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Getting Back on Track

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Okaayyy…. So, ten days, two weeks later, she’s finally getting back on track toward pursuing the new set of goals. Canning the job, I think, is gonna make a huge difference. Yesterday I made some progress on the current To-Do list; realized some of those couldn’t be done before other stages are done, and so tasks will have to be re-prioritized. Not a problem.

Today I plan to start moving sites off my friend Jesse’s server over to WordPress.com. This makes me nervous because I just HATE that techie stuff and always, invariably, inevitably screw it up. But I’ll start with Adjunctorium, which is really just a sandbox project at base — the world won’t end if that transfer fails.

Then I’ll move The Copyeditor’s Desk over — nobody ever reads it anyway…it must have a page rank in the negative numbers.

And finally Funny about Money will have to go over. And therein lies my concern: Funny is VAST. This will be its 2,490th post, and it has 12,083 comments, with an inexhaustible trove of images and God only knows what kind of behind-the-scenes infrastructure to support all that.

I’ve never tried to make a transfer like this by myself — I’ve always hired someone who knows what s/he’s doing. And if anyone knows such a person, I’d appreciate it if you’d pass the name along ASAP!!

At any rate, once this transfer gets under way, Funny may disappear temporarily while the domain name gets repointed to WordPress. I’m told the subscriptions will go over, but I do not know that to be the case and have little faith that it will be so.

So, if your RSS or e-mail subscription to Funny quits working but you can still see the site, re-subscribe.

Yesterday, I bought a hundred ISBNs. These are not actually necessary for e-book publishing, unless you want to appear as the publisher of record. And believe me: I do not want Amazon to engross that function — which is what happens when you let Amazon assign one of its “free” inventory numbers in place of an ISBN. The Copyeditor’s Desk is NOT going to cede its title as publisher (under the Plain & Simple Press and the Camptown Races Press imprints), period.

So, if the naughty books go up on both Amazon and B&N (we’re told B&N’s standards of naughtiness are much looser and stuff actually sells better there than at Amazon), then I have enough ISBNs for fifty books.

That will not be enough to let us know whether the p0rno scheme is going to work: for that to happen, we’ll need at least 100 publications. HowEVER… By the time I’ve used up 50, another $1,000 payment will come in from our client journal, and that’s enough to buy 200 more ISBNs.

Yesterday I set aside four hours to work on the present mischievous bookoid. Actually ended up spending about five on it. Am now about half or two-thirds of the way through it.

What a hoot! How do I come up with this stuff?? Here we are, still at a G rating (but not for long… 😉 ):

Coworkers and friends Stephanie and Bonnie meet at a Starbuck’s to spend part of a day off the job just hanging out. Stephanie, in the course of shoveling her ex-husband’s possessions out of what is now exclusively her home, has come across an antique Ouija board, handed down to her from her great-aunt Mabel. Delighted by the interesting old artifact, she brings it along to show to Stephanie. After some tergiversations (one of which is very funny, IMHO), they decide to try it out. They make contact with an entity who identifies him/herself as Lou Lee and claims to be 4500 years old:

The two paused to sip their lattes.

“Isn’t this a kick?” said Stephanie.

“It’s pretty silly,” Bonnie replied. “But yeah, it is kind of fun.”

Before long they set their fingers back on the planchette. After a bit, it began to glide across the board again. Back to the alphabet:

M…E…E…T

M…E

“Meet you?” Steph asked.

M…E…E…T

“Where?”

I… W…A…N…T

K…N…O…W

Y…O…U

“What on earth is that?” Stephanie wondered aloud. “Are you doing that?”

“No,” said Bonnie. “I thought you were.”

“Well…don’t.”

“I’m not.”

W…E…

A…L…L… T…H…E

P…L…E…A…S…U…R…E…S

P…R…O…V…E

“It’s the ghost of Christopher Marlowe.”

“I think he lived sooner than 4500 years ago.”

L…I…G…H…T

A… C…A…N…D…L…E… I…N

Y…O…U…R

B…E…D…R…O…O…M

“Uhm, that sounds kind of forward,” Bonnie remarked. Stephanie said nothing. The planchette curled across the board.

O…P…E…N… T…H…E

W…I…N…D…O…W… P…U…T

R…E…D… R…O…S…E

O…N… T…H…E

S…I…L…L

“Steph. Stephanie…” A light slick of perspiration had spread across Stephanie’s cheeks. She was so focused on the board she seemed not to hear her friend’s voice.

“Steph!” Bonnie lifted her hand from the planchette. It continued to move under Stephanie’s fingers.

I… W…I…L…L. C…O…M…E

T…O… Y…O…U

I… W…A…N…T

T…O… K…N…O…W

Y…O…U

“Stephanie. Please stop it.”

Y…O…U… W…I…L…L

L…O…V…E… M…E

Bonnie grabbed the moving planchette and yanked it out from under Stephanie’s fingers. “This is creeping me out,” she said. “It’s time to stop.”

Her face flushed, Steph looked up at Bonnie.

“Steph, are you all right?

She ran her hand through her damp hair to brush it back off her face. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“That was batshit crazy. Let’s put this thing away.” Bonnie stood up, placed the Ouija board back in its box, put the planchette in after it, upside down, and covered it firmly with the lid.

Neither woman felt like finishing her coffee, which was half consumed and going cold anyway. They sat at the table and decompressed for a few minutes, and then agreed it was time to go on their various separate errands.

“But Stephanie,” Bonnie said as a parting shot, “please: put that game back in the attic, will you?”

“Well… I thought it would look cool on the coffee table.”

“Seriously. Put it away. Don’t mess with it again. I’m asking you.”

Stephanie studied Bonnie for a moment and realized she really was alarmed. “All right,” she said. “I’ll put it away.”

“Promise me you won’t try to mess with it when you’re alone in the house, OK?”

“Stephanie! It’s just a board game. You’re starting to sound like that wacky old bag lady.”

“She wasn’t a bag lady. And I don’t know what was going on with all that, but if you weren’t doing it and I wasn’t doing it, I don’t think it was anything good. And I don’t think you should have anything more to do with it. Especially not when you’re all by yourself.”

Steph sighed imperceptibly. “OK,” she agreed. “I promise. I won’t take it out of the box again.”

Rose Redoute Yeah. Right, Stephanie…sure.

What follows, of course, will not be suitable for nice girls and boys. But if you like to live dangerously, I’ll let you know the title, whenever it is a title. 😆

By the way, if you think you can write this stuff and would like to do so on a contract basis, I’m hiring.

Happy Fourth of July! And…next?

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Welp, we’ve made it to another Independence Day without self-destructing. That’s something.

What are you doing for the holiday? Moi, I’ve been invited to a party at the home of some friends who live in a mid-town high-rise. Their place overlooks the Phoenix Country Club and the Steele Indian School, which host the two largest fireworks displays in the central part of the city. And from their balcony you also can see the large show at Tempe Town Lakes and several other smaller shindigs.

An old, halfway-long-lost friend who lives in that apartment building shows up at these evenings, so I’m looking forward to seeing her again. It promises to be a nice evening.

But between now and then:

Students have turned in their “extended definition” papers. In the world of people who recycle their high-school English essays, this means they’ve picked some exceptionally sappy and ill-focused topic such as “what is love” — apparently inflicted on them by  teachers following a required curriculum. The results would be painful to read even if they fit the assignment, which by and large they do not. So {sigh} we have to plod through 23 of those.

Then there’ll only be one more assignment — 2500 words of like drivel — and I’ll be DONE. Never to read another brain-banging freshman comp paper again! 😆

I sincerely hope, anyway.

I’ve started a second racy book — spectrophilia, Ouija board! This should be good. And last night while watching a couple of episodes of some TV show streaming through Kodi, poured another several Fire-Rider bookoids into Friedlander’s Word template. Now am up to book 13, leaving only another five to do. As soon as the cover images are delivered, I’ll be ready to post!

Almost: still have to write “Our Story So Far” blurbs for most of them. And get their ISBNs.

To re-jumpstart the entrepreneurial spirit, I’ve made a list of what I call “foot-draggers”: tasks that need to get done before I can make any headway but that I keep resisting because I know they’re going to be complicated as hell and require some sort of learning curve and I’m just effing learning-curved out. Videlicet:

1. Move Funny and other sites from Jesse’s server to WordPress.com
2. Upgrade WordPress.com service
3. Assign remaining ISBNs to books in progress
4. Buy 100 new ISBNs
5. Buy a month’s subscription to shutterstock. Make a list of general categories for future images and download the maximum allowed.
6. Organize these images on disk and in database by category & book title.
7. Read Friedlander’s template documentation carefully. Figure out how to do the Kindle conversion. Download a Kindle reader app to the laptop so layout can be checked before publication.
8. Learn how to publish epub versions on Barnes & Noble
9. Find the specs for Kindle and Nook covers; relearn how to do this in PowerPoint.
10. Upload diet book to Kindle.
11. Send Slave Labor to Snowfall press for PoD prep
12. Using PowerPoint and stock photo, make Biker Babe cover; create and edit Kindle version. Store to disk.
13. Develop new, more efficient record-keeping to keep track of ISBNs, titles, artwork, and freelances & subcontractors.
14. Develop task flow routine for publication of each book, w/ checklist.

So I figure if I do three of these a day, in less than a week I’ll be up and running.

Which sounds good until you recall that we have 23 student papers sitting on the server right now and another 23 incoming shortly. All told that comes to 58,250 mind-numbing words, the length of a short novel, to be read, commented upon, used as a teaching tool, and assessed. And most of them are high-school papers turned in because the students don’t feel called upon to bother to do the course’s assignments. With just a few exceptions, a total, unutterable waste of the instructor’s time.

But since the instructor’s time is worth less than minimum wage, I suppose no one accounts that as much of a loss…

If I start on the current raft of sea foam today, I won’t get to three of the tasks on the list above today. But if I put it off, it’ll drive me nuts, and whenever I run up against a tight deadline, invariably some student has to make a special case of him/herself and create a major problem. So the only question is, which day would I prefer to have wasted?

Miamifireworks

 

Back again…for the nonce, & with an addition

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The server seems to be going up and down. Wasn’t able to post earlier today…now it’s late and the Old Bat is tired. Urkl.

At this point, part of the Blogging Empire is over at WordPress.com and part is self-hosted over here at a friend’s server. I think, just by way of having everything in one place, that I’m going to move all the sites, including FaM, to WordPress.com. Their servers are very stable and for a reasonable fee you can upgrade to a pretty generous service.

But speaking of websites, how do you like the start of the Fire-Rider site? It’s still very much under construction. With the same template as Funny’s, it has two right-hand sidebars. Fire-Rider will be issued in a 19-volume series, so I figure as each bookoid comes out, I’ll post the cover image and Amazon link on the side. Blog posts will simply be a reprise or blurb highlighting each new volume’s action.

The image was drawn by my friend Gary Bennett, fine artist and multi-award-winning illustrator and Arizona Highways art director.

I’m pretty sure there’s a way to hide the menu above the banner image, but so far haven’t figured out how. If anyone knows, please feel free to clue me in!

Meanwhile, I yam going to bed…

It Lives!

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And it just quit its job.

Mayo PxYesh. I survived the surgery, apparently (to judge from the nurses’ and doctors’ commentary) better than most old ladies. Other than an overall sensation of having been run over by a truck, I feel pretty good. The tubes are out, everything is out but the IV connection, which they flat refuse to remove until I’m walking out the door. I even managed to figure out how to use the shower, which in its environmental correctness barely trickles out enough water to get your body damp.

In theory, I’m supposed to be discharged at noon, when M’hijito will kindly take MORE time off work to come schlep me around. The surgeon said I could pick up the dogs, which will make it possible for me to deal with them. And if that’s the case, I should be able to handle the pool, since nothing involved in its maintenance weighs more than 20 pounds.

Food is going to be a problem: I have to avoid high-fiber foods, and in my “real food” diet that’s mostly what I eat. The doc favors fake “food supplements,” which I flat refuse to eat. Somehow I’ll have to pick up some things I can cook that will be soft, high in protein, and low in fiber.

And that, I believe, will be chicken à blanc with rice or pasta. Heh. And I happen to have a lifetime supply of Costco chicken in the freezer…

My drinking habits will have to abate for a few weeks, alas. (How will I survive??) But that’s hardly the end of the world. In fact, it may be a good thing.

And: While I’ve been sitting here fielding sass from the current batch of students, some of whom have shown themselves to be exceptional douches, I’ve had a full-blown epiphany: I am NOT going to teach any more!

I’ve had six surgeries over the past year, one of them for a life-threatening condition. Enough is enough: I fail to see any reason to continue making myself miserable for a net income of $1,120 a month, max, averaged over 12 months.

So… I just sent an email to the departmental chair telling him I can finish out this section but wish to be relieved from duty this fall. If I just can’t make it without that $1,120, then I’ll go back in the spring. But somehow I don’t think a $13,400 drawdown from something over $600,000 is going to break me up in business soon. That’s a 2% drawdown. There’s enough in the credit union to cover six months’ of living expenses without any teaching income. So the soonest I’d have to start a drawdown is next January. Probably not even then, with any luck at all.

And with any luck, my proposed new enterprise, which promises to be pretty lively, will generate at least that much. And more, I hope.

Still Living; Still Trapped

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The extravagant belly pain that brought me to the Mayo’s ER turned out to be a bowel obstruction caused by scar tissue from an old appendectomy. Fortunately, the docs were able to fix it laparoscopically — that was not a given when I was rolled off to the ER.

At any rate, the surgery is done and apparently successful. I’m still stuck here and getting more & more miserable.

Main source of misery is that I can’t get them to remove a nasal-gastric tube that’s no longer needed and is increasingly uncomfortable & painful. They stuck this down my gullet to relieve the excruciating pain from the obstruction by suctioning out all food & such in the stomach & gut. It worked. But now the gut is empty — I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since Thursday morning — but I can’t get them to take it out. I can’t get the floor nurses to get a doctor’s permission to remove it.

So that’s fairly horrible.

Meanwhile, the rest of my life is going to hell on a handcart. The summer session is winding to an end and student p apetrs are coming in. The monsoon dirt storms are also rolling in, meaning catastrophic messes in the pool and no one there to clean it up. My bills are going unpaid. Fortunately most are on autopay, but AMEX isn’t… It’s a fuckin’ nightmare.

The church has a woman who does its healthcare ministry. She used to be a nurse at the Mayo. I’m going to see if she can advocate for me. First I’ve gotta get this tube out of my throat and then I’ve gotta get out of this place.

Waylaid!

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In the hospital. Have been for several days. Bowel obstruction. Surgery probably upcoming. Not very coherent: doped to the teeth on morphine.

Watch this space. Will be back someday. 🙂