Hello, lovely people.

I had hoped to give you a Ganymede Christmas present, and the story is indeed done, but I simply gave up on trying to figure out how to comply with the GDPR rules. I have a thing, a story. I want to give it to people. I need their email addresses to do that. And because of that, I need to make guarantees to the gods that I will not abuse people’s trust. Which I would not, but I still have to meet the same standards as someone who most probably would.

I am very bad at marketing, in part because I’m the opposite of an ideal marketing target. I hate getting newsletters. Advertising something, anything, at me is a good way to make sure I will never buy it. I’m so grossed-out by sales tactics that I honestly don’t know how I ever manage to buy anything. I’m a person who deliberately opts in to things I know I want, and I reject all other offers.

The idea that I would collect an email address from someone and then exploit it by selling it or otherwise misusing it really nearly makes me sick. I assume people who give me their addresses are doing so because they want the story I’m offering, not because they hope I do the digital equivalent of writing their name and number on a bathroom wall.

All the sample GDPR language I’ve seen assumes I’m misusing addresses and spamming people relentlessly with marketing campaigns, and it’s hard to know what language I can cut while still meeting the requirements.

I’m not going to a lawyer to determine how to legally and ethically give away free stories to people in the EU who specifically ask for them, but it feels like that’s what I actually have to do.

Yes, I probably am overthinking this. I’ll get it figured out.

In the past, you may have received an email asking you to re-opt in to my mailing list, and many of you did, and I thought that was enough. Well, I was wrong, and I probably need to just start from scratch with collecting addresses.

Anyway, I took a break from trying to sort that out, and I’ve written a lot. Like, I have a whole bunch of finished books just sort of languishing. They’re not Ganymede stories (except for this short Christmas thing), but of course I think they still have merit. It’s a wide variety of stories. I have been thinking for awhile I should ask if any of you would like to be beta readers. If you would be interested in something like that, leave me a comment and/or email me at darrah . glass @ gmail . com.

I have one kind reader who has read several things for me and has been very helpful, but I continue to sit on the books, full of uncertainty. It’s just not good practice to not get a variety of opinions. With the Ganymede books, I always had 3-4 beta readers, and that’s really the minimum required.

Please note, I have very specific requirements of beta readers. It’s definitely fun to get to read a fresh book that practically no one else has seen, but there’s also work involved. You’re absolutely encouraged to be enthusiastic, but you also need to be critical when the mechanics need work, or the plot has a hole, or the character the author thinks is so charming is actually annoying. (You might make me cry.) If you get in touch with me about beta reading, I’ll explain what I need and how I need it.

This is perhaps a lot of blah-blah-blah, so I thank you for reading this far. I honestly don’t know how to show it, but I appreciate all of you so much for reading my niche series and liking it so well.