Dilly of a Month

The last cold snap has arrived, and it’s relatively mild. I needn’t have worried about that early-blooming lilac, though I’m sure if I hadn’t things would have gone quite differently. It’s not a question of individual power but of Murphy’s Law; the older I get the more I begin to think ol’ Murph was a sage who knew a thing or two.

There’s a tradescantia needing repotting, and I have to turn the hangers for the airplane plants so tropism will bring them back t’other way. Playing with potting soil sounds far more appetizing than the other work needing to be done today, so I’m keeping it for a reward. Gamble needs one more pass to tuck in or snip stray threads, then it can go back to the editor; there’s business correspondence to be handled and toads to be swallowed.

I’d rather be writing. That’s a constant, though.

Once Gamble is out the door there are revisions on Chained Knight to go through, then that particular Tale of the Underdark will be ready for the next stage in the publishing pipeline. After that Doom of the Elder needs attention so it can be sent to the editor, which I might not be looking forward to since the series has had such a difficult go of it.

At least I can spend time with Highlands War in the mornings. We’re at the raids leading up to the second pitched battle at the crest of the book’s third quarter; I have the rest of it all thought out but dear gods, this one’s a monster. It will easily be 120-150k words, not bad for epic fantasy, yet I weep when I think of the revising and editing it’ll need. I’m nearly at the point where I don’t want to bring it out for wider publication, but that’s a decision I’ll make when I’m not exhausted and nerve-strung.

I knew April would be a dilly of a month and May will likely be worse. Still, I’ve spent significant time planning–yes, no plan ever survives contact with reality, but the very act of getting contingencies together is indispensable. It’s not so much being prepared as being flexible; the latter is far easier when one has set up a framework, no matter how useless said frames turn out to be in practice. Having something to start with and build on makes the whole thing loads less frightening, even if most of that something has to be thrown out. (A lever and a place to stand, as Archimedes muttered.)

Boxnoggin is basking in a bar of spring sunshine, but his ears are up and he would very much like me to stop staring at the glowing box. There are things to sniff and bark at today; that’s his plan, and often matches reality. The dog’s damn near a master of strategy.

See you around.

Version of Wager

Woke up with Loggins & Messina playing in my head, and Boxnoggin startled a young squirrel or rabbit in the predawn grey. I say or because it appeared long like a squirrel, but it had significant trouble scaling the fence and indeed ran along the back of the yard as if it had forgotten (or never knew) such a thing as climbing existed. So the jury’s out–Box could probably tell me on scent alone, but he can’t articulate and in any case he might just smell “rodent” without differentiating.

It will have to remain a mystery. At least the poor thing was able to wriggle under the fence and escape, hopefully a wee bit wiser.

Yesterday proved a bit of a wash. I had so many grand plans, but the day kept getting nibbled by administrivia. However, I did get the monthly newsletter put together–it will go out later today–and opened up edits on a book without screaming, so that’s something. I’ve clearly processed my fee-fees about said edits, so all that remains is the work. I’d rather be producing new stuff, but I have a glut of things needing attention before they can go out into the world.

The week’s subscription drop is formatted and done up as well–serial and Nest Egg folks get something special–so that was another thing ticked off the list. And I got a combat scene started, stealing time while dinner finished cooking to block out a horse-chase which will end badly for everyone except the protagonist. At least, I hope it won’t end badly for her, but there’s always a risk.

The weather app says there’s a frost advisory for tonight; I just knew we’d have one more cold snap. Today’s walk will be spent praying everything flowering is prepared for the event, and listening to what the bees think. I know better than to presume they don’t sense it coming; they’re wiser than Yours Truly. But maybe the sense that I care will help, who knows?

Some people might take comfort in a soulless, clockwork universe; I prefer mine animate and conscious. It’s my version of Pascal’s wager, I suppose.

Anyway, Monday was the kind of day where all the work is invisible; today should see some visible progress. At least that’s the plan, but in order to get there I need a bowl of gruel and Boxnoggin needs walkies. He’s going to want to investigate the corner where he first saw the Mystery Rodent as we head out, on the faint hope that it will have returned.

I’m hoping it will go bother someone else’s yard. We’ll see what happens.

Old Things New

I did my best to slither into my cave and pull a giant rock over the opening behind me all weekend; last week was weird and I don’t quite know if i should blame the eclipse. Even Boxnoggin was behaving a bit uncharacteristically, though not when a rabbit could be seen.

No, when such things appear, his response is ever the same, world without end, amen and ouch.

Deathwish BunBun appears to be inviting all their friends, and they are not crepuscular now but brazenly hopping about at high noon. This probably means more coyotes coming uphill, and I’m sure everyone’s gardens are going to be nibbled thoroughly this year. The rabbit burrow Boxnoggin found in a fern is now vacated, its inhabitants presumably reached an age where they can wander out and fend for themselves, and all that’s left is a divot the dog keeps sniffing hopefully at, huffing the fading aroma of cottontail.

I’d love to spend today on writing fanfic, but there’s the monthly newsletter to get out (if I can manage it, April is a bit busy) and today’s the drop-dead for beginning revisions. I think I’ll clear Gamble first, so I’ll address that during half my working time today, and whatever’s left will go toward the serial. Our favourite sellsword is in the middle of a raid right now, and it’s a confusing welter of horses, giant boars, and a whole lotta violence. Slowing it down inside my head to pick out salient details necessitates a lot of staring into the distance, of getting up and pacing the office to block out particular movements.

I spent most of Sunday (after household chores and some yardwork were both done) on the couch reading about Taoism while listening, to the first time in my life, to the Grateful Dead. Sure, I’d heard a song or two of theirs on the classic rock stations growing up, but somehow they never stuck in my head. I was startled into laughter when it occurred to me that I’d never really gotten into the Dead before, despite being such a hippie. It’s good to try new things, or old things which are new to oneself.

I was attempting to listen to podcasts all last week during walkies, but I don’t think that will continue. Apparently I need music during that time, so I can noodle out plot tangles and clean up the inside of my skull. It was nice to feel like I was educating myself during that time, but if it detracts from the work I’m going to have to pass. Maybe just on weekends, and I’ll save the weekdays for strolling along with shuffle-play.

Boxnoggin, of course, gets his shuffle through his nose. He’s nearly drunk with spring, and honestly I can’t blame him. The plum and magnolia blossoms are all but gone, cherries and apples in full swing, and the dogwoods have started to leaf out. Our backyard lilacs have awakened and the hops vine is going great guns; there is a lilac already-blooming on our usual walkies route, tucked in a beautiful little sheltered microbiome and not very fragrant just yet.

No matter, there’s time. All I need now is a little rain. Onward we go into the week then, hopeful as always.

Moss and Blossom

Clinging to helping hands.

The weather’s been good for both moss and blossom, which doesn’t often happen ’round these parts. Of course, what with climate change it’ll get more usual.

Yesterday was Movie Night, so the kids and I watched Glass Onion. Benoit Blanc saying, “I’m bad at dumb things,” is going to live in my head rent-free evermore. We had fun all the way through–the Princess had watched it before, so she was busy looking for details, while the Prince was snort-laughing at the savagely funny portrayals of rich folk. The only problem with the movie is that it had to tone down just how bizarre millionaires/billionaires actually are, since fiction must make sense and reality is under no such constraints.

It’s been a week of small victories and some frustrations. I’m trying to take the former while breathing through the latter; the eclipse seems to have jolted some things into place. There’s a busy weekend ahead of me–I want to get to a specific place in the serial before shifting to revise a couple books, and the garage could use a bit of spring cleaning. It’s always something.

See you next week.

Learning Anything

Woke up with P!nk’s True Love playing inside my head–probably a function of thinking about the Valentine series again, since I took yesterday to get the second volume of short stories put together and there’s two Saint City tales in it. I’m going back and forth between having the Cain’s Wife or Hell Wars trilogies as the next serial.

Originally I intended to finish the Valentine series and hop ahead in time a little bit, taking up the story from little Liana Spocarelli’s point of view. The publisher was not into that idea, since secondary character series tend not to do so well, so I shrugged and went on with Jill Kismet. (There’s a couple Kiss stories in the second volume as well.) But I’ve always known To Hell and Back wasn’t the ending–it brings Danny and Japh’s story to a place of equilibrium, yes, but there’s more to the world, you know?

Anyway, that’s a decision for another day. It’s enough that I now have two volumes of short stories to bring out, one this summer and another in December-January, I think. And I have to laugh, because my strategy for recovering from a super intense book hangover was…more work, revising and formatting. Clearly I do not have an off switch. But then, we all knew that.

We’ve almost reached the date I’ve set for beginning the Chained Knight and Gamble revises, too. I’d prefer to just…keep writing, and I will with Highlands War. But I have a glut of stuff that needs to be fixed up for actual publication, so it’s probably best to buckle down and get that done. Putting everything else aside to resuscitate and finish Doom of the Elder was not only intense and health-damaging, but also knocked a great deal of my schedule for the first half of 2024 rather caddywumpus.

Ah well. It’s enough that I’ve renewed my commitment to protecting the work. And honestly what did I expect, making this the Year of the Real? It’s certainly turning into a Learning Experience.

One of the things I used to say when a situation didn’t quite turn out the way one of the kids expected was, “Well, have we learned anything?” The Prince went through a phrase of glowering and nearly shouting, “No!“, and that was about the same time the Princess would simply give me a sarcastic glare. Later, of course, both would quietly admit to indeed learning a great deal, with rueful head-shakes and maybe a laugh.

It’s very difficult to make the parental choice to let a kid FAFO when the stakes are super low, because of course it doesn’t feel low-stakes to them. But now that mine are adults, both are well equipped for certain things because they did indeed Find Out while they were school-age. Working retail puts the finishing touches on such lessons if they’ve been learned before, instead of applying them with ten times the force because there’s money or adult risk involved. All in all it turns out okay, though it wears on both parental and child nerves.

I’ve had to admit that I’m undergoing a few Learning Experiences of my own lately, and the kids find it deeply amusing. Hopefully I’m providing a pattern for them to stay flexible even at an advanced age. (Christ, I feel old these days.)

Today’s for clearing a few bits of correspondence, then turning my attention to an army moving northward into what is properly enemy territory. There’s another pitched battle to set up and a double-cross with a traitor our favourite sellsword is well aware of, that’s going to be fun. And I continue to attempt re-wrapping the insulation on my shattered nerves.

But first, brekkie and walkies. Boxnoggin is rambunctious with the advent of spring, so he requires a longer ramble to wear him out for the rest of the day. Although he is getting older and slightly less enthusiastic–only slightly, mind you. Some dogs go from puppy to dog as they age, others remain pup to the end; he’s of the latter persuasion, with all that entails. Gods love the dopey little furball, because I certainly do.

Off I go.

Spring and a Hot Revision

I’m getting an avalanche of emails and messages from folks wanting me to talk about small and indie presses, more about self-pub, if it’s really so bad in trad, how to get a reputable agent, etc., etc., onward, amen. It’s awful rough out there right now and there is no safe path; there is no magic dingus which will make one a successful author. The idea that there’s a sooper-sekrit handshake or a quick algorithm trick to achieve fame, fortune, and babes on the path of publishing is a poverty tax akin to the lottery–it makes desperate people easier to fleece by holding out a hope that would not be nearly so enticing if our entire society wasn’t straining under the massive, world-eating greed of a few sociopaths. Everything wrong in publishing is a symptom of deeper problems.

The good news is, sunshine and articulation makes solutions a lot more possible; one cannot solve a quandary without knowing its dimensions. The bad news is, it’ll take a lot of collective action to solve a tangle this intractable, and I don’t hold out a lot of hope it’ll happen in any systematic fashion.

I am not pessimistic about publishing, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. (I did Bsky / Mastodon thread on that fact yesterday.) At the same time I mourn for what we’re losing, what we will lose as all this shakes out–whenever that happens. In the end, all I can do is keep working.

Staggering out with Boxnoggin for his first backyard break of the day, I was surprised by the softness of the air. We’re well past the tipping point, it’s abso-tively poso-lutely spring. Maybe the eclipse shook some things loose? We only got twenty percent at totality, and the shadows had funny weight. The birds were going somewhat mad–they knew something was up–and Boxnoggin only settled after the moon had moved to go about its business. The neighborhood cats seemed to be aware of the event as well, quite a few of them prowling in unaccustomed places at unaccustomed hours until ‘it ’twas past.

I can see why ancient folk thought eclipses were celestial anger and anyone who could predict them utterly magical.

Today is probably for cutting an epub of The Highlands War‘s first half for subscribers, as a treat. There’s also a tonne of business correspondence to catch up on and I think I have my rhythm back for the serial. There needs to be another couple dream sequences and then the next battle; soon I’ll be able to move on from this “hot” revision–the type that happens when a book is unfinished but won’t be for long, getting everything in place for the push to the end. Very soon I’ll have another zero draft to my name.

I’m looking forward to it. Of course that will touch off a round of other revisions, since Chained Knight and Gamble were both put on back burners while Doom of the Elder‘s zero got itself settled. And there’s the anthologies to get stuffed through the pipeline as well…

The hell of all this is, I love my job. I was made and born to tell stories, it’s what the gods intended me for. I wish the greed of a few rich folk didn’t make it so bloody difficult. This could be so much easier for everyone–and imagine the explosion of wonderful art we’d have in every direction and format, if that greed were defanged! It would be lovely, wouldn’t it.

In the meantime, I just keep going. There really doesn’t seem much other option, and in any case Boxnoggin wants walkies again so it’s time to grab some toast and get my earbuds.

I’ve got writing to get to.

Barriers in Self-Pub

Well, I ranted so hard yesterday my site temporarily crashed and my mentions are a mess. I regret nothing; it had to be said and I said it.

Someone took minor exception to me remarking that the barriers to entry in self-pub can be prohibitive (though not nearly so much as trad), so I thought I’d start Monday with a few remarks in that direction. Now, that person also made an excellent point that barriers to success are not the same as barriers to entry, and though I think that’s a bit of hair-splitting it’s also undeniably correct. The fact remains that even self-publishing requires tools and know-how, and those tools and know-how are neither common nor universal. Let’s jump right in.

An internet connection. This is so simple it’s often overlooked, but as I have been saying since the early naughts: The internet is not ubiquitous, it just feels like that way when you’re on it. Sure, you can get on wi-fi in coffee shops and libraries if you don’t have home connection, there’s still swathes of the country using dial-up, or you could do everything over mobile data. But uploading a manuscript (or a corrected manuscript) to your distribution platform of choice can get a bit dodgy with dial-up or mobile data, and the time investment of traveling to wherever you can find wi-fi is time that could be spent writing if one had access at home.

Hardware. Believe it or not, some people are too poor for desktops or even secondhand laptops. There are smartphones, of course, and where there’s a will there’s a way–but just think about the brute work of typing 50-60k words for a novel into a smartphone, and let’s not even talk about revisions. You could write longhand and just type the final draft in, I suppose, but again…let’s not even talk about revisions.

Software. Sure, you can use an open-source rich text editor for your drafting and let KDP or D2D format an exported Word doc for you, then slap an MS Paint cover on it. That’s absolutely one way to do it, yep, and the thought of trying it that way is…daunting, to say the least. Yes, there’s Scrivener and it’ll output an epub for you, but doing it that way presupposes you have access to Scrivener as a tool and also the understanding/knowledge of how to get it to compile in that format, then there’s getting an open-source program to proof the result in (say, reading the epub in Calibre and making correction notes in longhand, then updating the Scrivener file and recompiling) and that brings us to another barrier. Right now I use Scrivener for writing and revising, MSWord and Goodnotes for CEs/proofing, Vellum for formatting–and each of those programs required an initial investment of moolah plus an ongoing investment in skill, labor, and updates. Free does not necessarily mean good or labor-saving.

Knowledge. This is a HUGE one. I came to self-publishing already knowing certain basics–editing best practices, proofreader strategies, word processing software shortcuts and formatting foibles, a bit about distribution, big scams to avoid, and most importantly, where to look for other information. This last bit is a skill so basic to certain levels of privilege it can be almost invisible to those who possess it. It’s not about knowing what to do, it’s about knowing where to find a reputable bit of advice that will tell one what to do. By the time I started seriously getting into self-pub I had industry peers I could tap when I had questions as well as access to proven sources of good internet information. (And that was decades ago, so it was uncontaminated by “AI”.) Knowing, for example, that a certain distributor uses Ingram Spark instead of Lightning Source for their back-end POD is useful and necessary, but figuring out that’s something you need to know takes effort and experience.

Time. If you’re working two or three jobs to just barely make rent on a place shared with extended family (born or chosen), time to write, revise, edit, copyedit, proof, find cover art, figure out distribution and pricing, schedule releases, and market is at a premium, or perhaps impossible to find. Even time to research what the latest scams are so you don’t fall prey to grifters is an investment that might not be feasible. This leads into discussion of another barrier…

Energy. Ideally, publishers are supposed to do two things: Provide necessary quality control services (editing, copyediting, proofing, cover art) at economy of scale; and handle distribution/marketing with both economy of scale and pooled resources. Paying a publisher to deal with that stuff frees up time and energy for a writer to do the most important thing–no, not BookTok, for God’s sake, but write. If you already have a dayjob, childcare, and housing instability (or any combination of the above), or if your daily spoons are eaten by microaggressions or disability, a publisher leasing rights to your work could be the thing that allows you to produce any work at all. In self-publishing, you are responsible for not just the writing but the quality control, cover, distribution, marketing–the whole enchilada. Sure, you can skimp on quality control, and that feeds into barrier to success instead of entry, but if the name of the game is to get your work in front of people, well, you kind of want it to look good enough for them to actually read it and come back for more, right? Right?

Now, you might be saying these are barriers to entry in any artistic field or even any industry as a matter of course, and you’d be right. Someone with greater privilege will be able to surmount some of these speed bumps without even noticing they’re there–if one is already on the internet all the damn time, that presumes hardware and a connection, so you’re already two to the good. The barriers to entry in trad publishing are a lot higher, yes, and as I said yesterday, self-pub isn’t quite so difficult but there are still major speedbumps for marginalized folks. While one may start with janky tools and slowly accrete knowledge, skill, and money to invest in better tools while one’s craft and skill also grow, that still requires time and energy one might not possess.

Yes, self-publishing is democratizing to a certain extent. It’s still not a panacea, and not the only answer–though it is a really good one for a whole lotta folks! The barriers in self-pub are lower, not nonexistent. If we threw out the whole tottering, moribund edifice of trad tomorrow, in ten years we’d have it again (albeit maybe not as rot-laced) because pooling resources and economy of scale are both natural human endeavours (part of our heritage as a cooperative species) and a way of surviving under capitalism. A thriving publishing ecosystem would have many big trad houses (not just those counted on one hand), plenty of indie presses, lots of small publishers, and a vibrant section of the industry providing self-pub services at reasonable costs; within all that there would be a multiplicity of ways for marginalized folks to get their stories out without some of the speedbumps above forcing them to give up in exhaustion and despair. Bonus if said thriving pub ecosystem didn’t have to deal with Amazon greedily strangling everything it can while flooding the zone with toxic crap, too.

(While I’m dreaming, I’d love a flock of goats I didn’t have to clean up after. That sounds like fun.)

So, while the person taking exception had a point–especially about the difference between a barrier to success and a barrier to entry–I think a lot of discussion about self-pub falls prey to the bootstrapping myth in both subtle and overt ways, and outright overlooks quite a few things. That being said, I don’t think either that commenter or I are wrong, precisely, we’re just talking at different ends of the problem.

There were other comments I could write blog posts about–I’ve still only scratched the surface of this subject, as someone will make me dismally aware as soon as I press “publish”–but this one’s already long enough and Boxnoggin wants walkies. (Talk about a time investment.)

See you around.