aishabintjamil

I'm over at the Torquere Press Live Journal Community ( http://community.livejournal.com/torquere_social/ ) hosting today. Stop by and help me make the place look busy. :-) I'm taking prompts for a ficlet this evening, and after coffee I may even think of something intelligent to discuss.

I've been writing like a madwoman this weekend. I just decided I need to stop and do a couple of other things before bedtime, and took a wordcount. Holy crap. I'm not sure I believe it myself; 12,136 words. No that's not a typo. Aliyah really is 12k longer tonight that it was Saturday morning. My fingers ache. :-)

It's all raw first draft, but I'm nearly up to the endgame now. One more chapter in which everybody who's coming to help runs into each other at Joe's hogan, before Joe and his old teammates get there, then I'm on to the final couple of chapters where they corner the dybbuk.

I'm happy to report that our power came back on this morning at about 5:30 We lost it about 11:00 pm on Thurs. night when the storm that's been making the news all over the east coast passed through our area. We're feeling very fortunate right now, since according the PSNH website, there are still more than 200,000 people in the state without power. I think that's about 20% of their customer base.

Thankfully the weather has been relatively warm, so we didn't fare too badly while waiting for our power to come back on. My employer had power, so we I went to work Friday, and visited Barbara's brother Chris in Derry Friday evening, just coming how to sleep. We had a very high cat-to-human ratio on the bed, and aside from it being difficult to move, were pretty comfortable once we were under the covers. As a side note, two cats snuggled up to your head on the pillow function very much like a hat for conserving body heat. :-)

Thursday night was a very unnerving experience. Our bedroom is on the side of the house which took the brunt of the high winds, and on some of the stronger gusts the house shook. I could hear things rattling against each other on my bureau, and once or twice the bed shook. We lay there and listened to thing banging outside, wondering if the windows were going to hold up, or if we should consider relocating downstairs. The cats, interestingly, all stayed downstairs Thurs. night, even though normally three or four of them join us in bed on most nights.

Thankfully when I went out to inspect on Friday morning, the only damage I found was minor. A couple of pieces of flashing had come off the house. There were a number of shingles in the yard, but I think they were all from our next door neighbor's house. A large section of one of the neighbor's trees (which has been dead for several years now) came down in the back yard, but didn't hit anything. I'm truly amazed by the fact that at least half the tree is still standing. The national weather service recorded gusts in Manchester of nearly 60 MPH. I also had to retrieve our rubbish barrels from a variety of places around the neighborhood. We ended up with an extra barrel, and someone's recycling bin, which are sitting our front now in case someone is looking for them. If no one grabs them by the end of the weekend, we'll just adopt them. I think we had one more barrel than I found, so perhaps its a fair exchange.

The apartment building across the street had some sort of multi-hole bird house mounted on a pole. It was a good sized thing, probably about 3' tall by 2' in diameter. It's currently residing on the roof of their storage shed, pole and all. No large trees came down in our immediate area, but there were quite a number of them in other parts of town.

One of my co-workers described a near miss in front of her house on Thurs. night. She was just stepping outside to retrieve her escaping rubbish barrels when she heard a snap, and saw sparks  a little ways down the street. She looked that way just in time to see what she described as a nearly 2' diameter tree snap off in the middle and come down in the road, just missing a car that as passing. The tree took off their front bumper. Being a decent person, she immediately went over to see if the occupants were injured. They turned out to be three teenagers on their way home from something, and pretty badly shaken up. (Not unreasonably - a couple of seconds later and the tree would have hit the front seat, and probably killed all of them.) She brought them inside, fed them coffee, and let them make phone calls and wait for someone to come pick them up.

I'm hosting the Torquere LJ social group today. I'm taking word prompts for some fiction snippets. Come visit me and chat: http://community.livejournal.com/torquere_social/

I got my very first piece of fan mail about one of my stories earlier this month. After my immediate reaction, which was to do a very undignified happy dance, it prompted me to think about the whole question of the relationship between readers and authors.

I was inordinately pleased to receive the letter. As an author, I write something and send it out into the world with no real idea who's going to see it, or indeed if anyone is going to look at it. I know the editor who bought it liked it, and presumably thinks other people will like it, but I have no way of knowing if they're right. Eventually, if it's going somewhere that pays royalties rather than a one time payment, I'll get some feedback, at least in terms of how many copies of it have sold. That doesn't tell me if the people who bought it liked it when they read it though.

So I'm sitting here with a piece of genuine, unsolicited feedback, thinking how wonderful it is to know that at least one person really like my story. Then it hit me. I've read dozens, maybe hundreds of things that really touched me, that spoke to me in ways that made me read them over and over again. But it never once occurred to me to pick up pen and paper, or in more recent years, email, and write to tell the author that.

I always felt that authors were terribly important people, who would never have time to read my letter, or care than some fan had written to them. After all they were famous and undoubtedly very busy. They wouldn't care that a fan had written to them. It would probably just get thrown out by some secretary. (And all the authors who are reading this are probably now either laughing or wondering what planet I grew up on.)

Now it suddenly dawns on me that I'm, at least in theory, now one of those important busy people. And all kinds of things I thought about what it's like to be an author were completely wrong. I haven't suddenly become too busy and important to care what my readers might think. In fact, it means quite a lot to know what that what I wrote worked for someone, and maybe made their day a little brighter. I'm learning now that even established authors have days when they question the value of their work.

I find myself thinking now that perhaps if I had written to some of those authors whose work really touched me, it would have brightened their day just as much as the letter I received did for me. I wish I'd realized that. Who knows, maybe one or two of them would even have written back.

So if something someone writes touches you, don't be shy. Write the author and tell them so (assuming you can locate an address). As long as you don't overdo the number of letters to someone, the worst thing that will happen is they ignore it. On the plus side, your letter may be a bright spot on a day when they really needed one, and maybe you'll make a friend.

I walked into my local gaming store last week, and there sitting on the shelf was the shiny, new 6th edition of the Hero Rules System. One of my gaming buddies who knew I played a lot of Champions pointed it out and asked if I thought I'd buy it. So I went over and took a look at it, and then told him, no, I didn't think I'd be buying it.

This wasn't a simple decision. I was introduced to Champions back in the mid 1980s, when it was in its third edition - 3 paperbacks, which sold for 9.99 each. the first one was the basic rules set, and the other two were expansion and additions. We had a lot of fun with those rules. They included some sample characters, and there were supplements. One of the guys I played with even contributed to a couple of the supplements. But we never felt we had to buy them, and mostly we didn't. We wrote our own.

Then the 4th edition came along. That was a good update, for the most part. It was handy to have all the rules from the 3 books in one volume, and the price was pretty comparable to what we'd been paying for the 3 books together. I never had much use for the sourcebook or the campaign book sections, but I can see their value for novice players. I never bought a version with the software included, so all I can say about that is that I was glad they offered versions without it, so I wasn't buying something I didn't want and wouldn't use.

I was less enthusiastic about the 5th edition. We were perfectly happy with the way things went in 4th edition. I finally broke down and bought it when I joined a game where the GM wanted to use it. It was still only a little more expensive than the original set ($39.95). It looks like a bigger book but I just did a page count, and it's actually shorter than the 4th edition set (371 pp vs. 384 pp). I guess the additional 1/4 that makes it look like a bigger book must be thicker paper. It doesn't have a ton of rules changes, but enough that I felt I needed to have it if I was going to play in a game that used it.

Now I'm looking at the 6th edition. It's suddenly grown to something on the order of 800 pp., in two hardcover volumes. With glossy paper and color illustrations. And if I buy it, it's going to set me back a minimum of $70 if I buy them as a package from the publisher, $80 if I buy it at my local gaming store, which I'd generally like to support so it stays around.

But I'm looking at this new edition, and asking myself why I should spend that kind of money on something which replaces a product I'm already happy with. I'm just not seeing a benefit to it any more. A quick skim through the books doesn't suggest that they've made drastic changes. To be sure, there are changes - a character statistic has been dropped, there are a few new powers, some old powers are gone, and so forth. But are those benefits really worth investing $70-$80 in?

It seems to me that most of the changes are in production values, which aren't really important to me, and just enough mechanics changes to force me to buy it if I want to play in a game using it, because the old rules details won't be close enough to get by. This is starting to feel to me like some gaming publishers (not just Hero) are taking a page from the textbook publishing industry, and creating a new edition ever other year or so, whether there are really changes which call for it, just to keep people buying new books.

Personally, at this point, the one thing I'd like to be able to buy is the 4th edition in PDF format. But that won't happen because they want to sell the new, 6th edition.

Leap of Faith, my contribution to the Torquere Press 2009 Charity Blitz, benefiting the Matthew Shepherd Foundation, has been reviews by Teresa at Rainbow Reviews. She as kind enough to give it four out of five stars. You can read the review here:

http://www.rainbow-reviews.com/?p=2003

The story is available here:

http://www.torquerebooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&manufacturers_id=272&products_id=2203

For those who may be uncomfortable with the subject material, please be aware that it contains both explicit homoerotic scenes, and BDSM scenes.

Today I'm hosting the Torquere Press Community on Live Journal (http://community.livejournal.com/torquere_social/). Come on over and check it out. I'm posting snippets from the new story, and will be trying my hand at writing a short bit of fiction based on prompts from the community members.

I've just sent off another story submission. This one is going to Torquere Press's annual charity benefit:

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http://www.torquerepress.com/submissions/anthologies.html

Anniversary Charity Sip Blitz - Changing Lives

In 2008, Torquere Press decided to use its September anniversary and its Sip short story line for a little good work. Dedicating the month to supporting the fight for equal rights in marriage, Torquere and our
authors published gay and lesbian wedding themed stories, with the profits going to charities such as the Lambda Legal Fund. To date, more than $5000.00 has been donated to the selected charity.

In 2009, our authors have chosen the Matthew Shepherd Foundation as the recipient of our anniversary Sip Blitz, with the theme of Changing Lives at the core of the stories.

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This one is called "Leap of Faith." It features a secondary character from Embracing the Dragon, Greg Taylor, Danny O'Riordan's personal attorney. It's set about a year before Embracing the Dragon, and tells the story of how Greg came to be working for Danny, and found the courage to come out of the closet.

Assuming they decide they want it, it will be available as a stand-alone item, and probably as part of a collection of all the stories submitted for the benefit.