Alexandra Erin

Whoo… some fun times this weekend, as our block lost power for about an hour and a half. I could see the crews working on the line pretty soon after the outage began, but as it happened right around sundown and there was no knowing when power would be restored, it made for an interesting early evening. I used my phone to get to Twitter… used its light to find my flashlights and candles, then shut it down along with my laptop and read by candlelight for a while.

If you’ve never tried reading by candlelight… it’s not as easy as it sounds, especially if you don’t have anything like a reading desk that’s set up for it. I have a lot of candles, and it took four of them with an aluminum foil reflector behind them for me to be able to read comfortably in my easy chair.

A flashlight might have been easier, but I have more candles than I have batteries and lightbulbs.

I’d like to note that Catherynne M. Valente’s novel Palimpsest is going on sale this week. Pre-orders are available through Amazon.com. I’m looking forward to meeting her and SJ Tucker next month during the New Orleans trip… it should be quite the ride. Even though I’m going along as a passenger/participant/audience member, I know a few of my readers will be on the train, too… it’s exciting, scary, and humbling to consider that. I’ll bringing along a few goodies to help break the ice.

Thank you, everybody, who offered feedback on the More MU post. Obviously with opinions divided, no solution is going to make everybody happy, but I think I’ve hit upon what will work for me and what will be a decent compromise for everybody else.

It is what I described as the “mosaic” approach; turning More MU into an anthology series. For those of you who like reading Jamie and don’t want to see his story abandoned, don’t worry… that was never in the cards. He’ll be a recurring feature, in a similar capacity to what I described as an option for keeping things “Jamie-centric”: focusing on the more important, pivotal parts of his school life. In between those episodes, I can use the space to develop the same sorts of things I’ve done as Bonus Stories/Other Tales, that require a little more space to take off: Lucinda Blake’s interviews and the developing drama at the student paper, the intrigue and politics of Dee’s folk down below, Teddi Lundegard’s sessions with the students, etc.

Basically, Tales of MU will remain Mackenzie-centered while More Tales of MU will let me fill in the rest of the campus (and world) in a way that another single viewpoint and the occasional Other Tales never could. It’ll also let me develop the overarching plot more… so much of what’s going on is not happening in Mackenzie’s eyesight. To cover it all in Other Tales, I’d have to stop doing myths and legends, history, etc.

There won’t be any immediately noticeable change, though, since I’m in the midst of the skirmish

There won’t be any immediately noticeable change, though, since I’m in the midst of the skirmish plotline. I’ll be finishing that out before jumping viewpoints. I plan on making a poll post late Monday to gauge interest in various “features” I have in mind for the expanded More MU… the comments on that post can also be used to put forth ideas/characters I’ve overlooked.

Edit-dendum:

Here is a news story about the power outage… looks like I lucked out in terms of having the power back on relatively quickly, as some folks were down for much longer.

By using two browsers (one that’s not signed in as me), I’ve been testing the “Story’s up! No, it’s not.” bug that’s bedeviled the past few entries on Tales of MU. It seems to be an all-the-time thing… I can make a new post, it will treat it like it’s been marked “Private” (only I can see it) even when it’s not. I mark it private and republish it, and there it is. It’s only the Tales of MU site, none of the other ones.

Conclusion: something’s gone wonky with the Wordpress installation. I’m going to reinstall it. Shouldn’t take long, shouldn’t affect the stories. Website may be inaccessible for a small period of time. After that, I’ll get on with completing the week’s schedule.

It’s Thursday, and I’ve gone from starting the week with a cushion to have the schedule strung out behind me. As I said at the start of the week,I’m taking a look at what can be changed.

In particular, I think I have to say that it’s MOARMU that trips me up. It’s frequently the last thing I write in a day, and if I try to hold myself to writing it earlier I end up not getting to the stuff after it.

When I first started it, my hope was that being less invested in the character than I am in Mackenzie would make it easier to write, but with how many times it’s ground to a halt, I think the opposite is true. I just don’t have the character down as well as I do her. It takes me longer to write a shorter story with him. Having a challenge, stretching myself as a writer, etc. is a good thing to do sometimes, but my satisfaction doesn’t equal your enjoyment if it doesn’t result in words on the page, does it?

If I get stuck on a character’s viewpoint in Void Dogs or Star Harbor, I can flip around to somebody else and then come back (and when I remember that I can do that, it’s much easier to do multiple updates a week). MOARMU doesn’t work that way.

I haven’t wanted to face this because my goal was to have the two stories following parallel tracks; MOARMU is coming up from behind as it is, so updating it less often than the parent series would just make it fall further and further behind.

So, I’m thinking I’m either going to have to change the schedule or the format or both. I haven’t decided where to go with this. I don’t want to abandon the characters and the plotlines I have in mind, but following the skirmish match it may go from the day to day story of Jamie’s life at MU to an anthology of important episodes in his life at MU (more like a traditional novel) or maybe even a mosaic of interlocking serials from different peoples’ point of view; after the skirmish match, change to another character, come back to Jamie for the dance, etc. It is, after all, “More Tales of MU”, not “Jamie’s Tales of MU”.

I know there are people who prefer MOAR to the original recipe MU and this might disappoint them; on the other hand, for those who prefer it because it gives a wider view of the world, maybe making it a mosaic story would make it even better. In any event, there are still significantly fewer people reading MOAR than reading the original, and with more frequent updates, the audiences for Void Dogs and Star Harbor are creeping up towards MOAR’s levels; cutting back on my commitment to telling Jamie’s story will allow me to nurture those.

I don’t know. I’m thinking about it. For now, I’m going to strike the remaining Mores off this week’s schedule and finish everything else that’s on it.

(You can give feedback on this at the Livejournal mirror.)

Edit-dendum:

Good feedback. I’m hearing a lot of people endorsing the mosaic idea and a lot of people saying they don’t want to lose Jamie or see his plotlines left hanging. I guess I can clarify a little that giving him the axe (doesn’t he already have that?) is not in the cards… what I’m looking at is ways to keep the story going forward when it keeps threatening to die on me. To the people who are saying that they would rather have more sporadic updates of Jamie’s story than lose it… that’s pretty much what the mosaic would be, except for the fact that during the times it’s “sporadic”, there would be something else to read.

I’m probably going to end up doing a combination of the things that have been mentioned. The mosaic focus would come around to Jamie when something interesting/important is going on from his side, and then move to somebody else when it isn’t, so if you read Jamie’s stories it would be a bit more novel-ish.

So, this weekend, as you may have gleaned from my Twitter, I decided to mix things up by doing some writing on my laptop. I slipped on some ice on Friday and the living room furniture sounded more comfortable for my back than my office desk chair.

Yes, this is the same laptop that betrayed me so cruelly before, but it’s been well-behaved since then, and I’m a bleeding-heart liberal at heart. I believe in rehabilitation. I don’t see any benefit to not engaging with rogue computers.

You get the idea.

When I’m writing on my laptop, I usually don’t bother connecting to the internet until I need to. It’s distracting and it drains power much more quickly broadcasting wirelessly than sitting there typing does. Since I was already running late on my schedule, I decided to sit down and really focus… just write. Everything I need to do, in one marathon session.

And so I didn’t figure out until after I’d done about seven hours of writing that Vista had decided it wasn’t interested in allowing any internet traffic, Vista and Ubuntu still aren’t speaking to each other, and when I finally got hold of a writable CD, I found out my CD drive doesn’t want to write, either.

Fun tiems.

So I started copying the stories by hand. If I were typing from a print-out, this would be annoying but okay as I am pretty much a goddess of data entry, but my Windows Vista also doesn’t want to talk to my roommate’s printer. Trying to type from my laptop to desktop involves doing things with my field of vision that it wasn’t meant to do. It’s possible, but… irritating and slower than it should be.

I figured out halfway through Tales of MU that it’s easier to rewrite than retype, reading a paragraph or two and then copying what happened rather than transcribing word for word. In the process, I think the story got richer as well as longer. It ended with me having a seven-thousand word chapter (my target is 2,000-3,000… my “ideal” is kind of like 3,000).

So this got me thinking… right now I’ve got nothing scheduled for the weekends, and I’ve now twice made a great start in the first half of a week and then blown my schedule to hell trying to keep up after a late day. Here I am, with the possibility of posting two MU chapters today (one as a make-up for Friday)… or saving one for tomorrow. Essentially, having written one over the weekend and one today.

I’ve still got to copy the other stories, but I have no doubt I’ll be able to similarly expand them.

The problem with the “buffer” that people have previously proposed I adopt is that it would not be self-sustaining; if I had a three day buffer, the first three times I needed it, it would be gone. If I make a point of getting a day or most of a day’s writing done spread out over the weekend each week, though, I’d be starting the week with a head start. If I stumbled once a week, it would be built in, and I’d pick it back up. It would be essentially what I’m trying to do now, except instead of always trying to play catch-up, I’d already be ahead.

So, yeah. Last Friday is a bust. I failed to deliver. I’m going to call it a “Pyhrric loss”, though, because I can learn from it.

Even with the misses on the schedule, I’m feeling pretty good about the last few weeks. I’m getting better at holding to deadlines again. It is not a good thing to have items on a list that are never delivered, but when I don’t look at the list and look at how much I have produced, it’s a good output. I just need to smooth it out, so to speak.

And from the way money’s been coming in, I think I have some satisfied readers. No, I’m not on target at the moment to hit my goal for the month, but at roughly two weeks into February I’m at roughly $500, which is roughly… well… it’s not where I want to be but it’s where I can live in the short term.

I’m going to need that to be stepped up in the near future, because I’ve got moving expenses coming up, I’ve got taxes to pay, etc. But I understand there’s a two-way street here, which is why I’m stepping up my performance.

I’d also like to bring to everybody’s attention once again the ongoing sponsorship option (note to self: update the sponsorship lists immediately after posting this). On the contributor page, there is an option for Ongoing Support. It functions like a subscription or a pledge. By signing up your Paypal, you commit to giving $5 a month. You can cancel this on your end at any time, but for as long as it’s there, you’ll have the option of having your name (nickname or otherwise) appear on a roll on the Tales of MU, Void Dogs, or Star Harbor Nights website. These lists aren’t very prominently displayed right now. My next progressive tweak of the layout is going to have a prominent link when people are looking at the main archive page, along with a more prominent listing of the story title.

If you think you can spare $5 a month and you think the entertainment value you get over the course of the month is worth that $5, it doesn’t take long to sign up. You can choose to remain anonymous if you don’t want to participate in the sponsor thing and just want to simplify the process of contributing.

I set the goal for reader contributions as being $1500 a month. All it would take is three hundred readers to sign up as sponsors to make that happen like clockwork. I don’t expect to get there this month. But then… I’ve been surprised before.

I know your name on a website isn’t necessarily a huge incentive, but it’s a start. I’m open to suggestions for further incentives. Things that have been put forward include stickers or other affordable mailables (probably have to wait until after I move) and access to insider tidbits like little snatches of world background or character history (probably via email). I’m open to discussion on that.

And if you don’t have $5 every month or you don’t think it’s worth quite that much, you can still kick a buck or two over if you feel like it. No amount is going to insult me.

And as always… if you don’t have any money and you feel terribly guilty, relax. I still appreciate your patronage. Your page views in some way contribute to my advertising value. And if you tell a friend, or a bunch of friends, or put a link up somewhere, you’re contributing even more.

Wow. I need to keep up on my blogging. That got pretty long.

• Monday *DONE BEFORE MIDNIGHT*
  • Tales of MU *DONE*
  • More Tales of MU *DONE*
  • Void Dogs *DONE*
• Tuesday *DONE BY MIDNIGHT*
  • Tales of MU *DONE*
  • More Tales of MU *DONE*
  • Star Harbor Nights *DONE*
• Wednesday *DONE*
  • Other Tales of MU *DONE*
  • Something Else *DONE*
  • Void Dogs *DONE*
• Thursday *DONE*
  • Tales of MU *DONE*
  • More Tales of MU *DONE*
  • Star Harbor Nights *DONE*
• Friday
  • Tales of MU
  • More Tales of MU
  • Void Dogs

Pfffft… I’m laughing at myself right now. I decided to start posting a schedule every week and now I’m realizing I have been completely confused as to what day it is every day this week. I think I’ve said this before, but I have only a very tenuous grasp of the passage of time… even as compared to other aspects of reality.

I just got utterly confused as to whether the Void Dogs story segment I’m about to post is going up a few hours late or really early in the day, and then realized I’ve managed to utterly confuse my self about what I have and haven’t written and what day it is. I was so excited about getting back to Star Harbor I ended up writing that on Monday somehow and… oy.

So, schedule is a good idea. Better idea: CHECKLIST. Labeling the schedule as a commitment in my head doesn’t do much good, since calendars are apparently on the Department of Headland Security no-fly list. I guess I’ll keep alternating SHN and VoDo (which I’m told is a better abbreviation than “VD”) this week. Next week, I’ll look at the schedule each time I’m writing a story and I’ll mark it *done* right on the page when it’s done.

I mentioned the other day that I got the D&D book Open Grave. I was planning on reviewing it as I did Manual of the Planes, but the fact is, I don’t have as much to say about it in particular because as far as I’m concerned it does most everything right. More, it’s exactly what I needed.

See, one of my nitpicks of the 4th edition lies with a side effect of the designers’ approach towards keeping the game equally playable all the way through. The Monster Manual has roughly as many enemies at each of the thirty different experience levels… as many 1st level monsters as there are 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, and so on, and all the levels in between. Great, but when a party is 10th level, they could be fighting large numbers of monsters of several levels lower than them and/or a few monsters of higher levels. At 1st level, there’s quite literally nowhere to go but up, so the choice is somewhat restricted.

I don’t blame them. The alternative would be to double up the amount of weak monsters and end up doing extra work for creatures that will become “obsolete” fairly early on in a campaign. And frankly, the way monsters and combat work in the 4th edition, there’s a lot more to an encounter than the name at the top of the stat block. (I approach them as short-short stories in their own right.) And it’s not like there aren’t plenty of options for customizing.

But when it came to putting together encounters with “off the shelf” baddies, I found my options pretty limited. There are the tiny evil humanoids, there’s vermin like bats and rats and insects, there’s skellingtons… those are the basic options, and they’re all fairly clichéd at this point.

“You have to fight rats for a couple levels then you get to save a princess.”

So I thought, “How do you make rats interesting?”

And then I thought, “Lovecraft did.”

Boom. Horror campaign.

But even after setting on a theme that transformed a lot of the low-level monsters from stock fodder to pieces of a story, I found myself hungry for to work with. Sure, I’m a creative person and I could come up with new varieties of creepy crawlies, or rework some of the existing ones (and my campaign is going to involve a good bit of that), but the appeal of using something like D&D… especially the new edition where each monster comes in several varieties to serve multiple combat roles… is having ready made pieces to assemble a story. It’s like the difference between sculpting something from scratch and building it from LEGO brand bricks. Not all of us can be Michelangelo, and in terms of time cost vs. amount of fun had, LEGO does me just fine.

So, I had high hopes for Open Grave… specifically, I was hoping that it wasn’t just going to be Harryhausen skeletons and fantasy liches. I was not disappointed on that score. It has rules for plague zombies and zombie apocalypse-style throngs and it has a category of monster for Pet Semetary-style “came back wrong” undead and it has disembodied body parts and it has suggestions for hauntings that are resolved as something other than “beat the ghost into submission”… hauntings as hazards, as difficult terrain, as skill challenges. The “fluff” section is all about “how undead work” and it’s not terribly interesting to me but the meat is so much meatier than that of Planes.

Now, I’m not going to be doing Dawn of the Dead in my campaign, but the fact that they thought to include it shows that they took the right approach to the material. In 4th Edition D&D, your character is a Big Damn Hero from level 1 and is pretty close to a physical god at level 30. Characters like that demand cinematic-style challenges.

The adventures seem to be well-designed, and easily insertable into an ongoing campaign.

Even if you’re not running a horror campaign, it’s got monsters you can plug in to your evil wizard’s lair or your dragon’s den or whatever. Many of them are expanded varieties of existing monsters (i.e., more zombies, more skeletons, more wraiths, more ghouls, more vampires), so chances are you’re already using them and this allows you to shake things up a bit. The other that monsters are new and unique (in 4th edition, anyway) are all interesting and well done. They also thrown in such iconic baddies as Strahd and Vecna, for people who care about them.

I’m going to wrap up my review of the book’s positives here because it’s likely that some or all of my players are reading this and I don’t want to spoil anything for them by emphasizing anything in particular.

Negatives:

No player content.

I know this is essentially a DM’s tool, but since there aren’t any plans for an undead player’s handbook, I think they could have added some space for the players. For instance, I’m not a big fan of the “rehabilitation” that vampires have been undergoing in fiction, but I was surprised that there is no love for undead player character types. I was disappointed that there were no new rituals, particularly as I feel that rituals in the Religion category are underrepresented in the core rulebooks and this would have been an ideal place to rectify that a bit. I suppose the Divine Power sourcebook might take care of that, when it comes out. But a few paragon paths certainly would not have gone amiss (Undead slayers?) No new magic items, either, which are something I consider to be a DM’s tool as much as a player perk. The artifacts that are included are well-done, but artifacts are less “plug-and-play”… you pretty much have to design a story around them instead of including them in one.

Final conclusion:

I would strongly recommend this book to anybody who’s running a horror-tinged campaign, anybody who wants an expanded bestiary and can’t wait for Monster Manual 2, anybody who’s stumped for adventure/campaign ideas, and anybody who is dissatisfied for some reason with the way any of the traditional undead are presented in the core book. (In addition to having other varieties, there are suggestions on “swapping out” powers, and numerous templates that can be applied to modify undead and related creatures.)

One more reason I’m glad I’ve stayed the hell out of traditional publishing.

Jeph Jacques (whose name Ariella tells me I’ve been saying wrong for years; apparently, it’s pronounced “Jeau Smythe”) of Questionable Content has written a blog post which echoes much of what I feel about independent artistry on the internet, a subject I haven’t said as much about lately as I once did.

(By the way, I know Pages Unbound is still screwed up. I’m going to be looking at that next, but maybe the lesson here is that I’m not meant to run anything more complicated than a blog. Sigh.)

He’s looking at it through the prism of being a cartoonist, of course, but most of this stuff crosses media and genre boundaries.

He’s responding to a blog post by Neil Swaab, a Serious Cartoonist that digresses from bemoaning the death of printed alternative comics to point out what’s wrong with the webcomics model. (See my previous post about Andrew Wyeth for my prescient thoughts on this.) Jeph’s got a great rebuttal to the contention that the average successful webcartoonist is simply a t-shirt designer using a comic to advertise their wares:

“Saying webcartoonists are t-shirt hucksters is like saying Charles Schultz was an insurance salesman because Snoopy is on the Met Life blimp.”

Actually, though, that’s not my favorite quote from the post… that position is reserved for another one.

Here it is:

“I don’t know what country accepts BULLSHIT ARTISTIC CREDIBILITY DOLLARS as valid currency but I’m sure glad I don’t live there! Money is Money!”

That right there about sums it up. When self-produced works fail to make any money, Serious Practitioners of the Art dismiss it as a hobby. “It’s a sad thing, but we have no concrete measure of success except money… and you don’t have any so HAHAHAHAHA.” When somebody finds an innovative way to make their art pay so they can continue to produce it, it becomes a matter of “BUT… BUT… THAT DOESN’T COUNT!”

Jeph identifies the sentiment as sour grapes. I’m not quite sure I’d agree. The story it puts me in mind of is not the one about Aesop’s fox but the one about the Emperor and his snazzy new duds.

I’ve said before that I think the reason people who are working their way up the ladder of success through traditional publication are the ones who react with the most hostility to my mere existence is because the idea that my success is valid diminishes their specialness at having been chosen by editors and publishers, and because the fact that I don’t have to compromise my work in the same way they do makes them feel uncomfortable with the compromises they’ve made.

I’ll confess to not knowing much about the world of syndicated comic strips, but I’ve never once read an insider’s account that said “THE SYSTEM IS AWESOME! IT EXISTS TO BENEFIT ME! I FEEL LIKE I AM THE KING OF THE WORLD! EVERY WEEK I SEND OFF MY STRIPS AND THE EDITOR CALLS ME UP AND SAYS I’M CONCERNED THAT THESE DON’T REFLECT YOUR ACTUAL INTENTION ENOUGH AND WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THAT YOU SHOULD FEEL FREE TO CUT LOOSE AS MUCH AS YOU WANT!”, so I’m going to assume that it’s similar in some regards to the world of book publishing.

But people really don’t need to worry about the idea that hordes of independents and amateurs are going to diminish their specialness. One point Jeph keeps returning to is that the key to financial success for a webcomic is audience, and this is true. If your comic’s audience is large enough, you will be able to make a living for it. If not… well, you might be able to recoup your costs or have money for ice cream every weekend, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

But I think that’s probably another side of what scares people. There’s no such thing as an amateur syndicated cartoonist. Even if you’re living in an airless garret or your rent’s being paid by your SO or you’re working two other jobs on top of it… when you get picked up by a syndicate you’ve made it. You have earned your Merit Badge. You might spend the rest of your life chasing the brass ring and never catching hold of it but you can introduce yourself at parties as a cartoonist, and when somebody asks “Where might I have seen you work?” you can tell them.

The self-publishing gig doesn’t have anything like that. You can introduce yourself as a cartoonist, and when you get asked where people can read your work, you tell them “the web”. And they go, “Oh.” Because their twelve-year-old kid has a strip on comickeenesispotspace.blag and they’re not sure how yours is different, and in your soul of souls neither are you because nobody has told you that you’ve made it.

And the bitch of it is, I can understand where they’re coming from. When I tell somebody that I’m a writer, and they ask me, “What have you written?”, I know they’re expecting to be told the name of a book or a magazine that I’m published in or something like that, and I know that some of them are going to be less impressed when I explain what it is I do than they were prepared to be when they thought I was going to tell them about my book deal.

But, to quote the great philosopher Epictetus, “I don’t know what country accepts BULLSHIT ARTISTIC CREDIBILITY DOLLARS as valid currency but I’m sure glad I don’t live there!” Most people with book deals are living in garrets and working two jobs so their spouses can support them. Trufax, as they say dans la belle internet. It takes an average of ten years for a successful novelist to make a living at their craft, and most novelists aren’t successful. So what I’m doing–what I’ve done–is damned impressive by any measure.

Jeph Jacques writes one of two comics for which I start refreshing spasmodically every weekday-preceding night at around 11:00 p.m. He’s successful by any meaningful measure of the word. As far as I can tell from his newsposts and twitterings, most of the t-shirts in his shop are there because somebody told him they would totally pay him money if he made it available to them.

Ignoring that wouldn’t make him a better artist… just a poorer one. It’s funny to me that Mr. Swaab can write a blog post that concludes by saying whatever successful business model web artists come up with will be the future when he would apparently advise artists to turn down an opportunity like that.