Expresso & Publication

Watching: Macross Frontier #19, The Middleman #10
Reading: A Feast For Crows, George R.R. Martin

No word count for today. Too busy gearing up for the start of the semester.

*

About three years ago, when I first sent out a slew of short stories to various SF periodicals, I took the advice of Stephen King (and several other authors) and established a "rejection" folder, for all of the rejection letters I would receive. And soon enough, the letters arrived for me to start my collection. All of them are the standard form letter--the only minor exception being a letter from the Writers of the Future contest, which included a handwritten note consisting of three words: "send more soon!"

Well, my novel gobbled up my off year, and then law school came by, so I never did.

Flash forward to this summer. I had a law article burning a hole in my pocket--the fore-mentioned seminar paper focusing on doujinshi, fansubs, and fair use--but refrained from submitting it on the promise of my seminar professor, who promised that he would contact his students during the summer in case any of them wanted to further refine their papers for future publication. Well, come August, and I still hadn't heard anything from him. So, on a whim, I decided to send out the paper as-is.

A note on the Expresso website is called for here. Berkeley Press has a wonderful submission hub website, which allows you to easily submit your law articles to over 500 law journals with the click of a few buttons. The only limit on the number of submissions is the size of your wallet: Expresso charges $2 per electronic submission, minus the first, which they send for free. I checked off mostly IP law journals, and sent it off.

For the first week, I received two rejection emails, and one email noting that I had submitted to a journal that only accepted student-written pieces that were authored by its own students. (Chalk that one up to an overactive clicking thumb.) Another rejection followed a few days into week two. Feeling a bit desperate, I took a (figurative) axe to my paper in order to trim it down to the rather tight space requirements of my alma mater's law review, and sent the resulting frankenstein to one of our EICs.

Then, early this morning, I received a different sort of email from one of the Expresso law journals, entitled "Offer of Publication."

While the sight of that email left me positively giddy, never for a second did I forget that the battle is only beginning. Yes, with an offer in hand, I can be assured that my paper will be published in a scholarly journal, and that I now have a publication credit add to my resume (my only other published piece was in the high school literary magazine, hardly worth a line or two of precious resume real estate).

There are, however, considerations to be made. The accepting journal is relatively new, and, from my own investigations, doesn't seem to be represented on Westlaw or LexisNexis's online databases. As a result, I would much prefer to see my article published in a journal with greater name recognition and/or a wider sphere of distribution. So the tool of choice to exact a response from as-of-yet silent law journals is the "expedited review request."

Through Expresso, one can contact all of the law journals that one has submitted to, and inform them of your standing offer and its acceptance deadline. With that deadline in mind, you then request that the journal "expedite" its review of your article, so that you'll know whether they want it before you have to give your response to the initial offerer.

So, while publication is now all but certain, it's still a waiting game.

The acceptance deadline is September 8th.

I'll keep you posted.

Cable

Watching: The Middleman, Episode 9
Reading: Bitterwood, James Maxey; A Storm of Swords, George R.R. Martin

Today's Words: 205
Weekly Total (1 day): 205 words

Due to cable issues, I wasn't able to access the internet for the past few days, which was just as well, as I didn't get much (read: any) work done on the novel. I mean to make a strong push tomorrow and over the weekend, but today was lost to getting the cable back on line, and coaxing the muse back into place after a few days' respite.

1st Week: ~ 600 WPD

Today's Words: 1051
Weekly Total (7 days): 4277 words

So for this the first week since I've started day-by-day word counts, I've averaged a little over 600 words per day. A rocky start--especially considering that one day I wrote no more than 80--but one that's likely to improve over the coming weeks, even with law school about to begin again soon. I could have written a bit more today, but I've got to get in a few hours on work-related projects as well.

Today's Words: 267
Weekly Total (6 days): 3226 words

Today's Words: 246
Weekly Total (5 days): 2959 words

894 Forward, 420 Back

Today's Words: 1314
Weekly Total (4 days): 2713 words

1314 words/day is damned good for a nebosuke like me, but 420 of them had to be scrapped before the end. (That, and I realized that, in order to fix the problems that have been slowing me down as of late, I need to go back to the middle of Chapter 3 and rewriting my way back up.)

Oh well. Every crappy word written today is one less left for me to write tomorrow. Hopefully, soon enough, I'll have expended my quote of crap, and only the sweet, sweet ambrosia of good prose and sharp dialogue will remain.

Absens Allocutio

Today's Words: 81
Weekly Total (3 days): 1399 words

New Formats and eBay

Watching: The Middleman, Episode 7
Reading: A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin

Yesterday's Words: 769
Today's Words: 549
Weekly Total (2 days): 1318 words

As you might have noticed, I've decided to abandon the wordmeter, at least insofar as redrafting is concerned. The steadily increasing blue bar is wonderful motivation for a writer to keep chugging along through the initial draft, but as the second (and third . . . and fourth . . .) drafts inevitably must entail some element of editing and rewriting, the trusty `meter no longer serves its inspirational purpose.

Instead, I will be posting day-to-day reports of how many new words I've managed to eek out, and, when the redrafting takes a turn toward substantive edits, I might adapt the format to reflect the number of words I've looked over, fiddled with, and hopefully made better by the end of each day.

I'm finally into new territory in Chapter 6, which represents the beginning of the portion of the first draft that I've decided to chuck out wholesale and do over completely. It extends from Chapter 6 to 10, though Chapters 11 through (can't remember exact details, but I'm going to take a stab here and say:) 22 will require substantive redrafting to get it to mesh with what I've worked out. Chapters 23 through the end are the gravy chapters, the ones that worked well from the get-go, the ones that served as shining beacons of hope while I slogged through the dregs that were my original opening chapters, and the messy plottage (an amalgam of plot and pottage that I came up with just this very second) that currently is my middle act. Now, that certainly doesn't mean that they'll require some significant revisions before they're perused by eyes other than my own; it just means that doing so should be a hell of a lot more fun than rewriting chapters from scratch.

Oct. 31st is still the goal for the second draft, after all. And if I can get a draft clean enough for some first readers to read before I sacrifice my every waking moment to the Bar review gods next summer (because though I'm no longer a lawyer-to-be, per se, I'm still graduating this Spring, and a J.D. without bar membership is like a bookend without its partner: lonely, useless, and from certain angles just plain sad), so much the better.

*

A convoluted but funny eBay story, all my own:

About a year ago, I purchased a used Zaurus SL-C1000 for about $230 on eBay. (The Zaurus was discontinued in mid-2006, so eBay and a few select retailers with a remaining stockpile are the only buying options nowadays.) The Zaurus, for the uninitiated, was a Sharp-branded clamshell handheld device that ran a fully functional version of Linux, a device about as firmly wedged between the roles of laptop and PDA as possible, this side of an Asus EEE. I lovingly used it for notetaking for the Fall semester, and started to put up a post on this blog showing off its neat little features and compact form factor . . . until the little guy gave up the ghost.

Basically, it just died on me, right in the middle of class. I tapped the power button. Nothing. I pressed the reset button. Nada. I took the battery out and put it back in. Ziltch.

After cursing the tech gods--and the eBay user who'd sold me the device--I scoured the internet for an explanation. The most plausible painted a dire picture: apparently, using the wrong sort of AC adapter could very easily cause the Zaurus' power fuse to blow, which then would require some surgery and soddering to bring the device back to operational status.

Now I've gone into the bowels of my electronics before, and soddering is well within my admittedly limited mechanical prowess. But in order go in, sodder, and get out with minimal loss of life and frustration, I needed a schematic to point out the connection that had burned out.

Amazingly, the Internets failed me in this regard, as Google, Wikipedia, and several Zaurii-specific forums failed to provide me with so much as a snapshot of the dreaded power fuse. Desperate, I took the Zaurus apart anyway, and scrutinized its circuits for a burnt out fuse. Sadly, I couldn't find it.

Now hope spring eternal, so I decided to see if maybe--just maybe--the problem lay in the battery rather than the device itself, so I spent about $20 on a replacement battery. It came. It didn't work, though it helped me to deduce that the precise problem was that the Zaurus wasn't charging the battery.

So, I reasoned, the solution lay in finding an external charger for my batteries. One such charger was available, though it seemed to be selling somewhere between the ungodly sums of $60-$80, plus another $20 or so for shipping. Considering what the Zaurus cost me in the first place (and that a brand-new Zaurus originally retailed for about $399), that was more than I was willing to spend on the mere chance of rehabilitation.

I noticed that a similar charger was being sold on eBay--similar in its power output, but noticably different in its configuration. Not so different, however, that I wouldn't be able to modify the terminals to accomodate the Zaurus' battery, or at least so I believed. Best of all, this charger would only set me back $9, with the cost of shipping from Hong Kong included.

Long story short, the charger worked, and the Zaurus was once again alive, though reliant on an external device and the ocassional battery swap for life support. I discovered, however, that while the original battery could still hold a charge, it simply would not power on the Zaurus. I was forced, therefore, to buy another replacement battery to complete my swap-in, swap-out plan. Another $15 sacrificed to the eBay gods.

The battery arrived, and lo and behold, the HK manufacturers had modified it to better fit the Zaurus' compartment. However, when I plugged the battery in to the AC adapter, I discovered--against all logic--that the Zaurus was charging it! Almost a year after the device failed me, a single, $15 replacement battery had set everything to right. Happy ending, right?

Happy, yes. Ending . . . not just yet.

In the Zaurus' absence, I started looking to the discontinued line of Sony Clies as a potential replacement portable. (Some may recall that I once wielded a PEG-NR70V, a monstrously large Palm-based PDA with a ludicrously huge touchscreen, a lengthwise clamshell design . . . and an hour-and-a-half battery life. [Hey, it was the turn of the 21st century. With that list of features, you had to have seen that coming.] Well, back when I bought the Zaurus, I sacrificed the NR70V to the eBay gods to be able to afford it.) I used to have some buyer's remorse shortly after buying my initial Clie when the SJ series was released six months later, as the upper models of the line matched the features of my PDA (sans ludicrously huge screen and clamshell form factor) in a device that was roughly 2/3rds as large, and to add insult to injury, roughly 2/3rds the price. But I had always had my eye on the basic PEG-SL10, which originally retailed for $120, a monochrome model that ran on two AAA batteries. Of course, the Clies were abandoned by Sony back in 2004, and in today's world of smartphones and iPhones, the PDA is quickly becoming an exercise in obsolescence.

On a whim, I decided to check the Amazon marketplace, and discovered a refurbished SL10 available for $26, shipping included. I bought it, and quickly rediscovered why I loved the Palm OS. It did everything that I needed the Zaurus to do, and in the case of handling my novel's chapters without formatting degradation, it actually does it better.

So I put the Zaurus back up for auction, along with all the accessories I'd accumulated along the way. I set an aggressive buy-it-now price of well over $300, because Zaurii are even rarer on eBay than they had been a year ago, and lo and behold, someone bought it now! I'm still waiting on payment, but if the transaction goes through, I'll actually end up making a profit on the whole Zaurus ordeal, at least as far as the dollar figures are concerned.

eBay--and the Invisible Hand--can be funny sometimes.