You may have already noticed the announcement on the front page. Yes, Adrift is finished! And I can hear the voices chorus: "Again?" And to that I say, and I quote Bullwinkle J. Moose: "This time, for sure! Presto!"
At long last, this "three hour tour" of a voyage is nearing its end. Not the series, mind you; the series still has three books after this one. But I got past this one. That's the main thing.
Currently it's in final proofing, catching the last of the little mistakes we can spot and spray painting over the big mistakes with Paragraph-Size Liquid Paper... as soon as that's done, the book goes to the publisher, and six to eight weeks after that, it's out.
That's the good news, and good news it is. Now, here's the bad news: This is the last posting of Adrift on the website. The final section will not be posted.
"What?" I hear the screams, the crashes, the crying babies... and to that I say, and I quote Thomas Magnum, P.I.: "Wait, Higgins! I can explain..."
My publishing contracts stipulate that for the first three years of publication, they have exclusive print rights to the books they publish. This translates from legalspeak to mean, for three years, they are to be the sole outlet of the text version of this book. And this means that once I submit it for publication and it is accepted, I can no longer post it here. So my choices are to turn the book in the moment its done and get the ball rolling and get it out in early June, or, delay submitting it to put it up here. If you are reading this and have been around for awhile and have witnessed the struggles and problems and do-overs this book has undergone, you will understand immediately that I want this thing out of my hands and into print as soon as humanly possible. It's not a question of teasing the readers and forcing them to buy the hard copy; I already know they're going to buy the hard copy. I find it heartening that people will read a book for free on the internet and then go ahead anyway and buy a copy of the print version! This is not a business or financial decision, it's a "please dear God let's get this over with" decision. For those who are not buying the print version, the other three books will be going up in their entirety as usual, and Adrift will eventually be put up as a synopsis along with the ones for Resurrections and Sanctuary.
And so, the next couple of months my concentration is going to be focused on getting this 300 page monkey off my back. The next book, Honor, will restart on schedule June 6; I will repost the first segment at that time that I put up at Christmas, along with the following one so there'll be something new, or close to it, to read. In the meantime, I have posted another review to the Media page, I have put a new Top Ten list in the kittyloaf! for your amusement (one that is specific to this final post), I have unearthed a long forgotten link in the Oddities section and reconnected it; and I am confident that in the next few months the Gallery will rise again, bigger and better than ever...
And this is it for March. I may have another review by April; I'm still tired from the last one, and if you read it you'll know why... but I will continue to update the main page as I get dates of Adrift's publication status. To which I say, and here I quote Eric Cartman: um, actually, no, maybe I better not...
February 19, 2006 Happy Anniversary Marius and Cosette!
...which in the traditional calendar is the plutonium anniversary, whereas in the modern
calendar is the dilithium anniversary...
Many new things this time, if not in form, in function. There's the newly redesigned Media Comparison Checklist
page (the main page only; I'm still working on reformatting all the reviews) and a new review to go with it, the newly redesigned Oddities main
page, and a brand new kittyloaf that frankly makes me giggle. Hopefully it hasn't gone past its fifteen minutes
of fame in the reference department.
Also new is the next section, the fifth section, of Adrift. I'll let it speak for itself.
As for the rest of Adrift, since you all want to know how it's going, I have ten chapters left to
write as of today. I hope to have it completed by the end of the month, edited and proofed by the end of March,
and now that I have the publishing money thanks to my sister, the moment it's done, it's done.
Back to the salt mines. Enjoy...
January 25, 2006 Yes, yes, today is my birthday...
Believe it or not, I have now been working on this thing for ten years. It was in late 1995, when I first
saw the 10th Anniversary Concert on PBS, that I got hooked on this stupid story, which I am beginning to think of
as Metherables because it's such a hard habit to kick. Ten years later I should have been done with it. Instead
I'm still halfway through. I am hoping that it will not take me ten more years to complete it, though if it took
nineteen years that might not be completely inappropriate, since after all I figured it would be done in five or
six... must be my punishment for my repeated attempts to escape this book, right?
I have posted the fourth part of Adrift, finishing this book's look at Meanwhile In Paris. Hope
it clears up a few more plot points than previous drafts did. After this, though... here comes the evil parts!
Older readers for this website may remember what comes next in the series. If you thought it was hard to read before,
just wait; it's even harder to write this time around, and I'm having serious guilt issues making my poor proofreader
read it over and over again... both of us want Book Three over and done with, that's for sure! Adrift is
kind of like my "Goblet Of Fire", in that stuff gets darker and sadder from here on in. As has been said on
numerous occasions both here and elsewhere, that's why the book wasn't called Les Happyables...
I have now three reviews in the queue to write, thanks to Lindsay's tireless efforts to subject me to
worse and worse media versions (I am kidding, really!). I just need the time to sit down and parse them. One of them
is the fourth radio version we've unearthed, this time by BBC4, starring Roger Allam as Valjean (who was the original
Javert, oddly enough). I think this is odd casting but we'll find out when I listen to it, lord knows I've been
surprised in good and bad ways before on these things. Another version I'm working on is one people have been asking
me about, the one from the 30's glimpsed at during parts of the 1995 French film (the one in which Henri Fortin, that
version's Jean Valjean, is trying to explain the plot to a comrade and ends up saying, "it's a bit over the top").
My main stumbling block in this is an odd one, actually... my source taped it off Mexican television, so while it's
in French, it has Spanish subtitles. Normally I wouldn't care, but since I know just enough Spanish to get me arrested
in Tijuana, it's a little distracting hearing one thing and having my brain scramble the French and reading
similar but just different enough words in Spanish simultaneously... and it's like four hours long, so I can only
work on it in small spurts right now. Rest assured though I won't let the subtitles affect the review of the
movie itself. And if anyone has a non subtitled version I can borrow, you know where the email goes :-) And dangit,
I know there's another tape around here waiting for me, I just can't find it right now. I think it's French also,
from the 70's. Maybe next month I'll have at least one of these to post.
Even though I missed my self imposed deadline to get a 2005 copyright on Adrift, I'm hoping to have
it done in the next couple of months, right on time to use my tax refund for the publishing costs unless of course
I have to move out of this crappy apartment before I take my neighbors hostage. Oh dear, did I say that out loud?
Anyway, Honor is looking to gear up for the old original anniversary date of June 6 (the first section has
been taken out of the kittyloaf and will stay off site until June 6) so Adrift, which has
about ten or twelve chapters to go on the final segment, will come out before then. It will. I mean it.
So let it be written; so let it be donedonedonedonedone!
December 18, 2005 Hooray! Made it for Christmas!
I wanted to do a full update on Valjean's birthday on the 14th, but I had no time whatsoever. When I tell
you why, you'll understand. My new temp job is not only a 4-10 schedule, but it's also graveyard shift. So I'm
working 8pm to 6am four days a week. Which means sleeping during the day and not a lot of free time to do anything
during daylight hours. But on my days off I do have time to work on the book, and during my shift as well (plenty
of down time when running a machine, that's for sure). This job should last a few months, so I'm set for a bit.
But, since this is the holiday season, I worked an extra 10 hour shift last week, got no sleep whatsoever,
and missed my deadline, so I just put up the birthday blurb and went back to bed. Still don't have time to do a
full update with bells and whistles, but I do have the third part of Adrift up, so that's something. Second
part's links are disabled, see below.
I did move the Miseropoly card from the kittyloaf link to the Oddities section. The sad thing is I've
actually come up with almost a full idea for a Miseropoly set, board, cards, tokens, and all. God I am a sick
puppy. Anyway, the reason I moved it is because I've updated the kittyloaf with a Christmas present. Some of you
who were around back in 2002... *ahem* may have seen it, but if you weren't, consider it a
preview, which it is... the first section of Book Four: Honor. I'm posting it here and now because of the Christmas
theme. It will come back down when I update again in January and stay down until Honor gets underway. Hope
you enjoy the preview...
And that's all I have time for right now. Still working on Gallery options. May have a solution in place
if I can get the company I'm talking to to get back to me about hosting the pictures for me. Till then...
November 11, 2005 Wow, I'm two for two! Let's see if I can keep up this hectic schedule...
I don't have a lot to update with as of yet, except for the second installment of Adrift.
On a technical note, I've removed the entry page to the book (the starry background one) and
set the index to the table of contents. Note that the first section's links are disabled; I have
removed the first section because I'm not going to leave the entire thing up as I did before. I'm debating
whether or not to do that with Honor, too... it depends on how it goes this time around. Readers of the
old version will notice that this section originally took place later in the book, but I've moved it forward
so it begins the main storyline earlier. I can't explain it more without blowing some plot points for new
readers; just trust me on this one.
As far as the rest of the book goes, I'm still working on the last section of Adrift, but it's really
going well. It's feeling closer to the spirit in which I wanted it to go in the first place, long before
circumstances came into play that altered it. That was mostly my fault. I have resolved never again to write
people into the book, unless I'm going to kill them off. Because of a mistake made during Sanctuary wherein I wrote a friend in as a
continuing character (and subsequently divested myself of said friend) a major subplot changed, and I'm forced
to spend the last part of this book writing myself back out of my problem. Someday, however, I'm sure I'll look
back on all this and laugh... but if this book is overly long, that's why. It takes ten times the effort to fix
it as it did to mess it up in the first place.
I still have hopes of finishing Adrift by the end of December and submit it for publication before
the end of the year so it'll bear a 2005 copyright. Sanctuary has a 2001 copyright. I should be done by
now, dammit... anyway, if it turns out that I get publication started before finishing posting Adrift I'll
probably have to take it down, since it will be a condition of my publishing contract that the printed book be
the only print version for three years. If I don't get the rest of Adrift up before then, I apologize for
being slow to code this. But I will be starting Honor directly after finising Adrift, without the
two or three month pause I gave myself between other books. So there will continue to be book postings on the
site.
Work is still temporary. I hope to have better news on that front next month. The sooner I make money,
the sooner I can publish, the sooner I can move into a better (quieter!) apartment, and the sooner I can get
a permanent solution to the ongoing problem of how to set up the Gallery to foil stupid-ass hotlinkers.
Á bientôt...
October 23, 2005 See, I told you I would update this month...
Okay, long long long story short... in the grand tradition of Crosswinds.net and
Mediablend.com,
the company formerly hosting my website, which has gone through three name changes since the site transferred
(Webhostingetc., T3Link, and JDLinkLLC), the site went down in a crash of burning flames. The reason the site
was not updated for almost a year was a) I could not get a hold of anyone at my hosting company b) I was not
being billed c) I was not able to access the FTP, and although for awhile I had email access, in the end I could
not send out, I could only read what was sent to me. I did finally receive a bill when my domain registration
came due, and I paid it. Still, though, I heard nothing. Very bad.
It was only after I discovered that the company had folded entirely and transferred all the domains to a
holding company that I could get my site back. I went to another company, a long standing, reputable one,
GoDaddy.com,
and they took care of the transfer and everything. In the meantime, waiting for the holding company (a dumb
bastard Texas company called Awesomenet.net) to let go of my pont-au-change.com name, which the even dumber bastard
Tucows (the domain registrant) had sold to them, and believe me they weren't going to let go of it, insisting that
I had not paid the registration and, once the domain registration lapsed, were going to
squat on the name until
I paid them again, I had to have something to start a webpage on with GoDaddy. So, now that Mediablend had finally
let the old unhyphenated pontauchange.com domain lapse (we all remember what a stellar host they were :-/)
I reregistered that name as a holder until the hyphenated name got freed up. When it did, I linked the two to
the same DNS number, so no matter which way you type the name of the book, the website comes up. Unless you use
.net or something, then you're on your own.
So, the page is up and paid for for a full year... I thought I'd prepay that and see how it goes, make
sure that the site will continue to be as well managed as it is right now... so it's time to put stuff on it. There
are a few things that will need to be changed and deleted, that's for sure. The pages look mostly the same right
now, but that's because I'm trying to find a nice stylized webpage template for the inner sections, the
Media Checklist, the Oddities, etc. I'll worry about dressing them up again later.
I have investigated the possibility of making sure that hotlinking cannot happen with the
Gallery. As most of you remember, some jerkwads were directly linking pictures from the
Gallery to their stupid dumbass
Livejournal pages, which generated so much bandwidth usage that the page crashed. However, to do that I would
need to have my own server, or access to a single server, since that kind of programming would affect all
the sites stored on it, not just mine. And at $80 a month, that just is not feasible at all. I will consider
putting the Gallery back up at some future time, but not yet. I'm still mad at the dumb fucks that crashed my
previous site.
People, READ THE FUCKING DIRECTIONS! You can copy ANY of the images from the Gallery to your own
webspace and link from there, or do a text link as a clickthrough, because I don't own any of these pictures and
put them up as a resource for readers and artists and historians and costumers and whatnot, but DO NOT EVER
I MEAN EVER directly link from any picture on this site to your stupid blog. Because I will replace
it with the most disgusting picture I happen to find at the moment and it will then automatically forward to all
your friends' blogs and you risk having your host cancel your stupid ass.
Now that I have that out of the way, I'm going to begin reposting Adrift. In stages. As soon as I get to
formatting it for the website. Again, the book comes off the site upon submission to the publisher. However, unlike
earlier versions of how I do things, I'm not adding to the posting as it goes. I will put up the first section,
then, when the next one goes up, the first one will come down. In other words, read it as it's happening, or
you're going to miss out. I will put up the last section when it's finished, before publication. I won't leave
everyone on the cliffhanger like I did before. UPDATE:
I got the first section coded for HTML and have posted it. Subsequent sections
will come up as I get them done.
IMPORTANT! By the way... if you would like your books signed, email me at the usual address (check the banner in
the Blotter Talks! area for the address... keeps me from getting spammed by robots that way) and we
can make arrangements. All I ask is that you pay postage both ways and I'll even send you a little bookmarky
present to go with it. Let's be honest, I earn about $3 per book sold through
the publisher, or Amazon or B&N. I earn nothing from the jacked up inflated
prices of supposedly "rare" "autographed" copies. Unless they're going for a dollar or something
so outrageously cheap you can't
possibly pass them up, do both of us a favor and don't buy used, pre-autographed Pont-au-Change books,
especially on Ebay. Instead, you can have a new one autographed personally to you for about the same
cost. Trust me on this one. They ain't that rare, people. They're both still in print :-) Click the links
on the homepage if you don't believe me. (Strangely, I don't mind so much if you
buy a used non-autographed copy. Maybe because people who want me to autograph
something so they can turn it around on an auction site are in for a rude
awakening on its monetary value at this time, and besides, it just seems rude to
me.)
So, that's the update for this year. Seeing as how the last update was last year. But as you can see
above, it's been a weird year for the website.
See you next month.
December 20, 2004 Happy Birthday, Mom!
Move successful, if very long and very exacting on my health; I am still not physically recovered
from the actual labor of moving, not to my satisfaction. Meanwhile I have been unemployed since because the
agencies I'm registered with are not forthcoming with work that does not involve calling people at home.
For those who didn't hear: right after the previous update on Halloween, my computer crashed. I was
able to recover many of my resident files. However...
... the current version of Adrift was not among them.
Yep, that's right. The current working file was wiped. What I have to go on is an older text draft on
an old backup disk (second, I think), a printout of the third draft (after the second's corrections were put
in), and my notes for the fourth (current) draft, which are spread out over several loose pieces of paper
jotted down as the ideas occurred to me. This is what I have to work with.
The good news about that is that 80% of the book has not changed substantially since the first draft.
So whatever's on the second draft file is pretty much, with third draft corrections, almost all the book, so
I'm saved having to retype or OCR the whole bloody thing. There are some newer changes--for example the end
of the Marius/Cosette sequence with regards to the Marquis de Montrose and the matter of René
Devereaux's father--that were lost, but I have my fairly recent and amazingly legible notes on all this and
will be able to reconstruct it (it was the last full sequence I had written in before the crash). The very
first part of the last section, formerly known as "Ouroborous" but currently called "Transportation," had
been worked on; there are several changes in this with regard to the sequence of events and a shift in POV
(point of view). Again, I have my notes on this, and as the whole last part of the book was being
re-re-re-written anyway, I haven't just written a bunch in vain only to see it vanish in a puff of ones and
zeroes. (Frankly, at this point, if that had happened, I would have just thrown in the towel and started
writing something else.)
It has occurred to me over the years that the book is following my life, at least thematically.
Resurrections began with my resurrected writing career, and Sanctuary fit with my moving in
with my goddaughter and actually being part of a household again instead of a single hermit woman with a ton
of cats.
Adrift however has puzzled me from the beginning and every time I think I'm done with it I keep
having to wade back in. Thank God the next book, Honor, does not look to be particularly damaging as
far as my parallelisms go.
However, I am concerned about book five, now. It's called Inferno. *sigh*
In other news, thanks to a wonderful reader, I have some information on how to setup the
Gallery so that the bandwidth thieves are permanently thwarted. However this involves contacting my
website provider and making arrangements with the server. But it's not impossible. In the next month or so
we'll see if it can be done or not. Thanks again very much, Abby!
One last announcement for the time being: another of my trio of cats is no longer with me. I had to
give up Fantine to a shelter before the move. We had to pare down the number of animals from five to three,
so it was decided that Laura give up one of hers and I one of mine (the fifth one is kind of ours jointly).
And, much as I love her, when the choice came between Émile and Fantine, I had no doubt which of the
two I was closer to. Émile is a gentle, well-mannered cat who gets along with the other cats. Fantine
is very much a one-person cat and she barely tolerated her own littermate; furthermore, she has very long fur
which will not serve her in the southwestern heat this summer. Both Fantine and the other cat (Feather) were
taken to a no-kill shelter and I left a list of her behaviors and quirks with them. I'm sure they will find
her a good home. It's been almost a month since we parted, and I still think of her. Émile does not
seem to miss her; if anything he's less solitary and more outgoing than ever. She had been bullying him in
the last few months, ever since I took him to the vet this summer to have his broken teeth removed. I think
Émile's much happier, too. He's also learned to talk; like his namesake he has been quite taciturn all
his life, very rarely making any vocalizations. He's learning now how to meow. And yes, he's a baritone. It's
kind of amusing, really.
Long notes, short update. I know I missed Jean Valjean's birthday last week; I'm going to try for
another update in January. In the meantime I have put up a little short story for the holidays. I wanted to
do this last year but ran out of time and wasn't quite ready to resume writing yet. I'm glad how this one
turned out. If I could figure out how to fold it into the main story, I would do so; certainly it is
canonical. But if I can't do it seamlessly, I won't stop the book cold in the middle for this digression.
So: here it is. Hope you like it. (Where is it? It's in the kittyloaf on the main page, just a doubleclick
away.)
See you next year... the tenth anniversary of me starting this project. Jeez. This series should be
finished by now...
October 31, 2004 Boo.
More craziness chez moi. I am moving in November. I have to pack up house, cats, computer, etc. I have to end the temp job and find new one in my new city. It will be busy. There is no book update. But not because I haven't been working on it. Frankly, I doubt I will be updating the books to the site anymore.
I have removed the donation link as there has been only one donation, and for ten bucks, and after emailing the person she said if I can't use it for book publication then I can put it to the website upkeep. Thanks :-)
However, this does put a damper on this site. People seem to like the book and read it, but are not particularly willing to pay to read it. And if I have to pay close to $500 to publish them, what that boils down to is that I'm actually paying people to read my book... since the grand majority of those reading it online are not buying the printed versions. When it was only $100 to publish a book I knew I could make that back and more in sales. But at five times the cost I have to get serious about this project.
Under consideration: just keep the site up for promotion purposes only and link to book sale sites as the books are published. Sure would save me the hassle of first converting text to html to publish on site where it is proofed, and then back to text for publication submission. But that may not be enough.
Even without considering the book update issue, the idea has been broached that I make this a paying site to enter and use for one very large reason: too many people are linking directly to the Gallery images and eating up my bandwidth, after I have asked
several times that you not do so. My site is allowed 1000MB of bandwidth
and because of morons who can't read I'm up to 837MB on Gallery
images alone. But it goes against my nature to ask for payment to view images that are in the public domain. So, the solution: if my ISP
ever charges me for overages on bandwidth or asks for more money to support the higher usage because of people linking directly to the Gallery images I will close that part of the site permanently.
I have disabled that section of my site until further notice. If I find that it
is being accessed anyway, I will remove the entire collection.
Basically, what happens to this site is up to you. I know I will finish this project, at my own pace. Whether or not you actually get to read it, and in what form, is another matter.
The site will be updated again before the first of January.
September 20, 2004 And the beat goes on...
Well, the site's back up and running, everything's been updated, the "temporary" banners are cute as heck, and I'm actually getting some work done on
Adrift. If you haven't noticed, there's a donation link on the front page so that I can raise the $459 I'll need to publish Adrift when it's completed. Donations are accepted in any amount and anyone who donates will be named in the Acknowledgements in the front of the book. (Or if I raise an additional $200 I can have Adrift printed in hardcover
too. Oooooooo. I'm just kidding btw. If I want hardcover I'll bind the dang book myself or send it to those people that make paperbacks into hardcovers for schools).
I have taken the old, admittedly crappy "Notes" of the past two years and put them into an archive called "The Lost Years." Just for anal-retentive completion's sake, mind you. Link is at the bottom of this page as well as the rest of the Archives. NOTE: Some of these archives have links to pages or images that are no longer available. I'm not going around fixing archive links. If they work, fine. If not, oh well.
Keep watching the skies for updates. It's good to be back.