Coffee heat rising

One of Those Days….

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Do you ever have days where EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH goes ker-sproinnnggggggggg! And explodes in your hands? All over you?????

Okay, about 90 percent of this is because of my own carelessness. No question, I make a lot of extra work for myself by overlooking a LOT of stupid little mistakes. But DAY-um! There’s just too much of this stuff…and some of it — at least today’s some of it — is not of my concocting.

So I start at 5:30 a.m., as usual, figuring to toss off a short job and then feed the dogs and myself before getting on with the REAL work of the day, which is to plow through at least 50 pages of Most Honored Client’s current iteration of his magnum opus.

First, though, the latest Camptown Races masterpiece is on the schedule: post to Amazon. This is a nuisancey little job that can take half an hour or more, and because it’s a pesty thing to do, I’d like to get it off my plate first, before moving on with my day.

TWO HOURS LATER…finally I clicked “Publish” on the damn thing.

Problem the first: When I upload the cover art, I see that the font color selected for the title and author name is too dim to pop out against the mostly black and dark aqua background.

This is really a very cool, extremely strange and dark Halloween story, and I WANT THOSE COVERLINES TO BE EFFING ORANGE DAMN IT!

None of the oranges in my program’s standard color palette are bright enough, weirdly, to stand out against the dark background. So now I decide to create a shade of orange or red-orange or something that will work.

Three tries later, it’s clear that nothing in the red to orange range is gonna cut the proverbial mustard.

Understand, ONE try can take 8 or ten minutes. Or more, depending on how bad Cox’s “high-speed” (har har!) connection happens to be at any given moment. It takes for-freaking-EVER for a TIFF file to load to Amazon. Not as EVER as an entire MS, but EVER ENOUGH.

Finally I decide to change the font color to yellow. But the standard yellow in my palette is not gonna make it. Too grating. So once again, I have to fiddle around and fiddle around and FIDDLE around to develop a shade of yellow that doesn’t make my teeth grind.

(And I’ve broken another crown, BTW, with the tooth-grinding. Good morning to you, too.)

This looks much better. Create TIFF. Upload. Watch Amazon grind away and grind away. View result. Realize the blue “glow” effect is absolutely positively not gonna make it.

Back into the guts of the program. Adjust glow to the newly invented bright orange; transparency (against a black background!) 50 percent. Change color of font line to black. Re-upload. APPROVE!  Create new full-size JPEG, create new low-res JPEG, create new thumbnail.

How do you like it, by the way? Is this creepy or is this not creepy? That horse standing in the water is a kelpie, a type of Celtic demon. Be scared. Be VERY scared!

Click on the image for a view of the REAL THING.
Click on the image for a view of the REAL THING.

Upload edited, templated manuscript. Download the .mobi file into Amazon’s Kindle reader.

This process being one that takes forever, I finally get up and feed the dogs, who have gone back to bed.

Problem the next: Amazon detects a half-dozen “spelling errors.” These all appear to be Scottish dialect spellings in the Robert Burns verse I put in the front matter. Just as I click “ignore all,” I spot ONE real typo: Scottish is set lower-case somewhere in the MS.

Yes. Well. But that particular line is the book’s subtitle, which is set all caps, so no one would know whether you typed “Scottish” or “scottish.” However, knowing Amazon, I figure I’d better fix it. They can penalize you if they think you’ve got misspelled words in your MS: apparently part of the upload process is having one of their abused, terrorized wage slaves check the copy before it goes live.

Fix one character, reload. Go brush my teeth while this takes place.

Download the new .mobi file into Amazon’s Kindle reader. Go wash my face while this grinds and grinds and grinds away.

Back to proofing the .mobi file: In said front matter, half of the little definition of what a keltie is appears in italic! WTF? The name of the source, a website, is set italic, but the blurb itself is set roman. I can NOT figure out why a half-dozen words in the blurb appear as italic.

I screw around and SCREW around with this, racking up another couple of interminable uploads and downloads.

Finally I give up, scroll down the page, retype the copy, and retype the source, leaving it roman. Delete the corrupt passage. Pull up space pull up space pull up space.

Upload and download again. Pour another cup of coffee, open the back door and sic the dog on the new accursed cat that’s come over the wall, anti-cat barrier be damned. Takes almost as long to roust the puppy out of the sack as it does to re-download the .mobi file.

Return to proofing copy. The new passage I’ve typed spells “also” as “alos.” Alas.

Fix, upload, download.

And so on to infinity. Of course I find a few other errors. By the time this process is finished, it’s 7:30 in the morning! I haven’t had anything to eat. I haven’t walked the dogs. I haven’t come anywhere NEAR starting the project I’m supposed to be spending the entire day on.

A boxed set of the first six Fire-Rider stories is slated to go live on Wednesday. I haven’t updated the table of contents on a PC.

Yeah. Clever Amazon’s clever Word-to-MOBI converter cannot read the links in a TofC created on or even touched by a Mac computer. Don’t ask.

I send the MS to Tina. In the requisite 20 seconds, she returns it with the TofC updated on one of her terminals.

Now I need to enter new lines to break this thing up into the books it anthologizes. This, I hope and pray, will not fuck up in conversion (you may be sure the “hope” part is pretty forlorn). Ten minutes later I get down to the end of the thing and realize ONE CHAPTER in the last section lacks its numeral. Entering it in the TofC doesn’t work. AND the title of that book, which is supposedly formatted in a style undetectable to the ToC function, appears in the goddamn TofC as a chapter.

So I have to reformat the book title and fix the chapter title. And send it BACK to Tina to format on her PC. But not before deleting all the work I’ve interpolated into the TofC field, so as not to bollix it up on her end.

After all this screwing around, I see I haven’t assigned an ISBN to the damn thing. This requires ANOTHER ten or fifteen minutes of dorking-around time.

Right this very minute, I drop scribbling the present post (which I started as a device to vent and maybe allay some of the frustration factor) and head over to Bowker to get an ISBN.

Do you suppose I’ve written a stupid “description” for Bowker? Hell no. So now I have to write that, which you may be sure I don’t feel like doing to such an intense degree that I come up blank. I decide to wing it.

I upload the wrong cover image for the boxed set. Where’s the one Gary did? I search all over Digital Creation for the designer’s excellent rendition. Finally find it. Re-upload the cover image. Upload the PDF; watch the computer grind away and grind away. Jump through the remaining hoop after hoop after hoop after hoop. This consumes a good 15 minutes, maybe twenty.

BTW, you must get the first boxed set. It’s an incredible bargain: SIX FIRE-RIDER BOOKS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!

fire book 2aiReviews of the serial installments are trending quite well. It is NOT p0rn0graphic and is, as a matter of fact and in my not-very-humble opinion, a truly terrific book. It will go live on Wednesday,  probably around 6 p.m. Pacific time.

Just as Bowker finishes killing fifteen minutes of my time, the pool pump kicks on.

Yesterday, while my friend Carol and I were at a concert, a huge monsoonish storm came up. I don’t know how much water was dumped, but…whatEVER. Because I was across town, I wasn’t here to shut the pump off by way of preventing it from sucking up bushels of flying debris. When I got home along about 5 p.m., it was making a weird noise. The pump pot was gorged. I ran outside and shut the system down, figuring first thing in the morning I’d clean out the pump pot basket.

Yeah, well… First thing this morning, I was working. And the second thing. And the third thing. And the fourth…and so on to infuckingfinity!

I swear aloud, LEAP up, and FLY to the pool equipment. Shut down the gasping system and discombulate it. So much crap has been sucked up it has burst the plastic basket. That’ll be another 15 bucks I can’t afford.

Satan, the former owner of the Funny Farm, was an inveterate Happy Handyman. As you may know, the work of handyman hobbyists is usually suspect.

One of Satan’s projects was installation of a 12 x 5 metal storage shed on the east side of the house. Instead of pouring a concrete foundation, he laid down paving blocks, upon which he set his structure. The floor of this fine building is — wait for it! — oh yes! PLYWOOD!

Yeah.

The Sonoran Desert crawls with termites.

A family of these little munchers has found the shed and is eating its way across the floor. They’ve also invaded the shelves on the brick-and-board storage I built outside the shed — so those have to be taken apart and the boards tossed, somewhere far away from the house.

Saturday, I called my pet exterminator.

His wife called this morning to explain what they propose to do. No, they can’t use their (stinky!) organic (maybe not quite SO poisonous to humans and dogs?) product on termites. They have to use a standard termite product. For the same price, she said, they’d trench and apply prophylactic treatment to the entire house. They do not understand what this will entail, and I fail to enlighten her.

Price to treat the Funny Farm with a toxic product that is almost guaranteed to make me and the dogs sick? EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLAH!

I can’t very well not do it. Once they get into your house, if a home inspector spots damage you can NOT sell your house without expensively treating it, and by “expensive” we do not mean a mere $800.

This reduces me to tears. I have no idea how I am going to come up with $800, now that I’ve quit my teaching job so as to free up time to work on the publishing endeavor.

Another client sends work that she thinks I’m going to do forthwith. Alas, it will have to wait until I finish reading Magnificently Paying Client’s project, which has to be done by Friday. I don’t even open her email: it’s now another message marked “unread” and flagged with a little red flag.

I need to pay my writers. Simultaneously, I should create another spreadsheet for WonderAccountant to display checks and deposits for the S-corp, as we are having to do with my personal account thanks to the kind ministrations of Intuit.

So I get into my checkbook register, another target of my haste and carelessness. Transcribe entries for checks and deposits going back to last April. Now I realize a $300 check I wrote to one of the authors has never cleared. I’m not sure how much I still owe her, since things were a little muzzy before this.

I get in touch with her and inquire about the missing check. She’s never received it, and by the way, the Copyeditor’s Desk owes her $700.

That’s exactly what I figured, but not for the reasons I thought. Oh well.

Now it dawns on me that the missing $300 check was written and mailed on the same day as a check I wrote to another writer, who also reported that it never arrived on his end.

This means the post office has lost two checks.

I drove these checks up to the post office specifically so I could drop them into THEIR box, so they would not be stolen out of my mailbox. Thank you SO much, dear USPS.

Neither check has cleared. So I decide not to shoulder the hefty stop-payment fee to head off any fraud. In fact, if someone succeeds in fraudulently cashing the checks, the credit union will eat it anyway, since they should’ve noticed that Clorox or some such was applied to the “pay to the order of” line. I write a new check to Writer 1 and send out two other checks to a couple of other contributors. These I place in the unsecured mailbox out front, since there clearly is NO EFFING POINT IN MAKING MY WAY THROUGH A MIASMA OF ROAD CONSTRUCTION TO TAKE THESE THINGS DIRECT TO THE POST OFFICE.

It’s now 12:36. I’ve had one banana and a handful of pecans to eat today. Plus three cups of cowboy-strength coffee (it’s ready when a spoon will stand up in pot).

Every single thing I’ve touched or so much as looked at today has devolved into some kind of fuck-up. I am hungry (whaddaya bet the grill is out of propane?) and I want a bourbon and water and that is exactly what I am going to have.

And so…to lunch.

Quickbooks: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

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Intuit, like all tech corporations constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone, has done a huge revamp of its Quickbooks Online site. And WHAT a mess they’ve made of it!

They’ve made it virtually impossible to enter transactions directly in the “register” — which is easiest for me. Once they get you into the “journal” view, you can’t get out of it. They’ve eliminated the “cash purchase” choice for describing a transaction and expect you to expense all direct electronic payments.

When asked about this, the techs reveal that they don’t know that “expense” (as in “to expense”) has a specific meaning in accountantese, and that you might want to distinguish between an electronic payment and something you expensed.

They knocked WonderAccountant off her connection to my QB accounts. Nothing we did would reconnect her. We ended up having to sit in her office and listen to Intuit’s phone put-off blather while we waited interminably for someone to pick up the line. The fix, as the tech pointed out, was simple: but it wasn’t even faintly self-evident. Or evident at all!

Quickbooks Online is now so difficult and so hair-tearing, I can’t use it. I finally threw up my hands and told WonderAccountant that I was gonna go back to Excel.

Well, o’course she’s seen what I can to to an Excel spreadsheet… “Oh, no!” quoth she. “PLEASE don’t do that. Just bring all your statements over here and I’ll enter the data!!!”

Yeah. That’s what happens when you set an English major loose on Excel.

So now I not only have to pay for Quickbooks, I have to pay an accountant to use it! Thank you very much, Intuit!

Okay, so QB automatically uploads most transactions from your bank, and that’s nice. BUT…often those transactions are inscrutable. What category do they go into? What does this or that transaction actually represent? And checks? Despite the wonders of the technological age, I still do pay the yard guy and the accountant and my subcontractors with checks. The credit union records that a check happened, but it can’t transmit the recipient’s name or the check memo, and so she has no idea who it was written to or what it was written for.

When I record a check in the paper check register, it’s usually on the fly. Often I can’t read my handwriting or I forget to write down the date. So just forking over the check register along with the bank statement is likely to be worse than unhelpful.

Same is true for deposits: The credit union’s statements reflect deposits, of course, but they don’t show who the deposit came from or what for.

So yesterday I ended up consuming a fair amount of my scarce time creating a spreadsheet to record checks and deposits. This, we now have on DropBox.

One of the Intuit guys said that a correctly crafted Excel spreadsheet can be uploaded direct into QB. With any luck, she won’t need to fool with that. I think all that will be needed will be just for her to be able to find the check and see who received it and what for.

What an incredible waste of my time! And what a waste of her (paid!!!) time!

She’s tearing her hair in frustration and confusion, too, and she’s a great deal more proficient with QB than I am. She actually takes courses in Quickbooks as part of her ongoing training activities.

This is very much like the original reason I abandoned Quicken for the PC & Mac. Every couple of years, they’d force you to junk the program you had, which was working adequately, and pay for an “update” that was usually difficult to learn. Each new iteration brought a new pain in the tuchus. If you delayed buying an unnecessary “update,” after a year or so your data no longer could be read and you’d lose years of work.

Finally I thought screw you, Intuit! and went to an Excel spreadsheet. Excel lacks some of QB’s whiz-bang bells and whistles, but it suffices to record your transactions. I’m quite sure that if you knew how to do a pivot report in Excel, you could extract whatever you need to do a tax return in short order. The “sort” function alone suffices, if you’ve faithfully entered each transaction’s “category.”

Matter of fact, there’s a guy who’s published an Excel spreadsheet that you can use to file your 1040! It doesn’t appear to generate a useful report, though, based on a year’s worth of data. I expect it can be done, though, if you know what you’re doing.

Really. I thought Quickbooks Online was the answer to the headaches with the terminal-resident Quicken for Mac. Wrong!

Yeah, I was right…

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…I hate Twitter. Yes, I do. I hate Twitter.

Now, admittedly I thought I would hate Twitter when the thing first developed. The very concept was anathema, then as now. But okay. I know. One must go with the flow. Especially if one wishes to sell stuff, apparently. Or if one wishes to waste vast swaths of one’s time. I guess.

Lookit this:

stupidstuffontwitter2

Stupidstuffontwitter1

Pretty typical stuff, it is. Either ad after ad after mind-numbing ad for low-rent self-published fiction (and YES that IS exactly what we’re publishing over at Camptown Races Press) or toilet-paper rolls of drivel and irrelevancy.

WHO READS THIS SHIT AND WHY???????

Can it possibly be effective, even faintly effective, to cultivate a presence in any such swamp? How? How on earth can anyone manage to get any worthwhile attention amid all this meaningless, mind-numbing, brain-thwacking static?

Okay. I’m tired. It’s raining. It’s so humid that just sitting here on a chair in front of a computer causes dew to form all over your body. The dogs are comatose. I am comatose.

But I believe the reason I’m comatose has more to do with Twitter than 90% humidity on a 90-degree day.

Ugh. Wasting my time gives me hives.

 

The Flatware Safari

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cluny

So yesterday I remarked that I might buy a set of better-quality stainless-steel flatware, since my energy-efficient Bosch dishwasher tarnishes my beloved silverware when run on the endless “sanitize” cycle, the only cycle that will get the dishes clean.

This morning I had to schlep to Scottsdale for a meeting, so while out there I dropped by a Crate & Barrel to look at one of their 18/10 stainless sets.

Good lord.

Feather light. Mediocrity. Junk. All terms that come to mind when you inspect and handle the wares.

Who would pay $280 for a set of this stuff?

Really, I guess young people no longer have a choice, since apparently most flatware is now cheaply made (and junkily made!) in China. People commenting online about choices in stainless rave on about stuff they bought thirty years ago, but those who have tried to replace their pattern’s pieces recently report on poor quality and corrupted design.

Driving home, I thought, Why do I want to waste my time searching for decent (therefore probably nonexistent) stainless or waste my money on something that can’t even begin to compare with what I want, when I have a perfectly good set of real silver that I love? SO WHAT if it has to be washed by hand? When did washing a few pieces of silverware kill me?????

So there you are, dear Corporate America. If you can’t provide an adequate product, some of us won’t buy anything at all.

Really, if I seriously wanted a decent set of stainless, I’d be looking in pawn shops and thrift stores for something manufactured in the 1970s. It would take some time to find it, but dollars to donuts it’d be worth the time.

Of Books, Business, and Dishwashers

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So here at the Funny Farm, the proprietor continues to put in 12- to 14-hour days. Got a meeting in another two hours, which means no time to write this post AND get any significant other work done. WTF…I’m writing. Dammit, I get a chance to have a cup of coffee and rest for a few minutes.

Yesterday FaM subscribers received an email warning…uhm, advising you all that I soon will be emanating a kind of business newsletter from the Camptown Ladies site, holding forth more about the adventure of starting a new publishing enterprise than about the Racy Books themselves.

A rose, a candle, and an extraordinary man... Or is he a man?
A rose, a candle, and an extraordinary man… Or is he a man?

Speaking of the which, I see I’ve failed to mention our latest shenanigan, The Ouija Lover. Actually, this randy little number is one of my favorite books. The characters come to life quickly and are pretty entertaining — they get more so in the second book of the series, The Taming of Bonnie. The conceit — the “concept” in Hollywoodese — is really bizarre. So that went online yesterday, available for your browsing pleasure at this very moment.

The Ouija Lover is one of several spooky-themed stories that we’re publishing in honor of Halloween and La Dia de los Muertos. Only one of them, Kelpie (scheduled for publication next week), is really very dark.

Interestingly, most of the Camptown Races stories are fairly light and upbeat. That, apparently, is the overall mood of my writers. The occasional heavy or dark piece is an intriguing exception. I think that’s because these stories are very fun to write and (we hope) fun to read. We’re all getting a hoot out of creating racy stories!

Meanwhile, life goes on. In altogether different realms … I wish to sic one of our fictional spooks on the dunderheads who came up with “high-efficiency” home appliances. There’s another bizarre conceit: the idea that a piece of equipment that takes twice as long to do the job and does it badly (so the job often has to be done over again) magically saves electricity and water. Where do people dream these ideas up?

The present target of my ire is (again) the expensive Bosch dishwasher that I installed to replace the deceased (allegedly less marvelously “efficient”) model. This is the one that won’t get your dishes clean unless you run it on the “Sanitize” cycle, thereby engaging an internal heater that boosts the water’s heat enough to wash off the dirt without benefit of functional detergent. The cycle that takes two hours and forty-one minutes of electric power to wash a load of dishes that would take you about 15 minutes and no electric power (assuming you have a gas water heater) to wash by hand.

Now, I happen to own a set of Christofle silverware that the ex- and I bought back when we were flush and dumb. After we split, I took the silver with me. And I thought at the time, I am gonna use this silver and not save it for a special occasion, BECAUSE special occasions never come and I love this stuff.

So for the past 18 or 20 years, I’ve used the Christofle every day, with every meal. Early on, I found a set of stainless that knocks off Christofle’s design (no longer available: patent infringement?), which I use for cooking. And early on, I learned that if you keep the stainless separate from the silver, you can run the silverware through the dishwasher with no harm.

Well. So it went until I acquired the current “efficient” Bosch. After I figured out that the only way to get the contraption to work was to run it on the sani-cycle every time, I found that suddenly the silver was tarnishing and needed to be repolished every time I turned around. (Normally I’d polish the silver maybe once every six months or a year — if you’re using it all the time, it doesn’t tarnish unless you leave it sitting in lemon juice or some such.)

WTF? Why was I suddenly having to polish the silver every two weeks?

Finally I figured out that it must have something to do with the heat in the washer’s sanitize cycle. If you want the dishes clean, you can’t put the silverware in there.

And that means that if I want to use my silver, I have to wash every piece by hand after every meal!!!!

Thank you, dear environmentally correct hucksters, for taking us back to the 1950s in one more aspect of our lives.

Now, in general I’m none too fond of housework. But of all the housework chores, I hate washing dishes by hand with the deepest passion. It’s one thing to have to wash the laundry by hand once every week or two. But another thing altogether to have to wash eating utensils by hand two or three times a day.

It’s such a nuisance, in fact, that I’m thinking about packing up the silver, hiding it from the burglars somewhere or giving it to my son, and just going over to Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel and buying a set of decent stainless.

The Christofle knock-off stainless is cheap and light-weight. The real stuff, the silver, has a nice heft to it, which adds to the pleasure of a nice meal. A better set of stainless would have that quality, and it also would go in the dishwasher. Voilà: one annoyance gone. Sort of.

Crate & Barrel has some very attractive 18/10 designs. They’re not cheap, but they’re not horribly expensive. I just resent having to put away something I’ve made part of my daily life and that I enjoy using. Nor do I want to spend money on something like this because of some stupid “improvement” that’s utterly unnecessary, ineffective, and unfair.

Pisseth me off.

Digital Aversion

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They say you should start your work day with the chore you like least. Then you have the worst done and the rest of the day is, as it were, smooth sailing. Thus if you’re in sales, you should start with cold calls. If you’re a lawn man, maybe you should pull out weeds by their roots first thing in the morning.

By that theory, I should be over at Amazon right now, X-ing out my existence as the author of six books and creating a new existence as Roberta Stuart, pornographer par excellence. This is how I should start my day: get the most obnoxious, difficult, hair-tearing, time-sucking job out of the way first.

But as you can see…I’m not there. I’m here. Doing this.

It just makes me cringe.

What an ineffable waste of time. Amazon has decreed that you can’t have more than three pseudonyms, and it has further decreed that any variant of your name is NOT your name but is a “pseuodnym.” (I have three, because my dear parents gifted me with an unpronounceable, weird, and insufferably snooty first name.) So in order to build an “Author Page” to peddle my little company’s Racy Books, I have to sign out as myself and sign in with a new email and create a new persona. Then I have to persuade Amazon that the new persona is me. Then I have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop, presumably, to get revenues for Camptown Races books directed to the corporate bank account. It is going to be a freaking nightmare and I don’t wanna do it!

I don’t want to do it, because it soaks up time. Needlessly. And time is my only asset with any value!

The only element of my life that’s worth anything is my time. And as the seconds and the minutes pass, I have less and less of it. Every time the sun rises, every time the sun sets, I have less time in my spiritual bank account.

The older you get, the more conscious you grow of that particular little reality.

Hence: digital aversion. NOTHING consumes time more voraciously than these wondrous computer devices, programs, and platforms we all have to deal with, day in and day-a-wasting out.

Every day I have to learn some new program, jump through some new digital hoop, contend with some new hassle. Every hour is at least partly consumed  by watching a computer grind away and grind away and grind away. Some part of every day is absorbed by getting around yet another error message, yet another digital roadblock.

As we speak, I’m hassling with WordPress because it’s decided to hang over the upload of a freaking THUMBNAIL, goddamnit, needed to update the Camptown Races Press site. It’s not like this was a gigantic TIFF here. No. This is a tiny little JPEG. Now I’ve had to crash out of the program, my coffee has gone cold while I’ve wrestled with that sh!t, the page is not updated and for all I know may never BE updated and for the life of me I can NOT figure out how to make   control the amount of air between those damn thumbnail images.

I personally have come to hate it.

Yeah, digital technology has done wondrous things for our ability to communicate and to cope with vast quantities of (largely irrelevant) information. But folks…

Life was better without it.

Speaking of Roberta, that wily and prolific author has emitted another new book:

Veronica & KJ 2Girlfriends LORES

And she would be forever in your debt if you would grab it from Amazon and post a fine review of the thing.