Hang on a sec; kinda fearing the keyboard here at the moment....

Okay. So, I'm chopping kindling here. Not the wooden kind [well: hopefully], but the kind of textbased stuff endemic to novels. Which is oddly ironic. It's like this....

Two things I'm good at, regardless the final product: writing novels, and writing hypertext. Mutually exclusive though those technically are. Until now. Now, there's the Kindle, which looks to the reader something like a novel and looks to me, the writer, more like hypertext. So that should be okay. Except that I'm just about literally in the middle of retrocoding a book [started with a short one—about sixty thousand words] into hypertext, so the Kindle'll be okay with it. Technically, all you need to know is that retrocoding a novel really, really sucks.

Again: I'm kinda hoping the novel itself isn't terribly wooden, in the shatnereque sense; feedback to date has been okay, so it might not be a problem.

What is a problem is that even the newer Kindles [and you can't fully dismiss the K1, which to date more people are using] seriously lack some logic. I've mentioned this before, regarding implanted images: you can't really do them correctly, with class="alignright" or something...yet. What I'm also noticing is that you can't control much of anything beyond italics and boldfaces and underlines and superscripts, and a couple of fontsizes. BLOCKQUOTE and CODE kinda work, but only at the mercy of the Kindle's proclivities toward processing them.

The Kindle's been out for a couple years; there are two and a half generational versions of the thing; it's still technically nowhere near ready, at least for me.

Granted: if this were only forty or fifty years ago, the Kindle would rock; back then, a given novel was stamped out with a substandard form of Times New Roman; the better publishers could handle italics and underlines, but there was that one font, and it was always that one size. I guess I'm just spoiled by the advances in printed books since the sixties. So, technically, it's my fault; that doesn't improve my mood much.

The good news, if any, is that, from now on, things should be easierish. If I were writing books directly for the Kindle, it would actually take less time than writing them for mainstream publication [already anticipating the day on which that becomes a nonsequitur (Kindle used to be submainstream?)], simply because, over the last fifteen years or so, I've become used to thinking in hypertext; I've actually been known to be typing into Word and, instead of hitting Control-I, I'll bang out <I> as a sorta procedural macrofunction of commonality. Of course, that could be because a percentage of the last fifteen years have ignored Windoze and its functions; a couple versions ago, the Wintel version of LightWave, at least, dropped U in favour of Control-Z for undoing an action, which I still forget half the time. I don't know how redundant that is, by the way; I'm pretty sure NewTek still make a Mac version of LightWave, but I'm not positive at the moment; and Amiga and DecAlpha and SGI are all kinda dead these days.

So, I'm chopping kindling. That was the point here.

I'm really kinda hoping to have this one done today. Which is meaningless. I think I can have fixed what I know needs to be fixed today, and upload the file to playtest it at amazon.com; it's the results of the playtesting, and what might be required to get it truly ready, that I'm not yet sure about. Depending what might go wrong, it might take longer to get this thing up there; depending what might go wrong, I can't even guess what it might take to fix it after all.

Really funny is that I'm not getting paid for this. At all.

The book I'm working on is 97D [which 'I' didn't technically write], which I released initially as a PDF in 2000, for free; it's Episode Zero of the S97S, and was always meant to be something of a free advert thing for the rest of the saga. I'm not yet sure how you list something in the Kindle Store for $0.00, but that's my intention for this thing.

Then, as I get the other nine books chopped into Kindling, I'll throw those up there for profit. It's essentially drugpushing: LK0's free; the rest of the saga will cost whatever times nine—probably about ninety bucks. Which at least is better than the $360ish the hardcovers would cost, or the halfofthatish for the trade paperbacks. The standard play seems to be to set Kindling at ten bucks per title, and let amazon.com decide whether to run sales cutting that down to six or seven bucks on occasion. Which I suppose is fair, a pennydreadful at Safeway currently going for US&8.99 for newsprint pulp.

Okay. I'm now entirely killing time here instead of working on the .html; also, I'm kinda reaching over and playing the synth onehanded a bit, and randomly. A, D; E, F; A, D, E, F, A#, A, F, D, A, G#...A. The PinkPanther theme is weird.

Also: also, I'm outta soda; so I made tea; and now I'm outta that. At least I can make more, by going away from here to get more water.

D, C, A, G, F, D, G# G G# G G# G G# G, F D C D....

D A D!

More later....