SEARCHING FOR MALUMBA: Call for Alpha Readers

On August 30, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing10 Comments

Malumba cover rough This still isn’t the final cover, mind you.

Abruptly, and rather surprisingly, I have deemed SEARCHING FOR MALUMBA very close to being ready for alpha readers. Maybe a week away, which means that it’s time to start begging for people willing to look it over. Note the shift in subject matter: MALUMBA is nonfiction, and if you’re a regular blog follower you have already read chunks of it. It’s basically a compilation of everything I’ve written about education or teaching since 2001 and still think is interesting. There is some new material still to be added, but I think the book is in the 85-90% ready stage, so it’s time to kick it out there in the wild and see what people think about it.

Further instructions to follow; the only guidelines for now is that you need to be someone I know, either in the real world or through interactions here. I’m not sending alpha copies to people whose names or handles I don’t recognize; sorry.

Thanks!

Aaightden

On July 31, 2015July 31, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

It’s been interesting, over the last several days, going through literally every single post of my previous blog in search of material for Searching for Malumba. My previous blog started in 2004 and finally petered out in 2009 or so, with a brief revival before moving to this space a couple of years ago.

I was really really angry during those years. Like, all the time. This isn’t a revelation to me, mind you; it was the Bush years, and I have not forgotten what those years were like, but getting the compiled output of my brain for five straight years of that nonsense– plus a year or so of startled relief toward the end after Obama’s election– all dumped into my brain at once has been a little sobering. I also had a horrible job for a good chunk of that time that didn’t help at all. Right now I’m just compiling these posts, but once I start actually rewriting and editing I will be removing a lot more profanity from the earlier posts than I will from the newer ones.

(I won’t be removing all the profanity, mind you, which will make my book a bit atypical in the “teacher memoir” genre. Most of those books are sanitized for the delicate sensibilities of the elderly kindergarten teacher. I will not be doing that. My policy on profanity for The Benevolence Archives has always been to remove about half of it on second pass, and I’ll be following more or less the same policy for Searching for Malumba. I’m considering putting a parental advisory sticker on the cover. I need to find out if that image is copyrighted or not.)*

Actually, speaking of copyright, the other thing I need to do is contact William Carlos Williams’ estate and see if I can get permission to reprint This is Just to Say in the book, because one of my favorite pieces is about that poem and it won’t work if I can’t actually include the poem. I’d quote it, but it’s only about 50 words long, so “excerpt” becomes “reprint half of it” really quickly.

Anyway. The image, in case you’re wondering, was one of my favorites from that time. I have no idea if I found it that way or if I added the speech bubble, but either way I cracked up and immediately saved it once I found it.

I’m starting to Sunday a bit, I think. I haven’t gotten a single callback for an interview all summer despite applying for several jobs that I’m perfectly qualified (if not actually ideal) for. I’ve told my principal I’ll be back at school on Monday; the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff we ordered at the end of the school year is currently strewn in boxes throughout the building and it will take at least a week to get through everything in anything resembling a coherent fashion. I still have one solid chance at a position that will keep me out of the classroom but I don’t know how much I should get my hopes up, especially since it comes with its own baggage anyway.

If I get the other job I intend to keep looking for other work, because it’ll be a job I can quit midyear without screwing anything up too badly. If I’m in the classroom… I don’t know. My wife insists that I need to keep looking even if I’m teaching. I don’t know if I can quit on a group of kids partway through the school year. And you never know; I used to like teaching quite a lot, and I’ve been reading lots of stuff about liking teaching. It might end up being a good year. I might not want to leave. But one way or another this has to be my last year with this district. Cold reality is starting to creep up in a way that has nothing to do with me and I need to be gone before all the rats flee the ship.

Actually, that’s not true. I still love teaching, if by “teaching” you mean “helping other people to understand things.” It’s everything else about teaching that I hate. All the non-teaching stuff is awful and gets worse every single year. Entertainingly, the IDOE is commissioning some sort of group to figure out why nobody seems to want teaching licenses in Indiana anymore. It’s been fun, because every article I’ve seen about it has been swarmed by teachers going “Are you kidding? You need to ask?”

The reason no one wants to teach in Indiana anymore is that the laws and policies passed by the Indiana legislature over the last dozen years or so are having their intended effect. This is exactly what they wanted, and no one anywhere has any right to pretend to be surprised.

So. Yeah. Plenty to do today; I just need to decide if I want to focus on fiction, nonfiction, getting my head back on straight, or getting my house back under control. Only a few more days before my time gets substantially restricted again.

Whee!

(* Answer: No! It’s basically just text and as such is ineligible for copyright. At least according to Wikipedia. So I probably will be including it, because doing so entertains me.)**

(** Slightly more complicated than that, but it still looks like it’s free so long as I file the proper paperwork.)

A couple more notes

On July 29, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing5 Comments

Malumba cover rough lowercase (No, that’s not the cover; I heard y’all. But it’s a decent placeholder for right now.)

Spent my morning finishing off the rather lengthy process of culling the Teacher Posts from Blog Previous. I had initially thought that Malumba would come in around 75000 words; after the first round– and including nothing from this site, to say nothing of original material, and there probably ought to be some— I’m at 83000 words.

Now, this is just the first cull. There’s going to be a second phase where I decide to eliminate a lot of the stuff I just dumped into Scrivener. And about 1/3 of those 83000 words are “fuck,” so at least some of those probably ought to go. But damn. You may not have noticed, but I tend to talk about teaching a bit around here, and I feel weird letting the book abruptly just stop in 2012, especially since I wasn’t writing much in 2010 and 2011 and so those sections of the book are really sparse.

What I’m getting at is that this book might end up a bit longer than I had initially intended. Which, whatever; the ebook is still gonna cost $4.95 (or maybe less) and I doubt it’ll make a ton of difference in the cost of the print edition. But man. This could be a pretty long book.

(Next step: going through this blog, then figuring out how to organize this mess, then actually editing/rewriting everything. Whee!)

SANCTUM updates

On April 10, 2015April 11, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

fdt0u5 Note to my beta readers: I am currently washing the blood out of my eyes as I scramble to get everything edited and prettyified in order to get the final-ish manuscript out to you guys before my self-imposed deadline of tonight. I may blow said deadline and have to send the stuff out tomorrow.

Why final-ish? Mostly because I need to write the foreword and right now I do not care about the foreword. But if you agreed to be a beta reader (or if you’re reading this now and you’re interested) you can expect a file tonight or tomorrow.

I have a wedding to go to tomorrow, which ought to be fun, and then it’s Sunday, and then back to work again on Monday. I plan to spend all of Sunday cleaning everything I can see, so I really only have today to get this done. The good news is that it’s 1:30 and my wife and son won’t be home for another three and a half hours or so. The bad news is that three and a half more hours of editing will mean that I may as well replace my eyes with glass marbles.

I MAKE SACRIFICES FOR MY ART, PEOPLE.

Just think, soon it’ll be done. And then I get to start working on the next thing! I’m not even sure what the next thing is right now! Let’s all be excited about that.

Okay, this is some bullshit

On March 14, 2015March 14, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing5 Comments

I am– once again– trying to get a clean manuscript of The Benevolence Archives uploaded to Amazon. The version on Smashwords hasn’t been touched, because that’s the one I actually get movement from and I’m not fixing it until this is ironed out.

If I look at my document in Word, it looks like this:

(“Queris” is yellow because I used the search function to find this particular spot.)

Note that there are spaces between all the words.

Now look at one happens in Amazon’s online previewer after it converts the file for Kindle:

Note that the space between “to” and “the” has been arbitrarily removed.

Note also that this happens all over the damn place. And it appears to not only be arbitrary and random, but unfixable– and Amazon’s spellcheck isn’t even finding those mistakes any longer, as it reported this manuscript to be free of typos, ignoring not only the spacing errors it introduced but also words like “Queris.”

I am angryified at the moment.

EDIT: I think I’ve got it. There are still a couple of spots of wonkiness but at least it doesn’t look like it’s filled with typographical errors any longer. God, that was annoying.

In which things are annoying in new ways

On March 11, 2015March 11, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Writing11 Comments

Credit cards chained up with padlock I appear to have fallen victim to the most minor identity theft of all time; a single charge of just over $50 to a Family Dollar in Atlanta, Georgia that just showed up on my online statement. As I have not been to Atlanta at any point in my life, much less in the last two days, I quickly cancelled the card and get to go to my bank branch tomorrow and do a spot of paperwork. I checked all of the rest of my cards and they’re all clean; this weekend I’ll change all of my passwords.

Yesterday I made the terrible mistake of trying to add an “Also by Luther Siler” page to my pre-existing ebook manuscript for The Benevolence Archives. It led me down this lovely little rabbit hole where, after adding that page, a Prostetnic logo, and fixing the three places where I screwed up and referred to Lady Remember as “he,” the Amazon converter that turns my .doc file into a .mobi for the Kindle told me I had thirty-some spelling errors. The vast majority of them were words with no spaces in between, which is not normally a typo I’d allow to slide past– much less thirty times.

I checked the manuscript. Spaces in the proper places, every single time. Weirdly, the word before the space tended to be a single italicized word. In other words:

“I can’t believe Amazon is putting me through this bullshit,” Brazel said.

became

“I can’t believeAmazon is putting me through this bullshit,” Brazel said.

I actually rewrote every set of words where this happened, sometimes removing the italics and a few times where I felt they were really necessary leaving them in but carefully italicizing just the word and nothing else. Viewed the file in two or three different ways to make sure it wasn’t an artifact of the viewer’s insistence on full justification. Nothing made any difference. The next step is to put two spaces after each of those words and see if that fixes it. I promise the spaces are there in the source document; this is just a weird-ass artifact of the conversion process, and at the moment I don’t have a way to turn a .doc into a .mobi on my computer to dodge the need to use their converter.

Then, once I gave up on that frustration for the evening, I discovered that for some reason it doesn’t seem to be pushing the updated version through to my Kindle anyway, so the new version, which ought to be pushed out to replace old versions for anyone who hasn’t deliberately turned that feature off, appears to only be working for new downloads– and since I’ve already downloaded the book, I can’t download it again to double-check– I’ve tried to force my Kindle to update the file every way I can think of and it won’t do it, so I can’t check to see if the typos are just in the online viewer and I can’t get the book to recognize that the “Also by” page is supposed to be there. It won’t work on the Kindle app on my phone or my actual Kindle, although come to think of it I may not have downloaded the app on my new iPad so I may try that next.

So yeah. I’m frustrated. If, by some magic, you happen to download BA from Amazon tonight, I’d appreciate you letting me know if you get a version of the file with the “Also by Luther” page at the back– you’d be able to tell immediately, because the Prostetnic Publications logo is on the first page in the new one too. I need to know if the changes went through and if the space-omissions are there– they’re most common in the story called “Remember”.

Might even throw in a free copy of the new book once it comes out, actually, if you were to do that and tell me what happened.

(EDIT: Okay, I may have figured out the non-updating thing, as apparently you need to increment the “edition” number to make Amazon realize the new file is “important” changes. I’ve done that. The version up there now should still be different for new buyers, though, so the deal in the previous two paragraphs still stands. I have a hunch those errors will disappear when viewed on an actual Kindle device or through the app.)

ANNOUNCEMENT: SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE available for pre-order!

On February 16, 2015February 16, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing5 Comments

Sanctum_72dpi …well, the ebook version of it is, at least. If you liked The Benevolence Archives and are interested in the sequel (and that’s absolutely everybody, right?) you can pre-order it from Amazon right here, for just $4.95.

A couple of important pieces of information:

The plan is for Sanctum of the Sphere to release in digital and print simultaneously. I don’t have a final price for the print version yet, but I basically plan to take what they’re charging me and add somewhere in the range of $3-4 to it. I will try and have print available for pre-order too; I’m not actually sure CreateSpace does that, though. One way or another, the release date is April 28th for both versions. If the print version becomes pre-orderable, I will obviously let everyone know immediately.
Also: the print version of the book will contain the entire text of The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 as bonus material! I don’t think BA 1 will ever see print on its own– at 30K words, it’s just too short– so if you’re interested, this is the best time to grab it. The ebook version will be Sanctum only. I figure ebook people have had ample opportunity to grab BA 1 for free by now, and since Amazon won’t let me perma-free it, I don’t like the idea of charging for the same story in two different packages. Volume 1 will remain free essentially forever. Sanctum, much like Skylights, will never be part of a free promotion, but it’ll go on sale now and again.
Remember, if you’re a Goodreads person (Goodreadser? Goodreadsian?) you can add The Sanctum of the Sphere to your shelves here.

The next project in the Benevolence Archives universe is going to be another short story collection– at around the same cost as BA 1 but hopefully a bit longer. I have at least one other book to get to before that happens, though. Which… man, that’s a weird feeling.

One more announcement coming today, not as big of a deal as this one, but I’m gonna give this a few hours to own the front page by itself. The site’s gonna get reskinned later today too, but I won’t start really trying to push pre-orders until a couple weeks before launch, so don’t worry that the blog’s gonna get eaten by advertising again. I just found out yesterday you can make books available 90 days before release and don’t need a finalized manuscript, and figured I had no reason to wait. The overall plan hasn’t changed. 🙂

So close, and yet so far

On February 15, 2015February 15, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews4 Comments

T ngbbs44525015978cc his post started out as a full review of the book I just read. Not quite a pan, although the review was definitely going to be focused more on the things I didn’t like about the book than the things that I did like. And about halfway through the post it occurred to me that I really have nothing to gain by shitting on a book that, again, I mostly liked except for the part where I didn’t. I interact with the author on Twitter from time to time and he’s an entertaining guy; making myself look clever by tearing into his book seems more than a little unnecessary. But I still want to write about it, so I’m just going to do this instead. I’m not going to name the book, but the picture is a clue and there are ways on the Internet to figure out what I’ve been reading lately if you’re really curious.

Here’s the problem: The book is good until it isn’t, and the place where it abruptly becomes not-good is literally the last page of the book, and the not-goodness occurs in such a way as to throw every problem with the first couple hundred pages of the book into sharp and stark relief. I finished the book before going to sleep last night, and I damn near tossed it across the room after reading the last page. I finished the thing, thought “My God, that was dumb,” thought about it some more, realized that the idea of what had happened was actually pretty clever but that the execution of it was abominable, and then literally mentally walked myself through the entire rest of the book going “Yeah, that was a problem too, wasn’t it?”

One paragraph literally screwed up my opinion of the entire rest of the book, by throwing my brain out of story-enjoying mode and into writer-editor mode. There are plenty of people who read everything with an editor’s eye; my wife is one of them. It’s a perfectly acceptable way to read fiction; I just don’t happen to read that way. But once my brain gets shifted into writer-editor mode, it’s nearly impossible to get it out of that, and I’m going to go at the rest of your book in a sort of God this could be so much better if… mode that I really don’t like doing my pleasure reading in. And this was timed in the worst possible place, where it retroactively poisoned my entire opinion of the book.

Has this ever happened to you? Has the ending of a book ever screwed up your opinion of the rest of it? Because right now if people ask me about this book, I have to say “Read it, but ignore the last chapter.” And I don’t want to do that.

(Don’t say Skylights. Please don’t say Skylights.)

(Actually, go ahead and say Skylights if Skylights did that to you. But be aware that I will cry.)