In Common with Humans

I hope everyone who observes Easter or shares it with family had a great day! (Lent is over! 🙂 ) Everyone else, I hope your weekend was pleasant and peaceful. Easter was just another working day for me, except for having a chocolate bunny for breakfast, and I baked myself a nice mini-loaf of bread for supper:

It’s just regular everyday bread, though, nothing fancy like all those rich Easter breads.

We had beautiful weather all weekend, definable as, “we didn’t have two inches of rain both days.” Just kidding! It was just over 80 degrees on Saturday and just under 80 degrees on Sunday. The Nashua River dropped below flood stage, and Mass. Highway re-opened Rte. 119. “The damage [to the road] was not as great as anticipated,” the police website said–well, that’s good, and I’m sure there was great incentive to open the road before this morning’s commuter rush. It’s still closed up in Littleton where the culvert is being repaired, though.

Signs of spring: The laundry is hanging on the outside line today! For the first time since…well, I didn’t note it, but September, I think. It’s about 72 degrees, sun and clouds, breezy–everything might even be dry before I leave for Parish Committee meeting tonight. Other signs of spring: I’ve opened up the back windows, and I’m pining over the Mantis website. I think flood season is over. On to tornado season! 🙂

Krymsin Nocturnes got through Amazon’s vetting process and is “live” as a Kindle edition. It’s also been approved for Smashwords’ Premium Catalog and will go out with their next “shipments” to Sony, Apple, Barnes & Noble and Kobo. Lightning Source just shipped the proof copies of the hardcover and paperback editions I set up with them. Whew.

I’ve started blocking out the cover art for The Longer the Fall. I’ve renewed By Light Unseen Media’s ad on Facebook–if anyone sees it, do let me know! I tried it for a month in January and got no clicks at all, but it was pretty dull–I looked at it last night and thought, “what was I thinking??” I jazzed it up a little, not that Facebook gives you a lot of flexibility.

I’d still love to connect with someone, anyone, who has an iPad and can verify that BLUM’s titles are in the iBookstore. Is anybody out there an early adopter, or know someone who is?

Oh, and you can stop worrying: They caught the emu that was terrorizing Waltham. Assuming that was the only one. 🙂

A quiet day on this holiday weekend. I tend to buckle down to work around sunset. It reached 81 degrees and is a pleasant, warm, sunny day, but it feels like spring, not summer. Donelan’s was going to get some dates in from one of its other stores for me by today, but I’m loathe to go out. The Nashua River hasn’t dropped below flood stage yet, although it’s receding quickly. But Rte. 119 is still closed, and may not be opened until Monday after Mass. Highway checks the road for damage. (And that’s assuming there isn’t any, with a second inundation in two weeks.) So, we have Saturday traffic + detour traffic + shopping day before big family holiday traffic, and…I don’t need the dates for life support. *wry smile*

Anyway, I got mandatory Friday errands (mail and local newspaper) done yesterday, and I must have timed them perfectly because the traffic wasn’t too bad. I went to the Farmer’s Exchange for bunny pellets. They had baby chicks. 🙂

Last night I finished hand-editing and coding files for the ebook editions of Krymsin Nocturnes and uploaded them: Smashwords for ePub and other formats, Amazon for the Kindle edition. For Smashwords, I need to create a special Word .doc file with reviews at the front, text formated to their specifications, and a customized copyright page. For the Kindle, I am now hand-coding an html file of the entire book, which gives me the closest control over their conversion system. Then, both of those need to wait for vetting and approval. The Kindle edition is still waiting, on Amazon. The Smashwords edition is up and ready on Smashwords (and already getting some “sampling”) but is still pending approval for the “Premium Catalog” so it can go out to all the retail outlets: Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, and the Apple iBookstore. Mark Coker’s latest email update to publishers promises some new retail outlets coming soon, but evidently these are top-secret negotiations, because that’s all he’ll say.

I’ve set up Krymsin Nocturnes on Lightning Source for the hardcover and paperback editions and I’m waiting for the proofs now. I already have purchase orders from Brodart to fill, thanks to the Publishers Weekly review.

Meanwhile, all the information I can access says that Mortal Touch, Gideon Redoak and Cat the Vamp were all “shipped” to Apple on April 1 and should be in the iBookstore now. Trouble is…I can’t figure out how to verify this. You can’t access the iBookstore without an iPad. If any of you has an iPad and could check for BLUM’s titles, I’d be very grateful! I have iTunes but all I can see are the book “apps” that were already there for the iPhone. The iBookstore, it seems, is not something just anybody can browse–it’s an exclusive iPad club. My iTunes ran a full update on March 31, too, and has iPad options in it, but BLUM’s book titles don’t show if I run searches in the iTunes store, so they’re not there.

There doesn’t seem to be as much news about the iPad launch as I might have thought. All the turmoil that Apple is throwing the big publishers into with the “agency pricing” thing doesn’t affect me at all. I read the pricing requirements Apple gave Smashwords and just shrugged–except for the “end all prices in 99” bit, I was already there. Sony, apparently, is going through some big re-negotiating of price structures, and some of its ebooks have been pulled temporarily while that’s settled–this is according to the Sony ebookstore site. Smashwords still hasn’t “shipped” titles to Sony, they say that will happen any minute now.

I forebear to make any predictions about the ultimate impact of the iPad on publishing, computing, or anything else. The iPad reviews I’ve been reading fall into two camps: A) “It’s incredible, you can sit on your couch and watch TV on it!” B) “It sucks, all you can do is sit on your couch and watch TV on it.” But then, the very first Mac sucked, too, and we all know how that one turned out!

I just caught up with several days of news and absorbed a headline from yesterday for the first time: Health care hikes rejected: State tells insurers no on 235 plans for small groups. “Making good on Governor Deval Patrick’s promise to reject health insurance rate increases deemed excessive, the state Division of Insurance yesterday denied 235 of 274 increases proposed by insurers for plans covering individuals and small businesses.” That includes the huge announced hike from Fallon that forced me to downgrade my coverage to a higher copay/deductible plan. The insurance companies are squealing, and they’re going to appeal, but I could be getting a refund and a break on my health insurance, which would sure be nice! We “small group market” people are the ones who consistently get screwed over but good by all the insurance companies, and I’m really sick of it. I’m already paying a lot more for property taxes after the override vote to save the library last year, and now the library still might lose its accreditation, which I’m very unhappy about.

I wish it was all just an April Fool’s joke, but…*sigh* This is all getting about as tedious to write about as the interminable Account Cancelation Saga.

It’s lovely, sunny, mild and peaceful out, but just like two weeks ago, that’s deceptive. The Nashua River rose more than a foot higher than forecast and was 13.7 feet at 10:30 a.m. this morning. It’s receding very slowly and will still be over 12 feet tomorrow. Rte 119 is closed, along with Shirley Street south of it and River Street in Groton. If Main Street has to close, Pepperell residents will need to go up around through Nashua just to get from one side of town to the other (the post office is across the river from me, and I have to go there for my mail since mail isn’t delivered to my house). IOW, we’ll have to go through another state to get across town! This is because the covered bridge is closed for its restoration work–that and 119 are the only other bridges over the Nashua River in Pepperell. I used to think living in a town on a river was really cool, silly me. *wry look*

On top of that, the police website says there may be some harmless discoloration in the tap water today “due to the water break this morning” (no explanation of which break this is). But I definitely won’t complain, because I hear that Ayer residents are now boiling all their drinking water thanks to the town pumps being inundated!

And we thought February was rough. 🙁

I’m all testy and hyper because I’m waiting for the Smashwords “shipment” of BLUM titles to Sony and Apple. I’ve been waiting ages for Sony, and I’d really like to be in the Apple iBookstore for its launch on Saturday. I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do and re-checked it multiple times, now I just have to wait. I’m also getting ancy to see if The Longer the Fall will get any pre-pub reviews. If it does, they should be appearing soon. Since both Gideon Redoak and Krymsin Nocturnes got them, I’m daring to hope that my book has a fleeting chance. I shouldn’t get all invested in it, I know…

I’m happy to say that in Pepperell, the flooding is not quite as worse 🙂 as the last time. I got out and ran the local errands I didn’t do yesterday, in the nick of time: as of 3:35 p.m. Mass. Highway has closed Rte. 119 again down by the farm stand, according to the police department website. The river isn’t nearly as high as the epic levels I recorded in my video, and is only forecast to reach about 12.5 feet by tonight and then start to subside. (In the video, the river is at about 15 feet. 8 feet is flood stage.) “Officially,” we got 4.34 inches of rain in this last storm.

Other places are faring much worse. Rhode Island is in very serious shape. A section of Interstate 95 has been closed (first time I’ve heard of an interstate highway closing for anything but a blizzard), and Amtrak has stopped some train runs. In Fall River, a whole street and its sidewalks have buckled and disintegrated.

Closer to home, a section of 119 had already been closed near Littleton because of a culvert collapse, a few days ago, and Ayer’s water supply is threatened because three of the town’s four pumps were inundated with water. I am SO glad I no longer commute to work in the Acton area, which I did when I first bought this house, because the only ways to get there that avoid Rte. 119 double the distance and time. I’ll bet some talk gets started about major upgrading of Rte 119 when all this excitement settles.

All of BLUM’s titles are now opted in at Smashwords for inclusion in the Apple iBookstore (as unenhanced ePub editions). I must have been one of the first Smashwords publishers to jump in because I was monitoring the site waiting for the buttons to go up and punched everything through at 4:00 a.m. this morning. 🙂 It will be very exciting if we’re actually in the iBookstore for the April 3 launch; no guarantees, though. Supposedly I’m all set (finally!) for the Sony store as well, I’m just waiting for Smashwords to “ship.” My dedicated ISBNs have been on the books for months, I wish I’d known that was the hold-up with Sony before now.

Current weather alert from the NWS in Taunton (one of many):

…FORECAST FLOODING INCREASED FROM MODERATE TO MAJOR SEVERITY…
THE FLOOD WARNING CONTINUES FOR THE NASHUA RIVER AT EAST PEPPERELL.
* FROM THIS EVENING UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
* AT 11:30 AM TUESDAY THE STAGE WAS 6.2 FEET.
* FLOOD STAGE IS 8.0 FEET.
* MAJOR FLOODING IS FORECAST.
* FORECAST…RISE ABOVE FLOOD STAGE BY THIS EVENING AND CONTINUE TO RISE TO NEAR 15.1 FEET BY TOMORROW EVENING.
* IMPACT…AT 16.0 FEET…WIDESPREAD INUNDATION OF RESIDENTIAL AREAS ALONG THE NASHUA RIVER IS LIKELY. AREAS THAT WILL BE THE MOST IMPACTED INCLUDE PARTS OF EAST PEPPERELL…HOLLIS AND NASHUA. TAKE ACTION NOW TO PROTECT LIFE AND PROPERTY IF YOU LIVE IN A FLOOD PRONE AREA. FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT OFFICIALS. IF YOU ARE ASKED TO EVACUATE…DO SO IMMEDIATELY.

They’re using words like “unprecedented” and “record” and “100 year flood”–although not for this area so much as the South Shore, the corner of Massachusetts between the Cape and Rhode Island. In fact…exactly where my fictional characters in Rainbow Stone House live, their basement is definitely flooded, and probably parts of their road! They’re right in the middle of the region that’s been getting socked like this all winter and spring. It’s no laughing matter, the real world Fall River is in serious straits at the moment. 🙁 They might be getting up to ten inches of rain from this one storm!

It’s pouring. The end of my driveway and the grass section beside it are huge standing puddles. My Tuesday errands can wait. I’m betting that Rte 119 and other roads will be closed tomorrow. I’m just hoping we don’t lose the dam–or the bridge!

Okay, I know we pay them to be meteorologists, not writers, but…from the most recent weather alert from The National Weather Service local office in Taunton, Massachusetts, advising of a flood warning through tomorrow:

“FLOODING WILL BE AT LEAST AS WORSE AS IT WAS 2 WEEKS AGO.”

At least as worse! Oh, nooooooooze!!! I’ll have to make another video. *wry grin*

And speaking of climate stuff, did people notice this report on NPR?

Curiosity Rises With Trees’ Strange Growth Spurt

It seems that a forest just east of Washington D.C. is growing much faster than usual. Should we be surprised? After all, Mother Goddess could only paralyze the Republicans with snow for so long. Maybe She’s trying a new tactic!

“The Ents are going to wake up, and find that they are strong.” –Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings

(Hey, cut me some slack, it’s the Full Moon! 🙂 )

Here we are, waiting for the rain to start–again. Not just a little spring shower, no, they’re forecasting another three to six inches of rain through early Wednesday, followed by possible “major” flooding (again). Tomorrow is the Full Moon so the coast will see “astronomical high tides” along with easterly winds. It always rains on laundry day, *grump*. (I don’t own a dryer, everything has to hang in the laundry room to dry.) I’ll be doing a Full Moon ritual tomorrow night. There are some interesting astrological tie-ins this month.

Speaking of astrology, I got a pleasing surprise when I was switching my Internet subscriptions around. I had been getting the iVillage/astrology.com sun sign horoscopes, just to amuse myself, but every month I calculated the real transits to my natal chart and wrote them in my date book (the Celestial Guide astrological calendar from QuickSilver Productions, which isn’t merely a date book, it’s a whole almanac). I’d been wishing I could afford software that would run my transit calculations, and I was also looking for some widget that would display a real-time planetary wheel on my desktop. I hadn’t been able to find one.

I was very surprised when I went to astrology.com to sign up for the horoscope emails again and found something entirely different. Maybe I’d never entered my complete birth chart information before. I signed up for the “daily forecast” instead of the horoscope and started getting a daily email with every single real transit to my real natal chart listed on it, repeated each day that the transit is in orb, and each transit accompanied by a little graph showing where it is in its progress. Everything that I was laboriously doing by hand, plus visual aids, and totally free!

The “daily forecast” takes a bit longer to read than the sun sign horoscopes. *wry smile* But then, unlike the silly horoscopes, this report actually means something. But that’s not all. I’d been reading these for a couple of weeks before I even noticed the link at the top of each one: “today’s chart wheel.” I clicked on that, and bingo: up pops a chart wheel displaying my natal chart in the center with that day’s transiting planets around the outside…all accurate, and absolutely free! I just sat there with my jaw dropped, thinking, “when did this all happen?”

It’s kind of cool when you get something you really like and use, without even having to ask for it, entirely free of charge!

And speaking of birthdays…I was reminded of a silly bit of trivia this weekend. I think I noticed it when I read the books and forgot about it. Twilight’s Edward Cullen has the same birthday as mine: June 20. It’s not as common a birth date as most, for some odd reason.

And speaking of things you don’t want…the Account Cancelation Saga appears to finally be over. I didn’t hear back from Ms. Billing Department after I left my last message, but the next day, my NET1plus email and Postini accounts had finally been canceled. It doesn’t feel like much of a victory, though…the whole mess was just ridiculously and unnecessarily complicated, stressful and prolonged.

I’ve been turning the cover art into the the bookcover and dust jacket for Krymsin Nocturnes, and those are nearly done. I’ve formulated a new theory, however. I think this huge push toward ebooks is a massive conspiracy, coordinated by a secret underground cabal of colluding graphic artists whose nefarious goal is to never have to design a dust jacket ever again.

Just kidding. Well, mostly. 🙂 Dust jackets are a PITA, though–bleed width, trim width, flap width, flap bend, spine wrap…and it all has to be perfect or the cover and spine text will be misaligned. I guess they’re like a lot of things, you go through all the agony because they’re so effing cool-looking when they’re done. 🙂

And speaking of ebooks and astrology…um-hm. I never heard back from Apple about making BLUM’s titles available in the iBookstore (although a rumor went out that Apple posted a job opening for someone to liaison with small publishers). The launch date for the iPad and iBookstore is still supposed to be April 3. Today, one of my transits was Sun conjunct Part of Fortune. I got an email from Smashwords. Smashwords has signed a deal with Apple for their members to sell their titles in the iBookstore–possibly by April 3, when the store launches.

I’d wondered about that, but Mark Coker was playing this pretty close to the vest. With all the Amazon/Macmillan/pricing uproar, I can’t blame him. Apple is setting some stern rules, and I spent some time on my Smashwords dashboard tonight checking the three titles and adding or changing information. It turns out that not only Apple, but Sony, wanted all the Smashwords titles to have unique ISBNs, and that’s why Sony still hasn’t picked up BLUM’s (or any Smashwords) titles. I’ve been dedicating an ISBN to each title specifically for the Smashwords ebook edition, and I put that on the copyright page of each book. But Smashwords only just added a function to list the ISBN as part of the book’s “metadata” in its catalog.

So I’ve done that, and now, supposedly, the titles may be “shipped” to the Sony store very soon (and about time!!), and with luck, they’ll be going out to the iBookstore by April 3. We shall see. Apple has also set strict pricing formulas, the least of which is that every price has to end in 99. (*sigh*) I dropped all the prices by a penny. I was already up to par on just about everything else, unless there’s something wanky about the ePub formating, and I sure hope not.

And speaking of ebooks…I’ve been taking my netbook, Pigwidgeon, to bed with me and reading ebooks and manuscripts on him, and I’ve been amazed at how comfortable he is to read on. A couple of months ago, I had a bunch of queries to get through and I wasn’t feeling well, so I went to bed early with the queries on Pig. I figured I’d fall right to sleep, but it was so easy to snuggle in bed with Pig, I read for over two hours. He weighs less than some books, he’s very easy to hold in one hand with a thumb over the PgDwn key, and he does something no book can do: he keeps my hands warm! So, I’ve downloaded the free Kindle PC app onto Pig and I’m going to try out some Kindle books. I’m definitely becoming an ebook convert.

I love bound books. But when I’m really reading, I get lost in the material. I’m just as happy reading from a screen as a page, it’s the words that count. But that’s just me. We shan’t get into how unutterably pathetic it is that I’m so attached to my computers that I’m now taking them to bed with me, shall we? *wry grin* (it was only a matter of time…!)

I had a good time going to the free screening of The Twilight Saga: New Moon at the Lawrence Library in Pepperell on Saturday. It was great to get out of the house for a totally recreational, non-goal-oriented reason, and not have to drive for hours to do it! It was such a lovely, mild evening, I walked to the library and back.

The assistant director, Tina McEvoy, is a big vampire fan. She has a life-size standup cut-out of Edward outside her office door, and she did a free screening of Twilight the day it was released. I didn’t attend that time because I was doing a church service the next day–which would have been the case this past weekend if I hadn’t swapped the date for February.

The movie was screened in the downstairs conference room, and Tina ran it on a projector from her laptop. I sat in the front row of chairs, and I had a great view, but the speakers were a little behind me, so I missed bits of the dialogue. I’m sure I’ll see it again. The screening was lightly attended, which was kind of surprising. There were free refreshments, too. Edward greeted us when we came in, with a festive St. Patrick’s Day topper:

I liked the movie. I thought it was well done and a very faithful adaptation of the book. My criticisms mostly arise from exactly that fact: where the movie has flaws and weaknesses, they almost all originate in the book itself. I was particularly impressed with the improvement in Kristen Stewart’s and Rob Pattinson’s performances in this film. I thought they both give much, much better acting jobs, far more natural and emotive and less wooden than in Twilight. Since I doubt that they both got talent implants someplace between movies, I have to give some credit to the director. Of course, New Moon does give both of them a lot more to chew on than Twilight did.

The most effective element of New Moon is the stark change in Jacob after he becomes a werewolf. That’s just really well done–to the point where I kept remembering Bella’s plaint in the books about how much she missed the way Jacob would smile, and I could absolutely understand it. Taylor Lautner has that melting smile up until he changes and after that you just never see it. He really does a good job in this movie. You can just feel the simmering anger in him. He’s a lot scarier than the Volturi! I find the Volturi to be clichéd, two-dimensional and contrived, in the books and the movies, but Jacob is both realistic and convincing, possibly the most true-to-life and fully-developed of all Meyer’s characters (IMHO).

I’m sure this is controversial–I haven’t been reading any fan commentary about this film–but I liked the way the movie ended. I really liked it. Talk about a segue into film 3!

The CGI wolves…well, they’re okay. They’re CGI. Alice’s vision of vamp Bella and Edward frolicking in the woods…yes, that is silly. I’d have made different artistic choices there.

I often found myself wondering how confused a filmgoer who hadn’t read the books would be. There were times when I only knew what was going on because I’d read the book, and I felt the script could have/should have been clearer–for example, just what it is about Edward that the Volturi didn’t want to destroy. It was quite clear why Bella was taking risks to see Edward, but we never find out just why she does see him at those times, and it’s also not quite clear why she jumps off the cliff–in the movie, her motives seem rather muddled at that point. These sorts of loose ends are an occupational hazard of trying to be too faithful to the source material while still constrained for time.

After the movie I walked home, under a dark starry sky with the waxing crescent moon hanging in the west, and the spring peepers trilling in the distance. I didn’t need anything heavier than a denim jacket. It really was a nice evening!

I still haven’t done a general news update since March 8! So here’s a summary:

I finished up the edits of Blood Justice and sent them to the author on March 11. The other big thing I did that week was buy a new printer. I had a very modest HP 5400 deskjet printer that I bought for (IIRC) less than $100 six years ago. I vividly remember buying it because it was in January, I was still working at the shelter, and at the time my finances were just reaching a point at which I wasn’t clinging to every penny and buying nothing I didn’t genuinely, if not desperately, need. I went to Circuit City and walked out with two shiny boxes, a VCR and a printer, and a sense of euphoria: “I’m…buying consumer electronics! In a store! Just like a normal person!”

I’m very frugal. Shopping tends to be a novelty for me. *wry grin*

But this little printer wasn’t up to my current professional/business needs. Its upper paper tray had broken a couple of years ago, and while this didn’t keep it from printing, it was a nuisance. The print quality was deteriorating, and it was a low-end model, to start with. I’d been thinking about replacing it for a while.

Staples is running a special: if you “recycle” your old printer and buy a new one, they’ll give you a $50 credit. That’s a double deal because normally you have to pay to “recycle” your old printer. Not only that, but I had a brand-new, unopened set of ink cartridges for the old printer, which I bought at Staples, and I had the receipt.

So, I did online research and read user reviews, settled on an HP printer, the Photosmart B8550, that seemed to give me the optimum print quality at my price limit, and found that it was in stock at my “home” Staples in Nashua. Once I’d done all that, it turned out to be incredibly fast and easy to spend a lot of money. I don’t think it took me more than 60 minutes total to find the ink cartridges and receipt, disconnect the old printer and put it in a box, drive to Nashua, go to the shelf and grab the new printer, talk to the sales rep, go out to my car for the old printer, make the transaction, and drive home. Between the “recycling” credit and returning the ink, I saved $100, or more than a third of the price, on the new printer.

But this was another occasion when I didn’t wait a while and contemplate the box. For one thing, I didn’t have a printer until I got this one set up. I knew I was going to have to jump through some hoops to install the printer on three different computers and get it running on the wireless network with the wireless printer server–and I was right. That took me the rest of the evening and a certain amount of angst and agony. But it was finally all up and running and talking to everyone–and man. What an upgrade! It will handle oversize paper and small photo paper and the print quality is just amazing. I also hadn’t realized how big it was until I unpacked it–it’s HUGE! Well…that’s what I need. I’m a publisher!

After I sent off the edits of Blood Justice, I got started on the cover art for Krymsin Nocturnes, and that involved quite a bit of learning curve with the graphic editing tools, both hardware and software. I don’t really think it’s going to take me over a week to do every book cover! A couple of other things did slow me down a bit. On Saturday the 14th I learned, within the space of a couple of hours, about the sudden and premature deaths of loved ones of two of my online friends. That was very sad and not something I could just shrug off and forget about while I got work done. And while I was dealing with that, we had a “historic” rain storm and subsequent floods that kept me housebound for several days–not that I couldn’t have gotten out if it was urgent, but it would have had to be urgent to make it worth the stress and risk. So, last week pretty much consisted of me trying to put all those distractions out of my mind sufficiently to focus on finishing the cover art project.

At the same time, I’ve successfully cleared two really huge learning curves/hurdles/thresholds I’d been avoiding this month, with both graphic arts and video. Shooting the flood video and editing it in Sony Vegas showed me that yes, I can do video editing and I really “get” it, and that taking that class last fall was a very smart move on my part. My attitude toward the video projects on my long-term To-Do list has suddenly changed from an uneasy, “I’m going to have to figure out how to do all that pretty soon,” to an enthusiastic, “wow, the second I get a spare minute I’ve got to do more of that, because it’s great!” I just need to find out how to get video into a format that doesn’t take quite so long to upload. I’m still nailing down the technical details about compression and formats and so on.

I followed the health care reform vote on Sunday via the New York Times “live blog.” I had an echo of the incredulous awe I felt watching the election returns in November, 2008. This is the first major social legislation the United States has passed for almost fifty years. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a start!

Account Cancelation Saga: Yes, it’s still going on!! My NET1plus account was supposed to be canceled as of March 17. I know they haven’t billed my Discover card for any more charges because I monitor that directly online. I tried logging into my user account at NET1plus and got an error message saying it doesn’t exist. But…my NET1plus email is still active. I can still log into the webmail, which is handled by a third party service called IpsWitch, and Thunderbird is still downloading that mail, and my account at Postini is still active. Nothing is coming into them but spam, but I want all of those closed down. I want the NET1plus address to bounce. Everything that needs to be changed has been, for weeks now. I just left a message with Ms. Billing Department letting her know that the email and Postini accounts still haven’t been closed down. I don’t know if there’s a delay, or they just plain forgot.

I just finished a DVD review that was over deadline, the edits are back for Blood Justice and I’m about to start the cover art for The Longer the Fall. I’m starting to see and feel results from my amplified workouts, but I’m still having trouble getting back to my dietary regimen, which is frustrating.

And I have a new conundrum. While I was working on the cover art for Krymsin Nocturnes, I was getting some ominous hiccups from Paint Shop Pro, and I started to suspect that I should upgrade it. It’s version 9 and I last upgraded several years ago. So, I went to check out how to do that, and was unhappy to discover that I can’t. Paint Shop Pro was published by Jasc, and Corel bought out Jasc, and now Corel doesn’t support Paint Shop Pro. They have a new version for photo editing called Paint Shop Photo, or they have their own graphics program called Corel Draw. I can’t “upgrade” from an old version of Paint Shop Pro to any current Corel package.

I can buy Corel Draw for $599…or I can get Adobe PhotoShop, which people have been telling me I should do since the graphics department manager at Storey Publishing pounced on me over this point back in 2007. Or…for just $100 more than buying PhotoShop as a standalone, I can “upgrade” to the entire Adobe Creative Suite CS4 based on the fact that I have Adobe InDesign CS4. That would be the best deal by far, and I’m seriously thinking about it. Usually, when I think this hard, I’m going to be dropping some bucks in the very near future. *wry smile* It only makes it easier that the Kindle edition of Mortal Touch continues to be a hot seller (thank you, Kindle fans!)–and that I’ll be saving $70 per month on phone and internet with the switchover I just made.

I’ll report my decision. 🙂

“Okay. We know it’s a little clichéd – but here’s what we want to tell the Census: We’re here. We’re queer. And we want you to ask us about it.

“It’s crazy – the Census wants an accurate count of everyone in the country, and yet, there’s NO question in the Census survey that asks if you are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender!

“You read that right: LGBT people are basically invisible in THE survey that is designed to accurately reflect the diverse reality of America’s population – and beyond being downright ridiculous, it’s also a big problem.

“The census isn’t just a numbers game. The data collected every ten years has a direct impact on issues that are critical to every American – issues like health care, economic stability and safety. Census data tells us where we live and how we create family. And when LGBT people are not counted, then we also don’t count when it comes to services, resources … you name it.

“The good news is that you and I can do something about it. It’s time to Queer the Census! Join me and sign the petition from The Task Force urging the Census Bureau to make sure everyone is counted.

“Visit http://www.queerthecensus.org to take action now.”