Displacement activity
Feb. 27th, 2015 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceSo I have all these jobs that I really need to do, editing jobs and writing too, with urgent or imminent deadlines - so I am spending at least some of this afternoon out in the clubhouse, emptying books out of boxes and then putting them back in different boxes.
Thing is, it occurred to me that I'm spending a significant amount of time helping other writers get their books ready for Book View Cafe publication, and actually no time at all working towards the same splendid goal with my own backlist books. This is demonstrably sup-optimal, and needs fixing.
But step one is to dig out destructible copies of my early books, for which I have no viable electronic versions; and the other thing is that I am a disorganised creature with thirty-eight years of publishing history behind me, whose stuff has recently crossed oceans. And there's a lot of published stuff - one of the things about the writing life is that one tends to accumulate unpredictable numbers of every story, every book, every translation - and it was barely sorted when I packed it, and much of it is still in boxes in the clubhouse.
So I went to look through 'em to see if I could find a copy of Paradise to be scanned and OCR'd; and was barely into the first box before I decided this was a silly way to do things. And now I am going through all the boxes, sorting and organising and recording. And finding that I have dozens and dozens of copies of some books, and vanishingly few copies of others; but I knew that already, and by the end of the day maybe I really will know whether "vanishingly" is the mot juste...
(And if anyone local wants a free book or two, you only need to ask. Seriously. I do not need fifty copies of a twenty-year-old paperback.)
[EtA: I have been through all the boxes that admit to holding books that I wrote. Unless there has been some serious mislabelling among the rest, then in among the plethorae - mostly, inevitably, vols 2 or 3 of a series; I am universally scant on vols 1 - are some curious lacunae. I appear to have no copies at all of the Daniel Fox books, except for Hidden Cities (vol 3, yup); and if I have any copies of Pandaemonium they ain't there. And I have no spares of The Samaritan (which some consider my first book), or Shelter (which some consider my best). Hmm. I foresee raids on Abebooks* as a priority...]
*I have always envisioned Abe as a lumberjack, living in a check shirt and a big beard and a log cabin in the woods. Insulated with books, which he sorts & packs for the mail at the end of a long day's lumberjacking. With an axe. Seriously, this is the way I see him.
Thing is, it occurred to me that I'm spending a significant amount of time helping other writers get their books ready for Book View Cafe publication, and actually no time at all working towards the same splendid goal with my own backlist books. This is demonstrably sup-optimal, and needs fixing.
But step one is to dig out destructible copies of my early books, for which I have no viable electronic versions; and the other thing is that I am a disorganised creature with thirty-eight years of publishing history behind me, whose stuff has recently crossed oceans. And there's a lot of published stuff - one of the things about the writing life is that one tends to accumulate unpredictable numbers of every story, every book, every translation - and it was barely sorted when I packed it, and much of it is still in boxes in the clubhouse.
So I went to look through 'em to see if I could find a copy of Paradise to be scanned and OCR'd; and was barely into the first box before I decided this was a silly way to do things. And now I am going through all the boxes, sorting and organising and recording. And finding that I have dozens and dozens of copies of some books, and vanishingly few copies of others; but I knew that already, and by the end of the day maybe I really will know whether "vanishingly" is the mot juste...
(And if anyone local wants a free book or two, you only need to ask. Seriously. I do not need fifty copies of a twenty-year-old paperback.)
[EtA: I have been through all the boxes that admit to holding books that I wrote. Unless there has been some serious mislabelling among the rest, then in among the plethorae - mostly, inevitably, vols 2 or 3 of a series; I am universally scant on vols 1 - are some curious lacunae. I appear to have no copies at all of the Daniel Fox books, except for Hidden Cities (vol 3, yup); and if I have any copies of Pandaemonium they ain't there. And I have no spares of The Samaritan (which some consider my first book), or Shelter (which some consider my best). Hmm. I foresee raids on Abebooks* as a priority...]
*I have always envisioned Abe as a lumberjack, living in a check shirt and a big beard and a log cabin in the woods. Insulated with books, which he sorts & packs for the mail at the end of a long day's lumberjacking. With an axe. Seriously, this is the way I see him.