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Thursday/Friday Status-Ish Post
Mar. 18th, 2011 04:21 amNews For Today
So, Tales of MU did win the Rose And Bay Award for Fiction. I'll have a bigger reaction post to that later. My mind's on a hundred different things right now. My feelings about RAB are ambivalent (not the least of which because the dude still owes me a horcrux), but it's important to note that "ambivalent" isn't the same thing as wishy-washy or indifferent... ambivalent means that something is equally oriented in two directions. I'm really excited about it but also somewhat underwhelmed by how it's run. It's great that I've won my first award, but I'd rather in a couple of years be nominated for the award it could become.
I finally made my public-facing email address public-facing. I mean, I haven't been keeping it a secret, but my most public face is the Tales of MU website and now it's there. I put off adding it there for a while because I was looking at how well Gmail actually does handle spam, and I'm pretty confident that it won't be a problem. Email sent to contactme@alexandraerin.com gets forwarded into a label/folder in my main email account so I see it without having to sign into that account, but it doesn't go into my actual inbox and there's nothing important in terms of notices or business or money stuff that goes to that account, so if some spam does get through it won't be too big a deal.
Sometime Friday or Saturday... I want to say "today" but I have no idea what my "day" is going to consist of since my sleep schedule is very odd right now... I'm going to send out the Author Appreciation copies of The Gift of the Bad Guy to folks who ordered them in PDF. I'm going to give the final copy one more read-through on my Kindle (it is amazing how much more formatting errors, typos, and general oddness stands out to me on the Kindle screen) before I do that, but I'm pretty sure the thing is in the bag.
I haven't been doing anything about a Kindle version yet (PDF works on Kindle, obviously, and I think it looks pretty slick, but getting into the Kindle store increases my potential audience to beyond my current audience) but that will become a front burner item when this thing's been put to bed.
Personal Assessment
You know the phrase "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."? That's pretty much me right now. Burning with creative energy. Not so much with actual energy. My brain makes it hard to sleep when I lie down, my lack of sleep makes it hard to do anything else when I'm up. Then I have these islands or windows or whatever metaphor you want to hang it on where I'm mentally and physically awake and Stuff Gets Done at an alarming rate. Half of the ~5,000 word Tales of MU update on Wednesday was pieced together slowly over the course of several days. Half of it was written in two hours. The better parts are from those two hours.
If this doesn't break in a couple of days I might need to increase my melatonin/valerian intake. Aside from helping me sleep, they seem to help even out my moods. My instinct is to withdraw from them when I'm having real trouble sleeping, because if I take them and lie down and don't go to sleep I have a horrible locked-in feeling and sometimes actual sleep paralysis, but since that doesn't seem to help maybe I should try in the other direction.
I'll probably try that Saturday nightish, since it will matter less if I spend Sunday with a brain full of fog.
Plans For Today
For a certain value of "today", anyway.
As I said, I'm going to give the otherwise final version of the PDF of The Gift of the Bad Guy a read through and then dedicate and send out the AA copies. If my brain's in a technical enough place, I'm going to work on improving the navigation of the Tales of MU site. I have a Fantasy In Miniature story that's been bouncing around in my head since Wednesday... for a while I thought I'd nail three days in a row of updates there but then I ran out of steam.
I'm also going to go and mark my interest levels on more WisCon panels. I've signed up for the ones I'm the most interested in, but haven't had the spoons to parse the whole list any of the times I've sat down to do it.
So, Tales of MU did win the Rose And Bay Award for Fiction. I'll have a bigger reaction post to that later. My mind's on a hundred different things right now. My feelings about RAB are ambivalent (not the least of which because the dude still owes me a horcrux), but it's important to note that "ambivalent" isn't the same thing as wishy-washy or indifferent... ambivalent means that something is equally oriented in two directions. I'm really excited about it but also somewhat underwhelmed by how it's run. It's great that I've won my first award, but I'd rather in a couple of years be nominated for the award it could become.
I finally made my public-facing email address public-facing. I mean, I haven't been keeping it a secret, but my most public face is the Tales of MU website and now it's there. I put off adding it there for a while because I was looking at how well Gmail actually does handle spam, and I'm pretty confident that it won't be a problem. Email sent to contactme@alexandraerin.com gets forwarded into a label/folder in my main email account so I see it without having to sign into that account, but it doesn't go into my actual inbox and there's nothing important in terms of notices or business or money stuff that goes to that account, so if some spam does get through it won't be too big a deal.
Sometime Friday or Saturday... I want to say "today" but I have no idea what my "day" is going to consist of since my sleep schedule is very odd right now... I'm going to send out the Author Appreciation copies of The Gift of the Bad Guy to folks who ordered them in PDF. I'm going to give the final copy one more read-through on my Kindle (it is amazing how much more formatting errors, typos, and general oddness stands out to me on the Kindle screen) before I do that, but I'm pretty sure the thing is in the bag.
I haven't been doing anything about a Kindle version yet (PDF works on Kindle, obviously, and I think it looks pretty slick, but getting into the Kindle store increases my potential audience to beyond my current audience) but that will become a front burner item when this thing's been put to bed.
Personal Assessment
You know the phrase "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."? That's pretty much me right now. Burning with creative energy. Not so much with actual energy. My brain makes it hard to sleep when I lie down, my lack of sleep makes it hard to do anything else when I'm up. Then I have these islands or windows or whatever metaphor you want to hang it on where I'm mentally and physically awake and Stuff Gets Done at an alarming rate. Half of the ~5,000 word Tales of MU update on Wednesday was pieced together slowly over the course of several days. Half of it was written in two hours. The better parts are from those two hours.
If this doesn't break in a couple of days I might need to increase my melatonin/valerian intake. Aside from helping me sleep, they seem to help even out my moods. My instinct is to withdraw from them when I'm having real trouble sleeping, because if I take them and lie down and don't go to sleep I have a horrible locked-in feeling and sometimes actual sleep paralysis, but since that doesn't seem to help maybe I should try in the other direction.
I'll probably try that Saturday nightish, since it will matter less if I spend Sunday with a brain full of fog.
Plans For Today
For a certain value of "today", anyway.
As I said, I'm going to give the otherwise final version of the PDF of The Gift of the Bad Guy a read through and then dedicate and send out the AA copies. If my brain's in a technical enough place, I'm going to work on improving the navigation of the Tales of MU site. I have a Fantasy In Miniature story that's been bouncing around in my head since Wednesday... for a while I thought I'd nail three days in a row of updates there but then I ran out of steam.
I'm also going to go and mark my interest levels on more WisCon panels. I've signed up for the ones I'm the most interested in, but haven't had the spoons to parse the whole list any of the times I've sat down to do it.