I think editing is mostly done for now; my good buddies Epstein and W'rkncacnter have gone over the story with combs of varying finetoothery, with my girlfriend providing a general stamp of approval. The rest of the lazy bums who received advance copies haven't given me any specific feedback (although their glowing praise is flattering and YES I MEAN YOU RYOKO). I thought I'd show you guys what I do when I'm not messing with Marathon stuff.
I plan on never sending this story to a publisher; instead, I will eventually publish the complete novella myself. I have practiced typesetting the text using the TEX engine, and as soon as I'm satisfied I'll send the work to a printing press. Depending on how much money I can fork out for printing, I'll get a number of copies (probably no more than 100) for a first edition run. Then I'll see who wants to buy one.
Without going into too much detail, I'll explain a little of my reasoning here. The first half of the self-publishing decision is purely practical: few, if any, sci-fi magazines still take serials (novels published in parts), and this piece won't be long enough (nor is my reputation good enough) for me to sell it as a novel to the publisher. In addition to that pessimism, I also realize that I'd rather own my work completely. Royalty publishers (the best and most normal kind of publisher) buy some of the rights to your work, which makes me uneasy. Vanity and subsidy publishers (to whom you pay money or grant rights for in exchange for "publication") are bad news in general. So I've taken it upon myself to do everything except buy a printing press and run it in my basement.
WELL! That was a sort of boring paragraph. In any case, my site now contains the story in HTML format for easy reading online. It's been split into scenes so that you have some capability to bookmark given passages (for the longest time, it was just a single page, which got really nasty). Please respect my ownership/copyright (don't copy it to another site, don't claim it as yours, don't sell it, don't plagiarize, blah blah, etc. If you have a question, ask me.), but other than that, give me an honest word or paragraph or whatever telling me what you think. I believe I'm a good writer, but who knows. If you do like it, feel free to link other people to the story on my site. And, of course, discuss it here!
Title: Earth Mother part I ("Him")
Genre: Science fiction
Length: ~20,000 words
Writing time: 3-4 months
Link: @ITO
P.S.--I know it's a stretch and that requesting this is probably asking for trouble, but if we could keep this thread mostly on-topic (main focus on Earth Mother, some focus on my other writing, some focus on writing in general). I don't even really care if we get a flame war in this thread, so long as it's a topical flame war
then i can make my friends read it ... ^^
. The PDF I have for EM I is only 43 pages using 6in x 9in paper. Here's how it looks:
