first published online as a serial novel

“Ohh, mommy, look.” A mother and child studied the darkening sky. The young one was working hard at staying up later than usual, watching for a sign, hoping to stay up for another hour. A bright blossoming flared and faded past her finger's end.

“A star exploding.” The woman had been a mother many times over many years. The night sky held no new wonders for her.

The child had to think quickly. “A minute more, please. I am looking for the V of the eidolons.”

“Silly girl.” A pause. “What is an eidolon?” Eidolon. A new word from school. The little ones were ever bringing home new things; it was hard keeping up. The mother peered into the afterglow left by an expired galaxy.

“They are the wild flying pigs of time, unwinding the stars.”

―Chapter 6 The Raspberry Dream

First of all, a hearty, manly handshake for the 300-odd* persistent readers who stayed with the Orange Virgin for an uploading process that saw 32 monthly chapters lofted over three years (2006, 2007 and 2008). Thanks for your patience; you guys kept me going. The inconsistencies, logical absurdities and plain-out wrongheadedness demonstrated by the author (as when a personage may emerge many chapters after her introduction sporting an unexplained psychic phase shift) will be lessened, expunged and/or excised as The Orange Virgin is conflated to fit inside the covers of Platterland, a collection of tales due for release in late 2010.

The Return of the Orange Virgin as it first appeared on onetinleg.com will stay as it is, no charges, no changes.**

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* a conservative interpretation of the statistics generated by Google Analytics' urchin harvester and my webhost's Analog 5.1 webstats engine. For those interested, The Return of the Orange Virgin had received 11,375 hits as of posting the final chapter―among them Google text searches bringing up individual chapters, random hits, etc. Compare this with the 8,161 downloads logged by the MP3 sound files in the Free Reads section over the same period. I arrived at my estimate of 300 return readers who stuck with the OV to its warm and fuzzy Hollywood ending by balancing daily HTML chapter hits against "Print Version" code calls. I figured these visitors were reading a lot and weighted their numbers at 2⁄3 of full count.

** I recalled that other folks had tried serial uploading as a pay-per-hit experiment. Oops, a sudden flash and I checked Stephen King's (a fellow Mainer's) website. It led me to Wikipedia:

"King and his publisher held fast to their ideal rate of return at 75 percent, and they decided to double the cost of the fourth part of the novel to two dollars. King tried to offset this price increase by also doubling the number of pages to 54 pages for the fourth installment. He also promised to cap the total cost of the entire book at a total of 13 dollars. Paying readers dropped to 46 percent of downloads. The number of downloads decreased overall as well...."

Moral: Selling intangibles, there will be diminishing returns. Hence, a hold-in-your-hand print version (albeit neatened up) of The Return of the Orange Virgin might generate a cash flow to help with the heavy lifting that keeps a website afloat.