[LMB] (chat) Blackstone happiness, even greater happiness

[Lois McMaster Bujold]

(Lois puts on small businesswoman hat)

So, there was a nice royalty check from Blackstone Audiobooks in the 
mail today -- quite a number of my titles with them have earned out 
their advances.   For those of you who are following e-commerce, I note 
that my sales through Internet downloads, mostly through audible.com, 
continue to outstrip my really quite miniscule audio sales on physical 
media by about a ten-to-one margin.  I continue to suspect the principal 
reason is simple availability; bookstores have little room for 
audiobooks of any sort, still less for F&SF, so my work is not stocked 
in bricks & mortar places.

I hope Blackstone gets a few more titles through production and up soon, 
so that they, too, can be earning some e-bread.

(Takes off business hat, puts on artiste hat)

And in *other* news, I finished the first draft of _The Wide Green 
World, Vol. 1_ this past weekend.

24 chapters, either 128K or 133k words depending on how the computer 
counts them; a full book, though still half a tale.

I have no idea why Word claims the book is 128k when I add the chapter 
counts separately, but reports 133k when the very same chapters are all 
in a linked file.  Either the ways of computers are mysterious, or my 
arithemetic was off.  Ah, well.  It was enough words to reach the end, 
with possibly a few to spare.

This is the first of many "finishes" that a book of mine goes through.  
There will be revision passes on several levels -- on this one in 
particular, I expect to delay the last revision pass till after the 
second volume is complete in first draft, for obvious reasons of 
continuity checks.  Things planted early on may not bear plot fruit, and 
need pruned out; late developments may require earlier set-ups.  Pacing 
may turn out to be awry in relation to the as-yet-dimly-seen whole.  And 
so on.  Nevertheless, it's a lovely sensation to be this far along.

Better still, for a change, the timing came out even.  I now have a nice 
between-books break falling atop my book-launch distraction phase, good 
multi-tasking.   And I have a time window, before it becomes impossible 
to open windows for ventilation, to do some much-needed home maintenance 
things like painting walls with ten years of grime on 'em, replace worn 
carpeting, and other good things that will make this house a more 
heartening place to be shut up in, come what I hope will be a productive 
winter.

Ta, L.  (Takes off all hats, bows.)




    .





-- 
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.12.4/449 - Release Date: 9/15/2006