Forgot to mention:Â The Steerswoman is available in all formats directly from Smashwords itself.
Also, if you buy it from them, I get a bigger royalty than if you bought it from oh, elsewhere…Â Â Just sayin’.
Click ‘n’ go!
Well!
The ebook of The Steerswoman is up for sale at iBooks, for those of you with Apple devices:
No, don’t click on it — I can’t link you to an iBooks entry! You’ll have to go there yourself.
Now, I know for a fact that the ebook has also been sent to Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, Baker & Taylor Blio, and Flipkart (that’s in India — I’ve already sold in India via Amazon, by the way) among others. However, it hasn’t shown up on their websites yet… So it could be a case of Real Soon Now, depending on the individual websites.
How do I know this? Well, for everything not-Amazon, I’m using Smashwords as my distributor, and they do have some nice tracking, so I can see which online stores have been sent the ebook.   But so far, only iBooks actually has the book on sale.
So, if you’ve been waiting for this, check your favorite ebook source, to see if it’s up yet — if it’s not, it will be, soon!
Next up: I have to do the same for the other books…
In other news: Hey, James Davis Nicoll has put his review of The Outskirter’s Secret online! Go here for his fancy-blog version, and go here for his Live Journal version, which has a lot more comments from readers. I’m finding the discussion pretty interesting…
Be warned that there are TONS of spoilers.
Ack! Must run now.  I am suddenly in a time-crunch.  This because they’ve set the date for my surgery as May 9, just over a week away, and now I must accomplish everything that needs to be done before that in that short span of time.
More later…
ADDED INFO I FORGOT:Â Hey you can get it in every format, right now, from Smashwords themselves!
Still here, but kind of worn down… now that I’m off the Taxol and only getting Herceptin, I’ve been trying to do a bit more, to build up my strength. I actually drove myself to all my appointments on Monday! It was rather mind-boggling, after being chauffeured by my long-suffering sister for the last couple of months.   On another day, I took a half-hour walk!
Of course, both of those things completely wiped me out afterward, which is ironic: to get stronger, you have to make yourself more tired. But that’s how you do it, push a little bit more each day. Feeling tired is part of the process; it’s how I know I’ve actually done something.
I’ve received a lot of encouraging emails and comments — I probably won’t be able to reply to each one, but it really is good to hear from each of you.  It means a lot, and I want to thank you all.
In between resting and not-resting, I’m still working on getting the ebooks out on non-kindle platforms, with Sabine’s help. I can’t give you a definitive timeline on that, not yet.  I should know more in a few days…
In other news: James Davis Nicoll has written quite a nice review of The Steerswoman. Â Â Here’s the link to it on his website.
It’s also posted on his LiveJournal page, where other LJ’ers have left some comments.
More later; I have some stuff to do before I turn in…
Well, on Amazon in the US, that is.  Slight delay for Amazon sites in other countries, as we’ve seen.
But, yep. There it is.
That’s right.
Next project: getting all four ebooks out on other platforms.
Sorry about being offline for — heck, almost two weeks! That final dose of Taxol hit me a lot harder than I expected, the steroid crash was worse than usual, and I was useless for much longer than from previous chemo sessions. And as soon as I was able to do much of anything, I spent whatever energy I had on getting this ebook out.
Which it now is. So happy.
More later; I’ve spent the last 3 days in a white-hot copy-editing heat, so I’m kinda beat now.
I think I’ll turn in… g’night!
(Click images to embiggen for better legibility)
However, the good news is: Today was my last dose of Taxol. That’s the T in the TH of my current chemo regimen, and it’s the culprit in the peripheral neuropathy. So, whatever increase in side-effects I get in the coming week will be the last increase.  Then it’s just a question of will it go away? And if it does, how long will it take?
Meanwhile, the usual steroid crash I get after these is due, probably by tomorrow night, after which I will lie around like a plate of particularly uninteresting aspic until, oh, Saturday night. But also on the upside: I only got that massive dose of steroids because of the Taxol, and this was my last Taxol. Sooo … after this, also no more steroids or steroid crash. That will be nice.
Going forward, we just have the Herceptin every week (which does not knock me back as much as the Taxol), then surgery in May, and recovery, and soon after that, radiation therapy. Which will be a whole new adventure.
In other news: I missed the window for getting the ebook of The Language of Power completed before this week’s chemo and steroid crash. So, it’ll have to wait until Sunday earliest for any further progress; ditto with the non-kindle versions of the ebooks.
One thing that ate up time was my taxes!  While in theory it could have been simple, it was complicated by the fact that I actually did get some miniscule amount of money from Del Rey on the paperback versions of my books.  I do have the rights back, and they’ve stopped selling my works — but the delay in their accounting system meant that I was still owed money from before I disengaged from them, and this money was paid in 2013 and I had to include it in my income. Using the Profit or Loss from a Business 1040-C form. I wanted to do it right, and be beyond reproach for 2013, because 2014 is going to be crazy-time, what with income from various streams, and all sorts of business expenses, as well as the Day Job that provides my health insurance. It’ll be complicated.
And I had to get the taxes done before Chemo and steroid crash, because although I’ll probably be past the crash by Sunday, I might not be, given that it takes longer to recover each time, and it’s possible my down-time might extend into the tax-filing deadline. So I wanted to do the taxes while I still had a brain I could count on.
Unrelated info: Sabine and I have been watching Continuum on Netflix, which I quite enjoy. They put a lot of work and thought into the future-scenes, and the acting is pretty good, the storyline complex. Don’t let the synopsis fool you: “Cop from the future chasing terrorists.” Bleagh. Doesn’t cover it.
Also: I’m currently reading  The Little White Dove by JM Barrie (of Peter Pan fame).  This was a book I had stumbled upon ages ago when I was house-sitting in an old historical home, which had all sorts of fascinating old literature and scrapbooks lying around. I found the book hilarious and sweet at the same time, and I love the narrator. I just picked it up in a massive Kindle compilation of all of Barrie’s works, with cost next to nothing. I’m glad to see that I’m enjoying The Little White Dove as much as I did the first time.
Because bald=cold.
Slightly large, but she told me how to shrink it…
It’s comfy, warm, and my favorite color!
Gosh, thanks!
(Okay, back to the ebook conversions… I have 3 days before the next chemo, when I will be knocked flat again.)
I want to thank all the people who jumped right in and bought copies of the ebooks for The Outskirter’s Secret and The Lost Steersman last week — My royalty check for the month of March is going to look very pretty! Â And since my disability payments are only a fraction of my regular wage, the royalties help me a whole lot — so, again, my thanks to you all.
(Yes, Amazon pays out royalties on a monthly basis. Â There’s a two-month delay between the month’s final calculation and the actual payment, so I’ll get paid for March at the end of May; but I can see what my sales are, and what my royalties will be, in as close to real-time as makes no difference. Â This is VERY different from traditional publishing.)
I’ve emerged from my steroid crash, and am once again awake and alert. Â So, The Language of Power ebook will be out before the end of this month.
In other news: I was supposed to get my Herceptin-only infusion on Monday, but to everyone’s surprise, the day dawned with rain, hail, sleet and snow coming down in remarkable amounts at astonishing speeds. Â Last day of March! Â You know the proverb about March coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb — but apparently this year “going out like a lamb” refers to some poor lamb being born in a blizzard (which I understand does happen) and then DYING OF EXPOSURE to the cruel elements before the the shepherd manages to find it and carry it to the shepherd hut to warm up (I’m picturing Granny Aching from Terry Pratchett’s Wee Free Men series, here).
We tried to get out to the hospital, but every route we tried had a spinout, or an accident, or a bus spinning its wheels, unable to make it up an unplowed hill. Â We had to turn around.
So, doing it today instead. Â The Chemo suite is jammed with people: Tuesday’s regulars, plus those bumped from Monday.
The trend is still generally good — the tumor’s shrinkage means we’ll be doing a lumpectomy instead of a mastectomy. Â This is excellent. Â However, lumpectomies “come with” radiation therapy, as my oncologist puts it. Â Previously we’d thought we might be able to do without the radiation. Â But this is a trade-off I’m happy to make! Â Because: no mastectomy.
One fairly inconvenient thing: a significant percentage of patients being treated with Taxol have a side-effect called peripheral neuropathy, where they develop pins-and-needles sensations and numbness, which starts at the tips of the fingers and toes, and can sometimes creep further and further up. Â Â I’m one of those patients, unfortunately; but fortunately, my symptoms are comparatively mild.
But, a further downside: it can be permanent. Â We won’t know if it’s permanent in my case, unless it actually fails to go away — and even the temporary kind can take many months to clear up. Â But I count myself lucky that it’s no worse than it is. Â Because: Hey, I’m not dead! Â I win!
Other good news: Â when my pal Brian was here filling in in as caretaker while Sabine caught some sea & sun in Florida, he discovered a good Indian restaurant just down the street from me. Â Excellent, another win!
It’s Wins all around, basically.
