Neighbors

Things were a little stormy this week. I live in a town with a lot of big trees, so when the power flickered a few times at the start of the storm (winds > 35 mph), I expected to lose power for at least a bit overnight.

I did not expect to lose power for 36 hours. Then the power came back on in my area, and a few hours later I got a robocall from PG&E saying they knew about the outages and that it might be "several days" until power was restored.

Since I already had power, I laughed and said "oh, those poor bastards", at which point my power went out again.

Anyhow, I have power, and my internet is finally back. I don't think the temperature ever dropped below 45 F during the week, but it's hard to be motivated after 5pm when it's dark and chilly.

I had all my trees trimmed a couple of weeks ago, so I didn't have to pick up much other than some small redwood tree branches that came from my neighbor's tree. But the neighbor on the other side (A) and the people beyond them (B)...

If I didn't know better, I would assume there is witchcraft going on. A couple of years ago, one of A's trees dropped a limb on B's front fence. Then six months later, in the middle of a clear & still night, B's tree dropped a huge limb on A's driveway and demolished their car. This week, A's three-story spruce tree went down on B's pool house.

It's been going on for years. I can't imagine what their insurance premiums are. Plus, there was already some grumbling when B complained about A having chickens (hens, not roosters, and there's only six of them). Who complains about chickens?

Anyhow, it's five days later and I no longer hear the sound of chainsaws in the neighborhood. There are still areas downtown that don't have power, but I'm assuming they will be back up soon.

Coming Soon!

I'm planning on doing some photo manipulations for this year's Thingadailies, with the theme of "Space Kittens". I'm not sure if I'll have time every day, but anything that might give me more like this image is something to add to the list of things to do.

Exposure

It's been an odd day.

Apart from the minor little coup d'etat, I had the experience of waking up to a Facebook notification that someone had liked the Tess Baytree author page. I was reading this on my ancient tablet, and the person's icon was tiny, but I thought "Wow, what an unfortunate crop of that icon. It makes it look just like male genitalia." (That is not a direct quote, but you get the idea.)

Then I got out of bed and fed everyone and sat down at my gigantic hi-res monitor, and got another notification. The new follower had posted something on my author page.

Friends, that was not a thing I needed to see while I was eating my cereal. I got my cardio workout in as I frantically clicked a bunch of different things trying to make it all go away. As part of the procedure to block the user, I was exposed to his profile page and I'm just saying, he seems very obsessed.

Anyhow, I have never been so relieved to only have three followers to my author page.

An Image To Help You Forget

This is a painting I did about ten years ago because I thought it would be funny, and then Jon (who sat in the cubicle next to me at the time) and I swapped it for some other artwork on the wall, and waited to see how long it would take before someone noticed.

As far as I know, this is still hanging on the wall.

Meditation

 I'm not a great gardener. Mostly I just ignore everything around the house until it tries to come through the windows. I choose plants based on their ability to survive without intervention -- if something requires constant watering after the first year it goes in the ground, it's not going to last long here.

(In case you need a list of what grows in a dry, high-heat area with almost no water: roses, blackberries, artichoke, Swiss chard, and citrus. Oh, and of course oleander, which is poisonous and impossible to get rid of -- I'm not sure why people plant it all over the place. Sure, it grows anywhere, but it also burns like a torch.)

The best part of gardening, for me, is the meditative aspect. I'm bad at sitting still and thinking, but give me a shovel and some music, and I can dig for hours. (And then I can come inside and collapse because I don't use those muscles very often.)

I have a bunch of Bermuda grass (see terrible gardener above), and sometimes I make an effort to get rid of it. I realize that's an impossible task if you're not willing to use herbicides, but it gives me a goal.

In any case, today is the last day of Holidailies for the year. I hope you have your own version of meditative gardening to enjoy, and I wish you a healthy and happy new year!

Gratuitous Dogs Picture

(You can tell this isn't my garden because everything is alive.)

File This in the Category of Huh?

 You know how I pointed out that I forgot to add the "if you liked this book, please help others find it by reviewing it at your favorite online store" section to the cozy mystery? I suspected it might make a tiny bit of difference, but not enough to justify re-uploading a new copy of the book everywhere.

Well. Guess what has absolutely no reviews? Not even any star ratings. Is it because people bought it but haven't read it yet? Maybe there is something wrong with the Goodreads entry? (Okay, take this whole thing with a grain of salt because I am extrapolating from data and I could be wrong -- when you get to the end of a Kindle book and it prompts you to rate it, I think that rating goes to Goodreads, although it is also reflected on Amazon. This book didn't automatically show up in Goodreads, so I created it there manually, but I'm not sure it's linking to Amazon properly.) Or... maybe everyone just hates the book. (Peak author brain talking here.)

Anyhow, as I was anxiously watching the blank review section, I also noticed this:

(Uh, yeah, these ranks are nothing to write home about.)

Amazon's non-standard categories show up in a big way for the really popular categories, like romance. Paranormal romance, for example, currently has seven sub-categories, depending on whether you want to read about ghosts getting it on, or if you like it with fangs.

But Amazon tends to just semi-randomly assign books to categories. I mean, you choose a couple of categories when you upload the manuscript, but it seems to view those as suggestions that it might just ignore.

The other oddity is that it has separate set of categories for Kindle books and paperback books. The categories are sort-of maybe kind-of the same for some genres, but not for others.

Anyhow, in the screenshot above "Cozy Animal Mystery" is under the Kindle books hierarchy, and "Cozy Animal Mysteries" is under the paperback hierarchy.

That would make a bit more sense if I had set up the novella for paperback sales, but it's only available as an ebook. Why would they do this? I have no idea.

Obligatory Dog Picture

Ginger the Little Dog wishes everyone a safe and kind new year.

Goals

Yesterday I wrote an entire screenful of stuff about the different independent publishing Facebook groups I belong to, and then I stopped and thought to myself "Wasn't I going to write about goals?" and I could not figure out how I got from my intended topic to the topic that ended up in the blog.

(Side note: 2020 is the first year when I considered whether I ought to be tested for ADHD. Is this normal?)

(Side side note: I stopped doing agility with the little dog -- back when we still had class -- because I thought she was having back pain, and then that cleared up, and she's able to get up the back stairs with the ramp, but she just walked by the couch and watching the way she moves her back legs -- I'm pretty sure she has proprioception issues, so yeah, spinal problems.)

(Other side note: Does you see why I've started wondering about ADHD? I do this shit all day long. It's exhausting.)

Anyhow, the reason the FB groups came up in relation to goals, is that a whole bunch of authors were talking about how they use yearly planners and other scheduling software to figure out their release schedules and how to stay on track. 

I do monthly goals (on the other blog), and weekly goals on a writers' Discord server, but even those I sometimes forget about. Planning for things a year in advance seems like an impossible task -- unless I'm looking for things to laugh at myself about.

So here, without any more diversions, are my 2021 goals that I am writing down so I can laugh at them in twelve months' time:

1.  Publish the sheep heist space opera trilogy. (Book 1 is written and has editing notes. Book 2 is mostly written. I know what happens in book 3. This may be possible.)
   
   
2. Write and publish books 2 & 3 in the Penelope Standing Mysteries. (The first one was a novella. I'm not sure how long the other two will be. In any case, they are a little faster to write.)
   
   
3. Don't adopt any more animals. (Trust me -- this is a stretch goal.)
   
   
4. Send out a newsletter at least four times. (Quarterly should be possible, right? Especially if I manage to hit this publishing schedule.)
   
   
5. ABSOLUTELY NO CHICKENS!
   
   
6. Make the back yard a more inviting place. (This may involve hiring someone who has a better design sense than I do. That's fine.)

That should do it. I suspect I'll have chickens and a new cat or dog by March, but we'll see how it goes.

Gratuitous Dog Picture

I need to start messing with photos again. These are such cheesy fun.

Drama

 I am in three groups on Facebook that are about independent publishing.

1. The first group is full of people who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about, though a certain percentage of them (*cough cough* who tend to be white men *cough cough*) are willing to dispense wisdom as hard and fast rules, as if they were bestselling authors who have the only known path to success.
   
   My favorite post was one in which someone asked about Twitter, and one man responded with The One True Way To Make Twitter Sell BooksⓇ, which involved following hundreds of thousands of people, unfollowing anyone who didn't follow back, and posting every two hours in order to remain relevant. I would be shocked -- truly shocked -- if that sold even one extra book.
   
   Basically I only stay in this group because it is occasionally hilarious.
   
   
   
2. The second group is quite famous and does have a lot of people who have sold a lot of books. There is good advice given, but it's fairly... cultish. If you are at all susceptible to that sort of pressure, it would be very easy to believe that you should release a book every month. People refer to the founding members in hushed tones.
   
   Also, people tend to put up posts about how much money they made using various strategies, but neglect to include the amount spent in advertising, which may be as much or more than they make in sales. That seems like an important piece. Plus, the group makes a big deal about not having "drama", and that means that there really is a lot of drama, but most of it is people complaining about how there's drama, and users are fairly arbitrarily booted from the group.
   
   So it's useful but you have to take everything with a grain of salt, and not get caught up in any of the drama (which is often about not having any drama).
   
   
   
3. The third group is also large, though not as big as the second one. It's devoted to distributing on sites other than Amazon, and how to market for those other sites. Lots of good information, though it tends to be fairly scattered, since one distributor may have one requirement, and another may be completely different.
   
   One of the funniest posts in group three was the one in which people were talking about what had happened (if they even knew) to get them booted from group two. A lot of people were in that post.

I meant to write a post about goals, but I guess I'll do that tomorrow. (Even my goals about goals don't stay on track -- I'm hopeless.)

Gratuitous Bird Picture

Mackie, like most parrots, is quite good at destroying things. Boxes make the best toys for her.

Seed used to bribe her to hold still enough to get a picture

Hammered

 Confession: I spent the day doing adult stuff, including walking the dogs, cleaning the kitchen floor, and scrubbing the dried trail of drool that extends across the living room from the dog bed (where the dogs do a down-stay while I prepare their food) to the dog crate (where I put the big dog's food). So then I decided to make a whiskey sour after I ate dinner (because I have all these damn Meyer lemons to use up -- gardening is killing my liver), and as usual I didn't measure anything. Full disclosure: I'm a little bit hammered at the moment.

I'm on vacation today! Yay! Unfortunately, being on vacation makes me think about how much I don't want to work ever again. That's a problem. I've had a privileged life, so I can't really complain (spoiler: I'm going to anyhow!), but wouldn't it be nice to be born to a place where you could do whatever you wanted for the rest of your life?

I wrote half a piece of flash fiction this morning, but I didn't work on the ending to my November novel. Maybe tomorrow.

Gratuitous Dog  and Cat Pictures

Ripley at his winsome best

Mr. Your Business Is My Business