Coffee heat rising

Publishing

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.

Time Suck Control

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Okay, so after yesterday’s rant and after a full day of running from pillar to post around the city, I conceived the idea of building a kind of calendar to get a grip on the time sucks that have expanded to fill all available time and space. TS, I call it: it stands for “technological stuff” as well as “time suck.” And the technological stuff IS, by and large, the biggest offender in the time-suck department. Add to that to the fact that I now have to drive 40 minutes round trip to get free access to the PCs needed to format e-books, and you have some serious time suck.

One of the successful (s/he says) porn writers claims to allocate time like this: write a 5,000-word bookoid in two days; spend one day formatting and uploading it.

Well…it’s possible you could crank 2,500 words in a day, though it would be a bit of a stretch. Probably not very good words. But whatEVER. And it’s probable that once you know what you’re doing, you could format the result for Kindle, Nook, or both in a single day.

Realistically, I’m not producing anything like that much copy in a day. Most of the time, when I finally get a chance to sit down and write, I manage about 1,000 words, give or take. The second Biker Babe book is at about 3500 words right now, and the plot has barely begun to thicken. It will need a rewrite…as a practical matter, I’ve been so whipped by the time I start writing, I’m not thinking clearly and so the thing just isn’t coming out the way one would like.

At any rate, the write-write-format idea has some appeal. So yesterday afternoon (speaking of time sucks…) I created monthly calendars to cover the rest of the year, dedicating time for writing, for TS, and for my highly minimalistic social life. Videlicet:

Calendar1
As usual, click on the image to see details

As you can see, half of today will be occupied with two meetings. Tomorrow, the entire afternoon is gone: have to drive halfway to Yuma to the monthly chivaree of my fave writer’s group. The morning of the 5th will be blown by a dentist’s appointment (the prospect gets me so upset I can’t even spell it right!). And since I know I will be very upset after that meeting, I’ve scheduled the rest of the day for running errands an other time sucks. Tuesdays or Wednesdays are designated for errands (also disturbing, evidently…), because those are the days when Costco is at its quietest and so, incidentally, are most other venues.

Obviously, this pristine schedule won’t last: there’ll be, for example, at least two more dentist’s appointments in the near future, maybe more. I do get together with friends now and again, believe it or not. And there’s always SOME damnfool thing that scotches up the best-laid plans. But at least now I have a plan.

For August, it gives me four or even five days a week for writing, which is quite a lot. Sundays are ambiguous this month: writing or TS, whichever is most pressing, because a lot of stuff is still in the set-up stage, and I’m still climbing various unpleasant learning curves. But once all that stuff settles down, it means that in the summer I’ll have an extra day for writing (I hope) or for time sucks (as needed), compared with the rest of the year.

After choir gets started, we have this:

Calendar2a

In this scenario, half of every Sunday is occupied by choir, and so is every Wednesday evening.

The latter is significant because when I’m not falling over with exhaustion, I typically work until 10 or 11 p.m. So that excises several hours of work time — not very productive time,  by that hour, but still…things do get done then.

What’s left during the choir season, then, is three and a half days dedicated to writing, three and a half days given over to either TS or writing, whichever is most pressing, and four half-days of either writing or TS, if there’s time and energy for that on Sundays.

Now. The cool thing about this scheme (as unrealistic as it may be…) is that to meet our production goals, I’ll need to post something about once every three or four days. With specific dates already dedicated to time sucks (believe me, formatting and posting these things IS a time suck!), I can schedule exactly when I’m going to put the things up.

The 18 serials of Fire-Rider are now ready to go. Gary, the graphic artist, delivered all 18 covers, plus a high-res version of the original cover so that I can improve the image at the Fire-Rider website. If I start on that project tomorrow and only post on days that are already dedicated to time sucks, then the last FR story goes live on Kindle on October 3.

Since I’m not doing Kindle’s thing in which Amazon demands exclusivity and pays you not for the book but for the number of pages readers look at(!!!), then I also could post on Nook, once I figure out how. The figuring out will suck some more time, but actually it looks like it may be easier than posting to Amazon. In theory, I probably also could put it on iBooks, but the why of that escapes me.

At any rate, if all that’s going up is FireRider (plus an improved version of the cookbook, whose formatting I’m still wrestling with), that will give us a full month — all of September — in which to build an inventory. We already have six “racy” novelettes in hand. I’m working on two others right now, so that means I need to write only two and my freelances each need to write only two to meet our minimum goal for a single month. Ideally, we should have fifteen in hand, but ten will do the trick.

As it were. 🙄

 

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.

The Enterprise: Progress Made toward Business Goals

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So yesterday I started the upload of Slave Labor to Snowflake Press’s print-on-demand service, just to see what would happen.  It went pretty well until (I think) until I reached a point where the next step was… ????? Self-evident, this site is not.

Finding no way to proceed past the point of having uploaded the book and entered my company’s information, I saved and sent an email to their support folks. Got a message back instructing on what to do, so today I have to decipher that and move forward. I think the next step elicits page proofs — interestingly, from their online instructions as far as I got, it appeared that you’d better have printed and proofed your PDFs yourself, before uploading, ’cause you weren’t going to get bluelines or page proofs or whatever. If they ship proofs, though, THAT will be grand.

I’m also ready now to upload How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, the diet/cookbook. Realized there was no reason to wait  until I’d figured out how to get that on Kindle and Nook before setting up the PoD version. So once I learn EXACTLY how to do this task, 30 Pounds will be next.

Yesterday I developed a spreadsheet (I really do need a database on these computers!) to identify and keep track of stock photography for covers and populated it mightily. Today, having found those images, I need to subscribe to Shutterstock and start downloading and storing images for the future bookoids.

The Über-To-Do list I made a week or ten days ago, the one where I figured if I could get to three items a day, in a week or so I’d be positioned to kick Camptown Races Press into high gear — i.e., to focus most of my energy on writing and pre-marketing racy books and on uploading the books that already exist — is pretty well accomplished. A few things remain to be completed: one can’t register an ISBN, for example, until one has the cover art, and as usual I’m waiting (and waiting…and waiting…) for the artist to get done with the Fire-Rider images.

The websites are moved over to WestHost. The wonderful and clever Jesse is now freed of another distraction from his ambitions, and a new back-end guru is working on organizing the Blog Empire in a more reasonable way. It’s grown up like topsy, of course, and the result resembles…well, a weed patch. With that tidied up, things should run much more efficiently, I hope.

Today I have to move the Writers Plain & Simple domain name from WordPress.com to my possession, meaning what for that website, I do not know. As soon as we have the domain name, then we’ll move the site to WestHost, too. But I hope it won’t cause Writers P&S to go dark in the interiim. Oh well.

Also today I’m going to start building a kind of in-house user manual describing, step-by-step, how to do some of the complicated techno-tasks that have to be done. Some of these exist of a piece here and there — I downloaded William King’s explanation of how to build an e-book cover to a PDF and printed it. I’ve experimented with this once and found it pretty easy. Since I’m good with PP and not good at all with PhotoShop, and since the proposed smυtty books don’t need to have anything very fancy on the front, I’m thinking this will be the path of least resistance when it comes to publishing the frolics.

Other procedures to go into the proposed manual: how to post to Kindle, how to post to Nook, how to upload to Snowflake, maybe (if it proves very complicated) how to get stock art images. Any time I have to deal with something that’s yet another learning experience, I’m going to write down the steps, print them out, and stick them in a three-ring binder. So with any luck, I won’t have to look this stuff up and try to figure it out over and over and over again, which is what happens now.

Once again, though, this morning I simply had to take a break, which is what I’m doing while scribbling these golden words. The house has degenerated into SUCH a mess, I simply couldn’t stand another minute of it. Since I got out of the last visit to the Mayo Hotel and Resort, I’ve been working while flat on my back in bed. Though I’ve been recovering, most of the time I feel a lot better laying down.

Of course, my being out of commission does nothing to stop the constant blizzard of incoming paper. Piles and piles and PILES of it have come to rest on almost every surface in the house.

So I shoveled that off.

Found a box that would fit the index cards for the Boob Book, which have been arrayed in tidy (dust-collecting) stacks atop the family-room desk. Put those away neatly.

Then shoveled out a space in the office to hold the box of cards plus the 787 pages of source material for the book, which have accrued in three large binders. So got that stuff out of sight.

I’m waiting until I get a contract to write that book. I’ll send it to half a dozen agents plus one of my former publishers, Columbia UP. If no one bites, then I may write it and self-publish it, but not until I get the paying business off the tarmac.

Shoveled more paper off the desk in the office. Found stuff that was tossed on the desk because no file folders exist to hold it. So now have to devise some file folders and, far more problematic, find a place that can hold him. All the file space in the house and garage — four file cabinets’ worth — is jammed full of crap I’m supposed to save for three years, five years, seven years, or forever. What is the point?

Soaked the blood from the most recent medical adventure out of the sheets. Was kind of surprised to see it actually wash out. Sheets are expensive and I really, really didn’t want to have to throw that set away.

Well, I’m about as rested up as I’m ever gonna get. And so, to work…

Stuff Done, Stuff in Progress

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“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.