Another Brief Hiatus

After a year-long odyssey of drugs, therapy, injections & imaging, I’ve finally scheduled back surgery for later this week — a double spinal fusion. I’ve been assured my golf game will not suffer much, which is great news because it’s been suffering mightily for about 30 years. I want to say to all who have written or posted comments over the past year that I really, really appreciate your kind words of healing & encouragement. I’m especially grateful for all the success stories, since that’s where I see myself once I’ve gotten the recovery & rehab behind me. I haven’t entered this decision lightly, and I made sure to put myself in the best possible hands. If you can spare a warm vibe for patience & restraint, please send it telepathically to my partner Jenny. If you’ve met her, you already know she’s a saint.

I don’t know how long it’ll be before I feel like logging on again, so I hope you don’t forget about Mother Load, which will be released October 19th by Bella Books. I just proofed the final typeset galley and send it off for printing, which means everything is on schedule. The ebook will probably be available a week or so early.

[UPDATE: The surgery went just fine, the post-op pain was everything they promised and more <g> and I’m now back at home making progress every day in terms of walking around and gaining some in-home independence. I’m still a long way from getting out & about, but give me another month or so. My goal is to make it to Opening Night of this season’s Miami Heat at the American Airlines Arena downtown on Oct. 29. Thank you for all the encouraging notes & good wishes.]

Speaking of ebooks, there has been a lot of discussion recently among authors about the problem of ebook piracy. It’s affecting all of us, whether at Bella, Spinsters, Bold Strokes, Intaglio, Regal Crest, Blue Feather, Bywater, Phoenix Rising & Brisk … like I said, all of us. We try to alert one another whenever we find someone’s ebooks posted on filesharing sites, and we’re working together to post take-down notices and report copyright violations to site owners. You may not realize that getting an ebook taken down from a filesharing site is a major, major hassle for the authors, and it isn’t always successful. Even when it is, the books usually pop up again within hours. Authors are growing more discouraged every day, and some even say it’s affecting their desire to write. Most of these thieves don’t view what they do as theft, because to them an e-file isn’t really a “thing” since it doesn’t cost anything to reproduce. The cost however is in lost sales, and those add up pretty quickly when people start trading one $12 ebook around to their circles of friends and/or torrent sites. From a technical standpoint, there isn’t much we can do to prevent these thefts of our work. Our only real line of defense is to ask our readers to help us push back, to have the courage to say “No thanks” not only to the anonymous filesharers, but even to friends who think it’s no big deal to send out copies of their ebooks. Tell them you respect copyright and prefer to buy your own. If we don’t find a way to beat this back, I’m afraid we’ll lose a lot of lesbian voices who write especially for us.

I’m still working out the story details for my next project, but I’ve settled on a name: Rhapsody. Best to all, and I’ll be back to blog as soon as I can.