Quick Question About Book Length
I’ve now got ten short stories that I want to put together into a collection – Jeeves And The Singularity, Monologue, The Shakespeare Code, Occupational Elf, Bubble Universe, Print The Legend, Boltzmann And Boltzwomann, The Singularity, Free Will And Testament and one I’ve not yet posted here (it’s still under submission to a zine, but that zine has never yet bought anything from me so even though I think it’s a good story I don’t have high hopes it’ll get bought) called Rite Of passage.
The problem is that even with an introduction, that comes to only around eighty pages. That’s OK for an ebook, but is probably far too short for paper publication. Should I:
Give up — no-one’s interested in my fiction anyway (seems likely – the last few stories I’ve posted here have had little response)
Publish it as an ebook only
Wait til I have five or six more stories that fit (may be a very long time given the rate at which I produce stories and the fact that all these seem to have a common theme)
Publish a paper version as well anyway, even though because of POD costs it would be very expensive for what it is
Add on the Doctor Watson story, which would add about another 25 or 30 pages, even though I’m planning on doing a separate book of the Watson stories in in the future
?
It won’t be out for a little while no matter what — I’m waiting to hear about Rite Of Passage — but I’d be interested to know what people think.
Kinks post up in a couple of hours, Doctor Who tomorrow.
I Aten’t Dead
Just to let people know I’m still alive. I’m currently only able to write about 1000 words a day, because I’m working, and those words haven’t been appearing here because they’re parts of longer things — my piece on Something Else By The Kinks is about 3300 words long now (that will be up tomorrow, I’ve just got to write about Autumn Almanac, which is *insanely* difficult), and I’m also a couple of thousand words into the second Peculiar Branch story. (I’ve also currently got two stories under consideration by SF magazines, which will be posted here if they’re not accepted, and a novel proposal being read by a publisher). I’m also discussing a long comics post with David Allison.
I *will*, this week, be posting at least one Kinks post and one Doctor Who post, and hope to get a lot done over the long weekend.
One final thing — there have been reports in the press about plans to increase powers of surveillance over internet communications. You might have expected me to blog about those. I haven’t yet, simply because I know that these things are definitely *not* set in stone, and I know people who are working on these things. Were I a betting man, I’d be going to the bookies right now and putting money on these proposals never coming to fruition.
Quick Review Honesty Note
I’ve said I’m going to review every new book I get on Amazon. Just as a point of fact, I’ve got two books on the Kinks today, actually from Amazon, but I won’t be reviewing them – they both would be in competition with the book I’m doing, and so I can’t give a fair, unbiased review.
New MindlessWho post
This one’s on Day Of The Daleks. I have the flu, so I’m not quite coherent – I may have inadvertantly equated Nick Briggs revoicing the Daleks with the Baader-Meinhoff gang. But I may not. Why not read it and see?
Quote of the day
From daweaver in the comments to this post by Jennie Rigg
The whole NHS changes kerfuffle reminds me of the Twilight series. It’s badly written, lots of people get very het up and shout over the minutest detail while others wonder what the fuss is about, and there’s a huge wall of impenetrable and badly-written text to read just to make any sensible comment about the whole thing.
Quite.
I’ve now read through that bloody bill, in full, three times (once when it came out and twice yesterday reading the amended version, flicking back and forth between it and the two acts it’s amending), and whatever one’s thoughts about the changes in the bill itself, it can’t be a good thing when someone like myself (relatively intelligent, I’d like to believe, and definitely reasonably educated and literate) can read through such an important piece of legislation and come away still unsure as to crucial elements.
A lot of the changes in the bill are actually good ones. Some are stupid. But huge chunks of this bill will, as far as I can tell, end up being decided by courts as people argue over what rights and obligations it actually confers. And I can’t say I’m happy about that. We need some way of getting legislation to be human-readable, but I’m not really sure how one would do that. Any ideas?
(Posts about music and Doctor Who will come soon)
Legit emails being spamtrapped
I’ve just noticed that several legitimate emails to me appear to have been spamtrapped recently. I regularly delete my spam unread, so if you’ve not had a reply from me and your email was one that would normally have had one, I may not have seen your email. Sorry about that.
Manning campaign respond to misgendering accusations
The Manning campaign have finally acknowledged the gender issue (warning, may be triggering for trans-related stuff and for sexual harassment related stuff). They say that as far as they are able to determine, Manning wishes to be referred to as male and as ‘Brad’ or ‘Bradley’, but crucially also acknowledge that hir circumstances mean that hir expressed wishes and actual wishes may be different, and say that it is hir wishes that should be respected.
I’m still not at all comfortable with this – it may well be misgendering – but at least they’re thinking about it and taking the issue seriously.
Whatever gender s/he wishes to be addressed as, the important thing of course is that Manning is being tortured (and yes, hir conditions do count as torture under international law) and is facing the death penalty for releasing the wikileaks documents, yet many so-called ‘progressives’ are far more interested in defending the self-aggrandising admitted rapist (read his testimony) Julian Assange, who merely dumped those documents on a website…
My Longer Piece on Davy Jones
Is now up at the Mindless Ones, along with lots of YouTube videos.
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