Alexandra Erin

The Tales of MU CafePress store has never actually done much more than break even, so I’ve decided to dump most of the markup (i.e., my cut) and see if that brings in more sales… so, all the t-shirts, cups, and bags are now selling for only a dollar over base price. Check it out

MU has updated for Saturday, although a little bit later than usual, due to an error in continuity which fortunately was caught early on. Tribe will update at midnight. Void Dogs will updated during the day tomorrow, and there will also be a bonus MU feature coming.

Star Harbor Nights is currently down. It should be available again sometime Monday. Please sit tight.

In part because of the issues with SHN and with MU, I haven’t been able to get a bunch of website-related work done today that I wanted to… stuff like linking to the Facebook group somebody created, getting all the new fan art up in the gallery, and so on. I managed to get a bunch of the backlog at 365tales.com published, but haven’t been able to do anything to streamline the process. I’ll be adding some new moderators to the site soon, I think.

On the donate-and-win-a-squishable front, the current frontrunner is $235 and change. I realize that’s a tough number to beat, so I’m going to pony up a second squishable, to be given to a randomly selected donor. Anybody who donates in the period of the promotion will be eligible, except the winner of the first squishable. I’ll be adding that information to the donation post, in an official-looking sort of way, when I get my site work done, tomorrow or Monday.

 Man… I can’t wait until I no longer have to scramble to get all this stuff done over the weekend.

Or I was, for about five minutes. But wait… I’ll be on there again, for another five minutes, any day now.

I now have enough readers that somebody will periodically decide it’s a criminal oversight that Wikipedia makes no mention of me or anything I’ve done and tries to shoehorn in a mention. It’s kind of flattering, but ultimately futile… Wikipedia’s definitions of “notable” and “verifiable” means that even when I have a hundred times more readers than I do now and am making a decent living as an online writer, I likely won’t be “encyclopediable” for the simple reason that what I do doesn’t leave footprints anywhere that they look.

I don’t really care. Wikipedia and I have our differences, and the biggest difference is that people will still be reading me in ten years. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is determined to spend the coin of its own relevance as quickly as it can earn it by chasing the chimera of academic respectability at the expense of its own natural areas of strength. They want to prove that an online resource which anybody can edit can be as reliable and notable as anything else, and they’re primarily accomplishing this by promoting the idea that online resources which anybody can edit–which is really the whole of the internet–are unreliable and never notable.

While Britannica and other venerable institutions of the encyclopedia business struggle with the question of “How do we remain relevant in this ever-changing world?”, Wikipedia’s asking the question, “How can I get to be where Britannica is now?” I’m reminded of a cartoon Kris Straub drew of a man motoring out to catch the sinking Titanic, as a metaphor for a cartoonist chasing a syndication deal.

Wikipedia has tremendous appeal to people who want to know about Pokemon species, X-Files episodes, webcomics, and so on. Its standards are perfectly up to snuff in areas such as those and the people looking for that kind of information are perfectly willing to trust an online resource. How does Wikipedia respond? By deleting episode guides and webcomic articles en masse, hoping that this will somehow please the critics and naysayers among the scientific and academic communities. It’s like they think that every webcomic article deleted improves the standing and quality of one scientific article.

The ultimate reason for excising these articles is because they’re “unencyclopedic”, which is another way of saying, “because Britannica doesn’t have such things!” Wikipedia’s determined to outdo its competitors by refusing to outdo them. Is that some weird kind of chivalry, or what?

This is also why Wikipedia’s on a crusade to excise all Trivia sections from its articles. You know, the interesting parts. The parts where you learn little facts you might otherwise not have known, and which frequently call attention to the interconnectedness of pop culture and high culture and history and fiction in ways which motivate you to click on another article, and then another article, and seventeen hours later you know more about Barbados or piano tuning then you ever dreamed was necessary.

Well, you won’t have to worry about that for much longer. Wikipedia knows that above all else, an encyclopedia is not interesting or compelling, and is determined to do what it takes to be neither.

So yes, I take the fact that people are trying to get my name into Wikipedia as a benchmark of my growing success… but I don’t, in any way, look at it sticking as being a barometer of anything. Thanks for the thought, though!

 The good folks at Squishable, frequent sponsors of the ad spaces on Tales of MU, apparently include at least one MU reader… they’re offering one free Squishable product to the one person who makes the highest donation in the next two weeks. That’s from today, September 26th, through Wednesday, October 10th.

Because I’ll be the one tracking the donations, I’m going to say October 10th ends at midnight the next day Central Standard Time, if it becomes important. In the event that two or more people have tied for the largest donations, one will be selected at random from among them. I’ll contact the winner through the e-mail used for the donation, to arrange for selection and receipt of their prize.

Note that donations are still confidential… I’ve got no blanket permission to share your identities with anybody and this doesn’t change that. This is a get-people-to-give-me-money-out-of-the-goodness-of-their-hearts-ploy, not a get-and-resell-tremendous-amounts-of-marketing-data-ploy. If you are the largest donor and you do not wish to have your name and address shared with the Squishable people, I’ll just move on to the next person on the list.

This little promotion will continue even if (as seems likely) the donation goal is met before the 10th. As far as I know, the entire Squishable “library” (or at least what’s in stock) is open for this. Additional conditions may apply… I just got this offer e-mailed to me last night. I’ll keep you all posted.

Oh, and what exactly IS a squishable, you might ask? Imagine a teddy bear boinking a beach ball… and then go get a squishable to hug until that disturbing image goes away.

UPDATE!

Because one of the first donations to come in at the start of this little promotion was for $235 and change, I’ve decided to offer a second squishable–out of the goodness of my heart–to one other randomly selected donor from the same period. Anybody who donates even a dollar but doesn’t win the first squishable is eligible for the second.

While I’m still working Teh Day Job, my personal writing goal is to be as productive as I can in order to get the widest audience acquainted with my ability to turn out readable prose on a regular basis… that’s one of the reasons why I’ve started Tribe and Void Dogs while still working on Tales of MU.

However, for as long as I’m still working Teh Day Job, I’m not exactly made out of time, so for the sake of sanity the update schedules for the stories currently in progress have been changed a bit in the past few days.

• MU is now to updated daily, Monday through Thursday. This after two weeks of me failing to make it all through the week without needing a “crash night.”
• Tribe will now be updated every other day, continuing through weekends.
• Void Dogs will be updated once or twice a week, as time allows. It will always get an update over the weekend. It will sometimes get an update about midweek. That’s just how wild and crazy Void Dogs is.

All of this just highlights how important it is for me to be able to devote myself full-time to writing. “But,” you say, “couldn’t you just scale back the schedule to something more reasonable? Don’t you think your audience would settle for three updates a week or weekly updates if it allowed you to continue living with the financial security of regular employment?”

Yeah, I’ve tried that. The fact is that the less I write, the harder it becomes for me to keep writing, the more I have to “force” the stories to come, and the more the quality generally suffers. Eventually, I lose enough momentum and then I fall into a slump.

Also, my goal will always be to become a full-time writer, and that won’t happen nearly as quickly if I’m updating one story every week instead of multiple stories multiple times a week.

But, it looks like my goal is nearly in reach… you guys surpassed the halfway point in the donation drive in under a week and it looks like we’ll hit the overall goal in the next few weeks, even using the most conservative and pessimistic projection of trends. Somebody asked earlier for the “option” to keep donating to help pay off my bills and such. Well, I’d be loathe to raise the target just because the original target is reached a little early, but it’s not like I’m going to stop accepting donations when it hits $3,000.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on with the update schedules and the donation drive. Thanks to everybody who’s donated, and I know I say this a lot, but if you can’t donate… tell a friend. Tell the world. My sites are very text heavy, and I am not using even 1% of my bandwidth capacity.Word of mouth is the best advertising, particular in terms of cost-to-benefit ratio. Seriously, you don’t have to ask before you put a link to one of my sites up somewhere. Go right ahead and just do it.

After two weeks in a row of crashing hard at the end of the week, I’m moving MU to a Monday-Thursday schedule. Some people have suggested I simply make it Monday-Wednesday-Friday, but even shifting from five updates to four is going to make it harder to sustain the story… there’s an old saying which goes “writers write,” and it’s very true for me. Every time I’ve tried to take a hiatus from writing one story without something else to take its place, it’s been damned hard to get back into the swing of things. Even taking a day off is a slippery slope… but the weekend seems to get a psychological exemption, and I can convince myself Friday is part of the weekend.

This all was taken into account with my current plans and the fundraiser drive… several times over the past few years, I’ve had to suspend my writing on Star Harbor due to other demands on my time or simply to rest and recover, and each time the quality of the writing I could produce went through a temporary decline when I took it up again. I don’t want that to happen with MU, or Tribe, any other projects I may start, but as long as I’m responsible for forty hours of non-writing work every week, that’s a looming inevitability.

But, you guys have really come through… we’re a week in and better than halfway to the target. My goal is actually in sight. All I can say is the same thing that so many of you have said to me: keep up the awesome work!

This is an idea that’s been kicking around my head for quite some time. I’ve come this close to registering the domain name several times over the years, and I consider myself quite fortunate that it was still available when I decided to go through with it.

365 Tales is a new project that differs from my others in that it’s not an ongoing serial, and it’s also not just a place for me to post my own stories. It’s a venue for anybody to share their creativity with the world, in the form of microfiction: short-short stories, in this case of 365 words or less.

There’ve already been a few submissions, and I’ll be writing some stories for it myself tomorrow. If you’ve got an idea for a little something to contribute, then by all means, don’t be shy… this is the internet, after all.

One, a MU reader who goes by the name of Mewt is pledging to donate $5 to me for every $100 worth of commissions he makes for his custom chainmaille jewelry Buy some, and you can really have fun the next time you go through airport security.

Two… this will probably be getting a larger announcement once there’s more stuff on the page… but I am launching a microfiction site called 365 Tales Think you can tell a story in 365 words or less? Give it a try… it’s not 100% ready for public consumption, but good enough that you can get the general idea. I’m going to be writing stories for it myself tomorrow, but I’d love it if there’s already some outside submissions on there when I start publicizing it.

For a few minutes this morning, Project Wonderful’s ad servers were displaying a cached Tales of MU ad on Something*Positive to some visitors, instead of the ad that was actually slotted to display. It didn’t last long, and didn’t affect everybody who visited the site… but the errant ad showed up on enough screens for me to notice incoming visitors from S*P when I knew I wasn’t paying for any.

The problem turned out to be related to some maintenance they were doing on the servers, and was resolved even as I reported it. However, I’m a firm believer in “What goes around, comes around.”… or rather, I believe that’s the way things should work, and can work, but only if we make it so.

So, here’s a free, unsolicited plug for the comic whose slot was partially pre-empted for that brief time:

The Peace Keepers Force

I read through part of the beginning and the end of their archives. It’s kind of an MIBesque sci-fi romp, with kid martial artists instead of MIBs. The first strips are noticeably rough, but all that means is the artist improved with time. I don’t think it’ll make my regular reading list, but it’s worth a look.

The new address is void.alexandraerin.com … I’m trying out a different Wordpress theme (with some modifications), and I’m not done yet. I won’t bother updating all the links until I feel it’s ready, but if anybody wanted to see chapter three, it’s there.

Void Dogs will probably be a weekly thing for now, and if I find myself pressed for time (or sanity), it’ll be the first thing to go on hold.

There’s a good chance I will have time to develop it further come January 1st, though. It looks like we’re going to hit 10% of my goal in just the first weekend of fundraising.

 UPDATE: And, after seeing how long the first post was compared to those that followed, I split it into two. There was a logical breaking point where the mood shifted dramatically, anyway.