Name Change

First, an update.  As of last night, I have over 23,000 words down on Masters.  I’m not making progress as quickly as I’d like (I’d really like to get at least 1,000 words a day, but some days that simply doesn’t work out), but it’s coming along.

I had initially planned to put my stories and books up on the various ebook sites under the business name “Steel Shark Publishing”.  But I did a precautionary Google search and found another guy who calls himself Steel Shark Productions.  He’s a photographer and visual arts guy, but I don’t want to risk a Trademark infraction (the standard for determining if you’ve violated a trademark is if the consumer could reasonably be expected to be confused by the second comer, and I think I would meet that standard if I went with that name).  So I’ve had to rethink my business name.  It didn’t take long to come up with a new one.

In the submarine force, the missile submarines, or boomers, are referred to as SSBNs (Submersible Ship Ballistic Missile Nuclear).  So, for instance, USS Ohio (when she was still a boomer) had the hull number SSBN 726.  They are generally considered to be easier duty, because there are two crews for each hull.  So while one crew has the boat at sea, the other is ashore in “off crew”, training and drilling, but always going home and not standing any real duty.  On the other had, fast attack submarines are called SSNs (Submersible Ship Nuclear).  So USS PITTSBURGH, for example, would be SSN 720.  Since SSNs have only one crew per boat, there’s a lot more work for each person to do.  We SSN guys lovingly refer to boomer sailors as “Boomer Fags”, since they live such a cushy lifestyle.  Guys who serve on SSNs tend to say that SSN really stands for Saturdays, Sundays, and Nights since a lot of the time, that’s the work week for an SSN sailor while in port at home (in liberty ports on deployment is another matter, of course).  Since I currently do my writing on that same schedule, I think I’ll change my business name to Saturdays Sundays and Nights Storytelling.  Of course, the IRS EIN website doesn’t accept enough characters to spell that out, so it’ll officially be SSN Storytelling.  But I’ll still refer to the business by its full name.

So there you have it.  Now I have an EIN, but it looks like the IRS gooned up my application.  For some reason they put my last name as my middle name and my last name both.  Brilliant, eh?  Hopefully that won’t be too hard to fix.