Alexandra Erin

Certain names keep coming up when people discuss my writing, and it’s never a surprise to heat that my ideas remind someone of Neil Gaiman or Bill Willingham or Fritz Leiber, as I number these authors among my influence. However, the name “Robert A. Heinlein” has cropped up more than a few times, too, and this puzzled me as I’d never read any of his works.

Certainly I’m familiar with the man… both the name and his body of literature. I’ve read and admired authors who read and admire him (I believe my favorite author, Dr. F. Paul Wilson, is a Heinlein fan.) The man is a giant in the field. You could no more avoid him than you could avoid gravity.

Still and for all that, it struck me that I hadn’t read a word of the man’s writing. So, when circumstance stranded me at a book store for a few hours this evening, I decided to rectify that.

I skipped Strange Land and Harsh Mistress and everything else that I’d heard of and had some idea what they were about. I wanted a fresh experience. I wanted to experience Heinlein for the first time without bias.

So, I picked a book called The Door Into Summer and started reading… and damned if I didn’t know the whole thing frontwards and backwards.

It turns out I read it at some point, though I’ve got no memory of having done so… there was no “Aha! I remember reading this!” moment. I simply knew the story, and in far greater detail tham I could have absorbed from a summary somewhere. I have an inkling it might have been around the time I was in the fifth grade. I read rather a lot of science fiction at that age but don’t remember much of it, or anything else.

That kind of thing happens to me all the time… it’s part of what I call “the magic of being me.”

The really interesting thing is that I’ve written some stories with a very Heinleinian style and outlook… nothing I ever circulated. I’ll have to see if I can dig them up, though.

It makes me wonder what else of his I’ve read.

Since I mentioned Harry Potter slash fiction the other day, I thought I’d share my own modest entry into that delightful genre. Enjoy.
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Tales of MU 3: Virginal is now available on lulu.com… it does not contain the bonus story “The Sufferings of Sooni” as I had previously suggested it might, as with the way the storyline has evolved that will fit in better with book four, chronology notwithstanding.

Instead, I’ve included the infamous “found on the ethernet” bonus story at the end of the book… appropriate as it follows Mackenzie’s rememberances of her time among the fan fic community… and followed it up with a brief, book-exclusive discussion on the nature of the ethernet itself.

Well, a preliminary test of Google ads seems to show that for me, right now, they’re almost exactly as profitable as Project Wonderful ads. So, I’m going to try running both in tandem and see how that works. I hate to “junk up” my sites with more ads, but it’s a way of getting more money for myself without having to take more from my readers.

Long-term, as I develop my other revenue streams, maybe I’ll be able to look at the ads and see that one set’s doing better for me than the other, or whatever, and then cut back accordingly.

You’ll notice a few new Project Wonderful ads on Tribe. Hopefully, they’re not too distracting… or won’t be, once they’re occupied by ads and not blank white space. Currently the ads Tribe and Void Dogs are simply the same ad boxes which I made for MU… obviously, given my recent decision I do need to experiment with boosting my revenue. Plus, I figured I’d give advertisers an alternative target if they don’t want to advertise on a site with MU’s mature themes.

I may do the same thing with Void Dogs, once it has a regular update schedule… it’s slightly more work safe than MU, after all.

(Headline from the song “Defying Gravity” from the musical Wicked… that whole song sums up my mindset right now.)

Yeah, pursuant to previous post, and a bunch of other stuff going on in my life, I’ve decided to step up my plans and give my two weeks notice at the end of the week. I mean, I’ve crunched the numbers six ways from Sunday and I know I can do this, I know I can make it work.

I also know if I try to stick it out at work, with the winter weather coming on and me not having a regular ride, and trying to keep my writing projects going on a level that they’ll hold the casual readers while continuing to attract new interest for the next two months, then I’m going to end up screwing myself one way or another. Worst case scenario is I end up with a personnel file full of bad stuff about absenteeism and the like–or without a job–and then I lose my other safety net, which was the fact that the place I work for is always hiring and will be so sorry to see me go that they will love to take me back if, in six months, I find I need a regular job again.

There’s also other ways I could blow it… stressing out and losing it completely, for one thing. The recent micro-drama over the fact that I may (did) have told somebody to perform an act of anatomical improbability with a horizontally-oriented spiked mace is a good example of this. I’m not saying my hair-trigger temper’s going to magically disappear when I’m not working the equivalent of two full time jobs, but at the very least I’ll be able to take my time, read comments more carefully, and then think before I reply.

I could also screw things up by getting too comfy with a steady paycheck coming in and mismanaging my finances for the next few months. I know myself… I’m really good at the whole frugality thing, but only when I have no choice.

And then there’s the fact that if I tough it out at work for two more months, there’s every chance I’ll end up “toughing it out” for another month, to get that much more security… and then another… and then another.

 Like I said, I know myself.  Nobody is better than me at putting things off… I wrote the book on procrastination.

Well, I made a good start on writing the book on procrastination. I wrote an outline. A mental outline, really.

Okay, so it’s more of an idea for a book on procrastination. But I’m right on top of it, I swear.

The point is, I put things off, and then they never get done. So, it’s now-or-never time, do-or-die time. November’s an auspicious month for it, right? National Novel Writing Month. This November marks eight years since I turned my back on formal education and the traditional path to success. Also, there was the thing with the fortune cookies. When a piece of paper from a restaurant tells you that you shouldn’t waste your talents on unchallenging work, that’s a sign.

What does this mean for you guys? Well, I might nag a little more often people spreading the word… though I’ll try to come up with creative suggestions so it’s not like I’m just inciting people to spam. I’m not going to start with the “Please, please, please give me money so my babies* can live!” routine, because I’ve made my plans carefully and even if I’m speeding them up a bit, I don’t really have to do that now.

I might add a line to the end of the stories, right above the comments, reminding people that I do this for a living and that they can help me through donating… because that will be true now.

On the other hand, I can expect a couple of income spikes… book three should be available this weekend. I got all the grunt work done on the formatting. Several people have mentioned buying MU books or merchandise as Christmas presents (and, incidentally, I recently slashed prices in the MU store, as sales were kind of flat. Well, more like round. As in, 0. That’s probably because everyone just got done donating… but they weren’t that high to begin with, and after looking at other Cafepress stores, my markups were kind of high.)… and many people have also asked about purchasing autographed books, or insertable autograph plates of some kind.

I can’t really manage a mail-order business while I’m working all day, but I’ll have no problem doing it once I’ve quit. It’ll have to be inserts… ordering books, signing them, and then shipping them out again would be problematic for a couple different reasons. I expect to see a brief rush at the beginning, as people who already have the books and want autographs purchase them, and then it’ll level off into another long-term trickle, the way the books themselves do.

So yeah, long-winded and rambly post, but the upshot is:

I be doin’ this.

…to giving notice at work. Yeah, it’s not the end of the year yet, but I’m not sure I’m going to make it. My sleep levels are still way down, my stress level’s still way up, and as the weather turns colder and (potentially) snowy, I’m going to have a harder time making it in on a timely basis.

One of the tools I use for gauging my word-of-mouth (or word-of-mouse) it to look at incoming links… that is, when somebody clicks on a link to my page, it passes along “referrer information” that is collected on my server, to show me where people are coming from.

One of the things that turned up recently is this forum thread.

First of all, thanks to Cloaked Stranger and everybody else who’s spreading the word via forums or any other means, but I have to laugh (or at least, that seems like the healthiest emotional response) at the replies.

Once again, I have to say I’ve missed the memo on how “sex” is the opposite of “story.” I could get frustrated. I could rant and rave. But, as I told a commentator named Faye on the MU page recently, I knew when I started that some people wouldn’t get it, that it just wouldn’t appeal to them. I knew, and I did it anyway.

I write the story the way I want to write it, and some people like it, and some people don’t.

It’s very possible… likely even… that my story appeals to far less people in its present form than it would without the “smut” (particularly as the “smut” I write isn’t very likely to satisfy those looking for pornography), but paradoxically, I believe this gives it stronger appeal.

How is this possible?

Quite simply stated, there’s a lot of stories out there that appeal to almost everybody. Would I really want to compete with that? MU, on the other hand, is pretty unique… in a way that people who see sex and write it off as “pornfic” or “smut” aren’t likely to grasp. MU has no real competition that I’m aware of… and if there is something out there that overlaps it to a significant extent, I still wouldn’t really count it as competition, because the market’s far from saturated. The presence of anything truly similar to MU could only whet the appetite for such fare.

I recently read an article that describes a phenomenon I’ve managed to mention a few times, without knowing its name… that being the fact that the online world has created a situation where anything you care to bring to market can find its audience, or the audience can find it. Turns out, this effect is called The Long Tail… and that’s why occasionally running across one or two “No sex, please! We’re literary.” types doesn’t dishearten me.

While I would hope that people would try the story out for themselves rather than relying on somebody else’s second-hand description of it, ultimately I can be fairly secure in the fact that some people are just not going to be part of the Intended Audience… as I’ve often said, the Intended Audience for my stories is ”anybody who likes them.”

Anybody who doesn’t can simply get along without reading the story, without actually affecting my bottom line.

That’s the magic of the Long Tail.

…and I still haven’t got that memo.

It turns out the gay character in Harry Potter was Dumbledore.

I kind of thought this might be the case after reading book 7, in particular the eulogizing by Elphias Doge, who mentioned their “mutual attraction”, but figured that Rowling would at best leave it ambiguous. No, she came out and confirmed it… not only was he gay, but love, romantic love was what blinded him to Grindlewald’s evil for so long. That realization adds so much to that part of his story. (Edit: I just realized it also adds more to Rita Skeeter’s yellow journalism attack on Dumbledore’s “unnatural interest” in Harry Potter… just goes to show why, even in Britain and in the wizard world, Professor Dumbledore wouldn’t have been more open with his sexual orientation.)

Good on Rowling for making this canon.

Of course, this means she’ll lose all her radical fundamentalist Christian readers.

Hey, you wanna hear something downright eerie? 

Like, serious Twilight Zone material?

Okay, so, I was over at Quinn’s earlier today, and we were eating Chinese food. Because we had ordered enough for a family of five between the two of us, we got like five fortune cookies. I took two of them.

 My first contained the message, “Your life will be prosperous if you use your creativity.” I thought, okay, whoa… that’s kind of freakily accurate. I showed it to Quinn, and she agreed.

Then I opened up my second cookie, and was told, “Your respect for others will be your ticket to success.” Less freakily accurate. We both agreed that this one was probably misdirected, and I traded it to her for her next fortune… which read, “Avoid unchallenging occupations - they will waste your great talents.”

Given that I’ve been doing data entry for for the past several years specifically because it was non-challenging and I’d be free to think creatively on my own projects while at work, but now the time I spend on that job is becoming a hindrance, I’d have to say again, weirdly accurate.

Now, of course, anybody could look at your average fortune cookie fortune and find some kind of applicability to their life. That’s just how they’re written. The fact that I got two fortunes that seem to be really really relevant must be balanced out by the fact that the second one I actually read could really only be taken ironically. In terms of cookies I actually opened myself, the oracular success rate could not really be more than 50/50.

All of which is to say, nothing I said above is the downright eerie part. That’s what happened next, when Quinn excused herself to go finish up a quest on World of Warcraft before we put on the movie (What were we watching? Only the single greatest film Robert Altman ever directed… which I’m sure you all know is Popeye.), and so I reached into my Handbag of Holding to find a diversion and pulled out my Nintendo DS.

I opened it up…

And a fortune fell out.

It read, “Keep up the good work. You will be rewarded.”

Holy fucking shit.

Now, the obvious thing that might be suggested is that this was just a stray fortune from one of our cookies that ended up on my lap and I only thought it came from the DS. No, I actually watched it slide off the touchscreen when I flipped the thing open. Even if it were somehow possible for a fortune to have got into my HoH, the DS was in a zipper pocket.

Even if we were to imagine a fortune could somehow have fallen into my handbag, wormed its way into the pocket, and got worked around inside the DS (while the bag was not being jostled or moved in any way)… well, that would be such an astonishing coincidence as to be downright eerie, anyway.

But, here’s the kicker… I know it’s not one of our fortunes from the cookies we opened today. It’s not even from the same restaurant. The restaurant we order from uses a slightly smaller typeface and prints lucky numbers on the back in red. This one doesn’t have lucky numbers. The paper’s somewhat glossier, on top of that.

I was about to say that it was just possible that I got that fortune from the other Chinese restaurant I sometimes use, when I’m eating out with my parents, and thought it was cute and somewhat applicable and so I stuck it in my bag, and from there we need only assume it somehow worked its way into the pocket and inside the DS… still a leap, but a smaller one… but even then it would still be an eerie coincidence for me not to have taken out my DS at any time between then and now, when I was eating Chinese food again and getting other cutely applicable fortunes.

But I just recalled that this Handbag of Holding is brand new.

It has not been to any Chinese restaurants with me.

Is that some seriously freaky shit, or what?