So, a new designer came up with a really nice cover design for the adjunct rant, to be called Slave Labor: The New Story of American Higher Education. Hot dang! It looks very handsome. The e-book conversion dude is very pleased. So am I.
Slave Labor is ready to go except for the cover design; plus I need to proofread it on Kindle. It will go live first as an e-book and then as a PoD softcover.
Meanwhile, the diet guide/recipe book is also ready to go…except for the cover design. Title to be How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months…Without Hardly Trying. It also will appear first in e-book format and then become available as a bound book.
The novel, Fire-Rider, is also ready to go. Another designer, the former art director of Arizona Highways and a talented illustrator, is in the finishing stages of creating the cover artwork. That book needs a map (of a fictional place) and a timeline (of a fictional era…or two or three), so it’ll be awhile before it arrives on the market.
And I continue to try to struggle through the next book in the Fire-Rider series…around more work, more hassle, and more ditz than the human mind can conceive.
Client with the book that we hope will go to the University of California Press was back today with a fairly thoroughgoing revision. It’s looking good. But it occupied a chunk of time for which a lot of other demands were competing.
The puppy continues her stealth peeing. She pees by mental telepathy: she’s on one side of a room and magically a puddle appears all the way on the other side. So on the advice of people at the corgi forum where I hang out, I consulted with a trainer. Got a “free demonstration”…another term for “sales pitch.” This outfit, which uses a remote vibration collar, charges upwards of $600 to persuade your hound to be a gooood doggy. Way upwards. They charge $225 for the collar alone, which you can buy for less than a third of that on Amazon or through a pet store. Free instructions for use are scattered from one end of the Web to the other.
Interesting. But it consumed an hour of time that should’ve been used otherwise. Another half-hour or 45 minutes was wasted at the Corporation Commission website where, as per usual, the form to file this year’s annual report didn’t work. Onward to trying to get through the day’s challenges:
√ Wash laundry
√ Dust
√ Clean bathrooms
√Walk 2 miles
√ Download stock photos for cookbook; send to designer
√ Wash comforter, store for summer
√ Connect Kindle to wireless; figure out how to work it
Send secret codes to e-book guru
Find out about westside writer’s group membership
Write the rest of current Fire-Rider scene
Start a chart of ongoing events in that series
√ Call grill guy, make appointment
√ Take pool cleaner to Leslie’s, get fixed
Clean and shock-treat pool
Figure out what’s wrong with watering system; fix it
Prepare Cassie’s veggies
√ Shovel out office
√ Fertilize and deep-water citrus
√ Get rid of old blue backwash hose
Clean floors; steam-clean floors
File S-corp’s annual report
√ Wrap gift for M’hijito & do birthday card
Check for more maga-writing student papers
A-a-a-a-a-a-a-n-d just as I reached this point, about two hours ago, Tina sent her part of the latest opus, in which she tried to figure out a complicated tangle: three single-spaced pages of 10-point type, 75 end-notes that sort of imitate Chicago’s notes-&-bibliography references. What a mess. She looked up every single reference and couldn’t find some of them. I looked up the ones she flagged and found a few, but others: ?????????
It is now midnight and, as you can see, I have not finished this post. As I have not finished many of the things that needed or wanted to be done today.
I give up. I’m going to bed. Tomorrow I have to get up and sing.
How do you do so much????
LOL! And the bigger question: why I feel like I get so little done????