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Bookkeeping Blues

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ledgerIf it has numbers in it, I hate it.

So…any excuse in a storm! And over the past few months, I’ve managed to find quite a few. Soooo… About two-thirds of the giant dune of paper that’s piled up on the desk is four months’ worth of bills and bank statements for the Copyeditor’s Desk and for me.

Plowing through all that was going to take half the day, I suspected. And…yup! Exactly right. Got home from this morning’s early ayem meeting and grocery shopping on the way home. Sat down to work around 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. , after filing final grades for what I hope will be the last freshman comp course I ever have to teach. Finished wrestling with the figures shortly before 5:00 p.m., reduced to a bundle of aggravation.

I think I’ve entered all the credits and debits. I seem to have reconciled Quickbooks with the credit unions’ statements. The bills are paid and nothing is pending.  And QB says I have just about $3,000 less than the credit union thinks I have.

Well. Okay, so I’m glad it’s not the other way around.

But still. It’s frustrating.

Really. I’ve got to keep up with these little tasks.

In the process, though, I made a couple discoveries:

1. WordPress.com is quietly charging me $38 for something undescribed, even though I supposedly have a “free” website t here and even though the theme is not a premium theme.

2. Slave Labor a book that few have ever heard of and fewer still would care to read, is selling, in a very, very tiny way. Revenues on this obscurity average around eight bucks a month.

That’s for one book with a readership best described as “limited.”

So…let’s say each of 100 p0rn0graphic books earns all of ten bucks a month — probably a conservative estimate. Now we’re talking about a thousand dollah. That’s only $120/month less than I need to replace the teaching income. Hm.

That would require five people to buy each book per month, on average. Doesn’t seem out of reason.

So: onward with the stories!

 

Ay-MAZING Costco Tale

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gorillatapeSo yesterday afternoon I schlepped back up to Costco. Having been told by two different car dudes to stay off the freeways with the Vintage 2006 tires, I followed the surface streets way to Hell and Gone up to Yorkshire and 27th Avenue. This is a very time-consuming schlep: about 40 minutes, and the second one I’d had to make in two days. Monday a.m. when I went up there to buy new tires, they said they had the tires, but if I’d wait a day and make an appointment, they’d give me a discount. Since the bill was shaping up to be $500 and I’d just dropped $214 on replacing the mirrors, I agreed to come back.

The mirrors. Yes. You’ll recall that the side mirrors have been held on with Gorilla Tape for some time, hm?

Well, that cat got out of the bag.

I drove myself to the Mayo’s ER with the giant bellyache that led to their slapping me in the hospital and chaining me to a saline drip for five days. So my car was left in the parking lot.

My son arranged to pick up my car and drive it home, which meant…yes. I’m afraid so.  He found out about the Gorilla Tape.

Totally abhorred. I didn’t think he was EVER going to stop lecturing me.

So, nothing would do but what, last week, I had to put Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic up to replacing the mirrors.

While the car was at Chuck’s, I asked him to rotate the tires.

When I went to pick up the tank, he said they couldn’t rotate the tires because they were cracking so badly they probably wouldn’t survive being taken off and remounted. “You need new tires! And please…don’t drive on the freeway with these things!”

{sigh}

So Monday morning while I’m talking to THE cutest most handsome and drop-down-dead adorable young tire salesman and arranging to get Costco to change the tires the next day, I say to him, “I have to drive out to Sun City this afternoon and I’d like not to have a flat between here and there.”

His Cuteness says, “Well, just be sure to stay off the freeway.”

Moving on to {argh!}

Well, obviously, I made it to Sun City on the surface streets — that was really a treat! — and home, and back up to the  Costco, all without mishap. Turns out those tires were installed in 2006. They were nine years old!

Because I stopped commuting when I was laid off in 2009, they still had plenty of tread. And I’d never noticed the cracking, which was obvious once the guys pointed it out.

At any rate, I’m sitting there interminably — this experience took two hours, but I’ve brought the laptop and manage to grade a 2500-word Spanglish paper and do a couple of other small projects, so I’m keeping myself amused  — when the excessively cute Costco tire dude says, “Uhmmmm…. I made a mistake yesterday.”

“Don’t have the tires?”

“The ones we had are the wrong ones.”

Ooops.

What he proposes to do to make this right is to give me four tires that they DO have in stock, which are a grade better than the $500 worth of tires I paid for yesterday, AND to give me a discount on top of a discount. When all that is said and done, I pay $311 for FOUR tires, better than the ones he’d originally ordered.

THEN his boss says, “Let us buy you lunch.” (It’s 3:30 or so by now.)

I say, “Why, shore!” So he comps me whatever I want from the snack bar.

They don’t have filet mignon with béarnaise sauce, so I order up a piece of pizza and a soda.

Predictably, this stuff upsets the ailing stomach. But that doesn’t matter. Now I don’t have to use the few items left in the larder to fix dinner, and it’s been a long time since I’ve had a pizza. So that was nice.

LOL!  Is that or is that not the most amazing transaction ever?

work work work work work work work work work wor…

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Awake at 3:00 a.m. Couldn’t get back to sleep so dragged the laptop into the bedroom (yeah: bad! but the surgical incisions feel a lot better when I recline to work).

Packaged a proposal for the Boob Book, intended for an agent who looks promising and so, I hope, will consider working with me. Started merging the various documents and realized…helle’s belles! No chapter outline!

Dayum. So had to drop everything and write that. Hope it doesn’t look too careless or off-the-cuff. Finally got the whole mound together, attached it to a cover e-mail, and hit “send.”

By then it was light out. Dogs insisted on getting off the bed and racing around and being fed.

Dogs off, dogs fed, back door open for them to go out and the mosquitoes to come in. Back to the bed-desk.

Started grading papers. Only a few remain to be read, but one of my best students is running late. I’d given her some leeway…but of course worry that she may not get the thing in on time. She’ll pass the course anyway, even if she turns in nothing. But…she’s an A+ student and I would like not to send her away with a C. Or worse.

Two very well written papers arrived. That was cheering. One reasonably well written paper came in from a student who couldn’t write hir way out of a paper bag if hir life depended on it: i.e., said paper was written reasonably well by someone s/he hired. Another couple of papers: painful to read. Make that agonizing.

In-house for The Copyeditor’s Desk: a lengthy introduction for a book under contract and two reviews for our journal client. Tina had already read and formatted the reviews, so all I had to do was read behind her. The introduction…we’d read it before, but she found new stuff; I found new stuff; it got some tidying. AND damned Wyrd has decided to default to Roman numerals for the end-notes.

This is a known issue for Wyrd 2007, 2008, and 2010 for Mac…and apparently — far as I could tell from a relatively quick Web search — one that effing Microsoft has elected to ignore. And it is a gigantic PITA.

Naturally Wyrd crashed (AGAIN) just as I was wrapping up the intro…try to fix ONE character in the effing end-notes and you take the whole goddamn program down.

Little was lost; files I’ve been working on for the past several days (which were open because I don’t want to have to track them down in the intricacies of my file architecture) recovered themselves, and only one edit in the introduction disappeared.

I should be happy that only my time was wasted, hm?

Worked a little on formatting and writing “Our Story So Far” blurbs for the Fire-Rider series.

A prospective writer for Camptown Races Press inquired about our contract.

Ahem. Contract?

So as soon as I shoveled the paying work off the virtual desk, I had to come up with one of those. It actually looks pretty good, IMHO. Fortunately one chapter of my book The Essential Feature covered publishing contracts and was vetted by an intellectual property lawyer.

Now I have about 20 minutes before I’ve got to traipse the car to Costco AGAIN to get the car’s tires changed and be sheared to the tune of $400. I figure it’ll take an hour or two for them to do that, so I’ll take the laptop over there and write p0rn while sitting in their air-conditioned shop.

One never knows these days, does one? Just think of it. That little old lady sitting next to you in the tire shop or the dentist’s office, tapping away on her dainty laptop, just may be writing kink… 😀

 

Start-up Risk: What Will the New Enterprise Cost?

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QuestionmarkLast night when I got a chance to take a deep breath, I again reviewed and toted up projected operating costs for the first six months of Camptown Races Press’s existence.

Why six months? Because with any luck, the thing should run in the black by then, assuming I can put 15 to 20 bookoids online each month. Apparently critical mass is achieved at about 100 publications. That would be 17 squibs a month.

I’ve written two, each taking about a week or ten days to prepare. However, during that time I’ve also had to do with a new, painful, & temporarily debilitating surgery at the same time my summer course draws to an end — significant distractions, we might say. Also both of the new bookoids are longer and more sophisticated than necessary. If I wrote two books/month that were what I would naturally write when confronted with a keyboard and a screen and filled in with eight- to ten-page quickies (heh!), I could probably crank six or eight a month myself and hire out the rest. Assuming I can find enough people to write nine or ten in a given month.

So I calculated the minimum and the maximum operating costs I think will be necessary to run the new publishing imprint for six months, assuming it does indeed generate enough copy to produce 100 novelettes and free-standing short stories over that time.

Making another assumption — that I can learn to format these things for Kindle and Nook myself — the major costs are editorial (i.e., hiring writers), cover design, stock art, hosting fees, and back-end website management. Over six months, these will range from a minimum of $5,085 to a maximum of $7,850.

I propose to capitalize the new business with funds in the S-corporation. These figures represent about half to three-quarters of the S-corp’s liquid assets. And of course they don’t account for any unpleasant little surprises, like this handy-dandy MacBook Pro self-destructing….

True, The Copyeditor’s Desk will continue to bring in some money. We still have several editorial clients, two of whom pay a decent rate. But in a good year the editorial biz only nets about 10 grand. This has not been a good year, so far. Nor am I any more enthusiastic about taking on new editing clients than I am about ever having to teach another section of freshman comp…

But oh, my! This morning I sat down to begin drafting the proposal for the Boob Book, preparatory to sending out my pitch to publishers who might actually pay me an advance — which, should any such thing come to pass, would also help to capitalize the nascent porn business. And the thought wafted into my mind:

How incredible would it BE if all I did, every day, is write?
What if once again, after all these years, I were a writer and ONLY a writer?

{sigh}

And 🙂

But then of course the sane voice whispers, “Are you kidding? Have you even considered the opportunity cost of spending all your time writing when you could be earning actual dollars teaching dunderheads online?”

Yech.

The question is, which endeavor really represents the opportunity cost: the writing or the teaching? If scribbling steamy novelettes really can generate more than $1,120 a month, then teaching is the culprit here, because it would take away from the total potential earnings.

But if I can’t make that much, then spending my time writing instead of teaching is going to cost me $1,120, every month from now until I shuffle off this mortal coil.

It’s a big risk. Very big. I could lose my shirt.

Is it worth it?

Well. I’m not fond of teaching. In fact, I would go so far as to say I hate it. And I’m very, very tired of editing arcane academic works. I would go so far as to say I hate that, too.

I like to write. I’m good at it. And any day I’d rather spend eight to ten hours writing in pursuit of the almighty dollar than teaching or editing for part-time hire.

Yeah. Say I’m crazy, but I think it is worth it.

I hope.

Week, Interrupted (Endlessly…)

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BEFORE I FORGET: Go here and check out what our Web guru, Jesse, is up to. It’s not like he doesn’t have enough to do, with a full-time job and a growing family. Let’s try to help this bunch meet their goal. 🙂

Jesse is about to get even more busy trying to wrangle Funny and the rest of my blogging empire onto a new server, now that gainful employment has made his freelance business redundant. We’ve selected WestHost, because for less than he’s been charging it provides significant support and all the blandishments he’s been providing. At any rate, if the site goes down briefly (again 🙄 ), watch this space. It should stabilize, and I hope that all the email & RSS subscriptions will come over with it.

It’s already Friday and I haven’t finished the second risque novel. It’s within a few words of the end, but it ain’t there yet. That’s because every time I turn around, here’s something else I have to do.

Today I have to take the car down to Chuck’s, there to get the side-view mirrors replaced. When my son drove it home from the ER parking lot, alas, he noticed that the Gorilla Tape doesn’t really keep the mirrors very stable at freeway speeds. He became unnerved and insisted that they have to be replaced.

{sigh} The young will be served. I suppose.

But there’s another time suck.

Yesterday I ran out of propane, after I left the burners on to incinerate the grease. Another time suck: traipse to U-Haul to refill a tank.

Also yesterday I had to deposit a check from Social Security and one from Medicare. Not wanting to traipse way to hell and gone up to the credit union, halfway to Wickenburg, I tried to use the new printer to scan the things. Under the best of conditions, scanning and depositing a check electronically can take almost as long as driving all the way to the CU and back. Yesterday’s were NOT the best of conditions.

Then I had to call the Mayo and fork over the $80 Medicare had dribbled out to me (here we go again: another $11,000 dribbed and drabbed out in payments of $80 to $150, each of which I have to fiddle with interminably). To get someone on the line to accept a credit-card charge, I had to sit there and listen to their ENDLESSLY INFURIATING machine tell me over and over “thank you for waiting blah blah blah blah blah”… That sucked another ten minutes on top of the time suck involved in scanning and depositing the damn checks.

The handyman is supposed to come over to fix the leaking kitchen faucet. As of this morning, of course, it’s stopped leaking. So I have to deal with that somehow, one way or another.

Student papers are coming in, God help us.

We rigged a trick to get some of them to turn in papers early, so we wouldn’t be SO hopelessly swamped next week when we have to read 20+ pieces of long-form drivel on an impossible deadline while we’re both struggling to survive. They get 20 points of extra credit if they turn the final paper in early. So a couple of eager beavers have in fact done that.

This is good. But it means I have to drop what I’m doing to turn those around.

Met at length with my associate editor/bidness partner and her sister to discuss the porn publishing scheme. It really is a frighteningly promising scheme. The number of people — mostly women — who read this stuff defies belief. Porn is a multi-billion-dollar industry, most of it conducted by small-timers working as much under the radar as they can get. We believe it’s a huge, HUGE pie and we should be able to cut ourselves a slice of it.

But it will require focus, which is not something I seem to be doing well with just now.

Shifting the websites over to WestHost is a huge endeavor. There’s NO way I can do that myself, and Jesse has his own hands full. So this is going to be another time-sucking challenge.

The way this thing has grown — by topsy — has left me with a passel of individual sites, some of which I would like to combine as subdomains to just a few main sites, thereby relieving me from having to keep paying GoDaddy stupid amounts of money for domain-name renewals. We have…

• The Copyeditor’s Desk, a freestanding affair

• Funny about Money, also freestanding

• Plain & Simple Press, under which I’d like to see the following subdomains

• Writers Plain & Simple, the blog for P&S Press

• Fire-Rider, which will market 19 installments of the Fire-Rider series, if and when the artist ever gets the covers done and I ever learn how to get them onto Amazon all by my little self

• 30 Pounds in 30 Days, to market the diet/cookbook, another MS that’s been ready to go for a year and gone effing nowhere because of my illnesses and others’ foot-dragging

• Adjunctorium, the blog for Slave Labor, which probably will go away in the near future but needs to exist awhile longer

• Camptown Races Press, site for the new imprint through which we plan to run our pornographic works of art

• Camptown Ladies Talk, blog for the new racey publishing imprint

If Camptown Races Press flies — and I mean really flies, as in earns enough to replace the teaching income and then some — I’d like the editing business to go away. Not because I don’t enjoy reading some of my clients’ work. A few are truly interesting and worthwhile. But because I’d like to be able to devote all my time and energy to getting the sexy book business up and to keeping it running over the long haul. That is going to be a full-time job.

At any rate, umpty-umpteen gerjillion years of writing blogs have, at least, suggested a simpler way to set up the new imprint’s marketing blog. Do not do not DO NOT create blogs or static websites for new series. At the most, do subdomains for the most active and largest of them. Otherwise, use the sidebars to mount thumbnails of new stuff that comes out as it comes out, and set up pages for the series holding galleries of thumbnails for the backlist. Et voilà. A much simpler structure, much cheaper, and far easier to manipulate.

Two or three months’ worth of credit union statements and bills are sitting on the desk waiting for me to enter into Quickbooks and file away. Another huge time-killer.

It’s almost seven. I must fly to get the car to Chuck’s by eight. And so away, to watch another day be sucked into a black hole.

 

Blog Blues, Doc Blues

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So far, I haven’t been able to move my little herd of blogs off my friend Jesse’s server over to WordPress.com or, as another friend suggested, to WestHost.

When I started FaM as a little hobby on the now defunct iLife, I was pretty techie for my times. But now I’ve fallen way behind the curve and worse, have exactly ZERO desire to learn still more piles and piles and piles of arcana, most of which will be out of date within a couple of years. I am just flat learning-curved out!

So, unless I can hire someone to help with this project or find a live person at WP.com (good luck with that!), I don’t know when or if Funny will find its new home. Or when or if Plain & Simple Press, Fire-rider, 30 Pounds in 4 months, or any of those will ever get transferred.

Meanwhile, I’m BUSY, dammit, and don’t have time to fiddle with that stuff. Have to break off what I’m doing here and run down to a grocery store to extract some money for Luz, who’s probably on her way over here as we scribble.

Then check in with the stoonts…OMG! Only ONE  MORE SET OF PAPERS and I’ll be free of teaching freshman comp for the REST OF MY LIFE!

I’m almost done with the second salacious book. Ooo la la! What a hoot! This stuff could get addictive — it’s pretty fun to write. Let’s hope it’s as much fun to read. 😉

And I still have to write the Boob Book proposal, notes for which have been sitting on the desk since before I went into the hospital.

And some laboratory sent a threatening letter saying I owe $952 for some test, the nature of which is not mentioned. They say “your insurer” rejected the claim. They don’t say what the test was for or why it was rejected.

In the same raft of mail, along comes a notice from Medicare informing me that they rejected whatever this was because it was for genetic testing for a DNA defect.

To my knowledge, I never had any such test. Had I been asked, I would have said “no.” If any such test was given, I never was told the results.

They want NINE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-TWO DOLLARS for this phantom test.

When you call the 800 number for the lab, you get a sales pitch. I’m sitting interminably on the yakkity hold button for the Mayo’s accounting department. I haven’t tried to contact Medicare  yet, because I know what a horror show that’s going to be and I at least need to know what on earth I’m talking about. If I can find out at all.

Medicare says the appeal was rejected because it was filed after the deadline.

So now I get to diddle away an hour or more screwing with this. I think I’ll cut it short by sending a letter to both of them — Medicare and this lab outfit — stating t hat I never had any such test, that I was never told of any need for an appeal or of the appeal itself, and that I believe the whole thing is fraudulent. That at least will delay my having to pay for it, for awhile.

God, God, GOD how I hate dealing with bureaucracies!!!!!!!!!