Coffee heat rising

Writing

Almost Too Good for Words

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First crack out of the box this morning, The Good Gray Times reminded me that I have to prepare a dog-&-pony on editing for a meeting that will take place in about a week. Today’s paper brought this astounding bit of intelligence to the breakfast table:

The assault was described as a terrorist attack by the Belgian prime minister…

Man! Stay away from those fanatical Belgians!

I’m supposed to “present” on the subject of editing next week. Having been given a very vague topic, I’m feeling a bit at loose ends as to what to say. The morning’s instant of hilarity at least provided grist for a post at Writers Plain & Simple, a site I’ve neglected overmuch since we made the move to BigScoots.

That can be a start for the d&p, I guess… Maybe I should offer them something like 10 things to fix when editing your own work. Then I could hold forth about the passive voice, a subject one can easily spin out to 20 minutes of yakathon. I have a particularly good bleat about the passive voice. Restrictive vs nonrestrictive…always good for five or ten minutes. The abstraction ladder usually keeps people awake — lots of good images. EEEEeeeeee How can I say how much I don’t feel like writing this thing?

Yesterday I did make good progress on the second installment of the Ouija Lover series. Heh…now our supernatural hero has not one but two women in the sack. Hot diggety!

But alas, today is a TimeSuck day, so not much writing is gonna get done. On the slate:

• Assign at least 3 ISBNs (ideally, get it up to ten, but this is a time-consuming proposition)
• Post Fire-Rider VII to Amazon
• Create the “editing” PowerPoint
• Prepare hand-out to go with the PowerPoint
• Plug Fire-Rider VII on various social media
• Begin drafting an article for LinkedIn, which REALLY needs to go up next week
• Study Smashwords’ freaking endless set of formatting instructions
• Try to apply these to the first Fire-Rider installment
• Begin figuring out how to get FR up on Smashwords
• Figure out how to recruit people to review Fire-Rider installments, which entails…
• Figure out how to post FR episodes as freebies
• Remove cookbook widgets from all websites

In the absence of much editing work to assign to my associate editor, I’m hoping to foist the Smashwords formatting on her or on one of her underlings. A cursory read of SW’s godawful how-to PDF suggests that a strong grasp of Wyrd is all that’s needed. We both have that, with a vengeance; she’s probably more skilled with it than I am. And I think we could take one of the templates I’ve purchased and simply modify the styles to provide the desired font and type size.

Last night I took the cookbook off of Amazon. The formatting in the file that went online was a mess — something that was not visible in their click-bait “reader.” I had no idea what a fiasco I was publishing until I downloaded a full-bore .mobi reader and figured out how to make it work. Once the document was “saved” to Amazon’s server, I found I could not overwrite it with corrected copy, nor could I delete it and re-upload corrected copy.

The thing has a very complex layout structure, with heads, subheads, and lists. Smashwords will not let you use Wyrd’s automatically bookmarked level A and level B subheads…you have to go through the entire damn thing and manually enter bookmarks, then go back to the manually constructed TofC and enter links to those.

Well. With 125 recipes plus a four-chapter section on the 30-pounds diet, that is going to be a ridiculous job!

The print copy looks just fine. So I may just buy a bar code & UPC from Bowker and have it printed on the PoD’s cover, and then sell only hard copy on Amazon and Smashwords. Not promising, but better than just tossing out all that investment in time and money.

Frustrating.

But it was a learning experience.

Fleas?????? Is there ever a break from the timesuck?

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So I wake up this morning with a nice little pattern of bug bites on one arm. Now, there’s nothing unusual about the occasional solitary bug bite around this place. Arizona, as the local climate has warmed and the feckless humans have flooded in and tried to clone the upper Midwest wherever they come to light, has been overrun with mosquitoes.

You never used to see a mosquito here. Now they fill your house every spring and hang around until December, when the weather chills down a bit. One day a couple of years ago, I killed a dozen of the little monsters inside the house!

We haven’t had so many this year. I don’t know why. Haven’t had many flies, either.

WhatEVER. All that notwithstanding, I happen to know what a mosquito bite looks like. Having grown up in the Middle East, I also happen to know what flea bites look like.

Mosquitoes are not piggish eaters. They sit down to dinner once and then get up and fly away. Fleas, on the other hand, have never met a blood meal that they didn’t want more of. Right away, please.

So three or four really itchy bites clustered within a radius of an inch or two or three usually means a flea has come visiting.

And you know what that means?

Oh yes.

TIME SUCK!

Time suck of the first water.

You need to get on the job of flea-whacking instantaneously if you’re to have any hope whatsoever that your DIY efforts will work.

So. First thing after the requisite doggy-walk (we do the doggy walk at 5 a.m. because i wish to live and because one corgi will boss a human around but two corgis will reduce the human to full obedience at all times), it was into the bathtub with the hounds.

Actually, before we left, I inspected both pooches for fleas and didn’t find any signs that I recognize. It’s pretty easy to tell if the animal is heavily infested. My mother once brought a badly infested cat home from a pet store…the vet taught us how to recognize flea eggs and flea debris. They don’t seem to have any eggs in their fur, nor did I see any flea sh!t. However, both dogs had a strange dark deposit around their hindmost titties. I think this was dirt — probably congealed urine, since a female dog can spray her belly by accident, especially when it assumes as deep a squat as a corgi does. So I smeared these areas with olive oil, figuring some oil would loosen whatever that was.

Olive oil will not harm your dog, BTW. Baby oil and bath oil may, since they consist mostly of mineral oil. That’s antithetical to an animal that can be guaranteed to lick the stuff off.

So by the time we got home from a mile’s stroll, the dogs had been marinating in olive oil for twenty or thirty minutes.

Into the bathtub.

You do not want to know what a circus it is to launder a corgi. When they say a corgi is “a big dog in a small dog’s body,” that’s not quite spot on. The fact is, under certain circumstances, a corgi IS a big dog.

Two wrestling matches later, the dogs were clean and the bathtub was filthy.

Scrub bathtub out.

Now it was time to gather ALL the bedding, including the bedpad, all the mats the dogs lay on, all the area rugs in the house, all the clothing I’ve worn lately all the towels I’ve used, all the…whatever. These all needed be washed in HOT hot water and then dried on the dryer’s hottest cycle.

Six loads of laundry got stacked in the garage next to the washer.

The ACCURSED GODDAMN SAMSUNG WASHER!

That thing takes about an hour for every load. So we’re looking at SIX HOURS OF LAUNDRY out there!!!!!!!!!

One of the damn thing’s many charms is that you can’t select “hot” water on most of the cycles. There’s actually only one cycle that lets you select very hot water: the one that’s intended to “sanitize” the inside of the thing, since as we know these so-called “high-efficiency” washers tend to grow mold and stink to high heaven.

“High efficiency.” SNORT!!!!!! How exactly is having to run the electric for SIX HOURS to do a three-hour (or less) job “efficient”?

Then it was time to drag out the vacuum. Vacuum every nook and every cranny in the bedroom. Vacuum every square inch of the mattress and bed springs. This is complicated by  the fact that it’s one of those “pillow top” monsters that were in style at the time I bought the thing. “Pillow tops” are held in place by stitched-down patterns, which collect…yes…dirt and debris. Had to get an orange stick and a stiff brush to dig that stuff out of the stupid stitch thingies and THEN vacuum all that up. Endless.

Then climb under the bed (which weighs too much for me to budge) and vacuum every square inch under there. And vacuum every square inch under the dressers. And in the closet. And up the hall. And in the other rooms. Ugh.

Thank god for tile floors.

It’s almost 10 a.m. Good thing the dogs rousted me out at 5, otherwise I’d still be doing all that. Well, I am still doing all that: the accursed goddamn Samsung washer is grinding away out there.

It’s 10:03 a.m. and I have done no work. I mean, real work on the writing empire. Well. I uploaded an image to the Camptown Races blog, which will be called “Camptown Ladies Talk.” The images I wanted to use turned out to be a) too large and b) too difficult to fit into the header image space without some serious Photoshopping. But I found some images in the public domain that simply defy belief.

If you’d like a preview, you can peek at her here. But IF YOU ARE WITH THE CHURCH, DO NOT GO THERE, DEAR FELLOW CHOIR MEMBERS, CLERGY, AND HANGERS-ON because that will pop your eye out. That site is strictly adults only. Racy adults.

Yesterday I finished what I hoped would be the last chapter of the current Bobbi and the Biker bookoid, but as it fell together, I found Bobbi and Billy demanded at least one more chapter. This is alarming, because we’re already over 7,000 words. Whatever wraps this episode up is gonna have to be succinct.

This weekend I also posted book III of Fire-Rider. The marauding war bands get back on the road, after having flattened a major enemy stronghold, and the journey begins…

And now, speaking of metaphorical journeys, I must away!

Time Suck: You CAN’T avoid it!

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Nor can you control it.

Yesterday I received a notice that obliquely clued me to a REAL serious problem: somehow ISBNs that I had assigned to certain titles were wrong, either on Bowker’s end or on mine.

A fruitless discussion with a CSR led to more confusion. He arranged for someone else to get in touch by e-mail.

Before pursuing this fun mess, though, I decided I’d better get it  untangled.

It took the ENTIRE FUCKING MORNING to figure out that

a) Bowker was showing two ISBNs assigned to the e-book version of 30 Pounds;
b) one of those numbers apparently was spurious, bogus, and altogether nonexistent, even though it exists in Bowker’s records; and
c) the ISBN that I’d thought was assigned to Fire-Rider I was NOT assigned to it at all.

 We’re talking about sifting through 110 ISBNs here, and comparing Bowker’s spreadsheet with my spreadsheet, line by line.

By the time I figured out what on earth was going on, or at least what I think is going on, and then dealt with a couple of other hassles, it was after noon.

Oh well.

Finally did get back to writing: I got about three-quarters of the way through one of the two Travelers episodes that I need to write to help complete that series. My freelance co-author has been going to town with the thing whilst I’ve been tangled up in Time Sucks. Today I should be able to finish the story I’m working on and, with any luck, start the next one.

Tomorrow is devoted to time suck. Nothing substantive will get done, at least nothing that I want to get done…

And so, to work.

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.

The Writer’s Dinner

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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!”

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. 🙄