In Common with Humans

I’ve been engaged with major creative projects–the kind that take days to finish while the newspapers pile up unread and the garden goes neglected, I stay up past my bedtime, sleep badly thinking about what hasn’t gotten done and wake up angsting and sweat-soaked. *sigh*

Cover design for Blood Justice is done. This was a really tough one. I tried out and discarded a dozen ideas and looked at tons of book covers for similar, best-selling books online. The latter tended not to be very helpful because the industry standard for this subgenre (mystery/thriller novels), as a rule, is to print the author’s name and book title in enormous type, filling most of the cover space, and if there’s any art at all, it’s subtle, small, and/or mostly covered by the lettering. Often, there is no art, just “design work.” But I finally settled on a concept and implemented it, which took several days.

I’ve made up a promotional postcard, back and front, and sent that to the printer last night, as a rush job.

I think I’ve resolved the Baker & Taylor (wholesalers) and in relation to that, the Borders question. Long story, and requires more follow-up on my part, but I did get past the brick walls and establish what the block was and what I can do about it.

Today’s top priority is the Readercon Souvenir Book, which is going to get done barely under the wire. I’ve just gotten materials from the person editing the articles and so on, and stuff is still coming in! Yesterday afternoon was the last Readercon Committee meeting before the con. I have a few programming things I’ll be doing, but I’m waiting for the final schedule to post them, since there was already a change in the initial panel assignment I was sent.

Dad’s last two band concerts (June 17 and 24) both dodged bullets and were held despite ominous weather forecasts and/or violent storms that just missed us and/or were over and gone well before concert time. So, of the first four concerts only one, the second one, has been cancelled for rain so far! The weather for this Thursday sounds like it will be gorgeous. It will be nice not to be in suspense wondering if the band concert will be rained out or not! I take Pig with me and get work done at the concerts–sure wish I could snag a wireless connection on Townsend Common, though! (There are wireless signals, but no public ones.)

My vegetable garden desperately needs weeding and thinning but is doing well otherwise–the tomatoes are blossoming. The black raspberries in the back yard are starting to ripen. The lawn mower is still at the repair shop as they had to back-order a part, but they just told me the part came in and the mower should be ready tomorrow.

No further computer problems and no more critters where they shouldn’t be! (Or where they should be. I have four cats and I sleep alone! *grump*) It’s a hot, humid day today, and we’re under a severe thunderstorm watch (no storms imminent on the radar just yet). I did the laundry and hung it outside before I went to bed (at 5:30 a.m. this morning), so it’s all dry and brought back in now and won’t get rained on. 🙂 I’m going to be hitting CTRL-S about every two seconds while I work, because this computer isn’t like the laptops–if the power blips my work goes with it!

I don’t know what to do about the bunny–I bought a different brand of pellets for him and he won’t touch them. I may have to throw 20 pounds of bunny food onto the compost pile, as I doubt anyone will take them after the bag has been opened. I don’t know why he doesn’t like them! Very annoying. He’s not supposed to be finicky, he’s a rabbit! But he’s always thought he was a cat, *snort.*

I’ve finished downloading (from iTunes) and cycling to all of Season Two of Fringe, plus the extra “unaired episode,” so I just saw the two-part Season Finale. My comments? OMG!!!! He…and she’s…and they’re…I can’t believe they ended it like that!!!!! Can’t say more, that would be spoilers. 😉

And this is all the time I can take on a post! Hope everyone is having a good day! Stay cool and watch out for those flash floods, tornadoes, oil spills, and G20 protesters (I’m scared to read the news these days!)! paganpaul: I’m just seething with envy. *g*

The chipmunk has been successfully returned to its natural habitat. 🙂 Last night, I made a couple of focused attempts to flush the chipmunk out of hiding and catch it. I only succeeded in further traumatizing the chipmunk and dislodging lots of dust balls and lost cat toys from underneath various furniture, and gave up.

When I got up today, the chipmunk did us both the favor of chirping when I walked into the hall. After what I’m sure were more harrowing close calls, the chipmunk was hiding behind the door to the spare room. Forty-eight hours of stress, hunger and thirst (poor little guy) had finally slowed him down enough that I was able to pop a large bowl over him before he got out of the tight space he was cornered in. Then I slid a piece of cardboard under the bowl and out the door we went. What a relief! He certainly beat the odds, surviving for that long in the house with four cats, but I hope he stays outside!

I seem to be seeing (and hearing) a lot more chipmunks and birds this year but fewer gray squirrels (almost none). Is anyone else noticing that?

I hope everyone is having a blessed Litha and a nice Summer Solstice, wherever you may be. We’re certainly having perfect weather here for it–hot, not too humid, sunny and clear.

Haven’t been posting because I’ve been really busy, and still am, for a while longer. Yesterday was my birthday, but I spent it doing Father’s Day with Dad in the afternoon and then observing Solstice all night. I didn’t go to bed until after ritual ended at 7:18 a.m. local time, so I’m tired and have a little ritual wine hangover today.

My birthday certainly had an interesting beginning, though. I can’t actually say (to paraphrase a well-known quote) that, if you wake up with a live chipmunk under your pillow, nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day. I can posit two things, however:

1. The odds are definitely in your favor, and,

2. whatever happens, you’ll have a better day than the chipmunk is having.

I should have known that Giles and Cerridwen weren’t that interested in me when they kept getting up on the bed and sniffing around my head. It’s no hard deduction to guess what happened: Giles caught the chipmunk, was fleeing the other cats, ran into the bedroom and jumped on the bed, lost the chipmunk when he jumped (he does that a lot) and the chipmunk dashed to the closest available cover, which was under my pillows. There he stayed until I got up and started to make the bed, whereupon we both got a Big Surprise.

The chipmunk has so far eluded all of us and is somewhere in the living room right now. I’m hoping I can catch him before the cats do, and before he dies of thirst in some little cranny. 🙁 He’s just a little one, but he’s sure fast!

I wanted to live in the country, and I love being close to nature, and I love having a rustic kind of home…but live chipmunks in bed with me? That’s just a little too much. Here’s hoping that your Sunday/Father’s Day wasn’t quite so exciting!

I’m not doing too well at posting more often! But it’s been a somewhat frustrating week.

Publishing news: Book sales are steadily increasing. As of June 30, Amazon will double the royalties it pays on Kindle books. The Longer the Fall now appears in the catalog for Powells Books, but still is not up on Kobo and is still “processing” on Google Books. I’m waiting for the short runs to be delivered from Lightning Source.

I tried advertizing on Facebook for one month and didn’t see any perceptible return on my investment (which was rather a lot of money) in sales or traffic on BLUM’s website. Nevertheless, I was still thinking of trying out Google AdWords, and had set up an account a couple of months ago. Google kept sending me cheery little reminders about that. 🙂 They also sent a free $100 credit, which I received both in email and snail mail. (Yes, amazingly enough, Google sent an actual piece of paper mail!) The email offer expired on May 31, and I missed the deadline by accident.

I was putting away paperwork last week, however, and realized that the snail-mail credit had a different deadline: June 11. I could still take advantage of it. So, just in the nick of time, I created several ads (Google rotates them) and started a “campaign” running. It has the same pattern the Facebook one did: because I’m being very strict about my per diem limits until I see what return I get, the ad runs for 2/3 of the day and then stops until the next 24-hour period, making for funny-looking graphs and evoking cheery little hints from Google that I should increase what I’m paying them.

But.

So far–and it’s only been a couple of days–the click-through rate on my Google AdWords ads is MUCH better than it was for my Facebook ads. And, every click on the Google ad goes right to BLUM’s website. I never was sure where clicks on the Facebook ad ended up, because the SiteMeter traffic counter on the website sure didn’t show any big uptick in hits. This coming Friday (when I get the SiteMeter weekly report), we’ll see what the Google ads are doing.

I went up to Dad’s on Friday afternoon and missed a call back from Baker & Taylor, which blows. 🙁 I honestly didn’t expect they’d call me back! So now the telephone tag game is afoot, and at least I have a definite person and her individual number to call, instead of whirling around the endless voice mailstrom as I was doing. I called back and left a message apologizing for missing her and promising to call on Monday, which I will. I haven’t heard anything from Lightning Source’s distribution department about why Baker & Taylor won’t list any BLUM titles after the paperback edition of Mortal Touch. I hope I have better luck!

If only I could get so far with Sony. Smashwords was supposed to ship to Sony on Friday. None of BLUM’s books show as shipped in the distribution channel manager on my Smashwords dashboard. I just don’t know what the hell is happening with Smashwords and Sony, and Mark Coker isn’t talking! Neither is Sony, who has not replied to my publisher “application.” If twenty or thirty people who owned Sony Readers went to the Sony website and filled out the title request form they have asking for BLUM’s titles to be available in the Sony Reader Store, it might have a positive impact. But right now, I only know of three people who own Sony Readers!

However, The Longer the Fall has shipped to the Apple iBookstore, and should appear there in just a couple more days.

Aside from that…Dad’s band concert was cancelled due to pouring rain on Thursday. That sucked. On Friday, I went up to Dad’s to help him with some work around the house, and ostensibly to help put in the docks. But we never got to the docks, because Dad was pooped by the time we finished everything else. That makes four times that I’ve rearranged my day and/or actually gone up to Dad’s to help put in the docks, and they’re still not in! I got to spend some nice quality time with Dad, though.

Dad gave me a really cool early birthday present. He just bought himself a new Dell Inspiron laptop computer, and he told me that he’d gotten me something. He was very eager to give it to me. He kept saying that he thought it was something I “could use right away,” and he saw it and he just had to get it. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued! Whatever could this be? I was happy to wait until my birthday–I have no problems with deferred gratification–and I’d like to unwrap a present on the actual day, which practically never happens. But dad really, really wanted to give me his gift.

His anticipation was justified because he got me the greatest thing!! When I got my new computer, I bought one of those little Wacom pen tablets for digital graphic art. But I was economizing so I just bought one of the inexpensive little low-end models. Dad bought me a big one–top of the line, a real professional caliber pen tablet. And here I just invested in Adobe Creative Suite CS5 so I have Illustrator and PhotoShop now, and I’m doing original illustrations for book covers now from scratch. Dad couldn’t have given me a more perfect gift! Even if he didn’t wrap it, oh well! I oohed and ahed and thanked Dad over and over. I was really very pleased!

Unfortunately, the last three days have been a complete loss work-wise and very stressful, and the tablet inadvertently kicked that off. Oh, no fault of the tablet, there’s nothing wrong with it. But here’s what happened.

The tablet came with all these bonuses, including a rather astonishing collection of free optional software. One of the software bundles was PhotoShop Elements, and when I went to download it, I saw that it was pretty large, and I’ve been downloading all these TV episodes in iTunes, so it occurred to me that I should check my hard drive’s status. I was startled to see that my hard drive was almost full. Since I thought I had dual 320GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration, that just didn’t seem right.

Well, I thought I had two 320GB drives. The system thought it had two 320GB drives. Windows thought it only had one, 130GB drive–which is squat. I logged into Dell’s online chat support, and, to make a long story and two very long nights short, after four sessions with Dell tech support and many many hours of running diagnostics…

…I had to wipe and reconfigure the hard drives and install Windows 7 and everything else from scratch.

Nothing was wrong with the hard drives. Nothing was wrong with anything! But the only way to reconfigure the drives and partitions and get Windows to recognize them was to start from square one.

I gave Dad an external hard drive that he hadn’t started using yet, so on Saturday I was back at the lake begging it off him to back up my system. My flash drives weren’t sufficient for this. I also helped Dad with a couple of things and we had another nice visit before I came home and ran a full system backup (which took hours). I didn’t lose any data files. I have tons of drive capacity now–because I agreed with one of the techs that I didn’t really need the RAID if I was going to be backing up to external hard drives, and I’m a backup fanatic, I back up my data every day. I got the wireless network up and the printer set back up with a minimum of trouble, got email restored into both email clients, it’s all gone about as smoothly as recovering from a complete hard drive reconfiguration could possibly go. But everything has to be reinstalled, and then I’ve had to find and re-enter registration keys for things, and I have to reactivate Office 2007 and there seems to be a problem on Microsoft’s end, and nothing looks quite the same as it did before, and I’ve lost all my browser history and saved passwords, and…*sigh* Just a million little things that have to be restored and rebuilt and redone.

Dell tech support was extremely helpful, I must say. It remains the case that this whole problem was caused because somebody at Dell f*cked up when they built my system and shipped it with the wrong hard drive configuration. But then, I didn’t check it properly when it arrived, either. I was so fussed getting the wireless network and email clients set up, it didn’t occur to me to doublecheck every detail of the system configuration and make sure it was right. I guess I know better!

So that’s set me back a couple of days. It’s always something!!! My garden is doing great, but it’s been wet and rainy since last Thursday. I’m going to have to mow the lawns the minute I get the mower back. That should be soon because the repair shop gave me the estimate and I approved it (very reasonable, IMO). I haven’t gotten to play with my new tablet yet and I have plenty of art projects to use it for that need to be done, like, yesterday–starting with the cover art for Blood Justice, whose author will be promoting it at Comic Con in San Diego and needs promo materials, and the Readercon 21 Souvenir Book. So, out of another pothole and full speed ahead!

I got back from running errands to find both sample copies of The Longer the Fall stuffed into the newspaper box with the newspaper. At least they weren’t lying on the ground! Both the covers are perfect. Now I’m ordering the short runs of both editions so I can fill orders and start sending out review copies. I’ve finally won the war! This benighted book has been PUBLISHED!! 🙂

Now I’m just waiting for the world to come to an end or something…for years, I’ve had the weirdest feelings about this book. Maybe I’ve purged the karma now, but…!

I’ve found a new online source for ordering BLUM’s titles: Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego. All our books are in their catalog, including The Longer the Fall which Powells Books hasn’t picked up yet. Thanks to jimhines for posting a link that brought the store to my attention!

Having consummated the telephone tag game with Borders, I have now commenced pursuit of wholesalers Baker & Taylor. I know Lightning Source is looking into their failure to list BLUM titles, but Lightning Source doesn’t know about all the Publishers Weekly and Library Journal reviews. So far, I’ve been roaming B&T’s voice mail hell–I just sent them a courteous email today. I really want to get this resolved, not least because Borders is bucking all trends and opening a brand new, 24,479-square-foot store in Dedham, Massachusetts this week, in the Legacy Place lifestyle complex. (Map it!) They’ll have free wifi (my personal sine qua non for any location on earth). 🙂 Shelf Awareness says they’re having Grand Opening Celebrations the weekend of June 25-27. It would be nice if BLUM’s titles were in their shiny new system!

Amazon has installed Search Inside This Book on The Longer the Fall. Google, the Treebeard of the Internet, is still “processing” The Longer the Fall on Google Books. I haven’t heard any further updates on “Google Editions.” Apple has just announced that the iBookstore will be available for the iPhone, so people without iPads will be able to buy iBookstore titles.

Readercon Committee meeting yesterday afternoon ended up reminding me of a story I read as a kid in one of the old Warren Publications horror comics (Creepy, Eerie, one of those). The story was called “The Game” and it really was a rehash of an old “urban legend” ghost story. In it, a boy coming home from a party with the door prize, a Scrabble game, takes shelter in an abandoned house and spends the night playing the game with the house’s mysterious occupant, inside a curtained four-poster bed. In the morning, the boy’s father finds him, and the boy is stunned to see that the bed is sitting, all by itself, in the middle of a streambed–the house had been washed away by a flash flood overnight leaving nothing but the bed behind. The mysterious gaming partner has, of course, vanished.

The Committee was meeting in an office conference room, and we became aware that it had gotten dark outside–really dark. The small building seemed to have impressive soundproofing because all I could hear from outside was muffled, vague rumbling sounds from time to time. But someone went outside and reported that it was just deluging out, so we all had to look. At our exclamations (“I think I just saw Charlton Heston,” someone said), people who were teleconferencing in by speaker phone from New York cheerfully said yes, New York was under a tornado watch!

I had Pig with me and had connected to the office wireless in case I needed to refer to things online for the meeting, and I punched up the weather. Not only did the radar show a huge, very nasty storm going right over our location, but we were under a tornado watch, too!

By the time we wrapped up, the storm was well past, everything was calm and it was clearing. But when I left to drive home, there were tree limbs down all over the place, roads flooded with huge puddles–it must have been wild out there. And we’d entirely missed it, all hunkered down around a crowded conference room table and speaker phone and immersed in discussions. I went home and saw more storm reports online, including the massive tree that demolished a parked car in Brookline–holy mackerel. The poor car was not only smashed, its wheels were driven hubcap-deep into the ground!

There were three confirmed tornadoes in New England yesterday: in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The National Weather Service is not confirming tornadoes for any of the damage in Massachusetts, however, calling that a “macroburst” or straight-down wind blast. I don’t know…some mighty big trees came down and some of them appeared to have been twisted right up out of the ground. But lacking eyewitness evidence of a funnel cloud, the NWS calls it.

Pepperell apparently missed the brunt of the storms. My garden is really growing like mad now. All the potatoes are up, they were the last to break ground, and everything else is developing so fast! No flowers on the regular tomatoes yet but they do have flower buds. Meanwhile, I haven’t taken any further steps with the greenhouse-to-be. I have a lot of publishing work that needs my attention, and the greenhouse isn’t urgent. It’s on the list of things I’d like to have done by the end of the summer. I got my sister’s birthday present today and need to mail that out. It’s nice to have a break from the hot, humid weather we were having, but it will be back!

I’m going to try hard not to let so much time pass between updates!

Publishing news:

This being the lesser and more routine news after the thrilling headline I just posted… 🙂

The Longer the Fall is now “in stock” and immediately available on Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle editions. Links to each are on the book detail page on BLUM’s website. I uploaded the “Search Inside This Book” file to Amazon but that will take a few days to appear–meanwhile, you can read an excerpt on the BLUM detail page (and you can “sample” it on Smashwords, too). It will appear in Barnes & Noble’s e-store in about six weeks and on Kobo in about two, I think. It hasn’t been shipped to Apple yet, but their turnaround is very fast. I’m still waiting for the sample copies to make sure the covers are printing okay, but they’ve both been shipped. I uploaded the finished version to BLUM’s annex on Lulu.com, where you can buy a paperback or ebook edition for the same price as Amazon’s editions. I uploaded The Longer the Fall to Google Books, as well, where it is still “processing.” (I think Google’s real motto is, “Don’t be hasty.”)

As far as Sony goes, I’m no longer sure whether BLUM’s titles were ever shipped to Sony by Smashwords or not. The information from Smashwords is conflicting and Sony has apparently been giving Smashwords a very hard time. I have not received any response from Sony to my last attempt to apply as an independent vendor for their ebook store. But I had to send in the application about three times before I finally got a reply the last time (and then the reply boiled down to, “get lost.”)

I had been playing telephone tag with the contact person at Borders’ corporate office in Michigan, in an effort to discover why BLUM’s first title, Mortal Touch, was the only book listed on Border.com when all our titles have the same distribution parameters with Lightning Source. I’d gotten sidetracked in those calls, but I tried again yesterday and reached the representative–who instantly recognized my name! (Yeesh, I’m not getting to be a pest or anything, am I? I wonder if By Light Unseen Media’s name is on some blacklist at Sony! 8-( )

Anyway, the answer to the Borders dilemma turns out to be…that the rest of BLUM’s titles aren’t listed in Baker & Taylor’s catalog! They’re supposed to be. I have a signed, formal distribution agreement with Lightning Source that includes Baker & Taylor. Baker & Taylor has a reputation among small publishers that…well, “notorious for…” could be used many times in describing their business dealings with vendors. They’re locked up tight, you have to be a registered customer to even find out if a title is in their catalog. I did try calling Baker & Taylor about ten days ago and they didn’t even answer the number given on their website as the one to check whether an item is in their inventory. I can’t enroll as a vendor with them independently as long as I’m working with Lightning Source. I tried, because membership in IBPA includes a discount on Baker & Taylor’s hefty account fees. But Baker & Taylor told me I couldn’t sign up with them as long as I was printing through Lightning Source.

Just to reiterate, Borders requires that titles be available through Baker & Taylor to be sold on Borders.com or carried in stores. That’s why I wanted to get into Baker & Taylor, because so many bookstores will only order from them.

I thanked the Borders representative, who was very pleasant, and called my rep at Lightning Source. Would you believe that not even Lightning Source has a way of checking Baker & Taylor’s catalog?!? However, she is going to send the information on the non-listed titles to Lightning Source’s distribution department and see if they can figure out why Baker & Taylor isn’t listing those titles, and hopefully correct it. She said, however, that they have no control over what Baker & Taylor chooses to list, they can only send them the information.

Meanwhile, all of BLUM’s titles will be part of Borders’ ebook store, because they’re partnering with Kobo for that, and we’re in Kobo! So, you’ll be able to buy BLUM’s titles as ebooks from Borders but not as bound books as long as we’re not listed by Baker & Taylor!

Let’s hope we can convince Baker & Taylor that they’re extremely short-sighted to be snubbing titles that have been reviewed by PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (3 of them) and LIBRARY JOURNAL (2 now and counting)!!!!!

In other news, I was very relieved and pleased that Dad’s first band concert of the season was NOT cancelled last night and went very well. The Common was mobbed with people, the band played wonderfully (they get better every year) and I had nice chats with Dad on the break and after the concert. A line of storms came through in the afternoon, but as often happens, we only got a little rain while other spots in the state got clobbered, and the sun had come out by the time the concert started. I took Pig with me and spent the whole concert reading a full manuscript from my backlogged queue.

The garden is really gathering momentum–only the potatoes are still on the verge, everything else is up and growing like mad. I have a slight moral conundrum with the soon-to-be-greenhouse, though. It’s inhabited, and the critter is resisting the strong hints that it’s time to move.

It’s a woodchuck, which I knew lived under the screen house. He had a burrow entrance under the front of the structure, but after the roof was broken by a large fallen branch some winters ago, and leaking water rotted out some of the floor, the woodchuck made two burrow entrances inside the screen house. I knew about one, I didn’t realize there were two until I cleared out all the junk. I swept all the earth and stones and so on back into the burrows–and the woodchuck tossed them out again. Rinse, repeat…and today, the burrows have both been rather aggressively cleaned out. They look bigger than ever, so…we’ve got a little tussle of wills going on here.

This is worrisome, because my plans for the new floor in there are fairly serious. I’m going to fill in the rotted areas and the burrows with sand, put down heavy plastic sheeting, then put down a whole new floor of plywood, and probably put a tarp over the plywood, to help keep it from getting wet and rotting. It’s a greenhouse, not a living space, so it can be rustic–but I want it fairly solid. The sides will all have firmly tacked plastic sheeting down to ground level. I hope that the woodchuck can get out via that front burrow and he just doesn’t want to. But if he can’t…I hate to think the he’ll be trapped when I put in the new floor, and die in the burrow. It’s cruel, and he’ll stink up the greenhouse (another reason I don’t want to try, say, used kitty litter down the holes). Even worse, what if he’s a she and has babies in there? I’ve never seen more than one at a time, but it looks like a big burrow.

So, I’m unhappily considering all this. On Wednesday I tried using the hose and spray nozzle to clean the roof and it was 100% successful. Today, for the first time, I saw what the structure will be like in full sun with the clean roof, and it’s perfect. This will be a splendid greenhouse! I’m not going to change my plans because of a woodchuck! But either he needs another entrance to his burrow, or he’s got to move.

That’s the trouble with Nature! So darned uncooperative! *wry look* And yes, I know woodchucks are edible, heh. If I could catch him, I wouldn’t have this problem!

Breaking news! This just appeared on the Barnes & Noble page for The Longer the Fall–it got reviewed by Library Journal!! That’s two pre-publication reviews–that I know about, so far!

Wow. Wow. I’m just…wow. I just spotted this, I’m working on a longer post and was checking URLs for links and…wow!

Excerpt: “Second in a series of connected stories about modern vampires and their covert society, this dark fantasy by the author of Mortal Touch features memorable characters and a plot sure to attract fans of vampire fiction.”

THANK YOU, Library Journal!!

I know, it’s been a whole week without an update. Things have been extremely disrupted for the past eight days or so. A detailed account would only be tedious. Nothing major, but there’s just been one ridiculous pothole, pratfall and misfiring after another, many of them claiming hours of pointless or unplanned time out of my day. It was a holiday weekend and half the people I know seemed to be off at Wiscon or Balticon or Rites of Spring, or just back from BEA.

Publishing news:

I’m still not quite ready to officially announce The Longer the Fall. I put through the revised covers with Lightning Source Inc., and I have a copy of each edition on order, expedited with two-day shipping. If they’re still not okay, I’ll have to upload (and pay for) yet more “revisions.” I hope the covers will now be acceptable, but it kind of worries me that the same cover image is displayed for both editions with the book information on LSI, when the back covers are drastically different. I don’t know what’s going on there, so I’m just waiting, with a certain fatalism, for the sample books to arrive. (The covers are not interchangeable, one is the wrap-around paperback cover and one is a dust jacket, they aren’t even close in size.) I have orders to fill, and I’ll have to order the short runs and wait for them to be delivered before I can ship those.

Meanwhile, I punched through the Kindle edition, but it’s still being “reviewed” by Amazon. It should be available any minute now, though. The Smashwords edition was finally approved for the Premium Catalog and has already shipped to Barnes & Noble and Kobo, but will take several weeks to appear in their catalogs.

It turned out to be a good thing I waited to mail all the pre-publication review copies of Blood Justice at the same time, because I just found out that Publishers Weekly has moved to new offices, as well as Library Journal! All the ARCs went out today. Keep your fingers crossed!

Plans to help Dad get the docks in at the lake aborted three days in a row. I went up there on Friday afternoon, waited for two hours, and it turned out that through a complete miscommunication, Dad meant Saturday when we talked on Thursday. Once I got over being upset (partly because I was worried about where Dad was–he didn’t have his cell phone on him), I had a nice visit with Dad, but then I thought I’d be spending a chunk of the following day helping with the docks. So I planned for that, but just before I was going to leave the house on Saturday, Dad called and said they were postponing the docks for a variety of reasons. On Sunday, Dad was conducting a Memorial Day concert with the Townsend Military Band and the new plan was to do the docks after the concert. I went to Townsend for the concert, but when Dad arrived, he said the dock plans were postponed again–I can’t even remember why, now!

I certainly observed Memorial Day, in any event. The concert time was vaguely announced as “after the parade,” so I went to Townsend in time to see the end of the parade and the final ceremonies on the Common. I say “final” because Townsend takes Memorial Day very seriously and had a whole series of events starting at 9:30 a.m. and running until around 5:30 p.m. The ceremony I watched included speeches, readings of “In Flanders Fields” and The Gettysburg Address, a band number, taps, a prayer, a rifle volley and the placing of wreaths. After the concert, Dad and I went to a restaurant for supper. It was beautiful weather, although quite windy.

I’ve continued working out in my yard and garden most days. The screen house has made serious (not to say, amazing) progress in its transformation into a greenhouse. I’m ready to order the supplies I need to finish it (plywood, plastic sheeting and a piece of plastic to patch a hole in the roof). I got the vegetable garden entirely planted before the Full Moon on Thursday (in other words, everything was in during the waxing moon–just barely!). Most things are coming up, some of them just becoming visible here and there, some of them already bursting from the ground like they were being chased. None of the transplants have died or been eaten yet, not even an embryonic little basil sprig that I decided to go ahead and put in just for the heck of it–it’s growing, to my amazement. I’ve put in potatoes, with marigolds planted next to them, onions, garlic, basil, peppers, cherry tomatoes, standard tomatoes, Brussels sprouts with marigolds planted on both sides of them (I know you’re supposed to start Brussels sprouts in pots–but I planted them for the heck of it and they’re coming up), carrots, zucchini, small sugar pumpkins, and the row nearest the driveway is blue gladiola and bachelor’s buttons. I thought I’d plant flowers in BLUM’s colors. 🙂

We had a rip-roaring thunderstorm last Wednesday night, which gives you a good clue about where my head is at: at the first, completely unexpected BOOM, I leapt from my chair and went running out to bring in the chain saw, which I’d left outside with the garden equipment. Lightning was flashing away and I was madly pulling tarps over things and rescuing my chain saw! On Thursday, I did a Full Moon ritual. I’ve made four trips, so far, to the transfer station with a car full of crap, and there will be many more such trips through the coming months.

The topper, however, occurred yesterday–when I ended up at the Registry of Motor Vehicles for a chunk of the afternoon. It seems that I’d let my driver’s license expire…ages ago! I didn’t have a clue! Nor did anyone else! It’s not like I ever look at it! I was trying to cash the Verizon prepaid debit card at the bank and they asked for ID. I gave them my license, and the teller told me it had expired! EEP!!!! So I went scurrying straight down to the Registry office in Leominster, after filling out the application online and printing it out, which expedited the renewal significantly. I didn’t get into trouble for driving around on an expired license–I mean, it’s a technicality, I’m a good driver with a clean record, but it’s still illegal! 8-( I barely squeaked by the vision test because of my bad right eye, but fortunately, the Registry person passed me. I guess my penance is that my license now has the most gawd-awful photo in history…no, really. I defy you to beat this one. But, as this experience proves, odds are that almost no one will ever see it! *wry smile*

Today, I took the electric lawn mower to the repair shop. 🙁 I have a reel mower on which one of the wheels had seized up, and I applied WD-40 to it–with success! The reel mower works perfectly now! It badly needs sharpening, however, and I’m wondering if my Dremel tool will handle that job. The reel mower would be helpful for trimming the thickest areas of the lawn between power mowings (doing that with the weed whacker is a pain). WD-40 is my BFF…I’m just sayin’!!!

The way things have been going, I’m very glad that I didn’t try to attend a convention or gathering this past weekend! But I won’t be doing conventions for a while, and at some point I’ll make a post explaining why in more detail. I hope all my friends who went to events had a great time! Right now, I’m fervently hoping that Dad’s first weekly band concert of the season won’t be rained out tomorrow night–“scattered thunderstorms” are in the forecast, and you never know where they’ll end up scattering.

Woof, it’s really a scorcher. My kitchen window thermometer topped out at 98° (it hit 94° yesterday). That’s about 25° above “normal” temps for this time of year. After freezing all winter, I’m not complaining, but I’m not going to do heavy yard work in this weather, either!

Yesterday was an oddly chatty day. I went to the bank to deposit a check (and got a handwritten deposit slip because the bank’s network was down). A local resident who had been involved with one of the most contentious issues at Town Meeting, which I got up and spoke on, introduced herself to me and raved about how well I spoke. I did get some applause, but my personal sense was that I rambled on for too long and was just “preaching to the choir” and probably didn’t influence the opponents at all. The resident yesterday seemed to think I did! She was effusive in her appreciation (the article passed), and that was nice to hear, anyway.

Then I went down to the Natural Market in Groton looking for unsalted nut butters, and chatted for a bit with the sales assistant there. I’d love to visit that store more often, but Groton center is really a pain to get into and park because of the traffic on Rte. 119, Groton’s Main Street. I should check and see if I can park in back of the store without getting onto 119.

After that I went down to the Groton Nursery for garden plants, seeds and sets. It’s funny…I turned at the place where I was pretty sure I should turn, even though I didn’t recognize it at all. I was correct, but I couldn’t figure out why the road looked so unfamiliar. Finally it struck me: I’ve only been to the Groton Nursery in the winter. I go there for greenery and decorations for my Solstice rituals. I had no idea that the road would look so different in the summer! (Yeah, I know…*doh*)

I didn’t chat quite so much at the nursery, but I did talk to several people. On the way back to Pepperell, I passed a serious accident–lots of emergency vehicles and police, and at least one car with its entire front end totally crushed, as though it had run straight head-on at high speed into something (just what wasn’t clear, it was in the middle of the road). I hope no one was killed, I haven’t found any news about it yet. So, I guess I shouldn’t whine so loudly about my book because clearly someone had a much worse day yesterday than I did. 🙁

My electric tiller works great! I got the entire front garden patch tilled on Monday. I did triple passes cross-ways, went and dug two brim-full garden carts of compost out of the compost pile, spread that over the garden and tilled again lengthwise to till it in. Yesterday, in the late afternoon, I planted seed potatoes and onion sets and put in the seven tomato plants I bought. I hope to plant a bit more today. I’m just not sure what to do with the peppers. I bought a little 4-pack of pepper plants, and they’re so tiny! Now I’m looking at them thinking, “these are too small to set out, what was I thinking?” (Except I swear they’ve grown an inch since yesterday.) I also need to decide on a permanent spot for the peppermint and catnip plants.

I’m not going to over-do the garden. I’m a very practical gardener, I only grow vegetables I eat a lot of and, for the most part, can put by for the winter. So I never grow snap beans or radishes or corn, for example, because I don’t like them. I don’t grow lettuce because I’m not a big salad eater. I like spinach and snap peas, but those need to go in very early (I’ve always wanted to try a fall planting of peas, though). The potatoes are an experiment (I’ve grown them successfully but not here). The last time I tried carrots they did very well, so I have a pack of carrot seeds. I’m going to try garlic again, although the fate of the garlic that all vanished without a trace in 2008 remains a complete mystery. It came up, it was growing, then, poof: every plant, gone, not even a stub or a hole like something came along and ate it. 🙁 But the past two summers, not only has the weather sucked, but I was just making impulsive feints at gardening and sticking random things into random spots in the back yard that weren’t properly prepped at all. Now I’m really putting serious prep and care into my gardening.

So, we shall see.

My LSI rep isn’t in this afternoon. I called the rep who’s covering for her and she told me that I should have said I wanted new proofs for The Longer the Fall when I uploaded the revisions last night. *sigh* I missed that option, wherever it was. So I sent my rep an email about that. The revisions–i.e. the corrected covers–have been put through, but Lightning Source doesn’t have a very informative interface. It’s like working with some huge faceless corporation…although come to think of it, that’s pretty much what they are! The Longer the Fall is still “Pending Approval” on Smashwords, where readers are “sampling” it nonetheless. And I sent another publisher’s “application” to Sony. I can’t find the snooty email they sent me a while back telling me to sign up with Smashwords, and I’m hoping they’ll “reject” me again so I have someplace to contact there.

I just got a rejection letter for the other grant I applied for, poop. Two grant rejections in three days! It was pretty stiff competition, there were 530 applicants in the “fiction/creative nonfiction” category, but then they awarded 17 grants, bringing the odds down to approximately 1:31. I wonder what the deciding criteria were? *sigh*

I’ve started putting things I want to get rid of down by the street with a sign saying “FREE.” One of the things I put out last night, an old weight bench, is already gone. It’s like Christmas in reverse. 🙂

I swear, this book is never going to get published. Maybe I just better give up and read it aloud chapter-by-chapter on YouTube, because no one is ever going to get to read it, the way things are going.

The paperback proof arrived on Friday, but I was waiting to have both proofs in hand so I could check them together, and then I’d approve both at the same time. Lightning Source emailed me on Friday that the hardcover proof had shipped. It should have been delivered yesterday. I was outside working in the yard until nearly sunset, and when I finished I walked down to get the newspaper. The UPS driver had left the hardcover proof, in a very small box, just lying on the grass at the base of the newspaper box! Right there on the bare ground–the cardboard was already softening with the damp. I suppose I should be grateful he found the right house, but, really!!!!! I almost lost the Verizon pre-paid debit card because the UPS driver stuffed that into the newspaper box, it was a very windy day and the envelope had blown out of the box and was on the ground by the time I found it. It was sheer luck it didn’t just go tumbling off down the street!

UPS = EPIC FAIL.

So, today I sat down to give both proofs a close look. I found that both of them have unacceptable covers. The cover art somehow rendered at low resolution on both PDFs. It’s all pixelated and looks like holy hell. I have to re-upload both covers and I’ll probably get charged for both of those. I’m not sure how that happened! I’m completely baffled! But I didn’t catch it before I sent the PDFs off so now I’m stuck. I’ll have to call my rep at LSI tomorrow (you have to call your rep for everything with LSI) and order new proofs, and wait and wait and wait for those…I just feel like killing something, I really do. I am so upset. At least the interiors look okay. And I’m actually glad this is happening with my book and not one of my authors’ books! But it’s still both infuriating and creepy. This book didn’t want to be written and now it’s pulling down every “Murphy’s Law” it possibly can to stop itself from getting published!

The Longer the Fall is still “Pending Approval” for the Premium Catalog on Smashwords, after eight days now. (It has to be in the Premium Catalog to go out to all the retail outlets.) I emailed them and Mark Coker replied, “Inanna, as we mention everywhere, you should plan on it taking up to a week for us to review, sometimes longer. We do the reviews in batches (one is happening now), which means some authors will see their books approved within 2 minutes of publishing, and others who’ve been waiting 5 days will also get their’s approved.”

Well, fine, but that was Saturday and now it’s Tuesday night–and this is after the utterly hellish time I had getting all the bugs out of the book file and getting it to go through Smashwords’ “Autovetter” to begin with. It took me two days just to upload the effing book! So, for it to also be taking so long to pass the review for the Premium Catalog is just…just…non-obscene words fail me.

And I don’t think BLUM’s titles will ever appear in the Sony Reader Store. According to Smashwords, our first three titles (Mortal Touch, Gideon Redoak and Cat the Vamp) were shipped to Sony on April 12. They’re supposed to take about two weeks to be processed and appear in the Sony store. But Sony won’t add them. I emailed Mark (I’ve been pestering him a lot and I don’t feel like I should keep it up) and asked if any Smashwords titles are actually in the Sony Reader Store. He replied, about 200 of them so far–but I don’t know which ones those could be. I don’t think the books that had already been shipped went out again in the shipment that supposedly was sent on May 19, because the date hasn’t changed in my dashboard information on Smashwords. So, if the titles were shipped six weeks ago and haven’t shown up in the store, and they’re not going to be shipped again, and Sony doesn’t want to add Smashwords titles at all…well, I don’t have any recourse. Sony is very, very, very unfriendly to small publishers.

Back on April 30, I even tried to call Sony. I hunted on their website for ages looking for any form of contact information at all–email, snail mail, phone, anything. One of the Customer Support pages for the Reader Store gives a tech support number and I finally called that. Well…it wasn’t the right number, even though it was on the Reader Store page. The Customer Service Assistant did try hard to help, but he was baffled. He had an accent and I’m sure he was in Singapore or someplace, but that wasn’t the issue. The real issue was the call quality. It was just horrible. It sounded as though I was talking to someone on a cheap cell phone at the very edge of a tower range, driving at high speed on an Interstate, and going through tunnels every few minutes. The audio was almost unintelligible and the sound would just go dead for several seconds every few minutes. I was thankful I wasn’t calling about some real technical support problem, because it would have been a nightmare. The CSA kept putting me on hold, trying to find somewhere to refer me for a question about the Reader Store. Finally he took a message and promised to pass it on.

He must have done, because I got an email asking for feedback on Sony’s tech support services!

Wow, did I let them have it. But I never got a reply of any kind to my question. Take it from me, though: if you have a Sony product and you need tech support…don’t bother calling them!

Frankly, at this point I’m fervently hoping that the Sony Reader tanks like the Sony Betamax did, because their attitude just plain stinks. I own Sony Vegas Movie Studio software, and I downloaded a trial version of the Sony Acid music editing software and was seriously planning to buy it. Now I don’t want to, because I don’t want to give Sony another dime. I’d write and tell them that–if they had a mailing address!

The ARCs for Blood Justice have arrived, at least, but they can’t go out to Library Journal until June 1.

On top of all this, I got a notification yesterday that I did not win one of the grants I applied for. I’m still waiting to hear on another one but it’s a pretty long shot. So, yeah…not a happy camper at the moment. 🙁