Whaddya think of my idea for giving away all the backstory using a faux-Wikipedia look?  In case anyone’s curious.

Here’s the link: Black Tattoo.

I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet, and convert all of it to Django.  It’s actually quite a coup; it took me less than eight hours to do the whole conversion, and the site’s a hell of a lot easier to manage.  I mean, like insanely so.  I lost a bit of sleep putting this together, which isn’t healthy, but hey.  Anything for the fans.  A consistent sidebar is always a plus.

I should probably write a script to dump a single story as text, so I can edit it in my favorite editor, and then read it back in.

We’ll see if it all actually works when the Yowler stories automagically appear Friday morning, right?  Tests say they should, but time-based controls are hard to test correctly.  The stories are showing up in the sidebar of the home page, so that’s a good sign, but that’s just PHP getting the material out of the cross-database handler.  Tricky, but not the point.  The point is to publish!

So give it a bang, see what’s borked.  The media is being served out of the NginX front-end directly, routing around the Apache handler (which runs php and wsgi for me), so the only performance holes are the WSGI daemon and its calls to the database.

Real Artists Ship. I’m totally making that my mantra.

I created a setting: a cold corner of Discovery, the once-lovely world now turned into a post-apocalyptic mess by the sudden worldwide crash of its computational infrastructure.   A few AIs are left, and everyone’s trying to figure out how to reboot the planet without causing the crash a second time.  I had characters: the bitter but geekily brilliant Chelle, fourteen when the crash happened, now eighteen, who’s digging around in the most obscure places for defensively obsolecent technology that can be used to reboot small corners of the planet without risking another runaway.  Her best friend, The Nooj, a bit of a dork but loyal to Chelle.   A few other characters in a tight-knit group of “survivors” who have no idea how good they’ve got it compared to truly primitive people without heat or electricity.  Cy, one of the last few AIs, cold-hearted although he doesn’t mean to be.  It’s his lack of romantic emotionalism that saved him from the runaway.

The Corridor is standing off, afraid that what happened on Discovery is infectious: the very first Singularity Runaway in Pendorian history.  Everyone knew it was coming.  Discovery seemed like the last place it would happen.   Nobody knows what to do.

The basic plot is this: Chelle finds a Hunda Pest-Control Robot from the 25th century Terran CE while rooting around in a warehouse no one’s visited in centuries.  It’s made by the same company that made the “nursing unit” shells like Linia.  She also digs up an ancient drive case which contains a backup of Linia made shortly after she was deactivated but before she was crated up for shipment to Indigo 161-4.  (I have not yet found a credible excuse for how the backup made its way from Terra to Discovery.)  A little bit of playing and technogeekery and Chelle manages to find a blank robot brain that will emulate the full-sized Hunda OS, fit in the tiny doll body, and maybe work.

It doesn’t seem to, so she and Nooj leave to go find their friends and share a meal.

Linia wakes up.  Chelle and Nooj come back, find Linia walking around on the table, and hilarity ensues.

Only, it doesn’t. There’s no chemistry between Linia, Chelle and Nooj.  What Chelle wants is to get the world working; love is the last thing on her mind.  The Nooj wants Chelle’s body, but he doesn’t really quite understand why, being, y’know, barely out of his teens.  And Linia is in no physical condition to be a lover to either one of them.

Getting any two of these characters falling madly into bed is gonna be hard.

I even looked up the legal term that could be applied to Linia falling into Chelle’s hands: bona vacantia, or possibly thesaurus inventus, although the latter implies that Linia’s mind was left deliberately for someone to find.

Sure, I write science fiction and fantasy and pirate romances and now I’m writing contemporary alt history, but all of those are frames for the picture, and in the picture are two (well, usually two) people having sex. I tend to enjoy huge, ornate, justifying frames, sometimes to the point of having the full story, characterization and setting and so forth, be more important than the sex scene they frame. And sometimes, I just want to write a sex scene, and the frame is an excuse.

There are only so many different kinds of sex that people want to read. As most writers will tell you, sex scenes have a lot of heavy lifting to do. It has to do everything a normal scene does: reveal something about the character and/or the relationship, advance the story, and it has to arouse the reader. Writing erotica is harder than a mainstream sex scene because you start out with the sex as the main plot advancement. Erotica writers are left with a basic supply of plots and premises.

You can write stories about old loves trying something new, or discovering what makes something familiar really work, and whether or not that discovery improves or wrecks its pleasure. You can write about deceiving one lover with another, or both against each other.

Still, the most common form of erotica is that of new love. New love is fun, it’s confusing, it’s terrifying, it’s perplexing. New bodies to explore, new things to do. It’s a welcome theme for experienced lovers, to get past their jaded experiences of doing and grow into being part of a relationship. It can be fun to show the discord between one experienced partner and one inexperienced, to show how the more experienced can still learn something. And it can be fascinating to explore topics like late virginity, or the abandonment of life-long deliberate celibacy.

Even more-so, the strongest form of new love is young love. Adults, especially by the time they’ve reached their mid-30s, have learned to live with the disappointments of life, and have come to understand that every experience is tempered and comes with its own risks and rewards. Young people know nothing of that. Teenagers and young adults fumbling with one another, sometimes with book learning, often without. Guilty fingers in the back seat of Dad’s warp-capable shuttlecraft, or happy smiles from the dragon half of your family the day after your wedding. Playing with that kind of fire in innocence and ignorance is really powerful stuff for a writer.

I am not going to suggest that Karen Fletcher wrote anything at all like that.

Fletcher, aka “Red Rose,” was a furtive and occasional poster to the Usenet erotica writers hangout. I’d never read anything by her, and that’s probably because her self-selected story codes always tripped my kill-filters, which right away told me a lot about her imagination, if not her personality.

Fletcher has pleaded guilty to distributing obscenity. She didn’t have photographs. She didn’t do movies. All she did was write stories. Apparently vile stories involving the rape and murder of children. There’s no doubt that Fletcher has some kind of mental illness: she’s a shut-in, living behind locked doors, and her inability to deal with the outside world is certainly part of the reason she wrote rather such vile stuff.

There’s another case, Frank McCoy, who’s also in the same deep trouble for his own stuff. Several of McCoy’s stories, while not so thematically obsessive as Fletcher’s, were still in much the same channel. McCoy, I should add for disclosure, also hung out on the usenet erotica writers’ forum; he had his detractors, but he had a crackling sense of humor and he didn’t care much about what others thought. McCoy was apparently indicted for the crime of “potentially emboldening criminal activities,” according to the words of a prosecutor, although the actual charge is “transportation of obscene materials.” (Is it just me, or does “embolden” already belong on the list of words that will be verboten come 2009?)

But still, the fact that the U.S. Government has decided to go after fiction writers because they dared to show their stuff to others really bothers me. How is what they did any more abhorrent than the story of, say, the Friday the 13th series, a multi-billion dollar movie franchise the essential message of which was “If you want to have sex then you deserve to die?”

The prosecutor on the Fletcher case said that her writings were “more horrifying than any photographs or videos of child pornography which can be seen on the Internet.” You really have to question the man’s judgement: photos or videos involve, you know, real victims suffering somewhere in the world. (And that’s another thing; can our courts please learn to distinguish between actual victims and ordinary photos of individuals under the age of eighteen? Or even, photos with nobody in them?) The judge was equally over the top: “If anyone would have read the story and acted upon it, a little child could have suffered devastation that you would have had to live with for the rest of your life.” Has this judge been to a bookstore? Is he aware of just how many books out there use the threatened or committed assault of a child as a melodramatic point? Has the man even read Bill O’Reilly’s Those Who Trespass (1998), in which a drug dealer hooks two underage girls on cocaine, encourages them to have sex with each other, then has sex with each of them himself?

I’m not going to write about the sexual fumblings of pre-pubescents; I don’t think kids have them, really, and if they “play doctor” those experiences don’t really translate into the kind of complicated, adult tumble of emotions that I like to write about it. They just aren’t a worthy subject for the kind of writing I do.

But that doesn’t mean I feel safe. To the extent that the Feds are prepared to go after Fletcher and McCoy, they feel safe going after any writers who they feel is “emboldening” criminal activity. In Fletcher’s case, the “membership fee” to her website is balanced on the one hand as an attempt to keep her stuff out of the hands of minors with its depiction as a “for profit” endeavor. McCoy, like many on-line writers, gave his stuff away.

I’ve already deleted one directory of stories, The Ruse Angel series, about a robot that hunts down and neutralizes pedophiles; all the characters were well over the age of majority, but the topic and the way in which she did her job, well, let’s just say that while the story would have been a good fit for commenting on certain social trends (re: Japanese familial enclaves within a collapsing youth population against an adult male population rife with dysfunctional violent sexual imagery) it wouldn’t have been appropriate in the current political climate. Yes, I have self-censored.

Let’s face it: Fifteen-year-olds have sex. Writing about it is a valid topic. You can’t show the excitement, the confusion, the embarrassment, the pleasure and the disappointment (“That was it?”) of joining the sexualized adult world without showing the scene. Often, it’s a disaster. Sometimes, like in real life, it actually works out okay. Maybe not great, but okay. A learning experience, and one worth pondering.

People worry about the “defining down” of deviancy. I worry about that as well, but I also worry about defining it up, too: once they’ve bagged Fletcher and McCoy, maybe they’ll go after the writers at Camp Crystal Lake, maybe they’ll go after Bill O’Reilly, and maybe they’ll come after me.

I also fixed the CSS a lot, tightening up lists and so forth, and edited the ‘calendar’ image into a PNG with proper alpha channel work.

I actually spent most of the morning working on some banner graphics for Tina’s site, mostly for her people to put elsewhere.

Now I guess I gotta add more content, ne?

I started with a couple of different things I knew what I wanted to do: I wanted my photo on the header, I wanted the right sidebar to be big and to be mostly about my stories, so most of the blogging administrivia of other websites belonged more in the footer than anywhere else. The blog should be on the home page; the old view was wimpy.

I took my inspiration from a lot of different places. An old site about yachting that’s no longer around provided the template for what the header should look like, but I did my own textures and colors. The orange and blue came from the uniforms of the “soldiers of the future” in the video game Lost Odyssey. The photograph work was all my own. The torn and stressed paper background came from CG Textures, as did the leather texture I used in the header.

The PHP layout started life as Elements of SEO and quickly warped, with contributions from PersonalMag and Hemingway adding ideas for column control and footer design, although I wimped out and didn’t do the hard-core PHP stuff found in Hemingway, but instead wrote it simple.

But the big deal is the right-hand column. It contains hand-coded SQL for an entirely different database: The stories database. What does this buy me? Just about everything: the power to add series whenever I want, the ability to put stories up at will and have them show up on schedule, without my having to hand-control them. As long as the HTML document contains a comment field with the right metadata (which is stripped out before deployment, so you’ll never even see it), a little script entitled ‘add story’ will automagically create an entry in the database, and all the SQL in the system will automagically make those stories show up in the correct series’s index when their time comes (bwahahahah!). Or at least the pubdate is now or earlier. All of the indices are driven off one MySQL table.

The price of this was, sadly, having to wrap all my story deployments in an executable. It’s not as non-performant as I feared, and it seems to work pretty well. It would have been nice if I could have wrapped all of them into a single executable, but sadly that was not to be: the index engines for all of them are slightly different. Aimee and Bloody Beth are the same, but The Journal Entries are “special” (damn that date format!) and the Other Tales section has its own needs.

In the past week I have learned more than I ever thought I’d know about Ruby (but not Rails), PHP, the insides of Wordpress, the Gimp and using my Wacom pad, MySQL, configuring Apache’s RewriteEngine… holy moly, that was a lot of work. And my wrists are killing me.

There’s still some work to be done. I want to fix a few graphical ‘tics’ inside the Pendorwright Theme, add an “available in paperback” section, and so forth. Then I want to add to the stories sections themselves with some graphical work and fix those sidebars so they’re universal and look more like the one used by front page, which is why this is labeled ‘beta’. But it worked. Lessons to come.

I’ll be adding search capabilities and both plain text and PalmDoc versions of most of the content within the next month or so. The PDF collections for printing will take a little longer. I’m also hoping to categorize the stories according to arcs, so those of you who want to read only the Kitty stories, or the Aaden stories, or those featuring dragons, will be able to read what you want. I still encourage you to read everything– my ego demands no less!– but I also recognize the value in giving people what they want.

I hope you like the new site.