STATUS: Wednesday, August 3rd

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

It turns out the new work/life balance is work/work balance, when you’re working multiple jobs. Right now the way I’m approaching it is I have three of them. I am the head editor of Ligature Works, I am new media author/personality Alexandra Erin, and I am the author of Tales of MU. Of the three, the middle one pays the most, followed by the last one, and then the third one is currently a net drain; it’s less a job I’m doing for money than a service I’m providing to the world. It’s an avocation, for now.

One of the things about time management is that just about any job can expand to fill the available hours, and as I’ve started working in earnest on Ligature Works’s editorialia (that’s a word; an editor said so) these past few days, I’ve discovered that’s a real risk. I think I’m going to start confining it to a day or two a week.

Financial Status

Doing okay? Some improvements to both cash flow and some improvements to how we approach budgeting made possible by the improvements to my cash flow are doing a lot to alleviate the tensions around money in our household.

The one thing I’m not sure about right now is our budget for WorldCon. I keep counting how many meals the two of us are going to need and looking at how much money is set aside from the fundraiser for that. Hopefully there will be some budget options in the area round the hotel and convention center. We met the bare minimum GoFundMe goal and a little bit past that, but if anyone wants to pitch in a little more to buy us dinner, it wouldn’t go amiss.

The State of the Me

I had one of those nights last night where I just couldn’t get to sleep. Combination of stomach upset and nerves (I think from the terrible dream I had the night before). I was still awake at a bit after three when I threw in the towel and decided to get up for a bit. I laid back down a bit after 4 and didn’t fall asleep until what I would guess is close to 5. I slept for 3-4 hours solidly after that, then another hour or so after briefly waking. I’m feeling fine now, but I have a feeling there’s going to be a major crash in the afternoon.

Plans For Today

Fiction, fiction, fiction. I spent most of last month stymied on my queer lady fantasy romance serial Making Out Like Bandits (a Patreon exclusive, though you can read the first bits for free), so I’m eager to progress that. I’m also trying out ideas for August’s short fiction entry.

STATUS: Tuesday, August 2nd

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

It’s been a weird, disjointed start to the day today, and to the week (and by extension, the month of August), but productive nonetheless. I did have to run out yesterday afternoon for a grocery run, but our growing financial flexibility meant I was able to transfer the funds for next week’s shopping so I don’t have to actually tag along. Yay, progress!

Jack and I have been hitting a neat kind of stride with Ligature Works and submissions. I have a hard time collaborating with others, but I think we work well together in this respect. Our tastes are far from identical, but we share a lot of the same criteria in what we look for and what we don’t. We have sent out four acceptance letters so far. This actually means we only have two slots left in our initial publication budget, which means we’re going to start being really selective. We might not make any more firm decisions to accept for a while, unless something comes along that gives us the editorial grabby hands.

We might have to start dedicated crowdfunding for a bigger table of contents.

Financial Status

Doing okay. There were some big not-quite-annual car-related expenses at the end of last month. I think once we’re past WorldCon 74, we’ll be able to basically allocate most of the household grocery money we’ll need at the start of the month and then not worry about who has the funds on hand to pay for it vs. who has the time and ability to go shopping.

Our financial fortunes have really only improved modestly so far, but the less money you have to begin with, the bigger impact every dollar increase has.

The State of the Me

Honestly doing pretty good compared to July. I mean, we’re only two days into August, but I’m starting out with the idea that it’s okay to need to rest, and more attentive to things like keeping A/C and fans on as needed, paying attention to hydration, etc.

Plans For Today

I did not finish my draft of today’s chapter yesterday because of the aforementioned grocery trip. Wrapping that up and putting a bow on it this afternoon so I can keep to the schedule.

STATUS: Monday, August 1st

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

Well, it’s now August! Hugo voting ended yesterday. Jack and I were a bit late to the party with WorldCon memberships, so vetting the nominees and deciding how we would each vote took up time and energy right up to the deadline. That’s why we haven’t done much more than some initial slush-sorting for Ligature Works submissions, barring one “sorry, can’t take” and one “gotta have”. Now that we’re past that, though we’ll start responding to submissions in earnest.

This early in the window, there’s going to be more rejections going out than acceptances. That’s just the process. We have received in excess of 70 submissions so far. There are ones that are just wrong for us, then above that there are ones that are not the best of what we’ve received, and those one aren’t going to improve no matter how many more pieces we read, but even the ones that grab us might not prove to be the best by the end of the window.

Speaking of windows’ ends: the gender neutral writing challenge ended today. I kept meaning to put up more reminders so people who were working on stories over the longer term would know, but there was a lot of stuff going on and I didn’t have a lot of energy or focus. I received a request over the social mediums for a deadline extension, but that doesn’t really seem fair to the participants of the first gender-free challenge. Yes, I’m already planning the second one. It will be less off-the-cuff and cover a much longer period. Like 2017.

I figure if I make it a floating annual thing, that will make it easier for traditionally published stories to be considered, since they won’t have to try to hit a narrow target in terms of when they come out.

Financial Status

Well. It’s the first of the month. Payday! WorldCon 74 in Kansas City is likely to strain the budget a bit. I do have a nice little nest egg for it, but I suspect food and other miscellaneous expenses will run us up quite a bit.

The State of the Me

I’ve been so tired. Taking more rest has helped. I have a plan, a serious plan, for next July and August to be mostly a hiatus. It’s something I think of every summer when the hot months roll around and I remember how bad it is, but I’m not much on long-term planning so I don’t think of it until it’s too late, but I am currently mapping things out about a year in advance so it might work out well. Right now if I just declared summer break at the start of all my big plans, it’d all come crashing down. Next summer I should be well situated to take a couple of months of reflection after the end of my planned awesome year of awesome.

In the meantime, I guess I just have to step lightly from task to task and not take on too much at once.

Plans For Today

Well, where to start? I’m going to be meeting with my submissions editor (i.e., Jack) as we nail down howour routine for sorting, evaluating, and replying to Ligature Works submissions will work in practice. There’s also some writing to do.

I’m a real editor now!

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Yesterday, I said on Twitter that I felt like a real editor when I had to send out my first refusal notice for someone who had failed to follow submission guidelines in a way that is automatically disqualifying: they sent a standard manuscript, with their contact information and all. Since our editorial process is built around reading pieces anonymously, this is the one point on which we’ve accorded ourselves no wiggle room. It might be that we wind up using the other guidelines to trim the slush pile, or at least do some preliminary sorting and weighting, but that’s the one that’s just automatic.

Today, I had an experience that really hammers home the fact that I’m editing a magazine of fiction and poetry. I received the following email:

Dear Editor: I’m always glad to see new publishers on the scene, but you do have more requirements for publishing a writer’s work than I have ever seen.The worst requirement that is going to keep submissions out of your mail box, is your refusing to accept simultations. However, I do wish you goodluck.
[name redacted]
Well! I’ve heard about this, but I never believed it would happen to me. I was over the moon! This may not be the wisest move, but I replied thusly:
Dear Mr. [redacted]
First, let me heartily thank you for sending this email. As a writer and poet, I have many friends who have been editors and otherwise worked in publishing, and they have all told me stories about receiving messages like this when they were first hired or set up shop: the earnest and forthright man who wishes to tell them what it is that is wrong with their submission guidelines and what they may do to correct them.
Now that I have received one of my own, I feel like I am truly part of an illustrious circle.
I couldn’t agree with you more that not accepting simultaneous submissions will keep submissions out of our inbox. In particular, it will keep those submissions out of our inbox that are under consideration elsewhere, thus preventing awkward situations where a story or poem we would like to accept has already been accepted elsewhere. We are admittedly new to this side of the table, but my suspicion is that it will be markedly easier to assemble a magazine when the submitted pieces are sitting still as we try to arrange them. The advantage has always been clear to me, which is why I’ve never balked at submitting to a magazine that does accept simultaneous submissions.
Actually, come to think of it, I can’t recall the last time I read a set of submission guidelines that allowed for simultaneous submissions, without at least some healthy caveats. I know I’ve seen at least one, but it’s very much the exception and not the rule in my experience. I think considering simultaneous submissions is really a luxury that only the bigger, better established venues can afford, as they have the staff, organizational infrastructure, and pool of contributors to handle the complications that arise as a result.
Our fledgling two person operation, on the other hand, does not. In fact, if the only practical difference was that disallowing simultaneous submissions was that it cut our slush pile down by some arbitrary amount, it would still be worth doing on that ground alone. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite happy that the response has been as strong as it has been. I’m just straining to imagine how we’d keep up if it were both markedly increased in volume and some of the pieces submitted for our consideration came with an invisible random time limit and the possibility of a silent bidding war.
As for our other requirements, they are hardly that numerous but rather are specific. We have a preferred format for reading, which is quite normal. We have a standardized subject line for submissions, which is far from unusual and which aids in our automation and sorting. We require that all personal identifying information be stripped from submitted manuscripts so that we may read them without bias. Markets are split on this, but I think you’ll find most of them either require the author’s contact information be present or require that it does not; there are few magazines that take a laissez-faire approach to where the author’s name appears. We have a generous cap on the number of pieces that may be submitted by a single author at a given time.
And that about does it for requirements. Nothing unique, nothing even that unusual, nothing overly onerous or complicated.
Perhaps it strikes you as more than it is because we spell it out in paragraph form rather than bullet-pointing? This is a personal preference from my own time submitting. I prefer when publishers are unambiguous about what it is they expect of me rather than waving a hand vaguely in the direction of their inbox and hoping I can divine their preferences. It might be that you’ve never had the experience of stopping and asking yourself, “Is this really what the other person wants from me? Am I doing this right?”, but I prefer to go the extra mile to reassure those who do worry about such things.
Or perhaps when you speak of the number of requirements, you’re talking about the section entitled “Dos, Don’ts, and Dislikes” at the bottom? These are not requirements, per se, but rather are there to alleviate one of the unfortunate side effects of soliciting submissions for a first issue. If we were an established venue,then you or any other author or poet who happened by could peruse our back issues to see what sort of things we’re wont to publish, get a general feel for the magazine, and see how your work might or might not fit into it. I know that when I submit my poetry, I take care to get to know the market in which I’m trying to sell it.
It might be that the idea of finding the right home for your work is an alien idea to you. It might be that you are more accustomed to shotgunning your pieces across the wide world and its web, which would explain your preference for markets that accept “simultations”, as you would term them. To which I say: it is certainly an approach to things, but it is not my approach as a writer, nor an approach that is likely to receive a warm reception at any venue I edit.
Spam marketing may move penis pills, Mr. [redacted], but it does not move me.
That said, I wish you good luck as well in your endeavors. If you do chance to have any pieces you would care to submit, please do make sure you follow our relatively few, simple guidelines for formatting, as they help ensure that we can read your work without respect to your identity as a person and thus without any bias based on prior relationship, reputation, or email interactions.
Kindest possible regards,
Alexandra Erin
Head Editor
Ligature Works
Now, I’ve alluded to the size of our slush pile, both in this blog post proper and in the email response. If you’ve been thinking of submitting, please don’t let that stop you! Our guidelines, few as they are, can be found in detail at http://www.ligatureworks.com/submissions. We will tell you exactly what we’re looking for (insofar as that can be conveyed with regards to artistic works), exactly how to format it to be read, and exactly how to send it in. Easy-peasy!

In or near Baltimore? Come see Fluid Movement with us!

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

If my summer had gone a little more smoothly, I would have talked about this more. I’d hoped to even do an interview with some of the people involved to sharpen my semi-journalistic skills, but I just didn’t have the time and spoons to make that happen.

Anyway! Last year, Jack, Sarah, and I had the pleasure of attending GOLDBLUM, a quirky water ballet by Baltimore-area aquatic performance group Fluid Movement. I livetweeted the experience (scroll to the bottom, then read up.) I intend to do the same this year with their current show, SCIENCE FAIR!.

We’ll be attending the 5 P.M. show on Sunday, August 7th, at Patterson Park Pool. If you would like to join us, you can get your tickets online at fluidmovement.org. Don’t wait to long. They sold like hotcakes last year. I should be easy to recognize: look for the giant floppy sun hat and rainbow hair. I will also likely be one of the few people covered pretty much head to toe regardless of the weather. My skin does not stand up well to the sun.

If you’re a fan or follower of mine and going, please give us a holler at blueauthor@alexandraerin.com and also let us know if you’d be interested in some kind of offsite meet-up with me beforehand. We might go out early and hang out at a coffee shop or something, if so. I don’t get out to Baltimore very often, so this might be a good chance for that sort of thing. Otherwise, we’ll just see you at the show.

STATUS: Friday, July 28th

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

Yesterday was a bit disjointed, but I did accomplish two goals: wrote a piece of flash fiction, which I posted for my patrons, and wrote a new Sad Puppies Review Books. Both are things that I’ve been stuck on for a while.

My Patreon terms are flexible by design. I promise a minimum of one item each of several forms/genres. One of the items is flash fiction or poetry. I did this because I know I can’t write a poem every month. I’d like to. I really wanted to, this month. And so I kept sitting down and trying to do that, and not getting much of anywhere, and not doing anything with that time instead.

I think if I had taken the hint and written a flash piece the first time that happened, I would have likely had multiple flash pieces in the same time. And maybe even a poem, because creativity is funny that way. I’m not looking to lose any sleep over that, just reminding myself that there’s a reason the “or” is there in my checklist, and to pay attention next month.

The SPRB was blocked for a few reasons. One of them was that things that weren’t terribly funny and were more important than the alt-right’s entertainment media culture war. But I came to a realization last night that there’s not really a clean separation between this tempest in a teapot version of the culture war and the bigger one they’re waging outside it. The tempest is not contained within the teapot; the tempest envelops and includes the teapot.

At this point, there are only two remaining items on my checklist for the month. One of them is a big one: finish the zine version of last month’s output. The other isn’t: finish at least one new chapter/installment of my patrons-only serialized novel, Making Out Like Bandits.. The first one is just taking a lot of time because it’s a new thing I haven’t done before. Next month’s will be easier, because I’ll mainly be plugging stuff into a template. The second one is another thing I’ve been blocked on.

I actually started the next chapter of MOLB fairly early on in June, shortly after I put up the most recent one. But I got stuck on it, and I’ve been stuck on it. A little hung up on it, even. I think I’ve figured out my hang-up, though.

Financial Status

Again, I’d love to see more Patreon sign-ups before the end of the month. Since we broke a hundred pledges early on in the month, anyone that’s pledged when the month ticks over to August will be included in a drawing for my signed contributor copy of The Martian Wave 2016, which includes my Rhysling-nominated long poem “Observations From the Black-Ball Line Between Deimos and Callisto”, which may be my favorite of my poems. I believe the rights revert sometime in the fall, at which point I will put it up somewhere that more people can read it.

The State of the Me

I have been sleeping really poorly this week due to a series of misadventures with my phone. First malfunctioning earbuds meant that my sleep playlist was randomly interrupted by Google voice search telling me it couldn’t understand what I was saying. I replaced my earbuds, and the next night I kept getting pinged awake by submissions for Ligature Works. So I put my phone on Do Not Disturb last night, and somehow I turned on “Repeat 1”, which was distracting enough to rouse me a bit every time the track it was stuck on looped (it’s just under an hour long) but not wake me up completely enough to fix it.

None of this is quite as genuinely awful as an insomniac episode, and I tend to sleep a lot more shallowly in the summer anyway due to the heat. But it’s contributing to a low-grade general exhaustion that the heat and the humidity during the day don’t help.

Plans For Today

In terms of things with immediate results, I’m going to be working on Making Out Like Bandits.

Sad Puppies Review Books: CAPS FOR SALE

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

caps for saleCAPS FOR SALE

Reviewed by John Z. Upjohn, USMC (Aspired)

When this book opens we are introduced to a peddler. I began to feel a sick sense of dread when the book told me that he was not an ordinary peddler. The need to be a special snowflake is ingrained in the sick psyche of the Social Justice Warrior. It is what drives them. It is what makes them all they are.

This peddler walks around with a stack of caps on his head, red caps and blue caps and brown caps and gray caps, and then his special snowflake checked hat that I guess isn’t for sale because how is anyone going to know he’s Mr. Special Cap Guy if he doesn’t have his special cap?

A head-based cap delivery service is so woefully inefficient that it is no surprise he does not sell a single cap all day. “Not even a red cap,” he laments, which suggests that he knows that red caps are best, even if he insists on wearing his ridiculous checked one. Yet they are the ones at the top of the stack, where no one can reach them. SJWs don’t believe in simple market forces like supply and demand. If he knows that red caps are the caps preferred by the majority, there’s no financial reason for him to stock anything else. It’s okay for people to like other caps, but they can’t just expect to be pandered to!

But of course the same radical feminists and I-dentitarians who demand that honest milliners and hardworking haberdashers cater to their every whim lest they be called “offensive” never actually seem to have any money to buy caps! So no one but our poor little cuck of a peddler is surprised when he doesn’t make any sales, boohoo.

He gets no sympathy from me. Should have thought that before you insulted your audience by offering them choices!

So he tramps out into the countryside and sits his lazy ass down beside a tree and falls asleep. Maybe he should just get a Patreon, if working a real job tires him out! It’s when he wakes up that this so far too-predictable tale takes a turn for the interesting: acting individually, a number of unrelated freethinking monkeys have all decided to take it upon themselves, as individual sovereign citizens of the tree, to take one of his hats.

Of course he massively overreacts.

The way the peddler goes off on them, you’d think they’d all taken all of his hats, but each monkey took no more than one. This is also the first time any living creature in the story showed any interest in his hats. He failed to sell them at 50 cents. He communicated no reason to the monkeys or anyone else why they should pay him such a price, or any price. The market has spoken. The hats are worthless! Taking one is no more unethical than pirating a movie that you don’t even want to see in the first place.

Rather than dealing with each of the monkeys as an individual, he generalizes them, which according to Social Justice Warrior logic, is the worst thing you can do. He calls them “YOU MONKEYS”. They freely sell this book to children, and yet I have been banned from many forums online and offline for using those exact words to refer to people. Why is it okay for him to say it but not me? Creeping moral relativism at work!

So the guy gets entirely bent out of shape and he tries to impose his will on the monkeys, the way leftist authoritarians always do, but he finds that they, like all freethinkers, are immune to his only weapon, the feelbads. They won’t be shamed into compliance. They mock him and his beta impotence, each and every individual monkey a shining example of an alpha male, and then in the beautiful, glorious finale, after trolling him so hard that he throws his ridiculous checked cap down at his feet, the monkeys all throw his stupid caps down right at him, too.

It’s a powerful display of defiance and individuality.

They don’t have to give him back his caps, no matter how many times he shakes his fist or stomps his feet, no matter that he pulls out every stop from the Sal Alinsky playbook. He has no power over them. They give him back his caps because they choose to. It’s like they’re saying: it is only through our benevolent forbearance that you have any caps at all, you pathetic mangina. 

They have shown they can take his caps anytime they want. And he knows it. They have nothing left to prove.

Does he learn, though? Of course not. If he could learn, he wouldn’t be a leftist. Just like if there was any demand for caps in the village, the market would already have provided a solution rather than waiting for some “wandering peddle” to happen by.

But he goes right back to it, still haranguing passersby to give him fifty cents for caps that the invisible hand of the free market has already rejected.

Two stars.

STATUS: Tuesday, July 26th

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

As the impending presidential election continues to consume more and more of my brain cycles, I find it useful to remind myself of the advice my father gives: always proceed as though the world is not going to end, just in case it doesn’t.

Even if the world does come crashing down around our ears in the aftermath of November, of course, Ligature Works is set to launch at the end of September. I’m moving forward on making it into a real thing. We’re now listed in Duotrope, the online writer’s marktplace/submissions manager thingy. It has also been submitted to the Submissions Grinder and we’ve sent a note to the SFPA website saying that we exist. Going places.

Financial Status

I would really love to see more growth on both my personal Patreon and the Tales of MU one before the end of the month.’

The State of the Me

Doing pretty good.

Plans For Today

Work, work, work. This is going to be a hectic week, but I think it’s going to turn into a good start for next month.

Ligature Works poetry rates increased!

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

Back at the start of the weekend, I was considering raising the rates for poetry on Ligature Works from $5 to $15. After looking at both my budget for the zine and the marketplace, and giving some thought to game theory, unintended consequences, and being the change I want to see in the world, I have decided that Ligature Works will simply offer $25 for all accepted submissions, poetry and prose.

The reasons for this are basically threefold.

First, having very different rates for the two forms places a material incentive on authors submitting prose works, and yet it motivates us to accept poetry over prose. If you’re mainly a poet and you see someone offering 5 times the rate for prose as poetry, mightn’t that lead you to deforming your work to hit the higher payday? It’s not entirely a hypothetical possibility. The submission guides as originally written even noted the often porous boundary between flash fiction and prose poetry.

As long as there’s economic tension between the prose market and the poetry market, all the creators out there who submit to us would be trying to steer their shorter submissions into the “prose” door while we’re encouraged to shift them into the “poetry” one, which creates an incentive for authors who have written shorter works to pad them out to a “safe” size, at which they can’t reasonably be construed as a prose poem, whether that suits the piece are not. This is contrary to our basic belief that all pieces should be the right length for themselves.

By removing the difference between how we pay for prose and how we pay for poetry, this frees up both sides to behave naturally and submit/receive each work as its own thing.

Second (and strongly related to the first), it seems hypocritical to pay one rate for prose pieces regardless of how long they are, and another rate for poetry pieces, as if the fact that poetry is often less substantial in word count and page space means that it’s inherently less valuable.

It isn’t.

I myself write tens of thousands of words of prose fiction a month many months, and hundreds even in most of my worst months, but it’s a good month if I write one poem. Some people spend a year or more getting everything just right in their poem, going through multiple drafts and making sure every word bears the weight of the work.

Third, if the point of the “paying people” portion of this exercise is to reinforce the idea that creative work has value, we need to be prepared to provide value in return. When I set the rates at $25 for short stories and $5 for a poem, I based it on what I’ve been prepared to accept myself. And that’s fair enough. But $5 isn’t a “tacit payment” in the same way that $25 is; it’s way more tacit, way less payment.

Don’t get me wrong; I would still submit my poems to a venue that pays in the $5 range, or one that cannot offer payment. But I find myself unwilling to create a venue that values one over the other.

I’m aware that this decision is likely to have unintended consequences of its own. While the prose rate of $25 is still below what is considered “pro rates”, $25 for poetry is fairly competitive. It’s below the big markets, but above most of the small zines.

One obvious consequence of this is that our first few issues, at least, will likely be smaller than I’d envisioned, in terms of table of contents. But! That’s okay. I’m looking at the 2016 issues as a sort of “soft launch” anyway.

http://www.ligatureworks.com/submissions

STATUS: Monday, July 25th

Posted on by Alexandra Erin

The Daily Report

Last week of the month, and I really need to hit this one out of the park. I need a week like my first week in June. I think I’m in a good position to have one.

This past weekend, Jack and I had a decadently life-affirming lunch with Renaissance woman C.S.E. Cooney and her mother. We talked books, movies, and what we’ve been up to lately. I talked up Ligature Works a bit, but as much as we talked about work stuff, most of the time was just catching up and hanging out, and weirdly, being able to sit there for 2-3 hours with another writer, a writer I greatly admire, and just talk might have been the biggest shot in the arm I’ve had since WisCon.

My family member in the hospital is still in the hospital, but likely to be discharged in the next few days.

Financial Status

Well, thanks to a very generous gift, we are now officially registered for WorldCon 75 in Helsinki. I’ll be looking at how my financial are lined up for actually getting us there after WorldCon 74. Nothing else much to report right now.

The State of the Me

I think I’m hitting my stride with this “summer” thing. Midafternoon nap and adequate hydration are really the keys.

Plans For Today

It’s a creative day. Last week’s aborted end means I’m a little ahead on Tales of MU for this week, so I’ve got that going for me.