New Poetry editor and more updates.

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  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.

And anyone who has read Howard Pyle knows that this is the metaphorical equivalent to how Robin Hood met Little John.

________

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.

Projection: A thought about Mike Philbin.

All the time that Philbin is going on and on about the New World Order going to destroy the US, I have been coming across articles like this one.

It may require registration to view.  I really don’t know for certain.

HEY, MIKKAKE!  BEFORE YOU START GOING ON ABOUT OUR COUNTRY, I THINK YOU OUGHT TO TAKE A GOOD LONG LOOK AT YOUR OWN.

updates

Okay, the bad news first.

We are still having troubles with LSI on Death in Common, but hope to have it released within two weeks.

Good news, is that the ebook editions of my first three lycan books are available from Powell’s and other distributors that do not have proprietary formats.

On the personal side:

I have a doctor’s appointment on the 26th and hope to finally reach the point where I”m not limping along the way I have been for several months.  Right now for the first time in days my legs are not trying to twist themselves off my hips.  The humming sensation has moved up from the bottoms of my feet and I can now feel it in my stomach and chest on bad days.  That’s plain weird.  I don’t know enough about neurology to explain it.  There are some other matters.  Turning 55 has not helped matters.  LOL.    And others that I’m not going to discuss until I have some answers.

Poetry

I am in the process of interviewing people for the position of poetry editor.  I have turned away from the horror community in this search and gone over to the science fiction and fantasy community, but with an eye to someone who can appreciate horror also.

On the personal level, I am starting to slowly recover from the debacle.

The redo on DiC is being uploaded to LSI as I write this.

We have gone to contract on a novel by Gustavo Bondoni entitled “The Curse of El Bastardo.”

Poetry: A Death on the scaffolds on the Village Commons

I have decided that once we publish the four volumes of poetry that I have already contracted for, I am going to kill the poetry line.  It’s too much of a headache and it’s clear that I prefer to see things in a readable fashion.

I’m not an artist.  I’m a person who likes things to look easy and accessible.  Apparently I’m just too old fashioned.

Costs: We Don’t Use Lulu

Doing it right costs money.  A lot of people fail to be aware of this.

WE DON’T USE LULU.

One of the ways in which small press publishers save money is to use the lulu pdf generator to create the adobe pdf that they then upload to LSI.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Without going into a lot of boring detail, you still need to understand how to layout the books.  Word will auto generate your ToC if you set up styles right.  It will embed the fonts.  And so forth.  You just have to know where to go in the settings.

If  you fail to look at the book in the size that you intend to publish it in, you are going to get errors.

If  you fail to embed the fonts, you might get completely screwed up pages due to slippage.

Doing it right is a lot of work.  I tried initially to do it this way and out of three books uploaded to LSI, only one of them passed muster for me.

That was when I hired Tim Willard to do layout.   Since then, with the obvious exception of DiC, all of the books have been fine.

It is hours and hours of work.

I have a package deal with Tim and he does not bill me for the hours involved, but just a flat fee.

Costs:

Cover art

Cover lettering

Editor

Copyeditor

PR

LSI’s set up costs

Before it’s over I have spent over $500 per book

Now, when something has to be redone, that’s more money.  LSI charges me when I have to upload a revision.

Changing a cover costs twice what it does for changing an interior.

Doubtless, on Dic, I am going to get hit for both the cover and the interior.

We are not a two bit, one-man, do it yourself operation.

Sorry, Charlie.

We are doing PoD, but it sure ain’t lulu.

With lulu, you get triple the base cost per book and little or no distribution.  It isn’t possible to offer the deep discounts that the distributors demand to carry your product.

Daverana has international distribution.

Secretary

Last night I was introduced to a nice Scottish woman who may be coming on board to help get all the paperwork done.  Mainly she’ll have access to all the sales statements to figure out which authors are owed what, since I have trouble making heads or tails of the online statements from LSI.

It’s a headache for me.  But she ought to do it fine.

Resolution

I’m slowly working my way through the process of what all went wrong with DiC.  One of the crucial things is that LSI stopped supporting CS2 in the middle of working on it.  We had to purchase CS3.  CS3 has enough differences from it’s earlier incarnation to cause formatting errors.  Then there is the variance potential with LSI.

But there were a lot of additional problems that I have found in researching where everything went wrong.  I lay all of it at my own door.

I think I should have made time to show Rich how to do some things, since I know more about formatting and layout conversions that he did.  I made an erroneous assumption and this is what comes of it.

The problems started on Death in Common with the manuscript.  I could have headed that off if I had stepped in early and explained things to Rich that he has not yet learned about layout.

I could have saved Tim the grief of redoing it in pdf conversion that has had him agitated for months also.

I could have prevented a host of things.

I see that now.

I still do not appreciate the abusive emails from an unnamed individual.

That last part is not going to change.

Instead, I am personally going to fix everything at the manuscript stage so that it can be converted in the layout process more efficiently.

This is not a one man operation.  Things have to go through proper channels.  This one needed to go through an improper channel: me.

We established the channels and the areas that each person handles in order to expedite the work load.

However, in this case it failed.

I have done formatting for conversion to ebook layout before, so I know it well, even though I’m burned out on it.

Poetry cannot be handled in the same manner as a novel or collection.  The special formatting for poetry needs to be done initially in the manuscript stage before the conversion process of layout gets done.

In the old days, when I first started out you went from galleys to paste up.  Now it is all done with software.

This can create a few difficulties.

I am stopping everything I am doing, and delaying this month’s books to do this.

politeness counts

I suppose that the biggest irony of this entire situation with DiC is that had I been asked calmly to fix them, I would have done so the same day.

Human nature, certainly mine, is to dig in our heels when we are faced with aggressive behavior.  The response might be passive aggressive, such as appearing to cooperate, but dragging our heels.  Or it can be confrontational in response.  It can be a pissing contest.

The forms have a great variety, but the outcome is always the same: the person to initiate the aggressive stance never gets what they wanted out of it.

I waited 5 hours before responding to the individual, I searched out stuff and tried to mellow.  I deleted my first response which was simply “fuck off” and tried for a calmer take on it.  I think I achieved it.  But in the end, the result was the same.

The kind of anger I got was similar to other situations.  Initially I felt like I had just taken a blow to the solar plexus.

It was 1 in the morning when I saw it.  I was returning to bed from a visit to the bathroom and stopped to check email.  I was up the rest of the night because my head was spinning.

I got my second email and shared it with Natalie as I tried to make a decision on a second response.  I wanted someone to read it who was distanced from the situation.  That’s one of the ways I have to prevent myself from going completely kamikaze.

The next four emails, I simply did not read.  I put three tablets in front of the computer monitor so that I could see only the line required to forward it and not read the contents, and then sent them again to Nat.

I’ve done this before when I did not want to continue to lose my center in dealing with rude behavior.  I can’t afford to lose the work time.  I’m running behind on too many projects, partly from stress, partly from simply having too much on my plate, and partly from health reasons.

I collapsed exhausted at 3PM and woke up at 11PM and found this newest spate of them.

Writers are a dime a dozen

Over and over and over again people are told what type of behavior is considered professional.

Today I got two abusive emails from an author because there is a flaw in Death in Common.

I missed it going over the proofs.  So now I guess I am damned forever for my stupidity.  The page numbers were set too close to the bottom so as not to crowd the poems and they vanished due to the page cropping by the printer.

I will not and will never put up with abusiveness from an author.

Writers are a dime a dozen and easily replaced.

EDITED TO ADD: THERE ARE NOW SEVEN EMAILS.

Serpent’s Quest is finally out

Serpent’s Quest is finally out and available in tradepaper.

When I’m feeling aggressive … at warcraft

I play Warcraft to relax.  At a certain point in each day  I need to relax and de-stress.

Today I racked up three achievements in PvP.  I got my 500th player kill, played defense and killed every horde player who grabbed the Alliance flag in Warsong Gulch, and killed an undead warrior that got me a kill on every horde race.

I was feeling mean and nasty.  And it made me very happy.

The Sounds of Silence: A Reflection on Nitwittery

My life turned a corner recently and I hope that it is going to continue this way.

The change is the peacefulness of the past few weeks.  There were the usual stuff, but not much really.

The nitwits were silent and have been mostly for weeks.

Philbin did not even take a slap at me when I smacked him for another crazy theory about what is happening in our country.  Nothing happened at all.

All of them are silent when it comes to me and that is a wonderful relief.

I entered my first chatroom in March of 2003.  There I encountered a troll named Christina.  A wannabe writer and drama queen who was responsible for my removing my hosting from sff.net.  I have kept my chatroom at sff.net, but only use it for business meetings these days and we are preparing to move to a new one.

My encounter with Christina overlapped my first encounter with Pacione in September of 03.  My troubles with Pacione overlapped my first encounter with Mike Philbin in 04 and both of those overlapped my conflict with Dagstine.

It got so bad that during the summer of 07 I felt ready to abandon the internet and began to make my blogs friends only.  I was exhausted from it.

Now here we are at the edge of September and it appears to have finally ended.  The conflict and harassment that is.

At first it left me feeling off balance and uncertain.  I kept waiting for it to start up again and then it did not.

I have now come to the conclusion that it is all over and I can feel safe again.

Life is starting to move forward.

Remember the old childhood chant: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

Well, it was wrong.

The pain and sting of words outlasts physical pain.  We eventually forget what it felt like to have broken bones.  But the other stuff?  No, we suffer for the length and breadth of our lives over words.

We gain perspective.  We eventually shrug at the source.  But we still feel the pain.

For some of us our skin grows thicker and we can take more pain from these sources, but the potential for encountering someone whose attacks are sharp enough to pierce that is always with us.  And in this time of the internet, the likelihood of running into someone with a set of words that sharp is increased.

Will I ever run into another nitwit?  Most likely I will.  There are too many of them out there.

How will I handle it when I do?  I’ve never backed down from a fight in my life.  So I guess I’ll give them hell.

But for now, the silence is golden.

Nitwit Cooking #1

In honor of Julia Child and the new movie about her, I am presenting you with the first in my Nitwit Cooking series.  I hope that you enjoy them as much as I do.  I have enough to cover several days of post, but am always looking for more contributions for them.

Courtesy of Phil Smith:

Hamburgers a la Nickolaus.

1) Beg grandmother for $20
2) Beg cousin for a lift to McDonald’s
3) Buy two Happy Meals and eat them both.
4) Beg cousin for a lift back

Philbinburgers

1) Go to any burger outlet.
2) Find a female attendant at the counter. Place order, substituting the words ‘jizz’, ‘cum’, ’semen’ and any other synonym for ejaculate where possible. When she shows signs of discomfort, complain to the manager.

Big Dagstines.

1) Get a job in McDonald’s.
2) Take Big Mac bun, shit in it twice — one for each layer. Wipe your arse on a leaf of lettuce and put that in too.
3) When the customer complains to the manager, lecture them both about how the food industry is dead and how you’re saving it.
4) Then for the next few days, follow the customer around. Post notes through her letter box saying “You bitch, you deserve to be raped and killed. “

[Got to have the winky emoticon in it too. "But it was a joke! Can't you see it was a joke?"]

Comment left on LJ

“I read much of the attorney’s claim and agreed with your earlier statement that the claim was without merit: I really couldn’t see much if any resemblance between the parallel-quoted passages.

But is this cause to publicly vilify this misguided young person, to decribe their writing as “a piece of shit”, to seek to obviate any chance of their having a future career, and to do all this in defense of an extraordinarily wealthy writer and in assault on an unknown? You seem to be trying to whip up a mob to defend Goliath against David.”

I’m just about over my temper tantrum.

However, no one thinks about the cost.  Every time that something like this happens to a successful writer, it dampens the joy of being successful.

If my books took off tomorrow and sold in conspicuous numbers, how long would it be before someone like Jordan Scott turned up to accuse me of infringement?  I’m not even well known and I have already been accused of it by Polymancer.

If Pacione had been taken seriously with his accusations that I had plagiarized him back in 03 and 04, what might have come of it?