Elyse M Grasso

Retired. Fiber arts. Books. Spec Fic. Now writing and publishing SF&F. #nobridge

Occasional thoughts: emgrasso.dreamwidth.org
Author site: https://www.superiormagpiepress.com/
Heir of the Bindings: https://www.books2read.com/HeirOfTheBindings
Broken Oaths & Boundaries: https://books2read.com/BrokenOathsBoundaries

Public Key

npub1qx2r5x40rjtjazdv0q8udveza43p9gzw6sm58qj287hkq2sgzlgqyf3etr

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqr9p6r2h3e9ew3xk8sr7xkv3w6csj5p8dgd6rsf9rltmq9gyp05qpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds33vjf3

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1qx2r5x40rjtjazdv0q8udveza43p9gzw6sm58qj287hkq2sgzlgqyf3etr

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Last Notes

2026-08-30 04:06:48 UTC

#WordWeavers 30. If you could interview one of your characters over coffee, what would be the first question you asked?
I do not do this 4th wall breaking stuff, especially not for a question as foolish as this.
My characters live in my head, or I live in theirs: if there is something I need or want to know about them, I either know it already or will know it shortly.
That is not the same thing as suggesting that readers will ever learn all of the things I know about the characters.

2026-08-29 21:55:16 UTC

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If you want to make tomato sauce, the way my Nonna taught me (at this time of year) is to use a Vittorio strainer, which is a food grinder thing that ejects the pulp and juice one way and the seeds and skins another.
Quarter the whole tomatoes and leave them layered with salt in a cheesecloth lined peach basket over night to drain some of the water. Cook them until they are squishy (with some onions, celery, maybe a couple hot peppers), run them through the strainer, cook down more..

2026-08-29 13:59:02 UTC

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I have nothing to compare sales levels with... I published my first title in January 2025.
I noticed when I was researching indie publishing a few years ago that many of the recommendations for success were aimed at (or make sense for) people with deep backlists. I was a business owner before I retired, and I don't think the overhead of trying to sell entirely direct without the D2D publishing tools looks cost-effective for a very small number of titles. (I'm D2D + Amazon now).

2026-08-29 03:40:56 UTC

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I have thought about it and decided that
1) I wanted the 3 volumes of the trilogy to match in both ebook and paper and that was easiest to arrange if vol 3 was packaged in D2D, just as the first 2 were.
2)I am going to maximize the benefits I get for their admin fee. I think I will be paying less than $1 per channel: I'm pretty sure my time for doing all the admin myself would cost more.
I may think differently when the time that they bill me is closer (the emails said January).

2026-08-29 03:09:06 UTC

#WordWeavers 29. What writing accomplishment are you quietly proud of?
Finishing the trilogy and having some people say they liked the volumes they have seen.

2026-08-29 03:05:49 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 28 'Our next featured creator is a pun-slinger. Share a pun.'
Puns don't happen on demand for me.
29—At age 11, our TTMD guest answered 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' with 'Author.' Did you know what you wanted to be at 11?
Something related to science or computers, but not a teacher: possibly a librarian. (Librarian became more of a plan a few years later: a little ironic as I later switched from librarian to software engineer professionally.)

2026-08-29 02:37:54 UTC

#WordWeavers 28 What's one question you're still trying to answer about your story?
Which part of the story wants to be written next (since vol 3 of the trilogy is well into publication). And what the size and structure wants to be.
I've got pieces of both a later phase of Franz-Karl's story, and the Traveling Fast side-story, which is a slightly different cast, setting and genre within the same general world and might be a nice (or dark) change of pace.

2026-08-29 01:22:22 UTC

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Reports suggest that jail's 3 hots and a cot may not work well if you need specific meds on a specific schedule.

2026-08-28 18:01:43 UTC

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congratulations

2026-08-28 03:16:19 UTC

#WordWeavers 27 Which character would win a trivia contest?
They don't know our world, and largely lack the sort of informational commonality in their world that trivia contests imply.

2026-08-28 01:03:22 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 27 Tell a story, real or fictional, about an object on your desk/work area
I have an office with a desk where various supplies and equipment live, but my workspace is my living room, where the good sound system is... and the best view of the bird feeder and the mountains.
The bird feeder is currently broken: I woke up one day and looked out and the steel support pole was snapped.
There had been no violent weather. I suspect wildlife: possibly a bear or a family of raccoons?
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/117/170/395/359/692/624/original/44d7abaf1a0f7b09.jpg

2026-08-26 22:23:55 UTC

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We have a bunch of coal seam fires in Colorado, including a couple quite close to me. The power company tried to blame them for the Marshall Fire that burned my house.

2026-08-26 22:20:30 UTC

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Free ISBNs belong to the issuer. This may be a problem if your business relationship to the issuer ever changes. If you can afford them, buying your own (so your books are definitely registered as yours) may be safer.
That being said... The pricing of ISBNs in the US is stupid: I basically have a lifetime supply of ISBNs to use because that pulled the price per each into the sensible range.
Also I am a former librarian and fussy about cataloging data.

2026-08-26 21:56:21 UTC

#WordWeavers 26: What weather best matches your current work in progress?
Considering I live in a drought-stricken semi-desert, it's amazing how much time my characters spend afflicted by the more unpleasant sorts of rain and wind.
I'm sure there are other kinds of weather in the Elderkin Chronicles: the trilogy extends from spring to nearly autumn the following year, but what comes to mind is rain...
And Traveling Fast starts with rain and floods. (I may be in a rut.)

2026-08-26 21:37:26 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 26 Describe how it feels to be "locked in" to your work.
Which mode? There's the kind where you wake up in the morning knowing about a connection in the world or characters that feels like jigsaw puzzle connections, and the kind where part of the story falls out of your head into the computer and you look up and its a few hours later and the file is a thousand words larger.
There's also an editing trance mode, but that is rare enough that I don't know how to describe it.

2026-08-25 20:33:08 UTC

A volunteer cottonwood tree that is less than 2 years old, without watering, in a drought.
I have pictures from October and November 2024 that clearly show nothing growing on the spot where there is now a tree trunk sticking up out of the ground. It was only a sapling a few feet tall at the beginning of this growing season.
This is nuts: cottonwoods usually prefer streambeds. But the soil is thin on this ridge, with a layer of impermeable rock. I guess the roots found water and it took off.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/117/157/982/846/930/976/original/c5afeb0ff527432a.jpg

2026-08-24 17:49:25 UTC

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some developers had a quaint belief that just because a param was defined to accept one of three specific values, those were the only values that would ever show up.

2026-08-24 17:45:03 UTC

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When I did QA (about 40 years ago) I got some useful results by feeding unexpected/garbage values to every parameter of a complicated command... or threatening to: the tests were being developed in parallel with the code, so I would sit in meetings and say: and now I feed THIS param THAT value (which might be subtly out of range, or absolute gibberish) and the expected response is?
The dev response in the meeting was sometimes "Oops. Let me get back to you."
Requirement defs matter.

2026-08-24 05:55:39 UTC

#WordWeavers 24. Which chapter or scene took the longest to get right?
My writing process is fractal and non-sequential: there is text in the recent WIP that dates back to NaNoWriMo 2021. And some of it was tweaked 2 weeks ago, to harmonize with other changes made 3 weeks ago. But which segments Does. Not. Matter.
Every section takes as long as it takes... obsessing about it is just asking to be blocked.
Give the kaleidoscope a twist and see what the new pattern looks like. Write it down.

2026-08-13 06:08:50 UTC

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One major original purpose of ISBNs is inventory and distribution control. The whole point of an ISBN is that it is unique, AND worldwide, so that it reliably identifies an item with a specific set of traits (title, author, publisher, medium, edition or revision, etc.)Collision avoidance in assigning the numbers is vital. You absolutely do not want to have a system that might assign the same ISBN(equiv) to two different items. They had those before ISBNs were agreed to in the 60s. Thus ISBN

2026-08-11 14:40:20 UTC

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From what I remember of my ancient Library Science training, I'm not sure how a decentralized system would fulfill the functions that led to ISBNs being created in the first place.
And people maintaining it are going to need to maintain, store, update and verify large databases somewhere (" the cloud is other people's computers") so you are going to need some kind of mechanism to finance it all.
In the US, ISBNs are separate from copyright mechanisms already. ISBNs came out of publishing.

2026-08-07 02:20:33 UTC

#WordWeavers 7. What part of your world-building came together almost effortlessly?
Structural principles.
Actually, most of it flows pretty well except finding names for people and places. I know the way they work, but finding names that fit the patterns while being appropriately regional is a pain. (And there are so many of them! Even killing a bunch of them off doesn't really help: people still remember the names.)

2026-08-06 20:34:57 UTC

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I think credit unions are beneath the notice of the Epstein class. (My Visas are from credit unions)

2026-08-02 03:16:15 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 01: Choose an adverb to describe how you plan to approach your creative project(s) this month.
Erratically.
(Maybe if I lean into it the project will react by being surprisingly steady. If not,, at least I won't be disappointed.)

2026-06-29 01:36:40 UTC

#WordWeavers 29. Which piece of your own writing is the closest to your heart and why?
Whichever one I'm currently working on, because I'm living in it, and it is living in me.

2026-06-21 03:28:54 UTC

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When I was a kid in Connecticut? (With no A.C)
Family room in the basement, which stayed cooler. Dehumidifier in the family room.

2026-06-13 21:32:35 UTC

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The recommended trick for writing a character who is smarter than you or has more expertise in a specific area, is time compression. You can report them doing in minutes something that took you a long time to research or figure out. Poof! Instant genius.
My characters benefit a lot from L'esprit de l'escalier: I write a scene and the next morning I wake up going Oh! what that scene needs is X, so I update it. After a couple of rounds of that, my characters look very clever.

2026-06-12 18:28:28 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 12 Say something kind about yourself and your creativity.
I enjoy the stories that turn up in my head and (most of) the characters. Other people seem to enjoy the ones I've managed to get out of my head.
My taste in physical crafts runs to those that require meticulous attention to detail,, and I seem to be fairly good at them, once I've had a bit of practice.

2026-05-27 22:56:59 UTC

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Yup. Archival collections, especially if they were established before climate control was a thing, can be pretty bad. The floods sped up the problems but are not really required for general ickiness in books and papers that are decades old.
Even before you get into things like Victorian bindings that used arsenic dyes. Never handle a really old book with green binding with your bare hands...

2026-05-27 22:09:30 UTC

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When I was in library school we were warned that some archival work can be a short career because people get sensitized to some of the stuff that people rave about as 'the smell of old books'. Precautions were advised, especially if you were going to be dealing with something like 200 year old municipal records that had been through a couple of floods.

2026-05-17 03:59:08 UTC

#WordWeavers 17. How would your MC react to being handed a kitten?
He would cuddle it and might try to find it some treats.
(Whenever Franz-Karl is described waking up in an actual bed, there are cats there. I don''t believe that there are any mentions of cats being present when he goes to sleep.).

2026-05-15 22:04:05 UTC

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#ScribesAndMakers 15 progress
Ooh. I think I may know the first sentence of the marketing/back-cover blurb for volume 3. This is good because the lack of a concise description (and a cover image) so late in development had begun to worry me a little.
But Volumes 1 & 2 were worked on in parallel with the house rebuilding project, while volume 3 has mostly been worked on by itself, so I suppose the project dynamics are different.

2026-05-15 02:33:40 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 15 What's going well with your creative work so far this month?
The WIP has passed 135K words - several times - as I pull rough sections inherited from the NaNo projects, then add dialogue and action that fits the current storyline better.
The sections that need to be reworked are getting small enough that I may be able to hand the result off to my beta reader at the end of this month or in early June. I think I know what needs to be added, except a few antag scene details.

2026-04-19 13:06:06 UTC

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That's fortunate. There are ways of handling the hundreds? thousands? of US sales tax jurisdictions online which had not yet been created during my retail days, but it is not practical to try to run an online shop without going through some kind of aggregator who can manage the sales tax insanity. Aside from the need to track changes in the tax rates that need to be collected, there are fees for being allowed to collect sales tax in many of the taxing jurisdictions.

2026-04-18 23:08:04 UTC

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What sales tax/VAT jurisdiction do you sell in? I did some retail at science fiction conventions years ago and found that dealing with sales taxes made was almost more trouble than it was worth.(This was before E-Bay and other online sales platforms so there was no support in those days...)

2026-04-16 14:07:37 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 16 How do you feel about illustrations in (non-comic) books?
I think ereader apps need to handle the ones in epubs better. (They also need better footnote handling, but that is a separate rant.) There is a reason almost all of the physical books I have bought (or re-bought) since the fire have illustrations of one sort or another.
PDF reader apps also manage to muck things up, but differently. Recent versions of pdf readers seem to have settled on a common level of mediocrity.

2026-03-11 02:20:03 UTC

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When in doubt it is generaly reasonable to suspect that temperate zone non-citrus fruits are in the rose family and veggies are mutated brassicas.

2026-03-11 01:41:06 UTC

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What I really want(and did not exist the last time I looked) is a way to apply a different template to an existing document in LibreOffice. So that with appropriately named styles I can easily switch from a manuscript format to a publishing format. (It was trivial to do it in Borland Sprint 35 years ago, but modern software seems to have lost this basic capability.)

2026-03-05 21:01:02 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub Sometimes plot holes are where you plant the cuttings that will grow into the next volume.

2026-02-18 19:47:22 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 18 Our next featured creator has done her own book covers. Have you ever or would you ever do your own cover?
I did the cover design and art for the covers of vols 1 & 2 of Elderkin Chronicles. The art was tourist souvenirs that I photographed and then did things to in Krita.
I have done a preliminary layout for vol 3 but have not entirely figured out what the art should be or how to create it. I may hire someone for that part.
https://www.books2read.com/HeirOfTheBindings https://books2read.com/BrokenOathsBoundaries
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/116/093/270/773/143/224/original/01b11c6ff02e48d6.png
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/116/093/272/213/032/269/original/1c039a0a29dcbb22.png
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/116/093/282/363/112/386/original/c2fd0cbeb714a37b.png

2026-01-21 19:17:37 UTC

#ScribesAndMakers 21 An author quote you find meaningful
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it — Toni Morrison

2026-01-20 00:48:03 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 20. Figuratively speaking, do you travel with the caravan or solo over the hills?
When I was younger, I traveled solo. Now I sit in my web and wait...

2026-01-15 20:08:13 UTC

#ISS #NASA I'm glad to see that the astronauts returned to Earth safely. But I keep wondering what medical emergency required all four of them to return instead of whoever is having the problem?
Is it something contagious they all caught? A problem with the rations that means they all need to be detoxed?
Is there anyone still on the ISS? Or has it become uninhabitable for some reason?

2026-01-09 03:19:28 UTC

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LibreOffice can even handle Word doc types (along with the international standard odt, pdf and it can export rough epubs).

2025-12-28 04:19:54 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 27 How can we as writers support one another?
Abjure AI and all its devices.
Buy each other's books, boost each other's announcement and comments.
If you do reviews on any of the review platforms, cast a wide net.

2025-12-21 04:49:27 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 21 Do your stories come to you fully formed? Or do they only develop along the way?
The stories come to me as seeds of worlds and both stories and worlds develop fractally and recursively during the writing. (I do NOT write short forms: my current 'story' is going to be at least 4 volumes and roughly half a million words before I even reach the original seeds, much less their aftermath.)

2025-12-09 06:18:40 UTC

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what is CNF?

2025-12-05 04:17:26 UTC

#WritersCoffeeClub 5. What's a no-longer popular trend in writing you'd like to see make a comeback?
Payscales for authors, editors (of various sorts) and artists that provide a living wage.
That in turn requires a reorganization of distribution and discoverability, which have basically been ripped to shreds along with the 20th century channels.

2025-12-01 23:17:52 UTC

Ubuntu just announced their targets for 26.04 LTS. Not going in directions I approve.
I'm currently using Kubuntu, and I've got it down to only one snap package (thunderbird)
Is there a moderately stable distro out there using KDE, apt packaging, and NO SNAP stupidity? (The snap installation of krita is effectively useless) I would not mind losing flatpack, either.
I realize that the anti-UNIX abomination that is systemd is probably unavoidable in these benighted times.
#ubuntu #linux

2025-11-22 19:05:12 UTC

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Yes, but did Leonardo know anything about cover art?

2025-11-10 05:32:15 UTC

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I was registered Independent for years... until the year it was clear the meaningful election for an important position was going to happen in the primaries, not the general. This area is deep enough blue that the party machine had gotten complacent and needed a spanking, which was not going to happen if people waited for the the general election. There were shenanigans during the nominations.
I think the eventual candidate was a write-in during the primary...

2025-10-27 01:58:53 UTC

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Based on the illos that have been published, they are not planning to have accordion doors to separate it into Epstein A, Epstein B and Epstein C. Or if they are, the doors are unusually well hidden.

2025-10-27 01:53:28 UTC

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Big meetings and convention session in hotels take place in rooms that are called ballrooms.
Usually they are equipped with accordion dividers, so a particular panel or event can take place in the Lincoln Ballroom or Lincoln A, Lincoln B, or Lincoln C.
And if you are in Lincoln B, you had better hope that neither A nor C are noisy sessions, since there is no soundproofing to speak of.
There may be dancing in the Lincoln Ballroom if it gets rented for a wedding reception or something.

2025-09-23 21:48:48 UTC

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There are reportedly 1200 people who were known to be in Alligator Alcatraz whose records have gone missing and whose locations are unknown by their families and lawyers.
What makes you think the 15 deaths admitted by the feds is a remotely accurate number? You may need to multiply it by a few orders of magnitude to approach reality.

2025-09-11 05:28:24 UTC

#writerscoffeeclub 11 If you could banish one trope for a century, which would you choose?
Person who has found success and built a life in the city throws it all away to return to the toxic small community they escaped from.

2025-09-04 03:21:33 UTC

#Introduction for new server:
I'm a retired software engineer and former librarian, and a long-time but very intermittently active member of the SCA (the hobby for people who collect hobbies).
Since retiring and building my house, I have written and self-published 2 fantasy novels: Heir of the Bindings and Broken Oaths & Bindings, volumes 1 and 2 of the Elderkin Chronicles. Volume 3 is currently being written.
I am using Superior Magpie Press (in Superior, Colorado) as my imprint.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/143/862/100/328/999/original/abe82403ddbd0229.png

2025-09-04 03:04:57 UTC

My house burned to the ground in the 12/30/2021 Marshall Fire and Wind Event.
I moved into the (mostly complete) new house on June 25, 2024.
I'm very proud of it: the house was shortlisted for the Colorado Green Building Guilds' Annual award, but was beaten by a much more elaborate public building.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/143/779/572/254/144/original/93b354243299fbbb.jpg