Out of Ambit
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At the Young Wizards end of things: an...
2021 Hugo nomination eligibility: the Young Wizards series
Maluns
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Vintage Scots Christmas recipes: “Good Fare Christmas”
From the Young Wizards universe: an update
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Peter Morwood on Moroccan preserved lemons
Greek mythology, feminist reclamation of lost/ancient tradition, and...
Changes coming at YoungWizards.com: your opinion(s) solicited
Outlining: one writer’s approach
A project in progress: translating “La Patissière des...
Pulling The Lever
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Out of Ambit

Diane Duane's weblog

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Computer stuff

...Wrong lever.
Computer stuffHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeLife

Pulling The Lever

by Diane Duane May 26, 2020

This post is as much a marker for me as anything else; the sign of a lot of (sometimes deeply annoying) work finished, and a return to more normal operations around here. I hope.

The DianeDuane.com main site and webspace got hacked in late March, and nearly all my time between then and now (except when I managed to wrestle away some writing time as well) has been spent putting that right. The complications were manifold. The site was on an old server host that couldn’t progress past using php 5.4, which is no longer secure against the depredations of naughty people.

So everything was going to have to be moved to a server that could handle php 7.x, which is the present supported and secure version. And all the website stuff presently stored in the old hosting space had to be either converted to handling php 7.x-and-better, or thrown out and replaced with something better.

This in itself should only have taken a matter of days to sort out. But the next, deeper layer of the problem was that the version of the Drupal platform on which the old main site was built — version 7.x — was aging out. Upgrading it to v.8, with v.9 already looming over the horizon in beta, was going to be just one straw too many on this camel’s back. And replacing the site in a new server but still running on D7 would just have been tempting Fate. What was hacked before could (and very probably would) be hacked again. …And: for some time I’d been thinking about moving the DD.com site over to WordPress, as it really better suited my needs than Drupal did, these days.

So, having made that choice (which I’d been putting off for a long time because implementing it was going to be such a pain in the butt)… the serious work began. Getting onto the people at FXDomains and explaining what I needed of them for this migration. (And a shout-out to the excellent Blake, who made that part of the work so easy.) Installing a fresh copy of WordPress over there to house the Drupal-to-WP migration of the main site. (Fortunately this blog has been running on WP for a long time now: migrating that would just be a case of migrating its database and directories to a new install running under php 7.x. This too had its complications, and involved a week of testing, swearing and kicking things. But it got sorted out at last.)

Dealing with the main site was more of a challenge, as it involved finding a theme I liked (in this case “Uptime” by TommusRhodus: I commend those folks to you for terrific and patient customer service), getting it up and running, and then cutting-and-pasting hundreds of pages of text and portfolio material into it. That work is still not complete — many entries in the new website are still missing metadata that for various reasons couldn’t be forced to follow over from the old Drupal install.  But it’s now complete enough to be going on with. More can be done casually, day by day, as opportunity presents itself.

And then, after everything was finally in place: the insertion of various security plugins, to keep this mess from happening again. Then: backups. Backups of backups. Several different modes of backups, to be sure, because DAMN I am not planning to have to do this crap to my own site again any time soon. I’m already now contemplating getting our last site that’s running Drupal off of there: and with that a long chapter will close. I’ve been running our household sites on Drupal since v4.7, but we’re done now; time’s too short and life’s too busy. Arrivaderci, old friend.

And with all the backups done, and the pages loading as fast as they’re likely to for the moment (though more work can and will be done on this), it’s time, as the woman said, to Throw The Lever. That you’re seeing this means it’s finally happened. May great Thoth the Webadmin of the Ennead, the divine Patcher of Code, prosper the undertaking.

…Now where were we before I was so rudely interrupted? I’m sure I was in the middle of writing something…

May 26, 2020
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Computer stuffGeekeryOnline life

We’re off to see the server

by Diane Duane September 11, 2016

One of the annoying things about being a (midlist) writer in this world we live in is that you have to take care of (or have to have taken care of for you) your “shop window” — the various forms of publicity that let people know you’re alive and writing. In my case, this means, among many other things, the various Young Wizards websites.

The main Young Wizards site has been running on Drupal for a good while — in fact, since I stopped hand-coding it in HTML — and the theme it’s been using has, also for a while now, struck me as kind of static and in need of an update. This issue has been on my mind more or less constantly for the past six months or so. But you know how it is — things get put, as they put it over here, “on the long finger”. You get busy with work, or with the administrivia surrounding work, and it doesn’t get handled for a good while. Finally in August I got started on it, but it wasn’t going to be anything but a pre-production site for a while.

Then (as so often happens) something comes along and forces your hand. While I was at the Discworld convention in the UK a couple of weeks ago, out of the blue I got a mail from Google telling me that they thought my site had been hacked. And Google searches for “Young Wizards” now say as much. Needless to say, this isn’t a situation that can be left to fester.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last two weeks, more or less, tearing the installation apart and putting it back together again, as well as hastily working to bring online the makeover version of the main web installation that I’ve long been planning — based on WordPress this time instead of Drupal. (This is at least partly because, though I love Drupal dearly, I just don’t have enough time to spare these days to indulge my inner geek wrestling with the PHP and the modules and all the rest of it. I find I’m preferring a platform that updates its own damn core rather than having to have it done manually once a month. And there are a bunch of other reasons, but never mind those right now.)

None of this activity has shown on the surface. Among other things, it takes a while to first of all figure out what was giving Google the idea that we had been hacked (their own diagnostics surprisingly being a bit vague on this), then trying to work out whether the problem could be cured while leaving the patient in situ or whether more radical surgery was required.

In the case of the Young Wizards domain, the culprit appeared to be the wiki installation in which for some years I’ve been storing general notes about the YW universe that were well-developed enough or general enough to make public. The spammers had been at the wiki, creating thousands of spurious user accounts and messing with their User:Talk pages — not that this is something they haven’t done before, and something we’ve blocked or deleted insofar as Mediawiki’s basic structure makes that possible. But this time for some reason or another the situation seems to have grabbed the Googlebot’s attention when it passed through.

There is unfortunately no quick and easy way to fix this problem in Mediawiki by bulk-deleting all the spammer-users (yes there are workarounds for this problem [oh, excuse me, “feature”],  and no I don’t have time to mess with them as I have only so much tech-love in my system to last me through any given day, and anyhow, when the hell am I supposed to find time to write?). The simplest way to handle the problem for the moment has been simply to pull the wiki up by the roots, stash it elsewhere for later more radical surgery — if it can indeed be saved at all — and export the page data to be imported into a less spammable and more encyclopedia-like format (via yet another WordPress installation) at a later date. So this has been done.

But now comes the exciting stuff. Tarballing and gzipping-up the entire installation, just in case anything goes horribly wrong. Tarballing-and-gzipping-up the separate parts of it (because when unpacking it somewhere else later, why get all tangled up in command-line subcommands when you can just say “tar -xvf thiswholedamnthing.tar.gz”?). Taking final backups of both the Drupal install and the WP install. And then — deep breath — pulling the Drupal install out of the root. And (another deep one) moving the WordPress install into the root. (Which is a little bit dicey, but not too much so if you move slowly and carefully and don’t do things in the wrong order.)

And then… more work. Fixing broken links. Fixing crawl errors. Installing 301 redirects for pages that are obsolete or otherwise no longer needed in the new install. Generating a new sitemap. Installing security plugins on all the other WP installs in the domain in the right order. And on and on… And then, when it’s all sorted out, when everything seems to be working, asking Google to please take a look at the domain and see if everything’s okay now.

(sigh) Right now I don’t feel so much like the Wizard heading off in that balloon as I feel like the guy leaving that little wooden hut in Antarctica and saying to his colleagues, “I may be gone for some time…”

See you all on the other side.

September 11, 2016
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Computer stuffHome lifeLifeOnline life

At YoungWizards.com: a brief interruption of service on all our sites

by Diane Duane September 4, 2016

So it’s been one of those weeks in a lot of ways (got the annual Autumn Cold a bit early: annoyingly delayed getting home from the Discworld Convention in the UK: the stove died). But the most annoying thing happened while we were still at Discworld. I got an email from the Google Webmaster end of things announcing that YoungWizards.com had been hacked — or so it seemed — and I was going to have to Do Something About It.

This situation becomes interesting in that Google’s own diagnostics were unable to tell me exactly what the hacking consisted of (except “spammy content”, but they weren’t able to show me so much as a snippet of it: just pointed at the root of the domain and suggested that the whole thing was compromised). Ah well. Doesn’t matter: to get rid of the dreaded “This site may have been hacked” notification, I’m going to have to get busy ripping things apart and putting them back together again. While running on tea and toast and antihistamines… but there’s not much I can do about that.

So. This gets interesting, because we have a number of different installations there — the main YW.com site (which was about to be changed from a Drupal install to a WordPress install, but that’s going to happen a whole lot faster now), the YW Discussion Forums, the Errantry Concordance’s wiki, and individual WP installs for Games Wizards Play and the interstitial works being branded together under the “Interim Errantry” label. All of these are going to have to have their database passwords changed and have other security measures taken. Whoopee. (In particular this is an annoyance because, while I was in the process of hand-porting the old Drupal site’s content into the new WP install, it wasn’t quite ready as yet. Well, never mind that: it’s going live today or tomorrow, and I’ll finish rejigging the URLs and so forth next week.

Anyway, this is just a warning to those of you who visit YoungWizards.com or its associated sites on occasion that for the next couple of days, any part of the domain may appear to be down or missing entirely. Don’t panic: everything will be back (and in some cases much nicer and shinier: the main YW.com site has been needing a makeover, and the new WP theme suits it very nicely as a sort of portal site for all things YW-ish).

Meanwhile, thanks for your patience while I get this sorted out. Normal service, as they say, will resume shortly.

(Or at least as soon as I get finished looking at this page featuring historic test patterns…)

September 4, 2016
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Computer stuffHardware

Changing video cards: a call for advice

by Diane Duane August 14, 2016

So here’s a casual question for the group mind. It has to do with PC graphics cards.

The card presently in my desktop machine is a Radeon HD 5800. When I bought it (six years ago and change) it was fairly high-end. Needless to say, time passes and what was once a cutting-edge card has just now been relegated to “legacy” status and will no longer be getting driver updates.

Additionally, of late the card’s been getting… capricious. My present monitor runs at 1920×1200 (the best it’s capable of), but of late the Radeon card has been refusing to acknowledge the highest resolution and keeps not only falling back to 1920×1080 or similar (which looks like complete CRAP to the point where I can’t use it) but in such moods isn’t even able to perceive that the monitor has that resolution available. Though the (Samsung) monitor’s drivers are correctly installed, the card seems to have trouble correctly seeing / acknowledging the monitor’s EDID info and repeated attempts to force recognition come to nothing. The Radeon Catalyst control-center software is no better about this.

I keep installing software/driver updates as they come down, and sometimes they help, and sometimes they don’t. So it becomes plain to me that it’s time for a new video card, ASAP.

Now then. I’m doing increasing amounts of cover design work in Daz Studio, and Daz has a rendering engine called Iray that runs on Nvidia-chipped cards only. Between the fact that I’m kind of annoyed with Radeon at the moment (and that its support of the OpenGL standard has always been kind of patchy), I’ve been ready to make the jump to Nvidia for a while now. So the question is: which one?

For the moment I may have to go entry-level. (I’ve been drooling over the Titan cards for a bit, but I don’t have the budget to spare for one of those right now.) So my question is: Who’s got an Nvidia card that they like and has been good at the graphics end? I don’t need a billion cores (not right now. Later…) In particular, cards that do well for gaming will also do well for desktop graphics: high fps numbers aren’t an issue — for my needs it’s about processing power.

So if you have an opinion, please opine. 🙂 It’d be useful. I’ve been in specs-reading mode for a week or so now and I may have to make this decision sooner than later, if this most recent driver update doesn’t fix the problem that materialized again this morning. (Just when I have five different projects that need the big machine, and none of which can be worked on until the damn video gets sorted.)

Anyway, to anyone who has time to share an opinion: thanks in advance.

(Just adding this for completeness’s sake: the present machine is running W7 64-bit — will eventually allow the upgrade to 10, I suppose, but not just yet. Or may ask Scan UK to build me another with 10 preinstalled — this machine was beautifully built and excellent value for money: I recommend Scan highly. They’re good enough to have scored the Royal Warrant and that’s good enough for me.)

August 14, 2016
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When I’m Sixty-Four

by Diane Duane May 18, 2016

That’s today! (As Himself has reminded me.) And theoretically this is the day I get to take off from work to celebrate… but normally when I make such declarations I wind up blocking out a novel with Peter over dinner. So I’m not getting my hopes up.

I want to thank everybody for all the good wishes on Facebook and Tumblr and elsewhere*. It’s nice to be thought of. For those who were inquiring about my health here and there: It’s not too bad, thanks! (A brief veer here into what my mom used to call “the Organ Recital”.) The cartilage in my knees crackles a bit every now and then, but not in any serious way. I have a weird retinal slightly-blurred-vision thing going on in my left eye, but it’s not major and there’s nothing that can be done about it right now, so mostly I ignore it. I’ve been working on some gentle weight loss, and that’s coming along nicely. So, generally speaking: physically, things are good… and specifically, nothing physical is interfering with the Work. Which is what counts.

(I’m working on Young Wizards #11 right now. Yes, still no title, don’t ask me, I don’t understand it. And yes, dammit, I’m working on The Door Into Starlight. Give me a break here, yeah?)

Meanwhile, some nice folks have inquired privately what they could get for me to celebrate (as we say in Ireland) The Day That’s In It. Well, if they feel driven to do something, let them go over to Ebooks Direct and buy something. That way I get to tell them a story and get given something**! So we all win. (Especially since some of our bigger-ticket items are on sale at the moment.)

Those boots...(ETA: **Something like these. I was looking at these Ecco sneaker/boots the other day and thinking, “Hey, those are cool… but are they €130 worth of cool?…” And then this morning I was looking at them and saw the price had dropped by 40%. (W00t!) So go on, buy an ebook if you like, and help me rationalize getting these for myself for my birthday.) (I mean, I don’t normally get all that excited about shoes. But for one reason or another these spoke to me.)

…Or sure, if you’re a fan of Amazon wish lists, I’ve got one, though mostly it’s just a place I stuff things that I don’t want in the shopping cart right that minute. If the mood moves you in that direction, feel free.

In any case: thanks again to everybody who sent wacky messages or just generally expressed the sentiment that they’re glad I’m around. What can I do but smile and thank them? — and add, “Same here.” With luck, the condition will persist for a good while yet. Meanwhile, Peter and I will go out for pizza later. (And probably wind up blocking out another damn novel over the second bottle of wine.)

So please consider yourselves toasted genially as we celebrate. After all, being around here wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without all of you.  For a writer, what counts most of all things is to be read, to be heard: and all of you who do that, and take the time to say so, are the important ones. 🙂

Thanks again!

*And Himself Upstairs, who sent me the fireworks at the top of this. Love you, sweetie, now and always!

Save

May 18, 2016
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Ebooks Direct is becoming EbooksDirect.co
Computer stuffebooksEbooks DirectmetaOnline life

A new domain for Ebooks Direct

by Diane Duane September 27, 2015

Ebooks Direct is becoming EbooksDirect.co

For some time now we’ve been intending to move Ebooks Direct off the subdomain at dianeduane.com where it presently resides. Over the last couple/few years things have been changing in the search-engine optimization world, and the way SEO is working now makes hosting a store on a subdomain, rather than on its own dedicated full domain, a less effective way to do business than it once was.

So some time around the middle of next week we’ll be moving EBD away from  dianeduane.com and over to its own domain at ebooksdirect.co. (I would have preferred the .com TLD, but someone is squatting on it and I have no intention of wasting the eyerolls I’d inevitably spend on being invited to pay umpty-ump bucks for the privilege of buying the domain from them.)

There’s nothing the store’s patrons need to do about this (except change their browser bookmarks if they feel inclined). Fortunately the tech end of the change is fairly simple: a change or two at the Shopify end and the installation of a redirect instruction at dianeduane.com that’ll send anyone who types an old page address to its equivalent new one.

For those of you who’ve been in contact with the store’s help email address: there’ll be a new address to deal with, yeah, but all your emails from the old help account will be forwarded to the new one before the domain change kicks in. The old help address will continue operating as previously for a couple/few weeks before it starts automatically forwarding all incoming mail to the new help address.

So otherwise everything will be business as usual. I just thought I’d give everybody a heads up about this before the fact.

Thanks, all.

September 27, 2015
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Computer stuffHobbyhorses and General RantingOnline lifethings that piss you offWindows

Do. Not. WANT.

by Diane Duane July 28, 2015

ETA: Thanks to those who set me straight on the non-mandatory side of the upgrade. I’ll take refuge in Rick’s excuse here: “I was misinformed.” As for the rest of it, the “download opportunity” still behaves like malware: you should be able to decline the download. Not allowing your users to make the choice themselves is abysmally bad practice. 

I don’t often get stirred up enough to go into full-blown editorial mode, but today is one of the days when that seems to be happening.

A lot of you who have Windows 7 or Windows 8 machines will have noticed the appearance, earlier in the month, of a little white Windows logo in your system tray. This, when you click on it, munificently offers you a free upgrade to Windows 10. Those of you who have experimented with the thing will probably have noticed there is no way to get rid of the impending update download — or at least, no obvious way. And that it starts rolling out tomorrow, July 29th.

For those of you who do not want the 3-gig download and would like to turn it off, let me point you at this webpage:

How To Remove The Windows 10 GMX upgrade nonsense

This cranky and civic-minded person has laid out, step-by-step, a method by which you can get rid of that pestilent little icon in your tray and stop the unavoidable downloading and implementation of three gigabytes of material you don’t want and have no intention of using.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I understand perfectly well Microsoft’s rationale behind this, or at least their stated rationale; to keep security upgrades consistent across all the installs of their new OS. That said, rolling it out in this particular way is really unsavory. It smacks of the behavior of malware installers, rather than that of any responsible company with any kind of interest in keeping its customers on board.*

(Also, it’s worth noting in this context that many people who have already updated to 10 — particularly users with Nvidia graphics cards — have been reporting horrific driver problems with the new Windows version, secondary to this ill-thought-out policy of “you’ll take what we give you and you’ll like it”. Only just now has the beginnings of a fix for this particular problem begun to propagate, but this strikes me as a sign of more bad things to come, a slow-motion trainwreck better watched from outside it than inside.)

Now who knows, over the course of the next six months or so, when I get ready to build my new desktop machine, I may indeed go for Windows 10 — once I’ve had time to make the choice, the informed decision, as to whether it’s right for me, and whether I can find alternatives to the various programs whose function I like and would like to keep. Or who knows? Maybe I’ll go whole hog and just switch over to Apple. (I know a lot of you who’re Young Wizards fans, considering the frequent appearance of hardware with the Biteless Apple on it in the books, will be surprised that this is an issue for me at all. However, in this as in many other parts of my tech life, I am an amphibian and have for a long time worked happily on more than one side of the divide at the same time. But this present behavior of Microsoft’s is trying my patience way more than usual.)

Anyway, I’ve used the method detailed in the webpage above on my present Win7 desktop, and it seems to work perfectly. I strongly recommend that if you are ambivalent about the prospect of this forced update of your software, you go over there and have a look at it and decide whether it’s an option you’d like to avail of.

*I also understand that in recent online talks, Microsoft upper-level management have let it be known that people who find ways of avoiding this upgrade will eventually be cut off from normal product updates. And you know what? I can think of no quicker way for them to drive me straight into what Euripides called “the apple-laden land.” Yeah, there’s just one of me, and I doubt my loss is going to break Microsoft’s corporate heart. (shrug) No matter.

July 28, 2015
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Testing Terragen's glass shader
Computer stuffTechnogeekeryTerragen

Adventures With Terragen #38567294: Testing the Glass Shader

by Diane Duane May 29, 2015

DD: (loads default landscape)

DD: (adds sphere to landscape)

DD: (applies glass shader)

DD: (hits “render”)

Terragen:  …

image

DD: (tears hair) I MEANT DO THE GLASS THING TO THE DAMN SPHERE.

Terragen: (smirks)

DD: You keep this up and this cover is never going to be ready on time.

Terragen: Look, I made the mountain go sparkly! Move the light source and do it some more!

DD: (HEADDESKS)

May 29, 2015
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book salesebooksHobbyhorses and General RantingOnline lifeOnline lifereading

When is a “library” not a library?

by Diane Duane January 19, 2015

From over at the Tumblr:

freyaliesel:

o.o tuebl has all of Young Wizards in the library.

BEST NEWS EVER

It would be if (a) I’d given them permission to have the books, (b) I was getting paid anything for their presence there.

However, (a) I never have, and (b) I’m not.

ETA: To the person who commented on the Tumblr post saying, “writers get paid for libraries carrying their books?” Why, yes, we do. The libraries buy our books to lend out. And we’re glad to have the libraries lend them out as many times as they can after that, because that’s our mutual understanding of what libraries do. Public library sales are traditionally a significant part of any YA writer’s income. Sometimes as much as 10 to 20% of a smallish print run will go to libraries — sometimes more!* — and this can be a significant reason why early print runs of a book “earn out”, thus encouraging your publisher to buy your next book. So libraries, and librarians, are very much our friends. (They would be anyway. But this is an additional reason.)

Also: in some markets, like the UK and Ireland, the author earns additional royalties from the book being lent out by libraries — the more libraries buy and lend your book, the more money you get. This is never a huge sum, but it can be helpful even for the midlist writer. Peter and I just got a payment of this kind from one of our UK agents. It’s hardly a lottery win, but it means that we can replace our suddenly-dying clothes dryer this month instead of sometime in the spring.

Tuebl, however, is not a library in the commonly-understood sense (and certainly not in the public-library sense that Ben Franklin intended when he started the first one in Philly). Tuebl does not pay any writer up front for their books, or for the right to make them available for download. People upload books to Tuebl at will, frequently without any real concern about who owns the copyright. Tuebl then dodges this particular legal bullet by making the assertion that they assume only people who have the rights to upload material are doing so. (It would be really interesting to see how this “assumption” holds up in court when someone eventually gets around to challenging them on it.) Additionally, they offer authors some nebulous possibility of “earn(ing) money by giving your books away for free” — which may or may not work out in the long run: right now my preference is to let other writers do that and tell me how it worked out for them.**

If I’d decided to try this experiment for myself, the results, for good or ill, would be my problem to deal with. However, when people take it upon themselves to give away my work for free without my permission — while implying as hard as they can that it is happening with my permission — that gets up my nose enough for me to make an issue of it in public. In particular, I note that somebody or other (having perhaps mistaken me for a vast multinational publishing conglomerate) bought one of my books from my own store and uploaded it at Tuebl for people to download for free.

I sincerely hope people can understand how the above might make me cranky.

(sigh) Anyway. Onward to the next problem…

As an addeddum: someone else (anonymously) asks:

Regarding authors getting paid when a library houses their book(s), what happens when someone donates the book to them? do they still have to pay you?

In countries where “lending rights” laws obtain, yes they do. (In such countries, the money to pay the writers comes from the government. See, for example, this page at the UK site for this program.)

The basic idea behind these laws is that the book wouldn’t be there in the first place if a writer hadn’t spent the time and effort to write it (and also the money necessary to keep themselves alive while writing it), so the writer therefore deserves some return from the lending process, even if it’s just a small one. (The law establishes this as an intellectual property right: see this page for much more background info about how the Public Lending Right is handled across the 53 countries where it’s been implemented.)

Whether books are purchased by the libraries themselves or donated to them, they report their lending figures to the government body that acts as a clearing-house for the data, and this body sees to it that the legally-determined amount of money comes to the authors directly or through their chosen representatives.

 

*Indications are, from my early royalty statements, that something like 40% of the print run for the original (and now very hard to find) hardcover edition of So You Want To Be A Wizard went to US libraries. This enthusiastic uptake would have been instrumental in Dell agreeing to buy Deep Wizardry.

**Yes, I know about Neil Gaiman. Sadly (or perhaps fortunately, from Amanda Palmer’s point of view) we cannot all be Neil Gaiman.

January 19, 2015
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book salesebooksEbooks DirectEuropeIrelandOnline life

The Shadow over Cyber Monday

by Diane Duane November 30, 2014

Cyber_Monday_Shadow

Tomorrow’s one of the big days in the marketing year for anybody who (like us) sells ebooks. But this year, for many of us, there’s a nervous feeling about the event that hasn’t been there before: because this Cyber Monday could very well be our last.

Here’s the deal, in very broad strokes (because it’s really complicated). Beginning on January 1, 2015, small business people in the European Union who produce and sell digital products directly — downloads of ebooks, music, courses, and so forth — are going to find themselves dealing with a profound change in the way they do business. Once upon a time, if someone in Great Britain bought an ebook from a provider, say, in Germany, they paid the German rate of VAT (that’s Value Added Tax for those of you not familiar with the term: think of it as sales tax) to the seller, and the seller passed that tax payment to their own national revenue service when tax-return time rolled around, and that was it.

Numerous companies, usually large ones, turned this situation to their advantage by setting up shop in countries like Luxembourg (where the VAT was lower than elsewhere in the EU) and selling to other EU countries from there. The law now coming into effect was meant to eliminate that advantage. From January 1st, within the EU, if a UK person buys an ebook from a German ebook producer, the purchaser pays UK-level VAT on it. And the German ebook producer must now remit that collected VAT to the UK tax authorities. The legislation sets up a body in each EU country called MOSS (sometimes VAT MOSS or VATMOSS), short for Mini One Stop Shop. (The link is to the Irish version.)

Rosie Slosek over at One Man Band Accounting has the closest I’ve been able to find to a “master post” on the MOSS / VATMOSS legislation: I recommend you have a look at it, as she lays more of the details of this situation out unusually clearly.

I’m not going to say anything here about whether this change in how things are handled really  makes any sense or not (partly because I haven’t had enough time to look into the history of the legislation as yet). Especially since big companies have the money and resources to get around this new situation as they got around the old one. That said, in the meantime, MOSS is the law: right now it simply has to be dealt with. But here are the major problems that come with it:

Many small businesses — the very businesses that European national governments have been touting as the solution to recent economic woes, the way to drive recovering economies back into growth from the bottom up — will be driven to the wall by this change, especially in countries like the UK where there has been a “VAT registration threshold” for income under which one did not have to register unless one made the choice to do so. Many people already working hard to run little digital businesses out of their dining rooms or garages or sheds won’t be able to handle either the expense of the mandatory VAT registration that ensues the very moment you sell something of even €1.00’s value outside your own country, or the burden of keeping (for ten years) the definitive documentation — “two pieces of non-contradictory commercial evidence” for every single sale — to prove that you haven’t sold anything into a region you shouldn’t (with all the craziness that always attends a negative proof), or the increased costs of bookkeeping that are going to accompany compliance with this law.

Additionally, the law as presently framed is insanely unclear in many important areas — possibly because it was framed before many of the present day’s commonplaces regarding internet sales became widespread.  Here’s an example for you to start with, from an article in City AM:

“On board transport travelling between different countries in the EU (for example, by boat or train), the consumer location will be the place of departure for the consumer’s journey.”

 

This means a French person travelling from London to Paris by train, having passed through the Channel Tunnel, could purchase an online subscription, connecting to the French mobile network, with a French IP address, and using a French credit card, but it would be correct for VAT purposes to show this as a UK customer. Getting this wrong risks an unlimited fine, [Boldface mine. DD] even though the VAT rate in both countries is 20 per cent.

Change this just a little — make the purchaser German, with a German smartphone instead of a French one — and add to this the fact that the  German SIM in the smartphone is liable to be used as evidence that Germany was the country of sale. Now imagine the joys of explaining this — not just to your local tax authority — but to the two other tax authorities involved, each of whom is empowered by the new regulations to come after you demanding their bite of the cherry. You’re supposed to have “two pieces of non-contradictory commercial evidence”. What happens when all the ones you do have contradict one another?

There are numerous other problems. Who holds the confirming data? How? Where, and in what form? How will problems concerning its authentication be resolved? As matters stand, it’s a nightmare. (ETA: see also Rachel Andrews’ blog post on the merry hell that VATMOSS in its prent state is going to play with the customer experience.)

Soozi Baggs’ Huffington Post article sums things up nicely:

1. This only applies to digital products, so it won’t affect businesses delivering physical products or live services. Which means digital businesses get penalised while other types of small businesses are completely unaffected.

 

2. This will make building a business incredibly difficult. The current UK threshold allows businesses to grow to a point where they can make an income and afford to take on specialist financial staff before dealing with things like VAT. Many digital entrepreneurs will tell you that they only made a few quid in the first few months. It takes time and traction to build an audience and get your products out there. If you’re liable for VAT and the administrative activities that go with it from day 1, you’re never going to be able to get past those low earning few months – to be able to smash through that VAT threshold and deal with your taxes accordingly.

 

3. Many low earning digital entrepreneurs are mums who are trying to contribute to the family pot by earning money from sales of digital items, whilst caring full time for their pre-school age children. Or they’re fully intending to build a bigger business, but are doing it slowly – over years rather than months, because they have the childcare responsibility and can only work a few hours a week. Because of this, I firmly feel that this Directive will negatively impact on women who are mothers more than any other type of entrepreneur out there.

 

In short, this new ruling will be devastating for many people already in business who are not yet making the kind of money to be able to afford to register for VAT. And worse still, it sets the barrier to entry to business very high, which is likely to put off a lot of potential entrepreneurs – especially women who want to start a business on maternity leave and grow it slowly while their kids are young.

So. What to do (besides contacting one’s TDs or MPs or MEPs and trying to get them to bring what pressure to bear on this situation that they can, and signing petitions to help get this issue up onto the mainstream radar)?

Obviously Ebooks Direct — which is based in Ireland — is going to be affected by this situation, and there are a number of things that have to happen before Peter and I come to a decision as to whether we can continue running an online business at all. We have to crunch some numbers from the last few years’ sales to determine exactly what percentage of our sales come from inside the EU, to determine whether it makes most sense to simply stop selling into the UK and other EU countries. We have to talk to our accountants to figure out which of the ways to register for MOSS would be most logical for us, should we decide to go that route. (You can either register with your own home country — who collects all the VAT you collect from EU sales and passes them to the other VAT authorities concerned — or register individually with each of the EU countries into which you’ve sold digital items.) We have to have a talk with the people who run our present shop platform, Shopify, to find out exactly what changes they’re getting ready to enable in the platform to help their EU sellers keep doing business. If they won’t have VATMOSS support in place in time, we’ll also have to start investigating other platforms to see if they’ll have measures in place, for time is getting short. And then finally — like many others in our position — we’re going to have to look at whether compliance is going to make sufficient inroads into our creative time, our actual work as writers, for us to be forced to decide it’s simply not worth it to try to keep running a digital business at all.

Meanwhile, like many other digital booksellers, and as in previous years, we’re having a Cyber Monday sale at Ebooks Direct. (In fact, it’s already on.) If you see something in our store that you like the look of, it seems only sensible to say that this would be a good time to buy it. First, well, it’s a sale, and everything’s 50% off. 🙂  But also — depending on the answers we get from our accountants and so forth — after January 1, you may not be able to buy ebooks directly from us any more. Our store’s continuation is not a “given.”

And this goes not just for us, but for our many other colleagues online, both in Europe and elsewhere in the world, who’re involved in digital startups of one kind or another: they too will suffer. So will our fellow authors who’ve been delighted to find a customer base online for books from their backlists — ebooks their publishers haven’t been interested in bringing out — but now may be forced to abandon that very welcome income stream due to an unclear and unnerving regulatory burden. (Unlimited fines? Really??)

I urge you, whether you’re in Europe or not, to find out how the VAT MOSS issue will affect you (because if you buy digital goods from anyone but the biggest European companies, it will) and to take action now to help — among many others — the authors whose work you enjoy. Follow the #VATMOSS or #VATMESS tags on Twitter, and help get the hashtags trending: sign the online petitions to uphold the present small-business-protecting VAT threshold in countries that have them (such as the UK): on platforms like Tumblr, reblog this post and others like it when they come up: and just plain talk to other people online and off about what’s happening.

And for your assistance in this, thanks in advance, from both of us.

November 30, 2014
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Phasers
Cool wordsLanguageObscure interestsOnline lifeStar TrekWords and usage

Cripes, I’m cited in the Oxford English Dictionary

by Diane Duane September 9, 2014

That’s my year made.

From the Online OED:

phaser, n.

2. Science Fiction. A weapon producing destructive laser or similar beams (of variable phase); spec. a (usually hand-held) device whose output can be varied to produce different effects on a target (as stunning, annihilation, etc.). Also in extended use and in figurative context.First used in the U.S. television series Star Trek.

1966   G. Roddenberry Memo 26 Apr. in S. E. Whitfield & G. Roddenberry Making of ‘Star Trek’ iii. i. 272   Reference the mating of various components of the phaser weapons..when the hand phaser is mated to the pistol, they should appear as one weapon.

 

1967   Pop. Sci. Dec. 73/2   The main weaponry of the Enterprise is its banks of ‘ship’s phasers’,—artillery-size versions of the hand phasers and phaser pistols carried by the crew. These weapons are, of course, refinements of today’s familiar lasers.

 

1978   D. Bloodworth Crosstalk xxxiii. 256   The USAAF had brought down the first unmanned plane with a laser, and..had..been thinking in terms of light, chemically-operated versions that could be phased together… ‘Phasers?’ ‘Phasers. Right.’

 

1984   D. Duane My Enemy, my Ally vi. 85   Mr. Chekov, arm photon torpedoes, prepare to lock phasers on for firing.

 

1995   THIS Mag. July 21/2   His oddly reserved nature stands out… Whyte sets his phaser on stun, not kill. In print and in person, he usually gives a nod to his opponents before letting fly.

 

2000   Personal Computer World Dec. 481/2   The phaser rifle..easily vaporises most opponents in a spectacular orange echoey screaming fashion with a single shot.
…I get quoted often enough. (Normally in connection with potato chips.) But to be cited in the single reference that I use more than any other?*
Yeah. 🙂
*And to find out about it on International Literacy Day? There’s a certain pleasure in that too.
September 9, 2014
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"Disk boot failure..."
Computer stuffHome lifeIrelandOnline lifethings that piss you offUncategorized

Hardware issues

by Diane Duane June 5, 2014

image

Those of you who may remember the above image from a week and a half or so ago might be curious about how things have been progressing.

Briefly, not real well.

(Inserting a cut here (on the Tumblr side) to shield the eyes of innocent onlookers from the discussion of painful technical issues. The tl;dr version: My big work computer is screwed, I’m going to be fixing it for days, I will be cranky while this happens, my apologies in advance for an anticipated decrease in cheerful posts. (sigh))

Having tried everything one normally tries inside the case when a drive has non-noisily failed — swapping power and data cables around, checking everywhere for loose or dirty connections, fiddling with the BIOS (insofar as I dare to… I don’t like messing with the BIOS: there is nothing more pathetic and annoying than a motherboard you fried yourself), I then turned to out-of-case remedies and ordered in a SATA drive enclosure (we needed one anyway…) so that I could test the drive using a USB connection and find out whether any data could be reclaimed from it at all.

So yesterday the enclosure arrived. (Along with a Seagate 3-Tb external drive for backing things up from now on.) Very nice, too: sleek design, pretty. With due care the failed drive was put into it and powered up.

Nada. (Or as I originally just typed, Dana, which as Irish people will tell you is another thing entirely. )

So the situation is as follows:

(a) I now have a failed boot drive that will have to be sent off for data recovery in a clean room. What diagnosis I can perform at this end suggests that the failure was very likely electronic (drive board chipset failure, a short, etc etc) rather than mechanical, which is about as good as the news gets at this end: probably the disk platters will not have been damaged. Nonetheless this is going to be annoying and expensive to recover from.I haven’t actively started soliciting quotes yet, but my best guess suggests that if I get away with paying as little as €500 for recovery, I should count myself lucky. It could be double or triple that. (sigh) I will also have to spend a while wondering whether it’s worth sending the thing off for recovery at all, as I have no definitive list of What Used To Be There to compare against What’s there Now in the files restored from backups. (See  (b).) I think I know. But then I thought the backups were complete and that most important program installs had been done to the 1Tb F: drive.

Gaaaah.

(b) While there are fairly recent backups of C: drive material (the most recent was May 18th, [heavyirony] whoopee, happy birthday to me [/heavyirony]), they are not as complete as I wish they were: some directories in the C: drive that should have been tagged for backup were not. (Mea culpa, mea bloody maxima culpa.) Some of them are/were quite important, like my installation of Dragon Naturally Speaking, Scrivener and so forth. Now, these can be reconstructed: in almost all cases I still have, or can quickly recover, the original installation media / files. But doing so, weary piece by piece — including in some cases having to install original files and then their upgrades, one after another — is going to take days of time that I really wish I didn’t have to spend right now. (While I am also busy finishing a writing project.) Ah well.

(c) The backups that did restore haven’t quite settled in at the W7 system end. In particular, user profiles from the old installation, though their files are all there, have not re-manifested themselves in W7 as yet… so that desktops are MIA/unavailable, and everything has to be searched for before it can be used or worked on. (And if the profiles don’t come back after a few reboots, I’m going to have to start working out how to make them come back. Oh joy. The Descent Into The Registry: “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” Gaaaaaaah x2.)

…So. Those of you who follow me may find me a little less forthcoming with posts than usual for the next 3-5 days, and if my tone sounds a little strained when I do post, you’ll know why Please bear with me until I get this mess as sorted as as it can get in the short term.

Thank you. 🙂

This was crossposted from DD’s tumblr http://ift.tt/1pHE23c, where it was published on June 05, 2014 at 11:18AM

June 5, 2014
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40 years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV/movies, NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Young Wizards series, 1983-2020 and beyond; Middle Kingdoms series, 1979-2019. And now, also: Proud past Guest of Honour at Dublin2019, the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.

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