Daylight Day

[hafoc]

Monday of this week was an important day in my personal calendar: Daylight Day.

Daylight Day is, for me, probably the most anticipated day once you get past the days I leave for the various conventions I attend. It is the first day of the year when sunrise AND sunset fall outside my scheduled working hours-- theoretically anyway. It is a day when I might actually get to see some sunlight, assuming the clouds ever parted long enough to let any through. (Personally, I think the sun is just a myth cooked up by you Californians to make the rest of us feel bad. The idea of something existing above the clouds? Ludicrous!)

Even if I can't see the sun, I feel better knowing the days are getting longer.

Somewhat in keeping with the New Beginnings tone of this note, I'd like to announce to anyone who cares that I'm going to start putting my writings on a web site. Thanks to the kindness of friends, I'm pretty much all set up. quelonzia and athelind have provided me web space and a mail address for this purpose. tephra_adularia has offered me her not inconsiderable talents in setting up the site. As for myself-- "hey, man, I just drive 'em. I don't know what makes 'em go." (Two points for the movie that came from.)

I'll probably start with the small stuff, such as the Lance Steele short-shorts, just because they'll make easy small files to test things with. Then comes Hilltown--

--which, by the way, I've written another chapter-bit for, a modification to an earlier chapter. I've just been too blasted lazy to post it.

-- which I wrote to give away to my friends anyway. Hilltown is my gift to anyone who wants it, that's its sole purpose, that's all I expect of it. I am writing it for that reason, to remind me why I write anything at all in the first place.

Eventually I plan to put my minim opus, Flanker, up there. Right now I plan to put it up in chapter-sized .pdf files, and offer the full book .pdf file for, oh, I don't know, four bucks each volume? If that seems about right. Of course anyone could rip me off easily enough, but since it's only four bucks and since they can look at the single chapters for free, I doubt too many people would bother.

I'd also like to sell hardcopies to those who want them, on a one-off basis, probably off of Lulu.com or whatever it's called.

This is giving up my dream of having them published by a "real" publisher, but all that dream was doing was hurting me. baxil may say that book editors are overworked and underappreciated, dedicated and decent; athelind may opine that they are the unlucky tools of an obsolete industry; the Black Beast who lives inside my head-- for, gentle reader, I am prone to occasional bouts of depression-- (pauses until your astonishment has passed) -- may have other, less kind things to say about them; but regardless of anybody's opinion, it's clear to me anyway that trying to deal with them so far has done me no good, and may have done me quite a bit of harm. It's not FUN. I only write because it's fun, and if it's not fun, I don't.

I still have Flanker, or a couple volumes of him, at a publisher. I'm still hoping to publish that way if I can, and if the contract they offer me doesn't require me to sign away too much. But if I don't get results SOON, I'm gonna turn the raptor loose on the Net and let him forage for himself.

#

The other day I went out exploring. Normally I don't DO fun stuff at work, but my boss insisted, so I went.

I ended up on the lakeside road in and near Wilderness State Park. It was a threatening day. Cedar woods came down within, well, a stone's throw of the stony lakeshore. Lake Michigan didn't freeze over this year; there was a rim of ice right at the water's edge, with the little waves hitting the shore with the snappy-quick churn and dash only big fresh water has. The ground and the trees were draped in white, down to where the water began. The western sky was a scary blue-gray, colder than steel; the water was a scary gray-green.

But for all the brutal kill-you-in-three-minutes cold of the lake, it was kind beautiful. And it occurred to me that very few of my friends have ever seen this. In so many ways, I'm a lucky guy.

Comments

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

Daylight Day. I've got to tell ritzar12 about that, he'll love it as he often complains about the "go to work in the dark, come home in the dark" phenomenon of the winter months here.

I'm very excited to see Hilltown again. I loved that story.