1) Amazon has stopped selling the hard copy version of A Sane Woman. Which is not that surprising (nobody was buying it). The peculiar thing was that it was on sale there in the first place.

I had originally started to do print-on-demand with CreateSpace, partly because they are owned by Amazon and I thought that would be helpful. But their customer service was so dismal that I jumped to Lulu. So, I figured I wouldn't get on Amazon, but that was okay. I'm not trying to sell a lot of books.

But then it appeared on Amazon anyway, I don't know why. And now it's gone again. Weird.

As I've said before, I'm not going to do an e-book of ASW because I'd rather my first e-book be something more current., but I did just spruce up the e-book-ready HTML version, which is available here. If you have an e-reader, just download this and transfer it to your device, and you'll be ready to read it.

2) I've been thinking about Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny. I've had a note for a while to write about it, and that I should link back to the post on Maggie's blog which had started me thinking about it, but now I can't remember which post it was. (Memo to self: write better notes.)

The point was that writers often get locked into focusing their efforts on a specific genre, a specific style, a specific audience and market, rather than occasionally letting things go and seeing where they end up. As an analogy, sometimes musicians work on songs, but sometimes they just jam, and the jamming can get you to some things that you won't get to the other way. And sometimes it won't get you anywhere, and that's cool, too.

I wrote about Creatures of Light and Darkness in a series called "The Ten Pillars of Modern Literature," which started in the novel U-town and then appeared in other places until it had (IIRC) more than ten entries. I'm gradually posting the entries here (not very systematically – I keep getting distracted). The ones I've posted already were Dhalgren and The Time of Your Life, so today I've added Creatures of Light and Darkness.

3) Speaking of three, I saw a post on Yahoo recently about romantic triangles. One thing that was striking was that the person who wrote it clearly didn't understand the concept of a "romantic triangle" (Bella and the boys? Yes. Camelot? Yes. Harry, Hermione, and Ron? No. Blomkvist, Salander and Berger? No – the geometry is far more complicated than that; Berger is married and the other two both have other lovers).

But it also made me think of the predictability of romantic triangles, which made me think of the comic book Secret Six, where a romantic triangle was resolved by Scandal Savage marrying both of her lovers. The book was about to be canceled, which is probably how they got away with a three-way gay marriage. But why not? Vicki Cristina Barcelona was another example.

So, that's today's writing challenge. The next time you have a romantic triangle in a story, try thinking beyond the obvious. 🙂

More of Stevie One is posted. This is the ending of Part Four and the beginning of Part Five. The new parts start here.