Process tardiness

And I'm back from my huff.  Wasn't all that depression fun?  It certainly gets things done.

A couple of the above sentences are false in some way.  I bet you can't tell which ones.

The last week I've been busy doing things.  Quite a bit of it is an attempt to fill my sad, echoing coffers with some money.  I don't know if I want to go into that, though, as it's something that could be seen as cripplingly embarrassing – the way of making money, not being skint.  Maybe one day I'll enlighten those who don't read my Twitter about that.^*

In between the task of trying to scrape money from an unexpected source, I've been writing.  At the moment I'm not writing full stories.  I have a few ideas for novels and I want to hash out the plots first, kind of like thinking out loud, only on paper.  I've also been pinning down ideas for a short story and a short comic script, at least one of which I hope will be allowed out into the world, as long as it's muzzled and neutered.

The rant from last week did have a result, though (thanks to everyone who showed some support, it was much appreciated).  Someone mentioned that I should try to self e-publish at least one of the novels.  Self-publishing is something I've done before and what I said about Lulu.com being a fucking disaster still stands, but e-publishing might be a little less painful.^**

So, I looked through a couple of e-publishers and after a bit of deliberation, and a false start, I chose to try Kindle Direct Publishing.

Now, now, quiet down, your abuse is making my monitor vibrate.  Let me explain.

It's all a matter of practicality.  I dismissed Lulu out of hand because they are a bit shitty.  I looked at Smash Words, and would have gone with them, but there was a major problem: fucking around with U.S. tax laws. I'd had similar problems when I attempted to publish the Crown Wearer novella through CreateSpace.  You need to send forms to the IRS in order to get any money from U.S. companies and this seems to involve sending away a passport for ID.

Now, I'm dubious about this when it's my own country, but sending this stuff away, across the Atlantic, to vanish into foreign monolithic bureaucracy is even riskier in my mind^†.  Just thinking about it now makes my bowels quake.  There's also the rather more practical problem that my passport's run out this year.  So, while Smash Words was ideal for me in every other way, that knocked it out of contention, leaving me with Kindle Direct Publishing.

And this is going slowly.  My money woes make it difficult for me to get front cover art, since (rightly), the artists I know who are willing to help me out are going to do their paying gigs before getting round to me.  Which means waiting.  I'm going to make myself wait anyway, because once it's all ready I'm going hold off and unleash it on a Monday.  I don't know if that will help my chances, but it's got to be better than going, "Ah-ha!  I've finished, now let's get it out into the world at three on a Sunday morning!"

All this is a really long way of saying, I'm going to publish a novel, as an experiment, through Kindle and if I get any success with that I'll put another novel that's failed to hook agents and publishers.

^* Comment if you read my Twitter, go on, I fucking dare you.

^** Or it could deepen my mortification and cement me as that writer you know who just can't quite make it. Either way you'll get a laugh, and that's really what's important, right, you sadist?

^† If anyone knows of a an easier way to do it, I'd love to hear it.


Will