Slow down, you’re movin’ too fast…

…Got to make
The mornin’ last.

Putting the brakes on the ambitious publishing enterprise, and they’re finally beginning to engage. It takes a long time to persuade an 18-wheeler to slow down…

So freaking tired of computers am I that I’ve developed a flinch reflex at the very thought of re-engaging The Machine.

Last night I mounted an entire month’s worth of Racy Books to Amazon — which is really only seven shorties but goodies. It’s the first set of books we wrote under the Roberta Stuart byline, two of them by moi and five by a writer who for a number of reasons can’t publicize her name. This lady is really a very good writer, with an actual — get this! — SENSE OF HUMOR. Her stories always have a mellow wit that makes them charming to read.

Assuming you like Racy Reading. 😉

Also got the second “boxed set” of six Fire-Rider books up. That really is a serious book; each of the three collections of six “books” apiece will be novel-length on its own.

So, with the design and bureaucracy done, all that’s left to do is click “Publish.” The plan is to “publish” (I use that work guardedly: to my mind, putting a book up on Amazon is more akin to “posting” than to “publishing”) one bookoid a week through December and into January. This gives us eight books each of which can be posted with a single click. So if I click “publish” each Tuesday, then each Wednesday a new bookoid should appear on Amazon.

In the meantime, I will try harder to figure out how to get Goodreads to work. It’s purely torture.

And I will try to mount a FaceBook advertising campaign, a prospect that makes me cringe. I may try to hire someone to do that, possibly from Problogger or Fiverr.

Hiring a pig in a poke from Fiverr also makes me cringe. But it occurred to me that there may be bloggers who know how to handle FaceBook — or at least are younger, more flexible, and techier than I am. So I think I’ll post an ad on the Problogger job board and then do a few searches at Fiverr.

If YOU know how to deploy FaceBook Ads, by the way (this will entail identifying the right demographics in technolanguage that FB can understand and use), I’m interested in talking with you! Leave a comment below with a functional email address in the little sign-in form above the comments box, and I’ll get in touch. The book that would be advertised at the outset is Fire-Rider, not the erotica.

In another few weeks, I may have a boxed set of “Family at the Holidays” available, which would then be worth putting money into for marketing. If the PoD guy comes through (he has not, so far), then we already have a print version of “Family.” Either of those could also be marketed on FaceBook, if it’s possible to identify adult audiences(!!) who want(!!) to read erotica.

How exactly you target those audiences without accidentally hitting some kids escapes me. For that reason, I’m very dubious about advertising the Camptown Races bookoids on Facebook.

At any rate, if I can hire someone to relieve me of some of the social media marketing torture, that would free up time a) to have a life, of all the outrageous things; b) to write some more copy; c) to manage design and production; and d) to take care of business, which has been sliding.

FireFox lately has been given to strange catastrophic crashes, which can on occasion crash my computer. And of course we know Wyrd loves nothing more than to crash, preferably taking your entire system down with it.

Whenever the system crashes while any Office programs are up, every file you had open at the time reloads in two versions: whatever was saved at the time the system went down, and a “recovery” file that may or may not contain the most recent data you entered. My system is set to auto-save every five minutes, so not much data is lost. However, if you have, say, seven files open on Wyrd (not unreasonable around here: I often move from file to file), you have to compare FOURTEEN files line by line to see what was lost and what can be saved. If the auto-save has more recent data, then you have to close the file you were working in and save the auto-save over it with the new filename. But sometimes this process causes the system to “forget” where the original file resides, so you have to figure that out — my computer contains literally thousands of data files, and I’ll tellya…some days it ain’t easy to find where a recovered file is supposed to go.

Well, one of the recent crashes took down the Excel file I’d built to transmit data to WonderAccountant, after QuickBooks converted itself into something I simply cannot use. Even she has a time with it — and she takes courses in Quickbooks!

So, after I realized I had neither the time nor the inclination to learn the entire new program that QuickBooks has mounted, I went back to recording credits and debits in Excel spreadsheets. This workbook I posted on DropBox for WonderAccountant’s delectation — she does my bookkeeping, and really, if the spreadsheet is set up correctly, all she should have to do is upload to the correct account.

Last night I discovered that during a recent crash, data was lost from this Excel workbook.

But SOME data was saved in another iteration of it, which resided in another directory on my terminal.

Recovering the data entailed opening both workbooks and comparing each spreadsheet, line by line by infuckingTERminable line, to determine a) which was most current and b) how to consolidate the data in one file.

And needless to say, this entailed not one but several fuckups. By 9 p.m. I was tearing my hair out by the roots! It took over four hours of this hateful process to straighten it out!

And that, my children, is why the old lady is coming to hate computers.

Really. It was so much easier when you just noted debits and credits in a real, paper book of blank spreadsheets.

And it’s why I need to find somebody else to mount and manage the marketing campaign. At this point, when I get up in the morning and think about having to wrestle with the computers again, I just cringe.

No wonder my stomach hurts!

Whenever I finish diddling away time with the hobby blog, then, I need to take the dogs for a walk; then bring them back here and go back out for another 2.6-mile tour by myself. That gets in about 3.6 miles a day (assuming I get time in a day for these hijinks), which helps a lot with the stress and is helping to bring the weight back down.

But yes…”get time in the day…” As dawn cracked, the phone rang: pool guy. He wants to come over between ten and noon to fix the leak in the pump. Let us hope Gerardo is right, that the leak is just from a gasket. Thanks to Gerardo, the guy is going to have a challenge trying to upsell  me to a new pump, which will set me back a couple thousand bucks. Not looking forward to that exchange…

Anyway, carving that chunk out of my morning means no doggy & human walks: it’s already after 9:00 a.m. Walking a mile with the dogs, who have to sniff every blade of grass and lunge at every passing dog or cat, takes a half an hour. And the 2.6-mile junket requires 45 minutes.

It was very cold this morning — by Arizona standards — and so at 6:00 a.m. I decided to wait until it warmed up. It usually takes this pool guy days to respond to a phone call, so I figured I’d have today to myself. Not so… Now we’ll have to wait until after the guy gets here and lightens my pocketbook some more before we can go out. By then I’ll be fully engaged in something else.

The roommate left before dawn to fly to New York for an audition. She’s an opera singer. So the dogs and I have the Funny Farm to ourselves for a day. That means there are quite a few things I need to do by way of cleaning up the place and making it more livable for her. Those could easily fill up the day.

Roommate: I haven’t written about the roommate because she hadn’t announced to all and sundry that she’s leaving her several jobs in town. She’s one of the paid professional singers with the choir, a very lovely mezzosoprano who sings alto in our rowdy crowd. She also teaches at the Great Desert University and is enrolled in her second master’s degree program out there. Well, her husband got a job in the Bay Area, so she’s having to drop everything and move up there.

She didn’t want to walk away from the teaching job (some day she hopes to get an academic position, and so there’s a bridge she doesn’t want to burn), nor was she happy to leave the other contract gigs she has here in town. But they realized that, given the cost of housing in and around San Francisco, even on DH’s very substantial new salary, they couldn’t afford to maintain two dwellings even for a couple of months. So they sold their house here, rented a place in the City, and she is now couch-cruising to fill in the gap.

Actually, she’s got my guest bedroom, which is a lot better than a sofa. Except there’s no bed in there, so the poor thing is sleeping on one of those blow-up mattresses. All of which makes me feel mighty guilty for not having bothered to buy a bed for that room. It would involve hiring a moving man to move the impossibly heavy TV armoire, which is no longer used for TV but is full of linens & things, and that exceeds the hassle factor that I feel like dealing with. So does purchasing and installing a bed in there, come to think of it.

Anyway, it’s kind of nice to have a human being around. I mean, dogs are charming company and all, but…well, they are dogs. She’s not around much, because she has a hectic schedule that usually keeps her out from morning till late at night. Yet a few conversations have been had, and that is nice.

If it were possible to be sure you could find a person as quiet and considerate as this one, renting out a room would seem like a very good idea. It would provide some company and obviate the need to actually work. But I’m pretty certain this one is rare as diamonds.

🙂