Aunt Tilly wants to know: Why are young women attracted to the men they find, and WHERE do they find them?
Idle essays
Taking a Brief Break…
“Brief” is the operative term. After several frantic weeks, things are cruising along on a fairly even keel just now, so I think I can take off a morning or so to rest and try to think. Actually, I should run out to a grocery store, but the crushing heat discourages one from venturing out of one’s burrow.
We are now ready with about a dozen racy bookoids for Camptown Races Press. That will provide about a month or six weeks’ worth of uploads, if we’re putting them online about every three or four days. With any luck, we’ll be able to run a month or so ahead of that.
Book V of Fire-Rider went online this morning: Kay’s Ghosts. After an angry confrontation leads Tavi to rebel against Kay’s apparent lack of empathy, Kay asks Tavi how he thinks he (Kay) came to learn the Espanyo language. In the absence of an answer, Kay’s horrifying personal story emerges, one that parallels Tavi’s and possibly even outdoes it.
Yesterday I spent some time trying to learn how to use Twitter. The “hashtag” thing has always been a mystery to me. I guess it amounts to a user-generated search term. Apparently you can found one simply by typing it into a tweet. And apparently you can associate a tweet of your own with a larger community (as it were) of people nattering on the same topic. Say, for example, something like “Camptown’s latest #eroticromance just went online at Amazon: http://bitly.hotsytotsy.”
The first experiment with Tweetvertising is branded (uhmmm… I guess that’s the term) with #FireRider, #postapocalyptic, #futurehistory, and #adventurestory. Now I need to find some cool things to share with readers, so I’m not just blitzing folks with ads.
Can you post images on Twitter?
What I don’t yet understand is what the “@” symbol is supposed to do. I think it’s some sort of identification badge.
And can you create a Twitter account or an entity in a new name, or are you limited to one account? I think the FunnyAboutMoney Twitter persona was created way back in the day, by the delightful Mrs. Micah. (Remember her?)
Same question applies to FaceBook: can I create a site for Camptown RP and the Ladeez? Since certainly I can’t be blitzing my coreligionists, who comprise most of my FB “friends,” with news of lascivious literature.
Also yesterday I made an interesting discovery that will allow me to build a large and entertaining backlist quickly and easily. Better not discuss that here: it will soon become evident what I’m getting up to. It’s a stealable idea, and I think it’s best not tip my hand before the launch.
Working on learning how to make “boxed sets” compiling related bookoids under one electronic cover. You can do this cheaply using freeware called Gimp, but I think I’d rather have Gary Bennett, who designed the Fire-Rider cover, create the things, since he’s a pro, he has many years of experience with PhotoShop, and the result is likely to look a lot more professional than anything I could trick out in a program I don’t know.
Must decide today whether to cancel the New York Times.
The paper uses a local delivery service that also throws the Wall Street Journal and the Arizona Republic onto people’s driveways and into any available puddles. This delivery outfit just stinks. One of two specific reasons I canceled the Republic was that they used to call me on the phone about ten days before the bill was due and harass me to pay up right that minute, as though I were a deadbeat and was late on payment. (The other reason is that the Sunday paper contained nothing but advertising and went directly into the recycling bin without even being read.)
The Times wasn’t delivered either Saturday or Sunday. On Saturday, I don’t believe they came up our street at all: I walk the dogs before it gets too hot and so can see whose driveway has a dead tree on it.
I called and complained. No paper was ever forthcoming.
On Sunday (apparently as a consequence of my complaint), everyone else got a paper but I didn’t.
This is not the first time such a thing has happened, and it’s far from the first time I’ve complained about this bunch.
I have an “educator’s” discount for the Times, which makes it marginally affordable. Still, they’ve raised the bill with some regularity, to the extent that if I canceled that paper, I could use the money to subscribe either to the New York Review of Books (a favorite I can no longer afford) or to The Economist (a weekly that I’ve always coveted).
An online subscription comes with the dead-tree subscription to the Times. If you want to read the Times online only, you have to pay for the privilege. I don’t know if it’s a lot less. Nor do I know whether I would want to pay for the privilege: though I use it all the time to post links to Times articles, I usually find those articles first in the hard-copy version. And I do not find reading the thing on a tablet to be very alluring.
But even when they do deliver the damn thing, these days I rarely get a chance to read it. I’ll look at it while I’m bolting down breakfast, and then I’m launched into 14 or 18 hours of nonstop work. That means I may read maybe two or three pages. Why am I forking over money for that? At that rate, one issue of The Economist would provide reading material for an entire week of breakfasts.
I want to support the little high-quality journalism that survives in this country. But hell. Donating to Pro Publica or PBS would accomplish that.
Such a deal.
Hullo?
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! 🙂
The Writer’s Dinner
I did it to myself. I’m crankin’ away at the second installment of Bobbi and the Biker’s tale. He takes her to his favorite sh!t-stompin’ place, a country-western biker joint in a bad part of town. Tells her they have the best hamburgers in town. She thinks he’s putting her on, of course. But lacking anything better to eat, she orders a cheeseburger after they sit down to a big ole picnic table with his cronies.
Ketchup and mustard were passed up the table, and we dug into a classic American dinner like I hadn’t tasted since I was a little girl. Tender beefy flavor enriched with the nutty cream of melted Swiss and the tang of dill pickles and the sweet overtone of Heinz filled my mouth and I thought this was something I’d never get enough of. The fries were fat and hot, crisp on the outside and floury tender on the inside.
“Satisfactory?” BillyBob asked.
“Oh, my god!” I said when I could speak.
He smiled and bit into his own burger.
{chortle!} Well, by the time I finished this delectable passage, I was craving a hamburger — a real one — so bad I could hardly sit still.
Anyone remember real hamburgers? The ones that had real meat in them? Enough meat that when the short-order cook fixed it “rare” it actually came out rare? With tomatoes that had a flavor? And kosher dill pickles? And potatoes that looked and tasted like chunky slices of real Idahoes, not like long thin potato chips?
Dayum!
If you can remember that, I’ll bet you can remember real milkshakes, too.
Welp. By the time I finished the scene, nothing would do but what I had to have a real hamburger!
Needed to go to the grocery store, anyway, so it was off to the Safeway.
Back in the Day, Safeway and Smitty’s (defunct now, alas) used to sell beef round and chuck roasts for less th an they sold ground round and ground chuck. So I used to buy a roast and ask the butcher to grind it for me.
And the DIFFERENCE! Oh my. Fresh-ground hamburger was an entirely different critter from the stuff you bought off the counter in a styrofoam tray. That always mystified me…only because in those days we’d never heard of “pink slime.”
Ew.
Eventually Safeway got wise to that strategy and butchers would refuse to grind it for you. At that point I pretty much stopped buying hamburger. Even in my ignorance of the glories of pink slime, the cost seemed like just too much money for what it was.
Today, though money was no object. Such was my Art-induced craving for a real hamburger.
Also picked up some crumbled blue cheese (speaking of too goddamn much money for what it is…). Stuffed a patty of hamburger with some of it. Threw the meat and the potatoes on the grill…not quite the same as real French fries, but a helluva lot better than a bath in hydrogenated oil.
Tossed together a salad from one of those hydroponic heads of lettuce that tastes a lot like lettuce used to taste.
Incredible. You forget how good real food is.
Now. Let’s see what else we can do to get Bobbi to utter, “Oh, my god!”
Stuff Done, Stuff in Progress
“In Progress”: I have no idea whether this post will go online or whether it will stick once it does. Beloved Web guru Jesse, now constrained (by a job, of all things, poor guy!) to the weekends to perform his magic for the clientele, worked into the night to move the blog empire to WestHost and reported, sometime after midnight, that he would be spending a fair amount of today in pursuit of the same goal.
So today’s idle post may be being scribbled while he’s roaming around the site doing whatever it is that Web Magicians do. Oh well. It all goes off into the Internet Ether anyway, I guess.
Yesterday’s frenzy, the one that produced NINE major jobs all of which occupied Slot #1 on the priority list, did eventually produce a little forward progress. To wit:
1. I studied the Calibre user manual and thought holy shit! Decided to go through KDP for most of the Magnum Opuses, with the possible exception of the diet/cookbook. The cookbook has a relatively complex layout. Friedman’s user manual for the Word templates I purchased claims that if styles are used assiduously, even something with lists and tables should transfer into the enormously arcane Calibre software. But I’ll believe that when I see it.
If it doesn’t work, then I’ll have to hire my friend the e-book builder to prepare that one.
The smυt, though, is extremely simple and should fly through the process with no problem. I hope.
1. And I studied Barnes & Noble’s self-publishing tool. It looks extremely simple.
Okay, we do know looks can be deceiving, and that where things digital are concerned, 99.998% of the time looks are deceiving. But at least I have an idea of what I’m supposed to do.
1. Tina’s edits are now entered in the diet cookbook MS and some final layout polishing has been done. The thing should be ready to convert to PDFs today. The e-book conversion is more problematic; see above.
1. I realized the PoD version of the cookbook could and probably should be coil-bound, since those who don’t buy its e-book incarnation probably have in mind opening it out on the drainboard so they can follow recipes while cooking. Coil-bound cookbooks work better for that purpose than perfect-pound, because they lay flat. This is good, because it will be much simpler to convey the cover to the Snowflake Press. So the cookbook and the PDFs for Slave Labor go over to the printer today.
1. Though I did not start a month’s subscription and start downloading cover images, I did go through all my notes (with URLs for the images already spotted) and transfer the relevant data into a spreadsheet. This little ledger will show where stock art was acquired, the vendors’ stock number for each piece, when it was acquired, what work it was used for, and when it was published. Today if I have time, I will start the subscription and begin the downloads, a chore that will take some hours.
1. Though I did not create a second mock-up cover in PowerPoint (I’ve done that in the past and see that it seems to work, but whether it gets past Kindle and Nook’s gatekeepers remains to be seen), I did ascertain that a color image converted to a JPG by PowerPoint does convert in RGB, thank God. So, if the guy who says he makes his covers with stock art in PP is right, creating covers for the p0rn will be down-and-dirty easy, since nothing very artistic is required for those.
1. And finally, I managed to add a few words to the current Bobbi and the Biker bookoid, in which BillyBob finally calls Bobbi (whose lust for his magnificent body can best be described as “overheated”) and invites her to go line dancing at his favorite country-Western sh!t-stompin’ bar. This should be interesting…
Today I’d like to start with a sample chapter a prospective contributor sent over. Looking forward to reading that more closely — took a brief look at it yesterday but became swamped with yesterday’s frolics, which occupied almost every living breathing moment until about 9:00 p.m., when I crapped out. So probably that will be priority number one, after a bunch of Life Maintenance chores:
1. DONE Feed dogs
2. Check pool chemicals, restore balance; clean pump pot; backwash if necessary; shock-treat if necessary.
3. DONE Pour vast quantities of Bayer Tree & Shrub evil chemical around the paloverde and climbing roses in attempt to damage and kill off as many evil paloverde borers as possible.
The “beneficial nematodes” that I bought from Arbico last fall and this spring seem to have helped some, but another dozen of the monsters emerged from the ground, meaning hundreds if not thousands of root-eating grubs reside under the surface, where they’re working at killing the magnificent paloverde that shelters the west side of my house from the blast-furnace afternoon sun. Seeing their exit holes (which go about 18 inches underground), I got the idea of pouring borer-specific insecticide directly down those holes, on the following theories:
a) the fertilized females often return to their hole to lay their eggs…laying the things in a bug-killer infested hole can’t do the babes much good; and
b) applied in this way, the liquid will go directly down to the level where the damn grubs are chewing on my tree’s roots and presumably, by capillary action, soak into the soil where the little horrors reside.
4. UNDER WAY Wash and dry the bathroom rug and the puppy-dirt-collecting rug by the side door. Clean the dirt out of the washer and utility sink (a larger job than it appears, involving use of a shop vac and repeated running of the endlessly annoying washer’s “rinse” cycle.)
5. DONE. Find a place to store stacks of notecards indexing research for Boob Book. Get that stuff off the family room desk so the desk can be dusted!
6. Read contributor’s creative work; respond in something that resembles a coherent manner.
7. Upload Slave Labor to Snowflake Press.
8. UNDER WAY Write back cover copy for print version of diet/cookbook.
9. Upload diet/cookbook to Snowflake Press.
10. Continue writing the latest installment of Bobbi & the Biker.
11. Get to the 36 unread emails on the server.
12. Write job description for proposed intern, in connection with internship/apprenticeship initiative planned by members of Scottsdale Business Association.
How exactly I’m supposed to explain to some college internship coordinator that candidates must be 18 years of age but preferably over 21 remains to be seen. Oh well. Tomorrow’s another day.
Happy Fourth of July! And…next?
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?
