Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

Dumb Tax and Learning Experiences

by

Okay, this is gonna have to be fast because a ton of THINGS remain to be done. But you probably think I fell off the edge of the earth…so…just to keep my hand in, here goes…

Since quitting the teaching job about the four weeks ago, I plunged into a whirlpool of nonstop work, 12 and 14 hours a day: trying to catch up with all the work that hasn’t been done over the past year while I’ve been wrestling with the Mayo Clinic and trying to establish a business framework in which to build the proposed p0rn novelette empire. I’ve gotten a LOT done, much of it entailing technologies and jobs with which I am not familiar. Videlicet:

• The print version of Slave Labor is now in existence.

• The diet/cookbook is finally online!

• Day before yesterday I returned corrections for the print version of Thirty Pounds in 4 Months; while I was at it completely reformatted the endless thing in a new template. Awaiting new page proofs.

• The blog empire is moved over to WestHost but the new back-end guy hasn’t done much to get it organized. Says he picked up a bad bug from his two-year-old’s day-care experience…which is likely, because there is a nasty bug going around these parts just now.

• I’ve about learned how to upload a book-length MS to Kindle and soon will apply to Nook (later!).

• My friend who can fairly be described as the dean of scholarly publishing, referred me to the editor of Johns Hopkins University Press. I wrote a new cover letter and sent the proposal for the Boob Book to him, and he immediately sent it to an acquisitions editor, saying it “looks promising.” 🙂

• I’ve hired a freelance who has written several p0rn0graphic bookoids with more to come; I will fill in with two more after I understand more about how her characters interact. This will give us a seven-story series in a frame story.

• Considering another potential scribbler; we shall see on Friday when I interview the guy.

• Created a contract for hiring these creatures.

• I’ve written two founding stories for series of spicy novelettes, but have had an awful time finding time to write any more around all the other demands.

• The 18 installments of the Fire-Rider series are ready to go; just waiting on the art director to finish the covers (seven are in hand, though…that’ll last the better part of a month if I publish at the rate of one every three or four days).

• I’ve come to hate things technological…what a time suck!

• Finished the last freshman comp course I hope EVER to have to teach. Told the chair I’m taking off next semester.

• Took out a month’s subscription to Shutterstock, which gives me the privilege of downloading up to 750 images.

• Already have found, downloaded, and catalogued about 100. Every time I enter a new set of key words, a bunch more likely candidates come up.

• Found some extremely kewl drawings for the Camptown Ladies Talk blog (which has yet even to be established at Westhost; reference the alleged kid virus), but discovered they’re .eps files, which have to be converted to jpegs and then reduced hugely in size. But still…amazingly kewl.

• Created an awesome cover, using PowerPoint and Preview, for the first installment of the Biker Babe series. Unfortunately it’s a little too racy (read “eye-popping”) to publish on this site, but when the Camptown Races Press site is up, those of you whose sensibilities can sustain a truly lively image will have to come over and admire it.

• Purchased 100 ISBNs.

• Created spreadsheets to suffice (i hope) in the absence of a decent database.

• Edited copy. Advised one distraught author and another who simply plods along and refuses to give up.

• Escaped having to deal overmuch with my neediest client, who thank God ended up with his account at Createspace intact and operative.

• Mocked up a cover in Powerpoint that looks pretty persuasive but have not had the nerve or the time to fiddle with trying to upload it to Amazon or B&N…another day!

• Spent two half-days getting the car’s tires changed.

• Spent half of yesterday today re-learning Windows at the campus’s computer commons; figured out how to get content loaded to Amazon correctly, using a PC not a Mac.

• Approached the college with an initiative the Scottsdale Business Assn has cooked up, by way of offering internships in members’ companies under the SBA aegis. Interesting but tricky.

• Raised Hell, put a block under it, and finally resolved the issue with AMEX about the freeze on my credit bureau accounts. Extracted two new credit cards from AMEX, to kick in after American Express’s contract with Costco expires.

Along the way,  I have learned a LOT of stuff, most of it falling under the heading of “dumb tax.” For example:

• Yesterday I learned that Kindle cannot run a table of contents generated on a Mac, no matter what iteration of Word you’re using. It must be updated on a PC or its links will not go through. Period.

What’s the Dumb Tax part of that? If I’d been paying attention when I read the endless instructions for  how to upload to Kindle from .docx, I would’ve noticed this little detail… 🙄

• Bowker gives one an opportunity to buy a bar code and UPC to go with the ISBNs you’re spending your children’s patrimony to buy. I declined, knowing they weren’t necessary for e-books. But what I did NOT think about is that they are necessary if you want to sell hard-copy books on Amazon. Or anywhere else. The bar codes are expensive, and I was too cheap to pay for them.

Greed Tax: same thing as Dumb Tax. Now I’ll have to have the damn things printed out on labels and ship any hard copies of the diet/cookbook to Amazon, expensively, from my house rather than having the PoD guys ship direct to Amazon. 🙄

And why not have the graphic artist just add the bar code to the wrap-around cover? Because I’d like to sell these things sometime in my lifetime…

• When using a finely tuned Book Design Template, you have to use styles even if you’re preparing PDFs for print. If you use Wyrd’s italic or boldface function (command-i or command-b), for example, what will happen is that any line with so much as one character of italic or b.f. will take on added leading. So instead of the line being, say, 10/12 (ten point type over 12 point leading), it will appear to be 10/13. Lovely.

Why did I not sense this in advance? Not knowing, I’d hesitate to state, for fear of being erroneous.

My friend the e-book builder had converted Slave Labor to .mobi with far more techie software and expertise than I’m capable of marshaling. When I wanted a print-on-demand version, I just slapped the copy I’d sent to him into Book Design Template’s “Focus” model (very handsome, BTW) — without even thinking about the font formatting. Nor was there any reason to think it would make any difference. The styles are designed to make the files work with Kindle. Oh well.

• Also yesterday I learned that Windows has reinvented itself so many times that to a Mac user it now looks like it was developed on a planet circling Antares.

Should’ve bought myself a cheap laptop PC with which I could continue to use Windows, down through the ages.

That’s only partial Dumb Tax, though: in the past, I’ve found that switching back and forth between the Mac and the PC environments causes a lot of headaches. It’s quite a PITA when you confuse one set of commands with another.

• Because of the TofC issue, I learned that the college’s Computer Commons is dead empty in the summertime and is a HEAVENLY place to work. It’s quiet, it’s air-conditioned to sweater-weather levels, and with no one around, you get the techs’ complete, undivided attention.

I’m definitely going back today or tomorrow to work more on relearning windows and to refine the Fire-Rider tables of contents. If I can get them to let me sign in as a member of the public after my campus credentials expire, then the Computer Commons may become my office-away-from-the-home-office, at least during the summertime.

Honestly, I couldn’t believe how cold it was in there. In the morning, I was sitting here at the Funny Farm with the AC blasting and fans running, and sweat was running off my  nose as I was tapping away at the keyboard. I’m not thrilled about burning the gas to drive up to campus every day, but if I get more work done and have fewer conversion problems, it may be worth it.

I think the groundwork for the Camptown Races Press enterprise is now about laid. I sincerely hope so, because wrestling with all this stuff has meant I haven’t been able to write more than a paragraph or two a day for the past several weeks. By the time I’ve finished a day’s raft of To-Do’s, I’m so tired I can’t hold my eyes open.

So I’m hoping that by the end of this week I’ll have the websites updated, announcements of the newly published books posted here and at those sites, a social media expert hired to help peddle the things, and FINALLY some time broken loose in which to do what was the whole point of this exercise: sit down and write for a living.

Now…the only question is, how do I persuade every single reader of Funny about Money to review my astonishingly brilliant and wondrous to read Amazon books???

Enterprise Progress, Costco Progress

by

So some of yesterday’s unholy tangles got straightened out today. We now have a username and pw that will get us into the sites on WestHost — turns out we were trying to get in through the wrong URL. Oops.

The authorization code to free the Writers Plain & Simple domain name from WordPress came through some hours into the morning. With that in hand, I managed to find a LIVE HUMAN BEING (can you imagine????) at GoDaddy to complete the job.

These tergiversations occupied half the morning, but at least they resulted in getting something done, for a change.

Meanwhile, in the Bidness Enterprise Department…

a) The Scottsdale Business Association is considering an initiative to reach out to colleges and universities to collaborate on internships or apprenticeships for young people interested in careers in the various industries we represent. I reached a woman at Paradise Valley Community College who was delighted to hear from us. She’s now on our speaker’s list for next week!

b) A friend who’s an éminence grise in scholarly publishing gave me the name of a contact at a very prominent press (indeed!) who she thinks might be interested in the Informed Choices manuscript. So! Off that goes to him in the next day or two.

The morning’s productive time was leached away by a bunch of errands: had to deposit some checks in the credit union, and, while in that part of town, run by the Costco to pick up a minimal store of necessaries. Then, infuriatingly, I had to waste some more of my time sitting in line and screwing around with getting the car emission-tested.

I’m sure the state used to require these only every two years. And I’m equally sure that I killed a bunch of time in last summer’s heat on this same fool’s errand. My car is meticulously maintained and so has never failed an emissions test and is never likely to. Why can’t citizens simply present their maintenance records to demonstrate that their vehicles are unlikely to be contributing any more pollution than, say, the mines and smelters that distribute ozone and CO2 around the region?

Mercifully, this series of nuisances consumed far less time than expected.

Costco opens at 10 a.m., the credit union at 9. I figured if I could hit the CU at 9:30 I’d get to the Costco right at 10.

Arrived, however, at the credit union early: 9:15. No line inside: business conducted rapidly and efficiently.

Turned into the Costco parking lot at exactly 9:43 a.m. Almost 20 minutes before the store opened, but the gas pumps were open and the lines were short.

Parked right in front of the store about 10 minutes to the hour. Because of the 100-degree heat, employees were letting early birds in the door.

Shot into the store, grabbed the dog meat, grabbed the frozen dog veggies, grabbed some fresh fruit, grabbed the paper towels and toilet paper, grabbed a bottle of maple syrup, and charged the checkout line. Only one person in front of me, and he was halfway done.

Turned on the car’s ignition: 9:13 a.m.

Not freaking bad, eh? Filled up the car and got in and out of the Costco in under half an hour! Woo HOO!

Then it was off to the dreaded emissions test nuisance. Three cars were in line ahead of me, one already lashed up in the machinery. Figured to have to sit there in the heat with the air-conditioning off for about 15 minutes. Pisseth me off!

But no! When the car in the shed moved forward, the worker motioned the guy ahead of me and me to move into the shed!

There have been some changes made at that place! They now have a much faster, more efficient “test” — only took a couple of minutes to run that and fleece me for $20 — and they can do two cars at a time. So even though I resented having to pay twenty bucks for nothing, at least I got outta there fairly fast.

Now I have to pony up another $41 to register the damn car.

Glad I didn’t buy a new car. If I had, the bill would be more like $400.

Flew home, put away the Costco junk, flew down to AJ’s Amazingly Fancy Purveyor of Gourmet Items to pick up some stuff that can’t be had at Costco. All told, spent only about $180, less than a normal monthly Costco run.

Now I intend to stay out of Costco until this time next month, after the AMEX billing cycle closes.

The American Express bill this month was only $1400, despite the $214 for the new side mirrors and the $400+ for the tires. That means that absent the unplanned car bills, I probably came in about $315 under the $1100 budget. Could be a great deal worse.

Of course, that happened because I spent the better part of a week in the hospital and another week flat on my back in bed. But despite its unfortunate delivery, the message is that the more you stay out of Costco, the less you spend!

After another hour online and on the phone trying to get the domain name moved, I just could not face any more computer hassles! So once again the diet/cookbook didn’t get online. Tomorrow! Really!

Threw some potatoes and a slab of meat on the grill, fixed a salad, and had a decent meal. Then wrote another few grafs of the current Biker Babe installment.

Speaking of all this, it’s 7:30 p.m. and there’s still bookkeeping and bill-paying to do. And so, to work. Interminably to work…

 

So much for creative work…

by
Note how wallpaper brings to mind a black hole into which Time Itself is being sucked...
Note how wallpaper brings to mind a black hole into which Time Itself is being sucked…

Did I actually say I daydreamed of spending my days writing for a living? Really? What on earth could I have been thinking? Wouldn’t you think that after 70 years on this earth I would have figured out that NO ONE MAKES A LIVING DOING CREATIVE WORK.

My entire day has been consumed — utterly, totally consumed — with screwing around with  other people’s websites. And what have I accomplished?

Almost nothing.

Well. Along the way I’ve taken notes and printed out how-to guides, so I now have a kind of user’s manual for the wanna-be micropublisher:

• Tracy Atkins’s guide to formatting hard copy and e-books with his and Friedlander’s book design templates.

• Atkins’s detailed instructions for how to upload your book and cover to KDP.

• Amazon’s detailed instructions for how to upload your book and cover to KDP, which conflict in places with the latter.

• The KDP contract, all 22 single-spaced pages of it.

• Kindle’s cover image specs.

• Nook’s cover image specs.

• Amazon’s detailed instructions for how to create a cover image using that monopoly’s new cover image building tool.  (This will put quite a few graphic artists out of work.)

• Detailed instructions for how to move a domain off WordPress, which don’t work.

• William King’s (now outdated) detailed instructions for how to create a Kindle cover using PowerPoint.

But otherwise, what have I accomplished? Damn near nothing.

I’ve managed to upload the body copy for the diet/cookbook to the print-on-demand publisher. But since I wanted it coil-bound (so it would lay flat on a reader’s kitchen countertop), I imagined all I would need is the front cover image.

Wrong: after much puzzling and wrestling around and begging for help from support, I learn that you have to submit a PDF for a wrap-around cover, only with no spine copy.

Lovely. God only knows how long it will take the graphic artist to produce that. You understand, I’ve been waiting for MONTHS for cover  images to come forth.

I’d hoped to get the cookbook up on Amazon today in e-book format. At the outset, it looked like Caliber was the way to go. Considerable time-wasting study later, it appeared that was a bad idea.

Instead, it would be better to go directly through KDP, despite constant bitter complaints about the difficulty of said process. By the time I’d figured that out, though, I was already too tired and too frazzled with computer-generated frustration to take on a monster job like that. It will have to wait till tomorrow.

And that will mean ANOTHER day will go by in which I get exactly zero (0) writing done.

WordPress.com will not let go of my writersplainandsimple.com domain name, even though in theory I own it and in theory they’re supposed to move it over to GoDaddy at my request. I paid the bastards to renew it, and now their records say it expires in less than a month. They kept the money I paid to renew that but canceled the Akismet subscription, so soon that site will be spammed out of existence.  I have been banging my head against that wall since 9:07 this morning, to exactly no avail. I’m about to threaten them with a lawyer…this is getting ridiculous.

My friend the e-book builder sent a link to a very interesting market research tool that effectively deconstructs and reconstructs data from Amazon Kindle sales. Tried to download it. The outfit marketing it will only take cash or charges through PayPal. To do that, you have to have a password. Since we took both of our accounts off PayPal after the recent hacking attempt, at the behest of my bidness partner’s fiancé who has a degree in IT, I’ve forgotten the password. The one in my records doesn’t work. So I couldn’t buy the damn thing. Too bad: it looks extremely useful. Or…ahem…it could be just another time suck…

To Do, 7/21/2015

• Remind artist about need for 5.5 x 8.5-inch diet/cookbook cover image.

Mooted, two ways from Sunday.

a) He headed me off at the pass and sent the image before I could ask.
b) See above: a full wrap-around cover PDF is needed even though there’s no goddamn spine!

• Finish domain transfer from WP.com to GoDaddy, which didn’t get finished yesterday.

Foiled and frustrated, see above.

• Try to convert diet/cookbook to Kindle format using Calibre.

Hah!!!

• Build BikerBabe cover in PowerPoint, using William King’s somewhat outdated strategy.

Mooted by the discovery of Amazon’s proprietary cover-building tool, which looks useful but probably will prove to be another goddamn electronic frustration. If it works, though, it’ll be a godsend.

• Ask new web guru to build new sites for Camptown Races Press and Camptown Ladies Talk.

He still can’t get into Westhost.

• Inquire at PVCC about opportunities for Scottsdale Business Association to partner with the college’s internship program.

Bingo! Their internship director will meet with us next week. One count it (1) thing accomplished today!

 • Get domain name for Camptown Races Press.

Pointless until web guru can get into the hosting service.

• Do pool chores

Most of those were automated and so they got done. By now, I imagine, the filter probably will need to be backwashed.

 So. Think of that. By quitting the comp job, I’ve gone from spending my days doing a mind-numbingly frustrating activity that I hate to spending my days doing a mind-numbingly frustrating activity that I hate. Interesting.

The Enterprise: Progress Made toward Business Goals

by

So yesterday I started the upload of Slave Labor to Snowflake Press’s print-on-demand service, just to see what would happen.  It went pretty well until (I think) until I reached a point where the next step was… ????? Self-evident, this site is not.

Finding no way to proceed past the point of having uploaded the book and entered my company’s information, I saved and sent an email to their support folks. Got a message back instructing on what to do, so today I have to decipher that and move forward. I think the next step elicits page proofs — interestingly, from their online instructions as far as I got, it appeared that you’d better have printed and proofed your PDFs yourself, before uploading, ’cause you weren’t going to get bluelines or page proofs or whatever. If they ship proofs, though, THAT will be grand.

I’m also ready now to upload How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, the diet/cookbook. Realized there was no reason to wait  until I’d figured out how to get that on Kindle and Nook before setting up the PoD version. So once I learn EXACTLY how to do this task, 30 Pounds will be next.

Yesterday I developed a spreadsheet (I really do need a database on these computers!) to identify and keep track of stock photography for covers and populated it mightily. Today, having found those images, I need to subscribe to Shutterstock and start downloading and storing images for the future bookoids.

The Über-To-Do list I made a week or ten days ago, the one where I figured if I could get to three items a day, in a week or so I’d be positioned to kick Camptown Races Press into high gear — i.e., to focus most of my energy on writing and pre-marketing racy books and on uploading the books that already exist — is pretty well accomplished. A few things remain to be completed: one can’t register an ISBN, for example, until one has the cover art, and as usual I’m waiting (and waiting…and waiting…) for the artist to get done with the Fire-Rider images.

The websites are moved over to WestHost. The wonderful and clever Jesse is now freed of another distraction from his ambitions, and a new back-end guru is working on organizing the Blog Empire in a more reasonable way. It’s grown up like topsy, of course, and the result resembles…well, a weed patch. With that tidied up, things should run much more efficiently, I hope.

Today I have to move the Writers Plain & Simple domain name from WordPress.com to my possession, meaning what for that website, I do not know. As soon as we have the domain name, then we’ll move the site to WestHost, too. But I hope it won’t cause Writers P&S to go dark in the interiim. Oh well.

Also today I’m going to start building a kind of in-house user manual describing, step-by-step, how to do some of the complicated techno-tasks that have to be done. Some of these exist of a piece here and there — I downloaded William King’s explanation of how to build an e-book cover to a PDF and printed it. I’ve experimented with this once and found it pretty easy. Since I’m good with PP and not good at all with PhotoShop, and since the proposed smυtty books don’t need to have anything very fancy on the front, I’m thinking this will be the path of least resistance when it comes to publishing the frolics.

Other procedures to go into the proposed manual: how to post to Kindle, how to post to Nook, how to upload to Snowflake, maybe (if it proves very complicated) how to get stock art images. Any time I have to deal with something that’s yet another learning experience, I’m going to write down the steps, print them out, and stick them in a three-ring binder. So with any luck, I won’t have to look this stuff up and try to figure it out over and over and over again, which is what happens now.

Once again, though, this morning I simply had to take a break, which is what I’m doing while scribbling these golden words. The house has degenerated into SUCH a mess, I simply couldn’t stand another minute of it. Since I got out of the last visit to the Mayo Hotel and Resort, I’ve been working while flat on my back in bed. Though I’ve been recovering, most of the time I feel a lot better laying down.

Of course, my being out of commission does nothing to stop the constant blizzard of incoming paper. Piles and piles and PILES of it have come to rest on almost every surface in the house.

So I shoveled that off.

Found a box that would fit the index cards for the Boob Book, which have been arrayed in tidy (dust-collecting) stacks atop the family-room desk. Put those away neatly.

Then shoveled out a space in the office to hold the box of cards plus the 787 pages of source material for the book, which have accrued in three large binders. So got that stuff out of sight.

I’m waiting until I get a contract to write that book. I’ll send it to half a dozen agents plus one of my former publishers, Columbia UP. If no one bites, then I may write it and self-publish it, but not until I get the paying business off the tarmac.

Shoveled more paper off the desk in the office. Found stuff that was tossed on the desk because no file folders exist to hold it. So now have to devise some file folders and, far more problematic, find a place that can hold him. All the file space in the house and garage — four file cabinets’ worth — is jammed full of crap I’m supposed to save for three years, five years, seven years, or forever. What is the point?

Soaked the blood from the most recent medical adventure out of the sheets. Was kind of surprised to see it actually wash out. Sheets are expensive and I really, really didn’t want to have to throw that set away.

Well, I’m about as rested up as I’m ever gonna get. And so, to work…

Stuff Done, Stuff in Progress

by

“In Progress”: I have no idea whether this post will go online or whether it will stick once it does. Beloved Web guru Jesse, now constrained (by a job, of all things, poor guy!) to the weekends to perform his magic for the clientele, worked into the night to move the blog empire to WestHost and reported, sometime after midnight, that he would be spending a fair amount of today in pursuit of the same goal.

So today’s idle post may be being scribbled while he’s roaming around the site doing whatever it is that Web Magicians do. Oh well. It all goes off into the Internet Ether anyway, I guess.

Yesterday’s frenzy, the one that produced NINE major jobs all of which occupied Slot #1 on the priority list, did eventually produce a little forward progress. To wit:

1. I studied the Calibre user manual and thought holy shit! Decided to go through KDP for most of the Magnum Opuses, with the possible exception of the diet/cookbook. The cookbook has a relatively complex layout. Friedman’s user manual for the Word templates I purchased claims that if styles are used assiduously, even something with lists and tables should transfer into the enormously arcane Calibre software. But I’ll believe that when I see it.

If it doesn’t work, then I’ll have to hire my friend the e-book builder to prepare that one.

The smυt, though, is extremely simple and should fly through the process with no problem. I hope.

1. And I studied Barnes & Noble’s self-publishing tool. It looks extremely simple.

Okay, we do know looks can be deceiving, and that where things digital are concerned, 99.998% of the time looks are deceiving. But at least I have an idea of what I’m supposed to do.

1. Tina’s edits are now entered in the diet cookbook MS and some final layout polishing has been done. The thing should be ready to convert to PDFs today. The e-book conversion is more problematic; see above.

1. I realized the PoD version of the cookbook could and probably should be coil-bound, since those who don’t buy its e-book incarnation probably have in mind opening it out on the drainboard so they can follow recipes while cooking. Coil-bound cookbooks work better for that purpose than perfect-pound, because they lay flat. This is good, because it  will be much simpler to convey the cover to the Snowflake Press. So the cookbook and the PDFs for Slave Labor go over to the printer today.

1. Though I did not start a month’s subscription and start downloading cover images, I did go through all my notes (with URLs for the images already spotted) and transfer the relevant data into a spreadsheet. This little ledger will show where stock art was acquired, the vendors’ stock number for each piece, when it was acquired, what work it was used for, and when it was published. Today if I have time, I will start the subscription and begin the downloads, a chore that will take some hours.

1. Though I did not create a second mock-up cover in PowerPoint (I’ve done that in the past and see that it seems to work, but whether it gets past Kindle and Nook’s gatekeepers remains to be seen), I did ascertain that a color image converted to a JPG by PowerPoint does convert in RGB, thank God. So, if the guy who says he makes his covers with stock art in PP is right, creating covers for the p0rn will be down-and-dirty easy, since nothing very artistic is required for those.

1. And finally, I managed to add a few words to the current Bobbi and the Biker bookoid, in which BillyBob finally calls Bobbi (whose lust for his magnificent body can best be described as “overheated”) and invites her to go line dancing at his favorite country-Western sh!t-stompin’ bar. This should be interesting…

 Today I’d like to start with a sample chapter a prospective contributor sent over. Looking forward to reading that more closely — took a brief look at it yesterday but became swamped with yesterday’s frolics, which occupied almost every living breathing moment until about 9:00 p.m., when I crapped out. So probably that will be priority number one, after a bunch of Life Maintenance chores:

1. DONE Feed dogs

2. Check pool chemicals, restore balance; clean pump pot; backwash if necessary; shock-treat if necessary.

3. DONE Pour vast quantities of Bayer Tree & Shrub evil chemical around the paloverde and climbing roses in attempt to damage and kill off as many evil paloverde borers as possible.

The “beneficial nematodes” that I bought from Arbico last fall and this spring seem to have helped some, but another dozen of the monsters emerged from the ground, meaning hundreds if not thousands of root-eating grubs reside under the surface, where they’re working at killing the magnificent paloverde that shelters the west side of my house from the blast-furnace afternoon sun. Seeing their exit holes (which go about 18 inches underground), I got the idea of pouring borer-specific insecticide directly down those holes, on the following theories:

a) the fertilized females often return to their hole to lay their eggs…laying the things in a bug-killer infested hole can’t do the babes much good; and

b) applied in this way, the liquid will go directly down to the level where the damn grubs are chewing on my tree’s roots and presumably, by capillary action, soak into the soil where the little horrors reside.

4. UNDER WAY Wash and dry the bathroom rug and the puppy-dirt-collecting rug by the side door. Clean the dirt out of the washer and utility sink (a larger job than it appears, involving use of a shop vac and repeated running of the endlessly annoying washer’s “rinse” cycle.)

5. DONE. Find a place to store stacks of notecards indexing research for Boob Book. Get that stuff off the family room desk so the desk can be dusted!

6. Read contributor’s creative work; respond in something that resembles a coherent manner.

7. Upload Slave Labor to Snowflake Press.

8. UNDER WAY Write back cover copy for print version of diet/cookbook.

9. Upload diet/cookbook to Snowflake Press.

10. Continue writing the latest installment of Bobbi & the Biker.

11. Get to the 36 unread emails on the server.

12. Write job description for proposed intern, in connection with internship/apprenticeship initiative planned by members of Scottsdale Business Association.

How exactly I’m supposed to explain to some college internship coordinator that candidates must be 18 years of age but preferably over 21 remains to be seen. Oh well. Tomorrow’s another day.

 

Gotta Take a Break

by

Oh, wow! What a morning! I’ve been going since 4:30, with so many things demanding attention right this minute that I’m falling all over myself.  Gotta take a break and think about something else.

You know, I need to prioritize the jobs I’m trying to do so that at any given time I’m working on ONE of them, not trying to juggle them all at once. With a three-ring circus in progress, all it takes is a single disruption to set you to spinning off-balance.

Today’s disruption comes from WordPress.com, which has decided to gouge me a series of fees for the “free” website I set up for Writers Plain & Simple. These demands, in which they threaten to shut the site down unless I change the settings so they can “upgrade” at will, come exactly 11 months after I started that site, meaning that if I did sign up for paying services, a full month should remain. Meanwhile, I’ve been nagging my back-end guy to move the Blogging Empire off his server to WestHost and to take the WordPress.com site with it. All this was supposed to have happened last week, but because it didn’t happen (again…), now I have THIS hassle taking up my time.

Goddamnit.

So as I was trying to eat my miserable breakfast and sip my stone-cold coffee around various chatline operators, none of whom would come online (finally I got a message saying they were busy and if I’d like to file a support request maybe someday in my lifetime they’d get back to me), I tried to list the things that need to be attended to right now, right this minute:

1. Learn how to build an acceptable e-book cover image.
1. Learn how to use Calibre.
1. Learn how to post to Kindle and to Barnes & Noble
1. Finish the current Biker Babe bookoid, started yesterday.
1. Download cover images from stock photography sites
1. Get blogging empire moved over to WestHost
1. Figure out how to cope with that
1. Enter Tina’s edits and upload diet/recipe book to Kindle and B&N via Calibre, assuming I can figure out how to use Calibre
1. Upload print layout of diet/recipe book to PoD printer.

Notice that they’re all prioritized, all right: as No. 1.

Not a single one of these needs is going to happen today. One of my clients, a guy who seems to need a lot of hand-holding, called and urgently requested a meeting. I don’t know what he wants, but

a) I do know it’s going to absorb at least half of today; and
b) I suspect it has to do with his desire to set up his book in PoD format, which he’s been having about as much luck with as I’ve had in my project to move the blogs to WestHost.
c) If that is true, I do NOT understand why the design firm that I sent him to has not just made it so, since I happen to know they have an account with Snowfall Press and there’s no damn good reason they can’t just upload the PDFs to Snowfall and charge him for the privilege. And then some.
d) Because there is no damn good reason, that means whatever the reason is, you can be sure it’s no damn good.
e) And finally, what that means is that no damn good is about to pour onto my head and absorb the next week or two of time that I need and want to use to get my own enterprise up and running.

I am so damn tired of having to DROP EVERYTHING to do stuff for someone else, to the point that nothing I want to do to make my own life better and to position myself to earn a living without having to teach miserable freshman comp courses EVER GETS DONE.

I’m seriously thinking about dropping the editorial business altogether and telling clients they’re going to have to find someone else to read their copy. That, however, would he highly counterproductive. I’m spending the S-corp’s money like water trying to get this enterprise up (and do NOT appreciate WordPress engrossing some of it for nothing!), and will need at least some income to keep afloat until we see how the racy book enterprise works. If it works. Yesterday enough money came in to cover the cost of two hours’ worth of one-on-one lessons in using PhotoShop, which I happen to know is the best tool to create ebook covers.

It can be done in PowerPoint. But the resulting quality remains unclear to me. I’ve seen some ebook covers allegedly created in PP, and I’ve tried it and found it fairly easy. But in fact, PhotoShop is much more versatile and allows one to customize stock art so as not to have a cover that looks like all the other covers of men’s torsos armored in abs.

I’ve taken two courses in PhotoShop, back when we thought the university’s Journals office might need to do some degree of design work. Bored me stupid — listening to some guy explain how to do it for eight hours at a time is not conducive to learning. And because as it turned out all our journals had their own graphics people, we never used either PhotoShop or InDesign. The only way to learn to use software that works for me is for me to USE it. To use it for days on end, until its methods and works become second nature.

One thing is for sure, it’s dead right that if you want to get something done right, you have to do it yourself. Yea verily, if you want it done AT ALL you have to do it yourself. I’ve been waiting on the cover art for some of this stuff upwards of a year. I’ve been waiting weeks and weeks to get the blogs moved. And that’s one reason why everything I need to do is now parked at the top of the priority list: because NOTHING HAS GOTTEN DONE WHEN I ASKED (PAID!!!!!) TO GET IT DONE.

Cripes. I’ve got to get dressed to go meet the client.