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Books

Balmy Summer Day(s) in Arizona

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Tuesday: A hot, damp day in June

Sooo…yeah. Come late afternoon, I go to throw a little chow on the grill.

DayUM, but it seems kinda warm out there.

Check the back porch thermometer. Ayup: 115 degrees.

In. The. Shade.

Well…really, I didn’t need to toss the shrimp on the grill, did I? All that was necessary was to set them on a plate out in the sun for a few minutes.

LOL!

Stumble outside. Retrieve shrimp.

Incredibly, the damn things are done unto perfection. They’ve been on the grill for…ohhh…about two minutes on each side.

It worked. That’s all that matters. I guess.

***

Vast banks of white clouds are piling up to the north.

Cool OFF, little grill, so we can close you and toss your cover over you, because pretty quick now we can be sure it’s gonna rain like Hell.

Why, in the name o’ God, would anyone want to live in this place?

The nerve — the NERVE, I say — of my parents to drag me here when my father saw a chance to quit his hated job and “retire” to this gawdawful venue!

***

Friday…Another Day: Absolutely Positively NOT Another Dollar…

Lost track of time…probably because the brain fried.

One o’clock in the afternoon:

108 in the shade of the back porch

Rented a PO box for all the sh!t that comes in (and goes out)

Contemplating my mother’s “career” as a real estate agent; thinking holeee sheee-ut

Contemplating my mother’s “career” as a Wife and Mother: Thank you, God for delaying my birth into the mid-20th century

Sitting in the air-conditioned living room, sweating like a pig.

Do pigs sweat? Why? Dogs don’t sweat. Cats don’t. On the other hand…horses do.

Cruised around North Central Phoenix this morning & early afternoon, ogling real estate.

Do I want to become a Realtor?

My mother tried that. Flopped.

Unholy flop. You have to be a lot more dedicated, a lot more hard-working, and a lot smarter than I am to succeed in that game.

Especially when it is as GAWDAWFUL HOT as it is today.

Pushing 110 in the generously ventilated shade of the back porch.

The nerve — the NERVE, I say — of my parents to drag me here when my father saw a chance to quit his hated job and “retire” to this gawdawful venue!

Damn! Whatever possessed the man?

*****

Tempus Fidgets
and
Now it’s 6:20 p.m.

HOTTER THAN THE HUBS in the backyard! It’s 111 degrees in the shade. Five percent chance of rain.

(Does boiling water qualify as “rain”?)

A couple of peakèd-looking cumulus clouds lurk to the north — way north of the Valley, it appears. So the alleged chance looks mighty remote.

Ruby is conkered out on the bed. Good thing we managed to get in our DoggyWalk along about dawn this morning. No chance we’d be able to go out this evening. The sidewalks are too hot for her to walk on now, but even after dark, when the concrete will cool some, the asphalt roadways will be WAYYY to hot for her dainty paws.

***

Saturday
5:00 a.m.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

Annoyances of the 21st Century: Beeping goddamn phones.

The land line — which remains much easier for me to use than an accursed cell phone — has to be kept charged up. This is because its handsets are battery-operated, just to add another hassle to daily life.

To accomplish this, you have to set the handset on a base unit, which has a charger. When you do that,it “reminds” you…by going BEEP! about every five minutes after it’s fully charged.

Profoundly annoying!

*******

Sunday
Mid-afternoon

Almost got a nap in...til the damned phone rang. Friend/erstwhile client on his way over. He wants to hire(?) me to help with his latest book.

ohhhhkaaayyyy…

Outta the sack. Throw on some rags. Go out front to find irrigation hasn’t come on. Plants are frying. Neighbor across the street is out puttering in the 110-degree heat.

This is the spouse of the formerly beloved neighbor who for reasons unknown has cut me off. Flat.

Yes: She will not speak to me! If I call, she hangs up. If I go to the door, she won’t answer.

Why?

I. Have.NO. idea.

Ohhhh well. We already knew I’m not a nice lady. Apparently I’m even MORE not-nice than we thought.

Hotter than the hubs of Hades out there.

*******

Client/Friend in. Client/Friend out the door. He left several chapters of his new manuscript, a rumination on the way political and social power has shifted over the past century. I’m looking forward to reading it.

Evening rolls in. Put the BBQ away: cover it to repel the coming rain.

Ten after 7 at night: 103° and overcast.

Should go swimming. Why, after all, do I have this swimming pool???

But nay: it’s just too, too HOT. A hundred and three degrees with gray skies — thickened by wet-looking clouds. Ugh! What a place!

Coulda Shoulda Woulda

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Sittin’ by the dock of the bay….
Actually:
Loafing on the front patio,
watching the hours flowing away…
***
Just posted this squib at my favorite time-wastin’ site, Quora.
Is a PhD really worth pursuing? How many PhD students can really get ‘productive’ or real-time use output from their PhD research?
Victoria Hay, Ph.D.
Retired academic; owner of The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.

Profile photo for Victoria HayThe Ph.D. may (or may not) be worth pursuing…if you have an independent source of income.

You need a working spouse or an inheritance to keep a roof over your head and food on your table while you’re “pursuing” the Ph.D. Otherwise, you’re certainly not going to be “productive” or generate “output” from your research, because you’ll be too busy working two full-time jobs: one to support yourself and one to generate credit toward the doctorate.

Would I do it again?

Huh…let’s think about that…

  • I got a great job at Arizona Highways Magazine after I’d finished the degree. But that was only because the boss was impressed with academics. For him, it was a grand ego trip to have a someone with a doctorate on his staff. The job I landed was in journalism; it had nothing to do with academia.

Most employers are not that easily flamboozled.

  • I got a nice ego trip of my own when my dissertation was picked up by a prestigious publishing house. Does it matter that I’ve never seen a penny from sales on that book? Meh! Probably not: again, because the flamboozled boss thought that publisher was so awesome that he wanted to hire me.
  • Eventually, I got three books published through respectable presses.

All very nice…except I’ve never seen a penny in royalties from two of those books.

  • Later in life, I got an academic job.

Whoop…de…doop.

One of my academic colleagues and I did a little pragmatic research and discovered we would be earning more cleaning house for a living than the university was paying us at the associate professor level. In fact, we seriously considered going in together to start a house-cleaning business.

  • Would I do it again?

Hmmmm…. Probably not.

If I had gone whole hog into magazine publishing starting the minute I finished the bachelor’s degree, I would have had more fun in life; I would have had a lot more people reading my published words; I would have been paid a helluva lot more than I earned in academia; and I would never have been tempted to think about starting an enterprise as a cleaning lady.

Amazon Publishing? Think Again!

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Check this out:

This afternoon, what should land in the incoming email but this stalwart message from Amazon:

On Jul 10, 2023, at 4:44 PM, KDP Customer Support <support+5003n00002ihn8oAAA@kdp-support.amazon.com> wrote:
Hello,

We received a failure notification when attempting to pay your KDP royalties. To receive your payment, you’ll need to update your bank information in the following marketplaces:
Amazon.com,Amazon.com.au

To ensure we have the correct bank information on file, we’ve placed your royalties on hold while you update your information.

If you’ve corrected your bank information within the last three business days, you can disregard this email. We’ll attempt to pay your royalties using your updated bank information in the next payment cycle. You can check the KDP payment schedule here: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200641050#schedule

For security purposes, you cannot edit your current account’s bank information. Follow these steps to delete the existing bank account and add a new one:

1. Sign in to http://kdp.amazon.com.
2. Click “Your Account” in the top-right corner of the page.
3. Choose the option on how you want to receive the one-time password (OTP).
4. Follow the instructions to complete the Two-Step Verification using your phone or an authenticator app.
5. After you receive the OTP, enter it and click “OK.”
6. Click “Getting Paid.”
7. If you have a bank account entered, delete it by clicking “Delete” under the account’s name.
8. Click “Add another bank account.”
9. Under “Tell us about your bank,” follow the prompts to add a new bank account.
10. You may see a message asking for a bank in a different location (Amazon does not support electronic payments everywhere).
11. Click “Add.” You’ll see a green checkmark showing your information has been updated.
12. Click “Save.”

To learn more about adding a bank account, check our Help:
https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200641050#add_bank

To check your payment status on the KDP report, visit https://kdp.amazon.com/reports-new

Regards,
The Kindle Direct Publishing team
© 1996-2023, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Amazon and Kindle are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. 410 Terry Avenue North Seattle, Washington 98109 US

Please note: This is a transactional message regarding your account. Your subscription preferences will continue to be honored for all future commercial e-mails from Kindle Direct Publishing.

 

Uh-HUH! Isn’t that innaresting?

Well, folks…my little bookoids have been posted on Amazon for YEARS. All told, they’ve generated…oh, I dunno, maybe $50 at the outside. Not because Amazon’s operatives can’t access my account: this vast wealth has steadfastly been direct-deposited.

As a matter of fact, I wrote off the “publishing” (hah!!) enterprise many months ago. “Years” may be the operative term. I’ve never received more than a few bucks from Amazon — as in “double-digit figures” — and not more than a couple of times. So frankly, I’ve pretty much dismissed the whole endeavor. The only reason the books  still reside on this website is that I’ve been too lazy to take them down. And, Dear Reader, you can access most of them here for free, simply by clicking on the images in the right-hand margin.

It’s getting late in the day now, and I’m tired from the heat and the other tasks I’ve had to do today. But tomorrow, I’ll remove book ads from the site as necessary, or rework them so that they refer wannabe buyers to me, not to Amazon. The truth of the matter is, if you have something to say that’s worth putting in print, you’re far, FAR better off to go through a real publishing house than to fart around with self-publishing — Amazon or otherwise. If a publisher doesn’t want to pick your idea up, it’s probably not worth the cost of typesetting, editing, publicizing, printing, and shipping.

Meanwhile…to KDP, I have this to say:

It would appear that KDP is VERY shady:  https://writersweekly.com/angela-desk/and-even-more-complaints-about-amazon-kdp-kindle-direct-publishin

I am not going to spend my time and work myself up into a state of computer-induced frustration because suddenly Amazon (or whoever you really are) decides to rip off the vast wealth my piddling little books generate.

None of my banking information has changed. If you can’t send me whatever vast fortune my work is producing, then kindly take it off your platform. If you don’t want to hear from my lawyers, please have the decency not to use this device to cheat me out of whatever royalties the things have brought in. And please note: your company would be well advised to let me know when you comply with this request.

Millicent V. Hay (Victoria Hay)
Hay Writing & Editing, Inc.
Phoenix, Arizona

Asked…again

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So today’s “If You’d Asked Me” post managed to get up before the crack of dawn: short, to the point, and guaranteed to enrage my two friends (that I know of) who are anti-vaxxers. This, after the mile-long doggy walk and before the pool guy showed up to provide an estimate for replastering the crumbling pool. Proposed price range: $7,000 to $10,000.

One could knock something off that by opting for plain old-fashioned plaster, which in the past had a life expectancy of around 10 years. But — wouldncha know it — my guy reports that manufacturers have cheapied down the product so it no longer lasts as long as it used to. The so-called “premium” plaster is said by its maker to last about 7 years; he said it would last around 10 if cared for properly. The regular plaster is now estimated to last 4 years(!!); his guess was it could last 7 years with proper care. Premium plaster is $4,970, which is a savings…but not if you have to replace it in 8 or 10 years. For comparison, what I have out there now is plaster that was expected to last 10 years but has survived 14 years. The PebbleTec and PebbleSheen products, he said, last 15 to 20 years, which is about as long as I expect to be in this house before I croak over or am dragged off to the nursing home.

So I’m opting for the PebbleSheen, a finer, slightly smoother version of PebbleTec. The price, we’re told, is the same.

There’s a fair amount of cash lurking in Fidelity, which I guess we’ll have to withdraw to cover this little exploit. Depending on how bad the damage behind the cracked tile is and whether I decide to try to reinstall the pipeline that would let me plug Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner into a dedicated port rather than sticking his tail into the skimmer basket, price could waver by as much as three grand. Oh, whee.

I’m having to take the next RMD before the usual September date, because I’m out of money as of…just about now. This is because I paid off the damn car loan…never did recover from that hit. For at least the next year, I’m going to have to maintain an ascetic lifestyle. No clothing purchases, no new shoes, no meals out, no travel, no driving from one end of the Valley to the other, no indulgences…  Blech.

Having the laptop off in Apple’s precincts is a real inconvenience. Thank the heavens for DropBox! All the projects I’m working on are easy to access. But sitting on an office chair in front of a desk still does make the back hurt. A lot. So that puts the eefus on getting much done. Hence, I’m putting off converting the “Asked” page to the same PDF offerings that now grace Ella and Writer.

That notwithstanding, this afternoon I managed to write about a third of Drugging’s chapter 3. Converting the stuff from Bloggish to more formal English replete with citation & documentation is quite the little job. The Drugging of America posts can only serve as rough outlines from which to spin upwards of 2,000 words per chapter.

Figure it’ll take about two more days to finish the draft of that chapter. At that point I’ll be ready to write the proposal. Meanwhile, my friend La Bethulia, who’s a psychiatric nurse practitioner, agreed to read chapter 1, the weightiest of the three chapters that will go out with the proposal. Actually, the NNT chapter is a little bracing, but I think it will be OK. I actually may contact the NNT website and ask if someone there would review that chapter, since I take their project’s name in vain repeatedly. If I can get them to vet it for facts — and do so promptly, not an easy trick for an academic during the summertime — I think I’ll have a lot better shot at selling the thing to a real publisher.

I hope.

Mwa ha ha! A better way to publish *FREE BOOKS*

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Over at Plain & Simple Press, I’ve been giving away free installments of Ella’s Story, If You’d Asked Me..., and The Complete Writer. You could either read them as blog posts at the P&S “News” site, or, free-for-the-asking, get your hands on a PDF of the entire Complete Writer or Asked. Or read the chapters online, collected at each bookoid’s dedicated page. Since Ella’s Story is a work in progress, it wasn’t available in PDF.

But…now it is. 🙂

We (that we would be Wonder-Guru Grayson Bell  and yrs truly, the P&S proprietor) realized that the reason Writer’s dedicated page had staggered to a dead stop was that there’s a limit to the amount of data WordPress will tolerate on a single page. Writer was right up against it. So I proposed to take down the individual chapters from that page, consolidate them in a PDF, and repost. Grayson thought not: a giant PDF would have the same effect of choking WordPress. BUT…several PDFs would not do that. Probably.

This theory proved correct. The Complete Writer‘s content to date is now published in two PDF segments: section I, “Write Tight,” and section II, “Make It Perfect.” The next seven chapters, which comprise the print book’s third part, “Writing Nonfiction,” will go up one at a time; then when they’re all posted, they’ll be moved into a new PDF, leaving the page free for the next section’s chapters.

Nonfiction books lend themselves to this strategy, since they often fall neatly into sections. That’s not always true of fiction.

And it’s especially not so true of Ella’s Story, which works more like a kind of telenovela than a traditional novel. I write wherever the characters lead me, which just now is toward a revolution on some other planet.

Or someplace. Maybe.

Nevertheless, the Ella’s Story dedicated page was, as of late last week, beginning to swim through a vat of taffy. Looked like the same problem that tripped up Writer was afflicting Ella.

Monday (just yesterday!??), I posted chapter 22.

So, it occurred to my fevered brain that the content could be posted, pretty much without regard to what was going on in the plotline, in 10-chapter doses. No logic there…but then there’s not a lot of logic to Ella’s Story, anyway, at least not in any external sense. So…wtf.

Last night I packaged the first 20 chapters in two PDFs, creatively named “Part 1” and “Part 2.” Each holds 10 chapters, complete with full-color illustrations.

The remaining two chapters are posted separately on the page, below the links to the PDFs, and also as blog posts at “News.”

This turns out to be pretty cool for the reader. What it means is that instead of having to scroll through up to half-a-dozen blog posts or a-a-a-l-l-l the way down to the bottom of an infinite dedicated web page, you can visit said dedicated web page and find the most recent installments right under your nose. And if you’ve wandered off for awhile but can remember where you were the last time you visited, you can easily find your jumping-off point in the PDFs.

🙂

As you might imagine, I’m feeling pretty smug about this scheme. Come on over and check it out! Ella’s Story, chapters 1 through 22…now in easy access.