Amazon v. Macmillan

(I tried to post this to Metafilter, but alas, it was a double. Seems a shame to let all the links go to waste, though.)

In a late-Friday surprise move, Amazon removed all "Buy Now" links to books published by Macmillan, the parent company of Tor, St. Martin's Press and many others. Macmillan released a statement making clear that this is a hardball negotiation tactic on Amazon's part. Amazon's official statement frames the disagreement a little differently.

The heart of the issue is a difference of opinion about Amazon's place in the supply chain. In addition to various parodies of Amazon's statement (provided not by the CEO or PR department, but the unspecifically-named "Amazon Kindle Team" and buried on their forums), the incident occasioned some thoughtful analysis.

While Amazon has supposedly relented, authors are still waiting for their books to become available.

This is not the first weekend surprise by Amazon (previously.)

Patterns

This morning I finished the fourth week of the Couch-to-5k plan. I've been running Thursday, Sunday, and Tuesday since the first of the year - haven't missed a run. This is better than I've done in a while for non-karate-related workouts.

I've also been hitting the gym, going to karate at least 3 days a week, and eating quite a bit closer to right than normal. Plus the house is cleaner than it's been in ages. How am I pulling this off? I finally took a step back and looked at some of my patterns.

I live alone, and so must amuse myself. Sometimes I play video games; mostly I read. And since I was a little kid, I would read while I ate. This translated into eating while I read, and I could (and too frequently did) curl up with a book and any amount of food and plow through both without noticing. If all that was in the house was healthy food, I'd eat that, but I was still eating out of habit rather than hunger. And if I was hungry, I'd grab a book and end up killing an hour or two as well as having a meal.

My decision, then, was to try to focus on purposeful, rather than habitual, actions. I moved my book-in-progress from the bedside table to the breakfast bar, and now I prepare a meal, set it out, and only read until it's done. I was super-strict about this for the first couple of weeks, and I'm only easing back a hair now to make sure I don't backslide.

This has done two things: first, it's made portion control much simpler and less painful. I figure out what I want to eat, I eat it, I'm done. I'm not on any sort of super-strict diet or anything - I'm just cooking my own food and tracking it so that I know the new pattern is working. Second, I am not losing entire evenings (or days!) in a book unless I consciously decide to - and the thing is, I usually don't. I have time to do the dishes and sweep the floors and work on the novel, and I don't have to pry myself away from the book to do it. If I decide I want to read, I usually take a nice long bath and read in there. It's lovely and relaxing and there's no temptation to snack.

I grump all the time about the 50 pounds I put on just before I moved into the condo. But the thing is, yeah, I made some bad choices there, but that's not why I haven't been able to lose the weight. That is the result of years of patterns that I've set for myself while living alone, and it's finally time to toss them out and make some new ones.

Writing Elsewhere

I have a short essay up at our dojo page - check it out!

Happy New Year!

I've been exceedingly lax in posting since my October blast. Hopefully that will get a little bit better over the next month. I'm trying some new things with my routine and I expect them to have at least some effect.

My Life and Karate, Day Thirty-one

The Kickathon is tomorrow, and I thought that today I'd do a wrap-up of the blogging experiment, because statistics are fun! Courtesy of Google Analytics, bit.ly, and Facebook.

- 28 posts
- 1,402 total pageviews
- 384 unique visitors
- 39 Facebook comments
- 31 "likes"
- 10 blog comments
- One link from a well-known women's athletics blog
- Six donors
- $125 dollars raised

Saturdays and Sundays are definitely slow times - y'all are clearly only reading these at work. The fiction got the most feedback on Facebook for sure, but didn't get anywhere near the most traffic. (That's not definitive, of course, because I can't sort out people who just read posts from the front page rather than the permalinks, but there's a large difference between the top posts and the lesser ones.)

Thanks to everyone who donated, and if you haven't, there's still time. This was a great experiment, and an excellent writing challenge for me. I still got my butt soundly kicked, fundraising-wise, by people who went with more traditional methods, but hey - we reached our overall goal, and I ain't complaining. I would love to hear feedback on what y'all who have read so regularly thought of the whole thing - too much content? Not enough? More fiction? More pictures? Kill the italicized explanatory bits?

I dunno if I'll do the same thing next year, but this year was fun! Tomorrow is the actual event, and I'll post a report with pics sometime in the next few days. Thanks for coming!

My Life and Karate, Day Thirty

I have been remiss this week, but ramp-up to the actual event is eating much of my brain power. And we are less than two hundred dollars from our goal! This is awesome - I confess I was a little skeptical that we'd hit it, in this economy.

Thanks to everyone who's donated, and if you haven't yet, There's still time! Here is the link.

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-Eight

My dojo, Sun Dragon Martial Arts and Self Defense, is running its major yearly fundraiser. We're a nonprofit martial arts studio, which is something of a rare beast, and we raise money every year for our scholarship fund and the free self-defense classes we offer in the community. For my part, every day until the day of the Kickathon, I will write a random amusing anecdote about karate and self-defense, or possibly just whatever strikes my fancy. Enjoy!

It's Tuesday, and that means I get to make bullet lists. I love bullet lists. Although I'm too lazy to make actual bullets.

- We're only a few days from the Kickathon. I hope everyone's been enjoying the blog - I know I've got a reasonably steady readership, from the stats (which I totally do not obsess over, whatever gave you that idea?) If you've been one of those regulars, I will ask again that you please consider chipping in $5! We're not quite at our goal yet - it's reachable, but we need just a little more help to make it happen.

- If you're still a little fuzzy on what we're actually raising money for, black belt Graham lays it out in plain terms.

- I mentioned this yesterday, but hi to the Stumptuous folks wandering over!

- Either Saturday or Sunday I'll post pics and results from the Kickathon itself - hopefully none will be too terribly embarrassing, but with my sense of balance, that may be too much to ask.

If you'd like to donate to our fundraiser, there's the link!