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Life in the (Tedious…) (Drug-Ridden) Big City

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So tell me, what type of drug use engages Q-tips, chewing or bubble gum, and (maybe) a stiff wire swimming-pool brush?

Yesterday evening — late afternoon, actually — the dogs were barking around out in the backyard, generally being ignored or hollered at. Then at one point Ruby abruptly went ABSOLUTELY FREAKING BATSHIT!!!!

With the possible exception of two very angry German shepherds, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dog fly into such a frenzy. And I’ve had a lot of dogs in my altogether too lengthy lifetime. This dog wasn’t yapping. She wasn’t barking. She was screaming. Truly screaming like a person might scream.

Well, I was very tired and feeling under the weather and mighty tired of hearing dogs bark — not for nothing was Cassie surrendered to the dog pound with the reason, “barks.” So I yelled at them to shut the eff up and then hollered them back into the house. They settled right down when offered Dinner.

Dogs live for Dinner…

Welp, this afternoon when I went to take some garbage out to the alley, I discovered what had set Ruby the Corgi off: Somebody had been camping outside the back gate, evidently up to no good.

I know what the Q-Tips are used for. I know that gum is often favored by people who are wired to the teeth on stimulants like meth and Ecstasy. But the wire swimming-pool brush, the type used to scrape stubborn algae off the walls?  whaa????

One drug users’ message board suggests using a “wire brush” to clean your meth pipe . But I don’t think they mean a brush that’s six inches long by a couple inches wide. Part of it was mashed down, as though it had been stuffed inside something or used to scrub something. Sooo…could be, I suppose.

Speaking of “very tired,” this sort of sh*t makes me feel very tired of my neighborhood. It’s the stuff of dreams about moving far, far away.

There’s something to be said for an alley. It adds about 20 clear, vacant feet between you and the neighbor behind you. It puts two walls instead of just one between you and said neighbor.

And there’s something to be said against an alley: it’s a burglar thoroughfare, a campground for bums, a coyote freeway.

Our alleys are particularly well designed as bum campgrounds. The builder set up the back gates so they would open onto  vestibules inset in the fenceline, for reasons no one can guess. Maybe he thought this would encourage neighbors to hang out and chat with each other whilst hauling out the grass clippings and the trash. Maybe some stupid city regulation mandated it. WhatEVER…the effect is to create little cubbies where people can sit on the ground and sleep, drink, or do dope.

Annoyed, I picked up the paraphernalia the creep(s) had left behind, and then dumped a little dogshit on the ground out there. Tomorrow my son is bringing his golden retriever over for a weekend of dog-sitting. Now, that animal can create a gigantic mound of manure. His product is going into the Bum Armchair, too.

Then later this afternoon I’m sitting around the castle thinking about how I should be working and thinking about how I still feel awful and do not want to work and may never want to work again when Ruby flies into yet another rage, this time at the front door. I don’t see anyone out the front window, but I can’t view the whole courtyard from the window. The front door is protected by an iron security door, so I open the interior door and discover that someone has opened the east gate and left it hanging open.

They haven’t left any advertising nuisances. So that suggests most likely they walked up to the front door and tried to open it. Finding it locked and attached to a barking dog’s trigger, they took off.

{sigh}

Do I need to get the pistol out? It’s usually locked up. It’s a hassle to haul it out, and more of a hassle to prepare it to blow away some harmless burglar. I do not want to get the pistol out.

But then I didn’t want the dog to keep on screaming, either. Possibly not getting the pistol out is a symptom of the same overall sense of fatigue and laziness.

I need another German shepherd.

What kind of dog is like the GerShep of 35 years ago, an animal whose health will not run you into the poorhouse, whose temperament will not open you to lawsuits, and whose intelligence rises to the level of discerning? It must be large enough to remove a burglar’s foot, when need be…

Yesterday when I went over to the westside to hike with SDXB, we passed some very nice suburban tracts. One of them looked like the houses might be more or less in my price range. No slums bordered these tracts. None of the houses looked rundown. No police helicopters hovered overhead.

Sometimes I think I should sell this place and move to Scottsdale, to the west side, to Yarnell, or to Prescott. Someplace where bums do not smoke or inject drugs outside your back gate, where armed robbers fleeing the police do not come to ground in your garage, where idiot City Parents do not destroy your neighborhood with a misguided electric train boondoggle, where property taxes are still relatively low, where cop helicopters are not given to parking over your roof, where my dogs are not driven batshit once a day.

But then I’m reminded of the reality that I…can’t…afford…to…move.

Maybe I could afford a small, camper-style RV, though. The dogs and I could live in an RV. Then we could go wherever we pleased. Preferably someplace sparsely populated and quiet. Very, very quiet.

Rub_al_Khali_002

Are Entrepreneurs Allowed a Day of Rest? Is Anyone?

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Yes, no, maybe? Can you repeat the question?

The Human is scarfing down an exceptionally nice lunch/dinner thing with possibly more wine than should be allowed. The dogs are begging treats supplied by an exceptionally nice (and clever) church matron who makes them by hand in her kitchen. A gentle rain is falling, and now the Human is wrapping up lunch/dinner/thing with a final glass of wine and a rich dessert of…yeah…chocolate chips.

A voice from somewhere behind the lowering clouds  pierces the sky:

Celestial Voice: What do you think you’re doing?

Human: (choke cough!) Uhmm…eating?

Celestial Voice: You’ve been “eating” for half the afternoon. When exactly do you propose to get any work done?

 Human: Work? I’ve already rebuilt a template for hard-copy book formatting today.

Celestial Voice: Very nice. How about you actually do something constructive, like, say, FORMAT a book? And even maybe go so far as to publish the thing?

Human: Gimme a break, Your Vastness! I spent the whole darned evening last night and half this morning singing to your Holy Magnificence and helping to hustle cash to support your devotees.

Celestial Voice: Do I look fat in this radiant gown? It’s my favorite radiant gown!

Human: Oh, no, Your…uhm, Your Radiance! You look absolutely perfect!

Celestial Voice: Naturally. I embody perfection. To the extent that there’s any body to do any embodying.

Human: Well, Your Radiance, don’t you think that since You knocked off on the seventh day, your underlings should be allowed to knock off on Sunday?

Celestial Voice: That’s a cultural construct. How do you know Sunday was Day Seven? Could’ve been Tuesday or Wednesday or whatEVER.

Human: So, does Your Radiance mean I can knock off on Tuesday or Wednesday, too?

Celestial Voice: Surely. Assuming bankruptcy is a goal coveted by your species…

{Sigh} God as academic…

Oh well.

The Entrepreneurial Human is a) too tired to breathe, and b) too depressed by current events to function.

Today is Seabury Sunday in the Episcopal tradition. Under normal circumstances, it’s entertaining: we have a delightful band of Scottish pipers and drummers march us in and out with bagpipes, quite an impressive performance.

But.

You know, we —  that would be you and me, my friends — are engaged in a holy war. Most Americans and possibly even most Norteamericanos have yet to notice this, or to fully appreciate its implications. But a holy war is what we have on our hands. We are at war with an evil on a par with Hitler’s Nazism. I grew up with it: Saudi Arabia was my home throughout my childhood, and in those days I had a front-row seat to the growth of a very scary movement.

We are hated by a faction of Evil unlike anything Americans, Canadians, Latin Americans, and Europeans have seen in centuries: Evil allied with religion. Really, it’s beyond our ken. That’s what makes it so dangerous. It’s an evil that decapitates nine-year-old children, burns caged young men alive, sentences dissenters to thousands of lashes, and murders harmless civilians going about their business. Yesterday’s events in Paris spoke to that.

You understand, bagpipes and drums are tools of war. Take that bit of history, put it inside a church (holy war + holy war: interesting), and combine it with my personal opinion, which is that our only hope is to fully engage the jihadists, NOW not later, with everything we’ve got. And by everything we’ve got, I don’t mean flinging volunteers into the war machine: I believe we need to reinstate the draft so that everyone has a personal stake in what is in fact a menace to Western civilization, and so that everyone can understand on a gut level that we’re facing exactly such a menace.

Yes. I’m retrograde. But I’ll say it anyway:

We are being swept into another world war. The sooner we and our allies grasp that concept, the better our chances of survival. The longer we dawdle about building that understanding and allying ourselves in war with countries that have a vested interest in holding back the forces of darkness, the less likely we will, over the long run, prevail.

At any rate…given the religious overtones of the ISIS attacks on innocent civilians, the presence of a tool of war inside a Christian version of the House of God was, shall we say, disturbing.

So, my friends, if there is a Radiant One, instead of asking “When are you going to get of your duff and get to work,” She may be asking “When are you going to get off your communal duff and bring a stop to this?”

So How Are We Doing in the Erotica Biz?

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Well. Define “doing…” 😀

We made more in this paycheck than we did for the last Amazon payout period. Somebody in the UK likes the Roberta Stuart stories and kindly buys them. Whoever that person is: ♥♥♥♥

We still aren’t making enough to cover the cost of writing and production. BUT…comparing our figures with those of the author I mentioned a while back, the woman who reported that after she got about 80 books up on Amazon, she scored a $4,000 paycheck, maybe we’re not doing so bad. Our revenues are twice what hers were at this point. Probably, though, we have more books up than she did.

If that’s the case, then it supports the hypothesis that current publications and backlist resonate off each other, so that the more stuff you have online, the more, almost exponentially, you earn.

Before long, we’ll see if that really is the case.

Yesterday, which I’d planned to devote 100 percent to marketing, was subsumed by a nasty little flap.

Mrs. Accountability, who’s not only a fellow PF blogger but an occasional client, called to say her virtual assistant had found all of her books and a considerable number of mine posted on a free-download site. Putatively, its operators make their living by charging people for an all-you-can-eat subscription “membership.” She said the site reported that the first Fire-Rider installment, A Gift for the Kubna, had 9000 downloads!

Well, we both almost fainted dead away. Her books, which sell significantly better than mine, had similar figures. On Gift alone, then, I’d lost about $18,000 to theft!

We cruised around trying to find reviews or information about this pirate site but our searches revealed next to nothing. I had to go out. While I was driving around the city, she learned that the site was registered with GoDaddy and is apparently based in or near Hong Kong. She also saw several other PF bloggers’ books displayed on the pirate site, including Crystal’s from Budgeting in the Fun Stuff.

As soon as I got home, I called a class-action lawyer I know in Seattle and explained the details. He said intellectual property isn’t his thing, but he would ask his colleagues who are expert in that kind of law. His concern about suing the bastards was the possibility that the criminals undoubtedly are operating from some foreign country and, he knows the difficulty of enforcing the international copyright treaty.

Then I called GoDaddy, whose CSR instructed on how to complain and to whom.

Shortly before I geared myself up to launch into a full-blown complaint to GoDaddy, I happened to get an email from Tracy Atkins over at the Friedlander Book Designer outfit. When I described what was going on, Tracy responded with news that the site was a scam, all right, but not the kind of scam it appeared to be.

“Sites like that are notorious because they don’t actually have the books,” said Tracy. “They just skim the listing from a book store’s website.  Then they rely on people, and authors, to sign up on the site to see what is there,  only to find out that they are collecting your credit card info.  The odds that your book, any book, is on there is very low.  It’s just a scam all around.”

The scam is not to steal your books but rather to steal your credit-card data.

Wow! That bit of intelligence came across just in time: I was considering “subscribing” so as to get a better look at what they had. Which, obviously, was exactly what the crooks hoped for.

Meanwhile, at almost exactly the same moment Mrs. A. got the same advice from someone she knows. Everyone is pretty certain that the crooks don’t have any book content at all, ours or anyone else’s.

This is borne out by the observation that the site’s “statistics” change every time you reload a page. The number of downloads may go up, or it may go down, hilariously enough.

So that was a relief. But nevertheless, the little drama consumed the whole damn afternoon. I was not pleased.

Thanks to Atkins, the hard-copy version of The Saga Begins — a collection of the first six Fire-Rider books — is posted to the print-on-demand company’s magical-mystery website form, and it looks excellent. The cover that I tricked out in PowerPoint still needs some tweaking: the back cover copy needs to be tightened and made a great deal sharper, and I’d like to move the “Suggested retail price” tag elsewhere. The dimensions may need a little adjustment — hard to tell from this end. I have a call in to their guy, who should be able to advise on that whenever he calls back. But I hope at this rate to have a few copies to take to the shindig I’m attending in December. Every little sale helps!

We continue to post Racy Books for Racy Readers. The latest, Marisol and Banny Driving to San Diego, went live yesterday; another will go up tomorrow.

The graphic design artist just sent “boxed cover” designs for the next two Fire-Rider collections. Those will go up between now and Christmas, probably.

I need to plan some giveaways. Fortunately I didn’t do the one I’d planned — a Kindle Fire — Amazon having of course put them on sale at a gigantic Black Friday markdown.

Hmmm… I wonder if it’s possible to get a gift Kindle Fire and download a bunch of our bookoids into it — say, half-a-dozen — to enhance a proposed giveaway? Hmm hmmm and hmmmmmmm… I wonder. What if we could not only do that but maybe add a book or two by friends, PF blogger types? How great would that publicity be?

Sunday at the Park

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Ruby and Cassie are up and ready to go by 6 a.m. Normally, we would avoid the park on Sunday morning, because gaggles of morons like to meet there on Sundays and let their large dogs run loose. No. It’s not a dog park. Yes, it’s against city and county laws to let your dog run around off the leash. No, none of them gives a damn. They all think their dogs are their children and kids need to run around the park.

However, our usual route, bypassing the park through a neighborhood of aging half-million-dollar shacks, has an inhabitant whom I also would like to avoid at this hour. He’s this adorable, sweet old gentleman, just the nicest old guy. He has an eccentricity: He loves to feed the neighbors’ cats and dogs.

I think he’s lonely, and this little hobby is a way to get out of the house. It also attracts people who like to chat with him. So as hobbies go, it fulfills an important need.

The shade-tree  mechanics have a couple of big old scruffy cats, large and fat and calm, fixtures in the neighborhood. These cats live outdoors, left to take their chances with the cars and the pair of coyotes that cohabit the ’hood with them.

Our friend drives up to the front of the mechanics’ house at 6:30 or 7 a.m. every morning, parks, and walks down the side yard with cat food in hand. There he fills the cat-and-coyote dish to the brim. From there he goes around sprinkling piles of dog and cat kibble on the sidewalks.

If he sees a dog-walker, he’ll offer dog treats.

One tries to be polite. I would prefer that Cassie (in particular) not eat these things, because sometimes they make her sick. But more to the point, Cassie the Corgi is getting fat in her old age. And nothing is worse for a corgi than obesity.

It’s very hard to say “no” to this guy. He’s sweetly insistent: “They come from Trader Joe’s! They’re ORGANIC! They’re good for your dog!” Meanwhile, of course, your dogs are salivating and going batshit for the biscuits he’s waving around.

Yesterday, Ruby choked on one of the things. And really, it was looking serious there for a minute. We were half a mile from home and there was NO way I could get her to a vet in time to save her life if she couldn’t get it out of her throat herself.

She gagged and wheezed and horked and gagged and wheezed for several very scary minutes. Finally she managed to get rid of it. Thank God. If she hadn’t, there would be no Ruby to write about this morning.

So…that’s another route we have to avoid. At least early in the morning.

Really, it’s very frustrating.

You can’t go to the park because there’s likely to be half a dozen large out-of-control dogs racing around.

You can’t walk up into Richistan because there’s a crazy old guy who wants to feed your dogs stuff they shouldn’t have.

You can’t walk along Conduit of Blight because of the nitwit woman with the out-of-control Great Dane dragging her down the street, a dog that tries to attack your little corgis every time it sees them.

That doesn’t leave very many directions you can go in.

Think how much better the world would be if there were no humans in it, except for me and you.

😮