a social climber from a poor background, the owner of a scientific lab that is undergoing a business transaction, an employer with tolerance toward minorities, a widower, a suave manipulator, a man with decided views on interior decoration, and the owner of a cat named FaLa who steals the show from his human rivals in this story.

Hidden in the midst of all this is his friendship with Trip, a former prep-school linebacker, an M.I.T. graduate, a scientist, a Greenwich Village resident, a road rally racer, a reader of science fiction magazines, a regular customer at the notorious Everard Baths, a social nitwit, and a man with excruciating taste in interior decoration. A wonderful clash between him and Bob is inevitable.

One of my few running problems with Parhelion's writings is that he's often more interested in providing color than in tying all the pieces together. The color in this story is terrific - such as Bob's encounter with Village bohemians - but while that encounter does help to establish Trip's character and to give the reader a good sense of the social setting, I can't really see how it advances the plot. (Other than offering a character an opportunity for one of the best, unforeshadowed opening lines I've encountered in original slash.)

Maybe I just missed noticing the plot significance of the bohemians and other such color background, because one other frustrating quality about Parhelion is his tendency to be overly subtle. The actual nature of the business deal - which is the central nonsexual plot in the story - is revealed in dribbles, which I don't at all mind in itself, except that those dribbles never quite formed into any pattern in my mind. Obviously, I never took business classes. But not knowing what exactly Bob was managing to put over on his new business associates did make it difficult for me to assess how good he was as a manipulator, a vitally important aspect of his personality.

These are all quibbles; the relationship part of the tale is wonderfully built up, and if, in the end, Parhelion shows a tendency to fall toward standard slash solutions, he's given us plenty of reason why we would believe that such solutions would fit these characters . . . and has also shaken the complacency of her slash readers by suggesting that, as one character puts it, "It's not like I can help you throw dinner parties, or raise kids with you, or kiss you goodbye at the door each morning." Such was gay life in 1960, and Parhelion, admirably, makes no effort to gloss over the difficulties of the time.

*** 3 October 2008: Writing: My old journals.

I've been rereading my journals from 1995 and 1996. It's been interesting to see what my life was like in those days before I moved to the Internet. I received my first Internet-connected computer in the spring of 1995 but had little interest in the Web at that point. I wrote in December 1995: "Skimmed through On the Heavens and Meteorologica (getting the latter from the World Wide Web - one of the first times I've ever actually found the Web useful)." To those of you who are rolling your eyes, I should remind you that this was 1995. The Web was a much smaller place in those days. Still, I doubt that I bothered to look far.

My journal entries told me what I already knew, that I had no social life before the Internet. Or rather, my social life was confined to my family and one local friend I'd met in college, Katharine. I occasionally also got phone calls from an old college boyfriend. (This was in the years before flat-rate long-distance plans became popular, so we didn't get to talk to each other very often.) My only other human interactions were professional, with editors and fellow journalists and people I was interviewing, and those contacts were brief, because I was working freelance by this time.

My social life had been like this for eight years, ever since I graduated from college. No wonder my first taste of an Internet forum left me panting with excitement.

In retrospect, I can look back at my life in 1995-96 and think, "Oh, how few distractions I had." Since I wasn't watching much television or going out much, my only real distraction from fiction-writing was library browsing and researching and writing nonfiction. (Reading fiction doesn't distract me from my own writing; it fuels my Muse.) Here is a typical day in October 1995, as recorded in my journal:

o--o--o

8:00-10:30 [a.m.] - Nap and plot.

10:30-12:30 - Write Breached Boundaries [a novel in the Three Lands series].

12:30-1:30 [p.m.] - 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 [a novel in the Three Lands series].

1:00-1:30 [a.m.] - Eat snack and read Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer.

o--o--o

Oh, lord, to have my early thirties back. But I'm hoping that my schedule this winter won't be much different.

*** 4 October 2008: Writing and Mentoring: Bits and pieces of news.

1) I am now a LibraryThing author (i.e. I have official status at LibraryThing as a published author). Hurrah!

2) "Coded Messages" is live at Amazon. "Life Prison" - its predecessor - is not up, even though I uploaded it six days ago, two days before "Coded Messages." Blast.

However, I've already sold a copy of "Coded Messages." Somehow I suspect that the word "rape" in the blurb will attract a few more readers than my e-books usually do. I just hope the readers don't expire of disappointment when they discover that the story isn't erotic fiction. In the blurb, I did quote Remy's review of my writing, which says that my stories are "about the psychological, not the physical." So the readers can't say they haven't been warned.

3) I took another look at the adaptation of a Zoroastrian tell that I prepared a few years ago and concluded that - as I'd intended it - it's definitely a picture book. Which means that I'll actually have to submit this story to publishers. Blast and blast. Rereading all my submission woes from 1995-97 (which at one point drove me to thoughts of suicide) reminded me of some of the reasons why I chose to self-publish. I'm not saying negative things about rejection letters; I got those half the time when submitting to MAS-Zine, and I've issued a few of my own at True Tales. No, what drove me crazy about submitting to publishers was two things. One was what sending a manuscript to a print publisher entailed, and the other was the incredibly lengthy wait.

Well, I'm hoping that print publishers have finally caught up with the Internet age and now permit e-mail submissions; if so, I won't have to go through the whole rigmarole again of "print out manuscript, print out letter, sign letter, add paperclip, place in envelope, type out address label, stick on address label and return address and first-class label, type up self-addressed reply envelope, add stamps and return address to self-addressed reply envelope, insert self-addressed reply envelope, type up acknowledgement postcard, insert acknowlegement postcard, tape envelope shut, walk to post office, and stand in line." But the response times are probably just as bad now, if not worse.

I also really, really hate the editing process, not because I hate being edited but because I want the final word on editing changes, and publishers aren't usually willing to permit that to authors. And I suspect I will hate (though I've never gone through this) the whole "author image" deal, because I'm just not a poster child for marketability.

On the other hand, having one of my books illustrated and stocked in libraries would be fun. And getting an advance on royalties would be nifty. So I'll undergo this trial and hope it doesn't blow up in my face.

Next year, though. I don't have the eyesight to do the necessary market research at this point in the year.

4) When putting together the recent hurricane issue of True Tales, I asked and received permission to reprint an essay written by a heterosexual dominant. I was a bit hesitant about that, because usually I only publish gay content in the e-zine, but this was a really good essay that was relevant to the issue's subject matter, so I published the article.

Turns out that the author is a fellow member of the Doms' Auxiliary of my apprentice's leather club. He has actually met my apprentice and (once he'd figured out the connection between us) had nice things to say to me about Jo/e.

Honestly, the "six degrees of separation" theory just doesn't work in the leather community. The degree of separation is more like two.

*** 4 October 2008. Writing: Kindle sales figures for June to September.

My September Kindle report came in, so I totted up the total sales since June. (Amazon dumped my sales figures before that date when it changed over to a new accounting system; I have the pre-June sales jotted down somewhere, just not handy.) Here's how many copies I've sold, in order of publication:

Bard of Pain (published last year): 1.
Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers (published in May): 6.
The New Boy (published two weeks ago): 2.
First Lesson (published a few days ago): 1.
Coded Messages (published today or yesterday): 1.

For a grand total of eleven copies, or $12.25. Woohoo!

*Ahem*. Keep in mind that my last staff job consisted of spending three hours each week listening to boring city council meetings, then spending another two or three hours preparing a news article. For this, I was granted the high compensation of ten dollars per article.

Getting twelve bucks for stories I'd otherwise be giving away only for free is sweet by comparison.

Still, I'm hopeful that, as I get more e-books published, I'll be earning more than four dollars a month. (Well, yeah, I hope my sales per title don't decline.) Certainly the early sales figures for this fall's e-books are encouraging - one or two copies sold right off the bat for each title. (Please don't tell me about your e-books that sold two hundred copies in the first month. I know all about them.) And I hope I can get paperbacks out next year, because that seems to be where the real money is to be found.

(That makes it sound so greedy. I also want paperback editions for my really nice readers who have been asking for them.)

Later:

Sold another e-book tonight. That's three e-books in four days. I think it's because I currently am hogging the "new releases" page of the gay fiction section.

*** 5 October 2008. Writing: Reading original slash and DAISY/braille books.

I see that Manna has a new Administration book out. Alas, I can't read standard-sized print at this time of year, so I've put it on my wish list for next summer. (I found this out from someone's LibraryThing catalogue. It's a wonderful resource.)

In the meantime, I've resubcribed to Bookshare.org. I'd let me subscription lapse last spring because of my household's financial difficulties, but I found that I couldn't survive without it. Also (this is the frustrating thing), I can't check whether the books I donate to Bookshare.org are translated correctly into DAISY, an HTML-like format for visually impaired readers. (There's no way for me to check the braille editions, alas - at least, not without actually buying the editions - but if the DAISY edition is okay, then the braille edition should be.) Since I've been donating my own books, I want them to be correct, darn it.

Got a scene of "The Breaking" proofread today, but I'd rather have gotten two scenes proofread. I'm behind on my October schedule, alas.

*** 5 October 2008. Mentoring: Seminars for my apprentice.

I wrote to my apprentice that I would be assigning him readings that we could discuss. (I got the idea from a FetLife woman who had assigned her boi readings and reports. Me being a St. John's graduate, my idea of what to do after reading a book is talk about it.)

I asked my apprentice for his thoughts on the plan. His response:

o--o--o

My Mentor,

Is SQUEEE!! a thought, Sir?

My main thought, Sir, is "He wants to give me reading asignments -- and discuss them! What a lovely briar patch!"

your academically minded apprentice,

Jo/e

o--o--o

ACTIVITIES SINCE MY LAST DAILY LIFE ENTRY

Fiction written and edited:
--"Pleasure" (Master/Other).
--"Edgeplay in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes).

Fiction edited:
--"Law Links" (The Three Lands) - light editing.
--"Debt Price" (Master/Other) - proofreading and final editing.
--"First Lesson" (Loren's Lashes) - proofreading and final editing.
--"Empty Dagger Hand" (The Three Lands) - light editing.
--"On Guard" (The Eternal Dungeon) - light editing.
--"Edgeplay in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes) - light editing.
--"Mercy's Prisoner 1: Life Prison" (Life Prison) - light editing.
--"Mercy's Prisoner 2: Coded Messages" (Life Prison) - light editing.
--"Mainstreaming in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes) - light editing.
--"Stonewall in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes) - light editing.
--"Rebirth 1: The Breaking" (The Eternal Dungeon) - proofreading.
--"Forge 4: Trap" (The Eternal Dungeon) - light editing.
--"Pleasure" (Master/Other) - light editing and editing in response to beta reports.
--"Bloodplay in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes) - light editing.
--"Work-for-Hire in Mayhill" (Loren's Lashes) - light editing.
--"Anahita" (Darkling Plain) - light editing.
--"Elevator" (Leather in Lawnville) - light editing.
--"Emergency Call" (Leather in Lawnville) - light editing.

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

Fiction laid out and published:
--"Debt Price 2" (Master/Other) - online fiction.
--"Mystery" (The Three Lands) - online fiction.
--"Whipster 1: The New Boy" (Michael's House) - online fiction and e-book.
--"First Lesson" (Loren's Lashes) - e-book.
--"Leather, Licking, and Lawnmowers 5: Pinned" (Leather in Lawnville) - online fiction.
--"Blood Vow 6: The God's Land" (The Three Lands) - online fiction.
--"Mercy's Prisoner 1: Life Prison" (Life Prison) - e-book.
--"Mercy's Prisoner 2: Coded Messages" (Life Prison) - e-book.

Nonfiction written and published:
--Editorial for the September issue of True Tales.

Nonfiction edited:
--"Meta on a Muse."

Cover art created:
--"Pleasure" (Master/Other).
--"Debt Price" (Master/Other).
--"Whipster 1: The New Boy" (Michael's House).
--"Rebirth 1: The Breaking" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Rebirth 2: Love and Betrayal" (The Eternal Dungeon).
--"Mercy's Prisoner 1: Life Prison" (Life Prison).
--"Mercy's Prisoner 2: Coded Messages" (Life Prison).
--"First Lesson" (Loren's Lashes).
--"Mystery" (The Three Lands).

Fiction read:
--Robert A. Heinlein: "Space Cadet."
--Maculategiraffe: "The Slave Breakers" (original slash slavefic).
--Remy: "Northern Corporate Dominion" (original slash slavefic/prisonfic).
--Swordspoint: "Dolls and Seesaws" (original slash slavefic).
--Vingelot: "The Changer" (Harry Potter slash fiction).
--Lucius Parhelion: "Acquisitions and Mergers" (original historic slash).

Fiction/research reading:
--Mack Reynolds: "Ultima Thule" (Analog, March 1961).
--James Blish: "The Oath" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1960).
--Poul Anderson: "Welcome" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1960)

Research reading:
--Peter Guttmacher: "Legendary Sci-Fi Movies."
--Sidney Perkowitz: "Hollywood Science: Movies, Science, and the End of the World."
--Roger Fulton and John Betancourt: "The Sci-Fi Channel Encyclopedia of TV Science Fiction."

Books bought:
--Lucius Parhelion: "Acquisitions and Mergers" (original historic slash).

Films watched:
--"It Happened One Night."

Music listened to:
--Italian and Caribbean music that my uncle sent me.

Places visited:
--Jim Henson exhibit at the Smithsonian.
--County Registrar of Wills.