(no subject)

[dduane]

Work day, busy busy. But first:

At the Ebooks Direct store we now have Microsoft Reader versions (the .lit format) of The Door into Fire, The Door into Shadow, The Door into Sunset, and the Tale of the Five Omnibus. (I was holding off on the conversion to .lit because I didn't have the reader and wasn't sure how they'd convert. Seems they look OK, so here they are.) Just use the pulldown menu on each page and the .lit version will reveal itself. ...We'll start rolling out .lit versions of the Young Wizards international editions and the various other books shortly. Also: in couple of weeks we'll be putting up the revised edition of Stealing the Elf-King's Roses, with a cover that more accurately supports its identity as an urban-fantasy police procedural (yes, with a love interest, but what do you call Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle, then? Chopped liver?).

BTW, Microsoft: what is this dumb stunt of emailing me a video about "how the Declaration of Independence would have looked if the Founding Fathers had had Word"? They had something way better than Word, people. They had the words. Here are a few of them for you: Consanguinity. Usurpations. Conjured. Despotism. Inestimable. Perfidy. And possibly the best one in that document: Unalienable. ...Seriously, someone over there must have sent that email out before their blood caffeine level got high enough for them to realize how witless it would look in retrospect.

And by the way: WIL WHEATON IS NOT A DICK. Pass it on. (frowning at some people's behavior) Seriously: there's no excuse for it. And it doesn't have to be like that. I remember how when George Takei came out for a Trek/media convention in Dublin some years back, he was briefly astounded at not being dogpiled at breakfast even though he was surrounded by a breakfast room full of eager fans. It was explained to him that nobody was going to bother him as long as he was obviously eating and reading his newspaper. When he stopped one or both of those behaviors, then people would approach him. And that's just how it happened, though he wasn't mobbed then, either: folks came up and visited him by ones and twos and threes at decent intervals. ...A pity this kind of behavior can't spread westward to the next continent over. In any case, Wil did exactly right. And good on Felicia for having been proactive.

Meanwhile: the main Young Wizards website has had a makeover. There may be a few pages that haven't been optimized for the new layout yet (mostly in terms of images having their background colors changed, etc.) but Lee the Web Lady will hunt them down and sort them out over the next couple of days. Final issue: how to get the slider to fade rather than slide, if possible. (Probably some fiddly little jQuery thing. To be handled sooner or later...)

And finally: the Door into Starlight issue -- bumping this a bit so that I can be sure everybody interested has had a chance to respond. If you've seen it already, apologies: please ignore it. (And thanks again to all those who have responded.) If you haven't, leave a note in the comments, or Tweet with a link to the original message, or share it on G+ or Facebook. Thanks!

Comments

[keris]

"Stealing the Elf-King's Roses"

I think I missed hearing about how it's been revised. Is this just making the eBook look as it should type revision, or are there material changes from the previously published one? I bought the paperback (and enjoyed it) as soon as it came out, so that's my "reference version".

The only thing I think Wil Wheaton did 'wrong' was that he didn't call the police. I'd have had the lot of them arrested and locked up, in the UK at least that sort of behaviour is assault (if any of them actually touched him it would be assault and battery). (The same for all the rest of the paparazzi and their ilk, for that matter.) If it's not at an agreed signing then he's off-duty, he may do it as a request if he feels like it but has no obligation to do so.

I remember George Takei talking at a UK Star Trek con (I don't remember whether that was one you attended, it was at the Liverpool Adelphi either 1988 or 1990) about the differences in transpondial conventions, and how he and other actors loved coming to British ones because they weren't mobbed. He said that at US conventions they only see the Green Room and the signing table (and the stage) and have guards to take them between them because the fans will get so aggressive, whereas at UK cons they can just mix with the fans like any other programme participant (and if someone wants something signed and is told "sorry, not at the moment" they'll accept that). It seemed to us Brits that the US conventions were a totally alien culture, we would never think of doing that. (I haven't been to a Trek con for many years, I don't know if they've changed now, but certainly I haven't seen that sort of mobbing at the few other media cons I've attended since.)

(And because I didn't say it here and can't check LJ to see whether I said it there, I'm definitely in the market for The Door Into Starlight. In fact I was working out the other day whether I could afford to commission you to do it outright, based on your "several hundred hours of work"; I probably can't afford it by myself but it wouldn't take many of us. And I think that the publishers would take it as the full quartet of books.)