Alexandra Erin

Life’s been kind of hitting me from all sides, time-wise, so I haven’t had a chance to update this for a while, but I just thought I’d mention that the “wovel” project being driven by Victoria Blake has got off the ground and now all it needs are interested readers.

To reiterate, this project is essentially a web novel with audience participation/direction. Each weekly installment ends with a branching choice. The readers vote on which path the story will take.

For those who missed the previous announcement, I’m not involved in this round of the project, due to scheduling conflicts, but I support the endeavor.

They’re up to three chapters now, with the first one here. Please take a minute to check it.

Been having trouble sleeping again. I’ve got Wednesday’s Tales of MU and Star Harbor Nights updates both halfway done but I think I’m going to turn in and finish them tomorrow. Maybe instead of making Thursday the official “dead” day I should just declare it to be “five times a week between Monday and Saturday”, and let the updates fall where they may?

…that I don’t understand the impulse towards writing fan fiction.

I still don’t.

But I have succumbed to it

Update: Turns out that the search feature only grabs the first five hundred individuals, including dead journals, which it doesn’t show. That’s why all the top tags seemed to have 400+ users. So, nowhere near the top. That makes more sense, honestly. There was never a question that more people were actually interested in Tales of MU than everything else… but the most I could come up with was that other interests just weren’t getting tagged in a regular fashion. Oh, well. This is why I put “not sure” in the subject line.

And, at least I know why the number hasn’t gone up past five hundred.

Original message, for those who want to read it:
(more…)

We just came through another bad batch of storms. This one was not nearly as merciful as the last one, sadly, though I remain safe. My parents were a lot closer to the actual hot spot this time and I spent a good portion of the evening with my eye on the radar until they got hold of a phone and let me know they were okay.

This is shaping up to be a bad season for storms. Nebraska suffers years of both flooding and drought (we were the Great American Desert during Zebulon Pike’s survey, remember?) and this is apparently a flood year. The rivers and lakes are all unsettlingly high.

In any event, my brain is about fried. I made myself finish the Tales of MU chapter I’d been working on when the storms hit, but I’m not going to get Void Dogs or Tribe done. My brain just lacks the focus right now. I was going to write and post them after midnight, but I don’t really feel like staying up all night again and then screwing up tomorrow.

It’s not that I’ve never been through thunderstorms and tornados before, obviously, but this is the first time I’ve been trying to work from home in the middle of such conditions. It’s possible that I’ll adjust to it… but I really hope I don’t have to.

Dozens of homes were damaged, power lines downed, possible gas leak at Wal-Mart, dramatic pictures of a car with a serious splinter, but amazingly, nobody was killed. The worst damage was thankfully a couple miles to the west of me, but I was up until about six in the morning making sure the next wave that came through wasn’t going to kill us. The tornado sirens kept blowing even as the meteorologists were announcing the all clear.

More information on the aftermath.

Thanks to everyone who expressed concern over my safety with the storms that struck Omaha. There’s more storms moving in as of now (3:15 in the morning) but the worst has passed us by. I haven’t heard any reports of fatalities yet. A tornado apparently struck at a nearby Wal-Mart and did quite a bit of damage, there are reported to be a lot of emergency vehicles on site. It’s a 24 hour store so at the very least there would have been employees present. Some homes were apparently damaged, too.

So, I’ve been learning some new things about the principles of web design. Like, for instance… the principles of web design.

I’ve lamented a few times that my other stuff hasn’t even managed to catch on with even the MU fans that much, and I was mostly chalking that up to a matter of appeal, but apparently a large number of MU readers didn’t even know about them. Okay, obviously, not everyone reads my blog, but I also put little announcements and plugs at the bottom of the story just above the comments, or sometimes in the first comment. And then there was the little pull-down menu off to the side that said “AE’s Works” on it.

I was so proud when I managed to edit a freely available Javascript snippet in order to make that. “Look, a real web page with actual working doohickey.”

Well, of course, not everybody reads the comments… and those who don’t tend to switch tabs or close the window when they get to the bottom of the story. And a little box in the sidebar is apparently not that noticeable. So, after getting multiple comments responding to my anniversary message’s mention of my other works not catching on with “What other works?” or “Why don’t you list these in the sidebar?”, I took the hint yesterday and replaced the dropdown with a simple list.

Part of me is going “But I liked the dropdown! It was like the TARDIS… a clever little box that’s bigger on the inside and takes you to different worlds!” But, really, I think this will be a good move in terms of cross-promoting my works.

On the MU page, I’ve also cut some of the stuff that was pushing the actual content on the page down “below the fold”, including a set of links to buy the printed books that many people never saw. Why? Because they always scroll down until they reach the content. Where they expected to find printed books, if such existed, was in the store… and since they didn’t see them there, they concluded they didn’t exist.

So, I’ve added a link from the Cafepress storefront to my Lulu storefront. Hopefully that will help. I’ll make a nice prominent “Buy Books!” button at some point, too.

I’m going to be making some more changes, too. Some of them are already kind of waiting in the wings as a couple of readers have been helpfully going over the design and tightening it up from a technical standpoint. Right now I’m focusing my redesign efforts on MU but the other sites will get a bit of an overhaul after I’m done.

…to not seek your fortune in the publishing industry.

The tighter things are, financially, for the publishers, the less adventurous they’re going to feel in terms of seeking out and promoting new talent. The smaller their profits are, the less they will be inclined to share those profits with the authors who actually provide the product they sell.

Our current recession isn’t helping anybody in this profession. I definitely feel that the ricing price of gas (and the resulting rising price of everything else) is biting into me from both directions, as people have less to spend on discretionary entertainment and what they do spend doesn’t go quite as far… but, on the other hand, I do have some advantages:

1. I’m only trying to support myself, not multiple layers of management.
2. As people have less money to spend on buying books or magazines, they spend more time looking for free alternatives, which can give me more ad revenue. If these people become long-term readers, I have a chance at earning their “book dollars” when they become available again.

Of course, my position has its disadvantages. I don’t have a bunch of capital or assets to sell off if I start to run into trouble. I don’t have a bunch of divisions to spread my losses over. I can’t lay off my left hand in order to save money. In other words, it would take a much smaller wave to founder my little boat than it would to sink one of the great big ships.

The big publishing companies are likely to make it through their current crisis in some form on the strength of their inertia, of their sheer mass alone. People might be laid off. The authors will certainly continue to see smaller percentages of smaller sales reflecting on their royalty checks. But the companies will survive.

Good news for readers, but cold comfort to anybody trying to make a living working for them.

Whee!

I have more to say than that, but I pretty much already said it on the TOMU site.