Bitten by Books has just reviewed Serpent's Quest and given it five stars.

I'm very delighted by it.

Life today has become an odd creature.

One of the things that Clarke Gable adored about Carole Lombard was the fact that she cussed in a casual fashion.

Today most people, especially the young wankers, prefer cussing to making a logical argument.

Our culture has inverted itself.

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On another note, I decided to talk about what is currently going on with me on the agent front. I had been trying hard not to mention it, but something happened today to make me bolder.

A friend insisted that I query Ethan Ellenberg. I did so and got a startling reply. He asked me to send him 3-4 projects to consider. I started revising and cleaning up the three projects I intended to send him and asked him another question since it was clearly taking me a bit more time than I expected. His website says he wants a 50 page sample with a synopsis.

I got an answer from him today and he told me to just send him what I had and forget agency protocol on the size of the samples.

So I have my fingers crossed.

He likes my creds. :)

I rarely write poetry and usually when I do, it's standard doggerel and not meant to be taken seriously. Here's my drunken dwarf song/poem.
-----------------


YO HO TO THE BOTTLE I GO


Yo Ho! Yo Ho!
Yo Ho! To the bottle I go!
Ladies beware,
retreat up the stair
Yo Ho! To the bottle I go!

Yo Ho! Yo Ho!
Yo Ho! To the bottle I go!

When I’ve had a few drinks
It’s far clearer I thinks
I notices the winks
As the glasses we clinks
The lasses make passes I thinks

Yo Ho! Yo Ho!
Yo Ho! To the bottle I go!

Yo Ho to the Bottle I go
The ladies are fleeing
I guess we're not meeting
I just wanted some kissing
But something was missing
Ooops me bottles got broke

Vampires are hemovores and hemophages.

They are not carnivores and they certainly are not vegetarians.

Well, actually they grabbed a review I posted on Amazon, plunked it into the entry on someone who calls herself delirium's child and attributed the review to "a washed up has been."

I'm getting used to the label.

I'll have to tell the folks who are still sending me fan letters in email that they have to stop reading my works because I'm not all that sane any longer.

To miss quote Shakespeare, "Better to have (professionally) published and been forgotten, than never to have published at all."

Victoria Strauss has an excellent article on self-publishing vs vanity publishing and she answered some of my long standing questions about my own effort to re-issue my books myself.

There's a lot going on that blurs the distinctions between vanity and self-publishing. Language is being cheapened by this. Good words are going bad as the nasties try to make themselves look like the good guys.

Caveat emptor.

I've been relaxing with a new PC game. It's in-expensive. Just $19.95. Torchlight is a load of fun, operates in a similar fashion to Diablo 1, and the graphics are awesome. They are also allowing people to make mods for it.

I beat the game yesterday playing on normal and now I'm going through again on hard. One of the things I like best is that you get two stashes. One for the character and a shared stash where you can pass items between characters. I have one mule to stash a lot of the set pieces and another just for the gems that you can socket into armor and weapons.

It's also nice that you get a pet and you can send it back to sell stuff without leaving the dungeon.

If you're not already reading Freakangels, then it's time you started.

Warren Ellis puts up a new installment every Friday.

He has taken the basic concept of Midwich Cuckoos and carried it to its logical extreme. The psi kids have destroyed the world.

It's a great post Apocalypse tale.

I'm totally addicted to it.

I have finally found something to keep me from endlessly re-reading Transmetropolitan.

I'm building a huge collection of graphic novels written by Warren Ellis, who I believe is one of the finest writers of our time.

For one thing his work is gritty and not afraid to show the dark side of humanity in graphic (no pun intended) detail.

I have just finished the first draft of the first short story I have written in over two years. The title is The High Price of Medicine.

It is not worksafe.

I will be posting it on my website under Creative Commons.

While I will not tolerate people pirating my novels, I do want to give people some freebies. So all shorts and partials appearing on my website are Creative Commons.

I found out today that I can still release ebooks through LSI even though I'm not currently doing print versions.

That means I will still have their distribution.

Going that way gets the books into a lot of places, but still not fictionwise.

So I can do a few titles in print through LSI and a host of ebooks through them. That should give me plenty of distribution opportunities.

The only area that I'm still falling down a bit is PR and Marketing.

But I can't do much about that until after the holidays.

I have canceled the weekly meetings for the Daverana staff until the first Thursday after January 1st.

Getting going is rough, but we're still working on it.

The vanity / self publishing trend has gotten hotter and heavier recently with the launch of Harlequin Horizons.

The full text of RWA's decision is here.

Victoria Strauss has made some strong comments about the situation.

It is becoming more and more important to distinguish RE-publishers from SELF-publishers.

I agree with Victoria that the self publishing bubble will have to burst soon. The economy is not going to be strong enough for the masses to continue to do it at high prices.

Lulu may keep going, but I am of the opinion that even there people are getting tired of the no win self publishing world.

Well, maybe not, but we've gone to lulu with our books.

It started with a series of set backs and the fact that so far nothing published sold enough copies to sneeze at.

Then we had the brohaha over Death in Common that ended up with us taking a $600+ loss and finally returning the rights to it to the anthology's editor.

We will no longer do anthologies of any kind.

We need 20 books and 5 name authors to get onto Fictionwise and Fictionwise is where the real money is for the small press.

A few hours ago, I sent out emails to the contributors of Flashing Swords. We are suspending publication on the magazine indefinitely and using the website as an ezine doing only non-fiction.

Flashing Swords is now our fantasy imprint.

I am hoping that once I get those 20 books out (and we have them) and go to Fictionwise, sales will pick up and I can then start releasing books through LSI again.

Lulu has a bad rep, but there are some good authors, such as Jerrod Balzer, who use it and are satisfied with it.

Hopefully this next year will bring a turnaround in our fortunes.

Quoted from the Washington Post:
Palin asserts herself as a woman of appetites. "I love meat," Palin writes. "I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals -- right next to the mashed potatoes."

I meet a lot of interesting people at warcraft.

I run around with surgical techs, former prison guards, a NY accountant, several published authors, a Canadian police officer who trains rescue dogs, and a host of others.

So I should not have been surprised at all to meet more would be authors. One of them asked me the other day about finding markets for horror that were like the magazines of the Golden Age. I had a hard time explaining to him that such things no longer exist. There are a handful of struggling zines, but most of them are already overbought. None of them pay to equal that of the Golden Age.

The Golden Age is never going to return.

Another myth appears to be that all self publishers are created equal: they are all piss poor.

Well, the need for gatekeepers is great for the bulk of them, but I would like to bring up and talk further about another class of self publisher and put forth that we need a definition and a name for them. If there already is one, I will embrace it with joy.

When the corporations bought out all the publishing houses starting in the early 80s, and then large numbers of mergers caused the shrinkage of the market in general, they did several things wrong that have only been partially healed.

One of their first actions was to get rid of any titles that were not meeting their corporate concept of a bottom line. (I think most, if not all, Harvard MBAs ought to be taken out and shot for their part in this debacle or at the very least carted off to the guillotine)

They killed the back list and then the mid list. Many authors were able to make the transition from working full time to writing full time because of the steady sales from the back list. When that was wiped out, a lot of older authors lost their key livelihood. Same with the mid list. However, the publishing houses got hurt by this also.

The back list and the mid list were steady sales, but in smaller numbers than the titles at the top. The dependable flow of money from those two lists supported the development of other authors.

With the advent of PoD, many of the authors who got lost in that sea change went and tried to sell their own reprints. It was a salvage operation. And it is still going on.

The back list and the mid list eventually returned to corporate publishing, but those who had been lost mostly remained lost.

The back list, especially, is much weaker than it used to be. It never fully recovered.

A check of the books on Amazon will turn up a number of authors who have done their own reprints. I am not alone in this.

Yes, a reprint produced like this is a self published title, but it is a self published title that has already been approved by the gatekeepers at an earlier point in its lifespan.

In this sense, it fails to meet the general definition of self publishing, which in and of itself implies a lack of gatekeepers.

So what do we call gatekeeper approved self re-published titles?

We aren't self publishers, we are self REpublishers.

buffysquirrel has often said that I need to find a way to turn off my scum bag magnet. I think it really goes beyond that.

I was informed today that I'm not a pro author. I'm a self-published wannabe.

I had been wondering why I was being closed out on a messageboard and a chat forum for the past several months. So I inquired and was informed that they do not encourage writers who are self published.

The past several years have seen more and more older pros bringing out their own reprints. People as respected as Storm Constantine bring out their own reprints. Richard Lupoff has brought out his own reprints.

With the fragile state of the once healthy back list, it is often the only way to keep older books in circulation.

I pulled my books from Renaissance Ebooks over a breech of contract, and have been re-issuing them through Daverana Enterprises.

Apparently that makes me a self published wannabe with no professional credits.

When professional credits get old do they expire?

Or should this individual just get themselves a solid course in google-fu?

There's an hour left in my chat. I'm taking a moment to post this.

The reason I like IRC is that there are no ads down the side or all around like so many web based chats. Just chat and nothing but the chat

I am starting up my old chat sessions again, but at a new addy. I'm still at sff.net, however, since I have begun to use #thecorner as my spot to hold business meetings, I got a new one there. #Daverana.

Below is the addy for direct link. Daverana

For those with irc, the spot is irc.sff.net and the room is #Daverana.

The fun starts at 8PM Eastern time and runs until Midnight or we run out of things to say.

Reclusive, infamous, filled with attitude, RPG designer, Tim Willard has promised to put in an appearance. He created Year of the Zombie, which has been selling well for a looooong time.

On Tuesday I spent two hours in an IM conference with mikebrendan brainstorming on an epic scale battle scene for Loyalty of Wolves. Mike was awesome.

There is only so much you can glean from reading historical accounts of battles. Once you toss in the fantasy elements, it gets far more complex.

One of the things I tend to do is to think of mages as artillery and monsters as tanks. Yet it still falls way short of getting in all the aspects and potentials at epic length.

Word on the street is keep your eye on Timmons Esaias of Seaton Hill, who is currently doing research on a book that will revolutionize the way that genre writers understand warfare. Great things are coming. But I am not saying anything more.

My to-do list is insane today. I'm wired tired, going on 3 hours sleep and too much coffee.

Every time I get my priorities figured out and on a list, something else crops up that I failed to anticipate.

To say that I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed and maddened like the proverbial bull would be to put it mildly.

I have been trying to get the royalties figured out so I can get my writers paid in time for Christmas. I struggled with the way that LSI does them. You can only get the individual title sales on the website. When they send you a notice of royalties owed and payments, they shove it all together.

I had them email me a copy of them to import to excel. It was tab separated. When I tried to import it, excel had a heart attack. What I ended up with was a mess. So much for that option.

I tried using print. I had to do each month singly. So it came out with no dates and in micro sized print that requires using a magnifying glass to read. SIGH. But at least I have something to work with.

When I first found where to go for the royalties on their website (takes hunting to figure out), I mistook what I was seeing for total sales, when it was monthly sales.

If anyone out there knows how to do this in an easier fashion, I would appreciate suggestions.

I'm feeling very inept.

scratchware manifesto was shown to me today by dungeoneer and it got me to thinking about other creative mediums.

It is a well-known fact that publishing is in trouble. The vast changes that came with the buy-outs in the 80s and the imposition of the corporate bottom line has hurt it ultimately.

I watched the changes happening. I watched the transitions. A lot of what the scratchware manifesto sees as the ultimate source of trouble for the gaming industry applies to publishing.

The profit margin on books has always been small. They have always been labors of love more than money. That is --- until the corporations came in. In order to maximize those minimal profits, the editor lost his throne. At one time the editor had the discretionary powers to buy the books he wanted. Now the editor's power has been replaced by the committee. If there is a king in publishing it is the marketing department.

The Mom and Pop bookstores are mostly gone. The independent jobbers are gone, replaced by centralized distribution.

The hosts of first readers have been replaced by agents.

All of the direct human to human components of publishing are gone.

I see the matter as very similar to how games are now produced and how they were once produced. The big companies put 50 to 100 people on the design team to make it a reality.

Books are now being decided by a host of people working in committee like swarms.

As a result it gets harder and harder to sell something offbeat.

And that's in both industries. Really, it's in all creative industries right now.

The result is what Fritz Leiber called "Word Wooze" (Silver Eggheads)

Adam Lowe is my new poetry editor. He's an awesome person. And the tale of how we met is hilarious.

You see, for a time I had two wordpress blogs with different log ins. Everyone who visited Rusty Nail regularly knew that I was Cussedness. It's been my handle since 2003. So I never paid any attention to which account I was logged into while posting comments there.

The thread / post at Rusty was about Dagstine and it derailed into analysis. I mistook the name of an award given to a magazine that had both Dagstine and Adam were connected to for an award given out at a gay sf convention. My comment was essentially innocent, especially coming from someone who has never made any secret of being a bi-sexual gender queer who leans most heavily toward women. I posted that comment from my janraefrank account.

Adam accused me of being a homophobe. I responded to that without noticing that I was logged into the other account. I just don't think about these things. And then Adam complimented Cussedness on being such an enlightened individual.

Soon after he discovered they were both me and we had a huge laugh over it.

And we have stayed in touch ever since.

________

Now, on other news.

I am finally worn out and tired of dealing with the 'horror community.' I requested that Nanci at Horror World remove my forum there.

I cleaned out my twitter account and no longer follow people connected to that community.

Although I'm writing about werewolves and vampires, which are classic horror tropes, I feel more at home in fantasy.

I am walking away and going back to my roots.

I have been moving in this direction for several years. Now I think I can safely say that it's over.