Ever spend the whole darned day working busily, come to the end of the day thinking, “Gosh, I got a LOT done,” and then on reflection realize you really didn’t do very much?
That was yesterday. A bunch of time-sucks occupied most of my waking hours…
• Breakfast and light shopping with Associate Editor Tina and her sister. Okay. Not a time suck. That was fun.
• Correspond briefly with new client: her project is delayed.
• Review Big Kahuna Client’s magnum opus. Realize there’s not much more I can do until he gets back to town.
• Decide to use the time thereby freed up by creating a couple of Word templates for future client work: one for APA style and one for Chicago Style. Very time-consuming, but will save time on future projects.
• Acquire Nanyang University’s style sheet (one of them) for Ph.D. dissertations; consider creating another style sheet based on APA but tailored for the university. Decide against it: different departments there have different requirements.
• Consider how I might make a few pennies on these handy-dandy style sheets; fail to figure out how that would work.
• Consider the possibility of using them as give-aways in conjunction from some marketing effort or other, as yet inchoate.
• Write this month’s publishing co. newsletter, only two weeks late
• Publish the same through MailChimp, a PITA
• Publish the same on LinkedIn, easier but still requires tracking down a public-domain image. PITA.
I’ve decided to massage said newsletter so as to downplay the racy books a little and up-play (hee! is there such a word?) the book that’s selling: to wit, the cookbook. Hence, the shift away from news about the enterprise and toward useful information: this month’s newsletter describes three common triggers that can cause Word to crash, and what to do about them.
Also used the LinkedIn post recycling the newsletter copy to add a plug for the editorial bidness. A fair amount of new editorial work has come in. Since we’re not getting rich a-sailing the Amazon, I’m thinking that if we put the amount of effort and money into marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk as I’ve dumped into the publishing scheme, within a few months we would have enough editorial income to matter. And you know…editing Chinglish dissertations is really nowhere near as mind-numbing as wrestling with Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook, and other refractory institutions, hour after fruitless hour. Nor is it quite as boring as jumping through hoops to register ISBNs and jumping through more hoops to publish bookoids at Amazon and waypoints.
Meanwhile, though, I’ve hired Jackie Beck to help drive Pinterest traffic toward the Plain & Simple website and found she’s imbued with the common sense I so sorely lack. She has suggested that instead of mounting posts and images on three different websites — Camptown Races, Fire-Rider, and Writers Plain & Simple — it would be smarter to post all the marketing blats at a single site. She proposed that we use the Plain & Simple Press blog for that purpose, since P&S is the imprint for the two books I’m hot to market just now: 30 Pounds/4 Months and Fire-Rider. This will relieve me from an awful lot of jumping around and website hassling. Plus it just makes good sense.
One plan is to post a “riff” on Fire-Rider once a month: all new, never before published vignettes, scenes, and brief stories from the strange and fierce world of Okan.
I think of Fire-Rider not so much as science fiction as a kind of “reverse anthropology.” The story of a future culture, it rides on the science of anthropology to create its imagined world. The first riff (in that link above) shows Kaybrel, an aging warlord famed as a wise man and healer, teetering on the edge of the dark night of his soul, which will come in the next novel. In the latest one, The Women Warriors, we visit the home life of an Okan warrior’s family in a setting where extended families are truly extended. With a chronically decimated male population, the Okan practice polygamy. The elite women, who themselves are trained in the arts of war, have as much political and social power as the men. They decide whom they will marry and, if they please, they decide which other women their men will have as wives.
The first novel (now available in three handsome print volumes, btw, or electronically in three collections at Amazon) follows the men as they spend a summer tromping through enemy territory. The next novel, replete with cryptids (yeah!), will take Kaybrel through a spiritual crisis and show a number of the women in action.
Order the print b
ooks through Plain & Simple Press and you get $5 off the retail price.
Welp, time’s a-wastin’…must run to the post office, the credit union, and Costco before getting back down to work.
And so, away!
Images: Shutterstock.
Woman of Okan: © 2016 Jozef Klopacka
Kaybrel Kubna of Moor Lek. © 2016 Captblack76
What I dislike most is that you worked all day, you’re really whipped at night and you can’t really point to any single thing that got completed. Gah.