Hope you enjoy.

I finally broke down today and got a Facebook page. I'd been trying to put it off as long as possible, but I finally got one and I'm slowly populating it. Still no pic yet, here or anywhere else. I promise I'll get one eventually.

I wonder why I always get so bloody nervous when its time for me to upload my work. Maybe its because I'm doing a string of short stories as standalone works, instead of going for a monolithic novel? Or maybe I just get nervous in general doing things like this?

Either way, its going to be a few days before I start writing again. I try to only start projects on a growing moon, and the astrological wiggle room doesn't begin for another couple of days. Which gives me time to nail down ideas for the next story. Somehow, I'm imagining Feloni in a ballgown, clinging to Wolfgang Holzfaller's arm. Its totally out of character for a little roughneck like her, but that's how its going. The other question is, where could Wolfgang show up, that the other guests wouldn't be trying to kill or arrest him?

First off, by FOSS, I mean Free Open Source Software. As in free to use or not use as the case may be, not just free to download.

I use Kubuntu Linux almost exclusively on my computers; I sometimes do alpha and beta testing for Lubuntu as well, but Kubuntu is my workhorse distro. I've got it on a big custom desktop PC, a Dell Inspiron 1564 (the old kind with the Intel graphics chipset), and a Dell Inspiron Duo that's waiting on updates to its drivers before I can really use it for very much. Although the Duo is very promising; its one of the few remaining tablets not locked in to Android.

For my basic writing, I write in .txt. For the uninitiated, .txt is the same format used by Notepad. Plain text, no excess formatting, nothing to clog up the file and generate errors either here or Smashwords- and as far as I can tell neither requires exclusivity so I distribute on both and the Smashwords writing guide works really well for BookieJar. The word processor I use for this is Kate; unlike Gedit, Kate will automatically convert paragraph breaks from UNIX to Windows mode. This is important because you have to have Windows- style paragraph breaks for either website's software engines to generate the epub correctly.

Once I've finished writing, I compile all the text documents into one .doc using either OpenOffice or LibreOffice. The big laptop has OO, while the desktop and Duo have LibreOffice. Both work equally well. Just create the style sheet and assign styles to everything. I usualle create four: Normal, Centered, and Heading 1. Not that I'm particularly concerned about my epubs having a table of contents; I mainly do it so BookieJar will stop nagging me about not having one.

The covers, I assemble in GIMP. Thus far I've only been able to use public domain stock images, which is why they suck so hard. The fonts are by Kingthings, so if you want to use them, just google them. They're all FOSS, and licensed for commercial use as well. I've got a copy of Daz Studio and some 3D stuff which is also commercially licensed, and ways to build backdrops so I can combine them in GIMP, but I haven't been able to find any cute orc stuff for Feloni. Best I've been able to find is Tolkein orcs, and those are *so* not Feloni.

Although I've got the perfect Aiko 3 morphs and dress to make Treble, if I could find a Dark Elf skin and hair for her. Aiko makes a cute femboy. Anyway, I have to make two different book covers, one for each distributor because each has a different idea about what constitutes the right size of cover. BookieJar's is better for the in-document one, though. Don't forget to choose "anchor as character" for the in-document cover, to prevent odd bad stuff from happening!

Anyway, once its all done- the writing, cover and assembly, and all that; then its time to combine everything and publish. I set the price at 99 cents because it seems like a good middle ground. On the one hand, I'm not sure I want to distribute everything for free; I do want to make a bit of money. But on the other hand, my 99 cent short stories are having to compete with entire novels that have been put up for free. Difficult, no?

Maybe when I get more stuff up, I'll release some of the earlier ones for free as a promotional.