0004 Jevera 02: Divided

When I migrated from my old site to Blogger, I originally did so because I had a dream, at some far distant point in the future, of being able to monetize my stories, like some other authors have. It was a pipe dream, but it was still a valid dream to follow, so I went with it. I couldn't put ads on LiveJournal. DreamWidth didn't exist. I didn't feel like trying to host my own WordPress site. It seemed the right way to go about it.

Then I asked myself, "Well, if I'm moving my stories over to a new site, why not move my whole diary over?" It sounded like a reasonable question. I'd kept the old site up for eight or nine years, but I was getting tired of the maintenance, and I was also honestly frustrated with the lack of feedback on my diary updates. I assumed, and had a few people suggest, that the reason why nobody ever said anything to my posts was because despite the link from LiveJournal back to my diary, people didn't like having to hit the back button to comment. Having taken a class in HCI in graduate school, I could believe this.

I should, at this point, diverge long enough to state that the idea of me taking and passing a class in human-computer interfaces ought to either titillate or frighten people. I was the Problem Child who told the teacher I ran my monitor at 132×43 and used vi out of personal preference. That was one of the few grades I didn't earn so much as negotiate.

At any rate, I jumped ship, moving everything over to Blogger. The stories went to the Nail, and the diary came to the Ranch. I started porting over the back catalog of posts on my site so I could finally decommission it, and I started putting up my old catalog of stories.

Then I discovered something problematic.

Back when I started my original diary, I went into it with the idea that, if I wasn't comfortable talking about it with the whole world, then it wasn't worth discussing. I said to myself that I was going to just let my freak flag fly, and anybody who had a problem with it could just deal. I was tired of hiding. I was tired of sneaking around in the darkness.

Then, I actually had a couple of things happen that, for very good reason, didn't warrant wider conversation, but did need to be brought out for more than just my eyes to study.

Now, all of a sudden, I had a problem that, until this point, I had no need to solve, simply because I really didn't have any good topics of conversation that fell into that weird middle ground of "not completely private but not really public either." Having already made the leap to Blogger, I started surfing around it for options, and... I found something distressing. Namely, that while Google does support the idea of a private blog, with restricted access, it doesn't really have any concept of a private post, with individual elements in a blog restricted to specific people.

One might think that, like any reasonable or sane person, I would simply slink back to LJ, which is, after all, where all my friends hang out and post. And, you'd be perfectly justified in thinking of this as an option. Unfortunately, past events have left me extremely skittish dealing with SixApart's administration, especially on subjects such as frank discussions of sex and sexuality. It's not that I assume they'll ban me if I talk about it. It's that... well, they've already done it in the past, and I don't feel like courting disaster.

DreamWidth, now available, seemed like a good option. Very LJ-like, and with some new features that sold me relatively quickly... only... still no good way to put up my writing blog there. I suppose I could simply copy the posts and host them on DW, but they're very new and I have no idea how they feel about foreign ads on their sites. I suppose I could ask, but it feels a little like inviting the same kind of disaster as putting the sexy talk on LJ.

So, a conundrum, one that plagues me even now. See, the Nail, for all that I don't do what I said I was going to do with it, needs to remain on Blogger, or else go to WordPress, assuming that I'm not interested in rolling my own; it's the only place I can really host ads alongside the content, assuming I ever get enough content in place that anybody would want to put ads there; that, sadly, is its own topic. The Ranch could go to DreamWidth and consolidate with the Spiral, which would be fine, but it doesn't "solve the problem" of two separate hosts to handle my stuff. I could move DreamWidth's content to Blogger, but I'd have to have... um... three or four separate blogs, each with its own access list... no. Not happening.

Really, it's like my requirements for blogging software really come down to two major points:

• I want to host ads on the writing blog at some point.
• I want to secure individual posts to an arbitrary access list.

I don't think any noncommercial blogging platform actually provides me both of these at the same time. Blogger requires a separate blog for every access list. WordPress doesn't permit ads unless you pay for a VIP account. DreamWidth doesn't permit ads. LiveJournal's administration policies make me nervous... and don't permit ads.

It's looking like what I really want is a self-hosted WordPress site. But... what I don't want is another rassa-frassa migration from one site to another. I also want to avoid getting back into administrating my own frickin' blog software. I also want to avoid people thinking that I'm even more of a flake than I already am. However, it seems that if I really do only want to have to keep track of one site on top of LiveJournal... then this is probably going to be it.

So, to you, my theoretically loyal readers, any thoughts? Is the effort of consolidation worth the hassle of updating my own software? Does anyone actually read anything on DreamWidth? As long as I provide links as appropriate, do people care if I have a hojillion Blogger sites? Should I give up and come back to LiveJournal? Should I give up on the idea of trying to make money off my writing at some point? Does Jif really taste more like fresh-roasted peanuts?

Is there anybody out there?

0003 Radera 01

So, another month, another lack of update.

Really, it's not that I don't care about this thing any more. It's more the case that I get caught up in doing things and I don't really think about telling folks about it. I just don't "blog" the way most people do. Rather than talk about what's going on right now with my life, I tend to save up and dump it all out into large blocks, and then I forget stuff between when I start saving and when I figure it's time to post. So, chalk it up to use differences, more than interest fatigue.

So, this serves as a prelude to answering the question, "what has th' buni been doing for the last six weeks?"

Despite the removal of one user from my IRC server and the subsequent disappearance of a few others, the universe has not imploded, nor did I really expect anything like that to happen. I did expect a much larger hew and cry about the whole affair, but on the whole people seem to be pleased with the outcome. The community doesn't appear to have splintered, and in fact seems cohesive enough to assemble an anthology of short stories posted to the Shifti, though I'm not involved in the project directly. Still, things seem to be on an even keel there, so I'm not inclined to do too much rocking.

Anthrocon came and went during the downtime. I'm usually uncomfortably enthusiastic for AC, but this year was a little weird. Everything felt very last-minute, very rushed. Part of this was my own inertia; I didn't get the hotel situation resolved until the last minute, and we ended up having to change rooms twice during our stay in Pittsburgh. Part of it was a general lack of planning on my part, and I confess part of it was the ever-present sensation that I've failed in my own goal to have something for the dealers' room. However, as always, I went and had a blast and look forward to going again next year.

Of course, one thing that I've lamented for years is my lack of anything worth selling in the dealers' room. So, my plan is for AC next year, if not for some con prior, to have Beautiful World ready for publication by then. I'm actually further along on this project than it seems. I've broken the halfway mark for a science fiction novel—forty-thousand words—and I'm not yet halfway through the development. I've charted it out, and as long as I'm finishing a chapter every three weeks, I'll have enough time left to get the novel into publishable shape in time to get some advance copies for Anthrocon next year.

Unfortunately, this isn't coming without a price. I'm sure somebody has noticed by now that links to three of the chapters I'd posted previously have gone missing from my website. This isn't an act of censorship so much as it's an attempt to preserve the "publishability"—if that's a word—of the rest of the book. I'm not sure if this is an actual concern, but I'm in better-safe-than-sorry mode. This also means that I won't be posting any more parts of the book to my website, and when FA comes back up, I'll be removing some of the previous sections. I'm not entirely happy with it, but it seems like the best of a set of questionable alternatives.

Now, what this also means is that I'm looking for a shortlist of folks who'd be interested in serving as alpha-readers of the new parts of the story as they become available. One of the things I'll confess quickly and eagerly is that feedback is a large part of what helps drive the creative beast, and I'm making strides with generating that internally, but I'm also aware that other people reading my stuff helps me feel like making more. I don't think I want the universe involved in this process, but I'd love to have a pawful of folks interested in helping me make the book better. I'm not sure what I can offer right now for services rendered other than, like, autographed copies, but I'm sure I can come up with something.

In other news, I've successfully paid off the bankruptcy, which means that the thousand-per-month drain on my budget is now gone, to soon be replaced by a seven-hundred-per-month car payment, if my estimations are right, as well as gas and car insurance which should round me out to the money I'm presently "saving". So, no real movement ahead, but I'll have my own transport again, which will go a long way towards restoring my confidence in my ability to get ahead. Right now, the most likely vehicle on my list is a hybrid Ford Escape, not because I want an SUV but because nobody makes a hybrid station wagon that I wouldn't have to import and I can't afford to hold out until next year for some of the theoretical sixty-miles-to-the-gallon BMW or similiar. Plus, I can fit inside the Escape, or at least I'm led to believe that I can.

Speaking of fitting, the Weight Chart is back online. I found a scale with a 400-pound capacity, and I'm rather embarrassed to admit that at the beginning of the measurements, I needed it. The current trend shocks me, but today's lunch will likely change the direction of the red line for a day or two, mostly because I was in a hurry and ate faster than I could register it. That and portion control seem to be my biggest bugbears, but even there I'm getting better, little by little.

I actually weight to a doctor about my weight, and I learned a few interesting things I'd rather not have known. Rather, I'm glad i know them, but I'm not happy about them being facts, or even historical trends. Basically, whatever my weight was when I was eighteen, give or take two years, is my body's "set point", and most of the natural tendencies will be to maintain that number. Since I weighed 350 pounds at eighteen, I'm likely going to be fighting uphill forever. I've looked into bariatric surgery, but what I'm seeing in the latest reports is that it's a six-year "fix" that ends up not actually solving anything and compounds outstanding problems with new dietary fuckery. Most of the drugs combatting weight loss lead to side effects worse than the weight itself causes. So, apparently the sane goal for someone of my size and history is 315, which is ten percent of base body mass. I'm headed in the right direction, but it's likely going to be a long, painful road.

I'm not saying I'm giving up on the goal. I'm merely setting the expectations for myself and everyone else. Failure is likely, for reasons that have nothing to do with how hard I try or how much I want it.

That one thing aside, though... things seem to be shockingly good. There've been a few dips and wobbles here and there, but they're all things that can be resolved through talking and effort. I'm still not exactly the most social person alive, but I'm feeling better about casual interaction than I have in a while. I still have a pretty big back log of rants on various subjects, but the urge to drop trou and shit into a text file has gone down significantly in the last few months, even if the subject matter is itself fascinating. I really don't have any reason to bitch.

Perhaps that more than anything is driving the silence. I'm just... happy with my life, for the most part, and the elements with which I'm dissatisfied are all things on which I'm actively working. Happy people don't make waves. I'd love to be up for challenging the system and burning the world, but really, I've got it good right now, and I don't want to blow it.

Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

It's a new year, and despite a lot of emotional ups and downs so far, I have to say that I suspect this time around the sun will be far preferable to the one before. Not that I have any chance to go back and revisit the previous year in any meaningful fashion, mind you. Being of strictly three dimensions curved in four-dimensional space, I am limited to monodirectional motion through spacetime's w-axis. This at times seems like a real pity, because I bet I could finally roll over a Pac-Man machine if I went back to 1986 enough times.

Today is, of course, "Friday the thirteenth", which means exactly as much as you wish it to mean. I'm a big believer in make-your-own-magjickq. For the spelling of "magjickq", by the way, I have to blame a friend of mine who apparently got it from her girlfriend's polite teasing of the "schools" of "philosophy" that teach that any "will-to-power" "belief" system use an "alternate" spelling from the "authoritative" one found in the "dictionary" to separate it from mere parlour tricks and making David Copperfield "vanish". So, if consulting your horoscopes or reading your tea leaves or asking the nailbunny a question today means a genuine from-beyond-the-stars answer, do it! Make your own reality. Be or build your own sex goddess. Launch your own head!

Today's featured Wikipedia is on game theory. Game designers, take note! This will help tell you why Monopoly sucks and go is beautiful. I should probably spend a lot of time looking at this, too.

This was going to be a post on the general cluelessness of people on the internet, based on the fact that I received an e-mail that I thought at first was asking me for my e-mail address, and I was all prepared to rant about this at length, until I went back and reread it to confirm the exact message and found that the author wanted my "mailing address", which is not a stupid request at all since I'm trying to find out information about a class action lawsuit against one of the companies in which I'm invested. So, I suppose instead I should turn this into a post about always double-checking one's facts before saying or doing anything stupid like posting on about the general cluelessness of people on the internet.

The last couple of days have been a royal roller-coaster of emotion for many reasons, most of which boil down to "Kristy doesn't have her head screwed on right". I'd say I'm under a lot of stress, but the truth is that most of it is generated internally. I am probably my own single biggest source of angst and frustration, mostly because I have all these ideas and no followthrough on any of them. I've had projects languishing for weeks months years too long that really deserve some love and attention:

• Child of Man isn't dead, but it hasn't moved past chapter eleven since the last time I talked about it in public. I feel stuck on this one exchange that needs to be good because it's the point at which the transition happens from plot points being added to plot points being wrapped up. I'm at the turning point and starting the downslide into the climax, and I really need to make this next section happen well. Part of my problem, too, is that my writing in general has suffered because of the many times I've convinced myself that writing "just isn't appreciated in the fandom", a rant I've made before or at least supported in principle when other people have made it. I used to be able to tell myself I wrote for my own happiness. Once I was happy without needing to write, my output plummeted. It's very disappointing.
• Doomsday Lotto is still in search of an artist, and a finished site design. I know how I want it to look, but I haven't even updated the headline tracker in a wile, so I'm kind of afraid to go looking at it to find out how much data I've actually lost because the New York Times has changed its layout and I haven't. Any artists looking for an ongoing project?
• Short stories in general still feel more comfortable to me, but I haven't cranked any of those out in a while either. That whole "writing for money" thing feels like a weird and beautiful dream I had once, and now I'm awake. That's not really the right attitude to take; that should be the awake state, and this should be my unholy nightmare.
• My investment account hasn't really been touched in a while, which is irksome. I'm still putting some money aside now and again into it, but not as much as I'd like. Plus, there's now a class-action lawsuit against one of the companies in which I'm invested, accusing the management of the company of withholding information to keep the stock price elevated. I may have less than a hundred shares in their business, but they still represented the largest percentage of my holdings at the time they collapsed, and even now they're still the second-largest chunk of my portfolio. Seeing the suit, I'm tempted to sell, but I'm afraid if I do that the money I've lost on the investment will vanish completely; at least if I hold them I'm getting dividends out of the deal, and as a REIT, they're obligated by law to pay those.
• The big reason that I'm not spending more on investments is my debt. It's down for the year, but it's still over where it should be... which is to say I still have debt. The mortgage doesn't bother me, but the credit card debt does, even if the interest rate is nice and low. Current trend predicts that I'll have that paid off by end of 2007 if I can keep up the payments I'm currently making, faster if I can drop bonus checks and tax returns on it, slower if our expenses keep going up and my income doesn't match it.

I actually had a reasonably long talk with a friend of mine not too long back about money, and more specifically how it is that despite making twice what she does, I don't have any more take-home play money at the end of the month than she does, and often less. So, in the interest of research and discovery, I actually sat down today and updated my budget spreadsheet for 2006. If I did my math right and the guesses I've made about Jessie's and my expenses are anywhere close to accurate and Tanya and Shay both pay their rent and utilities on a regular basis, I should have five thousand dollars left over at the end of the year.

That's five thousand dollars worth of "miscellaneous", for the whole year. No, that's not a mistake. That's around ten percent of my income, a little more net, a little less gross. That doesn't sound like a lot, compared to what I theoretically make, but consider that out of the rest I'm covering two transitions, paying a mortgage, climbing out of debt, paying bills, doing all that stuff that has to be done to keep a house in order. New clothes aren't included, nor are video games that aren't our monthly-payment ones, but eating out is covered under groceries. Basically, if it's fun, exciting or new, it's not in the budget and comes out of that extraneous bucket.

Maybe I should start including an extraneous bucket in the spreadsheet, the fun-and-games budget that gives Jessie and I some psychological constraint on what we can and can't afford to spend. I don't know how much it'll help. Maybe it might even help to get some extra savings accounts. I should start budgeting my investment or retirement options; currently my balance transfer rate is lower than my estimated ROI on the stocks and dividends I've got.

The original intent of this post was to serve as a one-off joke on something silly that arrived in my inbox, and it's turned into a much larger dissertation than I'd intended. Ultimately, I suppose my point is new year, new dreams, new hopes, new changes.

Big money, no whammies.

Today's actually a fairly big day for me. I've finally done something I've wanted to do for a long time. I've put something I wrote up for sale.

I keep wanting to describe it here as vanity, but it's more than that. It's my writing. It's for sale. It's my writing for sale. Anyone who's an artist can describe this feeling. Few outside those who sell what they create can. There's something incredibly empowering in the idea of making a living on the fruit's of one's creative endeavors. It's powerful. This is in no way "making a living" on it, but if even one person pays money to read it, then I've accomplished a goal. I've written something I wanted to write, and had someone give me money for it.
I'll have sold my creative writing.

One dollar, in that context, seems pretty lousy. Professional rates for authors when I was growing up was three cents a word. At three-thousand, four-hundred-seventy-three words, three cents a word is over a hundred
dollars. Most people will not pay a hundred dollars for five pages of written text. Even I wouldn't pay that much. I would love it people did, but they don't.

The price-point's actually probably about right. It's little enough to seem like a pittance to most people, and enough to actually be worth my time. I only see eighty cents out of that buck, but that's more than zero which is
what I'd get if I just put it online on my website. I do intend to keep writing and giving stuff away, because I enjoy writing, but I do want to at least focus some amount of my time towards writing for payment. I'd like to see some kind of positive return on my investment, and I think I'm good enough to get it, if I can just get my name out there.

Jessie actually quipped while I was writing Lateral Promotion that I'd never make it as a porn-writer because I take too much pride in my work. I can't crank it out fast enough and I spend too much time worrying about plot and character and setting and not enough time worry about which tab fits into whose slot. I'm hoping I can prove her wrong, but it'd be nice to sell more than just smut.

That's where Child of Man fits into the picture.

I've been working on this novel for the better part of two years now. I won't say it's become all-engrossing because I am writing things other than that—Lateral Promotion, for example—but it is sucking away large amounts of my brain power trying to keep the thing moving. I'm already at thirty-two thousand words and counting. I know, I know. NaNoWriMo people crank out more than that in way less time, but few of them try to sell the products of their effort. This is something I think I can actually market if I put some effort into it.

Now I just have to see if anybody bites the hook.

---

This week, actually, has been quite good overall. Tanya came out for a visit, and it's always good to see her. I picked up some fresh cosmetics for Jessie that should do what her concealer wand wasn't handling. I got word that the repairs on the house have finally started. The previous owner of the house has contacted me and confirmed that he's going to finish siding the garage. There've been a few big dips, but right now they seem pretty
inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

It's always nice to feel like things are getting better.

Recently, a friend of mine wrote a story, or maybe told me about a story. I don't remember which; in the end, it doesn't really matter. It was a good story, or at least I liked it a lot which in my small corner of the universe means the same thing. We talked about the story, and then the subject went away.

Some time later, he wrote the story, or edited what he'd written before. He posted it to a mailing list we have in common. I read it there; it wasn't what he'd described. Most of it was, but the ending was different. To me, it wasn't as good as the original. It felt... robbed, or cheated. The ending seemed inappropriate. When he asked me what I thought, I told him as much.

I think he expected me to like it more than the original. I think he got very upset that I didn't. He said some things to me that I don't think he understands hurt me. They made me feel small and unwelcome, that I didn't know what I was doing. I know he'd never say these things to me and mean them like that, or even if he meant to tell me that, he would never try to hurt me with such things, but this time, they did. I felt that I had been asked for an opinion, and when I gave it and the explanation of why I thought what I did I was told I was wrong, and that hurt.

I thought that would be the end of the situation, and I wanted to just drop the matter. It didn't happen that way. I saw people praising the new story and its wonderful ending. I heard people on IRC discussing the story. I didn't feel I could re-state my opinion. I didn't feel I could leave. I didn't want to stay. I felt trapped. I felt unsafe.

Jessie asked to see the story. I sent zim a copy, thinking I could at least discuss it with zim. Jessie had never seen the original. Jessie thought the ending was brilliant, and zie pointed out an interpretation of events that had never even entered my head when I read it. I felt, for a few very brief moments, trapped in my apartment by my own mate. I never want to feel like that again. I spent six years feeling that way.

None of this is anyone's fault. None of this is anyone's responsibility to fix but mine. I don't know if I can fix it, though, and therein is my trouble. I felt this way at Anthrocon. I've felt this way to lesser degrees at the Bashes I've attended. I don't know how not to feel this way when I'm in this kind of situation. I don't know what triggers it, only that I could describe scenarios in which I know it will happen. All I know how to do is avoid those situations, but then to some degree that means I'm shutting myself out of life, and that's the last thing I want to do.

I was flustered all the way to work this morning. I told Jessie last night that I just wanted to put all this behind me, but this morning I couldn't. I'm writing this here hoping that by the time I get done, I can.

Yesterday, I decided that I was going to fold my old homepage into this one. I've been trying to integrate my old identity into my new one, and that site is really one of the last artifacts up from my old name that remains online.

I started, as I thought was best, by going through and editing all of the HTML so the style of the pages would match the rest of my new site. I found that I wasn't such a good coder then, though, so I had a lot of code buried
in the pages themselves that I needed to change. Quite innocently, I started going through and fixing things.

Then I started reading what I had written.

This is where things got a bit strange. You see, on one of the writing forums of which I'm a member, there are a lot of shared settings in which many authors will all write stories, and it's very common in those settings to pattern many or all of the main characters on the authors themselves. Thus, a good number of the stories on my homepage all feature me.

The only catch is that they're not me. They're the person that I tried very hard to be, and for a while believed I could be for the rest of my life. I spent a lot of energy writing those stories almost as a subconscious reinforcement of the mask I wore. There I was, immortalized on paper, so to speak. I even wrote stories about my ex-boyfriend, before he asked me not to include him any more.

Reading back over what I had written, and who I had tried to be, I felt the distinct embarrassment that people get when their parents show off baby photos of them to others.

I couldn't very well say that the stories were never written. Too many people have seen them, and they would know even if I disavowed any memory of them. Yet, it didn't feel right to include them in my current homepage. They're a snapshot of the past, in the same way that my high school graduation photo and my driver's licence picture are. They were all things I believed were once true, and in that I stand by them, but they aren't true now. They aren't me now.

When I started this transition, I did so with the statement that I would never try to hide who I was, but that I wouldn't let that person dominate my life. I would learn from my past, but I wouldn't live there. As such, I'm not going to take down my old homepage, but I'm not going to update it any longer, and the stories that were there will remain there.

I am a work forever in progress, and those stories are, to a great extent, a snapshot of a history I outgrew.