Friday: Yet again feels like a Monday.

News For Today

Well, the derby closes tomorrow and it's been a runaway success. I guess it's the magic combination of audience participation, competition, rooting for a favorite character, and supporting an author. Like most good magic it probably would not bear repetition lightly or well, but there just aren't that many parts of the story I'd be comfortable selling in this way. In this case I had no clear preference and I could see things going any of a few different ways while still being true to the story and the characters. That doesn't happen very often, and even less often with this kind of lead time and importance.

Personal Assessment

I was woken up once in the middle of the night by the grand dame cat of the house, Princess, being strangely affectionate... by which I mean she was being affectionate, and that was strange. When I got back to sleep I slept a good long time. Yay for generic Ny-Quil knock offs. I've woken up with no more than a touch of the sniffles, like what I had when I first reported them. Good sign, I suppose.

Dreams From Last Night

I was living at the dollhouse (my current domicile) but it was my family's house. i woke up and was in a hurry to find a clean (men's dress) shirt and a tie to go to work at the business that I worked for the last time I lived with my folks. I found a shirt, but the most I could find was a "tie cork", which is an object that existed in this dream that looked almost exactly like a tie but it was meant to go in back of an actual tie and hold it in place. It was not made out of and did not resemble a cork in any fashion.

While I was trying to figure out if I could pass off two tie corks as a properly corked tie, my mother came home and started arguing with me if i I still worked there or not, since it's been so long since I'd gone in. I told her that was why I had to go in today, and she told me they were closed today anyway. So we went out to breakfast, and I forgot to lock the side door after we went out and felt anxious about it the whole time. When we got back, the house had indeed been burglarized, but the burglars were conscientious enough to only take my desktop computer from the downstairs room, as a sort of object lesson.

Plans For Today

I'm a bit more than halfway done with chapter 486, and feeling better/more clear-headed than I have been all week, so finishing that up is job one.

Writing for pocket change.

I'm getting a surprising amount of feedback on the price I'm proposing to sell my snacklit for ($1-2 a pop). There's some concern that I'm undervaluing my work and may actually be cheating myself out of sales by doing so. Just to clear a few things up:

I'm talking about books of about 50-70 pages in length, hence why I'm calling them "snacks". I wouldn't charge $5 for such a book. I wouldn't pay $5 for such a book, unless I could see where the money was going. I think a lot of people will see the page count and the price being offered and feel that it's fair.

I'm aware that I have a number of readers who would pay $5 for such a book since they would know where the money is going (i.e., to me) and they'd give $5 to support my work in general so why not do it for 50 pages of prose.

I appreciate that. A lot.

But my goal here is not to just return to the same well again and again, but to cast a wider net. The early feedback I've received on price has prompted me to come up with a sort of special edition deal for people who would really prefer to show more support, but as far as the price in general goes, I'm going to have to resurrect a refrain I thought I wore out in the early days of Tales of MU:

Bear with me. I'm trying something here.

That... or words to its effect... are among the more polite things I said whenever somebody undertook to inform me what I was doing wrong, what I could change in order to sell my work, what I would need to do before it would be considered professional grade or a real story, etc. I wasn't completely ignorant of how novels are structured or how the publishing industry worked, but I also wasn't trying to write a novel and have it published in any conventional way, I was trying something new.

The purpose of the low price point isn't to try to undercut the novels on the bookstands. I'm not trying to convince a crowd of strangers that because my book is ninety-nine cents and Neil Gaiman's is 8.99 that my book is ten times as good a deal as his. I'm not competing for book money at all. If the experiment bears out and I end up making a bunch of these, several of them could end up in a book and then that's a different story, but for now I'm asking for pocket change, adn the reason I'm asking for pocket change is because I want pocket change.

See, "pocket change" is a pool of money. It's the small amount of money we spend on impulse buys and guilty pleasures and personal indulgences. When someone buys a candy bar or a bottle of soda from a vending machine, when somebody buys a single song or a single episode of a TV show from an online store or buys a few credits in a casual online game through microtransactions, they're paying with pocket change. Even people who mostly live paycheck to paycheck still will occasionally have a dollar or two burning a hole in their pocket that they will use for a treat (and more power to them, because even people living paycheck to paycheck are entitled to treats.)

The lit world doesn't really offer much in the way of impulse buys at the right level to take advantage of this pool of money/mentality. You can go to a used book store, of course, and get a book cheaply. You can sometimes find amazing bargains on a discount rack... some years ago a bunch of science fiction, fantasy, and horror books ended up at a local dollar store and I ended up discovering one of my own favorite authors (F. Paul Wilson) as a result of this.

But by and large, there are short stories, and there are books. Short stories you might get for free or you might get via a subscription that gives you many short stories. Books you buy, and you expect to pay book prices for them.

What's in between? Not much. What could be in between? I aim to find out.

Bear with me. I'm trying something here.

A few words about the situation in Egypt.

Two of them, in fact.

One is "riot".

The other is "demonstration".

These words mean different things. If you're not sure which one applies to a given situation, there are at least three different things you can do about that.

One would be to stop and educate yourself. That seems pretty basic.

The second would be to look at what words other people are using, particularly the people involved. If one side is using the word "riot" to describe what the other side is calling a "demonstration", then you're pretty much allying yourself with one side or the other based on which one you choose.

Now, you might feel that once a certain amount of riotous activity can inarguably turn a demonstration into a riot, so once violence and destruction happens, the shorter label must, ipsoid factoid, be applied. But consider: if one side is invested in seeing demonstrations being discredited by riots, then such honorable dedication to accuracy in word use hands an awful lot of power to that party.

And of course, I said there were three strategies that could be followed. If you're really unsure about what words do or don't apply to a given situation, there is a tack that is exceedingly easy to take: don't use any. There are times when it may indeed be a great sin to keep one's mouth shut, but not every event that happens in the world cries out for the commentary of every person with access to an internet news portal.

I haven't really watched much of The Cape yet...

...but after viewing the first episode, I'm struck by a fierce desire to call Summer Glau's character "Orwecle" how much the part of the title character's gimmick that isn't tied up in the cape matches the original concept behind my character of Ray Vallenzio/The Fire-Eater. I didn't play it up so much in any version of the Star Harbor stories that actually got written, but the idea that someone had the whole package of crimefighting skills packaged as circus/carnival performer training is where the character came from.

I can't claim credit for the idea (and I certainly wouldn't claim that they got the idea from me), because I didn't come up with it. I lifted it wholesale from The Phantom of the Opera. I mean, Erik wasn't a superhero, but that's where I got the idea of using that particular battery of skills to simulate/replace superhuman abilities.

I'm glad I didn't start watching The Cape before I started writing Gift of the Bad Guy, but I'm glad I'm aware of it now... they're two very different takes on the genre/milieu of superheroic fantasy, but the themes of showmanship underlying things in The Cape could be fertile ground for inspiration as the GotBG storyline moves forward.