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Pseudonyms

Monday, July 2nd, 2012

Charles posted about maybe publishing his Westerns under a pseud, and collected some comments. I started replying, and as often happens, I ended up with a lot more verbage that is usually polite to post on someone else’s blog, especially when I’m coming from the POV of headdesking at what some of the commenters were saying. I’ve also seen similar discussions elsewhere — it’s not just Charles’s crowd — so I’m posting here instead.

There seems to be a line of thought that says that you *should* publish everything under your own name, that if you write multiple genres, then the real readers, or your real fans, or anyone worth considering, will read whatever you write, or at least give it a try and then figure out for themselves which of your genres they like and only buy/read those. Or something. The thought seems to come from some principle of Writer Against the World, or Artiste Refusing to Sell Out, or some similar ego-war where giving in means losing. Or something.

In actuality, this is about marketing. Sorry, I know I just lost all the artistes, and most of the fierce individualists, but I’m talking to the writers who want their work read (and maybe even paid for) by lots and lots of people.

Anecdotal data, collected from a wide range of sources as opposed to just one writer and their close friends, as well as info from the big NY publishers (who do a LOT of things badly, but do have a buttload of marketing trends data) shows that a large fraction of the audience reads only one genre, or maybe two, and does not want to read another genre. I’ve run into people like this who will get angry about feeling OMGTricked! into reading a genre (or subgenre, or whatever) that they don’t like because one of “their” writers (as if they own them) decided to write something different under the same name.

As a reader, I’ll at least try just about anything by a writer I like a lot. So will a lot of other people I know. Strangely enough, most of these folks are writers — people who are just that interested in fiction in general, and who are constantly aware of skill and style and craftsmanship, enough so to be able to appreciate a good story no matter what type it might be. There are many readers, however, who aren’t like us.

Saying, “Well, I personally am different, therefore that’s not true,” or “I know hordes of people (which is actually like six or ten) who disagree with that, therefore it’s not true,” is an argument centered around ego, not data. Sorry, but it’s true. Your or my personal feelings, or experiences with our friends, don’t constitute a valid data sample.

Now, if there’s something that strongly ties your work together — frex., if all your fiction is pulp-style adventure, even if some is Western adventure and some is horror adventure and some is heroic fantasy adventure — then you can build your name brand on that, because your target audience is fans of pulp-style adventure fiction.

If you’re writing deeply scary horror, and rollicking adventure Westerns, and funny-ironic heroic fantasy, though, those are going to appeal to different audiences, for the most part. It’d suck of someone who loves funny-ironic fiction read one of your sleep-with-the-lights-on scary horror stories, and mentally crossed everything published under that name off their list.

This is marketing, folks. It’s about getting your stories in front of the people who’d enjoy reading them, and be willing to hand you money for them. You’re not in a battle of will with your readers, it’s not an ego-fight, and publishing under multiple names doesn’t mean that you lose, or you’re selling out, or you’re letting Those People dictate to you, or whatever. It means that you’re taking action to make it easy for the folks who’d enjoy reading a particular group of your stories to find them. There you go, that’s it.

And depending on what-all you write, it might also be about sequestering one or more of your genres from people who disapprove of those genres and would cross your name off their list because of that. Anything erotic is going to lose audience for your non-erotic adult fiction, and forget about children’s or YA. Even within the same genre, people who write erotic romance and inspirational romance use different pseuds, because writing one will interfere with selling the other.

Saying, “Well, any reader worth having won’t think like that,” is… well, fine. If you’re okay with chopping a chunk off of your target audience, then go for it. But realize that’s what you’re doing, and don’t gripe about how your sales numbers never look like those of your friend with four pseuds, or like the more popular writers in your genres. (Unless you hit the big-time and become the next Stephen King or something, but counting on that is ridiculous as a business plan.)

If you write more than one genre, or more than one subgenre with distinctly different audiences, and there’s no one strong style that ties it all together, give serious consideration to multiple pseuds. This isn’t about ego — it’s about readers and sales. People who think there’s some awesome heroism about being a starving artist sticking to his principles to the end can, well, do that. Me, I want to make it as easy as possible for people who’d like my stories to find them. Using multiple pseudonyms isn’t any kind of failure, or selling out. It’s a tool available to help you achieve your goals. Use it or don’t, but be aware of what you’re doing before you throw away a useful tool.

Angie

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Oatmeal vs. FunnyJunk and Charles Carreon

Monday, June 18th, 2012

Copied from Dear Author, with permission courtesy of Jane.

The Oatmeal is a satiric cartoon site run by Matthew Inman. About a year ago, he noticed that his content was being uploaded without attribution to a site called The FunnyJunk. The FunnyJunk is a site that contains user generated content. This means that account holders post things that they like from all over the internet. Maybe a pre-Pinterest sort of site. The Oatmeal writes to the FunnyJunk requesting that the information be removed.

FunnyJunk took down the comics but proceeded to create a mirror image of The Oatmeal’s website. The Oatmeal responded by asking his readers what to do.

The FunnyJunk responded with a call to action to its own users asking them to inundate The Oatmeal’s inbox and facebook page. The FJ’s users responded in droves using their arsenal of retorts such as gay slurs and incoherently misspelled sentences to insult The Oatmeal and his biological predecessors for having the gall to procreate and, I guess, learn how to spell and draw.

According to Ars Technica, after the furor died down, the FJ admin acted somewhat responsibly, possibly realizing that its site could be in jeopardy due to all the copyrighted material illegally reposted there.

When the flame war finally died down, the FunnyJunk admin issued an unsigned note saying, “We’ve been trying for the longest time to prevent users from posting copyrighted content” and “I’m having all content, comics, comments, etc. with the names of your comics in them deleted/banned by tonight… The site barely affords to stay alive as it is and has enough problems.”

The Oatmeal v. FunnyJunk could have died there in November of 2011, only to be a footnote in internet flamewar history. But no.

The FunnyJunk for some reason came into contact with Charles Carreon, Esq., an attorney who came into national prominence during the sex.com domain name lawsuit. Carreon penned a letter on behalf of FJ, threatening The Oatmeal with a lawsuit for the post where The Oatmeal points out that the FJ has copied his website. Carreon, on behalf of FJ, wants the post to be taken down and $20,000 in damages.

The Oatmeal gets a lawyer and responds back with well worded, backed by research, rebuttal. The Oatmeal also goes on to decide to raise money off this ridiculous situation because so many of his readers want to help but the money isn’t going to Inman, instead he raised money for charity. Initially, he only thought to raise $20,000 for charity but the donations came in thick and fast and in the end, Inman raises over $200,000 which is donated to The American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Federation.

The Oatmeal v. FunnyJunk could have died there on June 12, 2012, only to be a footnote in internet flamewar history and with its own Wikipedia entry. But no.

The situation gains the attention of the mainstream media and Carreon begins to make personal threats. He expresses wonderment and dismay at the internet’s reaction (he calls it bullying) toward his legal demands of Inman and The Oatmeal. He suggests that there might be other legal problems for the Oatmeal such as the fundraiser being violative of IndieGoGo’s term of service.

The internet continues to make fun of FJ and Carreon. Other attorneys make public statements about Carreon’s actions which include statements like “Holy fucking shitballs inside a burning biplane careening toward the Statue of Liberty, Captain! I hope that the reporter merely got the story wrong, because if not, that’s more fucked up than a rhino raping a chinchilla while dressed up in unicorns’ undergarments. ”

The Oatmeal v. FunnyJunk could have died there later on June 12, 2012, only to be a footnote in internet flamewar history, with its own Wikipedia entry, and a few mainstream media mentions. But no.

Charles Carreon’s pride has been wounded. In his delusionary state, he must see that the only way out is to double down on the Jack and the Six (i.e., worse blackjack hand in the deck). He takes the situation to DefCon 5. Last night, Popehat was alerted by another legal watcher that Charles Carreon has filed a lawsuit against The Oatmeal, IndieGoGo, American Cancer Society, and National Wildlife Federation.

He transcended typical internet infamy when he filed a federal lawsuit last Friday in the United Sates District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland. He belonged to the ages the moment he filed that lawsuit not only against Matthew Inman, proprietor of The Oatmeal, but also against IndieGoGo Inc., the company that hosted Inman’s ridiculously effective fundraiser for the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society.

But that level of censorious litigiousness was not enough for Charles Carreon. He sought something more. And so, on that same Friday, Charles Carreon also sued the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society, the beneficiaries of Matthew Inman’s fundraiser.

Popehat is a site run by a bunch of lawyers and they are offering Inman pro bono legal work and they are asking the internet the following:

1. Kevin and I have offered pro bono help, and will be recruiting other First Amendment lawyers to offer pro bono help. It’s not just Mr. Inman who needs help. IndyGoGo does to. So do the charities. No doubt the charities already have excellent lawyers, but money that they spend fighting Carreon (whatever the causes of action he brought) is money that they don’t have to fight cancer and help wildlife. That’s an infuriating, evil turn of events.

2. You could still donate through the IndieGoGo program The Oatmeal set up. Or you could donate directly to the American Cancer Society or the National Wildlife Federation. I like animals, and I loved my mother who died at 55 of cancer, but I have no qualms whatsoever about encouraging people to donate to those causes as part of a gesture of defiance and contempt against Charles Carreon and the petulant, amoral, censorious douchebaggery he represents.

3. Spread the word. Tell this story on blogs, forums, and social media. Encourage people to donate as part of a gesture of defiance of Charles Carreon and entitled butthurt censors everywhere. Help the Streisand Effect work.

4. Do not, under any circumstances, direct abusive emails or calls or other communications to Mr. Carreon. That helps him and hurts the good guys. I don’t take his claims of victimhood at face value — not in the least — but such conduct is wrong, and empowers censors.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part IV from Popehat.

Feel free to copy this entire post and repost it (even without attribution) anywhere you can.

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What’s Up With the Lawsuits?

Sunday, May 20th, 2012

Dear Author’s Jane (who’s a lawyer in her day job) put up a great post about the lawsuits against the publishers and Apple. She explains what’s going on, what the complaint actually is, who’s in trouble and for what, and who’s not in trouble and why. There’s some legalese, but the explanations are clear and very readable. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the business of publishing.

Angie

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More Harlequin Shenanigans

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

Harlequin is the single biggest publisher of romance, which is the single largest genre in the MMPB world. Harlequin has always courted newbie authors, famously taking unagented new writers when other New York publishers were (theoretically) requiring agent submissions more and more. They’re also one of the most predatory of the publishers, and always have been; even when I was poking around on the het side of romance, I never had any aspirations of writing for Harlequin, and what I heard from other romance writers just reinforced that aversion.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I hung out on RomEx, a roundtable on GEnie that was the Romance Writers of America’s (RWA’s) online home at the time, and it was a great place. Lots of readers and writers — both published and aspiring — were members, and there was a lot of talk about writing and publishing, among other things. There were even published writers from other genres who hung out on RomEx because the writing talk was valuable for everyone.

One of the things I learned there was that, at the time, Harlequin’s standard contract included a clause saying that you had to write under a pseudonym, and that Harlequin would own it. What that meant was that if a writer wanted to move on to another publisher, she had to start over with a new name, back in the days when communicating to all your readers that you were now writing under Jane Newname was even more difficult than it is now. This kept a lot of writers tethered to Harlequin, since moving on would most likely mean taking a sharp pay cut while they rebuilt their audience.

I heard a few years ago that Harlequin doesn’t do that anymore. Well, okay, that’s good. I don’t know when they stopped, but the fact that they ever did it was enough to keep me away; corporate culture doesn’t change that much over a decade or two, and a corporation willing to do something that skeevy, even in the past, is a corporation I’d just as soon not do business with.

Then last June, we heard that Harlequin was unilaterally changing royalty rates, notifying its authors via e-mail, and giving them a deadline to reply if they objected. Wow. So Harlequin might not be kidnapping your pseudonym anymore, but they think they can modify every active author contract they’ve got with a single e-mail and nobody’s signature. Umm, sure. Definitely not interested in writing for Harlequin.

Now, Harlequin author Ann Voss Peterson is explaining why she can’t afford to write for Harlquin anymore, despite great sales — one book sold almost 200,000 copies, and she’s never failed to earn out her advance in their first royalty period. And yet she can’t afford to stay with them. It turns out that she’s earning an average of 2.4% royalty on each copy sold.

Two-point-four percent? Seriously? We all know the New York publishers’ royalty rates are predatory, especially on e-books, but Harlequin makes them look downright generous. Click through and read what Ms. Peterson has to say if you’ve ever considered writing for Harlequin, or even if you haven’t. The math is horrifying. :/

Angie, still not at all interested in being a Harlequin author

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Pitching Guest Posts

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

I just got an e-mail from a stranger offering to write a guest post for me. Okay, I’m open to the idea. Except in this case, the pitch letter was very badly written. (A couple of sentences had no period, and one sentence had two periods; maybe he thought they averaged out? plus the plural intro to a singular example, and the fragment that just wandered off into the ether.) Also, the one topic suggested had nothing whatsoever to do with writing or publishing or e-books, my usual topics, nor even about social justice issues, which I also blog about sometimes. It sounded like this person had already written a post on tips for “medical health insurance” (redundant, anyone?) and was sending a generic (badly written) letter to as many blog owners as he could find and hoping someone bit. He said he’d read “http://angiesdesk.blogspot.com” — yes, the full URL rather than the blog’s name — but looking at the topic he suggested, I frankly don’t believe him.

I have to say, I wasn’t at all impressed. I wrote up a critique of the pitch letter and sent it back, because I’m a writer and this guy presenting himself as a writer sort of ticked me off.

A couple of years ago, I got another offer from a stranger for a guest post. This one actually sent me a custom letter, or possibly a generic letter that was well enough written to look custom, which is close enough. We went back and forth in e-mail a couple of times, and I told him that I usually post about writing, publishing, e-books, that sort of thing, and that I’d look at anything he came up with on those topics. I should’ve been more specific.

Again, I got the impression the guy — despite his apparently personal approach and his discussions with me — had never actually read my blog. What I got back a few days later was a post on “E-Books 101,” a sort of, “Electronic books, or e-books, are a rapidly growing phenomenon in the publishing world. An e-book is an electronic media file…” blah-blah-blah, basically explaining what an e-book was and how it worked and cetera, as though writing for an audience who’d never heard of them before.

Umm, no. Anyone who reads my blog knows what an e-book is [cough] and probably knows more about them than this guy did, even after he did his research and wrote the piece. It sounded like he hit Wikipedia or something, then summarized the basics.

After these experiences, the primary advice I’d give anyone who wants to go around pitching random guest posts is to READ THE BLOG YOU’RE PITCHING TO. That should be pretty basic, right? Apparently not.

Know your audience, which is the audience of the blog you’re pitching. Just because a topic is new to you doesn’t mean it’s new to the readers of that blog. Read the blog, see what’s been discussed in the last dozen posts at least, and note the level of discussion. A blog by an electronically published writer, addressing other writers, isn’t going to need an “E-Books 101″ type post; that’s ridiculously elementary for a professional audience. That’s like going to a blog for foodies and pitching an article on the difference between stirring and folding, or a post explaining what truffles are. :/

Write to the level of your target audience. If that’s going to require significant research on your part, then it will; consider that before sending off your pitch.

And if you plan to pitch your writing skills, learn to write first — bad grammar and punctuation in your pitch letter aren’t going to win you any gigs. [eyeroll]

I’m open to guest posts, but I’m not going to loan my soapbox for just anything. As anyone who looks at my calendar list can tell, I’m not exactly desperate to keep up a steady stream of material here. I post when I have something to talk about, and if I don’t then I don’t. I’m okay with that, and I’m not going to post something I don’t think folks who read here will be interested in just to get something up that day or that week. Particularly if I’ve never heard of the writer, I’m going to be pretty choosy about guest material; random pitches, even if well written (which the first one from a couple of years ago was) aren’t going to make the cut.

Angie

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A Step Toward Gay Marriage in Washington

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Per an article in the Seattle Times the Washington State Senate has passed “Senate Bill 6239 [which] defines marriage as between two persons, rather than between a male and a female.” The bill still has to pass the House, which isn’t expected to be difficult.

I’m not celebrating yet. The bigots are lining up to push through a referendum, so we’ll probably be voting on this in November. Like California, Washington has a focused, attention-getting liberal area centered on Seattle and the Puget Sound area, but much of the state, particularly east of the Cascades, is very rural and very conservative. And I’m sure the Mormon Church is getting ready to send money by the truckload for the No-Gay-Marriage campaign, just like they did in California.

Unlike California, Washington won’t let gay couples marry until it’s clear whether or not there’ll be a referendum. “Under state law, opponents have 90 days from the end of the session to collect 120,577 signatures to put a referendum on the ballot. The regular session ends March 8.” If the referendum doesn’t make the ballot, gay couples could start marrying in June. If it does, they have to wait until the results of the November election.

I’m hoping, but I’m not sure or even terribly confident about what’s going to happen. Or rather, I’m sure the bill will pass the house, but I’m also pretty sure the bad guys will get the referendum on the ballot, and I’m not betting on what’ll happen in November.

Bigots are howling that it should be up to the vote of the people, but they don’t seem to remember that segregation wasn’t voted down in the South, and the legal bans on mixed race marriage weren’t voted down either. Or maybe they do, and that’s the problem.

Civil rights are rights and shouldn’t be subject to vote. You shouldn’t be able to vote to take away your neighbor’s rights, and they shouldn’t be able to vote to take away yours. It’s frustrating how many people forget that when the rights belong to someone else, someone they hate, someone they’d just as soon stuff under a rock. (Literally — one idiot in the comment thread to the above-linked article wants to put all the gay people on Alcatraz. [eyeroll])

“Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, argued the measure is a civil-rights bill and that putting it on the ballot would subject the rights of minorities ‘to the whims of the majority.’” Exactly.

Anyway, it’s a step in the right direction. The bill will likely pass the House, and then starting March 8, the bigots will be out stumping for signatures. I’m sure they’ll get them easily, although I’d be delighted to be wrong about that. The real battle will be in November. Good wishes now and in November will be greatly appreciated.

Angie

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But it Was Only One Time…

Sunday, December 18th, 2011

So on Monday I headed over to the Barnes and Noble across the street, laptop bag in hand, to do some writing with Tara, a woman I met through NaNoWriMo this year. I get a lot of writing done at the bookstore, probably because I don’t trust coffee shop internet — it tends to have all the security of a dessicated sponge — so I have far fewer distractions while I’m there. Good deal, right?

Except Monday was the day I was driving the bus over at my publisher’s blog. I figured one time wouldn’t hurt [eyeroll] so when I got there, before getting down to the fiction writing, I wrote up my evening blog post, then went online to post it, and stayed online to watch for comments.

Bad move.

I was online there in the B&N cafe for probably an hour and a quarter, in there somewhere, before I packed it in and went home. All seemed well, but under cover of that seemingly normal activity, malware was oozing through my system, getting a good grip before it showed itself.

All drama aside, I’m assuming something infected on to my system, then received some sort of activation order a couple of days later. Or heck, maybe it did take that long to get ready to pounce, I don’t know. But a couple of days after, I started hearing weird noises, like the sounds the system makes when it finishes something, or runs into a problem. Except there was nothing going on, just the noise.

Then on Thursday night, I was reading e-mail (an advertising thing from an e-book store) and suddenly a new window popped up, something about men’s health. I was all, WTF? :/ and some perky voice started babbling. I closed the new window, but the voice kept going. So I figured the window had been one thing, but the soundtrack was just a coincidental thing, from some auto-play ad on another page. So I scrolled up and down the ad-mail I was looking at, hunting for the video, but there was nothing — just the usual static ads for books. I clicked on the other windows that’d been minimized and checked all of them too, but nothing. The soundtrack was just babbling on. So I figured, well damn, I’ll just wait till it’s done. Except it didn’t finish. :( It just kept babbling on and on, like a freaking infomercial or something. I had to shut down my browser to get rid of the blathering commercial soundtrack.

I restarted the computer just for the heck of it, opened the browsers again, and was going along reading the usual stuff, and every now and then it’d pop up an extra window. I killed most of them before the graphics all loaded, and I never got another ghost soundtrack, but something was clearly borked. I ran the security program I had on there, AVG, but it didn’t turn up much. I even updated Firefox — and I hate updating stuff, because things I like and am used to always vanish or break — and restarted again. I was still getting periodic windows popping up on their own.

I told my husband, who’s a computer geek at work and handles stuff like this professionally, about it when he got up, and after he got to work he poked around and sent me links to some other free security programs. I downloaded Panda, which looked good and Jim said was well thought of, and ran that. It hopped online to update its virus database thing, and… froze. [headdesk] Even CTRL-ALT-DEL didn’t work; I had to do a crash-shutdown with the power button. Started up again, started Panda again, and it started running. About 45 minutes later, it was 12% through and had found like 78 infected files. By then it was way past my bedtime, so I figured it wouldn’t need me for a while, and I left it running while I went to bed.

Jim got out the flamethrower when he got home and fiddled with it for a while. He said something in there wouldn’t let him load the page for Microsoft updates, so clearly whatever was in there was programmed to defend itself. (And that was after he’d run Panda through it for a second time.) He deleted Firefox all together (I’d saved my bookmarks before I went to bed, on his advice) and downloaded a fresh copy. The bottom line, though, is that I don’t trust my laptop anymore; if there’s something in there that can prevent my updating my OS, then it’s got to be deep and a fresh browser — even switching to another browser — likely wouldn’t get rid of it. Add to that the fact that it’s six years old and the touchpad/mouse button thing is starting to wear out in a weird way which seems to be partially hardware and partially software, and that its weight — while giving it a full size keyboard and a nice big screen — is harder on my joints than is used to be, and I had to agree it’s time to abandon this sinking ship.

I backed up my writing before I went to the coffee shop on Monday, and I did another backup of everything I want to save off the old laptop (onto a different flash drive, so in case the infection snuck aboard, I’ll have a clean copy of my writing at least) and have (mostly) switched over to another, newer and lighter, laptop we bought when we moved, so we’d both have something to work on simultaneously while we were living in hotels and most of our stuff was in storage.

I don’t like it. It has Windows 7, which I’ve been resisting (I never had Vista, either; I was still using XP and perfectly satisfied with it) but am now forced to deal with. I’m also fully updated on Firefox. Both have points of suckitude that are annoying me, but upgrading always sucks so I’ve been grumpily aware that it was coming. At least my bookmarks transferred over just fine. The plus side is that I’d been “temporarily” using IE as my second browser ever since the whole edema thing forced me onto the laptop most of the time, and I didn’t have any significant bookmarks there. I’ve been planning to try Chrome for a while, and that should be a relatively painless transition; at least I don’t have to worry about it eating my bookmarks.

The smaller laptop is smaller, with a keyboard that I keep wanting to put my hands down on one key to the right of where they should be. The screen is smaller, which is very annoying, and it also has a very narrow optimal viewing angle, so it goes dark and fuzzy if you’re not Right There in front of it. And its touchpad is less sensitive than the old one, which gets frustrating.

It’s not infected, though, so I’m dealing. And I’m not logging in from Barnes and Noble again, like, ever. :(

Anyway. Don’t use coffee shop wireless.

Angie, who’s going to be grumpy for a while

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Michigan’s Anti-Bullying Legislation

Saturday, November 5th, 2011

Another example of why I love Jim Hines. Michigan is working to pass an anti-school-bullying law that has a specific exception in it for religious bullies:

THIS SECTION DOES NOT PROHIBIT A STATEMENT OF A SINCERELY HELD RELIGIOUS BELIEF OR MORAL CONVICTION OF A SCHOOL EMPLOYEE, SCHOOL VOLUNTEER, PUPIL, OR A PUPIL’S PARENT OR GUARDIAN

Wow. So if you can sincerely tell a kid that his two dads are going to burn in hell, that’s just fine, carry on.

Click through the link above to read the whole thing. My favorite part is Jim’s summation at the bottom:

1. Bullying is not okay. Period.

2. Freedom of religion does not give you the right to physically or verbally assault people.

3. If your sincerely-held religious beliefs require you to bully children, then your beliefs are fucked up.

Especially number three.

I’ve added the whole set to Goodreads quotes; feel free to like it if you’re on Goodreads and you agree.

Angie

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October Stuff

Monday, October 31st, 2011

Words: 27,412 = 12 pts.
Submissions: 2 = 2 pts.
TOTAL = 14 pts.

Koala Challenge 9

Awesome writing this month, and hopefully I’ll do better for NaNo. [crossed fingers] Twice as many subs as last month [cough] but still waiting on several slow markets.

One more new thing that happened just today (okay, yesterday — pre-midnight) was that Google forced the Google Reader (which I use to read RSS feeds) into their new format. Which is fine, I like the old look better but whatever, except that you can’t just “like” a post now. You have to “+1″ it via that Google+ thing, which attaches your real name to it. :/ And like an idiot, I actually put my real name when I created the account, way back when only you saw your account information. I don’t particularly want my legal name to be attached to everything I do online — I write under my pen name for a reason — so I can’t help promote people’s web posts anymore without outing myself. Lovely.

I followed the brangling over Google’s refusal to allow pseudonyms a few months back when they started up Google+, but it was academic at the time. I agreed that Google’s making a huge mistake (and a distastefully self-righteous mistake at that) but since I had no interest in using Google+, it didn’t affect me. Well, now it does. Wow, thanks Google. :/

On the writing front, I’m doing NaNo this month, for the first time since 2008. In ’09 and ’10 I was working on large projects in November that had less than 50K words left to go and I didn’t want to derail them to break off and do NaNo, maybe losing momentum, so I just skipped. This year, I’m this close to finishing the second Sentinels novel, like maybe two more chapters after the one I’m on, and I’ve been in a great writing groove, so I figured I can do both. That is, my NaNo book this year will be the third Sentinels novel, which I’ll be starting as soon as I’m done here, but I’ll be finishing the second one at the same time. I figure it shouldn’t take more than a week or maybe two [crossed fingers] even working around my 1667/day on Book Three.

I’m thinking this should work well because:

1) I’m used to switching back and forth between projects; that’s how I keep writing when I’m blocked on a project but not on writing all together
2) The books are related, taking place in the same verse, and with some overlap characters
3) They’re even mostly concurrent, since most of the gang heads up to Seattle a few chapters into Book Two while Manny (the protag of Book Three) stays home to hold the fort and has an adventure of his own.

So it’s almost like writing one book anyway, right? We’ll see. :D

Anyone else doing NaNo this year?

Angie

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Going Visiting

Monday, October 10th, 2011

I did a Q&A session with writer Giselle Renarde, and the post has gone up on Giselle’s blog. I got to talk about writing, reading, piracy and DRM, and the unfortunate existence of way too many bad BDSM books. Come join the conversation. :)

Angie

Posted in chat, Issues, Writing | Comments Off

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