Orchid Song is a ripe pu-erh made in 2012. I got a sample of it in 2022, and since then, it has been sitting in my “need to try” bin at the bottom. It’s pu-erh, though—aging is good for it!

 

I have to admit, I was not impressed by the first steep. It felt a little watery, a little tepid.

 

But this tea made up for any short falling with the second steep, which came in dark and strong and sweet, with an almost chocolatey overtone. One of the things I absolutely love about ripe pu-erh is how incredibly dark and smooth it gets with time. It rivals coffee in depth of texture and flavor, without any of coffee’s bitterness.

Look at this beauty of a third steep: it’s dark and luscious and the flavor just sings with every sip.

 

It’s teas like this that make me smile to myself and cradle my cup and whisper to myself that I love tea.

Orchid Song comes from Yunnan Sourcing.

I do not have a way for people to buy my books except through third party vendors. There are a lot of third party vendors (Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Nook, Tolino, along side multiple library vendors), but I have not yet set up an individual storefront where people can buy my books and I get the vast majority of the profits.

 

There is one, and basically only one, reason for this: I have to collect sales tax, at least in my state (and possibly VAT in Europe which makes my brain implode). That means I have to remit sales tax. There are platforms that make this easy—little more than a button press. Sales are not likely to be large—just enough that I would likely only have to file sales taxes in the state where I have a permanent residence, and then, only quarterly.

 

Unfortunately, I understand my ADHD brain all too well. If all I had to do to stay alive was press a button four times a year, I would be dead within a decade. Sales tax has prevented me from taking this step for basically my entire life as an author, because I know I will mess it up and I know I will pay penalties for it. (This is not a request for advice: I have tried every reminder system possible and every single one works great for about a year and then my brain stops paying attention to it and I only realize I’ve failed to do it nine hundred years later.)

 

But I finally have an assistant again. I am slowly offloading tasks. It now occurs to me that I could literally have my assistant handle this (or at least make sure that I handled it).

 

I have been thinking this in particular right now because I know there are people who are more interested in not giving money to large corporations than ever before, and so I’m now pondering the possibility of opening up some kind of a storefront.

 

(It would also enable me to make book bundles that I can’t really do on large vendors, and/or do occasional signed print book sales, guarantee DRM-free downloads, and allow a potentially more permissive ebook license than you would get from a large corporation.)

If you have the time and/or inclination, I’d like to know if you’d be willing to buy ebooks / audiobooks from a storefront owned and operated wholly by me—if nobody is willing to do this, I’m not going to move forward, but if it’s something enough people are interested in, I will start putting thought cycles into it.

 

 

Thanks for your time!

(This is also related to the question of making audiobooks: at this point, Audible’s reimbursement for authors is crummy enough that I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I’m able to get over the ADHD hurdle to make them; this would probably change if people were able to buy them from me directly.)

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