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It's like literary Sunday around here...

Nameless has been updated with Chapter Three over at theoriginalsam. Autumn storms bring on philosophical fits, Christopher lies his way into book ownership, and Marjorie hates cellphones.

In BONUS LAND, I forgot I'd written a Torchwood fic at the start of January until I rediscovered a beta of it in my mailbox. So I have fanfic for you too: Interrogation, rated a light R, concerning just how Ianto and the others coped with the discovery of Jack's immortality -- especially once he returned to them at the start of S2.

I have many things on my to-do list today, and so far I actually wish to do absolutely none of them. *SLEEPZORS*

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I'm always moronically proud of myself when I do something with my LJ layout. I'm like a five year old with crayons, discovering perspective.

I added a box on my journal-page sidebar with links to my original work -- Other People Can Smell You takes you to the Lulu sales page, The Dead Isle takes you to the chapter index, and Nameless takes you to the "nameless" tag on the comm. In addition, I discovered that if you google "other people can smell you" in quotes, my lulu page is the first hit. Which is nifty!

DISCLAIMER: The rest of this post is about economics and quality control. None of it is a rant; I have no real side in this, it's basically just information.

( Self-publishing, layout, and quality control. )

In short: the news I'm hearing is that it's getting harder and harder to sell a manuscript as literary agents and publishing houses begin tightening their belts or folding altogether. Small indy publishers are the way many new authors are going, but self-publishing seems to be a viable alternative, especially for people who have an existing readership.

With Nameless, it's 99% likely that I will self-publish once it's ready. As an experiment I may buy a small publicity package from Lulu, just to see how well that works, and put up a website for the book. But it will continue to be available in first-draft form on theoriginalsam, and will probably be available in final-draft form for PDF download, either for free or for a very small fee. (What format do Kindle readers and suchlike use?)

I'm also thinking of compiling the Cafe Cookbook and the Cookie Book into a single volume to publish on Lulu. Though that would be not-for-profit, since like two of the jillion recipes in them are actually mine, and I'd get approval from the recipe donors first.

Really, I just love doing layouts.

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I have decided that cookies are bastards. Cookies, you are going on the shitlist with rice. WHY ARE YOU SO DECEPTIVELY HARD TO MAKE.

I made peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. They're not bad, but they're kind of...dissolving on the plate. Longtime veterans of the cafe may remember many bad cookie experiences in the past: cookies with no souls (too much baking powder; they were hollow inside), cookies made with bisquick baking mix (here's a tip: don't) and, infamously, the cookies made with elderly eggbeater egg substitute, which gave me food poisoning. The funny part of that story is when I ate another one after the first one made me sick -- just to be sure it was the cookies that did it.

Also, peanut butter chocolate chip cookies with lemon curd =/= a good idea. It's like a party in my mouth, but the really awkward kind where lemon showed up late and beat the hell out of chocolate chip because he was "looking at her funny" and then peanut butter hit on her.

No, I don't know why I just gendered lemon as female. BLAME THE COOKIES.

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So in Nameless, Christopher uses the term "literotica" at one point, and ruisseau pointed out to me that literotica is actually the domain name of a free-access porn site of user-created fiction and art. Because life is an adventure and I have hormones, I checked it out. And I came to a very important realisation.

I might write porn about fictional characters. Fictional characters who hang out with aliens or practice magic or solve crime or are werewolves and once I wrote porn about a robot (or possibly a cyborg, depending on how PC you want to be). I might even write porn about people who actually exist, though I am a little ashamed of that.

But god damn it, at least I write quality porn about aliens and wizards and crimestoppers and robots and real-life actors. If you're going to go down that road, you have to travel in at least a little bit of style.

The next time I am embarrassed about writing porny fanfic, I am going to go have a good long look at literotica.com and feel better about myself.

(That comment also led to me realising that somewhere in Dusk Books is a very high shelf with a little curtain across it where Christopher keeps the "blue" books. Local teenagers have been daring each other to try and sneak a peek at it for years.)