Since DE did so well last week, I thought I'd try marketing Accidental Death. First book... second book... :shrug: Anyway, there ya are...
I hope you enjoy it.
Well, we're bombing the hell out of Iran. Yay. The Ayatollah is dead. Also yay. We're hitting military targets, those fuckers are hitting civilian targets. Not so yay and also proof that what we're doing needs to be done to completion and not half-assed like the Gulf War. The good people of Persia are happy we're doing what we're doing. Anyone not happy can go pound sand. But they better do it fast before we turn it into glass. Glass up your ass. :gigglesnort:
Anyway, my life...
No writing or editing. I'm not sure when I'll do that again, but I'm not calling it quits, so the blog title stays. I did some marketing, which for some reason took off like a rocket and garnered me some sales. I finished February with 17.16 books sold for $29.76. Not big money, but better than a sharp stick, so I'm happy. And I've already got page reads this morning so my March dashboard doesn't look like a ghost town. I'm not sure which book I'll pimp tomorrow, so stay tuned.
I read two books on wood carving this week. One on whittling and the other a more comprehensive volume. I'm also slowly making my way through The Flight of the Falcon by Daphne duMaurier.
No baking.
Activity... It was a busy week for me. I did something active 5 out of 7 days. Early in the week, when it was still cool, I worked in the woods. Other days, I did cleaning projects. One day I did gardening. I surprised myself by actually discovering visible biceps. Woot, I have muscles again! Unfortunately, I also ate like a horse this week, so... Weight: 177.2 =op
My wood carving hobby is getting exciting. Like I said, I read two books about it, and since my tools arrived on Friday, I can now get started learning by doing - which is my preferred way to learn anyway.
As for gardening, I moved all my baby trees outside. I also filled pots with dirt and I'm ready to plant carrot seeds. I'll be ready to plant potatoes once I cut my starter spuds into quarters, dry those cut edges, and buy more dirt. All things in their own time, I guess. I'll also be planting tomatoes once the local store starts carrying seedlings. Oh, and I have three green pepper plants that made it through the winter in my spare room, so those'll be going into pots and outside once the weather is guaranteed to not turn to freezing.
All in all, life is pretty good here. I'm busy-busy, even if it's not writing related, and I'm okay with that. (Not super-okay, otherwise, I wouldn't feel the need to go on and on about it, but okay enough for now.)
How are things in your world?
Yesterday, I got a wild hair to mop the smoking porch floor. First, I had to vacuum, then I had to move all the furniture to one side, then I mopped. Wait for it to dry, repeat with the other side. Yes, I'm paying for it today. Even though Hubs did help move furniture. Ah, well, it looks nice and it smells good. Murphy's Oil Soap for the win.
Today, it's a Wallyworld trip. I need groceries, but I also need a new coffee maker. This one isn't dead yet, but it's on its last legs. And I need a new phone. This one is only holding a charge for about a 45 minute call and I like to talk to Mom for about an hour. It's really annoying when it starts its low-battery beep before I'm done talking.
Dollar General ice cream is better than Walmart ice cream. There, I said it. And I mean it.
I'm really getting jazzed about my new wood carving hobby. My tools are supposed to be here tomorrow. Yay. Yesterday, I researched wood while I was waiting for the floor to dry. Turns out cedar is excellent to carve, which is good because we have A LOT of cedar. Yay. I'll practice on that before I dive into the better woods. I'm thinking about carving beavers on my pieces of beaver-chewed wood. I know that a little obvious, but it works for me.
DE is still flying off the shelves. I'm up to 562 downloads. And now I'm seeing page reads, so there's another yay.
Hubs made me dinner last night, bless his heart. I was bushed.
When is Easter? :googles: Sunday, April 5th. Whew, I don't need to think about it for another month. Not that we do anything special, except dinner. Easter dinner is always a thing.
We've been watching Killing Eve. Yeah, I'm probably the last person to watch it. I had to wait until it was free, so there's that. Anyway, it's really good so far. Although, it seems to me that Sandra Oh is just making Eve be Christine Yang as a spy rather than a surgeon. :shrug: I'm okay with that. I liked Yang. We also found a neat medical drama called Monroe. It's kinda like House, but Monroe is nicer and he has a brogue. Love me some Irish brogue.
Okay, I should probably get off my butt and do my shopping. Have a great day wherever you are. :hugs:
I'm not sure exactly what happened yesterday. I was doing my usual thing, posting to FB groups - 1 every fifteen minutes to avoid getting my paddies smacked by FB's gulag rules - when I noticed an uptick in downloads. I was all like 'whoa' because in a short time, I'd moved like 20 copies. Cool, thinks I.
But it didn't stop there. The numbers kept rising... throughout the rest of the day and night, as a matter of fact. I'd moved 12 copies on Monday. As of this morning, I've moved 463 copies of Dying Embers in 24 hours.
Of course, all of those are free, but it gives me hope that at least some of those people will read it and go on to order FG and EG. (One person already did order the other two books at full price, so I've got that going for me.) I also have hope that it has brought DE high enough up in the rankings that the KU people will see it and start reading the book, too. Every page read adds up there.
I'm just a little dumbfounded. I've had this happen a couple times before. TTW got a boost somehow and moved like 100 copies in one day. Still, I've never had a book move this much in this short a time since I paid ENT for an ad.
Anyway, it's pretty exciting. I'd share the magic with you, if I knew what the magic was. I know yesterday I tried something different and hit the specialized FB groups (thriller, suspense type groups) with ads. Maybe that was the cause of the initial jump and, once DE started to rise in the rankings, that took over. Maybe I have a fairy god-newsletter that advertises my books without me knowing or paying for it. Either way, it does feel good to see the numbers jump like that.
Doesn't change anything with regard to yesterday's post, but still...
I've said this before and I'll probably say it again at some point in my life, but I'm not sure right now why I still call this blog 'The Writing Spectacle'. Lord knows I haven't been writing or even editing much lately. I'm not saying I will never write again, but it's not looking good right now.
Right now? Well, I'm getting all jazzed about wood carving. As I might've mentioned a couple hundred times, I live in the woods. We have about two and a half acres of mixed growth woods - hard and soft woods, deciduous and evergeen. All that wood is begging me to do something with it.
Sure, lots of it is for burning. But it doesn't all have to be burned. This is especially true of the special woods. I'm talking dogwood and redbud and persimmon, and one case, lilac. Why burn it when I can make it into something pretty?
Of course, I have no clue about carving anything right now. To that end, I bought a book on whittling (the easiest of the wood carving methods). I received that yesterday and it's pretty short. I read it and learned a little bit, but it's not quite what I'm aiming for. To that end, I ordered a better book on wood carving and... :drumroll:... a set of wood carving tools. They'll be here Monday.
Now, because I'm kinda weird, I've already been collecting interesting wood. I have several pieces of beaver-chewed wood, and some wood that I thought would make excellent staves. I also have a couple of root balls - cedar and dogwood - that looked like they might be interesting to carve something. Now that I'm actually going to do the carving stuff, I added some dogwood that the fallen sycamore killed. I can't wait to dig into that stuff.
Being a total novice, though, I'm going to start by carving cedar. We have TONS of cedar. It's not really great for burning in a woodstove, so it's in various piles around the property. I can use that to practice on. (I think. I'm still learning which woods carve best. If nothing else, it'll be a learning experience.)
The main thing right now, I guess, is teaching myself to carve without losing a finger or winding up with stitches and a bunch of really interesting scars. Fingers crossed while I still have them. ;o)
The writing? It's still there. I'm still working on editing Duke Noble #3, here and there when the mood strikes me. The problem is that the mood is striking me less and less. Maybe it'll get better this summer. One can hope, right?
Here we are again at Monday, which means marketing. I even got up early to get after it, but then I got distracted :cough:facebook:cough:, so here we are at 6 o'clock and I'm just getting started. Derp.
Anyway...
Sorry I spaced out last week and didn't do a Sunday Update. There really wasn't much to talk about that week anyway, but still, it was rude of me. This week... Well, there's not much to talk about either, but here I am.
No writing, but I did do some editing. I really need to get off my ass and get this book finished. In order to do that, though, I need to stop wondering whether anyone actually cares. (Beyond a couple of people, that is. They know who they are and they know how much I love them.) I marketed, but it was pretty much crickets. Tomorrow, Dying Embers goes on freebie, so we'll see if anything comes of that.
In reading news, I started a SF, read about a third of it, and DNF'd it. It wasn't bad. It was just not giving me any reason to finish reading it. I sometimes wonder if that's what other people feel about my books. (Then I remind myself I have plenty of people reading my books all the way through in KU.) I started reading Flight of the Falcon by Daphne duMaurier on Friday, though, so I've got that going for me.
In baking news, I made a chocolate oil cake with strawberry jelly and vanilla frosting. Yummers.
On the activity front, Hubs and I are over the crud finally, so we're making an effort on turning back into humans, as opposed to the slugs we were. While it was still unseasonably warm, we took walks Mon, Tues, Wed for about 2.15 miles. Then it got cool and we worked in the woods Fri and Sat for around 3 hours. I also did some cleaning and shopping. Weight: 176.2 (the poundage I lost to the flu jumped right back on me... derp)
Due to the woods working, I'm pretty sore today. Throwing logs will do that to a body. We're mostly through cleaning up the top branches of that sycamore that fell over 2 years ago, so yay. Funny thing about that sycamore. It turned brittle. I went to saw the limbs and they snapped off in my hands like bread sticks (the crunchy kind, not the Olive Garden kind). Good thing we weren't planning on trying to burn that.
Speaking of the downed sycamore, that bastard tree took out two perfectly good dogwoods when it crashed. I've got a large chunk of the bigger dogwood that I may try to carve into someone once I get some carving experience. I'm thinking I need to carve a dog out of the dogwood, or would that be too obvious? :smirk:
Oh, and I got our taxes done yesterday. Woot. If you're using TurboTax, you have until 2/28 to do them at a discount. Which was enough of a poke in the ass to get me to do mine.
I think that's it. I'll try not to forget to post on Sundays from now on. Have a great day and an awesome week. :hugs:
Updated: After Silver pointed out that the title of today's blog said 2025, I changed it.
