Now entering an offline zone…

Tonight, we will start sleeping over at the new apartment. This will mean no internet connection unless I walk back over here to use the connection, and that may not be on much longer anyway.

I’m going to load up the blogs with serial fiction for November without 4th draft edits. This means that they will have to be edited again before they become “official” canon and get stored on the stories archive. There will not be any nonfiction rants or rambles, just serial fiction posts from Changeling, and both blogs will carry the story for now, to suit your reading preferences.

The telecom provider is predicting 3 weeks of down time, and that was in line with my predictions to hubby. (Huzzah, I’m psychic! I can foresee epic bullshit weeks in advance.) If it goes past that point, I’ll put in an extra week of buffer chapters, and if it goes past that, well you’re stuck until I get back. Sorry.

One last thing: thanks for stopping by. Hopefully I’ll be back to my regular rants and rambles sooner than December.

A review for Haunting Sins…

Becky, AKA: Shutsumon wrote up a review of Haunting Sins, with an overall score of 3.5 out of 5, and a fair warning about the adult content. She wrote:

I liked this novella a lot. It’s wonderfully creepy and atmospheric with a subtle increase in terror and not too much gore. This is just how I like my horror.

You can check out the full review here.

I want to thank Becky for reading the story and for the review.

What the hell is an Urban Musical Crime Fantasy?

In the world of dark fantasy, there is no hero more maligned than…the bard. That’s right, while everyone just adores demon slayers and witch hunters, and there’s plenty of love for good witches and half-demon heroines, the fact is, there’s not much love for the bard.

I can understand why. Their power comes from singing, and to make a book about them, you’d have to make a musical. And who in their right mind would try to sell a dark fantasy musical?

Fortunately, I am not in my right mind.

Of labwork and narrators…

I’m looking over my writing queue for this year. I’ve got a lot of first chapters compiled together, and all of the premises are exciting for me. Many continue on existing story lines, but some  are new efforts to experiment in genres I haven’t tried before or felt really weak in.

For instance? Well, there’s porn. I mean porn that isn’t goofy because of pet names like, “his fleshy joystick,” or, “her puffy pink pork taco.” The thing is, it’s a rule of porn that you have to have a lot of sex between the plot points, and if you’ll excuse the pun, most of my porn peters out after four or five chapters. This is not to say the story stops working for me, but I run out of inclination to keep up with the sex scenes. I want to follow the plot and ignore the porn. It makes for a great story, but lousy porn.

For this effort, there’s actually two candidates. Most of you know about Wereporno, but I’m also writing a sci-fi porn that’s already gone to some pretty kinky places. I’m halfway through that story now, I think.

Wereporno is the bigger challenge because I’m juggling a huge cast. This works to my advantage, lots of people are free for random sex while other characters can devote time to plot points. In other words, I think it has a good porn to plot ratio.

NaNoWriMo, or, What? Me, worry?

In 2005, I entered NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, a contest which could not be more inappropriately named if it tried. First off all, it’s an international event, making the very first word a lie. Publishers don’t call 50,000 words a novel, but a novella, and for the most part, anything produced in under a month by rank amateurs cannot be fairly called writing either. About the only part that is accurate is that this shit all goes down in one month

But hey, marketing is all about the name being memorable. NaNoWriMo rolls off the tongue well, where as IntNoWaMo, or International Novella Wankfest Month, just isn’t as catchy.

The blog is moving…but it’s not leaving.

Effective today, all the blog links on my web site no longer point to this blog. Instead, I’ve created a wordpress blog on the site server, and I’ve implemented a design much closer to my web site. It’s been my intention all along to bring together all of my creative efforts to one portal, and I think the newer design will be much eaiser on peoples’ eyes.

All articles and stories will still be mirrored here for a few months more, but I’m going to post reminders to readers to visit the new blog. I hope people will begin referring new readers to the blog on my site, since this site will soon become obsolete. I’m not closing it or removing the old posts, so if you have linked items here, don’t worry. You won’t need to make any updates to old pages. But at a certain point in the near future, I will stop posting over here. Then this site will serve as an old archive for the sake of preserving links. (Because I love you people, and I don’t want to make you work too hard.)

Looks like I’ll be leaving Amazon soon…

Okay, first, go read this article: The International Digital Rights Mess (or Amazon’s Cock Up). If you don’t, here’s the recap: Without my permission, Amazon jacked up the prices of my books, BUT only to everyone outside the US. Why? Amazon is claiming “higher operating costs” and VAT are to blame. That’s bullshit. Why does an electronic store have higher operating costs for sending a digital product to a foreign buyer? And VAT on e-books is not so fucking high that you can justify a price increase from 0.49 cents to $2.43.

Yes, I’m pissed off. I’ve sent an email to Amazon, and they have one week to drop this policy. Otherwise, I will be pulling my books e-books from Amazon AND Mobipocket. If you want to buy my books, you’ll be able to get them at Smashwords, and you can download many titles for free from my site.

I’m pissed not because this is a typical corporate scumbag policy, and not because this kind of policy is way too common for Amazon. No, I’m pissed because my sales at Amazon were fan-fucking-tastic for an indie writer with no marketing budget. All of my e-books have dipped into the top 10,000 of Kindle sales at one time or another, and two cracked the top 100 for Horror sales. None of my books has risen above 35,000 in the sales ranks, indicating steady sales across the board.

You don’t know me, and vice versa…

I’ve read an article twice from Genderbitch, a post titled “But I’m Nice!” The Unreasonable Expectation of Auto Trust. It’s a long post, so if you read it, you’ll be relieved to know that I only have a few brief thoughts to add.

I’m sure that a lot of people who read my blog are good folks who’ve tried to help out with issues of equality and civil rights. But I cannot assume it is always the case, any more than I could assume that my readers fit into a certain group. That’s why I talk in terms of people who haven’t done anything to help out. Maybe you aren’t the person who needs the message, and maybe you feel offended because I don’t know what you’ve done. Well, whose fault is it that I don’t know? It’s yours, for not making a better connection with me.

Last night, I took a Facebook “test” that looked over my friends and turned up some surprising statistics. That the vast majority were Democrats was not so shocking. After all, being friends with a bisexual transsexual requires a rare kind of Republican. But I was surprised to see how most of my friends were guys. Married guys, mind you, and most of them writers. I made the mistake of assuming the numbers would be more equally divided. And that’s my fault for assuming I knew these people.

I don’t really seek out new friends on Facebook. I probably should in my efforts to market my stuff, but that seems like too much of a hard push. Instead, I let people come to me, and I let them get to know me through my odd status updates. (And by odd, I mean strange, not infrequent.)

DEAR FTC…your name means Fuck Those Chatterboxes

So, according to the new laws, I’m now an outlaw because I don’t disclose which book reviews are books I bought versus books I got for free. Which is just fucking hilarious.

Motherfuckin’ politicians won’t disclose when they got $150,000 from a PAC to speak out against a good idea, but if I get a free e-book and don’t say so, that’s a crime now? It’s true what Mark Twain said about politicians wanting to get rid of liars and crooks because they can’t stand the competition. They own the monopoly on organized crime, and they aren’t disclosing it to anyone.

Meh. Like I should fuckin’ disclose which books I get for free. Hell, most of the books I did get free, I turned around and bought copies to help support the writer. As it is I would have thought it’s a given who sends me free shit. I’m a cranky nobody whining on the internet, so obviously big guys like Harper Collins and Quercus aren’t kissing my ass and saying, “Oh, Miss Whitten, your shit tastes like mint candy-flavored shit! Please, won’t you give this Stephen King novel a great review? You know he’s so small and pathetic that he needs your amazing wit to help sell him to these moronic masses.”

Yes, offense is intended…

It wasn’t that long ago on Twitter that I remarked how hard it is to light a fire under anyone these days. You can’t get people excited about much of anything because with so many things vying for their attention, the end result is complacency.

Certain people have tried to use fear and false outrage to make people “care,” but the result of their efforts is a group of outraged consumers who are pissed off over nothing. It amounts to a bunch of whiny entitled assholes spinning their wheels and wasting their energies defending the financial interests of rich people. Right, because those rich folks need sooo much help.

As you already know, I’m a post-op transsexual. I grew up in Texas and dealt with the very worst that the state has to offer. Yet I still consider myself proud of my small town origins, and of my redneck heritage. But part of this has to do with the fact that my hometown was more accepting and tolerant of me than the folks in supposedly liberal Austin. That’s right, the rednecks “hicks” were more accepting of me than the rich “liberals” of Austin.

Why would I use quotes around the labels? Because these groups are just placeholders, not actual groups. It’s where people place their beliefs about a group. Anyone who support s civil rights, even in a practical way, is instantly filed in “liberal” even if none of their other beliefs will fit into the group.