literary endeavors

So, bitches, I am still all excited by this kindle self-publishing thing and have been wasting spending much time investigating it. I found a whole website, not owned by amazon, devoted to nothing but discussing the kindle and which contains a subforum for people who write for the kindle. It's a busy, busy place. Suddenly I feel like, whoa, there's a whole nother world I knew nothing about. (Kinda like when I found the hoarder-people's message boards!) There is all this helpful chatter about designing your ebook cover and publicizing and "tags" and pricing and writing a good "product description," which is to say, your blurb.

And the latter sent me to the amazon kindle store to actually read some and to see what genre classifications amazon has and what was selling in them. One thing led to another and I was looking at the erotica titles (which, best thing ever to put on your kindle if you think about it--no humiliating covers to worry about in public, yo). And there I found that, Oh Em Gee, you can already buy something for your kindle that was (partially) authored by me. And under my real name, too!

You see, boys and girls, many years ago--1996 to be exact--one of the first stories I ever sold was to an anthology of literary scifi erotica (shut UP). Now being that it was 1996, the internet was, if not in its infancy, at least still wearing pullups, if you know what I mean. There was absolutely no conception in the average person's mind that it would grow to be the kind of thing where you could find out anything about anyone forever, you know? I felt perfectly comfortable about putting my whole full name on this staggering work of smutty genius because anyone who was going to read it would have had to go looking for small press literary scifi erotica, and if they happened to be any of my relatives, co-workers, or neighbors, well, hell, they'd have to be as guilty of buying it as I was of writing it, correct?

(This inability to foresee the future came back to bite me in the ass, however, as such things do, somewhere around the turn of the century when our friend google became The Thing and vanity googling was everyone's new pastime. My young teenage son and I decided to google me one evening and what should pop up as the first result? Oh, just a review of said smutty anthology. "Let's google your dad!" I said, clicking away at the speed of light and hoping that was quick enough. Well, apparently not. A year or so later when D was at the apex of his pubertal obnoxiousness, I was telling my mom that I'd just sold another story. "What's it about?" she asked, just as D walked through the room. Under his breath with dripping sarcasm: "Elves having sex?" [For the record, I have never written about elves having sex. God.] Anyway, I learned my lesson and everything else I ever published that was NC17 from then on was published under a variant of my real name, one no one would think to google me under.)

But, to get back to the present, another thing the average person never envisioned in 1996 was the kindle. Whatever rights I sold to that anthology I guess didn't include me being paid another 50 bucks or whatever when the book was re-released in another format. Because I ain't seen a check in the mail and apparently it's been a kindle book since 2008. Writers: being screwed since cuneiform!

Okay. That is all.

xoxo