Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

Living Life in a Hot New World

by

Anatomy_of_a_Sunset-2Hot where you’re at, is it? Ninety degrees and you think you’re gunna die before the sun goes down?

Mwa ha ha! As nothing! Temps here have run upwards of 112, day after day, and that ain’t new. A couple of days have pushed 120. Friends sweltering in “cooler” climes — which in our Brave New World of global warming are unlikely to stay cool much longer — ask how we natives of the Valley of the We-Do-Mean-Sun survive.

Well. Some of us leave town. NG (SDXB’s New Girlfriend) is in Boulder as we scribble. But most of us adapt. I’ve lived in hot climates all my life: grew up in Saudi Arabia, which makes Arizona look like a balmy paradise. I’m still living. Looks like I’ve learned to survive global warming, hm?

Here are a few pointers for how to live in the Hot New World:

The_sun1Don’t go out in the noonday sun.

Seriously. Think of it as like snowbound. Don’t go outside between about 10 in the morning and 6 in the evening, if you can possibly avoid it. Convince your boss that you love your job so much you can’t bring yourself to leave over the lunch hour.  Work at home if you can.

Please do not be stupid about this. STAY OUT OF THE NOONDAY SUN!

Several people have died here this summer. Morons who feel they just must climb Squaw Peak or Camelback Mountain no matter what die. Got that? That’s die, as in dead.

A couple of days ago, a 12-year-old boy died when a grown man, an alleged adult, took him out for a walk in one of the city’s mountain parks on a balmy 112-degree day. They were on the longest trail in the Sonoran Desert Preserve, the one that climbed the highest hill. Yes: they had enough water with them: two litres. But the kid had a heat stroke anyway.

You can suffer heat stroke even if you have plenty of water. Don’t go out in the sun on a day when the heat exceeds 100 degrees, no matter how much of a man (or woman) you think you are.

Don’t assume your cell is going to work.

MorningSunThe guy who was with said 12-year-old tried to call for help. It didn’t work.

He had to abandon the boy and run through 112-degree heat to summon help. That didn’t work, either.

Be sure your battery is always charged. Consider carrying a throw-away phone as a backup. Keep that charged, too. And remember: if you’re out in the boondocks, your phone may not get any bars, no matter what your provider claims.

Wear a hat whenever you do go out.

Especially if you’re balding. Hey, dudes: nary a critter on this planet is handsomer than a man in a hat! 😉

But dude or dudette, get yourself a wide-brimmed hat and wear it when you have to go out in the sun. It not only keeps you a little cooler, it shelters your eyes from the glaring sun.

Get yourself a decent pair of shades.

Speaking of glare, shell out for a pair of Polaroid sunglasses. Keep them in your car and wear them. Comfort factor: HUGE.

Park your car in the shade, if you possibly can.

Interestingly, the reduction in scorch factor that you’ll get by parking under a tree’s shade is well worth hiking across an asphalt parking lot.

Keep a white towel in your car.

Drape this over your lap when the sun pours in through the windshield or the driver’s-side window and heats your bluejeans to the broiling level. And drape it over the steering wheel when you have to park in an unshaded space: it will protect you from third-degree burns when you get back to the car.

DCP_1260Keep your car in working order.

This means THE BATTERY, stupid. Car batteries die like…uhm…battery-driven robot flies in extreme heat. In Arizona a typical car battery lasts about 18 months. Check the battery regularly, or have your mechanic do so. Be sure your insurance has roadside service; if not, subscribe to one.

Sooner or later, you’ll need it.

Keep your house’s air-conditioning in working order.

In the springtime, have an AC dude come around to clean and service the unit. Yes, this sounds like a waste of money. No, it is not. And even if it is, when you have a “relationship” with an air-conditioning contractor, you’re more likely to be able to get service at short notice.

Sooner or later, you’ll need it.

Set your air-conditioning to cool your house way down at night and let the temp drift up during the day.

The reason you have air-conditioning is so you can sleep at night. With fans (below ↓ ), you can tolerate being warmer than normal during the day. Also, when the ambient temperatures are higher during the day than at night, you save more money with a warmer living space during the day than you do by suffering through hot nights.

Run A LOT of fans in your home and office.

Turn off the feature that makes the thing sweep back and forth. A fan works by blowing on you directly…when it’s swooping around the room, it’s doing nothing for you. Wherever you’re likely to come to light: have a fan pointed at you. Wherever you work — the kitchen, for example — have a fan pointed at you. Maybe more than  one fan. Where I’m sitting right now, for example, I have three fans going.

DucksReduxGet wet whenever you can. Stay wet as much as you can.

If you work in a cube or a private office, use a squirt bottle to spray yourself in the face. Do the same in the car, when no one’s around to pester you.

If you have a pool: use it.

If you have a shower: use it.

If you have long hair (as I do) let it get wet in the shower and don’t blow-dry it. I dip my hair in the pool at dawn, then braid it or put it up in a bun so it will stay damp for several hours. Et voilà: biological air-conditioning!

Do your physical chores before dawn or after dark.

This includes walking the dog. Do not walk your dog in extreme hot weather. Not unless you enjoy vet bills. Or disposing of doggy corpses.

I do all the gardening, watering, and pool care chores before the sun is very far over the horizon.

Do your health or recreational exercise indoors or at night.

Around here, covered malls open early, long before the shops open. You can go to one of them and walk or jog till you’re blue in the face…without risking death.

Some fundamentalist megachurches have gyms and indoor hiking or running tracks. Get religion: go there to do your daily exercises.

Never push a child to exert him- or herself in the heat.

If the kid complains about being too hot, too uncomfortable, or too tired to charge around, indulge. Better you should spoil the brat than kill the brat.

corgiherdingDon’t push a dog or horse in the heat.

Dogs commonly die of heat stroke when temps get high. My homicidal (I use the term advisedly) former son-in-lawsin killed his wife’s beloved dog by forcing him to run with him as he jogged on a hundred-degree day.

While he probably did that on purpose, many naive pet owners lose their dogs because they have no clue that dogs do not tolerate exertion in the heat in the same way humans do.

Horses also can fall victim to heat stroke, especially if the air is dry or breezy, allowing sweat to evaporate too quickly.

If you must leave your animals outside (you should be arrested for doing so),  provide plenty of shade and water.

Never leave a child or pet in a vehicle. Not even for a few minutes.

A car can reach homicidal temperatures within minutes, even when outside temperatures are only in the 80s. Summertime temps commonly reach 160 degrees and higher here. It is a felony to leave a child or an animal in a car here — as well it should be.

Eat smaller, lighter meals more often.

You’ll be a lot more comfortable if you don’t stuff yourself. Heavy meals make your body work harder, causing your metabolism to heat up. This is nice on a snowy day, but not so great when it’s 115 in the shade.

Find daytime hangouts that are air-conditioned.

Which lunch shops are coolest? Can you spend Sat’day afternoon in a movie house?

Cook meals outside on a grill or use a slow cooker in the garage.

Never (for godsake!) turn on the oven. Try at all costs not to heat up the kitchen.

If you can, sleep through the hottest hours of the day.

That’s the theory behind siesta. Do what you need to get done in the morning, sleep through the mid-afternoon, then work into the evening.

And that, my dears, is what Yours Truly is about to do.Rub_al_Khali_002

Beautiful Toes! How to beat back toenail fungus

by

This is a tacky topic. Sorry. BUT…it really is so amazing, I’ve just gotta tell you about it. According to Wonder-Dermatologist, if you don’t need to know about this now, sooner or later you will.

Here’s the deal: It turns out that as you age, your immune system ages (not surprisingly). And as your immune system ages, its ability to beat back the normal yeasties and other fungus critters that occur naturally around us tends to…well…fade. Hence — Gawd Help Us! — toenail fungus!

So a few weeks ago, I’m at the dermatologist’s office forking over some taxpayer dollars to be told (as usual) that I don’t have malignant melanoma, so while I have him trapped in the examining room, I ask him about the nails that are lifting off both toes, “Fungus,” he opines.

Then he says the drug they give you to beat back toenail fungus can make you passing sick, and he doesn’t recommend it. BUT, he has an alternative. He suggests

…hang onto your hat…

Vick’s VapoRub.

I give him The Look.

He stands his ground and says that there’s evidence that the aromatics in Vick’s are mildly fungicidal, and that if you use it often enough and long enough, it will beat back nail fungus and keep it beaten back.

Suspecting he’s been smoking some of the ingredients, I come home and look it up in the Hypchondriac’s Treasure Chest; to wit, the Internet. Of course, the usual LiveStrong woo-woo is on the float. But lo!! I do find a study, one that appears to be a real study, published in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. It’s a very small study — that is not good — but it does hint at the possibility of positive results.

The researchers followed a group of 18 participants over periods of 4, 8, 12, 24, 36, and 48 weeks, during which subjects were asked to treat affected nails with Vick’s VapoRub and periodically self-report the results on a 5-point Likert scale. Cutting to the chase: about a third of them — five patients — experienced a “cure” in that the fungal microbes were no longer detectable after treatment. (Several fungi can cause nail disorders; one is a common yeast infection and another is also very much in our environment — these two and only these two were found to have been eradicated by the end of the study.) Ten had a partial improvement, and three showed no improvement.

Yet — here’s the weird part — when asked to assess the results subjectively, all 18 participants “rated their satisfaction with the nail appearance at the end of the study as ‘satisfied’ (n = 9) or ‘very satisfied’ (n = 9).”

Okayyy….this looks like a “nothing ventured nothing gained” affair. The dermatologist said that if it worked, keeping the fungi at bay would require applying the stuff for the rest of my life. But why, I ask myself, not?

Meanwhile, I also learn that miconazole is sometimes prescribed for nail infections. Well, hell. Miconazole is available over the counter — gents, you can find it in the feminine products department of any grocery store or drugstore. It’s used to treat vaginal yeast infections. Just pretend you’re buying it for the wife.

If one’s good, two must be better, I figure.

So I buy a course of miconazole treatment — 3 vaginal suppository tubes of 3% cream plus a small tube of 2% cream for external use — plus a little jar of Vick’s VapoRub. Over at Michael’s, I pick up the cheapest small, stiff oil-paint brush I can find: this is ideal for applying said chemicals.

One suppository tube of miconazole lasts for a couple of weeks: dab a small amount of it under the top of your nails, around the sides, and along the cuticles. Then do the same with the VaporRub.

The VapoRub does, it is true, stink to high heaven when you apply it. However, the odor quickly dissipates. I’ve learned to cover my feet with ankle socks for an hour or so. After that, the stuff has soaked in and the smell is gone.

But here’s the thing:

After six  weeks, it’s as the day to the night!

The nails are certainly no worse. If anything, they’re better. But the rhino hide that had grown around the nails? GONE.

After six weeks of applying a small amount of miconazole and a generous amount of Vick’s twice a day (morning and evening), the tough, calloused skin around the nails — especially around the worst affected ones — has softened so effectively it now looks normal. The result is that even if a clinical cure is not accomplished, the feet look so much better cosmetically that one wants to do a Dance to Spring!

VapoRub is your basic petroleum jelly with some aromatic chemicals mixed in. So it’s prob’ly not surprising that it would moisturize and soften damaged, toughened hide on your feet.

As for the nails: it will take quite a long time for them to grow out, of course. So I think no decision can be made about a “cure” (or whatever) for several months — the term of the study was 48 weeks. I’d guess that’s about when one can risk an assessment as to whether this works or not.

But in the meantime, I’d say it’s very much worth a try. In the present case, the nails themselves already look better, and the skin around them appears to have returned to normal.
_____________

And remember: I am not a doctor. No part of this post constitutes medical advice. Talk to a real medical doctor before applying or swallowing drugs, quack nostrums, or experimental treatments.

DUCK! New Incoming Cockamamie Idea!

by

Lightning_strike_jan_2007Alas, I seem to be constitutionally prone to coming up with new schemes. It must be a congenital thing…

Did I mention the idea of trying to give presentations at the local independent bookstore by way of getting the word out? The plan is to talk about how to put together and produce a self-published book.

It gets better.

On reflection, I recalled a friend of mine, one of the former firm wives who went back and got an MBA and a CFP and set herself up in business as a financial adviser. She specialized in working with women on retirement planning.

By way of hustling customers, she started doing a short community service course at one of the community college campuses, “Retirement Planning for Women.” Yes. That’s one of the things community colleges do, in the continuing ed department: they offer “community service courses” for the general edification and entertainment of the public. These things don’t carry any college credit, and they’re very short and low-key. And therefore easy to prepare and present.

Well. Why not a community service course on Self-Publishing Your Book?

Mwa ha ha!

First off, if these people are duly impressed, at least some of them will want to buy my books (obviously, they won’t know about Roberta’s emanations). Second…I just happen to have enough content around, thanks to an entire journalism textbook (emitted through a real publishing house) and two blogs to compile a whole new book on writing fiction & nonfiction, blogging for fun and marketing, and how to enjoy the (largely unpaid) “Writing Life.”

Last night I tossed the things into a Wyrd file, copying & pasting madly, and came up with 83,830 words — and that’s without an introduction.

Well, holy maquerel. A typical trade book is 80,000 words.

It’s fairly inexpensive to put one of these things together, as long as you neglect to count the value of your time. I could produce such a book in print-on-demand format, offer it at half-price to people who sign up for the course, and still make a small profit on it. More to the point, though, the thing could direct its readers to Plain & Simple Press, the font of all my non-naughty self-publications, and also itself list everything I have for sale right now.

The copy is in hand. It needs a lot of revision and massaging. But…I think if I sat down and worked hard on it, I could put the thing together in less than a month. What a piece of cake!

I could also take it (along with my other opuses) to proposed public presentations.

There are a lot of good reasons to self-publish a book other than a pie-in-the-sky dream that you’ve written the Great American Novel and all that remains to make you rich and famous is to get it in the public’s hands.

Companies can make good use of print-on-demand technology for customer education, employee training, and marketing. Doctors, dentists, and veterinarians can profit from custom-made books for their patients; ditto lawyers for their clients. Genealogy hobbyists and self-published books: a match made in heaven! Nonprofits can use an inexpensively produced print-on-demand book for fund-raising or publicity. Local history groups, archives, and small museums: print-on-demand is perfect for gathering information to preserve for future generations.

That’s the kind of thing I’d emphasize: what practical things you can do with a self-published book, whether it’s in electronic or print-on-demand format.

I’ll bet I could sell that idea. And with it, I could sell books.

 

Amazon Update

by

So the Kindle people write back and insist they can’t see any sign of my having set up a sale for the 30 Pounds / 4 Months book, in spite of the fact that I’m quite sure I did so.

Ugh. I am simply too discouraged to fart with this any more. Life is too short.

But I will ask Wonder E-Book Dude (whose work gets more amazing every time you turn around — this guy is AMAZINGLY good, especially if you have an ebook with complex formatting or with images)…yes, E-Book Dude if he will please convert the cookbook to ePub suitable for Smashwords. Then I can get it up on a lot of venues beyond Amazon, and after that I’ll start trying to plump it through face-to-face contact and selling hard copy in outlets other than bookstores.

And now here’s SDXB, bringing a halt to any further work for the next few hours. ‘Bye!

Day’s end…at last…almost

by

Oh, god…have i ever been this tired?

God to Puling Human: Well. Yes. Of course you have. What are you going on about?

Up at 4:30. Write today’s rant. Post it on the one Facebook writers’ group I’ve found that seems to be pretty darned good. Fiddle with the pool. Shower in the backyard hose, wash chlorine out of hair. Feed dogs. Bolt down breakfast.

Paint face. Throw on clothes. Put up damp hair. Fly out the door to Scottsdale. Sit through meeting.

Excused from buying new picture frame by son, who found one in his garage to replace the one that broke when it fell off the wall. Convenient, because it means I don’t have to hang around Paradise Valley after the meeting until Aaron Bros opens at 10 a.m.

Stop at Sprouts to buy a couple of grocery items on the way home. Starved: cook up some pasta as a snack.

La Maya invites me over to talk, lunch, and paint (or, in my case, draw).  Get a little work done here and then head to her place. Have incredible RM food (RM: that would the Real Mexican) for lunch, beside self with joy. Discuss life, the universe, and all that, “all that” including politics, academia, business, and art.

She suggests that where marketing is concerned, the better part of valor is face-to-face contact, NOT social media. Together we dream up the idea that I should approach Changing Hands, the only independent bookstore that still thrives in the Valley, and offer to do a workshop (they throw these things all the time) on some aspect of self-publishing. In the act, I peddle my wares to the attendees.

We also propose that I should compile another bookoid, to be produced in PoD format and distributed at these proposed shindigs, that would be filled with tips for writers and self-publishers. I realize I already have enough material to generate such a creature. Easily.

Furthermore, we consider the possibility that I should offer a service course along the same lines for one of the local junior colleges. This, she suggests, would create a small market for all the non-naughty bookoids (we think the naughty ones had better not be suggested to the minions of the local community college district): chances are good that most of the students would buy the things, especially if they could be offered at a deep discount for a week or two during the courselet’s duration.

This, I think, is an exceptionally good idea. Especially if one of the bookoids is the proposed compendium of writing tips. 🙂

Back at the Funny Farm, now I sift through the entire body of Plain & Simple Press posts, dating back to early 20 and ought-14. Come up with 48,950 words.

Not bad. I’ll need about 80,000 words, so am almost 5/8 of the way there. Some passages can be expanded upon — for example, a live link to some article somewhere else can be replaced with a precis of the article. An introduction will add about 1,500 or 2 ,000 words. And I have in print an entire textbook of writing advice, from which I intend to self-plagiarize liberally.

If Melania can rip off the First Lady, I surely can rip off myself.

Next, I open an email from Amazon, responding to my demand to know why TF the 99-cent sale of the six books I put up for countdown sales didn’t work. Amazon’s factotum informs me that the countdown sale is in effect: it was set to start at 3:00 p.m.

Ohhhkaaayyy… I check a couple of the books and find that indeed by then they are showing as available for 99 cents.

But on reflection, I’m pretty sure that even though these old eyes need a pair of glasses to read a damned computer screen accurately, and even though a 3 looks sort of like an 8, I still can tell the difference between a 3 and an 8 and between a letter a and a letter p. No problem. The difference is sterling clear. I do not believe for one effing minute that I entered 3 p.m. instead of 8 a.m. SIX GODDAMN TIMES. But whatever. It looks like the sale is now online, even though I’ve lost the advantage of making it available for 99 cents on the entire first day of the goddamn sale.

Just about to throw it in when a message comes over from Jackie: How come the cookbook is still selling for $9.99?

Shee-ut! Damned if it ain’t.

I open the Amazon factotum’s email by way of sending another annoyed inquiry when I discover that down near the bottom, well below the fold, she claims I never set up the 30 Pounds / 4 Months book for the Countdown Sale.

That, alas, is flat out not so.

The 30# book was the first one I set up. I remember it well because the annoyance factor was so high. After I screwed around with that, figuring out how to operate the software to create the sale, I moved on to Cabin Fever and set up all five of the naughty books. Then, I posted my ads on Twitter and several Facebook sites, merrily crowing that the books would go on sale on June 21.

Later, when I got a notice from Kindle reminding me that I’d made all these arrangements, I discovered that the sales were scheduled for JULY 21, not June 21.

Re-entering the website and navigating back to the place to set things up, I found to my amazement that the drop-down month calendar where you have to select the start day was a JULY calendar, not June — a bit of a surprise, since I did this on June 10, and so naively assumed the calendar they shoved in my face to be the June calendar.

Experimentation showed there was no choice of any other month: it was July or nothing. So I had to go back into each of the books I’d already set up, to confirm that in fact the date Amazon had arrogated was July 21, not the June 21 I believed I was selecting.

I think I would have noticed if I hadn’t set up a sale for the 30# book. If I’d opened 30# on the “Bookshelf,” which I most certainly would have done — first, since that’s the one I expected to make money and that’s also the only one for which an inane “countdown” sale can work effectively — I would have noticed if I’d never set up the sale.

Then I had to go back to each of the two ads, change the dates in PowerPoint, convert to PDF, convert to TIF, crop the TIF, resize the TIF, convert to JPEG, and repost all the ads I’d put everywhere on the goddamn social media. This annoyance was also something I would have noticed.

Really, dealing with Amazon is the sh!ts. Some damnfool thing happens EVERY TIME you try to do something. There’s always some complication, some unnecessary hassle, some mindless pointless restriction that makes your life difficult, SOMETHING. And every, single, goddamn time you respond to one of these by trying to do a workaround, that screws you up even worse!

Not ONE thing that I’ve attempted on Amazon, from trying to create a Goodreads Author Page to trying to establish a pseudonym for Roberta Stuart, has worked without some kind of headache or hassle. NOTHING is simple at Amazon. NOTHING works in any sensible way.

If Bernie would please bring back the antitrust laws, I personally would lead a coup* to clean out all the airheaded Republicans and Democrats and install the man as king.
_________

*Dude, little CIA factotum: it’s a joke.

The (not-so-much!) Joys of Amazon

by

I’ve about had it with Amazon. Honest to God, every effin’ time I try to do anything with any book on Amazon, I end up with my hands full of sh!t. This time? Well. Sumbeach, that’s about as articulate as I can get right this instant.

How about a couple of pictures, each worth a thousand words?

Cookbook

Naughty June 2016

I’ve posted these things, plus promotional copy and links, on websites, Facebook pages, Facebook Groups, and Twaddle from here to Hell and onward to Gone, day after day after brain-banging, mind-numbing DAY over the ten days or two weeks.

NINE Facebook pages and groups plus Twitter have been urging people to hurry on over to Amazon and buy these astonishingly wonderful books as dawn cracks on Thursday, July 21. Posts at these nine sites have gone up every single day, along with associated posts that gave me a chance to mention the alleged sale, EVERY DAY for the past day after day after endless day.

Understand: because no two FB pages or groups seem to post the same way, you end up dorking and dorking and dorking around to get them to do what you want. One page will respond to an inserted URL by inserting the web post with the image that appears closest to the top. Another will try to insert ALL the images in the post. Yet another will slap in the images in the righthand sidebar, which bear no relation at all to the content you’re trying to plug on FB. And still another will insert nothing. So for about 99% of them, you have to delete incorrect data and then go into your computer, track down the correct images, and  insert them. Then at Twitter you have to write all new promo copy, because of Twitter’s frustrating word count limitation, which is crimped even further by the need to add hashtags. And by the fact that Twitter reduces the character allowance to account for the size of the attached image. To minimize that, you have to convert your URL to Bitly, another time suck.

At one point, I figured the average number of time-wasting search-and-clicks per Facebook posting was 8. So 8 x 9 = 72 endless click-search-click-search-search-clicks per posting!!!! PER AD. There are two ads involved here.

Even if you’re pasting the promotional copy into each Facebook page/group (which cannot do for all of them), this process adds up to about two hours of mind-numbing computer diddling-around. Per session.

Multiply that by ten days, and you come up with a conservative(!) estimate of about 20 hours spent on this annoying, excruciatingly boring task.

So comes dawn’s early light today, I go on Amazon to check…because, you know, during this whole exercise a still small voice in the back of my mind has been nagging, whaddaya bet? whaddaya bet? Well. If I were a betting woman, I would’ve bet that Amazon would once again give me the shaft.

And I’d have been right.

Naturally, not one of the six books I’d set up for the Amazon Countdown Sale promo program offered any kind of markdown.

Well, except for the “take it for FREE” offer for those who subscribe to Amazon’s free borrowing program. That’s the one where Amazon spies on you to see how many pages you’ve clicked through. If the reader doesn’t “look” (snark!) at enough pages, the author doesn’t get paid. Yeah. Readers “buy” the book but the author doesn’t get paid.

Not that you get paid much in the “borrow” program anyway. You get a fraction of what you’d get if the person bought the book at the ludicrously tiny amount you can get away with charging for an e-book.

IMHO, Amazon is the single worst thing that has ever happened to publishing and to creative work.

Yes, it lets every would-be hobbyist writer get his or her work in front of a (mostly imaginary) public. And yes, it lets everyone get around the gatekeepers at real publishing houses.

But you know: those gatekeepers served a purpose. They knew (still do know) what sells and what doesn’t sell. When they decided to accept or reject a proposal or a manuscript, it was based on some real insight not just into the intrinsic quality of the work but also into its marketability. Even with those gatekeepers, if you’ve ever gone to a charitable book sale or a used book store, you’ll see that the market is simply awash in books, books, books, and more books: many more books than any single reader or even a group of readers could reasonably keep up with.

But now the market is more than awash. It’s DROWNING. It’s fuckin’ SUBMERGED in dreck! I just read a “published” book by some wannabe Great Writer of the Western World that’s full of punctuation errors, spelling errors, and…oh hell. The idea is good. It’s a salable concept. But the published bookoid is a mess:  the copy has apparently never been graced by either a copyeditor or a proofreader.

Both of those, BTW, were provided as a matter of course, free to the author, by real publishing houses.

Amazon single-handedly has degraded the overall quality of literature available to the public, destroyed the publishing industry, and further impoverished the lot of writers and artists.

And if you weren’t already wasting your time “publishing” (le mot juste is something more like “posting”) books that no publisher’s editor in hir right mind would look at twice, you get to waste it anyway jumping through Amazon’s endless “promotional” hoops to no avail.

“Disruption” is just a techno-euphemism for “destruction.”

Here’s what I’m gonna do:

I will leave the 40 or so books we have on Amazon there, since they generate all of about $12 a month…well, in a good month.

But meanwhile, I will convert them all to ePub (which I should have done in the first place!) and post them all on Smashwords — assuming I don’t have to pay through the schnozzola to get an e-book formatting expert to do the formatting so that SW will accept it. If I can’t, then I will post them all to Barnes & Noble. And I will post the Camptown Races bookoids at an online retailer that specializes in “romantic erotica” (no kidding: who knew?).

Then I am going to forget about it. If they sell themselves, bully. If not, WGAS. All of the energy and all of the time I’ve spent on trying to create and sell books? That will be fully diverted into trying to sell editorial and indexing services.

The Copyeditor’s Desk has been supporting this folly. It’s about time it started supporting me, instead.