It's been one hell of a June, folks. Issues at my work, issues at my partner's work, issues at my kids' school, embarking on an extended orthodontic ordeal for one kid, throwing another kid a birthday party (fun but still draining), accepting that my beloved 16-year-old rescue mutt is now on palliative care, and driving to another province to visit family... that's the first time I've written the whole list out like that. No wonder I'm struggling to break out of a passive loop of playing old games and reading old stories. 

So there's been precious little progress on book 5, I'm afraid. But I do have sale links to share!  

The volume 1-3 omnibus of Secrets of Sleipnir is on sale in Canada at Kobo until July 2nd!  

And I'm taking part in the July Smashwords sale again! Follow the link to find Low Dusk FREE, and all my other single volumes 50% off, for the whole month.  

Kobo Canadian Spring Reading Sale

I recently found the toggle on Draft2Digital's account settings that lets them notify me when I can submit my books to store-specific promotions. I've gotten a fair few emails since then, and for the first time one of my submissions was selected!

From April 3-16, my omnibus of volumes 1-3 of Secrets of Sleipnir will be CDN$3.99 as part of a Kobo sale featuring Canadian authors! (Thanks to store contract requirements, it will be CDN$3.99 on every digital storefront during that time, but only for Canadians. I think. That's my understanding, anyway.)

Observant readers may notice that this is more of an identity reveal than I've ever openly made before. Very observant readers will have already figured it out from the way I've been stubbornly insisting on using Canadian spelling all along. Passive-aggression is the Canadian way, but in the face of provocation it's not the aggression that subsides; it's the passivity. For obvious reasons, I've been feeling provoked lately.

My pseudonymity is still important to me. This only narrows the field down to my being 1 of 41 million people. I consider that acceptable.

Book 5 Progress

I don't consider myself a "pantser," really - someone who writes by the seat of their pants, with no outline or even much of a plan. With my habit of editing-as-I-go I call myself a "knitter:" I can't do the next 'stitch' until the first one is right. I had to rewrite my most recent full chapter 3 times before it finally let me move on. This makes me slower on my first drafts, but leaves those first drafts in good enough shape that later editing passes are actually kind of enjoyable. I am, after all, writing to please myself first (though part of pleasing myself is telling a story I hope others will also enjoy).

Which is to say I'm still writing the first half of the first draft of book 5. But it's shaping up to be a fun one, that I'm going to be excited to share!

Speaking of being excited to share...

Twitch Readalouds Resume

Starting this Sunday morning, 06 April 2025, at 3:00 PM GMT (15:00), my friend Aunty Trashy will resume reading excerpts of Low Dusk on their Twitch channel! I will be in the chat as the author-in-residence: getting made fun of for my five-dollar-words (I consciously allow myself one per book! Learning new words builds character!), sending blushing emojis as Trashy effusively praises my sex scenes whilst skipping them to comply with Twitch's Terms of Service, sharing insider information about my writing journey and details that haven't (yet) made it into the books... and giving out Smashwords coupons for free books! Come on out and join the party! 

( Complying in advance, no. Fretting in advance, yes... ) At first I only heard of people embedding Payhip into their own personal website, which is itself a subscription, but when I looked closer I found you don't have to do it that way; you can just build a storefront right on Payhip's own website.

So I did!

I actually really like how clean and simple the page turned out. And, at least in theory, I pocket more of the royalties than using the D2D --> platform pipeline. The payment processors take $0.30 per transaction, which is 10% of my cheapest books, and then a 3% fee, and then Payhip pockets 5%, for a total cut of 18%. Compared to the platforms taking 30% and D2D taking 10% for a total cut of 40% (85% for print-on-demand), that's pretty good! 

I've updated my sticky posts for Low Dusk (as the most recent release), and the master list of all my ebooks and audiobooks, to put the Payhip link first. In the process I made the blog look a little better on mobile, and made the master list look a lot better. 

I'm not expecting to make a lot of sales this way; most people are very attached to whatever store platform connects directly to their ereader or ereader app. But it feels good to have it set up, as an additional way for folks to buy my books and as a kind of - archive, almost. An archive people can buy copies from. A backup storefront separated from a supply chain that's looking uncomfortably vulnerable these days.

(Don't worry, I also have other backups that aren't stores! 3 devices of my own and a Nextcloud in Denmark. The great thing about text is it's so data-light I can fit tiny stashes anywhere and everywhere. I also have one print-on-demand omnibus and will acquire another when it exists.)

I know this isn't very important or meaningful in the broad scheme of things. Maintaining reader access to 4 (for now) self-published smutty novels is about as impactful as turning a single box of cereal upside-down in the grocery store to signal to other shoppers that it's made in the USA. But it's still something I can do. It has more impact than not turning the box. My own little act of resistance, within my own little scope of power. So, I persist.

Remember how I said in my last update that my arm fracture was healing well? I appear to have jinxed myself, because just a few days later at yet another followup I was told my most recent xray was identical to the one from 3 weeks before it. This is bad. It should show continued healing. My GP was requesting an orthopedics consult to look at the xrays. He confided he was half-expecting to be told to just stop xraying me, but two days later he called relaying the orthopedist's instructions: cancel all my physio and upcoming direct patient care days, put the sling back on(!!!), and expect a call to book an in-person consult, soon! And then I did get that call, the same day, to book an appointment next week! 

This last was particularly shocking because I'm used to thinking of orthopedics, as a specialty, in terms of the waitlists for hip and knee surgeries, which are so long they're partially culled by people dying of old age. I've since heard from colleagues that the rest of ortho is one of the swiftest and most orderly of the specialties (probably spillover benefits from all the desperate efforts to speed up the hip and knee situation), so hopefully they weren't actually putting in a special rush job because my arm is about to fall right off. 

As of today I have 8 more days of anxiety and furious sling-resentment to look forward to. The sling was much easier to comply with when I was freshly-injured and in pain. Now my arm has almost no pain unless I do something excessively dramatic, but the sling causes me plenty of pain in my neck, shoulders, and back, plus not being able to approximate normal use of my hand is maddening... and yet, as soon as I put in even a few hours of wearing the sling, the very next time I got up and let my arm dangle it started to ache. So maybe I really did hustle out of the sling too quickly in the first place (with full medical approval, but how much time does a GP get to tailor their advice? Less than none). 

Anyway all this seems like the perfect time to roll out my grumpy-fish icon. I don't expect the emoticon version, ~ònó~, to catch on, but I know what it means: Fish Hate Thing. Me too, fish, me too.

Yeah. I was out for an evening walk and tried the very difficult and dangerous feat of taking one(1) step over a patch of ice - even looking right at it to make sure I didn't fall! - and landed hard on my dominant hand. I felt the force sort of explode up in my elbow immediately, but I thought the subsequent pain wasn't bad enough to be a fracture. That, and knowing the rural hospital nearby didn't have full emergency room function overnight, led me to wait until morning in hopes that the pain, swelling, and range of motion would improve on their own. They didn't, and several xrays and seven hours of waiting later I learned I have a radial head fracture.

It was oddly validating to learn I do have a broken bone and wasn't just being a baby about the pain. Even though I'm sure the vast majority of the pain comes not from the break itself but from the abundant soft tissue damage surrounding it, there's a certain seriousness to "fracture" that simply isn't there for "just a sprain."

I'm going to be off work for several weeks at least, but I don't know how much writing I'm going to get done. I can type a little - a huge relief: for all I procrastinate, being unable to type felt like being gagged - but only a little, taking frequent breaks. This blog post took me quite a while. At this point I am unlikely to have book 4 ready to coincide with the Smashwords February sale.

The End of Year sale has gone well though! Quite a few people took advantage of the free downloads, which has a gratifying Number Go Up effect for me in my Draft2Digital user page. It seems the majority acquired the omnibus edition, which really counts for triple the downloads - and does suggest people took the time to look at what was on offer and just choose that, as opposed to doing a mass grab of every free thing in sight! But in future I won't make omnibuses free, I think; until such time as more folks start leaving ratings and reviews, my main little bump of joy from these sales is that download number. Next time I may try making just Low Dawn free, discounting High Dusk and High Dawn, and leaving omnibuses and any new releases at full price.

If there's anyone reading who hasn't availed themselves of the Smashwords sale, today is the very last day to get my books free at https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/96863 ;-D 

Hope everyone else is having a better New Year!

Apologies for the lack of a November update. My reaction to the disaster of the American election was to withdraw, snail-like, into a tiny circuit of comfort games, shows, and reading, and I just started to re-emerge a week or two ago.

Things That Helped ( Read more... )

Which brought me back to:

4. My own writing! 

Secrets of Sleipnir has always been an exercise in writing even more exactly what I want to read than I could achieve in fandom. That didn't change when taking a heavy blow to my morale. Slowly but surely, my desire to continue the story came back. It helped a great deal when a dear friend did a reaction thread to book 3, which has about the same energizing power as a few dozen excellent AO3 comments. It also helped when I considered that the particular rising powers that be hate exactly my kind of writing the most, and so making more of it is, in its own small way, an act of resistance - even if only by feeding the flame of joy in myself and a few readers.

As someone said, and which I may in fact embroider on something the next time I pick up a cross-stitch project, the horrors persist but so do I.

In practical terms, this means the first draft of book 4 just crossed 46,000 words today. It feels a little more first draft than some of the previous books; I may have to let it sit for longer and edit it harder, because as I said in October the material is heavier than my usual. But I am determined to see it through, to earn the books (4 of them at last count, 2 more in the current arc and 2 standalones) waiting on the other side of these events.

Bluesky

I recently passed the 1-year mark on Mastodon, and I can say that I enjoy microblogging! I've been hearing some good things about Bluesky, and after exploring it with Bridgy Fed I decided to graduate to full cross-posting with an app, so that most of my posts go to both platforms at once. I don't really know what I'm doing there yet, and I can't say it doesn't feel very much poised at the top of an enshittification luge chute, but I'm willing to give it a chance. The shorter character limits on Bluesky have certainly made my writing meme answers more concise! There, as everywhere, I am saxbrightwell.

Smashwords

Having seen very little response with a smaller discount during the last Smashwords sale, especially compared to the satisfying amount of Number Go Up during the sale previous, I have decided to participate again at the giveaway level this holiday season! 



All my books will be free on Smashwords from 12 December 2024 to 01 January 2025. If you take advantage of this, in lieu of payment I would greatly appreciate reviews and links on your own socials. My own hype can only go so far; the hype of others has exponentially more impact!

That about wraps it up for this month. Take care, stay warm (or cool!), and have fun!

Core Keeper

I took the last week off writing to explore the 1.0 patch of the game Core Keeper. ( More about that... ) I got over my classic neurospicy fear that not doing something for a few days means I've completely forgotten how to do that thing (I get the same anxiety every time I have to return to work after a long weekend) and wrote a good chunk this morning. Back in the game, baby! Just in time to have another brutal week of work, but I've mentioned before how that seems to be, paradoxically, good for my writing output. Yeah, I don't think I'd do well trying to write as my only source of income XD

Draft2Digital Courting AI

I, like many others, was emailed a link to a survey where Draft2Digital was asking about writer and publisher attitudes towards an opt-in function to sell works hosted on D2D to scrapers to feed into the databases for Large Language Models (LLMs). The questions were mostly multiple-choice and heavily slanted to "how would you like us to do this?" as opposed to "should we do this at all?" with only two free-text boxes, which I used far more freely than they wanted me to.

Now, I'm aware this is a bit hypocritical of me, when I'm willing to use graphic models like Adobe Firefly (where the database was bought and paid for or legitimate public domain) and audio models like Google Play's digital audiobook utility (which provide serviceable text-to-speech for free but give nowhere near the value of a human reading), but I am not kindly disposed to text models. When they first emerged I thought they were quite interesting for how closely they appeared to imitate thought, and I couldn't bring myself to care about the idea they might be 0.00001% influenced by scraping my fanfic on AO3 any more than a human writer might be influenced the same way. Now, though, it's clear they were badly implemented from the get-go and have already half-destroyed the internet with their gibberish sludge output, just as the venture capitalist investment money is starting to run dry. Had LLM companies begun with an approach like, "We want to buy scraping rights to your book for $10,000" the landscape might look very different for them now, but they didn't do that, and it's too late to try to build that goodwill retroactively.

I'm very fond of D2D. They're the best aggregator in the field, with the widest reach and the most useable website. I've been quite happy with them. But this move was ominous. As others have said, if they're testing the waters in such a pre-slanted way, they're probably already in much, much deeper behind closed doors. I wish I could tell their decision-makers they're so late to the party that the more profitable business choice would be to loudly repudiate all association with LLM companies forever and guarantee none of their hosted works will ever be scraped. "100% AI-Free, Always" is already the attractor, and "nOw wiTh ai!!1! put glue and rocks on ur pizza!" the repellant.

Still, I will probably remain with D2D until/unless they eliminate the ability to opt out of scraping. Even the presence of an "opt in in exchange for a fee" function is something I would make my peace with in time - not compensating creators for feeding models is how these companies shat the bed in the first place. But the fee would have to be VERY high to tempt me to participate myself.

Parting Thoughts

One of the writer's Mastodon memes I participated in recently had the question this week, "If you could write a story in any fictional world, what would you choose?" This question landed a little differently for me, as a writer with their roots in fanfic; I already can write in any fictional world I choose, and have done so many times! But I realised, with great delight, that the world I want to write in most is mine: Sleipnir, that flashy ringed moon swiftly orbiting his vivid blue ice giant parent, Mama Loki. He's filling up with alien fauna, and OCs patiently (and not-so-patiently) waiting for their own novels once I finish with my OTP for a moment. But that's still a queue of 3 books away, and I only just got moving again on the first of those 3, book 4. So I'd better get back to work. Until next month!

As you may have seen from my listings sticky, I assembled an omnibus edition of the first 3 books in my Secrets of Sleipnir series. The main reason I did this was to be able to order a print-on-demand author proof edition for myself, but I figured I might as well put the omnibus ebook up for sale at a discount as well. To my shock, there have been some orders for it! But I'm posting today because the proof has finally arrived: 

 

In The Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard, the eponymous emperor says, "... every poet should see his work in book form at least once. It is good for the soul." I would say that's true of other writers as well. I knew I wanted this. I was very pleased to have sold enough ebooks to cover the cost of both the proof and the hideous shipping fee to my country. But actually holding it in my hands has been more moving than I expected. I spent a few minutes just hugging it.

All of which is to say, there is now a print-on-demand option available for the omnibus edition! Don't @ me about how much it costs; print-on-demand is not cheap and even at that eye-popping price I'm making the exact same royalties I make off someone buying the ebook version. It's there if you want it badly enough.

Writing Update
My hiatus is going on a little longer than planned, because the fanfiction I was playing around with for a vacation challenge has turned rowdy on me and I have to wrangle it into shape. But I expect to be well into the thick of book 4 by August!