Thursday This n That

The other night, I was trying to figure out what to read next.  I'd just given up on the time-travel romance and I couldn't decide.  So, I downloaded some free, new-to-me books.  But reading on the Kindle wasn't blowing my skirt up.  I keep meaning to read some more of that Andre Norton collection I bought years ago, but I never know which ones are parts of series or even what order they're in or anything.  This lead me to a bibliography of everything she'd ever written.  Holy crap, the woman was prolific.  I printed the list out and sat down at my bookcase.  It took me about a half hour to sort through them all and get them in some semblance of order.  I sorted them by series and publication date.  Then I picked up the earliest 'single title' - Huon of the Horn.  But it's a historical with SF/F elements and I wasn't in the mood.  Next up in the single titles was Dread Companion - a straight SF.  So far, so weird.  It makes me wonder if Andre was smoking something.  We'll see if I stick with it.

One thing I did discover, though, is that most of this collection is comprised of first edition paperbacks.  Way cool.  I think a couple might be rare.  Even cooler.

I did this same thing earlier this year with my collection of Mickey Spillanes.  And wouldn't you know it, I don't have all of them or even all of any particular series.  Same with the Andre Nortons.  Ack.

The problem with collecting old books... well, one of them anyway... is that I'm not quite sure in my head which ones I have or which ones I need, so I end up buying by author name and hoping I'm not duplicating.  Unfortunately, this is how I ended up with two old copies of The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles.  Which I discovered when I reorganized my bookshelves a while back.

Oh, well.  They're books.  And they're old.  And I love them.

Heh, I didn't start out to make this an all 'book collecting' edition of this-n-that, but there it is.  Anything you want to add?  Do you collect books by any particular authors? 

Cold Turkey

I quit football cold turkey this year. 

I can't watch it anymore.  I can't watch a game where I don't respect the players or their institutions. 

It's not just the whole kneeling for the national anthem thing - although that's part of it.  It's the outright criminals who have played and are allowed to play.  The wife beaters and the animal abusers and the thieves and the addicts... Ugh.  It's the universities that are so leftist I want to gag.  It's the college athletes I loved who go pro and turn into thugs.  It's the cheaters who are allowed to get away with it and the fans who celebrate the cheating...  Anything to win, right?

Meh.  I'm done.

That first weekend of college ball, which has always been my favorite, was hard.  Me, the gal who would jump between several games all day long on Saturdays and watch the U of M games with abandon, didn't watch a minute of any of it.  And I got a little twitchy.  This was the third weekend and it does get better.  Although, missing Sunday night's Packer game was still hard.

Like any addiction, I didn't expect quitting to be easy.  I still look at the scores sometimes, but I'm weaning myself off that stuff, too.  (Although, seeing that OU had beaten the crap out of the Buckeyes did brighten my day.)  I still follow the Packers on FB, because it's the PACKERS for petesakes.  And the Packers organization hasn't done anything to make me want to gag - as far as I know. I still wear my U of M sweatshirts.  Think of those as hearkening back to the days of Bo, when the university didn't suck and football was pure.  Kind of an 'in memorium' thing.

I don't know if I'll ever go back to being a rabid fan of football again.  Maybe someday if it ever gets back to where it was.  I don't see that happening.  For now, I'll say no and find something else to do with my fall weekends.  Let's hope I'm over the whole thing before this year's bowl games, or I may need a rubber room and a pile of chocolate to combat the DTs.  ;o)

Sunday Update - Week 37

Hi there.  Another week has rolled by.  Here's what happened...

Wish Hits the Fan is now live and available for your enjoyment.  Wish in One Hand is still free thru tomorrow.  In Deep Wish and Up Wish Creek are still 99c/.99p thru Thursday.  The hope is that people who picked up WIOH for free will want to purchase the other books shortly thereafter.  Anyway, the books have been selling together over the weekend so far, which is good.  And the ads seem to be doing their jobs and paying for themselves.  One more ad will go out tomorrow and Tuesday.  WIOH actually hit #34 on the Amazon free Paranormal/Urban Fantasy list Friday - an obscenely hard to reach list, btw.  So, it's a win.

I haven't done much of anything else with regard to writing or writerly pursuits - just marketing.

Still waiting on my paperback proof for WHTF.  I paid extra to get it here Friday.  It shipped Thursday.  Not sure what the hell, but if I don't see it tomorrow, I'm contacting Createspace.  Seriously.  

I went fishing once last week.  Caught some panfish, but nothing worth writing about, hence no Saturday Fishing Report.  This coming week ain't looking any better.  Hot and sunny.  Bleh.

The reading has been going pretty good.  I actually read 5 books last week.  Three of those were by 'new to me' authors.  One had no stars on Amazon =o(.  Well, it has one review now.  It was pretty awesome, so if you're interested in YA paranormal, check out Bewitch Me by Amelia Blake.  Also, if you're into those kinds of books, Caught in Between by Allison L. Perry was amazing, too. 

Bow season started here on Friday.  Crossing fingers none of our deer get culled. 

Well, that's about all I have to say this morning.  I hope you all had an awesome week and will have a great week ahead of you.  :hugs: 

Release Day is Finally Here!

Cross posted with Outside the Box...

When I first started writing the first genie book (Djinn-ocide... which would eventually become Wish Hits the Fan) back in September of 2009, I really had no idea where it would go.  I thought maybe I could make a series out of it someday and maybe it would land me an agent and a publishing contract.

LOL, well, we all know where that last part of the vision went, don't we?

I self-published Wish in One Hand in August of 2015.  A little over two years later, the fourth and final book in the Once Upon a Djinn series is available for the general public to read.  Yay!

I'm super stoked that all the books are together.  And I really I hope you all enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Here they are...

Wish in One Hand

In Deep Wish

Up Wish Creek

Wish Hits the Fan

Not quite sure what's up next.  I'm going to enjoy this for a little while, I think.  All four books together.  Finally.

Whew.

Thursday This n That

I read something in the news the other morning that said you shouldn't read news in the morning. 

Okay, now that I've let that sink in for a moment, because it sounds like a Steven Wright bit and I like Steven Wright, I'll admit that it's probably a good idea to not read the news in the morning.  Especially right now when everything is so farqued up.

Speaking of farqued up, last night I had someone try to school me in the intricacies of FB in a most condescending way.  I almost replied back and then I remembered my personal pledge to not engage.  And then I remembered that life is too short and she'd been kind of irritating me for a while.  So I AllisonAnderson'd* her. 

Allison Anderson was a neighbor of mine a long time ago.  She was a drunk who would come home after she closed out the bar and turn her stereo all the way up, thereby waking me up and making it impossible to go back to sleep.  (I suspect she often passed out with her stereo on.)  She would also crank her stereo up and leave in the middle of the day when I was trying to write.  And she'd mow her lawn at midnight.  And stand on her front lawn screaming obscenities at her parents who lived across the street. It was her friends who left their motorhome running in her driveway** so that my house filled up with carbon monoxide that one day. Yeah, her.  So, since I couldn't kill her like I wanted to, I pretended she had ceased to exist.  In my head, I walled her away.  No more interactions of any kind.  And then we moved, which was awesome.  And then I heard she'd overdosed and died one night. 

Speaking of horrible people who died, I had a nightmare about an old ex of mine and the next day I learned that his mother was dead.  And I celebrated.  When I told my mother, she said something like 'we shouldn't celebrate when people die' and then she laughed because she knows what I went through with Mama Frankenstein and the monster she created. Seeing the ex's obituary would be icing on the cake, but no such luck yet.

Yes, I am bloodthirsty.  No, I have not based any characters on him.  Don't bother looking.  He ain't there.

Oh, and before I forget, Wish in One Hand is free now through the 18th.  In Deep Wish is .99 here and in the UK through the 21st.  So is Up Wish Creek.  Throw in Wish Hits the Fan (releasing tomorrow) and you can get the entire series for under $5.

What's up with you today?

*I refer to the maneuver of ignoring someone so completely it's like they're dead to me as the 'AllisonAnderson'.

** Yes, I did use the motorhome thing in Accidental Death. If you get that close to being snuffed out, you might as well use it in your writing, eh?

Trying Something Fun

Okay, so you all probably know I've been committing myself to reading books by people I'm unfamiliar with and then, if I like the books, I review the books.  I do it here and there throughout the year, and I mark the books on my Reading List with a # so you can see which ones they were.

Over the weekend, I couldn't figure out what I wanted to read.  Scads of hardcopy books on the shelves, scads of downloaded books on the Kindles and nothing was perking my interest.  So, I got an idea.

I went to the Top 100 Free book lists.  First I went to the Top 100 Free of all books, but nothing was blowing my skirt up.  Then I went to the Top 100 Free Paranormal.  I scanned down the list looking for covers and titles that sounded interesting.  When I found one, I went to the page for that book and read the blurb.  If it sounded like something I wanted to read, I downloaded it.  I picked up one right away.

During this process, though, I got a better idea.  Find books with few or no reviews and read those.  That was a little harder because often the covers or titles or whatever didn't thrill me enough to click through.  But I found two. 

The first one I read didn't have any reviews at all at Amazon and the one review it had at Goodreads was 'I liked it'.  Which is sad because it was a fun book. 

You know, it occurs to me this morning, I don't even bother reviewing books on Amazon by current popular authors anymore.  They have thousands of reviews.  Neither they nor their readers need mine.  Unpopular and unknown authors need reviews. 

So, here's my challenge to you all.  Find a book with 10 or fewer reviews that you think you might enjoy.  Read it.  And if you like it, review it.  (I say 'if you like it' because we're doing this to help authors who may be struggling and bad reviews don't help.  And in these cases, bad reviews aren't really helping readers either.  They're already not buying these books, why give them another reason?)

And just in case someone stops buy who needs clarification, I am not advocating giving good reviews to bad books.  Or books you haven't read or anything.  Read it, like it, review it.  Personally, I don't finish books I don't like and I don't review books I haven't finished.

Easy peasy.  You find a book you like and maybe you get a new author to read, and you give them a boost because maybe they're so down about the lack of reviews they're contemplating not writing any more books.  Win win.

Just a thought.  Anyone in on this?

Sunday Update - Week What?

Hey, Everyone.  Thanks for stopping by. 

It's Sunday morning and I'm caffeine deprived.  But let's see if I can rebuild the week anyway...

I haven't done any writing or editing this past week because I was preparing for Wish Hits the Fan's book launch and all that.  I did get the book loaded for pre-order and all that.  I was really working up a storm on pre-release stuff.  Then Thursday hit and I fell apart and I still haven't gotten back to work.  Today.

I read three books last week - Silver James' Assassin's Moon, Night Without End by Alistair MacLean, and Postmortem by Patricia Cornwall.  All very exciting books. 

Fishing was bleh.  But still very necessary.  Unfortunately, I think fishing on Thursday was what derailed me. 

The fawns are losing their spots and the bucks are losing their velvet and all of the deer are losing their summer coats.  Fall is here even though it's not really yet. 

After dealing with Kira's allergies for years, I decided to tackle them.  I ordered some stuff from Vetericyn - ear wash and eye wash.  (She gets itchy eyes and ears.)  It only arrived a couple days ago, but it already seems to be helping.  I had bought some wound care stuff of theirs years ago for Max and it worked like a dream.  Why I didn't get this other stuff earlier is beyond me.  (Maybe because it ain't cheap, but then again, trips to the vet for eye goo that never really worked well wasn't cheap either.) 

Postcards for the Once Upon a Djinn series arrived.  The first batch went out yesterday.  The next batch will go out later - because some of them are to people in FL and with Irma... Well, we'll see what happens.  I also handed out my first one of these and the gal at the feed store was suitably impressed.  (I already know she's a reader, so she gets swag when I stop there.)  I told her and I'll tell you, if you haven't already bought these books, don't buy them now.  Wait until the 15th, when they'll all be on sale and available.  You can get all 4 books for under $5 then.

Of course, if you want to get them now so you can start reading, they're still pretty inexpensive at $2.99 ea. 

Today I have to finish updating the back matter for AD, NC, and BF.  Then I have to upload WHTF to Createspace.  Then I have to futz with UWC.  And I have some advertising I have to get in by Tuesday for a Friday newsletter.  Address more postcards.  And finally, tonight, I plan to get back to work on Early Grave.

Ugh, I need more coffee.

What's up in your world?