The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
The printer says the page proofs for 30 Pounds 4 Months are in the mail. I imagine that package will arrive before Christmas. So with any luck (assuming I didn’t mess up anything in the design and layout!), the print version of the cookbook will be here right on time to rescue us all from our holiday food frenzies! 😀
At any rate, if you want to get started NOW, you can grab the digital version at Amazon.
So the scheme to cut the production schedule by about 50% has finally pretty well kicked in. We’re now posting about four books a month — one a week — which makes me feel like I’m barely moving. Suddenly whole days have reappeared: I no longer wake up at 5 a.m. and go to bed five minutes later, at 11 p.m. 😀
Strangely, though, it feels like I personally am accomplishing at least as much and probably more. We recently put our latest Racy Book online. Brace yourself:
Another short story, this one involves a science teacher, a studly visitor, and a funny twist at the end that leaves the other characters a little shocked. It’s the second piece in the “Travelers” frame story, and (assuming you enjoy a little clinical description now and again) it’s pretty entertaining.
Tuesday I’ll put the second “boxed set” of Fire-Rider stories online, offering books seven through twelve under one cover.
Meanwhile, I’m working on a new iteration of the ill-fated diet/cookbook, which I hope we’ll have a shot at selling now that we have a new marketing agent.
A boxed set of the “Family at the Holidays” series is almost ready to go online. All that’s needed is to add a special “bonus” story to give readers a little value added and then post the thing at Amazon.
I’ve put an ad up for one of the naughty books at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. Set up a Pinterest page for the marketing lady. Tomorrow must chat with her about what and how she’s doing.
Today I finally got around to downloading Scrivener and beginning to learn how to use it. The instructions are packaged in five interminable steps. The first took a little over an hour to plow through, figure, out, and try to understand. Doesn’t look hard…just damn complicated.
Learning yet another large, complex computer program is NOT something I crave to do. However, apparently it can convert directly to ePub format, which is profoundly desired. Right now the bookoids exist only in .mobi format, which is easy to create but which is salable only at Amazon. We need ePub to sell the things at AllRomances and at Barnes & Noble. And you can mount an ePub file at Amazon, too — probably more easily than farting around with using Amazon’s conversion tool to post from Wyrd.
So once I’ve learned how to use the program, it should cut the workload by making it possible to use the same file to post books at three different retailers.
Scrivener is something I’ve been wanting to get to for weeks and weeks, but have had neither the time nor the physical strength to take on.
A-n-n-n-d… Right now it’s after 11 p.m. The dogs are barking. I can’t scribble another word. And so, to bed…
Okay, so this morning in comes word from Amazon that Bobbi’s Secret Life, the second story in the Bobbi & the Biker series, is finally online! Hot dang. So now we have two new stories online, the Ange & Billie squib and this one.
And, as stated in recent memory, the Fatlady is tired and is about to go do something else.
What happens when a college prof
and a biker get together?
Last month’s Costco AMEX bill showed up a couple day’s ago. It was only $660!!!! That’s about 2/3 of its budgeted figure, and probably the smallest AMEX bill I’ve ever had!
The reason for this miracle, I think, is that ever since the last of the endless round of surgeries, I’ve lost interest in eating well and lost interest in shopping at Costco.
Any trip to Costco is likely to turn into an impulse-buy carnival. Whenever I’m in that store, I’m tempted (and usually cave to temptation) to buy 18 times more stuff than I need at the time and three or four things that are just too, TOO neat to pass by. Because, after all, we know they’ll be gone by the next time we get to Costco, eh?
Instead, I’ve been buying at grocery stores, Walgreen’s, and Target, and only buying as much as I need at any given time. Whereas you’d think that buying in bulk would represent a cost savings, apparently it doesn’t. At least not in the short run. It might, if you only bought things that are cost-effective in bulk — the paper towels and the toilet-paper, for example. But Costco’s meat (for another example) is no cheaper than grocery-store meat, and most of the other stuff, while appealing, isn’t something that you just have to have.
A second, probably lesser reason is that I’ve taken to occasionally paying for things with a debit card, so as to get a few dollars back in walking-around cash. Without the teaching job, I have no reason to traipse to the credit union to deposit checks twice a month (after the District gave away all our private information to hackers, forcing me to close my checking account and get a new one with a new account number and to put a freeze on all my credit-bureau accounts, I canceled the direct-deposit). So a debit payment works to provide a little cash now and again.
But I don’t think I’ve paid more than about $150 or $200 that way. Even if I put $200 on the debit card, that’s still only about $860: way under the $1100 budget.
Telling, eh?
So along about the middle of the night, our latest issue, The Kelpie, went live on Amazon. Really…if you can stand a little explicit biology (this one is relatively tame in that department), you have gotta read this crazy little squib. It’s quite short — probably reading it beginning to end will get you through the waiting room at the dentist or the doc’s office. But what it lacks in length, it makes up for in Halloween spookiness. Our author came up with the craziest idea, and from there built it into quite a dark and spooky story with an odd, didn’t-see-that-coming twist.
Only one serious hangover from yesterday: the new Excel file I built for WonderAccountant to view the details of checks and deposits (now that I can no longer use Quickbooks online in its new incarnation) crashed when my computer went down yesterday. (You’re surprised by a catastrophic crash, after all those shenanigans? Surely not!). MS Office for Mac saved the files as “Version 1.” When I saved it back down to disk as an .xlsx file and then tried to reopen the file from that location, I got a “corrupted file” message. NOTHING I tried would reopen it.
But I did manage to reopen the “version 1” file, which I’d stupidly closed because Excel wouldn’t let me open a file with the same name, by calling it up from “Open Recent” in the File menu. You must be calling on something that resides in memory when you do that. When I saved it back down AGAIN as an .xls file (which usually works), it again wouldn’t re-open. Saving it as an .xlsb file finally did recover it and save the data in a file that will open.
Claro que it’s time to back up that entire disk and DropBox to the flashdrive…
Ugh. I worked until 11 p.m. last night, having started at 5:30 a.m. What a bitch of a day. Now, though, only about 75 pages of Honored Client’s book remain to be re-read, so I probably will be done by the time we meet on Friday. I sent him what I’d finished so he’ll have time to review 95% of the book, just in case something comes up on this end.
I’m supposed to go to a local FINCON group’s get-together this evening. Though they’re meeting at my hands-down favorite Valley restaurant, it’s way to Hell and gone in Tempe, and the weather is threatening some major rain. Really, I do NOT want to drive to Tempe through rush-hour traffic in a storm. It’s dangerous enough to navigate that effing freeway under the best of conditions…I do not use the term “fellow homicidal drivers” lightly. When it rains, people around here go absolutely BATSHIT. Batshit on the surface streets is bad enough. But on the freeways? Holy cripes.
The grill cleaning dude came by at 7 this morning. He said it was raining between here and the East Valley, whence he had to drive, and that people were already running amok. Said it was truly a horrible drive.
Today’s next chore is to figure out how to use Mailchimp to send out my newsletter, which has been sitting on the hard drive for several days. This will require sitting through a 25-minute video — probably more than once. I know I’m going to hate that, and so I’m putting it off. Hence, this blog post. 😉
Just picked up $245 from a client. Tomorrow I should collect another $800 from a second rather charming client, and Honored Client…well, who knows? I haven’t toted up the time. But at $60/hour, it will be enough to bring home a little bacon. This will be good, because yesterday The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., disbursed a shitload of money to writers and editing subcontractors.
Wow! Here it comes: the sky is getting black and the wind is picking up. Just ran off to shut down the pool equipment as lightning and thunder begin to crash around us. Dollars to donuts we lose the power (and the wireless connection) again.
And so, to publish, before we’re shut down…
Altogether too many seven-day weeks of 16-hour days… I’m afraid today I lapsed into goofing off. Almost as if today were a Sunday (remember those?).
Better yet, when a dear friend called to invite me over for a BBQ dinner tomorrow, saying she and DH were inviting another singleton friend, recently widowed, who felt sad on “special days” because her kids had kind of forgotten her, as adult kids will do, I wondered what special day are we talking about here?
Oh. Labor Day. Okay.
Heh heh. Every day is Labor Day at the Funny Farm.
Progress is being made:
The Camptown Ladies, having joined the Twitter parade just a few days ago, already have 100 followers.
People have taken me up on the offer of a FREE copy of any Fire-Rider book of one’s choice.
Thanks to Twitter, I stumbled upon these bons mots at a new-to-me site, No Wasted Ink. Too bad there’s not a “like it a lot” button.
And let us admire this handsome website, Web home of co-conspirator Dharma Kelleher.
E-book Builder pal has stepped up to the plate and plans to convert the Fire-Rider series into Smashword-friendly format. As of just about now, four of the eighteen bookoids have new ISBNs for the new format.
And speaking of electronic formatting, the irrepressible Mrs. Accountability resurfaced this morning, looking for edits on her two new cookbooks. When I told her about my difficulties formatting for Kindle (thanks to my own astounding techno-incompetence), she proposed to try to format the long, complex .docx file for .mobi. As we speak, I should be editing her book.
Yesterday I journeyed out to Avondale, halfway to Yuma from here, to deliver a presentation on “editing,” a vague topic if ever there was one. Not knowing what to say, I came up with “Eight Tips to Improve Your Writing.”
What I didn’t know was the organizer had arranged for two of us to speak on the same topic, and the other one was Dharma.
Well, I happen to know that Dharma is a killer editor…because she’s edited some of my stuff. So as you can imagine, when I got there and learned this, I thought “gulp!”
Not surprisingly, she came up with a very clear, very succinct, and very to-the-point presentation. And she, being cleverer than I am, has already put it together as a marketing dingbat for her blog. Check it out: if you subscribe you get the e-book version for free.
Think I held my own, though: we overlapped a bit but we both made our own points, and when we talked about the same issues we put our own spin on them. I, however, was not bright enough to think of turning the PowerPoint into something salable.
It’s never too late, though.
Up at 5:30 with the hounds, who will not brook laying in after the sun’s earliest beams start to creep over the horizon. Was about to take them for the usual mile-long stroll when Cassie the Corgi pulled up lame. Didn’t think making her walk over concrete and asphalt would be kind, so we retreated into the house.
But…IT’S FINALLY COOL OUT THERE IN THE EARLY MORNINGS!
So used the couple of cool dawn hours to get a ton of work done:
Pull up and toss out (many!) dead plants
Build a dirt dam to divert water from the foundation of the house just east of the lime tree
Haul rock from the front yard to shore up the dirt dam. (River rocks forming the border of a flowerbed that didn’t take, which I need to deconstruct and recover with gravel)
Water the potted plants as usual, in the ongoing struggle to keep them alive
Haul emptied pots (see item 1) to the potting shelves on the east side
Haul out wire stuff I used to keep Other Daughter’s damn cat from shitting all over a defunct flowerbed, which Gerardo is determined to get rid of (what is WITH that man???)
Fertilize four citrus trees, two climbing roses, and an olive tree
Deep-water four citrus trees, two climbing roses, and an olive tree
Wash a blanket and a load of laundry
Cooked up some more dog food for the corgis
Ugh.
Poor little dogs didn’t get fed until after 9 am. Neither did I.
The ISBN routine is such a time suck, I don’t feel I got much else done. Come to think of it, I didn’t. I drank. I ate. I loafed.
Now I must get to work on Mrs. Accountability’s latest work of art and also review one of the Camptown Races writer’s submissions, which I’ve neglected shamefully.
And so, to work. Again. Still.
For a free copy of any Fire-Rider adventure, leave a comment with a real email address & let me know which one you’d like, and if you’d prefer a .mobi file or a PDF.