MeiLin's blog

Yep, another redesign. I'm trying to cut clutter further and focus harder on the text. All personal stuff is now under "You" in the top menu.

More to come. Bug reports here, as usual.

UPDATE Spoilerville is down till I figure out how not to spoil people accidentally.

There is now a section on the site called "Spoilerville." This is where discussion of the book(s ) for those who read the whole thing at once will go. Currently it contains one subforum: "Lovers and Beloveds."

DO NOT ENTER THAT FORUM UNLESS YOU WANT TO BE SPOILED. srsly.

Because that forum exists, I ask you now to please keep spoilers out of episode discussions on the free pages. Don't even spoiler tag them. Please. Just keep 'em to Spoilerville.

Thank you and I love you all madly today.

I am within days, possibly hours, of putting this thing to bed. I got my last batch of feedback in an epic 4 hour phone call with Karen, I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the notes from the call, and when I've wrapped it up, I'm putting the manuscript to bed.

When I put it to bed, it goes out to the pre-salers in raw form. I'm sure they may find typos, hopefully not many, and hopefully no repeated paragraphs. (I'm hoping that my dear pre-salers will tell me if they find such.)

Two reasons:

1) I'm on vacation, the first one I've had in two years, if you can count that one as a vacation; a client ruined it.

2) I got the manuscript for "Lovers and Beloveds" back from Netta this morning! I'm still waiting on my "fresh reader" to weigh in. Netta says I have very few issues to deal with in this iteration.

What that means: I should have the bare manuscript out to pre-salers no later than September 15th. I am aiming for a print publication date of 10/15/10. Please, Eddin, make this possible.

I've been selling off a chunk of my collection. To my astonishment, I've sold about a third of what I listed--a fuckload of BPAL. Velvet Ackbar (aka Sir) and I have been getting it ready to ship and there was so much of it I got a literal case of the vapors and had to step away. RAGING headache. We've gone through three rolls of plumber's tape (what you use to wrap the tops of bottles to keep them from leaking) and we're nowhere near done.

Not sure:

Tired now.

At chu's request, here's a review of Fledgling Raptor Moon, a half-bottle of which arrived with a half-bottle of Tiki Princess, the last two BPALs I'm going to be able to buy for a while.

This one was so detailed and long I wrote it down the minute I woke up, and so crazy I thought you guys might be entertained:

This is cross-posted from the Crowdfunding community at LiveJournal, where I was asked, "How did you do this thing, anyway?"

I did it. I crowdfunded a novel. I'm hesitant to say, "So can you," for two reasons:

1. You have to have something people want. This depends entirely on you. I can't tell you how to write an awesome book or make awesome art, for instance. You have to be good, you have to have something that people can look at and say, "I want it. I want more of it." Understand: I don't think I'm "all that," but apparently there is an audience for what I do, and they want more of it.

Mass marketability is not the issue. It's finding the group that wants your stuff. Not everyone has something people want. Maybe it's not proofread well enough. Maybe it's still a little derivative. Maybe the style and grammar are shaky. (I'm speaking in writing terms because that's what I know, by the way. Feel free to insert your discipline's terms here.) Maybe it's just not very good--yet. And that's the operative word. You can get better. Focus on your craft first.

But you already know that.

2. You have to take a professional stance. If this is a hobby, don't bother. You don't have to work at it full time, but it has to be more than something you fool around with on weekends, something you do to while away the hours. You have to want it. You have to be willing to commit time, thought, soul and yes, money.

Let's say you've got something you know will connect with an audience--remember, it doesn't matter if it's not "everyone," just as long as it's a big enough chunk of "someones." I crowdfunded the novel based on an audience at its height of 2,000 people. And you're willing to take yourself and your work seriously. Don't confuse taking yourself seriously with a swelled head. You can know exactly how good (or bad) your work is, how far you have to go to make it awesome, and still take your work seriously.

OK, then, now what?

UPDATE: If you can, please spread the word in your various communities that presales are still open, but close TODAY AT MIDNIGHT. I just got a message from someone who didn't realize they were still open and almost missed out on getting one.

Original message:

Presales come down at midnight, so if you've been putting it off, this is your last chance.

My first swing through the second version of book 1 is done through chapter 12 of 17. The chapters are going out to the betas as I finish them. It's going much, much faster than I expected. I thought Netta would send me far more in the way of notes than she has. (You should have seen the original edit.) I'm told that's good, but this is my first time with this sort of thing, so who knows.

I have preliminary book one cover art, fresh from Alice Fox. Gosh, I wish I could show it to you...

Update: After a very frustrating evening, I've had to unpublish the two questions submitted so far. Access control modules for Drupal are sub-optimal at best. I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to do this. Stay tuned. I'm tired of crashing/restoring the db for one night.

Original post:

The working title of book one has been "Curse of the Traveler Queen," but it doesn't fit. It has nothing to do with the protagonist of the story, for starters.

In casting about for ideas, I've come up with "Lovers and Beloveds." I think it fits. So it would be

Lovers and Beloveds
An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom: Book One

Thoughts if any?

Book one presales end 7/15/10. This last batch is going toward cover artist Alice Fox's fee. Overages, if any, go to other book production costs, like the book block and the proof copies; as usual, the author is last in line.

I really need help with this, folks. If you know History fans who've drifted away, now would be a good time to tell them to come back. Please spread the word that the History is returning. When the presales go down, the shitty first draft goes behind the paywall.

In other news, I've begun plotting both book two of the History and the rest of this major arc of Scryer's Gulch. The Guch is resuming either this Monday or next; we'll see how far I get with the writing.