Coffee heat rising

Books

How am I whipped? Let me count the ways…

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It’s 8:30 p.m. I started working at 7 a.m.

Well, wtf? That’s only 13 hours. Why do you suppose I feel so whipped, whapped, and brain-banged?

Actually, I got an enormous amount done today, some of it by serendipity. Big accomplishment is finishing the last installment of the Travelers series. My dearly beloved freelance writer/cowriter has written five of the seven pieces for that magnum opus. And it must be said, she’s a lot better at it than I am. She’s an amazingly good writer, and — mirabilis!! — she has a sense of humor.

Ô that rarest of the rare!

Her stuff is fun to read (think of that: p0rn that actually is, objectively, fun to read…). So I’m hoping we’ll get some serious traction once we start to post Traveler stories to Amazon.

Anyway, I finally finished doing my part: mortaring in the chinks around her solid bricks with my little addenda. They’re not bad, but they’re not as funny (on purpose) as hers. 😀

Also today an amazing discovery came my way: a large cache of vintage erotica has slipped into the public domain. It’s out there for the taking, and it invites republication in new and elegant forms.

You think 50 Shades is something new? Not so much, my friends. It was outdone several generations ago. Let me tell you raunch! Let me tell you BDSM!

Well, I shan’t. I’ll let Camptown Races Press tell you.

The seedling of a new plan sprouted today: a Camptown Races sideline to be labeled Classic Erotica, presenting repackaged and freshly decorated vintage smut. This could be highly entertaining. Oh, no. It will be highly entertaining. Some of this stuff puts 50 Shades to total shame.

I tried on a new template for the Camptown Ladies. Tell me how you like this one. I couldn’t get that handsome cowboy(oid) (OH! let’s just pretend he really IS a cowboy!) any larger without resizing him in Preview (again), which I ain’t a-gunna do. Just click on his gorgeousness for the full effect. He is, in a word or three, to die for.

Another of the day’s several projects was to get a grip on the workflow involved in “publishing” a bookoid on Amazon. It’s truly a tedious, time-consuming project, one I hope some day to foist off on an admin, virtual or in-person. To do that — and also to make my own efforts work consistently — I wanted to begin writing down a step-by-step checklist of the process involved. Yesh. The problem is, as you may note, that some of these “steps” are not single steps: they’re a whole series of steps folded into one “to do.”

Book Publication Checklist

Which Book:_____________________________________
Which Series:_____________________________________
Publication Date___________________________________
Place cover design, PDF, and .docx files in same folder

1. Design Cover | Need not be perfect for Bowker

Obtain Shutterstock copy
Record book the image is used for
Design image in PP
Check that image is correct size
Save to DropBox
Save to hard drive

2. Get ISBN | Assign 3 ISBNs at the start of each week

Proofread MS copy and be sure content is adequately formatted
Create PDF and store to disk
Record correct ISBN by COPY&PASTE into spreadsheet.
Enter ISBN here:
Enter correct ISBN on copyright page

3. Format MS

Format Word MS in plain vanilla
Check that A-level heads are marked “Chapter Title”
Insert links to preceding bookoids in series
Insert links to appropriate websites
CHECK links to be sure they’re not mail-to!
In a series, insert link to vh Amazon author page for future stories
DO NOT insert “chapter number.”
Delete any header or footer content
Replace section breaks with page breaks
Check all character formatting: use styles
Check all paragraph formatting: use styles
Proofread content again
Update TofC field on a PC
Check ISBN on copyright page
Check  for correct title information on copyright page
Enter credits for artwork on copyright page
Enter plug for upcoming bookoids and other bookoids at end
Enter link for Camptown Ladies at end

4. Post to Amazon

Enter preliminary data in form
CHECK THAT SERIES & VOLUME ARE GIVEN AND ARE CONSISTENT
Format image to required size
Upload image
Upload MS
Check in Kindle reader
Make corrections
Re-upload to Kindle
Recheck in Kindle reader
Finalize upload

5. Clear data from DropBox | Move folder from DB to hard drive, containing:

Move images from Images collection to hard drive
Move cover jpegs from bookoid directory to hard drive
Move Word file from bookoid directory to hard drive
Move PDF from bookoid file to hard drive

6. Begin Publicity

Post teasers at websites
Post teasers at social media sites

7. Publicize | ASAP after bookoid goes live:

Post widgets at websites
Post links at social media sites
Hit up reviewers
Tell friends
Hand out flyers at SBA, WVWW, choir
Send notice or newsletter to mail list

TO DO: BUILD MAIL LIST

Dear God. “To do”: Finish bourbon & water and go to bed…

Of Artichokes and Oysters…and New Books

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 In the first of two annoying crashes, the Mac crashed and deleted everything I’d written here. I can’t even remember what I was going on about.

In the second of two exceptionally annoying crashes, WestHost (our new web server) crashed a post I was writing at Writers Plain & Simple and erased 30 minutes worth of work. In spite of my having saved it. No. BECAUSE of my saving it: I hit “save” and the “Edit Post” page went down.

God…freaking…DAMN…it, this has been another of those marathon time-suck days. Coming up with the idea of clustering the time-sucks on specific days was good: yesterday I got some writing done. Day before yesterday, not so much, because reality inetervened. But yesterday: Bobbi got tossed in the middle of BillyBob’s king-sized bed.

What could possibly happen?

So…artichokes. Did you know you can freeze them?

Trader Joe’s sells these wonderful little baby artichokes, SO cute and so delicious. They come in packages of four. What usually happens here at the Funny Farm is that I cook them all (they fit fine in a pasta kettle), eat one, and drop the rest in a Ziplock bag to stash in the fridge.

I may (or may not) eat a second one the next day or so later. But then the package gets shoved to the back of the refrigerator shelf. And I lose track of them.

(Did you know that some people think starting a sentence with “and” or “but” sounds pompous? Honi soit qui mal y pense, say I to that. Goddammit.)

Anyway, so before long these lost artichokes spoil. And I am disgusted and discouraged.

It’s quite enough to have computer technology to make you disgusted and discouraged, without having to be disgusted and discouraged over rotten artichokes.

Freeze them:

Cook them all. (To wit: boil a pot of water; add a little chopped up garlic and a sliced lemon if you have it; toss in the ‘chokes; cook until done, about an hour.)

Take them out of the hot water and set them upside down in a strainer or colander that’s been placed in the kitchen sink. Let the water drain out and the artichokes cool to room temperature.

Place the artichokes on a tray or cookie sheet. Set this in the coldest part of your freezer. Wait.

When the artichokes are frozen through, place them in air-tight plastic freezer bags and store in the freezer until you get around to eating them.

Voilà.

This morning I posted the third Fire-Rider installment on Amazon. It only took three hours to acquire the ISBNs for that and the fourth story and then to get the present piece “published.”

This happened because of the dizzying swarm of errors I’ve instilled in the MSS. I’m laboring away thinking godDAMNit, I know I fixed that I know it I know it I KNOW it!!!!!!!

Well. Yes. I did fix it. But I stored the fixed files to a flash drive and failed to copy them back up to DropBox.

But that notwithstanding, there were a couple of errors in the “fixed” files that I hadn’t fixed.

You begin to sense the complications implicit in this chain of events? Yeah. On and on and on…

I think they’re all fixed now. But I hate Word. I hate it hate it hate it. WHY does it default to do the stupidest most ridiculous most pointless things imaginable by the techie brain? Why do you have to fight it uphill every single step of the way?

Oh Hell. Fire-Rider isn’t an unwitting iteration of the Odyssey. It’s an allegory of  Man vs. Machine.

FR III isn’t online at Amazon yet (it takes awhile for these things to arrive in the marketplace. But FR II is here.

fire-book-2ai

Time-Suck Control: Update

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Hah! This morning I put off the print-on-demand vendor’s time-suck demand until Wednesday, the next day I have scheduled for diddling away time in largely unproductive frustration and hassle. “On my way out the door to an all-day meeting,” said I.

😈

That would be an all-day meeting with a computer keyboard…

So how did the first day of the Time-Suck-Control Scheduling Strategy go? Not too badly. Not great, really, but it was more or less successful. I set aside yesterday to do nothing but write (around the household chores, the pool maintenance, the fricasseeing plant survival chores…oh well). The entire day was devoted to jump-starting the second bookoid of the Biker Babe series, which is suffering from a low battery.

And yeah, I did get through a scene. And I figured out the problem: Biker Babe is turning into something different from a tale of two people f**king like rabbits as they scurry across the landscape. It’s actually turning into a romance. Yesterday Bobbi (the babe) met Biker’s deceased wife’s best friend, a motherly sort who, devolving into a kind of female mentor, advises her to treat Biker kindly and remarks that for the first time since the Deceased croaked over, “that spark in his eye” has returned.

Problem is, Bobbi is a denizen of academe, something she keeps hidden from the widower’s friends. She’s socialized to feel an intense hypersensitivity to sexist slights and also to resist being stuck in the traditional female role. This is at odds with the biker culture, in a funny way. (Not funny ha-ha, either.) She does not much like being called “babe,” nor does she appreciate being told to sit and wait while he takes up a challenge to beat one of his pals at billiards.

As you can see, trouble is about to rear its ludicrous head…

At any rate, these developments are slowing down the scribbling pace, because setting up the situation distracts from…yes, the rabbitting around.

Today I’ll have to move on to another story, which I’m pretty sure I can crank in one day without too much trouble. Rabbits are pretty easy to describe in action…

The second whiteboard — the one in the office — turns out to be a handy aid in the Time-Suck Control Department. The main whiteboard, which has a calendar and space for to-do’s, resides on the door I have to pass through to get to the car. This forces me to look at the things I’m supposed to be accomplishing now, today. I’ve pressed the second one into service as a place to list time-suck chores.

Writing chores appear on the out-the-door white-board and time-suck chores on the office whiteboard. So, things are less likely to be forgotten, but they’re separated out and assigned to specific 14-hour time slots.

Soon we’ll see if this really works. Tomorrow is another writing day, but Luz will be here for four or five hours. That means today I have to shovel the pigpen a bit, and although she personally is quiet and not inclined to bother me with socializing, having somebody banging around the house still is a distraction.

Wednesday is assigned to time sucks, but the morning will be trashed by a visit to the dentist. I expect to be pretty frustrated and upset by that visit, since he’s about to announce that he’s going to empty my bank account and torture me with a new series of pains and discomforts. Like I haven’t had enough of those of late… Whether I’ll get anything done after that is anyone’s guess. A lot of time-sucks remain to be done on that day:

• Post Fire-Rider, Book II (this entails registering an ISBN, a true time-suck!)
• Read my friend Ken’s suggested links on book marketing; distill new ideas for action
• Write and post an article on LinkedIn by way of attracting attention to the publishing ventures
• Get act together and create a more effective marketing plan; contact a writer who’s doing pretty well & ask for appointment to discuss her strategy
• Send receipt to editorial client
• Build e-mail list of people to pester about new publications
• Start a Pinterest site
• Create a Writers P&S site on Facebook (ugh!)
• Pester the Web guru about getting the sites up and adding lost plug-ins
• Figure out what vendor (above) is talking about and come up with some sort of fix, if needed.

Getting all that done in one afternoon, after the dentist’s appointment soaks up the morning? Highly questionable. And therein lies the reason I need someone to help with (read “to do“) the marketing stuff.

Fire-Rider! The labor produces

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At last! Something substantive to show for a month’s worth of unremitting labor! Today I finally got the first book in the Fire-Rider series posted on Amazon.

WAHOO!

How d’you like the cover? It was designed by artist Gary Bennett, who was art director at Arizona Highways magazine during its glory days, when I also had the privilege of working there for a short time.

fire-book-1aiFireRider‘s action takes place 1900 years after the fall of the American republic and its many imitators, allies, and enemies worldwide. A period of global warming flooded coastal cities and island nations, spread havoc and famine, and culminated in a series of global pandemics. The result was a world-wide population collapse that left humanity with too few of the highly educated workers needed to sustain its technological apogee. A swift climatic reversal gave way to a harsh ice age and foreclosed any possibility of reviving the human race’s former technological glory.

The survivors live during a postliterate, post-industrial, post-technological dark age that will come to be known as the Great Lacuna. Rival Espanyo and Hengliss cultures alike survive in agrarian, feudalistic cultures loyal only to local warlords and overlords. Chronic warfare dominates the cultural landscape.

The stories related in the saga of Kaybrel Fire-Rider, Kubna (“warlord”) of Moor Lek, were gathered during his time by the wandering scholar Hapa Cottrite, one of the few literate men of the Great Lacuna. Some 3700 years later, a crew of herders found a cache of crumbling documents hidden in a cave where they had taken shelter from a storm. These were the remains of the Cottrite Codex, a collection of arcana and journal entries penned by Cottrite himself. The Fire-Rider epic is a fragment of that precious trove, translated and narrated by the famed storyteller Estabanya Estabanya Marcanda do Tilár i Robintál do Nomanto Berdo of the Methgoan Academy of Written and Oral Performance.

A Gift for the Kubna joins the allied raiding parties of Okan and A’o before the burning city of Roksan, a major Espanyo stronghold that the Hengliss allies have defeated and sacked. It tells the story of how Kaybrel, the powerful and dangerous governor of an Okan province called Moor Lek, came into possession of the orphaned Tavio Ombertín and why he decided to take the youth under his protection.

This is going to be an awesome saga. Don’t miss the first installment! And please: be sure to tell your friends on Twitter, Facebook, and waypoints. You’ll love it.

Watch this site for updates and more story-telling.

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???

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.