Coffee heat rising

WHEN am I supposed to get any writing done?

Well, actually, the first grutch of the day is not about the endless series of roadblocks to the writing venture. It’s about my usual hobbyhor$e, money.

Dammit. I went in to get my teeth cleaned yesterday and the (wonderful!) dental tech informed me that she found a crack in a molar.

Make that ANOTHER crack. I already have four crowns holding broken teeth together. So that will be ANOTHER THOUSAND BUCKS out of my already impoverished funds!

Quitting the damn teaching job may have been a mistake…

I’m not convinced: in my experience, a cracked tooth hurts. This elicits no pain at all. So I expect it’s a superficial crack in the enamel. Maybe it can be fixed with bonding. One way or another, it represents MORE money drain and MORE time suck.

Time suck seems to be the story of my life.

Yesterday I spent the entire damn day at the campus computer commons, because Kindle will not read & convert ANY linked table of contents generated on ANY Macintosh computer. So I had to drag TWENTY-THREE FILES out there and convert every TofC on a PC. While I was at it, I had to (try to!) correct an error that happened in some of the Fire-Rider files, causing images to pop up in the middle of the TofC.

Then while I was there, I called  up the cookbook and discovered that the Wyrd “style” I used to format the all-caps design flourish in first-of-section paragraphs came over as fucking MICROSCOPIC TYPE! As it develops, what you see in Kindle’s “Preview” tool ain’t what you get!

To fix that, I’ve got to get into an HTML file from an unzipped bundle and screw around with that without causing any more chaos. I do not KNOW how to zip and unzip files in Mac, although I do know it can be done. So that will represent another whole afternoon wasted.

Thank god I didn’t do it in any of the 125+ recipes in there! There are only about a half-dozen initial paragraphs with this little quirk. But it’s still going to take time…I find most of my electronic time-waste is entailed in fiddling with code and crap and not with anything that does anything even remotely creative.

Today the ENTIRE DAY is going to be absorbed. In 14 minutes I have to leave for my early-morning bidness group meeting. Then fly back into town, let the dogs out for five minutes, and fly north up the freeway to meet the designer, who has the remaining Fire-Rider covers ready plus a bunch of other stuff. Then race home, bolt a few bites of lunch, and race back out to the Mayo for an afternoon checkup with the gut surgeon.

Tomorrow is mostly gone: Meeting with a would-be writer in the morning — mentoring, more than anything, unless I can persuade the guy to write porn and unless he can actually do it. Then meet a friend who wants to introduce me to another writer over happy hour — that will blow the evening. So, only a few hours will be open in the afternoon tomorrow.

Saturday is mostly gone: West Valley writer’s group shindig occupies the ENTIRE afternoon. I happen to really like this group, though — it’s the only group of amateur writers I’ve ever seen that’s not mostly comprised of flakes and nut cases. They’re very professional, very together, and many of them are pretty successful at this game. So it’s fun to meet with them even though their events take place halfway to Yuma.

Yes, I knew it was going to take some time to catch up with the ten or twelve months lost to the medical disruptions. But y’know, this wrestling match has gone on since the first of the month. I haven’t finished the second Biker Babe book because literally I haven’t had more than an hour or two uninterrupted in which to focus on it, not when I’m not so damn exhausted I can’t hold my head up.

Cripes.  Thirteen minutes to blast-off. Gotta get the dogs in and gather all the junk and get out the door. Bye!