On Imaginary Real Estate

I have good news, and I have bad news. What, you want the bad news first? Here it is.

I have been informed that the term "Antellus," my name for the counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes, is in fact a registered trademark, which I stupidly used for the name of my novel series without doing a thorough search, despite my usual care about such things. It so happens that Antellus is already the name of someone else's planet, and has been since 1988, when I was in the third grade, not that it matters what grade I was in. I was granted permission to leave it on my already-published works, and I'm sincerely grateful for that, but it seemed best to go ahead and expunge it, because (a) the series is not complete, and (b) I get all nervous when people use words like "licensing fee" and "litigation."

So I have changed the series name to Enoch, after the principal setting of the stories. The name of the planet continues to be Antellus, because my muse wills it so, but I must please ask everyone to refrain from referring to it as such in the future. You can call it the counter-earth. You can call it the antichthon, which is the ancient Greek term for that hypothetical planet. You just can't call it Antellus.

Incidentally, no one within my novels calls their world Antellus, because to them it's just the earth, of course. The term actually only appears in the metadata for my two novels and in the front and back matter of one, and wasn't associated with the ISBN of either, so the issue is fixable. And I'm pretty sure that "Enoch" won't give me any problems, because it's the name of a city in the Bible, after all. You can't sue people for using names from the Bible. Right?

This change has three annoying side-effects, however. One is that The King of Nightspore's Crown will be unavailable for a day or two while the corrected files get approved. The second is that the links are all broken now. I've tried to correct everything on my sites, but there might be a bad link or two out there. The third annoying thing is that the kind patrons who purchased copies of my novel before the change now have an out-of-date series reference on the front cover. However, I would encourage them to think of their copies as collectors' items, and imagine the millions they'll bring in when their heirs auction them off in remote posterity.

In all seriousness, I'm more than a little frustrated by this, because it was a stupid, easily avoidable mistake, because my novel-writing endeavors are like a tiny flickering flame that the merest breath of air threatens to extinguish, and because, despite my limited powers, it deeply grieves me to be paid by willing patrons for anything less than the best I can deliver. So, sorry.

Now on to the good news. Drat, I've forgotten what it was. Well, in lieu of that, I hope you'll go check out the excellent greydogtales.com, where they like the kind of stuff I like, and where they gave me a nice shout-out the other day.