Week, Interrupted (Endlessly…)

BEFORE I FORGET: Go here and check out what our Web guru, Jesse, is up to. It’s not like he doesn’t have enough to do, with a full-time job and a growing family. Let’s try to help this bunch meet their goal. 🙂

Jesse is about to get even more busy trying to wrangle Funny and the rest of my blogging empire onto a new server, now that gainful employment has made his freelance business redundant. We’ve selected WestHost, because for less than he’s been charging it provides significant support and all the blandishments he’s been providing. At any rate, if the site goes down briefly (again 🙄 ), watch this space. It should stabilize, and I hope that all the email & RSS subscriptions will come over with it.

It’s already Friday and I haven’t finished the second risque novel. It’s within a few words of the end, but it ain’t there yet. That’s because every time I turn around, here’s something else I have to do.

Today I have to take the car down to Chuck’s, there to get the side-view mirrors replaced. When my son drove it home from the ER parking lot, alas, he noticed that the Gorilla Tape doesn’t really keep the mirrors very stable at freeway speeds. He became unnerved and insisted that they have to be replaced.

{sigh} The young will be served. I suppose.

But there’s another time suck.

Yesterday I ran out of propane, after I left the burners on to incinerate the grease. Another time suck: traipse to U-Haul to refill a tank.

Also yesterday I had to deposit a check from Social Security and one from Medicare. Not wanting to traipse way to hell and gone up to the credit union, halfway to Wickenburg, I tried to use the new printer to scan the things. Under the best of conditions, scanning and depositing a check electronically can take almost as long as driving all the way to the CU and back. Yesterday’s were NOT the best of conditions.

Then I had to call the Mayo and fork over the $80 Medicare had dribbled out to me (here we go again: another $11,000 dribbed and drabbed out in payments of $80 to $150, each of which I have to fiddle with interminably). To get someone on the line to accept a credit-card charge, I had to sit there and listen to their ENDLESSLY INFURIATING machine tell me over and over “thank you for waiting blah blah blah blah blah”… That sucked another ten minutes on top of the time suck involved in scanning and depositing the damn checks.

The handyman is supposed to come over to fix the leaking kitchen faucet. As of this morning, of course, it’s stopped leaking. So I have to deal with that somehow, one way or another.

Student papers are coming in, God help us.

We rigged a trick to get some of them to turn in papers early, so we wouldn’t be SO hopelessly swamped next week when we have to read 20+ pieces of long-form drivel on an impossible deadline while we’re both struggling to survive. They get 20 points of extra credit if they turn the final paper in early. So a couple of eager beavers have in fact done that.

This is good. But it means I have to drop what I’m doing to turn those around.

Met at length with my associate editor/bidness partner and her sister to discuss the porn publishing scheme. It really is a frighteningly promising scheme. The number of people — mostly women — who read this stuff defies belief. Porn is a multi-billion-dollar industry, most of it conducted by small-timers working as much under the radar as they can get. We believe it’s a huge, HUGE pie and we should be able to cut ourselves a slice of it.

But it will require focus, which is not something I seem to be doing well with just now.

Shifting the websites over to WestHost is a huge endeavor. There’s NO way I can do that myself, and Jesse has his own hands full. So this is going to be another time-sucking challenge.

The way this thing has grown — by topsy — has left me with a passel of individual sites, some of which I would like to combine as subdomains to just a few main sites, thereby relieving me from having to keep paying GoDaddy stupid amounts of money for domain-name renewals. We have…

• The Copyeditor’s Desk, a freestanding affair

• Funny about Money, also freestanding

• Plain & Simple Press, under which I’d like to see the following subdomains

• Writers Plain & Simple, the blog for P&S Press

• Fire-Rider, which will market 19 installments of the Fire-Rider series, if and when the artist ever gets the covers done and I ever learn how to get them onto Amazon all by my little self

• 30 Pounds in 30 Days, to market the diet/cookbook, another MS that’s been ready to go for a year and gone effing nowhere because of my illnesses and others’ foot-dragging

• Adjunctorium, the blog for Slave Labor, which probably will go away in the near future but needs to exist awhile longer

• Camptown Races Press, site for the new imprint through which we plan to run our pornographic works of art

• Camptown Ladies Talk, blog for the new racey publishing imprint

If Camptown Races Press flies — and I mean really flies, as in earns enough to replace the teaching income and then some — I’d like the editing business to go away. Not because I don’t enjoy reading some of my clients’ work. A few are truly interesting and worthwhile. But because I’d like to be able to devote all my time and energy to getting the sexy book business up and to keeping it running over the long haul. That is going to be a full-time job.

At any rate, umpty-umpteen gerjillion years of writing blogs have, at least, suggested a simpler way to set up the new imprint’s marketing blog. Do not do not DO NOT create blogs or static websites for new series. At the most, do subdomains for the most active and largest of them. Otherwise, use the sidebars to mount thumbnails of new stuff that comes out as it comes out, and set up pages for the series holding galleries of thumbnails for the backlist. Et voilà. A much simpler structure, much cheaper, and far easier to manipulate.

Two or three months’ worth of credit union statements and bills are sitting on the desk waiting for me to enter into Quickbooks and file away. Another huge time-killer.

It’s almost seven. I must fly to get the car to Chuck’s by eight. And so away, to watch another day be sucked into a black hole.