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Idle Essay Day…

Item: Are you reading this? I don’t even know for sure whether Funny about Money is appearing online. I think it is. The last post I published appears to be visible. But who knows? Firefox caches things in inscrutable ways. I may be writing this in some phantom site, and a phantom published page may be coming up in the Twilight Zone.

I feel distinctly  like I’m in the Twilight Zone. Most of my websites are nonfunctional, particularly Writers Plain & Simple, my key marketing site, which actually had a decent number of followers.

Then some guy had the nerve to notice WP&S’s disappearance and spam me with an offer to fix it, for a small fee!!!!!

Shee-ut.

As usual, everything happens at once. I just posted a new Fire-Rider story, but I’ve been so distracted with this mess I haven’t been able to even try to market it.

Then my neighbor Sally announced (once again) that she’s putting her house on the market. This time she’s serious: she’s rented an apartment in a Scottsdale old-folkerie.

The last time she stuck her Realtor nephew’s sign in the front yard, the Perp showed up that very day and tried to buy the house. She hates the Perp and says she won’t sell to him, but she simply does not understand that you can’t refuse to sell to a qualified buyer just because you don’t like him.

The Perp, I’ve learned, is roundly feared and hated by the other neighbors. This is the guy, in case you haven’t been following Funny for the past ten years, who vandalized my pool shortly after I moved in — to the tune of $10,000. SDXB and I took him to court and won. When he lost, he threatened the judge, who was so alarmed that he would not let SDXB, me, or our lawyers leave the courtroom until after a police officer reported the Perp had gotten in his car land driven out of the parking lot.

My lawyers were alarmed, too. Terrorized, actually, is le mot juste. They urged me to move out immediately and put the house on the market forthwith. They wanted me to take an apartment and be gone ASAP.

Well, I’d just bought the house. I couldn’t afford the tax hit involved in buying a house and turning right around and selling it, and even if I could, I’d also  had a bunch of upgrades installed right before I moved in. By this time, I’d only been in the place three or four months.

I had a German shepherd and a Ruger and a bad attitude, so I stayed.

Nothing happened except that the German shepherd took after the poor little psychotic Son-in-Law when he tried to enter through a side gate. Scared the guy so bad he never came back.

But obviously the Perp has not forgotten. If he gets Sally’s house, he will work very hard, indeed, to make my life miserable. And he won’t have to work very hard at all: What he’ll do is rent the place to the slimiest trash he can find and let them do the job.

One of the houses he turned into a rental was occupied by a creep who abused his children so violently that the neighbors across the street sold their (very nicely renovated! recently renovated!) home and moved. When asked what possessed them, they explicitly said that the screams of this guy’s tortured children were frightening their children to the extent that they felt they could not stay in the vicinity.

We had not yet made an enemy of the Perp, who lived right next door to SDXB, who had witnessed this creep abusing a pair of puppies (the creep lived directly behind SDXB). So SDXB passed this bit of intelligence along to the Perp, who called the renter and told him that the neighbors had said they were going to call Child Protective Services if they heard his kids screaming while he was beating them again.

The creep moved out that night. Following morning he and his “family” were gone, skipped out.

So that’s the kind of folks the Perp rents to.

He’s been out of the  rental business for awhile. When he first bought and moved into the house next door to SDXB, he started buying up homes in this neighborhood, which is only about two blocks wide by three blocks long. He would watch and find aging original owners — since the houses were built in 1971, these people were getting on in years, and they also had no idea what their houses were worth. He’d then go to their doors and offer to buy the house and pay in cash.

He obtained six houses in this area that way, all of which he turned into rentals. He would tell mortgage companies he was buying them to house family members or to move into himself (until relatively recently, you could get anyone’s real estate paperwork online through the County Assessor’s office, so you could find the deeds and mortgage agreements — that’s how we know he was lying to mortgage lenders).

He would chop down all the trees on a property — he really dislikes trees — and then rent it out.  Any maintenance was done by him, and much of it was out of code. He built what Down-Easterners might still call a “summer kitchen” (they’re Romanian refugees, and their customs are a bit different from the natives’) on the back of the house next door to SDXB’s and bragged that he’d tied into the city sewer without a permit. He presumably installed the electric and plumbing without benefit of permit, too.

A house next door to some friends of mine is back on the market. I almost bought that house during the crisis described above, but it needed some very costly renovation. Much more than I’d spent on this house. I felt I couldn’t afford it.

Now it’s on the market for about $400,000. However, my house may be worth over $300,000 now. And the house in question has been HUGELY renovated. It’ really is gorgeous. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t have a gas stove, which pretty much is a non-negotiable for me.

But. With the Perp breathing down my neck…I might manage to make my peace with a glass-top stove. I do most of my cooking on the propane grill, anyway. Next grill could have a gas side burner…wtf?

So that’s where we are now. General frustration. General fear. Ongoing hassles. And I’m not getting any work done while all this disruption continues.

If you can read this post, please say hello in the comments! 🙂

Dumb Tax and Learning Experiences

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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???

So much for creative work…

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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.

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!!!!!!!!!

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…