Alexandra Erin

Last fall, when I determined to end my conventional employment and support myself as a writer with donations from my fans and other tools the internet gives me, the good folks at Squishable.com, frequent sponsors of my largest ad spaces, offered to donate a free Squishable to the person who donated the most to my $3,000 drive. I liked the idea so much that I decided to match them, by offering another Squishable to a randomly selected donor.

That donor was kerinbot, and it’s taken this long for the apparently very popular alligator model to come back in stock. It’s the one she had her heart set on, though, and it’s now winging its way towards her.

Today’s the last day of May. Tomorrow is, by some manner of coincidence, the first day of June. June’s always been an auspicious month for me, ever since I was born… in June. I started the first version of Star Harbor in June. I started the Tales of MU in June. Now on Monday I’m set to relaunch Star Harbor, I suspect with more people reading it than ever now that so many MU-readers have discovered its archives. On Thursday, the anniversary of MU’s first post on Livejournal, I’ll be officially launching the companion story I was toying around with in an earlier post. I’ve actually broken with my usual practice and written several chapters of that in advance, in order to make certain that the idea works.

I’m very excited about it. The protagonist of the second MU story has a different perspective from Mackenzie, and this will be reflected in the story. When I started writing, I didn’t have nearly as clear an image of the college and its grounds in my head, and this was reflected by a lack of detail in the story which now partly embodies Mackenzie’s style. She doesn’t describe people who don’t catch her eye in some way, and she doesn’t dwell on her surroundings. As a result, she lives more inside her head, which I think serves the narrative well… and through another bizarre coincidence just happens to suit my strengths as a writer the best… but this new protagonist sees the world differently, which will allow me both to flesh out the world quite a bit more and also stretch myself as a writer.

A couple different readers have asked, in various ways, how separate I mean to keep the two Tales of MU stories. I’m not going to rule out a direct crossover down the line, and there will be moments when the new protagonist could hardly fail to notice the goings-on in Mackenzie’s life, or where they both view the same same event from different angles, but on the whole both stories will be readable as separate entities. If you read both of them, you’ll just get a clearer picture of the whole.

Anyway, it should be an exciting month.

I’ve got some very slow net access for the moment. I wasn’t really expecting it and I don’t know how long it’ll last. That’s actually more frustrating than not having any. I’m trying to decide if it’ll be worth it to try to hammer out a Tales of MU chapter and get it posted before I get dropped again, which is what I did last night. The chapter turned out pretty decent, but there’s still a couple errors in it. Since I’m getting my net fixed tomorrow, it’s probably not going to be worth the stress.

Ah, well.

Earlier this evening I posted a mild entreaty on behalf of a candidate for the Livejournal user representative elections. I’ve since removed it from both this site and Tales of MU, where it was cross-posted.

The thing is, it was a mild entreaty. I don’t use Livejournal that much. Because Livejournal was instrumental to Tales of MU’s early success, I felt like publicizing the election a little (a lot of users aren’t aware of it) and mention who I was voting for and why, and while I was at it, urge the people on the fence to go and vote for him. But I’m really not terribly invested in the issue. But the post was met with a bit of vitriol, and… well… even when I don’t care about something I tend to come out swinging if it looks like somebody else is reaching for their bat. I’m trying to keep up my little empire while dealing with a dead cable modem here. I don’t have time. I can’t be bovvered.

I can’t even check my email at the moment, except using a little tiny webmail interface, so if I came to the attention of the “sleeping dragon” I’d have a couple thousand extra emails to download when my internet’s back Thursday or Friday.

So, I took down the campaign post.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t honestly think this election matters half as much as people seem to think it does. Now, I’m not terribly active in Livejournal affairs, and I’m tapping this out on my phone’s keypad without having access to another browser window, so I apologize if this is a little scattered, but here’s why.

Livejournal’s new owners are Men Of Business.

The buyout puts the blogging engine used by about a third of all bloggers in Eastern Europe in the hands of Russian business interests. That’s a business decision, right there. They have their own plans and their own purposes, and these don’t involve Snarry fic or Harmonians versus Herons. Leaving any speculation aside, they want to make money. That’s why somebody buys a company.

I hesitate to say this, because I know fandom’s a tetchy entity, but I think they’re going to find themselves at odds with Livejournal’s management on an increasing basis. The fandom communities like to remind people how big a portion of Livejournal’s userbase they are. But the real question isn’t how many members their communities have. It’s how much money do they bring in versus how many potential legal headaches and site-disrupting dramas they cause.

We’ve seen Livejournal’s new owners move to tighten things up already, with things like changing the new account sign up process to “streamline” the number of free account options, and sanitizing the public-facing pages by scrubbing the interest lists. These actions were met with considerable uproar, not the least from the fandoms which perceived themselves as under attack. I think the main purpose of this advisory board in general and the user rep in particular is to convey the illusion that the management gives a damn, that the decisions they’ve already made were arrived at through compromise and open dialogue.

Whoever’s elected is probably going to take a lot of blame for doing nothing when there’s not much they can do.

Now, I could be wrong, about the whole thing or about the precise extent to which the user rep will be a figurehead/scapegoat, but the bottom line is, I don’t think it’s going to matter a lot at the end of the day. So I give my vote to somebody who impresses me personally, and against somebody who’s being supported by a campaign I find odious and extremely hypocritical in its tendency to shout “But the candidate’s doing nothing! You can’t blame her for the actions of her [extremely well-organized] supporters!” while leveling just that sort of blame against the other candidate for the scattered actions of his supporters.

That’s my take. Nobody has to agree with it. Nobody has to change their mind and vote the way I’m voting.

I’m leaving comments open on this in case anybody wants to share their thoughts on the broader context here, but stumping for candidates will be deleted. I’m just not interested.

I’ve said before that I don’t hold to the credo of “Chekhov’s Gun” (if you put a gun on the mantelpiece in the first act, somebody has to take it down and shoot it by the third act), and in the course of re-writing the FAQ on Tales of MU I’ve found myself reminded of why.

I once read an entertaining conversation involving a Harry Potter fan who was outraged—outraged, almost to the point of apoplexy—when she found out that J.K. Rowling had said inequivocably that the character Regulus Black (who never actually appears in the story in the flesh) is dead (a fact which became canon in text in book seven, anyway), because it shot down her pet theory that Mr. Black was actually living as Stubby Boardman.

For those of you who aren’t immediately familiar with the facts of the story, Mr. Boardman was a musician. An earlier book had described Harry Potter reading a tabloid rag in which an article claimed that Stubby was actually secretly Regulus’s brother, Sirius. The reader knew at that point where Sirius was, but Regulus’s fate was a mystery. To this reader, and apparently a few others, this could only mean that we were supposed to conclude that Stubby Boardman and Regulus Black were one and the same.

If not, then what was the point of mentioning it at all?

Of course, the “point” of including the article was threefold: one, it helped establish the character of the publication. Two, it showed us a glimpse of the wider world beyond what happens when Harry Potter’s around. Three, it was funny. You know, entertaining.

There’s a lot said about the art of writing which tries to reduce it to a science. There’s a lot said about not “wasting words,” which is good advice, but in practice the rather complex question of what is or isn’t a wasted word gets reduced down to “Any word which does not keep the story moving in a straight line is a waste.” That works fine if you’re trying to write a really tight, taut, tense, terse thriller. If you’re working in any medium and genre that has fewer t-words, though, a little bit of color does not go amiss.

Apparently, the very talented Mary Anne Mohanraj was good enough to mention Tales of MU during a panel discussion on polyamory in fiction at Wiscon, the leading feminist scifi convention. How’s that for cool?

…so I can do some much-needed Wordpress and plugin upgrading. I would have given more notice (for instance, any notice) but I didn’t expect to be awake this early on Sunday, when very few people are checking. If I don’t do it now, then my choice is either do it during the week, which will disrupt the site’s operations, or put if off another week.

UPDATE: Back up! The FTP went a lot faster than usual. Now I know when to do this kind of thing in the future.

…since I’ve blogged, but I haven’t been writing as much as I should, and when I’m not writing, I feel bad about blogging. I think, “What am I doing, opening up the blog window when I could be writing?” But of course, when I have the urge to write something and I suppress it, that makes it harder to write anything else. I won’t become a more prolific writer by not blogging.

So, here’s the state of the me.

I do have my new glasses. I’m still getting used to them, or rather, I’m getting used to how astonishingly poor my eyesight had become. Until I realized just how old my old glasses were, I hadn’t really realized that I wasn’t able to read the signs for the stores and things around the neighborhood… I was just relying on my knowledge of what they said. Now I can see with perfect clarity. It’s a bit like having superpowers.

After talking back and forth with Victoria, the editor behind the wovel project, I’ve decided it’s not quite the right time. There’s things going on in my life that aren’t for public consumption. I have a strong story concept, though, and I will be possibly working with her in the future, if her idea has legs. I hope it does. You all know I believe in the future of online literature. I’d love to see her succeed.

I’m very excited about starting Star Harbor back up. The fundraiser’s been going great over there.

I’m less sure about the future of some of my other projects. They’ve never really caught on the way they might have, and they’re not consistently catching my own imagination, possibly as a result. I’ll be taking a hard look at them. I might come up with some sort of “give me an incentive”-based means for keeping them going. Not financial, in the form of direct donations… I don’t want to overtap that particular well. Meilin Miranda has used some pretty creative things as benchmarks for bonus stories on her Intimate History series. I might use something like number of people who link to Tribe, or whatever. Stuff for me to think about.

On the other hand, if I cut some of my other projects, I could open up the MUniverse a little bit more. Some people would like to see more world-building and less sex. Some people would like to see nothing but sex. I like things just the way they are. Even though this is the internet, there’s no reason we couldn’t all be happy. It’s not like I don’t have a head full of world/school details and sexual scenarios that don’t fit into the story. I could make a parallel story, following another student who moves in different circles than Mackenzie, for instance, to give double the detail about the setting and some different perspectives on various things. I could also make (and have often thought about making) a sub-section within the site that has nothing but “adult” vignettes, what are often referred to around the internet as “lemons” or “PWP”… “Porn Without Plot.” The parallel story would have a set update schedule, but the other site would pretty much update whenever I have an idea I want to get down.

Anyway, at this point this is a lot of idle thoughts more so than plans. We’ll see how the next week goes.

First note: I’m going to need to get new glasses. Soon.

I’ve had the same glasses for the past five years without incident. No eye exam in that time… yeah, I know that’s not a great idea, but see above in re: without incident. Well, now we have incident. I’ve had a growing problem over the past few… well, actually, it’s been creeping up on me for quite a while… where I haven’t been able to sit at the computer for as long as I used to be before being afflicted by headaches, blurred vision, and pained, tired eyes, or more subtly and simpy the desire to look at something else (which turns into the worse symptoms if I ignore it). Because it’s been growing so slowly over time, it took me until I was having a conversation about how often my eyes have been hurting lately for me to realize exactly what was going on here.

So, yeah. New glasses. In the mean time, it’s taking me about twice as long as it should to get anything done at the computer because I have to take frequent rest breaks. After identifying the problem, I’ve done stuff like decreasing resolution and increasing font size and playing with monitor brightness, but that’s only getting me so far.

Here’s the other thing. I’ve got people asking me when I’m going to start Star Harbor back up… and I’d love to do that, because I’ve invested a lot of myself and a lot of my time in the characters. But here’s the thing… it needs to be worth my while, because, well… I’ve invested a lot of myself and a lot of my time in the characters.

So, I’ve put a donation link on the new Star Harbor page… one separate from the donation link on this site… and for every $50 that’s donated, I’ll post a new Star Harbor chapter. There’s more details on that site. It’s my hope that, given the level of fan response for Star Harbor, this will take care of whatever expenses come out of my optometry needs.