First evening at Orycon — fun! It’s a small con in the nice Doubletree Hotel. I slogged through the Friday afternoon Seattle traffic (and I thought Friday afternoon to Vancouver, BC, was bad!), and what should have been a 2.5 hour drive turned into 4+ hours.

But make it I did, checked into my fleabag hotel, and walked over the Doubletree. Had a bite to eat, ran into a couple of people (including Dale Ivan Smith and Patrick Swenson), and then proceeded to the bar. Parties are up on the 14th floor. Arrived too late in the day to see any panels, but I intend to see Cat Rambo on an 11:00am panel this morning.

This weekend, I will be heading down to Portland for Orycon 33, the first time I’ve been to Orycon. Don’t know much about the con, but I plan to be there spreading the word about Hydra House.

And I will have ARCs! Advanced Review Copies of K.C. Ball’s “Snapshots from a Black Hole & Other Oddities,” which is due out in late January, 2012. So if you’re a reviewer, come and find me and I’ll make sure you get a copy.

Looking forward to it! Say hello if you see me.

What I mean is, we have new covers! But I’m sure there aren’t THAT many MST3K fans still lurking around that get my obscure little reference. (Are there?)

Recently we nailed down the final art for the two books coming up in the Spring. The first is the cover art for K.C. Ball’s “Snapshot from a Black Hole and Other Oddities,” done by the impeccable Christopher Sumption (http://www.chrissumption.com/):

Gorgeous, isn’t it? Chris did a fabulous job with this and we’re excited to have it on the cover of K.C.’s book.

The other one is the cover for the sequel to “Brigitta of the White Forest” by Danika Dinsmore, entitled “The Ruins of Noe”:

Also gorgeous, isn’t it? This cover was done by artist Julie Fain (www.juliefain.com) who is a fabulous artist! Check out other work by both of these fine artists.

And what’s that? You notice a theme with these covers? Maybe the RED COLOR?? Quite by accident. Wasn’t planned that way, but it’s just how both covers came out.

Stay tuned for more books to come next year from Hydra House!

On October 1-2, 2011, Hydra House and en theos press will have a booth at the newly reinvigorated Bookfest in Kirkland, Washington. You can find the information here: http://www.northwestbookfest2011.com/

Danika Dinsmore (“Brigitta of the White Forest”) will be there, teaching two workshops: one on creating Dystopian fiction, the other on creating Imaginary Worlds. J.D. Munro (“The Erotica Writer’s Husband”) will be on a panel called “Taboo: Crossing the Line – Sex and Sexuality in Literature” at 5pm on Saturday. Not sure where our booth will be, but you can bet we’ll be selling books and giving away chocolate!

Nice to see Bookfest making a comeback. Back about ten years ago, I was on the board of the Eleventh Hour Productions, which oversaw the Seattle Poetry Festival. We shared an office with Bookfest in that incarnation down in Columbia City (Seattle), and we all saw how much work those ladies put into Bookfest. So I sympathize with Sheryn Hara and the others in putting this event together. It’s not easy!

With a great deal of pleasure, we are pleased to announce the publication of speculative fiction short stories by West Seattle writer K.C. Ball entitled “Snapshots from a Black Hole & Other Oddities,” slated for release in November, 2011.

The book will feature twenty four stories, eighteen previously published and six of them brand new.

“Snapshots” is edited by Redmond author Cat Rambo, and features a kick-ass cover by Seattle artist Christopher Sumption. The plan is to launch the book at Orycon in November.

K.C.’s writing is snappy and cool, and marches the reader through some bizarre twists and turns before arriving at emotionally satisfying conclusions. She is a Writers of the Future winner and a graduate of Clarion West. She has been published in Lightspeed Magazine, Analog, Every Day Fiction, and Kasma, among many others.

We are very excited to be releasing K.C.’s book as the first official release of Hydra House. Watch for more great work to come from this author and many others.

Come out and see us this weekend at Foolscap in Redmond! We just found out a few days ago that both Danika and Tod will be sitting on panels there as well as reading on Saturday.

The gracious Patrick at Fairwood Press will be handling book sales for us, and there will be a few copies at Park Place Books, so if you haven’t got a copy of “Brigitta of the White Forest,” now’s your chance, and Danika will bring her special stamp along!

The schedules are:

Danika Dinsmore
Friday 4:00 PM Elk Why So Much Fantasy and So Little SF?
Saturday 5:30 PM ? Reading
Saturday 9:30 PM Canyon For Love and/or Money
Sunday 2:00 PM Canyon Writer Inspiration: What Inspires You to Write?

Tod McCoy
Saturday 8:00 PM ? Reading
Sunday 11:00 AM Alder New Paradigms for Creativity and Compensation?

Tod will have chocolate and wine at his, so come out and see him!

It appears I finally broke into the Apple store.

About two weeks after I got my EIN (by calling the IRS directly), during which Apple repeatedly told me the EIN was wrong and denied me, forcing me to click the resubmit button each time, I was approved. All I can figure is that my EIN finally went on file and Apple figured it out.

On to the next step.Uploading a book.

The software isn’t nearly as user friendly as you would think. There is step after unexplained step, forcing you to think real hard about what is expected. There’s one intermediate step that asks for metadata or a related ISBN or some such thing, and I finally just left that one blank and moved on. A couple of errors popped up with the EPUB, but those were easily fixed in Sigil. (Tweak Epub is what I use for the OPF errors.) Finally, after hoop after hoop on my new old Mac, it took.

What an ordeal.

HOWEVER. It’s been … I don’t know. Ten days? Still not approved. Just sitting in limbo. Granted, Apple SAID it would take ten days (seriously? ten days? for what? someone to read the book?), but I honestly didn’t think it would take that long.

So I wait patiently.

And wait.

iTunes is not even supposed to be that large of a market. If they really want to make it worthwhile for people to sell in, they better get off the stick, as it were. All this hoop jumping is ridiculous.

I got my email last week that my iTunes account had been approved! Yay! About time. I think the holdup was the fact that my EIN was brand new and not on file with the government yet. Took about two weeks. But at last, the first hurdle was gone.

On to the next hurdle. You get into your account, you accept the Terms and Definitions or whatnot, then you get to look at your dashboard. Flip through some instructions, download a PDF on how to proceed, and then download the iTunes Producer.

But wait … it’s not running. In fact, my computer doesn’t know what to do with it. Huh? What kind of file is that?

Search around, no instructions. None. Nothing to indicate why it’s not working. Search and search and search some more, all the while getting that sinking feeling that what you have is an Apple file that only runs on Apple computers. But do they SAY that anywhere?? No??

Finally you come across some references on other bulletin boards (MobiReads is a good one) where other people are complaining that iTunes Producer won’t run on anything but a Mac. Okay, then. I finally wasted two hours of time when a simple sentence would have fixed this: THIS FILE WILL ONLY RUN ON APPLE COMPUTERS.

So now I either have to buy a Mac or find a trusting friend who will let me borrow theirs.

Again, I am delayed in uploading my book.

I guess I can’t complain too much. Having worked for that OTHER big software company, I have to say we didn’t give much thought to making things work with Apple computers …

So, two weeks later and still no luck. No love from Apple with regards to getting into their bookstore, and no way of knowing just what the heck is going on. No number to call, to information posted by Apple, just an email address to an account that probably never gets checked. Argh.

Although I think I know what’s at the root of this. When I first applied, I used my SSN instead of an EIN — in most cases, especially for a sole proprietorship, that should be FINE. But for whatever reason, Apple didn’t like it and rejected my application.

So what I did was to pick up the phone and CALL THE IRS. Under most circumstances, people think that’s CRAZY. But it turned out to be a quick and efficient way to pick up an EIN right there on the spot! Now I have one.

I plugged it in to the Apple website and guess what? No love. Same thing. But the nice tax man said that it might take three weeks to get into the system before someone like Apple can verify it.

So now all I do is check that email account for the Apple rejection email, which contains a link to “try again.” I think every other day I do this. I re-enter my new EIN and wait for something different to happen.

Maybe someday soon my persistence will pay off.