I’m Back. Again.
Crystal Blade Episode 36: A Cousinly Talk is now live on Kindle Vella. Go forth, read, enjoy.
So where have I been for the last week or so? Well, basically I felt like absolute crap, had little to no energy, and wasn’t in any position to focus on writing. My guess is a viral sinus infection combined with a bunch of shit in the air pretty much knocking me on my ass.
So I gave myself permission to take the week off, rest, and only do stuff that I could do on autopilot; namely, finish reformatting all the titles that I’d pulled out of KU and publish them wide.
As of 7/7/23 every title that currently isn’t in KU (I’m still waiting on “Prelude to a Storm”‘s KU period to expire later this month) was published on Smashwords and Google Play. I’m currently waiting for Smashwords to review everything and pass it onto their Premiere Catalog which gets distributed to its partners. Once that happens, I’ll update my universal links for every book and then I’m pretty much wide for the duration.
To be honest, I’m glad I did it. I keep hearing from people still in KU that their payouts are continuing to drop despite Amazon raising the subscription price, plus there’s the whole mess of Amazon threatening to yank accounts when they find a KU title on a pirate site. As for me, I’m actually making about the same wide as I had in KU, plus I’m making additional money from Vella. So I’m not complaining.
In the meantime I have five more chapters to finish on Crystal Blade and it is done done done. If I get a move on I may be able to do that by EOB Saturday, I dunno (and yes, Susan, as soon as that’s done I’m pivoting to High Tide). I have to leave a Vella story up for thirty days after I publish the last episode, so once Blade is done I’ll set up a pre-order for it on Amazon for mid-August or so.
So it goes.
It’s the Little Achievements
Despite what I said yesterday, I was working on formatting Lady of Thorns today when it occurred to me to check the outside temps.
83°F. And tomorrow was supposed to be back in the nineties. I dropped what I was doing and headed out to the garage to do battle.
See, I’ve had a long-term problem with the driver’s side front door on my Mazda 3. I suspect it’s due to the fact that the driver’s side is the one that catches the full Texas sun in the afternoon, and that heat is degrading or damaging components. As a result the central locking button doesn’t always work, I can’t manually lock the door from the inside, and my Door Ajar light will come on and stay on no matter how hard I slam the door. I would have to manually lock the door from the outside to get the light to go off, and recently that hasn’t been working unless I stand there for a minute and lock/unlock/lock/unlock the door until the light finally goes off. I don’t want to leave the light on because that drains the battery over time, damaging it, so I’ve been putting the car in the garage where the driver’s side wouldn’t get roasted every afternoon.
Being my grandfather’s granddaughter, I looked up reasons for what was going on and found a couple of possible solutions. The easiest was to spray contact cleaner inside the little clamping mechanism that holds the door closed because the grease in it may be gooked up, stopping it from making contact when it closes and fooling the car’s computer into thinking that the door isn’t closed properly. So I did this (I also need to add some white lithium grease when I can find the tube of it, which is SITH), cleaned away the gunk that indeed came out of the mechanism, then got in the car and closed the door. The Door Ajar light stayed on, but when I hit the central locking button the door locks clunked solidly and the light went off.
That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s more of a bodge than a fix. So I got out my tools and carefully started taking off the door interior panel (there’s a recessed panel behind the handle that hides a screw. Wanna know the perfect tool for popping it off? A curved sculpting tool. You’re welcome). Got that off and various wires disconnected, then checked all of the wiring I could see. There were no obvious worn/melted parts, which was reassuring.
Then I followed a set of wires down to the side of the door near the clamping mechanism. The wires plugged into a round outlet that I assumed controlled the mechanism based on its location. I unplugged the wires, hit the outlet with more contact cleaner, then plugged the wires back in. Next I went around the door, found every contact I could find and cleaned them all with contact cleaner, then put the door back together.
Got in the car and closed the door gently. The Door Ajar light went off. I’m not absolutely sure that I fixed the problem and I still want to give that clamping mechanism a good coating of white lithium grease, but so far it’s holding. If I can nurse it through to this fall I’ll buy a new clamping mechanism and install that when it’s not quite so warm outside (even at 83°F I was dripping with sweat by the time I went back inside, and that was with the garage door open).
Firing on All Cylinders
Crystal Blade Episode 34: Oh, Oh, Oh, It’s Magic and Episode 35: Coda are now live on Kindle Vella.
Yeah, I know—two eps in one day? It’s because my publishing schedule has been thrown off this week. Normally I do M-W-F, but Ep 33 was published on Tuesday and I didn’t have Ep 34 ready by Wednesday, so you get a twofer today. You’re welcome.
Much as I would love to get the Two Thrones books hammered out this weekend and set live, I also have a buttload of cleaning that I really have to do now that the temps have dropped, plus I need to try and fix my driver’s side car door while the air is still tolerable in the garage. It’s times like these that I really wish I had the money to hire a PA and have them help me out with the formatting et al, but that is an achievement for another day.
Aaand Olympic Cove is Wide
Smashwords finally approved all of the Olympic Cove books so they’re being sent out to B&N, Apple, Kobo, et al. I’ll give it a few days for all the systems to update, then I’ll update my universal links to reflect the new data.
I’m currently working on formatting the Two Thrones books and I hope to have them all finished and uploaded to Smashwords and Google Play by next week. After that I just have the standalones (Behind the Iron Cross, Trickster, Stealing Dmitri) to format and upload, and all of my titles will officially be wide.
Then I can start recording the audiobooks. I’m already getting things set up on the laptop so that I can record in my closet (it’s a walk-in with outlets and there’s enough room for a small table, a mike, a chair, and me). I’m going to do the Olympic Cove audiobooks first, then the Two Thrones, Hidden Empire, and Paladins of Crystal books, then all the standalones. I may do the Esposito County Shifters books as well, but since that series just doesn’t do very well it won’t be until everything else is finished.
With the audiobooks the goal is to have everything recorded by the end of the year (considering that the average audiobook is about ten hours, plus all of the editing/formatting/uploading I’ll need to do in addition to the writing work I’m already doing, you can see why it may take six months to finish sixteen novels and a handful of novellas).
Oh, That’s Better
I’m thinking the back of the heat wave has finally broken. I woke up this morning and didn’t immediately want to hide in my office, I’ve had more energy, cranked out a K on Crystal Blade, and the temps only made it up to 98°F. Tomorrow’s temp is supposed to be pretty much the same, then it starts dropping back into the low nineties.
Of course, the worrying thing is that it’s only June and we’ve already had a multiple day run of triple digit temps, something that’s far more common for July and August. And I know this heat has been straining Anita Gigawatt to a dangerous point; Cthulhu only knows what’s going to happen if we get another heat wave like this in those months.
Anyway, I don’t have the Crystal Blade scene ready for Vella just yet (this is a spicy one) but I should have it ready before the end of the day so stay tuned.
This Is Miserable
The heat wave was supposed to crest tomorrow but I think we got it today. It was 106°F with a heat index of 119°F. I waited until 8:00 PM to go out and get some Whataburger for dinner so that I didn’t have to heat up the kitchen at all and even then it was still 100°F and the car clearly wasn’t happy about running in those temps.
The biggest problem for me is that even though I’m staying inside I still feel drained. I’m getting the worst sinus headaches and I keep having to go lie down before I get nauseated. I don’t know if it’s because the house is pretty much sealed and we’re not getting a lot of fresh air, or there’s just a lot of mold/pollen/cat dander/what have you that’s been supercharged by the heat, or what the hell is going on. But Nicola is wrecked. I managed to get about 800 words done on Episode 33 of Crystal Blade and got that uploaded, and after that I gave up and went to bed.
Does it suck that this crappy weather hits right while I’m trying to finish the book? You betcha. But I’m also in my late fifties and I have to accept that I have some limitations these days, and trying to work through a screaming sinus headache is simply not on. Hopefully once the heat wave breaks I’ll feel better and can get back to work on cranking out the rest of the Blade eps.
Turning Lemons Into Lemonade
Over on the Book of Face an author in an indie publishing group mentioned that he had decided to take his one star reviews and start using them as advertising for his books, complete with four greyed out stars and one yellow star along with a quote from the bad review, on the basis that there is no such thing as bad press and one star reviews have been known to push sales.
So I thought, hey, that’s a good idea. Luckily for me I don’t have a lot of one-star reviews, but this one was memorable.
It Is Hot As Balls Out There
I did our big stock-up yesterday with a goal towards parking the Mazda in the garage and not taking it out again until things start cooling off. I have an intermittent fault somewhere in the driver’s door which triggers the door open warning light and makes it next to impossible to lock the door from the inside.I can lock it from the outside, but it requires a lot of fiddling to get the door open light to go off (and I don’t want to leave that on because it’s a drain on the battery).
As far as I can tell the root cause is a short somewhere in the door, which wouldn’t surprise me—that door faces the setting sun and has been baked every summer since 2014. Fixing it will require pulling off the door seal and checking the wires. Needless to say I cannot do that without dying of hyperthermia at the moment, so the next best thing to do is keep the car out of direct sunlight, drive it as little as possible, and hope that temps cool down to a point next weekend where I can pull it into the garage, take off the door sill and track down the short. Assuming I can find the relevant bit of melted wire, fixing it will be a matter of wrapping some electrician’s tape around the gap in the wire (or possibly some heat-shrink wire wrap, which I have upsatirs).
It will be hot, sweaty, and unpleasant, but better that than paying a garage a grand for labor and diagnostics.
That Was Certainly a Flavor Choice
As you may know, Bob, Coca-Cola has been releasing limited edition flavors from their Creations division. There was Starlight (some kind of berry flavor), Dreamtime (mango), Move (coconut), and now we have Ultimate, which was apparently created in partnership with a gaming company.
I like trying out new flavors (I still miss California Raspberry) and they always bring them out in a Zero version as well so yesterday I tried a small bottle of Ultimate. First opinion: it tastes like bubble gum. After some more analysis I decided it tasted specifically like a cross between Juicy Fruit and banana Laffy Taffy; serious tropical flavor with a strong banana note.
Unfortunately, it’s also sweet as hell and was a bit too much for me. So I stuck the bottle in the fridge and didn’t think anything more about it until I was getting a glass of Coke Zero last night. I figured, eh, waste not want not, and poured the remainder of the Ultimate into my plain Coke Zero (I’m gonna say it was a 50/50 mix).
A revelation—Ultimate’s sweetness was muted by the plain Coke Zero and the really strong banana-y tropical flavor became a pleasant note instead of in-your-face overwhelming. So I picked up a case of the mini-cans today and I’ll be combining them with Coke Zero for the next week or so as an extremely refreshing summertime drink.
There Will Not Be a Crystal Blade Ep Released Today
And I’m sorry about that but the weather is really starting to do my head in and I just wasn’t able to get it written, edited, and uploaded in time.
As that is the case, allow me to share a meme that my BFF was kind enough to send me. The cat stuff you will understand. The Poe connection, well, that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.
Nicola Cameron Writes 