Category: meta

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Sent out Lights again. Sort of: I e-subbed it, then immediately got a note back saying that I had formatted something wrong. It’ll take me a bit to fix it for reasons too boring to explain, but it’ll be really re-subbed tomorrow.

Agent Kristin had an informative post about author websites. In particular, she said this:

What you might not want to include is a whole play-by-play of your current editor, agent, or publisher search. This could backfire. I have seen sites where an author has clearly outlined all the rejections (sometimes the letters are posted there verbatim!). It would make me think twice about asking for the full (although the one time I encountered it, I did end up requesting the full as opinions can vary widely) but think of the psychology impact of that. If lots of people are saying NO, maybe I’ll think twice about saying YES.

Um, oops. I’ve been doing more or less this, counting the number of rejections and then advertising them here on the blog. And I take her point that this might give a bad impression. So I’m changing tacks, slightly. I’ll still talk about the Quest For Publication, but I’m not going to give the names of the places I’m submitting to, at least not until someone buys it. Then you’d better believe that I’ll be shouting it from the rooftops.

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So this is my new blog. The question that you’re asking yourself, naturally, is why are making a new blog? After all, I already have a blog, and my own domain, even. Why do I need to go out and get a new blog hosted by WordPress, especially since my existing blog is also running wordpress.

There are two answers to this question:

  • Soon (this year, deo volenti), I’m going to publish my first short stories. By that time, I’d like to have at the very least a blog with the name that I’m going to publish under.
  • I kind of want to separate my “jaspax” persona from my “J.S. Bangs” persona.

That last point deserves some explanation. The moniker “jaspax” has served me well for 13 years now. It was the screenname I chose for my very first e-mail account, at AOL, for heaven’s sake, in 1995. Since then I’ve carried that name to almost every major e-mail provider on the net, and even registered the domain as the home of my permanent blog. I’m going to continue using jaspax for the forseeable future.

However, the site at jaspax.com is very personal. It’s also the site of my wife’s blog, and it’s the place where I (theoretically) go to rant about politics, religion, the day job, etc. (I say “theoretically” because I haven’t actually posted there in a long time. I haven’t been in a ranty mood lately.) I don’t want those to be the first things that a potential reader, agent, or editor sees when they look for me. Rather, I’d like to have a site with my regular name that focuses on writerly things and sciency things.

Dude, then why are you publicizing the link to your other blog right here?

As if I could hide it from the All Seeing Eye of Google anyway. Anyone who wants to know if jaspax and J.S. Bangs are the same person can find out here, no trouble at all. I’m not putting up a wall between the two purposes, just a lovely little hedge with a garden gate and maybe some little gnomes.

The gist of this is, here you can find me talking about writing, linguistics, geeky stuff, etc. For the time being, at least, this will be the place where I post most of my stuff, since these are the things that I find I want to write about.