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Books I have been meaning to get my hands on
For the past while money has been tight. Time has been tight too. As a result I’ve accumulated a list of books that I want to take the time to read. Some of them I want to purchase as well because they were written or edited by friends of mine. My shelf of “books written by friends” is threatening to spill over onto other shelves. This makes me happy because it means that my friends are succeeding in their writerly aspirations. Anyway, the following books have caught my eye. Perhaps you might like them too.
At the top of the list is Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians by Brandon Sanderson. This book looks like lots of fun and I know it would appeal to my kids. I want to get it and let them all read it. As an added bonus I can get it signed by Brandon, which is always fun. Brandon has another book out that I also want to acquire Mistborn 2: The Well of Ascension. I loved the first Mistborn book and want to see how the story continues.
My friend Stacy Whitman edited another book that intrigues me, In the Serpent’s Coils by Tiffany Trent. This book is put out by Mirrorstone which is an imprint owned by Wizard’s of the Coast. I’m curious to read it.
There are a whole pile of books by Julie Czerneda that I want to read. I’m not going to list them all. But at the top of the list are A Thousand Words for Stranger and Migration: The Species Imperative 2.
A picture book by Anthony Browne caught my eye. It is called Voices in the Park and it sounds like book I’d really enjoy sharing with my kids.
Terry Pratchett has a new book out called Making Money. I love the Discworld novels. It always makes me happy to read a new one.
Robin McKinley has been a favorite author of mine since I was in junior high. She’s put out a book called Spindle’s End. I love her fairytale redactions, so I want to read this.
That is far from the entire list. I have other friends with books that are still forthcoming. I also have other books which catch or lose my interest. This list fluctuates from month to month. Sometimes I even get to remove books from the list because I actually got my hands on them.
Candle weather
I was standing in the kitchen. The light coming from the window was a soft grey. The patter of rain sounded softly against the windows. A feeling of happiness filled me as I lit a spiced pumpkin candle. The soft strains of Debra Fotheringham’s music blended pleasantly with the rain. My feet did a little dance of their own volition and I sang along.
I was so worried about this Fall. I was worried about keeping up the schedule. I was worried about getting the book done. I was worried about how the kids will do in school. I was worried if the book would even sell. But here I am on the first day of Autumn and all those things have passed. Instead I am happy. It feels like the holidays. Even my kids all noted that “it feels like christmas.” Christmas is a long way off. I have many things to do between now and then, but for today I am content. It is a moment of peace in the midst of my labors.
Tomorrow I will need to teach another creative writing class. Tomorrow I will need to clean house. Tomorrow I will begin sorting invoices for over a thousand book orders. Tomorrow I will continue editing livejournal entries for my book. Tomorrow I will write some fiction. Tomorrow I will begin working on the next Schlock book. Tomorrow I will work in my yard. Some of these “tomorrows” will actually be “later this week.” Some will even be “next week.” Some even further out than that. But for today I have peace and the scent of spiced pumpkin candle.
Property rights with a new twist.
Last night all my kids had a spontaneous Art Time. Gleek and Patches were coloring. Link started drawing a comic full of Nintendo characters. When bedtime came, they left their art stuff out. Art Time continued this morning. But it was a little more conflict filled this time. Link finished his comic and wanted to show it to me. Patches wanted to see too, but Link declared that Patches couldn’t see until the comic was in a book. Patches wailed. He wanted to see his brother’s cool work. Link scowled, he wanted to maintain his right to decide who gets to look at his work. I attempted to negotiate a veiwing for Patches while honoring Link’s copyright. In the end, Patches was allowed to view when I was.
This is not the first copyright issue I’ve had to negotiate. Yesterday it was Gleek and Kiki.
Kiki has been drawing a lot lately. She’s been experimenting with Anime style art. Kiki is so pleased with her new style that she decided to get rid of some of her old work. She “got rid of it” by leaving the old drawings strewn across the front room floor. They sat there for several days. Then yesterday I got tired of the drawings being on the floor and asked Kiki if they were important or garbage. Kiki declared them to be garbage and began to clean them up. This would have been fine except Gleek heard the exchange. In Gleek’s eyes the drawings were beautiful and it was a tragedy that they were all going into the trash. Gleek tried to grab them, Kiki grabbed them faster. Kiki insisted that the drawings go into the trash. She didn’t want to see them laying around. Then there was crying.
I waded in and tried to argue with Kiki. It seemed spiteful to me that Kiki would rather throw the pictures away an let her little sister cry than to just let her sister have the pictures. It was definitely a power play on Kiki’s part. She was asserting her right to decide what happens to her art. In this house we are big fans of intellectual property rights. It felt wrong for me to just declare that Kiki had to give the pictures to Gleek. I leaned hard on Kiki to see if she would cave in. She would not. Gleek cried some more. Then I remembered that Kiki is attempting to save money to buy copic markers. I negotiated a deal where Gleek bought the pictures from Kiki. After that everyone was happy.
I’ve since made clear to Kiki that if she leaves pictures laying on the floor, that constitues a forfeiture of rights to those pictures. They enter the public domain and are available to anyone who wishes to pick them up. Print outs made from scanned pictures that Kiki has drawn will also have to be discussed. Kiki thinks that the other kids should pay her a nickel every time they print out a picture that she has drawn. So we’re going to have to discuss “fair use” and “duplication rights.”
It is amazing to see my kids starting to develop ethics about these things at such a young age. I suppose it is inevitable considering how we pay our bills. I guess I just didn’t expect to have to be judge and jury over intellectual property rights as well as physical ones .
And another pre-order update
As of this writing we have sold over 1100 books. Over 900 of those are sketched editions. Howard wants to be able to sketch in a ton of books. He’s very literal about that. 1200 books weigh about a ton, so we’re leaving sketch ordering open a little longer to see if we can reach 1200.
This means that we have paid for all the expenses and stocked away 4 months of bills. This is good. It seems likely that we’ll reach the “happy dance” number of 6 months paid, before we close pre-ordering in November.
Things are looking well and my inner squirrel is happy to have a hoard again.
Schlock Pre-order status report
Things are going well.
Our experience with releasing the last two books tells us that we will get about 60% of our total orders in the first 24 hours. The remaining orders will trickle in during the rest of the pre-order period. We are less than 12 hours into pre-ordering and we’ve almost reached 50% of our goal. Naturally I’ll still be a little antsy until we’ve met or exceeded our sales goal, but I’m feeling optimistic that we will meet it.
So far there have been 533 sketched editions ordered. Howard is lobbying for extending the ordering time on Sketched editions and I’m considering it. Last time he sketched over 800 and it went really smoothly even though he was tired at the end. But every sketch edition sold pays bills ever farther in the future and that makes me happy. But I can’t let the extension run too long because allowing people to select characters adds another whole layer of complexity to the sorting I must do to prepare for shipping. I need time to figure all of that out. Fortunately I have that time since we opened pre-ordering two months in advance instead of just one.
I’ve fielded a pile of email this morning. Some were people begging for special help. Fortunately all of the requests were well within my ability to supply. It makes me happy to be able to help people so easily and they’re always so grateful. I had one email from a guy who had a miserable time working our store. I’m not sure why he had such an awful time. His description of the problem was unlike anything I’d heard from any other buyer. But he fought his way through and placed an order anyway. It makes me so glad to have people care so much to buy our books that they’ll perservere in the face of stupid store software. As I start printing and sorting invoices I’ll be contacting people who have incomplete orders to see if they need further help. Fortunately most of the emails I’ve gotten indicate that the store is working well for most people.
So for the next week or so I take a big breather. Then I dive into shipping tasks, like printing and sorting invoices, figuring out how many sketched editions feature each of the characters, figuring out how many boxes to buy, getting more global priority mailers, ordering stamps to go in the sketched editions, renting a storage unit, and a host of other such activities. I’m hoping that I can make the shipping days run even more smoothly than they did last year even though the process will be even more complex. (Three possible books instead of two and specific sketches required for specific orders.)
Things are going well.