Food porn

Via pecunium, a blog post on the crystallisation science behind making fudge. The recipe the blogger links to is possibly not of great relevance to the .uk people, as it's American and thus involves corn syrup, but the post itself is well worth a read:

http://www.headblender.com/joe/blog/archives/2005/02/

ETA: Oh, and pecunium's recipe for an oxtail galantine, which I will link here so that I don't lose it.

http://pecunium.livejournal.com/281882.html

paperwork

It's royalty statement day. I didn't notice last month because I didn't look at the total that included the Fictionwise sales, but a second title is now over 1000 copies sold (God knows how many pirate copies there are out there, but that's the number I got actual money for). Another probably will be by the end of the year. Small press numbers, but definitely respectable small press numbers.

Just received the formal renewal offers from Loose Id for First Footer in A Kiss At Midnight, and Spindrift 2: Ship to Shore. The wonders of the modern age are such that these have arrived four days after I posted the new contracts back to the Nevada office. I actually got the renewal offer and a pdf of the current contract by email last week, but to be official it has to be sent by snail mail as well. :-)

When LI first started, the contracts followed EPIC guidelines on renewal, and said that renewal had to be by formal written offer/acceptance by both parties. There's a good reason for that guideline, but once they got two years in and had to actually start dealing with renewals for multiple books per week, I suspect it rapidly became a paper-chasing nightmare. They've now switched to a system where the contract automatically renews on the anniversary date unless one or other party sends formal notice of termination. In the meantime, those of us on the old contract have to send in a new one as the old one expires.

In my case, that's been quite a lot of contracts to check, fill in and sign, especially when we get to the nice complicated ones like The Syndicate, where there are two authors, two of the ebooks published at different times were combined into a single print edition, and there was a completely separate contract for the print rights rather than the combined contract we have now. I'm sure treva2007 winces when she sees an email from me with the header "contract questions"... I haven't got my files to hand at the moment, but I *think* that this is almost the last of them, and Pulling Strings is the only one left on the old contract.

I think I've got a new sig line

In a conversation on IRC which was getting ever filthier in a literary fashion (as happens on that channel), Jedit to me:

Yes, but you are a perfect purveyor of perpetual perversion perpetration