Category: Writing

. . .but has gone downhill in stupid, annoying, and ultimately unimportant ways since.

Doncha hate when that happens?

So!  Allow me to briefly report that Surfside, Moon’s Honor, and Technical Details are now in the Smashwords catalog.  This is entirely due to the expertise and efficiency of Roseanne Girton, who did every bit of the work.

A note about these books:  They are published as ePubs only.  Also!  They, as all Pinbeam Books eChapbooks are DRM-FREE.  This means that they may be read on/with, if not All The Things, then very many of the things.  To wit, and according to Smashwords:  “Apple iPad/iBooks, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo, and most e-reading apps including Stanza, Aldiko, Adobe Digital Editions, others.”

Kindle and Nook readers may of course find these eTitles, and the entire Pinbeam Books catalog at Amazon and BN, where they are also sold DRM-FREE.

In other news, I wrote some words yesterday, and if nothing catches on fire, I’ll write some more today.

Hope everybody’s having as good a Monday as practicable.

* * *

Progress on One of Five

5,020/100,000 OR 5.02% complete

“This is nice,” she said.

“It is,” he agreed. “Would you like some more wine?”

“Trying to get me drunk, spacer?”

“Certainly not.”

“I believe you.”

Things have been happening.  I shall sum up.

Celebrations first!  I am slightly behind in congratulating my colleague Tim Akers on the tenth anniversary of his first professional sale.  In celebration, he’s giving away stories!  And critiques!  And — but go on over and congratulate him yourself.

* * *

In the way of celebrations — I am pleased to announce that Surfside and Moon’s Honor are now available at Smashwords. Technical Details ought to be available by the end of next week.

Regarding the above, please note!

The only flavor of file available from Smashwords, for Surfside, Moon’s Honor, and (coming soon) Technical Details is EPUB. This is because  converting into All! The! Formats! requires a specially-tuned .doc file that I am incapable of producing. (As a further note, I am also incapable of producing the EPUB files; those conversions have happened through the goodwill and expertise of Roseanne Girton, who, in addition to being proficient in these matters, is a saint.)

I do apologize to those folks who want to read their books in their special format, but that’s just not possible with these books, from where I’m sitting.  All of our eChapbooks are DRM-free and can be read on a variety of ereading apps (and your Nook).  Thank you for understanding.

* * *

Today’s mail brought several pleasant surprises, including a new bag that is Significantly Smaller than the red backpack, and which will hopefully curb my tendency to carry All The Things, All The Time.

Also in today’s mail was the last check from Audible Author Services.  This was a nice little program where authors were paid one thin dollar for everyone of their audiobooks purchased from Audible, via quarterly checks.  We’ve sold something over 7,000 audiobooks in the last year, which is nice to know for reasons other than those having to do with dollar bills, though of course dollar bills are very nice of themselves.

I’m going to miss this program.

* * *

On the outgoing side of the page, signed bookplates are speeding on the Wings of Eddie to Forbidden Planet in London.  Which reminds me to say that we received bookplates to sign, yesterday.

* * *

That gets us more or less caught up, I think. I did spend a good chunk of the week changing out my head, which isn’t really as much fun as you’d think.  The time involved made me even happier that I didn’t say, “Oh, sure, we’ll just write a Liaden novel in-between the two Carousel books”  — because omighod, whiplash.

On the other hand, if I hadn’t written two Carousel books back-to-back (and then two short stories based in the same universe), my head might not have gotten Quite. So. Stuck.  I don’t know how my colleagues who have several series going simultaneously do it, frankly.

All of which reminds me to say that…

I started writing a novel.

So!  How was your week?

* * *

Progress on One of Five

2,398/100,000 OR 2.4% complete

“Is there some trouble?” Luken asked her, and almost she sighed again. Such a sweet man, he couldn’t be any more attentive to her if she was paying him. The fact that she wasn’t paying him had the power to surprise her, as did the notion she held of him, as a friend.

But, there, she’d left the man without his answer, and she’d already seen what he was capable of, when he decided that something needed fixing.

So, she smiled at him, and shook her head.

“No trouble. More like I haven’t had enough breakfast to weigh me down to ground, yet.” She broke a roll onto her plate, and reached for the jam pot.

“What were you dreaming, then?” he asked, spoon arrested over his cereal bowl, his eyes on her face.

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Let’s see. . .

Last night, we finished signing the last of the tip-in sheets for Trade Secret; the box containing All Those signed sheets of paper was picked up by Eddie the FedEx guy not 15 minutes ago and is now on its way to the printer in Pennsylvania.

Yesterday, in-between Other Stuff, I scoped out how to adjust the new scanner so I could OCR one of the excavated scenes.  It’s now over on Splinter Universe, with an author’s introduction.  For those interested, here’s the link to the introduction     And!  here’s the link to the first outline for Scout’s Progress.

If there’s any interest in seeing other old stuff like this, let me know.

So, that.

Today, Steve is in town, getting a flat tire fixed and doing errands.  I?  Am doing some vacuuming and dusting, and slaying a dish monster, which I feel is rather unfair, since I slew a dish monster yesterday.

Oh!  “Gift of Music,” by Sharon Lee will be appearing on the Baen front page in January, 2014, in support of Carousel Sun, to be published in February.

. . .I think that’s all the news that’s fit to print.

How was your weekend?

 

So, since I’m working on several projects simultaneously, I need one of those desk files for the various project folders.  As it happens, I actually had one of these, but it was (1) filled with files, and (2) had All Sorts of Crap piled on top of it.

Careful excavation produced a nice metal-mesh file holder, which will do nicely.  I pulled out the dusty resident files, thinking I’d be throwing most, if not all of what was in there.

Ah, no.

What I have here are bits and pieces of scenes, story ideas, word lists — all for the Liaden Universe® and many of which have to still be considered “live” files.  There, I’m in a little bit of trouble, because some of the scenes were printed out on a nine-pin printer — which is what the dinosaurs used to print out their APA submissions — and the ink has already faded to the point that the words won’t scan.  These pages will have to be retyped, in my abundant spare time.

So, a combination of Argh! and Oh, hey! there.

Also, I find handwritten notes, also fading — apparently green ballpoint ink doesn’t have much of a shelf-life — which I will reproduce below.  As with similar incidents/finds in the past, no, I don’t have the least clue at this remove what these have to do with the story bits they were found with.

The following are possibly from the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs.  Either that, or I noted the title of the book in the margin because I wanted to remember to look for it at the library.

Ahem.

Better an old man’s derlyng than a young man’s werlyng.

Better be out of the world than out of fashion.

If you’re born to be hanged, you’ll never drown.

Care killed the cat.

A cat in gloves catches no mice.

A guilty conscience needs no accuser.

So that.

Next up is a single sheet off of one of those pink While You Were Out message pads.  The front — where you would write the message — is not filled in.  The notes are on the back of the page. This ink perhaps started off in life as peacock blue.

At the top of the page, closed off in a parallelogram, it must have wanted to be, is:

ref desk
5600

…which happens to have been the extension number of the UMBC Library’s Reference Desk, often manned by a cheerful and knowledgeable woman named, if memory serves, Sierra.

Below that, carefully printed, is:

Ho bios brachus, he de techne, makre (gr)

Life is short, art is long.
Hippocrates

I also have here story notes, some of which have been written, others of which I suspect will never be written, but if there’s one thing that you learn as a writer is that you never say never.  Also here are the outlines/synopses for the three Jen Pierce books, the lyrics to Shambalya by Three Dog Night, with werewolf story? scrawled in the margin, lists of weird and/or archaic words. . .

Sigh.  I love my process.  It’s so idiosyncratic that three-quarters of the time I don’t know what to make of my notes.

Oh, wait!  What’s this?

. . .

A list of the Houses of Fortune, including Luck, Hazard, Chance, Risk…Oh.  I remember.  That’s a short story…or possibly a series of short stories.

Well.  I’m glad I got motivated to excavate the file holder, but I’m not certain but what most of this needs to go right back where it had been.  Which still leaves me with a need for another file holder.

Isn’t cleaning grand?

Yeah, I’m rereading Creatures of Light and Darkness (by Roger Zelazny, for the six people on the planet who have never heard of the novel), and finding it Even Better than I recall.  Which is tough, because I already thought it was a masterwork.*

I very much fear that this will lead to a reread of Lord of Light (also by Roger Zelazny, which ought to go without saying).

Well.  It could be worse.

I may have neglected to report the arrival of a Rather Large box filled with paper.  We’re to sign the papers, which will then be bound into the signed editions of Trade Secret.  I’m a little anxious about this box.  We were only to receive, according to our last communication with the Baen Managing Editor, 1,000 pages.  This looks to be. . .Rather More. . .than 1,000 sheets, and of course the cover letter, telling us where to FedEx them when signed, makes no mention of how many pages are under cover.

I guess I’ll spend part of my day counting pages.  It’s not that I grudge the work; but I am protective of my hands.

Edited to add:  That would be 6,500 sheets of paper.  No wonder it looked like a lot.

Also on today’s duty roster is laundry, which I seem to have missed doing last week, in-between Whiskers and putting together various chapbooks; and “The Wolf’s Bride,” which is coming along nicely, if I do say myself.

* * *

Progress on “The Wolf’s Bride”

713/5000 OR 14.26% complete

The dogs of the village knew him; and he passed without challenge from forest edge to market street, walking with a predator’s sure, silent tread down the moss-lined way.

 Above, the night-time sky was a velvet stole, across which a handful of jewels had been scattered, winking in bright hues of gold, and green, and blue. It was silent in the darkness, as it never was in the day, when the merrybells sang the sun’s praises. His bones told him that it was mid-night, and he lengthened his stride, then breathed a laugh at his own foolishness.

————

*the title is the beginning of a poem included in Creatures of Light and Darkness purportedly written by the mad poet Vramin.  The entire poem is thus (with apologies to the spacing):

Oh the moon comes like a genie
from the Negro lamp of night,
and the tunnel of my seeing is her roadway.
She raises up the carpet of the days
I’ve walked upon,
and through caverns of the sky we make  our pathway

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So yesterday, I finished “The Gift of Music,” for Andy LaPierre, who y’all will have the pleasure of meeting next year some time.  I seriously have no idea what to do with the story, and said so to Steve, after he read it last night.

“Why not try to sell it?”  he asked.

Which is — wow.  What an idea.  I don’t remember the last time I submitted a story, cold.  Somewhere in the last decade or more it became clear that I wasn’t writing commercially viable short fiction and I just stopped submitting stories.  I didn’t stop writing stories, because…well.  But I did stop submitting.

We did the chapbooks, and of course there’s Splinter Universe (which I fear may not be a viable “market” for this story until sometime next year).

Anyhow, I’ll think about that. . .a little later.  Today, I have a pile of chores before me, having chosen to devote yesterday to getting Andy out of my head.  I also have a full-blown summer cold, and all I really want to do is lie on the couch and watch endless episodes of “Maverick.”

Or maybe not.

Before I vanish into the Land of Chores, though…I don’t know how many of you follow Ursula Vernon’s blog, where, a couple days ago, she was ruminating on the lack of less-than-bright protagonists in fiction.  Here’s the post. Which I read with interest.  Ursula identifies three “stupid” leads in her post — Buttercup from The Princess Bride, Bertie Wooster from the Jeeves and Wooster novels, and Freddy, from Cotillion — and wonders why there are no others.

Now, after ‘way too much thought, it occurred to me that all three of the characters Ursula identifies are comic characters — The Princess Bride is, after all, a farce; the Jeeves books never pretend to be anything but broad comedy; and Cotillion is definitely one of Heyer’s lighter works (though I must go on record as being at Freddy’s feet).

So, here are my questions:  (1) Can you (yes, you) think of any non-comic novels in which the main character is not extremely bright, or gifted in some manner that makes intelligence into a non-issue?  (2) Do you feel a lack of, in Ursula’s phrase, “good stupid characters” in fiction?

Have at it.

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