September? It's being shipped there by brigantine sailing schooner? Or printed on Alpha Centuri? We used to be able to transport bloody convicts over there quicker than that!




Well, according to the artist, some guy named Diller, he reused a half-completed picture of one of the Caphans, but there's a strange resemblance to another person of our mutual acquaintance, as you can see from the cover. I reckon Shep got to him.

I'm just surprised because the last time she posed for an artist (in Paris in the 80s, as far as I know) she wasn't quite so covered up.







I've had a Sir Mumphrey novel ready for a final proofread for a year now. It's adapted and expanded from the World War II adventure with Miss Canterbury that appeared here on the board. I've also got 65,000 thousand words of a Vinnie de Soth novel "in the can", although admittedly it could run to a trilogy.

The problem with these is... I'm not sure how I want to see them in print. I could probably convince five or six small publishers to put out editions now if I went to them with the finished product, but I don't think I'd get much if any advance or any guarantee that they'd be marketed or "pushed", or even put out anywhere except via Amazon. Sales would likely be very limited. And once the first volume's out there with one publisher its hard to change to another for a character's second outing.

Alternately, I could go via a literary agent, who would negotiate something for me with a larger publisher; but many agents' contracts now include not only a percentage of book earnings (which is fair) but a percentage of earning from any future use of characters debuting in those books (which is not). I'm reluctant to get into the legal detail that a good deal would entail.

Or I could set up a company and publish them myself. The technology's out there now and the set-up costs are manageable. Trouble is, that feels a bit like vanity publishing to me, even if it makes a profit, and I'm not sure I want the hassle about what is really just my spare-time hobby. Plus, promoting a book requires a lot of time, energy, and expertise. I'm just not that into "pushing" myself.

Every time I look at these works - and half a dozen other books I've written "for myself" rather than at a publisher's request - I end up in a looping decision spiral then wander off and do something else instead.