Dandelyon's Worlds

With a name like Deirdre, I've become accustomed to having my name mis-spelled. It happens on mail, at work, on convention badges, and even when I get something published.

I take it in good humor, joking when I can. The best fun recently was at the Pirate-theme Capricon, where I got many laughs telling people that they'd left one of the "Arrrrrs" out of my name, until someone in registration heard the laughter and insisted on providing me with a replacement badge.

This year, at Duckon, they got my badge right--in 14 point type that no one could see at any distance--and my placards for programming wrong. I re-wrote my name on the back of the placard--but pen does not show up at a distance the way letters printed large do.

One of the panels I was on was Writing in Someone Else's World, a panel that ellenmillion had said she would have liked to hear. This prompted me to request of the audience that if they were recording, I'd appreciate if there might be some way to get a copy. No one had a recorder, but someone was taking notes, and shared them with me.

In the notes, the other three panelists were identified by name.  I was "???"

"???" isn't going to help anyone find me or my work sometime later. 

Should I have used the mis-spelled placard?  I'm inclined to think not--Google isn't likely to find me if I'm mis-spelled, and for the time being, I need to be found online.

I suspect I'm going to feel less good humor about people getting my name wrong in the future. 

Which, of course, is unlikely to be helpful. 

I guess I'll have to try to figure out something constructive to do about it.  But what?

So, I paid bills yesterday (oops, now the day before yesterday), after we headed off to Home Depot to find an inexpensive replacement for the sink cabinet in the upstairs bathroom. The old one is an eyesore, and probably moldy, and I'm done with it! We're also replacing the medicine cabinet, which is doubtless an antique, but was never anything special, and is not as attractive as it used to be.

The new ones are plain, and not nearly as spiffy as the $500+ set that I really really liked.  But money doesn't grow on tomato vines, more's the pity.  So I left the cool victorian-look pieces in the store and brought home stuff that will at least be clean and functional.

I'm continuing the process of attempting to declutter.  Today (really today) I went through more piles of mail to determine what I really need to keep, what to dispose of carefully, and what's just junk to put in recycling.  (I don't have much that an identity-thief could make use of, but that's no reason to be careless.  Having no money just means I can't pay someone else to try to clean up the mess if someone does get ahold of my information.)

Yesterday I reorganized the gluten-and-corn-free cabinet so it wasn't overflowing onto the kitchen table. 

Today in between tweets for #scifichat, I emptied some bags I'd taken to cons or family gatherings to put the miscellaneous stuff in them away (or get rid of it), got rid of more paper, and cleared off the 2010 anthology and magazine deadlines from my writing board, and started putting up deadlines for the new year.  In the process, I found a market with a deadline of tomorrow, that happily fit one of the stories I needed to send out again.  At least I think it fits--I hope the editor agrees.  So I also started a new logsheet for the new year for submissions, structuring this one to tell me to submit ten pieces a month.  Right now it looks all neat and orderly; I'm hoping that that will change when I  submit more than ten in a month, but even if some of the months end up shorter, I hope the incentive will help keep me keeping my stories moving.

Another thing I'm working on is setting up a proper customer/fan database.  Well, spreadsheet, to be technical.  Anyway, I'm trying to capture everyone who's hit any of my donation buttons over the last year, as well as anyone else who would want me to have their contact information for when I can do things like send out announcements of publications or the like.  If you want to be in my database, feel free to message me with your information.

I also finished off two book reviews, which I sent in yesterday.  I found it's much harder to write a review of a book that disappointed me than one I loved.  Oh, well, the book  question did have a number of good points, and if I'd known about the thing that I felt was its biggest flaw ahead of time, I'd have probably enjoyed the book more, because I would have known I should focus more on the other parts of the story.  Hopefully, my review will help the book find readers who enjoy it and avoid readers who won't.

One of my goals, in reviewing fiction, is to help people find books they will enjoy.  Even in reviewing books I love, I want to characterize the books in a way that will get people who are likely to enjoy they them to read them, without encouraging people who don't like that sort of book to read them. 

I am mindful, for instance, of  Lois McMaster Bujold's reflection on her Sharing Knife books, which are part action adventure and part romance--she got many reader comments telling her that people were disturbed that the action was interrupted by the romance--and just as many from people who felt the action was interrupting the romance.

And I am also mindful of the game seller who, at a convention, asked her customer what games they liked, then made a recommendation.  When the customer pressed, asking what the seller personally liked best about the game, the seller admitted that she thought the best part was packing up the game after the playtest.  Then why did she recommend it?  Because that game irked her in exactly the same ways as the games the customer loved.

I hope that I can emulate the successes of that game seller!

So, I've got this story. It's gotten several very complimentary rejections. It is a hard to place length, either just over or just under the cut-off for Novelette length (about 7500 words) (there's two versions, one edited tight, one with more local color). But I'm starting to think there must be something else wrong with it.

Or maybe I just haven't found the right market.

It's urban fantasy; a ghost story with a twist.

I'm hoping for a few people willing to read the story and give me comments--or suggest a market for it.

Or should I sell single copies, electronically? Or post it as a short serial, for subscribers only? Or some other alternative method of publication?

If you are willing to comment on the story, please let me know.

I really like this story; I'd like to place it somewhere.

One of the secrets of busking, if you want to earn your dinner or pay some bills, is to find a good corner. Somewhere that the merchants won’t chase you away, where you and your audience won’t block traffic, and where people who like your special style of music will hear you. If you sing French folk songs, it probably won’t be effective to stand outside the local Mercado, or the local Rap club, for instance.

Cyberland is a little different. No, a lot different. Every corner is, theoretically, equally distant from every other corner. That's good, right?

Well, not really.

First, all corners are just one click away, from any site that has your url--but how many sites do?  And are they sites where people are looking for what you do hang out?  Just because all sites are equidistant, doesn't mean it’s easy to find the corners you’re interested in, from wherever you are.

So, it’s not as simple as picking a spot, opening the guitar case, and performing. You can’t count on someone’s shopping list or evening commute taking them past your corner.

So you go out and put your name and url places.  Then you try to figure out what's working. 

This is problematic too, for though I know there's tools out there, I don't know enough about them to use them efficiently.  I haven’t figured out how to use tools like visit counters—and don’t know if LJ is friendly to them. ( It’s not particularly friendly to PayPal buttons, which have to be pasted in with the screen in HTML mode, and even then usually don’t work the first time I test them, so I have to edit the entry and paste the code in again.) So, unless people leave a comment, I don’t know they’re here, and unless they tell me, I don’t know how they got here. So that makes it difficult to track what works and what doesn’t.  I did tell LJ I do want to know who looks at my journal, but if that feature is running yet, I haven't found it. I also don’t know what, if anything, it would tell me about non-LJ visitors.

That said, so far, Twitter, with the assistance of e-fiction book club, have allowed at least one new reader to find me, and places like Author’s Den and Blogspot have not yet produced results I can see, though that may not be a fair comparison, as I joined Twitter earlier.

So, my quest to figure out how to make my corner of the net a good corner for Cyber-busking is ongoing. You could help me a bit—you can answer this question:

When you’re bored and wanting to find something to read on the net, how do you go about looking?

And, of course, if you are more net-savvy than me, feel free to show off your knowledge as much as you want!