Friday

News For Today

Business side: Spring fundraiser starts today. To try to pre-empt the inevitable Formspring question about which one I'm rooting for: if I had a clear favorite, I wouldn't be doing things this way.

Personal side: My housemate's unexpectedly gone out of state for the weekend. I love being home alone.

Personal Assessment

I've been on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster lately... more so than usual, anyway, and I've also had a weirder than usual sleep cycle up through Wednesday, where I was having a hard time staying awake for a day's worth of activity or sleeping for more than a few hours. I believe I had some other issues (dietary, to be specific) that were being masked by the fact that I was withdrawing from caffeine at the same time... I think that's ironed out now. I might start making a diary of what I'm eating, though, just to make sure that I am eating, and that I'm getting a sufficiency of things like protein and potassium that really fuck with my body when they're missing. That probably won't be for public consumption, though. Nothing brings out the trolls and the Internet Doctors like public discussions of eating habits.

Plans For Today

Are a little shaky, as I'm still a little shaky. I'll keep you posted.

Update: Plans for today.

My writer-brain doesn't want to engage itself, so I've decided to work out the technical side of the sponsor newsletter so I can get the first one sent out. Again, this newsletter is going to contain more details about my plans, sneak peeks of upcoming stuff, and little behind the scenes tidbits. I'm not going to compromise my position on MU, which is that no story essential to the main MU plot will be behind a pay screen but there will still be MU-related content.

As I've previously said I'll be doing two newletters in April, the Special Swear-To-God-It's-March Edition and the April Edition. These *may* be preceded by a smaller test mailing. I've never done this before. Well, I guess I could do a test run with only my email addresses in the list.

Bleh. The technical stuff is the reason I didn't actually get March's done in March. As this and The Gift of the Bad Guy shows, I really need to figure out how to do something first and then announce I'm going to do it.

Newsletter Opt-In

Okay, here's the main sticking point on the newsletter thing: most of my sponsor/subscribers signed up before the newsletter idea was even an idea, much less a thing. So here's the deal: I don't actually have permission to send out a mass email that includes them. Now, I know a lot of people will read this and go, "Oh, surely they won't mind...", but this is a matter of business ethics and the terms of service of any mailer I might use. I can't decide for other people that in this case it's okay. Also, in some cases I've not only not secured permission but I've actively stated I won't send unsolicited email.

I mean, I'm just a small-time author with a few hundred people to reach but imagine if some company selling A11-n@tura1 p3n1s 3mb!gg3nm3n+ decided it could ignore anti-spam restrictions by sending people things asking them if they wanted to hear about A11-n@tura1 p3n1s 3mb!gg3nm3n+. If it's okay for me, it's okay for them. The ethics of the situation don't change.

And let's face it: while I'm offering this newsletter as a thank you or add-on, the purpose of thanking and adding on is to encourage people to subscribe and stay subscribed. So in a real way, "Can I add you to this subscription list?" is a solicitation for a product/service.

And then there's the fact that not everybody uses their main PayPal email address as an email address. I want to make sure I'm not sending to a full mailbox or a spamcatcher that automatically forwards PayPal email and deletes everything else.

The people who've subscribed since I announced the newsletter... I'm good there. I got their permission when they signed up. Everybody else... well, they could cancel their subscription and make a new one but as a businesswoman I'm not a fan of any plan that starts with "cancel your subscription." So what I'm do is make an opt-in form and making sure that everyone knows that if they're a sponsor/subscriber they can go and put their e-mail address there.

And because I'm going to have a publicly-facing subscription form, I'm going to allow anyone to sign up and receive one issue as a free preview/courtesy thing, for as long as the publicly-facing form exists. Eventually I'll be able to conclude that everybody who's an existing sponsor has actively opted in or de facto opted out and I can take the form down.

I'm going to put it in some more stable/easy to find places, but right here this moment, here's the opt-in form:

Name: E-mail:


Click here to remove yourself:

Again, anyone can subscribe but non-sponsors will be removed after one month. If you used the new form on my new page to subscribe and opted-in there, you don't have to do anything here. Existing Sponsors: If you're using a different email address than your PayPal one, please put your PayPal address or name in the name field there so I can still match you up.

New Feature on Tales of MU, I guess?

Um... okay, apparently sometime yesterday I added a feature to the site whereby I can credit people who spot typos. You can see this on display at the bottom of the most recent story. This makes use of the tag architecture, so... once more than one story has been given this treatment... you could click on your username and see a list of all the stories you did a correction on.

While I'm planning on doing quite a bit of back-tagging as I go through the archive, I think the only fair and realistic way to do the typo correction credit is going forward. I.e., new corrections only.

It's a pretty nifty use of the tag architecture. I just have no memory of implementing it. HTMelves?