Working my way slowly through Larionov's autobiography (conveniently called "Larionov" for those willing to dig through the WAY out of print to find it). It's really interesting, will be an excellent beach read if it ever OMG stops raining!! <.>

But seriously the title of this book is slightly misleading. It should be called "Larionov: I F*CKING HATE YOU VIKTOR TIKHONOV!!!" because so far that seems to be 90% of the content. Hahahaha ... poor Igor, well it was written in 1990 I can't say I blame him for being bitter.

Some other random thoughts:

+ Nice to have confirmation on some details I more or less guessed at for SiR. I got lucky :) Should have hunted this book down before, it is LOADED with interesting information.

+ Larionov has REALLY weird ummm ... opinions about nutrition. He writes about trying to help Vladimir Krutov lose weight by fasting, which is frankly a horrible way to slim down @_@ He also says he frequently starved himself to recover from hockey injuries because apparently (he thinks) starvation encourages the body to heal faster. Ummmm... whaz?

+ He does go into Soviet Hockey and steroids, describing in detail exactly how they were given and exactly how the USSR cheated the screenings in the Olympics and international competitions. Of course, he claims every one who was (at the time of publication) a current NHL player was totally clean and refused the injections ... I find this um, kind of ridiculously convenient?

Nevertheless, those of you who have read King of Russia (which I may make another attempt at finishing this summer.... maybe ... well I can dream can't I?) will recognize the descriptions, indicating that perhaps this is still going on. Which is ... scary and sad, but not entirely surprising either

+The translation is not great, and also in British English which is annoying me to no end. Also a little odd consider that one of the "co-authors" of the original edition (in Russian?) is a Canadian journalist, you would think they would have tapped him to edit the translation instead of this Lawrence Fowler guy would doesn't seem to get that the bulk of the English reading audience for this would be Canadian/American and probably don't understand what "a row" is ... and also that this is a horribly constructed sentence in any version of the language:

"He suggested new ideas to the senior coach, without whose supervision perhaps only the cook on the base worked."

UGH!

+ Also I know they want to keep it in Larionov's tone, but the organization of the story could have been better. Larionov keeps digressing into other stuff (mostly his feelings for Viktor Tikhonov lol) in the middle of stories which makes it really quite confusing to keep things straight. Some basic fact checking would have been nice too, Mogilny did not defect BEFORE Sergei Priakin signed as Pat Burns suggests

+ It's interesting how incestuous (or maybe just small) the hockey world is. Larionov had a good relationship with Vladmir Vasiliev and a tentative agreement to play for his team (Larionov's home town) if the Soviets should try to stop him from joining the NHL. Vasiliev was the Soviet coach behind the bench for that infamous 1987 World Junior game between Canada and USSR that ended in a full out brawl. One of the Canadian coaches: the GM of the Canucks who signed Larionov, Pat Burns. Of course half the players in that game seemed to end up on the Detroit Red Wings ... so I wouldn't say significant, just interesting how the same names pop up over and over and over again.

Therefore NOTHING productive will get done! :D

I have to plug this (sorry!) if you, like me, love to discover new music you need to sign up for the Popcuts account right now! Popcuts is an online music store stocked with lots of indie and lesser known artists (it's particularly good if you like hip-hop or ambient/techno/etc) but unlike a conventional music store you get rewarded for spotting a good tune first.

You see Popcuts revenue shares with their users, so say you download Don Rimini's Hools (awesome track BTW I literally cannot stop listening to it @_@) for every person that downloads it after you, you get .02 worth of store credit, which means if you are one of the first to download a REALLY good song you rack up enough store credits to get free music easily without really doing anything except having good taste.

This can get wicked fun if you download a whole bunch of songs and just let the points add up. Plus they've just started to get more established artists on the site (I'm a big fan of Benny Strange, Carla Bruni is there, Amelia is there... oh and Santogold is there too)

So check it out

So today is Wednesday (YAY!) which means of course a fabulous new chapter of Ugly Little Communist House (go read!)

I've been doing some thinking about the future of ULC (for those of you lost, ULC = that series that is not SiR hahaha) and I think the series will definitely be going on hiatus for a bit after Chapter 13 is finished (so ... next week basically) just not for the reasons I originally thought we would put it on hiatus. As I was preparing this week's chapter to be published I realized that the next few chapters deal with events surrounding CHRISTMAS and as much fun as "Christmas in July" may sound, people do not want to read about snow and bitter cold while they're on the beach. So I think we will be putting the series on hiatus until the summer is over.

Writing about a hockey team in the off season is ONE THING, writing about a blizzard in 90 degree sunshine is something completely different.

There are a couple of advantages to doing this. One is that we've done a crap job of marketing ULC and this gives us time to catch up on that. I guess I shied away from really reaching out to potential readers on this one because I've always felt self-conscious about ULC. Because the writing style is so abrupt and so thin, I've always worried that it's just not good enough. Well I'm getting over that, but it will take some time to build a market for it.

Also we have new stories (!) and projects scheduled to start July/August. I am VERY pleased to say that I topped 30 finished pages on Split-Self today and 17,000 words in the draft. Our goal is to hit 50 pages before we start publishing because that will give us roughly 5 weeks of updates. Hopefully I will hit this mark mid-July. I'm REALLY pleased with Split-Self actually. I'm really proud of it. I think it might actually be better than SiR in many ways, so hopefully when it's ready to go you will all agree with me :D

The second thing coming is "HyperLocal: story scavenger hunts", the pilot program will be launching this August and hopefully will bring us lots of success and lots of new members :) What is a story scavenger hunt you ask? Well it's a text message (SMS) based game where players have to solve clues from their local area to collect the next piece of the story. So for example, one day a clue might be "What can you buy for $5.43 at Antonio's Restaurant?" and before you can grab the next part of the story you have to run down to Antonio's and find the answer, text it to us and if you're right the website will text back automatically with the next 160 characters of the story.

Obviously, it's just an excuse to run around like a lunatic solving riddles in the summer :) We're preparing clues to direct players to historic places, cool odd stores, little cafes and restaurants that they may not know about all over the city.

Anyway, the pilot will be running in NYC this August so keep your eyes open for it. If it is successful we'll be expanding gradually, more stories, more cities. But first we have to get through the pilot!!

It probably won't surprise you but nobody makes a good living on Google's Adsense program. Or rather, the only people who make a good living on AdSense are the AdSense executives. But we're aiming to make just enough money in the coming months to at least cover SOME of our expenses.

Anyway, every now and then AdSense's generic ads load up truly amusing interpretations of who the fluffy-seme reader is and what they want:

I'm not even sure how one "Compares Prices" on the fall of the Soviet Union? Did Yeltsin get the best deal? Can other would be empires get discounts on their ultimate social collapse?

The world may never know.... 

Feeling a little frustrated and blue :(  And it occurred to me while eating sympathy pizza and watching Amazing Wedding Cakes (shut up) that Martin really is closer to an Anti-Hero than a traditional Hero.

[Spoilers for the Newest Stuff in Season in the Red ... go read now if you haven't! Don't read this! XD]

[Okay, warned you...]

See in the original draft of SiR Martin was not the main character, but the original draft (started in 2005 or so) was a HORRIBLE HORRIBLE piece of writing and I only got about 30 pages into it before I just could not deal with that anymore. There were some pieces of it that I really truly loved (for example the Paintball scene) but there were more pieces that I really truly hated. The main character was the narrator which I hated MOST OF ALL. I thought it was contrived, Mary Sueish and just on whole unbelievable and BAD. (I still worry the narrator is a bit contrived actually...)

Well about a year ago I start retooling the first draft to create a second draft that hopefully did not suck. So the first order of business was to pick a new main character. I couldn't completely remove the narrator from the story without completely rewriting everything, so as you've probably noticed SiR goes through these periods where the narrator is almost omniscient and periods where she is obviously describing things she's either directly observed or taken part in. I actually ended up liking this effect quite a lot, since SiR itself deals with the modern sports media machine and its role in "creating news" a bit. it's a nice touch I think. The narrator thinks she is an "objective" observer merely telling the story, but actually at several points in the story itself she gets involved in such a way that changes the course of events. In the end she's in no way an objective observer nor is she really a true participant.

Anyway, I still needed a main character ... so I looked at the list and picked the one I liked to best: Martin. In truth, the final version of Martin's character is like the evil twin to his character in the first draft. Initially Martin was a very minor character whose part in the story just kind of kept growing because I enjoyed writing him, but essentially he was sweet wide-eyed fish out of water. That's it. I liked the idea that he didn't really fit in anywhere and that he was the kid who got babied a lot. I especially liked his occasional moments of sarcasm.

But being a minor character is different from being a major character. Readers tend to think in cliches, so you have to make sure the elements of the major characters are appropriately balanced or else they'll be pigeon holed. If that happens then the story has nothing interesting or compelling to offer readers, because they are already convinced that they've already read this story, they know who these people are and where it's going. You could be the best technical writer in the world, but if your characters aren't at least a little mysterious the story is not going to work.

So the trouble with Martin was that ... I liked this idea of Martin being small (the ridiculous thing is that Martin is 6'1" and around 175lb ... not really all that small), I liked the idea that it didn't matter how GOOD he was at hockey if people kept going 'oh he's too small to play'. I REALLY liked the idea of him in fact not having superstar level talent and going through several rounds of failure and obstacles before he finds his place. Stories of extremely talented people bore me, I liked the idea that Martin is talented and legitimately NHL level talented but NOT a future Hall of Fame candidate. Unfortunately, when you have a character who is small, young and goes through a lot of shit the first instinct of readers is to either infantilize him or completely emasculate him. He becomes either an innocent child or a damsel to be saved ... and obviously you don't want that. So it was necessary to make Martin's character much more severe in order to give the story a more balanced feel.

In a way Martin is still sweet and wide-eyed, but that sarcastic streak has turned into an undercurrent of cynicism, hostility, and maybe just general bitchiness that I also find REALLY appealing. He's also become indecorously pragmatic to the point where he is able to completely and totally sell out the one person who has done nothing but try to help him.

Martin is able to justify what he did to Alex by telling himself that Alex does not care where or with whom he plays. These things are important to Martin though, he wants a roster spot and he's losing his roster spot. So he figures that if unflattering information comes out, the organization will trade Alex and then Martin will get what he wants and Alex will be no worse off for it. After all it's not like Alex cares what people think right?

The funny thing is, Martin's not sorry. He will never be sorry, even if he realizes that Alex is not quite as callous as he assumes HE STILL WON'T BE SORRY. If he had to do it all over again, he wouldn't make the same decision of course but not because he feels guilty about it, but because it didn't work. He didn't get what he wanted. I sort of dig that aspect of his character, he's practical in this particularly brutal way ... like the Nazis were practical even, and yet (I think) you still want to see him succeed.

Here's something interesting. Our traffic for yesterday (Wednesday) was comparable for our traffic levels on Saturdays (our peak days, otherwise known as the day SiR comes out). This has never happened before and I'm still trying to figure out exactly WHY it has. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth here but... hmmm...

Edit: Okay ... apparently we are getting some overflow traffic from the StumbleUpon campaign. This is interesting, I'm definitely going to have to blog about this campaign in more detail soon

Ugly Little Communist House has been updated. If you're not reading this you should definitely check out this chapter because I think it's among the best in the whole work. ULC is a heartbreakingly sweet, funny story ... yet I've had in the past (and continue to have now) troubles getting it updated on time simply because it has not found its niche of readers yet :/

SiR has a strong enthusiastic niche of fans who, even through they've gone silent now that they cannot comment via livejournal anymore, we can see logging in every week, some checking the site multiple times, for the new piece of SiR. I look forward to updating it every week ... probably more now that the fans DON'T post comments anymore, because every week I wonder if THIS IS THE CHAPTER that's going to have the plot twist that forces people to click the "reply" button (so far no luck, maybe I'll have Alex suffer a tragic, messy, skate sharpening accident.... hahaha).

ULC on the other hand ... well we just don't know how to market it :/ So it's beginning to feel like a 'if a tree falls in an empty forest' concept. If we don't update will anyone even notice?

Writers may write for themselves, but any writer who tells you they don't care about feedback when they publish something is a liar. You publish something to express it to others, if there is no "others" there is no point to publishing. So I'm not sure what we're going to do with ULC if it continues to be unable to draw even the tiniest of readership ... we may put it on indefinite hiatus so that the time can be focused on other works that CAN draw a readership :/ :/ :/  And this is a difficult thing because I really do think it's unbelievably awesome story regardless.

God... StumbleUpon Ad function is the most interesting and innovative program I've ever seen, but if they are going to insist on having every campaign reviewed by an actual person before being activated could they at least have people with IQs above 3 do it? We keep submitting to campaign in categories that fit our content: hockey, travel, etc. And keep getting rejected because ... I dunno the site isn't plastered with hockey players, sticks and pucks I guess?

So they've rejected Ugly Little Communist House for a "travel" section but have approved it for "Communism"? ULC, for those that do not read it, is a Kerouacian style story of expat Americans living and teaching English in the Czech Republic. Other than historical asides and descriptions it has almost NOTHING to do with Communism and everything to do with living abroad, sightseeing, cultural exchange, etc etc etc. In short TRAVEL. So why is it approved for one category but not the other? Because "Communist" is in the title? Should we change the title to "Ugly Little TRAVELING Communist House"?

Well, we're going to go ahead with round two of StumbleUpon anyway and see what happens. They have FINALLY figured out that Season in the Red as a story about a HOCKEY TEAM might fit in the HOCKEY section ~_~ Let's see if the conversion rate improves this time around.

If not I may be forced to conclude that StumbleUpon is a very expensive way of padding your Alexa rating, and not much else :/

So expanding the blog function a bit here. Now in addition to the character blogs, I'm also going to be posting little previews/teasers of whatever I'm writing now, stuff about site development and the occasional thought that is too long for Twitter :)

We launched a Stumble Upon campaign this week. Basically things are going well with the site in general but we've run into a couple of road bumps we did not plan on having :/ The first is traffic levels, we get basically all our traffic on one day (Saturday when SiR updates) and little bits of traffic throughout the week. This is connected to another problem I didn't anticipate having which is moving our fanbase for SiR off livejournal and onto this site. I can't stress enough how inappropriate SiR was on livejournal the way it was. It was kind of one of those things where you know eventually someone is going to call you out on it. SiR is not slash, and is fictional. It is happily slashable, but it was still sort of inappropriately loitering in communities designed for other things. So it had to be moved.

Well now it's moved and a great deal of people have followed it here, but the move has been a difficult transition for me because the cross-posting to livejournal was just so much damn FUN :D and I miss it.

The Stumble Upon campaign caused a traffic explosion, but it (so far) has not been quality traffic. I'm going to fiddle with a parameters somewhat and see if we can get a better conversion rate turning hits to quality visitors.

But ultimately >.< this is really frustrating. Obviously good communities do not just appear overnight, but I never imagined it would be THIS difficult to even get it started.

Anyway, Hockey Objectification Squad needs to be updated BADLY :D The off season has bought all the fun naked pictures with it, so I've got a backload of goodies a mile long

We are the number one hit for "Marc-Andre shirtless" incidentally O.o 

Not a hockey player but rather amusing, Michael Phelps has horrible facial hair:

I thought swimmers were supposed to shave to make themselves faster? :D