It was nine in the morning, on a cold and rainy night

With Steve’s connivance, Binjali got to his state inspection today. The shop boss called me mid-morning to say that “The Subaru passed inspection.” But! “There’s a pretty major leak in the tranny line. We can replace the line if you want; cost about twenty, twenty-five dollars.”

I do love a system where a car can pass its yearly inspection, but still have a ruptured transmission line. I gave my permission to proceed with the needed repair and after work I settled my honest debt, picked up the car and drove home.

Once at my own desk, I undertook to compile Two Tales of Korval: Adventures in the Liaden Universe® Number One for uploading to Smashwords, which took about an hour and a half, working from an html file. In order to convert it to a document acceptable to Smashwords’ Meatgrinder, all the code has to be stripped out, which isn’t exactly hard, but is time-consuming, most especially the part where you have to delete the html code for itals and put in the Word itals. And then going through the document one word at a time to make sure that you haven’t missed any < or >.

Be that as is, Two Tales is now available on Smashwords, for them what indulges.

The ironic part of this whole exercise is that we went with Smashwords so that they could do the hard work and distribute to Apple. It would, however, appear that our publications, even meatground and verified do not meet Apple’s Stringent and Exacting Standards for publications it will permit to be listed in the iBooks store. Some things? Are just too much trouble.

I know I said I’d put the unbound copy of I Dare up on eBay last week. Time got away from me, and that didn’t happen. Now, it just seems reasonable to wait until after the upcoming US high holiday — Memorial Day, celebrated Monday, May 30. Watch this space for an announcement that the auction has gone live.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of thought on how to design the delivery of the linked short stories I talked about here a little while ago. Serializing a novel is fairly straightforward — you write a chapter, you post a chapter; when the chapter earns its piece of the action, or the next posting day arrives, whichever comes first, you lather-rinse-repeat.

Short stories seem to be something different. It’s my impression that, for web serialization, one must publish something at least once a week to keep reader interest, and I’m pretty sure I can’t sustain an output of a short story a week for very long before my brain explodes.

I’d thought of just writing a short story a quarter and publishing it directly to Nook/Kindle/Smashwords (hmm; not sure Smashwords allows single short story publication — must check), but that would leave folks who are looking for a serialization out in left field.

Anybody have any idea how a series of short stories would work as a web serial? I know some authors have taken subscriptions and mailed the story when complete to subscribers. This also doesn’t seem to be completely satisfactory, but I could be wrong.

So! Brainstorming session’s open! Who’s got something to say?