Thursday This n That

 Yay!  Thursday this n that!

We saw the first fawn of the year yesterday.  And it was Lumpy's!  Yay!  (If you don't know about Lumpy, she's a doe with a huge lump on her jaw.  It comes and goes.  And the first time we saw it was fall of 2019, so it's obviously not effecting her life or her ability to raise babies.)  In previous years, she always had twins, but she's getting up there, so I'm not surprised she's only having singles now.

I'm still decompressing after being gainfully employed.  Thankfully, the thoughts of what I have to do at work in the morning have stopped hitting me every night.  

Hubs had jury duty yesterday.  I had planned on going into town with him and then just dinking around until he was done.  But they don't allow cell phones inside the judicial center, so we nixed that idea and I stayed home.  He didn't get picked to sit the jury.  He called about 11:30 and told me he was coming home, but first he was stopping at the Chinese restaurant.  We'd already planned for this, but I left it up to him because I wasn't sure if he'd feel like stopping after the rigmarole. He was home by 1 and we ate Chinese for lunch and then again for dinner.  We'll have it for lunch today, too.  That ought to quiet my Chinese cravings for a while. LOL

I haven't gone fishing yet.  Soon.

Tuesday, I went to the thrift store.  I only found two books, but it was still a good trip.  One book was a collection of Hercule Poirot mysteries and the other was a 'junior' collection of Sherlock Holmes from 1956.  I'm reading the Sherlock Holmes now.  It's been a long time since I sat down with Sherlock, so it's all good.  One thing that strikes me about this book is that it totally is not dumber-down for the younger people.  Hell, the first story talked about Holmes' cocaine addiction.  You couldn't get away with that today in anything targeting a younger market.   The stories are also chock full of hard words, just the way they were originally written.  Actually, I'm not exactly sure what makes this a junior edition, but it says that on the spine, so there ya go.

I do love the wonderous swirl of words by some of the old time writers. 

Okay, that's it for me right now.  Have a great day!

Checking Things

 Part of getting back to writing... a big part of it... is the business side.  To that end, I went into Amazon and was scrolling through my books, checking to see where they're all at with reviews, ratings, etc.  I immediately noticed that one of my books had more than it did the last time I looked, so I zipped over to see if any new reviews were left or it was just those silly ratings*.  Sure enough, there was a new review.  But it wasn't actually a review of the book.  It was someone saying that the file must be corrupt because it's blank when they open it.  

So, I went in to see if everything was okay with IDW.  Looks okay to me.  Nothing especially hinky.  :shrug:  Oh, well.  I re-uploaded the book anyway, just in case.  Last night, I got the idea to check whether this person was a Verified Purchase.  Nope.  Then I went into the person's profile and it appears as if they have only done a few reviews - several of them were bad and those were due to some technical issue with the book.  I went into one of those and from what I can gather, the person is using the Kindle for iPad app.  Therein probably lies the problem.  

Unfortunately, authors have no control over whether our books are available or work right on anything but the Kindle.  In those cases, the reader should probably contact Amazon customer support and work it out there.  Leaving poor reviews - or even taking a star off a good review - does the author a disservice.  Those stars are our lifelines to sales.  The more we have, the better our books do.  And conversely, the fewer stars the poor the sales.  

I thought I'd leave a little note saying, ever so nicely, that the issue is with the app, but I can't find where I can reply to reviews.  Maybe that's an ebay thing and not an Amazon thing.  :shrug:

And yes, I do remember that I'm not supposed to address reviews, but I hate having incorrect and potentially sales-damaging information out there.  

Anyway, I'm getting back in the swing of things.  Checking things out and working to rebuild my writing career.  It's not going to be easy.  I'm not sure if I can ever get where I was with the old books.  I guess the only thing to do is write new books.  To that end, I'll be doing a NaNoWriMo type thing in July.  Fingers crossed.

* Don't get me started on Amazon 'ratings' where any old Joe with an opinion can click one star without repercussions and there's no way for the author to even know the whys and the whats of it.  Feh.

Home at Last

In an unexpected turn of events, my last day was yesterday instead of today.  I was pretty much done with everything, so it's totally understandable.  All in all, the two years of day-job was an interesting experience.  I learned lots, talked to a bunch of people, made some friends, exponentially increased my typing speed...  I'd say more but I'm under a confidentiality agreement.  Which is why I rarely talked about work for the last two years, and since work ate pretty much all of my waking hours, it meant I wasn't blogging.  

Anyway, that's done.  I'll miss my guys.  I'll miss my customers.  But I'm ready to close the chapter and move back into the book of my life.  

Needless to say, Hubs is happy I'm home.  It remains to be seen whether the kitties are happy.  Right now, it's like any other morning.  They'll be confused when I don't leave the house around 8. 

So, what'll I do today?  Anything I want.  Read.  Write.  Walk.  Play toys with the kitties. The possibilities are endless. But I'll probably grocery shopping so I don't have to do it tomorrow.   ;o)

What's on your agenda for the day?

Words! On Paper!

 For the first time in a long time, I sat down last night with my red pen (found one!) and my notebook (that's been sitting by my chair untouched since I started a day-job) and...

I wrote words!

It wasn't a huge amount of words, but I filled a page with genuine fiction.

You see, I had a funny little germ of an idea the night before (also something that hasn't happened in a while) and I thought I'd noodle around with it. I sat my butt in my comfy recliner and started to write.  By the bottom of the page, my hand was pretty tired... damned atrophy... but I have the beginnings of a story.  Yay.

It's weird.  It's entirely possible no one will ever read it.  Then again, it might be good and if it is, I might know of a place who may be interested in it.  If they're not, it'll be a short story to sell on Amazon.  

But that's a long ways off.  The important thing is I WROTE WORDS!

YAY!

Oh, and something else that hasn't happened in a long time... I lay in bed last night thinking about the story and what to write next. I should've gotten up and written in down because it's most likely in tatters of memory now.  :shrug:  No matter.  I was thinking about stories and writing.  Also YAY.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

Where to Begin?

I've been trying to decide how to start the journey back to writing.  One thought I had was to just grab my notebook and red pen*, and free write.  Let the ideas flow out of my fingers and onto the page where only I can see them and they can just BE.  In the past, I've done this whenever I'm stuck.  I write until I find a way through the mess in my head.  Basically transferring the mess from my head onto a page.  It works for me.  And if not writing for two years isn't stuck, I don't know what is.

The other thought I had was to pick an unfinished story and just start writing on it again.  But without getting down on myself for mistakes.  This would be a full-on 'give yourself permission to suck' - which is another way I've gotten myself out of an inability to write.  There have been numerous times in the past where I've been so focused on writing a story that would SELL that I couldn't write anything.  Time to suck with wild abandon and not care who knows it.  Suck away, my friend.

I may do a combination of both.  We'll see how it goes.  Either way may break something free.  Fingers crossed.  I will write again.  First, though, I should probably see if any of my red pens still have ink in them.  ;o)

What do you do when you're stuck?

* I always write in my notebooks with red ink.  I started doing it years ago to get rid of the fear of someone marking my writing up, pointing out all the mistakes, in red.  And I got to where I just like it.  

Sunday Update 6/2/24

It's been a while since I did one of these.  Don't expect me to catch up. LOL

Almost two years ago, I went and got me one of those payin' job things.  Last Tuesday, I gave my two-weeks notice - which basically amounted to nine days worth of work.  Friday the 7th is my last day. Think of it as me retiring again.  Think of it as me shrugging, if you're so inclined.  In reality, it's just time for me to come home and get back to being me again - writer, fisherman, gardener, kitty mommy, housewife - without day-job distractions.  (I was going to say without any outside distractions, but the world being what it is means plenty of outside distractions.  Blerg.)

The first thing I need to do, which I'm already starting to do, is get back into a writerly mindset.  This means taking care of the business side of writing, refilling the well by reading, and then actually sitting my ass down in this chair and writing.  For the business side, I delisted all my books from Draft 2 Digital and am taking them back to Kindle Select so I can drum up some page reads.  As single novels or series are marked as delisted, I'm enrolling them in KDP.  I did this a while ago with Song of Storm and Shroud.  Last week, I did it for Blink of an I and for the SCIU series.  I'll be doing some marketing for those in the coming days/weeks, as time and money allow. 

I've also been reading.  I finally set a Goodreads goal for 2024 - 35 books.  I think I can do that in the next seven months.  I've already read 4, so I'm off to a good start.  

The actual sitting down and writing will come.  I'll make it happen starting later this month.  The plan is to start small.  In the beginning, I'll be in my chair with a pen and my notebook, jotting down ideas and writing little sentences and paragraphs about nothing in particular.  I'd like to do some kind of JulNoWriMo - July Novel Writing Month - wherein I set myself a goal and write toward that end on a single novel.  I don't think I'll be able to do 50K in a month yet, so I'm not even going to try.  Maybe 30K.  Maybe only 15K.  The point will be to write every day so that the atrophied writing muscles get back into shape.  I'll talk more about that as the time approaches.

In non-writing, I have 6 tomato plants I'll be nurturing and all of my gardens need care after two years of neglect, I have a lake full of fish waiting to ignore my worm, and Sawyer needs a motherly influence to curb his less-than-stellar behavior.  

I'm ready to begin.  5 more days of the day-job to weather through and then I'm home.  I feel good.  I feel strong.  I'm ready to pass out lollipop, kick ass, and write books... and I'm ALL out of lollipops.  ;o)

How are things in your world lately?  

The Long Trek Back

:tap tap tap: Is anyone still out there?

So, anyway I did a thing.  Last week, I delisted Song of Storm and Shroud from everywhere but Amazon.  Last night I checked to make sure it was delisted everywhere and I put SSS back into Kindle Select.  For the first time, people can now read it with Kindle Unlimited.  If you have a KU subscription, you can read it for free.  I hope you'll give it a whirl.  

It's not much, but it's a start.  Regardless of the day job, I need to start doing writerly things and feeling like a writer again.  It's been too long.  There has to be more to life than work, eat, sleep, repeat.  Basically, I need to claw my way back to writing again.  I don't have the time, but I'll make the time.  

In the course of taking care of SSS on Amazon, I remembered that Silver had told me I needed to go into all my listings and let Amazon know that my books weren't created using AI.  So I did that.  34 times - 17 ebooks and 17 paperbacks worth.  

There's a bunch of writerly stuff I've let slide.  I'm not going to get it all done expeditiously.  It'll take time.  I'll probably slack off.  Some days the day job will be too much for me to even think about the writerly things.  :shrug:  

We'll see how it goes.  

How are things going with you?