Coffee heat rising

Selling the Older House

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Save your money. Let the buyers fix it up to their taste! Click on the image for a clear view of the popcorn ceilings.

My neighbor Sally, as I probably mentioned, sold her home at what she thought was a good price but for what in reality was slightly below market.

She lived in the house for 39 years, and she and Catherine were the second owners. So…that is an OLD tract house. The only updates have been things that had to be done: more on the order of repairs than updating or remodeling. It still has the old Mediterranean brown cabinets…

Mediterranean brown…that probably predates most of our readers…

Before you were born, Dear Readers, the then-young and then-stylish developed a predilection for cabinetry stained a particularly ugly shade of dark, dark, DARK sh!t-brown. It was almost black.

It was depressing.

It was hideous.

It was the height of fashion.

Yes. So were the harvest gold appliances Sally’s house still sports. “Harvest gold” was a kind of muted mustard yellow, relatively unobtrusive, all things considered. The competing high-style colors were avocado green, Hallowe’en orange, and brit-shindle brown, each comparatively more hideous than the mustard gas.

Sally contemplated the prospect of selling for a very long time. At least a year, probably longer. She knew the house was out of date. So she took it into her head to have a guy come in and lay tile all over the utility room and kitchen.

She was proud as she showed it off. Gazing upon this decorator upgrade, I thought… Holy mackerel! Who sold these to her and WHERE did they come from? They were classic 1990s 12 x 12 ultra-bland tiles: Return of the Creature from the Cocaine-White Lagoon!

As we scribble, the new owners’ workmen are in there chipping the stuff off the floors.

It was a ridiculous waste of Sally’s money to install that stuff. If she couldn’t do a complete remodel — new cabinetry and counters and sinks in the kitchen and bathrooms, new fixtures, new appliances, new flooring throughout — then she would have been better off to do almost nothing: paint, clean, fix anything that’s obviously broken, and leave it at that.

If your parents are aging and considering a downsize move from the Old Homestead — or you are — try to get them to keep a grip. The people who bought Sally’s house claimed they were a young couple about to have a baby who were going to move right in. No: they’re transparently fix-and-flippers. These people give the old folks a line of bull to make them feel good about accepting less than the house is worth.

But whether the Homestead is bought by a genuine young family or by eager fix-and-flippers, all that old 1970s decor is gonna go! The parents should not pay to remove it or update it as they’re on the verge of moving out.

For hevvinsake, don’t let them do an expensive update like retiling the floors or installing granite counters over those fine Mediterranean brown or pickled oak cabinets! They’re not going to get top dollar from an old house that’s had one or two low-end upgrades installed.

Just paint the walls a neutral color. Clean the carpets. Repair anything that’s broken. And get the heck out of Dodge!

Marketing: Maybe it’s working

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Well, my friends, today our naughty girls surpassed 300 followers on Twitter! And they’ve been live there for less than a month. Aunt Tilly is so pleased she’s giving the girls a gala shopping trip at Nordstrom’s.

People have retweeted ads for the Fire-Rider books. And we appear to have proven the theory that the highest and best marketing use of Twitter is NOT to advertise your books but to entertain. While Twitterers (??surely not “Twits”?) have turned up their collective nose at self-serving tweets, they merrily retweet and “favorite” pictures, bons mots, retweets of fun stuff, and links to fun stuff.

They really liked this, for example:

muse
As usual, click on the image for a bigger & better view!

Betcha can’t guess what that’s from…

The “quote” is part of a comment I wrote on a student paper. And I’m sure you’ll remember the public-domain image of the Muse on an ancient Greek vase, since it was ripped off from Wikipedia and posted here a few days ago.

They loved it. And it went over pretty well on Facebook, too.

Moving on, I’ve established a Facebook group for my band of doughty writers. Trouble is, at least a couple of them don’t do Facebook. So we’ll probably still have to communicate by cc’ed email. But it’s kinda kewl to think we have a Group. It’s set up as a “secret” group — meaning only Big Brother can watch us — because a couple of our authors work in professions where letting it be known that they amuse themselves by writing randy fiction could be counterproductive.

In the next couple of days, I’ll set up a Facebook “page” for the girls themselves, thereinat to pitch our wares as they come online. We should be ready to start publishing the p0rn beginning in the first week of October.

We already have a very fun (read “randy”) Hallowe’en story, and the same author has got up to writing a second Hallowe’en piece. Another of our team has a series that can lead up to Thanksgiving (yes…about FAMILY, what else? Don’t you love those family Thanksgivings?). And a third has written a fairly hefty novelette fit for the Christmas season.

By the way, the Girls still don’t have their names, poor babes. One person has posted a suggestion, but one contestant does  not a contest make. Would you go on over to Writers Plain and Simple and add your ideas in the comments to this post? Or if you’d prefer to visit Aunt Tilly and the Girls themselves, the Camptown Ladies name-the-girls post is here. Aunt Tilly will not allow them to use their real names (Chastity and Patience) because she doesn’t think it’s appropriate for nice girls to flaunt themselves in public. As it were.

OMG! I just got my life back!

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My God. I feel like a door that slammed in my face just came open. When I walked out of the doctor’s office this morning, I was almost weeping with relief.

Here’s what: After the surgery to relieve the bowel obstruction that I enjoyed at the end of June (the sixth major surgery in 12 months), it took a little time to recover. After about two months, the Mayo called me back for a “follow-up.”

Instead of seeing a doc for this appointment, I met with the surgeon’s P.A. And by the time I walked away from that woman, I was utterly terrorized. She said…

• The adhesions will (not “may”) return.
• They could return within a few weeks or months, or it could be as long as ten years.
• When that happens I’ll have to go through the whole horrible thing again: another five days in the hospital in agony with tubes stuck down my throat; another abdominal surgery; another God knows how long to recover.
• There’s a limit to the number of times they can do this surgery. After two or three procedures, they can’t do them again.
• And at that point, you’re pretty much done for.
• I must eat an extremely low-fiber diet. That means…
….No fresh veggies, properly cooked or raw
….No fruit unless it’s stewed or canned
….No salad greens
• All meats must be stewed or boiled: no grilled meat, no broiled meat, no fried meat, no roast meat
• No whole-grain cereals
….No oatmeal
….No whole-grain breads
….No polenta
….No brown rice
….No barley…and on and on and on

Holy shit. Basically she was saying that my life as I knew it was ended, and that 70 years worth of vibrant health was effectively ruined.

Needless to say, I’ve been in quite the blue funk these past few weeks.

I actively dislike soggy, mushy food. Some of it, I’ll eat, but it’s not something I would seek out, or that I look forward to eating. So, since I spoke with this woman, I haven’t had much to eat. Certainly not much I enjoy.

But I’ve gained ten pounds!

Part of the reason for the weight gain is that in the absence of anything appetizing to eat, I’ve been scarfing down ice cream. I don’t much like ice cream, but as a practical matter it seemed like about the only thing worth eating that didn’t threaten to send me back to the O.R. Part of the reason has been that I’ve been too depressed to crawl out from behind the computer. And part of the reason is that things like pasta and boiled potatoes tend to pack the pounds on. I can gain two or three pounds just from eating a hearty helping of spaghetti.

I’ve only gained ten pounds because I’m hardly eating anything.

Saved a lot on groceries, though. 😉

Then the GERD symptoms came back. I’ve had a lump in my throat for weeks and weeks.

At first I thought it was probably trauma from all the tubes they stuck down my throat — they had me intubated for three or four days, and the surgery (during which they stuff God knows what down your throat) took three hours. Thought it would go away over time.

But it didn’t. Instead more GERD symptoms joined it: burping and queasy and heartburn that wakes you up at three in the morning.

So I thought…I need to see a gastroenterologist, NOT a surgeon. And thanks to Young Dr. Kildare, I happen to know one.

The last time I was enjoying GERD manifestations, he wanted me to go to a specialist. Well, I don’t think much of the specialists who reside at John C. Lincoln, so I tracked this lady down through Angie’s List and managed to wriggle in to see her.

At the time she told me I did not need to have anything stuck down my throat to diagnose what was obviously gastric reflux and that if I kept taking the omeprazole YDK had prescribed, in a few weeks it would settle down. If not, they had other strategies.

She was right. Within a couple of weeks, it went away.

That was in 2012. It didn’t bother me again until after the most recent Adventure in Medical Science: three years later.

So I asked her if the GERD-like symptoms could have been kicked up by the surgery.

Yep.

And was the throat lump thing from acid reflux or from the various gadgetry shoved down my gullet?

Probably both. Keep taking the omeprazole. It’ll get better in a few weeks.

Is it true that this is going to come back and I’ll have to have repeated surgeries but after a couple more there won’t be anything more they can do for me and then I’ll be pretty much a goner?

SNORT! She said that?

Yesh.

No! I have one patient who’s had eight surgeries for adhesions. And it’s not a foregone conclusion that the adhesions will cause another blockage that requires surgery. I have one patient who went FORTY YEARS without a recurrence. She’s 80  years old.

Is it true that henceforth I must eat baby food? I’ve gained ten pounds on this stuff! I have to lay down flat on my back to zip my jeans.

Gaining weight is what causes the GERD to kick up. Come to think of it, tight pants aggravate GERD, too. Go back to your healthy diet and lose the tight jeans until you can fit back into them.

Can I eat salad greens?

Yes. Have a Cobb salad for lunch today.

*** woooHOOOOOO! ***

So it was straight to Whole Foods from her office! Got a package of crunchy tempura sushi and a box of mâche for lunch. Have been afraid to eat sushi because of the seaweed wraps, and tempura and greens were verboten.

Also got a package of CARROTS (not allowed) and a bunch of RED CHARD (on sale on sale on sale!) and a cantaloupe and four juicy-looking peaches and some of those wonderful salty dried black olives (so bad for you!) and another head of garlic and some little green onions and a $4.99 bottle of wine. And some made-in-America chew toys for the dawgs.

Happy Dappy Day.

I figure at two pounds a week, it’ll take five weeks to lose the starch-and-ice-cream-induced avoirdupois.

Fortunately, the weather is cooling off enough that I can walk and bicycle during the day. So, in addition to getting back to the low-starch, low-sugar, low-salt fresh veggie and fruit diet, I figure I can walk an extra mile in the morning after the doggie-walk and then set the alarm to get off my duff in the afternoon and go for a three- or four-mile bike ride.

So with any luck at all, after about a month the fat will be gone and so will the GERD.

 

 

 

Calling on the Muse…and all that

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Muse_reading_Louvre_CA2220Wannabe a writer? Or an artiste? Or the 21st century’s answer to Bach? Well, all you have to do is summon the Muse, eh?

LOL! Personally, I’ve never been much of an acolyte of the Muses…inspiration lurks in the “Pay to the Order of…” line of a well-written check. But some of us revel in the emotional tug of a mystical impetus to inspiration.

The “Muse” answers to one call: hard work. Work at learning one’s art. Work at practicing it. Work at perfecting it.

Over at Writers Plain & Simple, a student’s tyro article inspired (heh!) a squib on the subject, you might enjoy.

Meanwhile, not an awful lot of Musing got done around here today. Book 14 of Fire-Rider went up (to the right). Tweets got twittered. Correspondence got sent to authors. A couple of authors got paid (one belatedly!). A meeting got met. The e-book builder got discussed with. The mess that is my computer filing system got a start on a cleanup. None of it what you’d call “inspired.”

Oh well.

All I wanna do is WRITE!

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Damned if I’m not digitized out. The digital stuff is freaking consuming my life! I start at 5:30 in the morning and work through until 8 or 9 p.m. And what do I accomplish?

Unclear.

Whatever it is, I ain’t gettin’ rich on it.

Actually, I think the truly huge digital hassle factor may be coming to an end. I now have all eighteen Fire-Rider stories ensconced on Amazon, where they can be published with a single click, according to schedule. Two of them just went online as we scribble:

Book 12: Our Harried Heroes Struggle through the Mountains

Book 13: Wahoo!! The Trade and Flesh Capital of Our Heroes’ Known World

In the UNHOLY Time-Suck Department, yesterday I finally acquired 18 high-resolution versions of what I thought were supposed to be the cover images but what were actually 72-dps images, fine for thumbnails but trash for covers. These I uploaded to Google Drive, since DropBox doesn’t provide enough storage space to hold them all plus all the other stuff loaded up there by me, my sidekicks, and our clients.

Trotted over to Amazon and re-uploaded the 300-dps images for all 13 books now online there: not as deadly tedious as one would think, but still a time-suck. An unnecessary time-suck, which made it mighty galling.

Then I went through ALL EIGHTEEN DAMN BOOKS, averaging around 11,000 words apiece (some are much longer), and revamped them to fit the tastes of Smashwords — at least, as far as you can tell from what passes for Smashwords’ brain-bangingly verbose user manual. This entailed getting rid of all links to Amazon (of which there are up to 20 in each document) and making a number of other changes. Time-consuming and tedious beyond your wildest dreams!

And I assigned ISBNs to all the remaining .mobi versions, and then to about a dozen ePub versions. If you think manually deleting dozens and dozens of links (Word 2008 for Mac will not do a batch link deletion!) is time-consuming and tedious, you ain’t seen nuthin‘ until you fart with an ISBN form.

And of course, Bowker’s software developed some kind of a glitch, in which it decided I was trying to sell to the U.K., not the U.S. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth — all in slow motion, of course — with Bowker’s tech people helped this problem only marginally. I would end up having to crash out of the form, sign out of the site, sign back in, and re-open the form. Of course, all the data I’d entered would be gone, so I’d have to re-enter all the form’s ditz and pray it would let me “Submit.”

However, all this stuff is now done. I also realized that I could adjust the size of the 72 DPI images to widget size in Preview rather than in WordPress. This relieves me from having to jump through that hoop three times for three websites. And Twitter. Building the widgets will still be a time-suck, but a slightly less lengthy & tedious time-suck. Assuming, of course, that this works. Which we’re about to find out…

right…

…NOW

 Yes. Yes, yes, YES!!!!!!!

It works!!!!!!! Check out those fine little widgets! → → → →

Now lookee here, dear readers: Your Beloved Funny NEEDS you to trot on over to Amazon, download one of these, and post a review!

If you would like to review one or more of the Fire-Rider stories, let me know (in the comments, below ↓ ) and I’ll send you a .mobi or a PDF (soon, I hope, we’ll have ePub files, too).

I also have a draft of the first boxed set, which I can send to you in .mobi or PDF. This will contain six of the serials, which are averaging around 11,000 words apiece. So a boxed set is about the length of a typical full-length genre novel.

Reviews are trending positive so far. So it’s possible that my elevated opinion of this book — that it’s surprisingly good and a fun read — is not a delusion.

And no, these are not the proposed p0rn, which won’t start going online until the first week of October. There’s virtually no sex in the saga, which is a Joseph Campbellesque journey tale. (Think Star Wars, only without the spaceships.)

At any rate, I’m hoping that once all of these are online at Amazon and through Smashwords, things will settle down so I can get back to my own writing projects. Ideally, I’d like to be able to write for three days in a row, followed by one day devoted to the digital stuff.

And so, to work…

↓ ↓ ↓ Get your review copy here!  ↓ ↓ ↓

Multi-Tasking on Steroids

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So, let’s see…as we scribble, Your Honored Blogger is engaged in

• A chat with an Adobe Acrobat representative
• A chat with a client
• Managing ISBNs through Bowker
• Riding herd on email
• Managing back-end ditz on Funny
• Updating and riding herd on file full of password & secret code arcana
• Writing this post

If I’m not mistaken, that’s SEVEN THINGS AT ONCE.

And really, I should be doing an eighth thing: signing into gmail on the iMac so I can upload 18 300-dps images to Google Drive for the ebooks dude.

I feel like the character in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the one who tried to record her life in four different notebooks and bring them all together in one golden notebook.

Lessing said the novel was really about fragmentation — both of the mental breakdown variety and the societal variety. And I must say…life feels a great deal like that.

Here’s what’s going on in some of the other “notebooks” today:

• At Writers Plain & Simple: Trying to get a grip on Twitter as a marketing tool.
• At Camptown Ladies Talk: Do You Love Me? Or Only My Picture: a rumination on a flap going on at LinkedIn.
• At Twitter: How do you  like this little discovery?

Red Gladioli on DarkThis is how the Tweeting Set manages to post more than 140 characters: create an image (background picture optional) and paste your message on that!

So easy: PowerPoint will let you do that in a matter of minutes.

What that allows you to pull off, then, is to post an excerpt from your magnum opus to Twitter!!!

Hot damn.

Now, frankly… So far I haven’t seen any steamy excerpts that move me to hurry right over to Amazon and download whatEVER. But miracles could happen. I guess.

Heh heh… The Camptown Ladies are starting to take on personalities of their own, sort of like fictional characters seem to do. (It’s an illusion, of course: a hallucination. But it entertains wannabe writers no end to imagine that their characters “come to life” on the page.) The Girls are reasonably well behaved (for the nonce). But we shouldn’t put anything past Aunt Tilly….

Well, we have another task to multi: Dogs are campaigning for dinner.

There being a limit to how many things one person can do at once, it’s time to sign off here. And so, away!