A couple of articles caught my attention lately, one courtesy of Hippo tech columnist (and old writer buddy of mine) John (Jack) Andrews (who's over on twitter as @citizenjaq). Jack tackles the whole LCD vs. e-ink phenomenon that's happening as tablets get more and more popular. I've expressed my preferences here before: I don't like to read on an LCD screen if I can avoid it. It takes something that really captivates me to get me to sit and read it in full on my computer screen. Before I got my nook, I'd print out a manuscript or e-galley to read. (Having read physical manuscripts for this year's Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards, I can safely say it's something I hadn't missed!) Before my nice little, one real function e-ink device, e-books were a pain. Now? Love them! I'm actually buying them preferentially these days, in part to save on shelf space and in part because they're easier.

But I get that the multi-function tablets are the wave of the future. I suspect that a tablet, or a tablet's successor, will eventually replace my net book, since they give the appearance of being better at the things the I had understood net book was designed to be good at (eg. streaming media). Jack's article gives me some hope for the e-ink resurgence, though -- and, as I've posited before, it may depend on getting that color e-ink working.

Given the way my e-book reading pattern followed my purchase of a device, the other article that caught my eye didn't surprise me, but it did make me stop to think for a moment. Gideon Spainer at the online London Evening Standard shows how the release of new devices creates a huge uptick in e-book sales. He seems to be cautioning that e-book sales depend on these new devices being released -- and, given the attitudes about technology that consumers tend to have (i.e. new gadgets are shiny!), I think he's partly right.

But I also think the chart in the article that shows these sales figures has a general shape of going upward. Even if no new devices were released (not likely to happen, given that B&N is shipping their new touchscreen e-ink nook today, according to their press release as covered by SlashGear), e-books are still selling more copies than they were in 2007. Maybe the upswing in sales isn't as much between nifty new products, but the general trend is still an increase -- and I don't think that's likely to change any time soon.

So, ages ago, Danielle Poiesz, whom I met over at Pocket After Dark, invited me into a sooper sekrit project. Never one to turn down something sooper sekrit, I was eager for more information -- and what I discovered was Book Country. The idea behind the site is creating a community of writers -- from aspiring to published to bestselling -- and other publishing professionals, where these folks could interact, particularly by reviewing each other's work. The launch for the closed beta hit shortly before I got extremely busy with doing work for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards and reading the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award nominees, and I've not devoted as much time to reading other people's work there as I've wanted to. I'm hoping that this week will be the week I get back to the site and give my own critiques back, as I've received a *number* of critiques on the excerpts I've posted. (The rough versions of the first three chapters of Blackstone Academy are posted there, as is the first chapter of East Wind.)

The critiques have largely been helpful, though some have been more based on particular taste of the reader than a general sense of help, all of which is valid. Danielle actually gave me one of my most important critiques on East Wind, which was that it's not an urban fantasy -- it's more of a paranormal mystery. Splitting hairs? Well, not really -- Book Country has a brilliant genre map that shows where subgenres fall on the spectrum. Getting feedback on where your book actually fits best helps when, eventually, you want to write a pitch letter. I may not be gritty and/or snarky enough in my style to write UF, but paranormal mystery? It's got a different tone, and readers go in knowing to expect something a little different.

At any rate, the beta is now open, and Book Country is on twitter as @Book_Country as well as on facebook. Thus far, it's been a great experience, and I highly recommend writers checking it out, especially if you're a writer in search of a critique group. There are lots of great folks there willing to share their advice!

I probably don't actually have enough links for an extravaganza, but it sounded good in my head, so I'll let it stand.

• I've been waiting until it was public to announce this, and since this interview at Operation Awesome is up, I'm going to say that makes the news officially out there: lyster , aka Max Gladstone, is being represented by Weronika Janczuk of D4EO Literary Agency! He talks about it on his blog here. So many congratulations, Max! The world is one step closer to seeing your awesomeness in print!


• New bits of my writing on the Web: a series review I did for School Library Journal is up here. The history column is progressing with some fun questions and answers. I got to write about the mysterious Great Oak at Double Beach, which no one remembers coming down; a wacky local legend about early governor of Connecticut Gurdon Saltonstall and the lake that bears his name; and weird road names in Branford and how they came to be. I've also started doing some articles for Branford Patch beyond the column, the first of which is about our local toy store, Kid Wishes, closing the bricks and mortar store and moving online..


• Other new fun stuff related to my writing: the director's commentary style interview that I did with Brian LeTendre (of Mo Stache and Secret Identity Podcast) is up streaming here, and is available for download at my home e-tailer, DriveThru. (The interview is downloadable for free.)
• Speaking of e-tailers and e-book sales (with just a slight segue jump), Chuck Wendig wrote a great piece on how the low ball prices on e-books can impact your favorite authors. Don't get me wrong -- I love getting books at the $3 price point. sartorias 's books are available at around that price over at Book View Cafe. I priced Into the Reach and Departure at under the $5 mark. jeff_duntemann 's new novella and an accompanying novella by James R. Strickland are priced together at $2.99 at Barnes and Noble, and will soon be on Kindle for the same price. Clearly, authors I know and respect are offering their fiction at rates that are incredibly affordable -- less, as Cat Valente says, than folks pay for a cup of designer coffee. I don't know how the business model will shape out, but it is interesting to watch. And I agree with (and am a follower of) Chuck's final point: if you like a writer, buy their stuff, and recommend that your friends do the same. I don't always have room in my budget to do so, and I may hold off until after the release date when cash is flowing more freely (and my review pile has fewer books in it!), but I try to support the authors I really want to keep writing more books.


• Of course, that crazy e-book market is doing things that the e-prophets have been anticipating since, oh, 2000 when I went to the Denver Publishing Institute and first heard the voice crying out in the wilderness. According to PW, e-book sales were up 202% in February. But while those percentages don't always mean much to me, the big number in this article is that publishers reported over $90 million in e-book sales. Despite this, and despite the uptick in college students reading e-books, most college students aren't using e-readers for their text books. I'm actually kind of astonished by this, since I first got hooked on e-readers as a great idea when thinking about how much I'd have preferred to carry around something the size of a nook on campus, rather than all my text books -- assuming that it took notes more like a Kindle. ;) (I'm still not a fan of the nook's note taking capability in comparison, but luckily, I don't need to take notes much anymore, unless it's in a review book, and those are almost always ARCs.)


• And last in e-book news, Kindle owners are in luck: they'll be able to start borrowing books from their libraries just like nook and Sony users! PW's link is down, weirdly, but here's the news from Venture Beat. No word yet on a time frame, but I'm super psyched that Amazon decided to make library lending possible for the Kindle. It's a big win for libraries!

Actually, that ended up being more links than I thought I had. Ta da, extravaganza complete!

...when you drop it off the top of a very tall building.

Oh, look, it's Thursday already!

I've been in a reading glut lately, which is great because it means I'm finally getting through some of my TBR pile -- and also because I had to quick get through some galleys from Simon and Schuster's Galley Grab before they expire. (Pre-review: A Brush of Darkness by Allison Pang? Awesome! I've got to get her over here for a guest blog, too -- she does a whole Thomas the Rhymer thing, and I think I've mentioned before how I feel about Thomas the Rhymer.... Anyway.) I've also got a whole stack-o'-series to read for an upcoming SLJ article; luckily, those are all at a lower reading level than my usual UF novels!

It's been hard to get motivated to do much other than read when Miss Bug is napping, however, which means that other projects are languishing a bit. I've got a good start on East Wind, and I had a nice stretch of days where I got a couple hundred to a thousand words down on paper. I broke that stretch yesterday by getting ahead on "Five Main Streets" articles -- and that's super fun, too. Learning more about Branford's history is awesome, and I've gotten in touch with some community members who will make themselves available for interviews about specific landmarks and such. Very exciting!

But while I'm making progress, my reading brain is the one in charge lately. I'm hoping I'll plateau soon, write a bunch of reviews for Flames Rising and Mythprint (as well as the reviews I'm assigned), and hit that all-I-want-to-do-is-write phase. I figure it's just about time for that part of the cycle to hit the top.

--

New articles of mine online that you may not have noticed:

Interview with Mark Henry's character (now an author in her own right) Amanda Feral at Flames Rising.

Review of Magdalena: Origins for Flames Rising.

Four articles in my column "The Town with Five Main Streets"

Thanks for checking them out!

This is not a post about James Frey's new publishing scheme. Plenty of writers have already covered that topic (Genreville collects three excellent responses). But a conversation about said scheme with lyster got me thinking about my mercenary philosophy of freelancing.

It's a very Fireflyesque rule, in general. If I take an assignment where my publisher or editor dictates what the work is, then I typically anticipate it's a Work for Hire gig. This means, effectively, "I do the job, and then I get paid." I don't own the rights to the material. My publisher can take the material and run with it, edit it in a different direction, or do whatever suits their purposes. For reference articles, this is a no brainer -- I don't need a byline for short entries about authors (though sometimes I actually do get bylines). For reviews, the same is true -- though I acknowledge that while I'm a professional reviewer (I do get paid for a chunk of the reviews I write) I also take unpaid review work. I enjoy writing about books (as you may have noticed), so I do some that's pro-bono -- or pays me in kind (even if that's just a free copy of a book I'd have otherwise spent money on). Some of my free work has led to paying gigs; some of my low-paying work has led to better paying gigs. In some Work for Hire contracts, there's a possibility of earning royalties.

If I'm writing my own stuff in a world I create, however, the situation is different. I'm happy to sell publication rights, and I've had very good luck placing some of my short stories in fair-paying markets. If I'm playing in your world (whether it's writing an adventure or writing a shared-world short story), I don't anticipate additional rights. I'll take them if they're offered, but I don't anticipate them. If I'm playing in my world, I'm a lot more proprietary.

There are writers who are in this profession just to share their vision, their story, and their characters. I think art for art's sake is a noble endeavor, and maybe the purist form of our profession. But I also think it's fair to expect to receive compensation for work. To support that as a reader, I'll buy short stories on fictionwise (for example); I try to purchase books by authors I want to write more books. I've been known to purchase print copies of books I've reviewed as ARCs or e-ARCs if they really impressed me. (blackaire and mdhenry, I'm looking at you.) I donate to web comics I appreciate -- a model I love, actually, since it's a very immediate response to my appreciation for the artist's work -- and I'll buy print books of web comics (because you never know when my internet will crash and I'll be deprived of my comics). I try to put my money where my mouth is -- because someday, when I've got the possibility of royalties accruing, I hope that my readers will do the same for me.

jimhines talks a lot about martial arts and writing on his blog. An experience at kempo tonight lent itself to this kind of comparison as well, so I thought I'd try an analogy over here.

I'm allergic to citrus-scented cleaning solutions. While this gets me out of certain housework tasks (Twostripe is incredibly accommodating about mopping the kitchen floor while I'm out of the house), it also comes with the inconvenience of not being able to breathe around that artificial smell. So tonight at the dojo, when trying to clear out the smell in the waiting room, one of our instructors sprayed some air freshener containing whatever ingredient it is that makes me choke. When he came back into the dojo, I could feel my lungs tighten.

There's a saying: "Can't see, can't fight. Can't walk, can't fight. Can't breathe, can't fight." It's meant to list targets on an opponent that will end fights fast (which is one of the things kempo is about). I suppose it's also a list of the targets you need to carefully defend: eyes, knees, and throat. Suddenly not able to fully breathe, I bowed out and hung out in the parking lot for a few minutes before my sensei came out to find out what happened. I explained; he apologized profusely; I accepted and said I'd just wait ten minutes or so to see if I could come back in. It didn't end up clearing up, but one of the other instructors came out to work with me on the lawn in front of the dojo, so maybe we were good street-side advertising as a bonus.

Breathing is really important -- and not just when you can't do it. You can't forget to breathe when you're working out, or you'll drop. You can't forget to breathe while you're, say, in labor, either. That's the literal. But, metaphorically, if you can't breathe -- if you can't just take a bit of time to live, to enjoy life, to just *be* -- you can't write. For me, the more anxiety and stress I cause myself by worrying about whether or not I'm writing enough sometimes keeps me from remembering to breathe.

I finally turned in some chapters of Blood and Tumult to lyster last night, and I wrote a review this morning. There's other work to be done, but for most of today, I just took a little time to breathe. And I feel recharged.

Well, I've written a couple of book reviews and an essay, and I've done a lot of copyediting. Obviously, I've not done a lot of blogging. I'm brainstorming a new short story, which is exciting. And I'm thinking about the fiction I set aside for the past year, and I'm sort of wondering if, when you leave a story alone that long, is it yours any more? Is it the story you're meant to tell if you can set it down and walk away from it for a full year? I'm not sure, and I wonder if it means I need to start somewhere else in the story.

But mostly pondering and not a lot of action. I do have linky goodness, however, so here's what I've been reading online this week:

• Friend of the blog Carrie Vaughn has a great post on the rise of urban fantasy at Tor.com.
  
• From jeff_duntemann, DIRIGIBLES!
  
• QuestionRiot by dcopulsky has an interview up with a graduate student in video game production.
  
• Lastly, a PW article on how the format falling most as the ebook rises is actually the mass market. It shouldn't surprise me that this is the case, given the similarity in pricing between the two formats, and yet, it sort of did. I didn't expect to see mass markets take a hit.
  

That's it for today. Maybe I'll get back up to having a guest blog tomorrow -- I'm reading the Charlotte Guest Mabinogion on my nook (among other e-books, like a good chunk of the library of sartorias's titles, which I've acquired a number of), and her introduction had some words of interest on myth that, if I can track them down again, were worth sharing.

Yesterday was the two week check in for Kaz's Summer Camp, but it's been busy at the Abbott household, with family visiting and writing actually getting done! Here's where I stand so far:

Reasonable goal:
* With my cowriter, finish the draft of our serial novel. (We're at chapter 10 of 20 -- halfway there!)
lyster has submitted chapter 11, so we're moving right along. It's my turn, and I hope to have that back to him before the next goal check in.

* Complete typesetting on four essays written by other authors (this is contracted, so it's kinda cheating to count it).
Done! All of the typeset essays got turned in to my editor last Friday. There are a couple of paperwork issues to finish up, but otherwise, it's all taken care of.

* Write one short story.
No progress yet on this one.

* Write multiple book reviews (not contracted, but already arranged with the venues in which they'll appear).
One SLJ review got turned in, and I'm working on the mythsoc reading list before diving back into some other reviews.

The only extended goal worth mentioning is:
* Blog at least three times a week.
I obviously haven't gotten on track with this! I'm counting each week as a new week, though, so this will be a weekly goal rather than a summer-long goal.

I'm also adding a new goal:
* Write a joint interview article for Flames Rising.
My questions have already been sent out to various awesome writers, and I'm getting some great responses back (many of them hilarious). Once the article goes over to Flames Rising, I'll talk a little bit more about it here.

Wow, has it been that long?

Why yes, yes it has.

The holidays were fabulous around here -- lots of great time spent with family before the actual dates themselves and then lots of extra hours at work to cover the time I took off! We had some fun gaming in New York on the first with our characters from the 3.5 continuing Xen'drik Expeditions campaign (we couldn't just let it go when it stopped being an organized play game). Twostripe has ramped the karate schedule back up, and Bug is big enough in my belly now that I can feel her from the outside of my belly even when she's not moving. That, by the way, is wild. There's a little person in there! The editorial assistants are now eating grown up food ("We're not kittens any more, boss!"). And I've been copyediting, book reviewing, finishing up my Living Forgotten Realms Adventure (slot zeroes starting soon!), and doing reference writing -- my usual ridiculous pace of work. My big fun project for the weekend (besides crib shopping!) is creating a map of the kingdoms in Great Britain for the Viking Saga game. Since we're somewhere between 700 and 900-ish A.D., ambiguously, I have some great fun maps to play around with to help me decide. (New favorite resource: Anglo-Saxons.net.)

The other big news for the beginning of the year is that I've just gotten a Nook, and am in the testing phase to decide if I want to keep it. Much to my embarrassment (since I posted the assurances of a bookseller on several forums), the Nook does not, in fact, read .doc or .docx or .txt files, which was one of the primary convincing factors for getting it. (I had intended to use it primarily as a tool for 1) reading digital review books, and 2) keeping up with Substrate submissions.) The Nook does read pdfs natively, however, and there are plenty of free programs to convert files from Word to pdf. Next hurdle? It doesn't annotate pdfs yet (actually, it might -- there are differing reports from users on this, and I need to play around with it more; B&N just says it doesn't support the feature as yet). That's a hurdle for me, since I want to be able to annotate Substrate pieces to remember what my thoughts were while reading -- and want to be able to have other people do the same for me. (Twostripe has not yet given much response to my thought that he could, perhaps, read drafts of my manuscripts more easily on an e-book reader this way; he is a print guy.)

The reading function, however, works beautifully. I've had an overdue review for Flames Rising since, what, August? The book came to me as an e-book, and despite reading the first twenty-odd pages on my computer screen, and then printing it out to three-ring-binder in hopes that I'd actually read it in print, I hadn't managed to actually read the thing. With an e-reader, though the formatting is still a little wonky (the pages are about a screen-and-a-half, so every other "page-turn" is only a small portion of the screen), it's been a much easier read to digest. It's a short story anthology, and in the last two days, I've read the various introductions (there are three -- two nonfiction and one fictional) and three short stories (including the first actual fiction I've ready by Cherie Priest of Team Seattle, who I've been meaning to read for ages), which amounts to nearly a third of the book.

The Nook is easy to use, loads fast enough that I don't feel like I'm waiting, has decent wallpaper installed for when you put it to sleep (they recommend never turning it off), and seems like a pretty straightforward device. I'm enjoying the e-book reading experience far more here than either on computer screen or printed from a three ring binder, so it's a major coup in that regard (though whether it's better than any other e-book reader, I couldn't say). Since reading e-books for review was half of the point of buying it, I'm satisfied on that score. I'm still playing with the annotation function to see if I can make it work for the rest of what I need it for -- which will impact my final decision on whether I remain an e-book reader owner, wait for a model that does everything I want it to (the Kindle has a lot of the functionality I'm looking for, but doesn't natively read ePubs, and the conversion process for that sounds like a bigger hassle than .doc to pdf), or decide to purchase another of the devices on the market (despite what their flaws might be). In the mean time, I'm having a fun reading experience and generally enjoying using it, so I have no doubt I'll be an e-book reader owner in the future, if I don't end up keeping my Nook this time around.

I don't know how I do this. When I start out with a new calendar, it's blank and clean and pretty! (My 2009 calendar is a lovely print calendar by Lindsay Archer (the 2010 version is available here if you're interested.) And yet, somehow, those dates get filled with black ink to mark my day job hours, blue for appointments, purple for classes, and green for social engagements. (I switch colors on pretty much everything except the red deadlines and the black day job hours -- I'm not as organized as I'd like to think.)

Usually, I'm a few steps ahead on the autobio project -- though, granted, the first half of the year deadline is always much easier than the one late in the year (because I get the contract for both in the late summer/early fall, which means the first deadline is a crunch and the second deadline is languid and serene). This time around, I had to hand off more than usual to fellow copyeditor and Substrater Michelle while I organized the administrative details. (It's a good thing she's a copyeditor I really enjoy working with! I love working on the essays myself, so it's hard to hand over the work to someone else. It has to be someone I trust -- and Michelle certainly fits that bill.) I've got a great batch of writers this time around, and I'm very much excited to see them all in print.

But in the meantime, there's a 4e adventure that needs to be finished over the weekend, not to mention the rest of my first chapter installment in my joint Baeg Tobar project with lyster. (Have I mentioned Blood and Tumult by name yet? No? It's in progress! I'm 1500 words in on my first segment -- unfortunately not the full 3000 that would let me pass it back to Max. *sigh*) I have School Library Journal reviews that need to be written, not to mention the overdue reviews for Flames Rising.com and the overdue article edit for Journey to the Sea. (Alas, the free work always ends up falling behind those paid assignments.)

I was raised to keep myself busy as a kid, and I think I've taken that lesson to heart. My mother was the kind of teacher who always had several projects going outside of the classroom -- the biggest one was building a life-sized rainforest in an empty mall store. So I'm sure I get some of this impulse to take on so many projects from her.

One of these days, though, I think I'd like a vacation. It's a good thing I've forbidden myself from taking any work that's due in March! (I'll be busy with another little thing around then, but she's sure to be a handful.)