A few months ago, I withdrew from the writers’ coop Book View Café, in the midst of internal turmoil in the coop. I did so with great regret, because BVC had been a home and community and source of support for me for a number of years. I was the voice of Customer Support at the BVC bookstore, and VP of the organization. I began many friendships and working relationships there. (Most of those continue.)
Without going into detail, it was the kind of unrest that often occurs in volunteer-run organizations, where a lot of the work falls on a few, and people get burned out and frustrated and walk away. Disagreements in how things should run proved intractable, and the result was about half the members leaving. Many good people remain at BVC! I wish them all the success in the world. Do continue to check out their books!
Some of us who left formed another, much more informal group called Treehouse Writers, more to maintain social and professional connection than anything else. We are not trying to create a different BVC. We have a blog at https://treehousewriters.com.
About Faery Cat Press. One of my fellow Treehouse writers, Laura Anne Gilman, created Faery Cat Press as an umbrella group to pull in her own books and books of friends, partly as a way to purchase ISBN numbers at a group rate (they’re expensive, otherwise), but also to provide a more consolidated front where booksellers are concerned. For that reason, my newest releases now are listed (depending on where you look) as being from Faery Cat Press, or Starstream Publications in association with Faery Cat Press. But don’t go sending submissions to Faery Cat Press, because FCP lives in the aether, somewhere in the land of Faery! I can only go there in my head. For promotion and marketing purposes, I am and shall remain Starstream Publications.
Hahahahaha! Of course they didn’t. No, they punted it to GE Appliances, who sent a tech. Who apparently didn’t have much of a sense of smell, because he said, “Smells like plastic to me.” And suggested I throw in some fragrance tablets to cover the smell.
With the world basically in lock-down against Covid-19, and the possibility looming of a two-week self-quarantine at a moment’s notice, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking. We now have a freezer stocked with my signature Fantasy Beef Stew*, Space-Time Chicken Stew**, chicken chili, Grillers Crumblies chili, chicken chili, and rat stew***. Not to mention lots of Trader Joe’s frozen foods. And cans of soup and tuna and makings of more chili, should we need it.
Microsoft, the evil empire, has struck back at my efforts to keep my computers running. I have a desktop and a laptop running Windows 10, and both have tried to update to the newest, greatest iteration of Windows, cleverly named 1903, and both crashed and burned due to bugs in the installation software. Microsoft support people actually spent a couple of hours on the phone with me, but they couldn’t solve the problem (though they did acknowledge that there were a lot of people having problems).