Sunday 13th July 2003
I got busy again. With a few different things. Not the least of which was spending seventy-two hours playing GrandTheftAuto between short naps. It's important work.
--Gremlin
That aside, there is a bit of news....
Probably the biggest thing involves WastedDiscourse Publications. Which, of course, has a backstory to it.
Those who have been around for any length of time are probably already aware that I'm kinda at war with my publisher. Which is to say that the publisher is in no mood to do anything about the distribution of NotS, since it actually includes the word pipebomb somewhere in the middle of the book. Which has been causing problems for years now.
Which leaves roughly three options. I can A) sue the living shit out of them to force them to make things happen, which probably would't really do a lot of good; B) go find a different publisher, which will probably lead to the same sorts of problems all over again; C) stop writing things interesting enough to upset people.
None of these options sounds like much fun to me, so I've gone with D) none of the above; start up my own fucking label.
So that's what I did. Which is not nearly as easy as it sounds, of course.
The trick is that starting a company like this takes a lot of money. Or, it takes a lot of money to do it correctly. The old way. Which also sounds kinda boring, to me. So I did it differently. I started looking into easy ways to outsource the expensive parts.
The search went temporarily on hold when it was announced last year that the same people doing the shirts and things for Wasted were going to start doing books as well. Unfortunately, after ten or eleven months of delays, it turned out that the cost of printing a book their way was...extreme. To put this into perspective, printing a book here costs more than buying the book at the MSRP of twenty bucks here. Which basically means that, having discovered how impractical it was to have CafePress.com print books for us, I happened across lulu.com who are able to do it for less. For the moment, that's who I'm using to get this done.
There are, of course, other options. But I'm putting those off for a bit, since they all involve massive startup costs. In theory, I could spend several thousand bucks to set things up elsewhere, but the money would all work out about the same in the end. Either way, I'm stuck with the industry standard of about twenty bucks for a trade papaerback; it makes more sense to save the money in the first place and see what happens with it. If it works out, I'll look into massmarket shit--printing up millions of copies of the little 4.18*6.88inch paperback books in advance, with a current MSRP of $8.95 or so. I'm not expecting to get that far this year.
Anyway: since I happened to have it handy, I went ahead and released everynight through both of my current options. I'm not really expecting a lot of people to buy the prototype from wastedinc.com except maybe for collectors' value. The two versions at WastedDiscourse.com are technically identical. The only difference is that VersionOne has the white cover Hunter liked, and V2 has the black cover I liked. Given the fact that roughly ninety percent of all books purchased in the US are never read beyond the first chapter, and serve only to adorn coffeetables, variant covers just help to turn a four-hundred-page novel into a home decorating method.
Presuming you read beyond the first chapter, the rest of the book involves a sort of alternatve reality in which books are effectively outlawed--or, at least, regulated to hell and back--in the near future. Not quite Bradbury in function, but somewhat similar in theory.
I dunno. I just write these things; I try not to think about them much after the fact. Ask someone who's read it already, I guess. By the time I finish writing a book, I'm officially sick of it.
The next step, of course, will be to catch up on the S97S--the epic series of nine books [ten, counting LK0] which should have had the first two released by now. My current intention is to release LK1 later this month, LK2 in August, and LK3 in September; then I'll get LK4 out in September 2004, and so on. First, of course, I have to figure out where in hell I put the books; I don't think they're actually on the computer at the moment. That could take some time....
In other news...I guess this isn't exactly news, per se. In fact, the latest development turns out to be a couple of weeks old. But I didn't hear about it right away.
Petco, evidently guilty of contractural fraud [as well as other sorts of fraud, puppymilling, and so on, according to basic google.com searches on the subject] appear to have finally got hold of Hunter a couple of weeks ago to discuss their 'problem' with her. Where their problem appears to be that gremlin.net took the liberty of exposing their fraud to the world.
So it's not really about a rat anymore. No one has any useful information on that at all. For all anyone knows, the rat is dead. Or sold off to someone else. Or still at the vet. No one seems to have the slightest idea where Hunter's pet has gone. But Petco are very interested in discussing their problem with Hunter regarding my website. Suggesting, to me, that no one at Petco is actually intelligent enough to EMail gremlin@gremlin.net, admin@gremlin.net, or webmaster@gremlin.net about it. Instead, they call Hunter's mobile phone while she's asleep, and leave increasingly threatening messages about their problem with her.
Unfortunately, the phone is from Verizon; so hitting Nine to save the message is largely aesthetic; the aggressive bullshit from the district manager of Petco was erased by Verizon before I could copy it over to an .mp3 for use here.
Naturally, I found out about this whole thing minutes after swapping the petco.com spoof at gremlin.net/index.html for the wordart thing there now. I kinda wish I hadn't, since Petco will probably assume that I got rid of it out of fear of...something. Whatever scary thing a corporation which lacks the intelligence to EMail webmaster@gremlin.net when they have a problem with a website could think up. Probably something dumb, like 'take it down, or the BabyJesus will cry'. That wouldn't actually surprise me much.
So now I'm curious yet again about this fraudlent corporation. I'd like to know where Hunter's rat is, when she'll be getting him back [they only live for about three years, so it's slightly TimeCritical], what problem they have with Hunter regarding my website, and so on. I may have to call them up and ask some of these questions directly. Don't worry, though: I'll record it to let you know about the answers.
In still other news--insofar as this is still news; most people already know all about it--scotsmantroll has proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that he's a fraud and a welch. See scotsmantroll.grem.tv for more information, and realise that he's still posting in the chatroom, and--ridiculously enough--citing scotsmantroll.grem.tv as evidence that he never lost the damned wager. To date, no one agrees with him at all; although everyone is seriously beginning to suspect that he might be fully pathological, and incapable of understanding that his bullshit isn't actually believed by anyone.
He is, after all, a self-confessed christian.
More later....