The Pleasure of Smelling a Flower (Vincent and the Doctor)
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This is just showing off, really. |
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This is just showing off, really. |
Hello all. Life is good. Wrapped up the writing of TARDIS Eruditorum entries for Series Five yesterday, and got back on finishing off the next chapter of Last War in Albion today. That’s going well, and I’m quite happy with the chapter.
So, let’s see. I don’t think we’ve done a “what are you reading” thread lately if at all, have we?
What are you reading? Should the rest of us be reading it too? For me the answer is the Frank Miller Daredevil run, but that’s for an already discussed reason. It’s… historically very important and easy to see why people made a big deal about, but probably not essential reading for one’s happiness in life. It’s sort of beyond the scope of reviews: if it sounds like the sort of thing that will interest you, it probably will, and otherwise can be skipped.…
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Figure 298: Wally Wood’s extremely detailed art packs in a number of entertaining sight gags. (Click to enlarge.) |
Right, this is one of those things I’ve been promising to do before another Kickstarter, and I have the numbers handy, so let’s go ahead and have a look at how the whole writing career went over the last year.
I’m doing this mainly because I do have to shake the cup occasionally and ask for money, and encourage people to buy books to support the project. And I feel like if I’m going to plead with you for money, you have a right to know what my financial situation is.
So, first of all, I am not the primary earner in my household. That would be my wife, who is an oncology nurse at a fairly large hospital. She makes about what you’d expect for that, which is to say, a fraction of what she deserves. We live in Danbury, Connecticut, which is around the 66th percentile in terms of cost of living in the US – a two-bedroom apartment in decent but not great repair runs us $1250 a month, to give you an idea, and that’s pretty much standard market price.
I made $12,409 in royalties in 2013. $3169 of those came from the bundling of books in the Storybundle Doctor Who deal, while the other $9240 came from general sales, for an average of $770 a month. In practice this helpfully supplements my wife’s income in a given month and means that we enjoy the considerable luxury of never having to get too stressed about where rent is coming from in a given month.
There was also the matter of the Kickstarter. I made some errors in calculating shipping costs that resulted in much, much more of the Kickstarter being used to fulfill rewards than I had expected. Between paying for editing and design services on four books in 2013 and rewards shipping, all but about $5000 of the Kickstarter was spoken for. (Design is about $800 a book. Final costs on shipping aren’t quite nailed down because I still have some replacements to ship due to my screwing up and not using sturdy enough packaging, but they were around $6-7k.)
That $5000, along with the Storybundle windfall, essentially went to two things. The first was our honeymoon, which we took in Chicago after eloping. We drove out, stayed in a Pricelined hotel, and put all the money towards eating at nice restaurants. It was an absolutely amazing time, and we would both like to thank everyone for making it something we could do.
The second was my wife’s birthday present for me, a very nice grill that lets me do all sorts of fun cooking things. I was going to include a picture of it, but I ended up writing this at about 3am, so really, not the best lighting for it. Still, I love it dearly, and have made some really lovely dinners on it. (Next up, a grill-roasted duck with potatoes, also grill-roasted.)
To sum up, then, between this job and my wife’s work, we’re able to maintain a pretty nice middle class existence for two.…
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Karen Gillan is a particular specialist at the “pretend you’re in the middle of an earthquake” aspect of acting in Doctor Who. |
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This happens more often than you’d think. Trust me, I know. My wife’s a hospice nurse. |
Hello all. I’ve finally gotten around to those tax things, so the general “here’s where things were in 2013 for Eruditorum Press” post should be up this week.
But for now, gossip! Discussion! Games!
The following eight posts will have other stories subbed in for them in the manner of Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone.
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Figure 290: Northampton School for Boys, from which Moore was expelled for dealing acid. Moore notes that he declined to rat out his accomplice, who he says went on to become a police officer. |
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What do you mean Girls Aloud are “on hiatus”? |