Actually, it's more of a sort of counterexcuse. The book being finished, I got back to something I'd been putting off for a while, using the book itself as the excuse. So, that being all over with now: the dentist.

Quick disclaimer. I don't fear dentists. Which is to say that I don't fear pain and needles and drills and whatever. I do however have a certain philosophical allergy to paying a guy mumblehundred bucks an hour to whimper at me about my own teeth. As though I intentionally set out one day in 1987 to begin the long and generally upsetting process of doing less than enough on my own part to preserve my teeth for the exclusive purpose of causing emotional damages to some quack I might eventually meet someday in 2005. Thusly, while I'm okay generally with pain and needles and drills and whatever else fails to impress anyone with chronic migraine, I'm still less than ginchy with going in and hearing about this shit from some overpriced stranger.

That said, I totally lucked out. As it happens, I discovered a dentist who A) happens to practise within walking distance of my front door [granting that Steven Wright once mentioned, accurately enough, that ‘anywhere's walking distance when you've got the time'; I now having the time can walk to any dentist on the continent, I suppose], B) happens to have adequate skills in handling each of my myriad issues without outsourcing me to a specialist, and C) has nothing more irksome nor perplexing to hit me with than 1) ‘You're healing up nicely—about twice as fast as most people would', 2) ‘I usually recommend against things like aspirin; though, in your case, thinning out your blood will actually cause you to heal in the correct order', and 3) ‘You shouldn't smoke: you'd heal far faster if you didn't'. C)3) reminds me that people in general have become so conditioned to fear and complain about cigarettes that they'll actually produce these nonsequiturs.

Nevertheless, the guy rocks. Which is to say that he's conducting this three-month process of effectively replacing my entire fucking skull, and there's been just about zero pain involved. And that's not quite the exaggeration it might sound like. We're talking about taking stuff out, reshaping the bones, bionicising existing elements, implanting new elements, et cetera; a simple skull replacement might in fact be easier and faster, at this point.

We won't talk money. Except to state that I could otherwise have bought a car. Meaning a car I'd actually drive. Still: it's worth it, longterm.

Curiously enough, the dental problems being purely a symptom of the larger migrainic issue, I've actually been having less headaches in the last three weeks. Best I can figure, having less pressure [anaerobic periodontal infexion in four or five abscesses] at all times, there's less general stress, and therefore less environmental attrition to trigger the headaches in the first place. Which isn't a cure; I've still been having the same brainwrenching meltdowns; I've just been having less than I'm used to. Whee.

So, that's where I've been, mostly. The novel finished, and the integral need to have something onhand to describe as one of the symptoms of the virus, I went off to kill the symptom and get all better. Naturally if ironically enough, I now realise that, had I done this several years ago, I'd have had more energy and less overall debilitation all this time, and got the book written in somewhat less than eighteen months. Which figures.

About the book, since I haven't officially said so here in the main blogue of the site: it's done. It's been done for a couple weeks. The prototype experiment paid off, as it were, appointing those who saw the book in advance as auxiliary editors. And, yes: the final version of the novel does list them as having helped get it where it is today.

Although: I kinda LucasFilmed the thing yesterday, having taken it with me to a restaurant to look over. One of the Deleted Scenes [more on those in a minute] lost in releasing a fifteen-hundred-page concept as a 568-page novel having mattered a lot to me, I managed to find a spot to drop in a paragraph indicating roughly the same thing without adding to the pagecount. So, yeah: I effectively added Greedo shooting first; though the addition is somewhat less intrusive and stupid...I hope. Plotwise, nothing's changed; it really just kicked the literal wordcount up to 239,841.

I'd copypaste in the new paragraph itself, but it's rife with spoilers; here's a hint: it involves spraypaint on a roadside sign on Page 484.

Incidentally, since the book itself has been out for less than a month, this next bit of good news is potentially critical.

Sometimes, things go wrong in manufacturing. With anything. That's a given. With books, one potential disaster is the pages being affixed to the spine with less than enough glue. When that happens, a book can suddenly explode halfway through. And I'm not talking about plottwists. I'm talking about Page 323 leaping out of the damned thing as I was going through it, watching for any fuckups missed to date.

Enter the kickass Return Policy. Outsourcing this thing to CafePress.com gives it the same policy as anything else they print [somewhere way the hell back in time on this site, there's probably still a fun report about ordering several hundred bucks' of shirts and things from Wasted, meaning in this sense from CafePress, having one of twenty or thirty things prove to have been slightly misprinted, mentioning it to CP, and surprisingly getting the entirety of the order reprinted and reshipped, without the same misprint I'd complained about], so, though I'd written this thing, and though the real issue was that it had been underglued, they elected to send me another copy—the newer version with the updated cover and X% less typos—for free, and overnight. Which is to say that, while I'd just had the original shipped for four bucks over the course of eight days, they teleported the replacement to me as quickly as technologically possible: I called on Tuesday; it was delivered on Friday—on Armistice Day—on which UPS really aren't known for delivering anything. So I'm just pleased now.

Anyway: for those who had bought the prototype version, you've still got time, as of this writing, to give CP a call, invent whatever excuse you like, and have the final version sent out as a replacement. I wouldn't recommend abusing that too far; but the wording in the guarantee allows for it, and I can tell you from experience that it does in fact happen as advertised in practise.

Okay. Deleted Scenes. Something I've threatened in the past.

For those just tuning in: the story within Paroxysm was massive. The 240,000 words ultimately released were a total concession. The real story, as it were, was closer to a million words. Partly because, as you may not have guessed from this blogue [which you can't begin to pronounce without ‘blah'], I tend to thump out more words than one might regard as being necessary to whatever in hell I'm on about. Still, a few things were cut or drastically downsized for the final version.

Some were cut for length. Because, again, a fifteen-hundred-page novel is unreadable; excepting fifteen-hundred-page novels about talking snakes, it's also unsellable. Others were cut because the world changed while I was writing it. One of the more notorious examples would be the chapter I wrote in April or May, in which half the population of New Orleans collected into a certain SuperDome before the nationwide blackout allowed the everpresent bilgepumps to die, ultimately allowing for this fun chapter in which thousands upon thousands of people were trapped in the SuperDome as New Orleans flooded outside, still having to deal with the zombieplague itself. Then, as you may have heard, August happened to the world; I cut the damned chapter.

So. Since that and other such cut chapters still exist, for the most part, here on the computer, I'm contemplating a subsite to contain them. I'm not sure where or when, but I've pretty well decided that I'll probably do it. I am of course already certain that the contents of the potentially-forthcoming Deleted Scenes subsite should be entirely avoided by anyone who hasn't yet read the novel as it was released; it'll have scads of spoilers, yet make no standalone sense to anyone not already familiar with the whole storyline.

And that leads to something funny enough that I've got to mention it, given that the regulars to this site are everything from FanFickers to bibliophiles and beyond.

Quick backstory. I write novels; we knew that. I write various novels, releasing them under various names—none of which particularly more ‘real' than any other; most of us knew that. Regardless the novel, genre, or pseudonym, I'm amazingly good at learning to hate the publisher, process, et cetera. Which was a large part of deciding to technically selfpublish Paroxysm, and as Gremlin, blurring the line between the standard cypheranarchic cyberpunk and total fucking psychopath.

Given that, I did put some consideration into supplemental publishing means. For example, setting up to release this book at some later date as a massmarket pennydreadful sort of Safeway thing for $US8.99, or whatever those little 4.18" pulps go for once a novel has outlived its slick, creamy, perfectbound trade paperback phase. Although, astonishingly enough, to date, I've heard nothing negative about a 568-page, 6.625*10.25" novel listing at $29.99. I'd expected a good percentage to complain about a novel costing thirty bucks. To date, I've had complaints from zero individuals. So that's kinda cool. Maybe it helps that the same money no longer fills the average fueltank; I dunno.

Anyway. In glancing about the 'net for surrogate publishers, I ran across PublishAmerica.com. Though, between some strange wording on their site [including their disclaimer, which says, to me, everything on this site is pure bullshit; see the contract we'll send you if you don't suck] and my memory of BookFucker.com from the twentieth century, I stopped to run a quick scamsearch on these guys, which led instantly to PublishAmericaSucks.com. Have a look. The results will amaze you.

Particularly entertaining was a sting implemented by various members of the SFWA after PublishAmerica.com described SciFi novelists as ‘writers who erroneously believe that SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters'; given that defamation, a number of established novelists got together to produce this compendium entitled Atlanta Nights, as written by ‘Travis Tea'. Chapter Thirty-four of this travesty was actually produced by a bot, and begins with Bruce walked around any more. Some people might ought to her practiced eye, at her. I am so silky and braid shoulders. At sixty-six, men with a few feet away form their languid gazes.

Here's the punchline. Travis Tea, inasmuch as he existed, then submitted Atlanta Nights into PublishAmerica.com's unbreakable decisionmaking machine, which reportedly [by PA, that is] rejects four in five submissions, holding out for only the greatest stories, best prose, highest attention to blahblahblah. The short version of the story is that they accepted this mess, including Chapter Thirty-four, and offered Tea a publishing contract. Presumably to avoid true fraud charges, the entities behind Travis Tea stopped holding in the laughter and exposed their own hoax, a week or two later in a general press release:

"Atlanta Nights," by Travis Tea, was offered a publishing contract by PublishAmerica of Frederick, Maryland.

Washington, DC (PRWEB) January 28, 2005 -- Over a holiday weekend last year, some thirty-odd science fiction writers banged out a chapter or two apiece of "Atlanta Nights," a novel about hot times in Atlanta high society. Their objective: to write a deeply awful novel to submit to PublishAmerica, a self-described "traditional publisher" located in Frederick, Maryland.

The project began after PublishAmerica posted an attack on science fiction authors at one of its websites ( http://www.authorsmarket.net). PublishAmerica claimed "As a rule of thumb, the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction.... [Science fiction authors] have no clue about what it is to write real-life stories, and how to find them a home." It described them as "writers who erroneously believe that SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters."

The writers wanted to see where PublishAmerica puts its own quality bar; if the publisher really is selective, as the company claims, or if it is a vanity press that will accept almost anything, as publishing professionals assert.

Atlanta Nights was completed, any sign of literary competence was blue-penciled, and the resulting manuscript was submitted.

PublishAmerica accepted it.

From: PublishAmerica Aquisitions [sic--Grem] [e-mail protected from spam bots] Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004 Subject: Atlanta Nights
As this is an important piece of email regarding your book, please read it completely from start to finish. I am happy to inform you that PublishAmerica has decided to give "Atlanta Nights" the chance it deserves....Welcome to PublishAmerica, and congratulations on what promises to be an exciting time ahead.
Sincerely,
Meg Phillips
Acquisitions Editor
PublishAmerica

The hoax was publicly revealed on January 23, 2005. PublishAmerica withdrew their offer shortly afterward:

From: "PublishAmerica Acquisitions"
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2005
Subject: Your Submission to PublishAmerica
We must withdraw our offer to publish "Atlanta Nights". Upon further review it appears that your work is not ready to be published. There are portions of nonsensical text in the manuscript that were caught by our editing staff as they previewed the text for editing time assessment pending your acceptance of our offer.

PublishAmerica Acquisitions Department

Those who wish to see the novel, "Atlanta Nights" by Travis Tea, for themselves can find it at http://www.lulu.com/travis-tea

Publication at Lulu.com is free.

For more information about PublishAmerica and vanity presses, see:

http://www.sfwa.org/beware

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25187-2005Jan20.html

So, that amused the hell out of me. You should be able to find more on the whole subject of PublishAmerica.com [hereafter known as PrintAnything.com] through those various links.

The good news is that I now know what to do with the next novel I get halfway through writing before working out that the whole concept sucks. Watch for the forthcoming epic by New Author, Travis T A Knight >:)