Just so you don't think I'm sitting here idly doing nothing, here's the next book dragged out of the dusty file drawer and in-progress for the ebook list. Should take me a day or so to copy and paste and clean out artifacts and such to get it ready for the Meat Grinder. (Editor's Note: Done.)It has been tempting, by the way, to rewrite these things. To redraft a book that is fifteen or twenty years old so that all the technology isn't dated, or what I now see as awkward writing left in. (Or to tone down parts of it. In The Forever Drug, the sex is past R and shading right into NC-17, and these days, I'm not as graphic about that as I used to be. But the books were of their time, and rewriting them would be a mistake.)
John D. MacDonald put out a collection of his old short stories once, twenty-five or thirty years after he wrote them, but instead of leaving them as period pieces, he went in and updated stuff like how much lunch or train tickets or the like cost, to make them more contemporary. The stories were still good, but that updating wasn't -- because the society in which the old pieces were set had changed enough so he couldn't easily fix that -- people listened to the radio, they rode trains, they talked about things in the fifties that people in the early eighties didn't even remember.
When people talk to William Gibson about Neuromancer, somebody always asks: Where were the iPhones, Bill?
Way off in a future I didn't think about ...
What else can he say? Predicting the future isn't what we do.
So with my backlist stuff going into the realm of ebookery, I'm fixing the typos and artifacts I spot -- and I'll miss some of those. Plus some bits here and there so that dates agree with ages and like that, and now and then, changing "gigabytes" to "terabytes ..."
Okay, I've put up four books in epub versions in the last week. I think I'll get back to the Matadors now ...
Awesome. I loved the Venture Silk books and am looking forward to rereading this one!
ReplyDeleteWhat about spindoc!!!
ReplyDeleteApparently somewhere along the electronic way, I lost the first eight chapters of Spindoc. Until I am willing to type them over, or scan the book, which I'm not at the moment, I won't be uploading that one ...
ReplyDeleteOn the cover:
ReplyDeleteI filled an old hypodermic syringe we had from the last set of dog illnesses, using a yellow dishwashing liquid. I wanted to feature that color, so I went looking for a place where I could do that.
The background is actually the ceiling of my kitchen, there's a set of track lights over the pots and pans rack, two pointed down, two up, and I liked the lighting of the spot on the ceiling. So I held the syringe in the spotlight, shot the picture, and then increased the image's saturation. (I wanted the shadow, and I almost went with an image of just that, but it was maybe a little too esoteric.)
The font is American Typewriter, and the letter color is picked up from the b.g. with an eyedropper tool to maintain the color scheme.
Pray tell, M. Perry, why is it that Amazon list "Forever Drug" as a Kindle choice... but it isn't really there?
ReplyDeleteGot me, Stan -- I found it when I went looking.
ReplyDeleteI'll re-upload it to be sure -- probably take a day or two before the new version shows up.
I've just learned to prefer Kindle to Smashwords because my different readers will "auto-sync" where I left off. Smashwords is lacking that function.
ReplyDeleteBut... at least Smashwords seems to be motivating authors and publishers to get more books into the "e-stream!"
Have a Great Day!
Yep, the cross-platform stuff can get hinky. I download Smashwords mss into Stanza, and it picks up where I left off when I'm reading a particular book. I've got several readers on my iPod -- Kindle, iBooks, e-reader, Stanza, and a collection of classic novels in its own reader. I had B&N and the Nook, but I deleted them because I never use them.
ReplyDeleteIf it doesn't show back up on Amazon.com in a couple days, lemme know.
I just got it from Amazon. Thanks, Steve.
ReplyDeleteNow, get back to work on the Matadors! ;~)
(Please?)