anke

Thought I’d drop a line… I’m revamping the website to a system that better integrates art and other content, and that takes up so much brainspace not much is left for drawing. I’ll pick it up again soon.

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

About a month ago I started air layering a branch of one of my Japanese maples.

I had no idea how long that’d take, and didn’t know how long to wait before I could peek, but it got taken out of my hands.

Yesterday we had rain and wind, and apparently that made the top of the shoot too heavy, and it broke. Now, it broke where I’d cut into the wood and would have cut the top part off – after there’d been enough roots to plant it somewhere.

So, well, time to check how it’s doing.

That’s some callus there, and one little white root poking to the right. Though there were the beginnings of a few more just visible. (That’s my thumbnail at the bottom, for scale.)

So I cut it back a good deal so there aren’t so many leaves from which water evaporates, stuck it into a pot with more of the seed and cutting soil (the end is a way under the surface, so the poor little stick won’t fall over), and wait.

I put a freezer bag over the whole thing to keep the air around it humid, and put it in a place without direct sun so in its mini greenhouse it won’t burn up. I figure the chances are better than with a plain cutting, since there are roots starting to grow, whose tips presumably can absorrb water and nutrients as they should, but we’ll see.

Anyway, the principle works, so one of those days I’ll start on one of the dissectum varieties. (wikipedia photo, for the curious.)

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been hanging around blogs and forums by and for self-published writers, and the talk about promotion made me wonder, how do people find the authors they follow?

For me, in vaguely chronological order:

Terry Pratchett: I’d heard about his Discworld series from online acquaintances. When I had a look in a bookshop the first time, I put it out of my mind right quick, because the old Josh Kirby covers were so offputting, with people looking like scarecrows mde of skin stuffed with lumps. Then Nautilus a German magazine about fantasy media ran a series of articles, and when I needed a book for a long car trip, I picked up Mort (translated, paperback, full price).

Walter Moers: I’d heard about his novels back at school from one of my classmates, but didn’t really pick up anything. A few years later I saw that the local library had the books, and I gave the first one a go.

Steven Brust: If I remember correctly he was recommended to me by Herm Baskervile and at least one other Profusion member.

Jim C. Hines: Becca Stareyes posted a review of The Stepsister Scheme on her Livejournal.

Lois McMaster Bujold: A local bookshop had remaindered English paperbacks on offer for one euro (the usual price for remaindered books being 3 or 4 euros nowadays…), and I found Komarr in that box.

M.C.A. Hogarth: I found her via the Livejournal grapevine. I think the first project of hers I heard about was the Three Micahs column. I could “sample” her fiction on her blog and with free short stories, and am in the process of buying the backlist as well as new offers.

Lindsay Buroker: I saw her posts on the Mobilereads forum, and somewhere (I think in her signature) she linked to a free short story featuring the same characters as one of her novels.

I get the impression what works best for me is word of mouth and/or getting something for little money or for free. I haven’t really developed a habit of downloading samples of ebooks rather than looking for complete free works yet, but I’m working on it.

Which authors do you like so much you’re keeping an eye out for their next book, and how did you find them?

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

Wish List by John Locke is a novel available as an ebook for less than $1. Last time Kobo ran a “$1 off” coupon code promotion, I snapped it up.

Then I tried to read it.

Somebody, for some reason I can’t fathom, thought it would be a good idea to put SEVEN BLOODY PAGES OF ADULATION in the front of this book – review outtakes, including “five star” reviews. In a small font. Preceded by a relatively lengthy copyright note, and followed by a page with a dedication, and a page with acknowledgements. The book had no working table of contents to skip that cruft and just get to the story. That left me pretty irritated even before the prologue started.

Seriously, why would you do that?

I can kinda see how those comments might be considered potentially useful in paper books, because in a bookshop there is no display with reviews, but downloadable ebooks? Online, reviews are easy to find – usually on the page where you download the book in question. So they strike me as superfluous in ebooks.

And those reviews have a better chance of being balanced than whatever is included in the book. Since I’ve seen one author quoted on a book with “a fabulous book, I wouldn’t want to miss a line” and on the later added sequel with “a fabulous series, I wouldn’t want to miss a line”, I assume those endorsements are fake, or at least dishonest. And even if they all were genuine, obviously only 100% positive bits of reviews get into the book itself. It’s advertising.

If I had looked at a sample to decide if I wanted to buy, I’d have dismissed it before reaching the end of the adulation, because with going through that much hyping being “required” before I can read it, the book probably isn’t any good speaking for itself. It reminds me a bit of the unskippable advertisments in some DVDs, only this is even more pointless, because if I already have the book, I don’t need convincing to get it. And it bears repeating: SEVEN BLOODY PAGES! AAAARGH!

I’ve got to say, it makes HarperCollins ebooks I’ve seen so far look better by comparison. They include stuff often found at the front of print books – other books by this author, or the copyright page – at the back of the book, after the story.

In my opinion, there should not be more between the reader and the story than neccessary, because anything beyond that will bore, annoy and put off some prospective readers.

Eh, yeah, enough rant, back to Wish List.

The prologue involved a date between a man and a woman, from the viewpoint of the man. He wants sex, she doesn’t, but he talks her into it (not that he has a hard time). While they’re in bed getting started, his mobile phone rings, he pulls a knife from below his cushion and stabs the phone. Then he’s disgruntled because his date is freaked out by his behaviour, rather than impressed.

From the style I guess it’s supposed to be funny. I found it extremely creepy.

I decided to not read the rest of this book. It’s rather unlikely I’ll ever pick up any other book by John Locke.

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

I’ve started getting into ebooks, and there’s a whole lot of anger all around about things like piracy, DRM, ebook quality, geographic restrictions, pricing, publishing dates…

Now, I don’t want to post a long rant, but yesterday and today I made my first experiences with buying books with DRM, and would like to illustrate one particular problem.

These are four different books. The series is named “The Sharing Knife”, and that name is written in rather big letters on the covers, but in addition to that there’s “Volume 1: Beguilement”, “Volume 2: Legacy”, and so on, respectively.

It makes HarperCollins look not exactly competent when they distribute books like that. (The first book had dozends of minor (presumably) OCR-caused mistakes – double quotes split into a pair of single quotes with a space in between -, which doesn’t help.)  But what adds insult to injury is that the title would be easy to fix for the customer, if not for DRM making the books uneditable.

There are a few authors whose books I like enough to buy even if the files are DRM-infested, but when it comes to looking for new authors to try out, I’ll concentrate on ones with publishing houses that don’t use DRM. Or who self-publish.

For the sake of fairness, I have to say: At least HarperCollins is trying. Those ebooks seem pretty well structured, including a table of content with links, and not including boilerplate text about stripped covers.

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

manga_critic on Twitter pointed out:

I love the retailer who turns up at The Beat to refute Shaenon’s arguments by pointing to his man-cave marketing strategies. link

“Only men who like superhero floppies patronize my shop, ergo no female audience for comics exists!” link

The first time I entered a comic shop, they had a huge display of Art Fantastix near the entrance. The most memorable covers were a closeup of a female ass getting grabbed by a male hand, and a woman apparently being fucked by alien furniture. (Do I have to spell out those links are Not Safe For Work?)

With the impression that the place was mostly a porn shop catering to men, it was a decade before I entered it again. In that time, I filled two bookcases with manga and albums/trade paperbacks, and a few boxes with “floppies”, bought in bookshops, in the second comic shop in town, or online.

I don’t understand why some shopkeepers and a big chunk of the comics industry have decided they don’t want the money of people who happen to be female. Maybe because they would have to at least pretend they considered us people, rather than tits&ass on legs.

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.

A while ago one of my online-friends, Eliza Gebow, mentioned something about asking people what scares them most, to incorporate it in her writing.

Trying to think of what that I had read in a piece of fiction scared me most, a situation from one of Lois McMasterBujold’s “Miles Vorkosigan” books came to my mind.

There was a woman who got a surprising visit from two of her male relatives. Another guy had written them a letter about a supposed danger the woman was in, and they’d travelled quite a distance to talk to her about it and help her.

She told them that there was no danger. She even pointed out why their informant might want to cause her trouble.

Her family dismissed her completely.

Someone with a vagina could not possibly know better what’s going on in her own life and immediate surroundings than some guy whom she met a couple of times, and/or the word of a complete stranger is to be trusted above that of your own sister, provided said stranger has a penis.

This scenario terrified me more than the two or three dozen books by Stephen King that I read put together, because being dismissed is a whole lot closer to home.

Originally posted at  ankewehner.de. You can comment here or there.