Blog Without A Name

1. There seems to be some disagreement about whether the Komen Fund has actually promised to re-fund Planned Parenthood. Sure they did. No, they didn’t

2. The bills for the Great Ankle Debacle have landed. Now, my wallet’s sprained.

3. Unfortunately — but fortunately! — yesterday (aka, before #2 landed) Steve was alerted to a sale at Tiger Direct, and I now have a 7-inch, 32-gig Galaxy Tablet winging its way to me.

4. Yesterday, was the Day of Reading for the 2012 Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest. Today, is the day of cleaning up the house, followed by date night.

5. We have so far earned $48.50 for Planned Parenthood through sales of the cChapbook The Cat’s Job. Proceeds from the February sales of that eChapbook will be donated to Planned Parenthood. To cut out the middlecat and donate directly to Planned Parenthood, follow this link.

As many of you read, the Susan G. Komen group has withdrawn financial support from Planned Parenthood.  The support was for the purpose of providing breast cancer screenings for poor women, and for various educational programs.

There’s an argument about why this has happened.  Planned Parenthood says that the Komen fund has knuckled under to political pressure.  The Komen folks say they have a policy! not to fund any organization under Congressional investigation.

This is not about that argument.

The point here for Steve and me is that this move means that breast cancer screenings have suddenly been made unavailable to a large number of women, when early detection is key, and through no fault of their own.

So, here’s what we’re doing.  For the month of February, all income received from The Cat’s Job ebook will be donated to Planned Parented, in Hexapuma’s name, specifically for the breast cancer screening program.

Here’s your links:

The Cat’s Job on Smashwords
The Cat’s Job on Nook
The Cat’s Job on Kindle

To Donate Directly to Planned Parenthood, right now, no gimmicks, go here

Well, so.

My intention was to get the rest of the. . .junk. . .off the floor of my office and into its proper place, be it another room, or the trash can.

Didn’t get there.  Instead, I filled out some more forms, did some laundry, put all the 99 cent electronic books back up to $2.99 and the $2.99 book back up to $4.99, was cranky in silence about outstanding emails to Various that haven’t been answered yet and it would really be nice if any one of these three things would get resolved, argh, and will shortly go off and do the dishes before sitting on the sofa and starting to read Necessity’s Child.

Well, at least the taxes are done.

I guess I’ll move “clean up office” over to tomorrow’s to-do list.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about off and on is the responses to the issues of copyright and piracy.  A couple commenters mentioned — sapiently — that publishers are shooting themselves in both feet by operating under the default assumption that their customers — or at least the greater number of their customers — would rather steal a copy of a book than buy a legitimate copy.  And so we have DRM, and boneheaded proposals like SOPA.

One idea put forth was that publishers should ally themselves with their customers to fight piracy.  This sounds like exactly what should happen, but — I’m having a hard time envisioning how that would work.

Does anybody have a Plan, a Vision, an Idea about what this collaboration would look like?

 

Today is catching-up-with-paperwork day.  I’ve got things to mail, forms to fill, more forms to fill, and emails to answer.  The first session has been completed, and I’m taking a coffee-and-blog break before I dive in again.

In the realm of Real Work, I’ve finished reading Dragon Ship and feel that I have a good grasp on the story.  Necessity’s Child (the book formerly known as George), to the extent that it exists, is loaded on Paladin the Nook, awaiting my reading pleasure.  And! I woke up this morning with a title for the story commissioned for the Baen website and the beginning of an idea of How It Might Go.

I also woke up this morning on the edge of a dream where I was a guest of President and Mrs. Obama in their summer house next door to the Bangor Public Library.  I wasn’t the only guest; there were quite a few, because the BPL, which had many years ago been given custody of Stephen King’s computer, which. . .stopped functioning in some way that precluded him from recovering the stories on the hard drive had! finally! broken those stories free!  and six new Stephen King novels were about to be unleashed onto an unsuspecting world.  Quite naturally, they were throwing a party, though not at the Obama’s house, which would be too small to hold the crowd, but across the river in Orono, at the Event Center.

Stephen arrived and we all got on buses, finding piles of party clothes in the foyer of the Event Center.  I found a shirt I quite liked, put it on and went in to party, but was stopped by a young man who offered me my choice of several different outfits.  “Well, but I kind of like this,” I said.  “Yes, ma’am,” he said softly, “but that’s Steve’s shirt.”

…and on that note —

Back to the paperwork!

Dragon Ship manuscript, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (e)
Kim, Rudyard Kipling (e)
Regency Buck, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Pollyanna, Eleanor H. Porter (e)
Chimera, Rob Thurman (e)

Very much worth a read: Juliet E. McKenna talks about copyright, piracy, and free speech.

It snowed yesterday. Then, it sleeted (slet?). Finally, it rained. And the wires froze, and we lost power for a couple hours during late night/early morning hours. This morning — bright, blue, and crispy — we have power, but everything is coated in ice.

*crosses fingers for the continued flow of electricity into the Cat Farm*

News around the house has been light. Work on the taxes goes forth, slowly, as work on the taxes tends to go when performed by someone who can’t actually add.

We had some excitement issuing DMCA notices for forty-one separate titles to a new pirate site which has set itself up as a kind of subscription book club. All you have to do is give them your credit card number, they’ll charge you $15/month to download all the “free” books you can eat. Such a deal, right?

Except none of the books on offer are legitimate copies, which means the authors get no royalties.

So, anyway — this is amusing, in a black sort of way — I got a note back from these nice folks, assuring me that my titles have been removed, despite the fact that my take-down notices were “incorrectly formatted” and stating that eBookr takes the DMCA “very seriously.”

Which they obviously do.

What they clearly don’t care very much about are the rights of legitimate copyright holders. Which makes them no better nor worse than a coalition of universities, I guess, and rather more polite when found out, too.

In other news, Steve has unfortunately come down with Teh Crud. I’m hoping to dodge it, myself. I’m also hoping not to have to wear the walking boot to Boskone.

Today, I really must read Dragon Ship, which I haven’t done yet, because — see taxes, above.

Fans of Mozart and Scrabble will naturally wish to know how they weathered the long separation.

Scrabble had a rough time of it, what with supervising the cat sitter, and Mozart, too. She was very happy to see us, and immediately fell in to an exhausted stupor from which she occasionally rouses herself to take a few crunchies and a sip of water, and to assure herself that Steve and I are towing the line.

Mozart is being very clingy. Apparently a week’s separation is Too Long anymore. He began to complain to poor Mary sometime on Monday evening and continued, more or less non-stop, even after we got home on Wednesday (apparently the auto-bitch app takes a while to cycle into shutdown. I’ve actually found this myself, regarding auto-bitch — a note to developers.)

I am, alas, still behind on email. Patience, grasshopper.

And that? Is the news that’s fit to print.

How’s by you?

So! Back in Maine. Yay!

Chattacon was awesome. We had fun! We hope everyone who was there had fun, too! It was great to have breakfast with attending Friends of Liad, and to hang out with fellow guests Laura Anne Gilman, Rachel Caine, and John Picacio.

I bought a. . .sculpture from Kevin Dyer. It’s hanging on the wall above my computer screen, so I can admire it often.

Speaking of eye-candy — Toni did us the kindness of bringing a blow-up of the cover for Dragon Ship; it’s just. . .wow. I’m just hoping the book can live up to the art.

Speaking of which, today, I’ll load Dragon Ship onto Paladin the Nook so I can read it and therefore gain an understanding of what the story is actually about, but, for the most part, today is going to be about going through the paper mail, paying bills, and sorting email.

If you sent me an email, please do be patient; I downloaded about 1200 pieces, and even with throwing away half that leaves, um…Quite A Lot to deal with, and my first priority is!

Getting the taxes together for the accountant, who needs them before we go to Boskone. My former employer has unexpectedly provided my W2 already!, so I may be able to finish my part of All This Stuff this week. That? Would be good.

There, now; that’s caught me up; what’ve y’all been doing while I was away?