Captain Robert took his crew to Shangri-La and Timbuktu
Thursday, October 6th, 2011 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rolanniSlightly less excitement yesterday. I guess you can’t be blacklisted every day.
From the musical side of My World, Abney Park is releasing a new album on October 15 — Off the Grid. There’s a rumor of an online pre-release party, but no links yet. I’m very excited, and will be buying one of those CDs Very Soon After they become available. Also! Frenchy and the Punk are doing a Kickstarter campaign to fund the production of two new CDs. They’re less than $700 short of a very modest goal to complete a very worthwhile project.
On the housekeeping front, yesterday…I decided that I wanted cranberry bread, but I had some other stuff to do and didn’t want to be tied to the whole rise-punch-down thing. So, I unshipped the bread machine, which I use once every year or so, loaded up the ingredients, pushed the button, and went back to my office.
About fifteen minutes later, the machine SHRIEKED, and kept on shrieking while I ran down the hall to the kitchen and pulled the plug. Looks like the kneading blade froze up. I was corked off, because, hey! cranberry bread. So I dumped the dough out, and preheated the oven to 170 degrees while I finished kneading the dough and distributing the cranberries (I found later that you don’t first-rise with cranberries. Who knew?). Then I turned the oven off, put the dough in, set the timer, and went back to my office. An hour later, the dough had doubled. I punched it down, set the oven to pre-heat to 375, made a loaf, put it in a loaf pan, covered it, put it on top of the stove, and went away again for half an hour. When I came back, the oven was hot, the dough was riz, and in she went.
I had a couple pieces of the result of all this effort this morning for breakfast, with cream cheese. Mmmmmm, cranberry bread and cream cheese. Very tasty, despite All It’s Been Through.
Now, I have to figure out if the bread machine is DOI. And, if it is, whether I want to bother with another one.
There was frost on the deck and the cars this morning, and I just came back from a walk in the sun. (Maine resident moment: I looked at the thermometer before I left, saw that it was reporting 37F/3C outside, and said, “Oh, I’d better get a sweater.” Which I did. My nice, RED fleece sweater, to go with my nice RED hat.) It’s just a little too breezy to be perfectly comfortable (note to self: find Fall gloves), but my, isn’t sunshine nice?
The proof copy of Barnburner arrived from Lulu yesterday (probably, yanno, a couple days ago, but I hadn’t managed to get to the post office for a couple days). It’s a perfectly presentable little book, especially for something that’s going to be sold entirely off the web and not browsed in bookstores, so Here’s The Plan.
I’m going to format Barnburner’s sister book, Gunshy, and make them both available, for now, from the Lulu Store. This will solve the immediate problem of people who want those particular books-as-books and who can’t find them. It looks like the price-point will be right around $12US.
It seems pretty clear that Lulu is not going to be the permanent solution for any future chapbook-like-objects Steve and I may do, such as collecting the stories off of Splinter Universe onto paper. I’m still exploring options there. The biggest problem is that the POD presses are…not kind to chapbooks. We may end up having to do perfect-bound 5.5×8.5 (aka “digest”), and going 84 pages each (the lower limit for digest) to get a rational price for people. This would mean a longer wait while enough material builds up, but! more stories when the book does make weight.
And just by the way — if you’re thinking of using Lulu to self-pub. As dancinghorse said, back in another conversation, if you’re willing to accept a number from Lulu’s ISBN tree and let Lulu be the “publisher” of your book, they will distribute to Amazon, BN, &c, &c, for “free”. If you have your own ISBN (which Barnburner and Gunshy, for instance, happen to have), Lulu will charge you $75 per title to distribute to Amazon, BN, &c, &c. And then of course, the bookstores get their discount off retail…so you earn less per each.
For those who wonder how I fill my hours, now that I’m “not working”, I have the following projects immediately on my plate:
1. Format and proof Gunshy
2. Do fly-revisions on the first 60 grand of Necessity’s Child and make a list of those things that Must Happen, those things that it Would Be Nice to See, and those things which are just Off the Wall. (Sorry, this really is as close to doing an outline as I get. Sometimes, I don’t even do lists, if I have the time to just Live In the Book.) Then, yanno, finish writing the thing.
3. Write and post “The Space at Tinsori Light”
4. Start with the Liaden Audible Lexicon project
5. Continue researching POD options for chapbook-like-objects.
6. Consider a possible crowd-source project for next year. I’m tempted, but I don’t know if it’s feasible. Checking notes and deadlines now.
Deadline projects in-house at the moment are:
1. Dragon Ship — November 15
2. Necessity’s Child — March 15, 2012
3. Trade Secret — July 15, 2012
Plus, various flavors of Life, some of which, like the details involved in the closing of SRM, are ridiculously time-consuming and involve appointments with Experts.
So, anyhow, keeping busy, here. If not out of trouble.
And, as it’s a little cool in the office, I’ve just put one of the shawls Sarah Al-Amri of her kindness sent me.
Twice warm, me.
Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-10-06 11:33 pm (UTC)2
Date: 2011-10-07 07:02 am (UTC)Broken record department: I've noticed that Kindle is charging a lot for it's downloads these days. Buying whatever....mostly available used in a book format is cheaper. Except for A Night in the Lonesome October which one cannot find for love or money as they say. Finally I ordered it from interlibrary loan.
As for the cranberry bread. Yum! Perhaps you could find a way to distribute that too. You could start with that and then branch out. Mail order cranberry bread plus. You might need a bigger kitchen. You also might want to avoid all shrieking bread machines. I bet Mozart and Scrabble didn't enjoy the noise.
Looking forward to all productions.
C.
Re: 2
Date: 2011-10-07 11:52 am (UTC)At this point (well...soon), Barnburner and Gunshy will be available for purchase as paper books from the Lulu store. Not from Amazon or BN. I'm not paying Lulu $150 to put the books in the Big Guys' databases.
Mozart and Scrabble slept right through the whole bread machine drama. The minions are in charge of screaming machines...
Re: 2
Date: 2011-10-08 07:02 am (UTC)Of course I buy all of Lee and Miller's works brand new as soon as they are released. I did read your posting for a second time and realized that the two Maine novels would be avaible at the Lulu store which was even easy to find on their web site. And I'm sure you'll let us know when they are available. And thank you for making them available to us books people again.
We checked at the library for a copy of "A Night in the Lonesome October" at Phillips, a giant used bookstore in Los Angeles, is it? Their only copy was unfortunately in Korean. Oh well. I had never heard of Phillips before.
There are several excellent used bookstores in Salt Lake City. Unfortunately I have only ever gone their twice and have no plans to go there again.
C.
Dragon Ship
Date: 2011-10-07 04:36 pm (UTC)Anne in Virginia
Re: Dragon Ship
Date: 2011-10-07 09:17 pm (UTC)Pub schedule hasn't been set yet, that I know of.
Ms. Weisskopf decides on eArcs. It seems likely that there will be a Dragon Ship eArc, based on the fact that all of our new books with Baen have had an eArc edition, but it's not our decision, really.
And! I dunno if Mr. Blyly is gonna be up to a repeat performance. It's a really big job, taking all those orders and mailing all those books (she says, speaking from experience). Let's give him a couple more months to recover his sanity before we ask him.
no subject
Date: 2011-10-07 08:46 pm (UTC)asks you before you're ready to launch the Lulu versions.
My bread machine was the Automatic Dough Maker and Butter Maker before it died.
I theoretically can use the mixer with the dough hooks for the bread at least. I kinda
miss the butter option but I don't raise herbs any more so I don't get to make the
fancy butter. Dill butter was awesome with fish, though...
Anyway, before I make myself hungry - looking fwd to the new books! You and Steve
are awesome!
Lauretta@ConstellationBooks, in the-calm-before-the-beer-tasting
no subject
Date: 2011-10-07 09:11 pm (UTC)asks you before you're ready to launch the Lulu versions.
Oh, good to know! Thanks.