Altogether too many seven-day weeks of 16-hour days… I’m afraid today I lapsed into goofing off. Almost as if today were a Sunday (remember those?).
Better yet, when a dear friend called to invite me over for a BBQ dinner tomorrow, saying she and DH were inviting another singleton friend, recently widowed, who felt sad on “special days” because her kids had kind of forgotten her, as adult kids will do, I wondered what special day are we talking about here?
Oh. Labor Day. Okay.
Heh heh. Every day is Labor Day at the Funny Farm.
Progress is being made:
The Camptown Ladies, having joined the Twitter parade just a few days ago, already have 100 followers.
People have taken me up on the offer of a FREE copy of any Fire-Rider book of one’s choice.
Thanks to Twitter, I stumbled upon these bons mots at a new-to-me site, No Wasted Ink. Too bad there’s not a “like it a lot” button.
And let us admire this handsome website, Web home of co-conspirator Dharma Kelleher.
E-book Builder pal has stepped up to the plate and plans to convert the Fire-Rider series into Smashword-friendly format. As of just about now, four of the eighteen bookoids have new ISBNs for the new format.
And speaking of electronic formatting, the irrepressible Mrs. Accountability resurfaced this morning, looking for edits on her two new cookbooks. When I told her about my difficulties formatting for Kindle (thanks to my own astounding techno-incompetence), she proposed to try to format the long, complex .docx file for .mobi. As we speak, I should be editing her book.
Yesterday I journeyed out to Avondale, halfway to Yuma from here, to deliver a presentation on “editing,” a vague topic if ever there was one. Not knowing what to say, I came up with “Eight Tips to Improve Your Writing.”
What I didn’t know was the organizer had arranged for two of us to speak on the same topic, and the other one was Dharma.
Well, I happen to know that Dharma is a killer editor…because she’s edited some of my stuff. So as you can imagine, when I got there and learned this, I thought “gulp!”
Not surprisingly, she came up with a very clear, very succinct, and very to-the-point presentation. And she, being cleverer than I am, has already put it together as a marketing dingbat for her blog. Check it out: if you subscribe you get the e-book version for free.
Think I held my own, though: we overlapped a bit but we both made our own points, and when we talked about the same issues we put our own spin on them. I, however, was not bright enough to think of turning the PowerPoint into something salable.
It’s never too late, though.
Up at 5:30 with the hounds, who will not brook laying in after the sun’s earliest beams start to creep over the horizon. Was about to take them for the usual mile-long stroll when Cassie the Corgi pulled up lame. Didn’t think making her walk over concrete and asphalt would be kind, so we retreated into the house.
But…IT’S FINALLY COOL OUT THERE IN THE EARLY MORNINGS!
So used the couple of cool dawn hours to get a ton of work done:
Pull up and toss out (many!) dead plants
Build a dirt dam to divert water from the foundation of the house just east of the lime tree
Haul rock from the front yard to shore up the dirt dam. (River rocks forming the border of a flowerbed that didn’t take, which I need to deconstruct and recover with gravel)
Water the potted plants as usual, in the ongoing struggle to keep them alive
Haul emptied pots (see item 1) to the potting shelves on the east side
Haul out wire stuff I used to keep Other Daughter’s damn cat from shitting all over a defunct flowerbed, which Gerardo is determined to get rid of (what is WITH that man???)
Fertilize four citrus trees, two climbing roses, and an olive tree
Deep-water four citrus trees, two climbing roses, and an olive tree
Wash a blanket and a load of laundry
Cooked up some more dog food for the corgis
Ugh.
Poor little dogs didn’t get fed until after 9 am. Neither did I.
The ISBN routine is such a time suck, I don’t feel I got much else done. Come to think of it, I didn’t. I drank. I ate. I loafed.
Now I must get to work on Mrs. Accountability’s latest work of art and also review one of the Camptown Races writer’s submissions, which I’ve neglected shamefully.
And so, to work. Again. Still.
For a free copy of any Fire-Rider adventure, leave a comment with a real email address & let me know which one you’d like, and if you’d prefer a .mobi file or a PDF.