An embarrassment of half-assed riches

See, the thing is, I keep getting these great ideas to blog about, but then I get distracted and they don’t gel and I have about 6 half-written posts in my drafts folder that kinda sorta mean something to me now, but not really. Prepare for leftovers, kiddies, because mommy’s tired and she doesn’t want to cook dinner.

Re: Ann Herendeen and Phyllida

This is what’s apparently called “good” gossip. I shall take the liberty of bragging.

Eric Selinger, a professor at DePaul University, who also contributes to some romance blogs, including Teach Me Tonight, has invited her to be a panelist on a conference next spring at Princeton University, along with Pamela Regis, author of A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, a History, and Joey Hill. Selinger is also teaching Phyllida in two graduate seminars, this summer and in the fall.

Also, Ms. Regis will be referencing her in a chapter she’s writing on Women’s Genre Fiction for The Cambridge History of the American Novel.

The woman’s a groundbreaking juggernaut, I tell you. I’m like Smart Bitches with Ferrets.

Re: The Proviso‘s followups

I think I mentioned before that this is the first of a series. Well, it’s not. It’s more like a family-and-friends saga.

Right now I’m working on book #2, which is titled Stay. It’s the story of Knox’s wards, Vanessa and Eric. You won’t get too far into The Proviso without reading a little about Vanessa, and Eric is mentioned not long thereafter, though Eric has more face time in The Proviso.

I’m also deep into book #3, Magdalene, which is the story of Mitch, who has no face time in The Proviso, but is somewhat significant to one of the characters and is mentioned a lot. He’s a widowed Mormon bishop busy tending his ward and running a business and keeping his 17-year-old son on track, and then he meets Cassandra, whose prior profession is, well, the world’s oldest. Teh sparks. Let me show u dem.

Re: “Self-Publishing”

I am henceforth and forthwith going to refer to it as “independent publishing.” I set up my own publishing company. I bought my own ISBNs. I got my Library of Congress Cataloging Number. I got my cataloging info to put on my copyright page (oh, Librarians, I did this for you, my loves). I paid an editor! to edit my book. And hey, all you Mr. PageMaker Publishing Persons out there, I’m using Word to typeset. Bite me (but only in the nicest way!). And no, I will not be using Garamond or Palatino, thankyouverymuch.

April Hamilton does a very nice job as ambassador for independent publishers and she has a point when she says that independent artists and musicians and filmmakers don’t seem to feel the same industry shame at “self”ing anything. In fact, “indie” as applied to the aforementioned is a tag of distinction and diversity.

Re: eBooks

Y’all know this is my pet theme. I would feed it if it had fur. There’s just way too much information going on in eBookWorld right now to disseminate by myself or what I think is important about it. But a few things have caught my eye recently:

1. During Tor’s book giveaway, I noticed they have one book in the .epub. It’s a graphic novel and so bravo!

In case you don’t know, which you probably don’t and that’s okay because this is the only time in my life I’ve been an early adopter of anything, ebooks come in all sorts of formats. This is no VHS/beta situation. This is a VHS/beta/and 16 other ways of buying and viewing movies with attached machines that may be obsolete tomorrow situation.

The .epub format is hoped to be the .mp3 of electronic books; that is, it’s open source and elegant, so it has the greatest flexibility of all the other formats to explode eBookWorld. The hope is that there will come along a slew of ebook reading devices whose native format is .epub and/or that the device can decode the .epub format and turn it into its native language–across the board. I don’t have an iPod; I have a Rio Karma. But it still reads .mp3 files.

2. I’ve been sitting here wondering when the iBooks store is going to open. Huh. Guess Jobs really does think people don’t read anymore… Bastard.

3. The dude at PersonaNonData thinks each ebook format should have its own ISBN. Poor Elizabeth Burton over at Zumaya is swimming upstream there, but I’ll tell you what, Ms. Burton, if it becomes an issue, pack all your formats into a .zip file and slap an ISBN on that. Right now, the standards don’t require one per format, but if it does, you can see small publishers taking the hit. Unless, of course, they take my suggestion.

4. And as always, my personal gripe about DRM. Stop it already.

Re: LDS fiction. Again. Go away.

It won’t die. The term “LDS fiction” has been defined by the consumer. It is its own genre. Live with it. You’ve been pwn3d.

Either write/publish in it and slap the label on it or write/publish out of it and get it into the mainstream. As I said in my penultimate post on the LDS Publisher thread, mainstream genre/literary readers are going to be a lot more forgiving of characters being LDS and/or being informed by an LDS worldview (and oh, hey! you get the culture out there into the social consciousness!) than LDS readers are going to be of LDS characters who don’t conform to a rigid morality…

…which is its own little irony right there, forgiveness. Yes, it’s true. We LDS are very forgiving. When you act like we think you should.

Re: Sex

Heh.

3 thoughts on “An embarrassment of half-assed riches

  • August 4, 2008 at 2:31 am
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    Re: me and Phyllida: Thanks for doing my bragging for me! Just hope it’s not premature.

    Re: Your independent publishing status: Congratulations. Hope it’s the beginning of something big.

    What I admire most about you is that there’s no envy. You seem genuinely happy for my (modest) success, even while recognizing that so much of what happened with Phyllida was simply luck. I consider it a Cinderella story. Some people looked at my print-on-demand book and saw only the ashes and the rags. But a few people saw the beautiful woman underneath, the potential consort for a prince.

    I don’t know how much groundbreaking I’ve really done, but there was a lot of copy editing.

    Many thanks for your support and good wishes.

    Reply
  • August 4, 2008 at 7:44 am
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    That so flippin ROCKS about Ann and Phyllidia.

    And Ann, don’t let the sour grapes suckers get you down. Yeah, yeah, luck. But you sat in that chair and typed that baby out, no? Not so much on the luck thing then. It’s hard work making that idea leap onto the page. I can’t wait to read it myself, but my book budget has been nommed up by kids who need books for homeschooling. 🙂 But I’ll get it soon! I actually can’t wait!

    Reply
  • August 4, 2008 at 8:03 am
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    Ann, I have my share of lime moments over other people with different issues, believe me, but what you’ve done helps me and the rest of us out here swimming upstream, essentially alone. Your success is mine, even if only symbolically. It gives one hope that when editors and agents say, “We want something different,” they really mean it. It gives one hope that things of quality get recognized and sifted out from the dreck.

    And yes, it is groundbreaking; otherwise, there wouldn’t be academics knocking on your door at all hours of the night. 😉

    Reply

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