I have taken all the package deals from the Cast Directory and moved them to the Bible, or I will at the end of editing. Right now they are just copied. When the Setting Bible goes online, there will be a revised Directory without the package deals.
I have listened to a lot of hyperventilation about AI, and you all need to calm down. The day to truly worry about his is coming (I have written about this elsewhere) but the write-bots and art-bots are not going to be your shiny new overlords.
They could, though suck away what little precious compensation is left from art and writing. Against that future I propose two regulations:
1] AI content and art must always be identified as AI created and
2] AI content cannot be copy-righted. It is automatically public domain.
These rules would not solve the AI threat to the persistent fantasy of making arts and letters a day-job, but the will greatly reduce the crisis.
Speaking of mitigating crisis:
This was staged.
There were not a lot of surprises with the radiation treatment.
At one point I told my doctor:
“I thought I needed to take another Imodium last night, but I fell asleep.”
And he replied, “That is the most stereotypical response to radiation I’ve ever heard.”
So I did experience the exhaustion and diarrhea that everyone predicted. I am infamously hyper-active and have an iron stomach so this took a week longer than average, but I definitely have them now.
I did not develop any mutant powers, nor does my poop glow.
The TV series Yellowstone is totally cowboy Game of Thrones punctuated by shameless horse porn. Like GOT the writing is so good you forget that these are unlikeable people killing each other over self-created problems.
Ron DeSantis is doomed. No one who wants Trump is going to vote for the wanna-be Trump when they can vote for the actual Trump. Aerosmith, even at their advanced age, is still a better act live than any of their tribute bands.
Human society has a surplus of whining, and I do not want to add to that, but some unpleasant things need to be spoken aloud for the record.
If you have 300+ yards of offense, five sacks, and still lose by more than a touchdown, as the Cardinals did Sunday, you have to start looking at the coach. And the quarterback. And the GM.
Kliff Kingsbury running in the shadows. Not foreshadowing at all…
Since all three of those people, GM Steve Kiem, Head-coach Kliff Kingsbury and quarterback Kyler Murray got lengthy contract extensions this summer, the team’s performance has nosedived in most measurable categories.
Ah, but for the Bidwell family, who have long owned a football franchise that has not won a championship since 1947, this is depressingly consistent.
Katie Hobbs explaining why she settled for a field goal.
Katie Hobbs refusing to debate has become the defining issue in her campaign, and that’s not going to win it. You can’t play not to lose. That’s how you get 300 yards of offense and no offensive touchdowns.
Not worried.
The Phoenix Suns did not extend forward Cam Johnson’s rookie contract, thus guaranteeing they will pay more for him at the end of next year. Yes – they will, because barring a career ending injury, he will get at least one whopping offer that the Suns will have to match. And that is why Johnson is not likely to pout over this.
Has Suns season started yet?
There’s nothing going on in House of the Dragon that we didn’t see in Game of Thrones.
Speaking of blood in all the wrong places, I’m higher mileage and past my warranty, and every trip to the doctor feels like driving an old car into the muffler shop: you’re come away with a list of things that must be fixed, a list of things that should be fixed, and a list of things that can be ignored, until they get on one of the other two lists.
At the top of my list was a colon biopsy, which I have had, and it was not as much fun as it sounds.
This is NOT the colonoscopy that I also have to look forward to. It is a different but equally expensive procedure.
Yes, it is an outpatient procedure that I drove home from and was able to get to work the next day, but we are a week past the procedure at this writing and functions are just now returning to normal.
You want details? No- you do not.
Rule 6, corollary 1:This can’t be stressed strongly enough: No one wants to hear about your last bowel movement.
WORD COUNT:
In the past 7 days:
I have edited 10 Sample Cast treatments for Go Action Fun Time. These were already written. I am counting them at 250 words each. = 2500
I started a chapter of the next 64 novel. I didn’t finish, but I am 1000 words in = 1000
Writer’s group = 500 words.
That’s 4000 words, short of my 5k goal. I have some artwork I could throw in, or I could just accept that I did not feel well and that cost me a thousand words, or I could blame it on TV, namely sports and House of the Dragon, which for all my whining, I am almost caught with.
UPDATE: Between drafting this and posting it, I have finished both the chapter and the remaining cast treatments.
Just in time for Suns season.
Whiskey.
Now we know.
GAFT Cast members – and the reason I didn’t make word count last week either.
Through a combination of poor fortune and self-created folly, Dilkon proved to be expensive, with each of the expeditions being more expensive than the last.
Let’s pause here to clarify: I do not mean travel expenses. My company picks that up. And while the work was more troublesome than it needed to be, that was a product of the locale and personnel involved, and not generally instructive. Also, there were more than the three trips I am about to describe, but these were the major expeditions.
We have already described one adventure related to this job. This would turn out to be foreshadowing.
1st Visit- January 2022
Navajo burger
There are two places I found to eat lunch in Dilkon, and by that I mean pick up the food and eat it in your car. The Navajo Nation was (and still is at this writing) 100% masks indoors, and indoor dining is out-of-the-question. There is a food stand in a dirt lot that will sell you a Navajo burger, a double green-chile burger in a pita of some sort. Or you could go to the pizza place, and get a slice or pie of arguably the best pizza for 50 miles in any direction. (It is honestly decent if not outstanding pizza.
Having learned the day before that a Navajo burger will sit in my stomach like a boulder for three hours, I had gotten some pizza, driven back to the jobsite and ate my slices while listening the NPR station I could kinda-get out there on the car radio. When I finished, I tossed my crusts to the stray, or at least unleashed dogs waiting for that, and went back in to work.
I came back out at the end of the day to discover my battery dead. I then discovered that I had not gotten back (or replaced) the jumper cables I had loaned to my child.
Happily, one of the electricians hadn’t left yet. After failing to jump the car with his cables, we ruled the battery dead. Dilkon has a grocery store, and two convenience stores, none of which carry jumper cables, much less car batteries.
Good fortune balanced poor fortune when it turned out the electrician passed through Winslow, where my hotel was, on his way back to north of Flagstaff somewhere.
His daily commute was close to 90 minutes. I added twenty more at the auto parts store (just down the road from my hotel) where I purchased the second most expensive battery on the shelf (cheap parts die with simple radio play in deeply rural parking lots) and a set of jumper cables.
He added five more minutes picking me up in the pre-dawn gloom the next morning.
It’s forty minutes from Winslow to Dilkon, during which I learned a a lot about this man’s family problems and his relationship to Jesus, none of which is fodder for this space. I also learned that people in and around Dilkon have been driving as far New Mexico for simple medical services.
So, it’s nice to be part of a project that is clearly necessary. We have surprisingly few of those.
2nd Visit – Late February – early March 2022
On my way back from Two Rivers (next to last post – I’ve been busy) the power steering died in the truck.
Verity – new to me.
While I bought Verity as a back-up vehicle, Oliver, my child, has been using it as a primary vehicle to and forth from Phoenix College and related young adult adventures. Oliver lacks the size and skill to manage a pick-up truck without power steering.
Warned that it could be a while before I had the time or money to fixt the truck, Oliver convinced one of their young adult friends to fix it – at my expense, but not at a lot of expense.
The repair happened while I was in Dilkon.
Then as Oliver drove the newly nimble Verity about the oil light came on. Knowing the oil had been recently changed, Oliver chose to ignore it and keep driving – until Verity threw a rod.
Throwing a rod is generally fatal to twenty-year-old pick-ups.
Verity + Rattletrap
Yet times are strange. I bought that thing for about $5k – pre-pandemic. The replacement cost for a similar vehicle now would be something like $7-8k as I understand the market now. The part-time mechanic (who likely destroyed the thing in the first place) has offered to replace the engine at cost. He thinks that could be below $3k. I am not so certain. I have tasked Oliver with that research, and that is ongoing.
Bongo at Homolovi
Meanwhile , Lyft charges appear randomly on one of my credit cards.
This visit took place two days before Unobtanium was to appear at the Las Vegas Pirate Fest. My tow vehicle is dead in my backyard, and while Ruby has a towing hitch (that I had installed) the Subaru Forester is not a good towing vehicle. Las Vegas is 350 miles and four good climbs from Phoenix.
My first thought was to rent a van. Inventory inside the van, tent and gear in Rattle-trap. But no one, I mean no one, rents a van with a tow hitch.
U-Haul, however, will rent a pick-up with a tow hitch – even for an out-of-state run. So I thought I had done that.
I burn back home from Dilkon, slide into U-Haul minutes before closing, and discover they have not the pick-up I had confirmed and paid for.
I towed Rattletrap to Las Vegas in a 12’ box truck, which had plenty of capacity but over-all cost me $800 I’ll never get back. Impoverished and emboldened by that experience I then towed that same rig with Ruby, my Subaru Forester, on the shorter and flatter run to Lake Havasu City for the London Bridge Ren Faire.
Ruby+Rattletrap at LBRF
The listed towing capacity of a 2015 Subaru Forester is 1500#. I don’t know how much Rattletrap plus the Unobtanium tent and inventory actually weigh, but Ruby can tow it as long as we stay under 75 mph.
Traversing I-10 westbound at or near the posted limit does not improve the scenic value of the journey.
FTR – London Bridge RF actually takes place on the shadeless, packed dirt expanse of the county rodeo grounds.
UnObtanium at London Bridge RF complete with tent.
When the smoke cleared:
The Dilkon Medical Center is still not open (medical facilities dawdle forever before opening) by my lighting is complete.
Ruby survived her Reservation country and towing adventures.
If you don’t count the U-Haul fee, UnObtanium made money at both events.
We plan to return to both next year.
And Verity still sits in my backyard, with her new roof rack still in place. If you want or need a 2001 Dodge Dakota with a blown engine, make me an offer.
I’ve been going through the vinegar lately, courtesy of several circumstances whose only common thread in the involvement of vinegar and myself. I could blather, in good blog style, another two paragraphs before getting to actual content. The research on vinegar is right there on the other screen. But let us assume you have a useful familiarity with the common household acid and get right to the things.
Vinegar deters ants. I have a small invasion going on in my kitchen, and the front-line treatment is vinegar. It’s not pesticide, but that’s ok. I don’t desire to exterminate the ants. I just want them to stay out of the kitchen.
Vinegar will kill the buggers on contact. The true value is that it will wipe away the chemical trail they follow across my countertop. This works until they blaze another trail. So, this insurgency may persist until I find whatever hole they are getting in through. Then I can solve the problem for good – not with vinegar, but with grout.
Vinegar relieves ear-itches.
Or so we all hope.
The rest can be explained better by photo:
Still not actually my dog.
Vinegar kills mold. Unobtanium (specifically Cheryl) has acquired several Easy-up shades and a 5 meter bell tent. The bell tent did not come with poles, which is a $60 proposition, but that still saves us like $700, if we can mitigate the mold inside the tent and one of the Easy-ups.
A generous treatment of vinegar and the bright Vegas sunshine seems to have mitigated at least the mold smell off the Easy-up.
When the poles get here, we’ll set up the big tent and empty a gallon of vinegar via spray bottle underneath the relentless Vegas sun.
Tangential to Unobtanium becoming more of a lifestyle than a hobby, I have asked Cheryl to marry me, and she said yes.
Kinda buried the lead there, didn’t I?
The plan is to merge our lives in Arizona, due to the fact that I have a good day job, and she is basically a pirate seamstress who just needs to get to an airport.
So I fear we are 6-9 months from blogging about real-state in this space.
Meanwhile, she is in Vegas digging out from spending all summer at sea. She has been out with Royal Caribbean Cruises, for those not in on the joke. What should have been 5 weeks of costume alteration and repair turned into 3 full months due to the various quarantines.
I went to Vegas, picked her up at the airport, like a good boyfriend, and then the next morning asked her to marry me over breakfast. This approximates our third anniversary as a couple, thought that is, I swear, coincidental. So, we are no longer boyfriend/girlfriend. It is worse than that now.
No longer my girlfriend…
I do not expect her in Phoenix until the end of October for Goth Christmas Halloween.
Meanwhile, she has outfits to sew, and I have lies to fabricate.
If you want to go down the hole with vinegar versatility, the links below will start you on that journey.
The dog had different ideas about where things should go.
My house is a mess, but I am not bothered by it the way I would have been in the recent past. Things got done. We just haven’t cleaned up the inevitable mess from progress.
Much of the mess is from the creatures that live with me. With increasing heat, my adult cats found the courage to face the big dog and the tiny kitten that had scared them into the garage and the yard beyond.
My Problem has returned
They have found their way inside, and established that they are bigger than the kitten – and do not want to play. Also, Pippa (the dog) mostly remembers she’s not supposed to chase cats in the house.
Problem is even here helping me xfutkdo right now.
A better photo of Rey’s damn dog
My humble residence has become the party spot for Rey’s gang of friends. Because it is an actual house with a working TV you can play games on, and an actual yard you can smoke in while you pretend to play with the dog.
That leaves the kind of mess you would expect.
Some of that mess is from creating things. Rey creates long,mutant attrocities from old Furbies and a stash of sewing supplies.
You can buy this from her.
Not one of the pets.
Long time readers (meaning from the start of this year – or four posts ago) may recall that Cheryl and I were on the verge of running a vendor booth at the Las vegas Pirate fest and tpoints beyond. That would have been in April – so it didn’t happen.
But we still have inventory – all over both of our houses, and I hope to have a website to hype by the end of the month.
Verity and Rattletrap in their natural habitat.
Last week I wrote about the truck – which I have named Verity – and how I got what I paid for. I paid more – the radiator cracked in addition to the wonky brakes, but all is relatively right now. She is road worthy, unless you try to stop for fast food. Then you will learn that the windows will not go down.
I’ll care more about that when it stops being 106 at night. (that’s right – as I write this, at nearly 10pm, it remains 106 F outside.)
(Still better than snow, as we say in the valley – but I begin to have my doubts.)
It’s a mess now. Cheryl (my girlfriend) talked her mother into selling the house her mother no longer actually lives in, and the worst outcome came to pass: it sold nearly immediately. This meant a lot of trips to Congress, a lot of moving crumbling cardboard boxes in the heat, and hauling loads to Las vegas and Phoenix in verity and the ressurected trailer I liberated from Cheryl’s mom (who does not have the means or inclination to tow it).
I call the trailer Rattletrap.
A trailer can sit for 20 years and still work if you:
Grease the bearings (not complicated, but extremely messy)
Replace the tires
Replace the wiring and lights.
All told about $250 and a bottle of whiskey for the hero who helped me grease the bearings.
It is harder to teach yourself to tow it, especially an old one with a short tongue, but I got it from Congress to Las Vegas to Congress to Phoenix without undue disaster, and it now sits in my yard.
A scene from the last episode.
My game room is covered with Go Action Fun Time game materials and artwork, all being scattered by the dogs and cats. I am trying to get regular episodes going on Discord (that’s Zoom for 20-somethings, being both irreverent and free).
A few lessons from that first session:
It was suprisingly painless to make a fill-in PDF for charater sheets. Perhaps my Adobe subscription is worth something after all.
I need a table mic. My current system works for me facing my laptop, but that’s not how I run games, particularly with people also playing in person.
I might have to look into some dice-rolling bot.
It is possible to play You-Tube videos (or other sound sources) such as the unofficial GAFT Theme song (an acquired taste – you were warned!) through discord with the aid of some bot the kids hunted up for me.
Discord runs in the background unless you actually disconnect from the session, so your find can come on-line and haunt you for several minutes until you figure this out.
Rey is back at college, and I have the house to myself again. I could settle back into the old routine that got me here. Or I could reflect on how that got me here, and make some changes.
Before we get to all of that, some brief announcements, pending more formal (louder) announcements to come:
I will be speaking at a couple of panels at KABAM Fri-Sat, Sept 20-21, 2019.
I hope to be at the Phoenix Library Local Author Fair on November 2nd. That is pending application, and the link below, while no secret, is for my reference.
I have always viewed routines as a potentially dangerous addiction. Some of this is the autism – which loooves routines – but most of this come from a life in show business where routines, as most people would understand them, are well-nigh impossible.
I have a day job, and a house to myself. I can have routines, and I do. I can go from stopping the alarm to starting the car in 45 minutes, with breakfast and coffee and lunch in a cooler. That this routine exists and is reliable brings me more pride and joy than I am comfortable admitting to.
You will be relieved to know that I am not about to describe said routine. Also worth noting: this is basically the only routine I follow with any consistency. The laundry is a process rather than a routine, in that it is not time-sensitive. I can do it in a long afternoon, or I can spread it out over three nights. If I do it in an afternoon, though, it is a routine.
Similarly, I have a process for cleaning the house, and even a process for writing, but these are steps-in-order, they are not a choreographed ritual that is my workday morning routine.
I should be more systematic about the writing routine: reflection, warm-ups, that sort of thing. There really are creative best-practices (but stay away from “Creativity exercises” business trot out when trying to “brainstorm” or whatever word they use for it now. You can’t force creativity out in a scheduled meeting.) But I am often surprised by opportunities to get creative work done (“I know they said 9am, but they actually meant 1 pm”) and have learned to summon the magic without a great deal of preparation.
Routines are time consuming, though. It is within my autism to schedule every minute of my day doing plausibly useful things that wold maintain and enjoy the quality of life I have right now perpetually. Instead, I rather imagine progress. I am not unhappy with my life as it is now, but that is largely because I see it as a process rather than a routine. If the last few years have taught me anything, there are precious few constants we can rely upon in life. Even my precious morning routine is quite different than it would have been four years ago.
As usual, I have been busy: travelling, making things, dramatically reducing the amount of vegetation surrounding my house. Since this is supposedly an author blog, let me lead with that news.
Yes – my artwork. If you think you can do better, contact me.
It is only a PDF for now. That was enough of a maze without trying to reformat for e-pub or mobi. I now know there are six different formats of PDF. And PDF/A is bad. Well, it’s fine, but the security features will lock up the bots at Drive-Thru. Also, compressed or linked JPEGs and transparencies are bad because Apple is i-fussy. I’m not clear what any of that is, so I don’t have to worry?
You, loyal reader, do not have to wait for Drive-Thru’s blessing to get this product. Contact me directly, and I will hook you up. With a commitment to playtest it for me, it would be free.
Bongo at a river-side park in BHC.
I journeyed to Bullhead City on RC Lurie business, so you don’t have to. Bullhead City is a cluster of hills on the banks of the Colorado River, across from Laughlin Nevada – where all the money comes from. On top of each hill is a 55+ trailer park. The exception is along AZ95, the main drag, which is an extended strip mall. You might infer how much I enjoyed my stay.
I’ve actually been there twice. The first stint I stayed at a $40/night motel, where nothing was open after 11pm (I arrived at 10:30pm) and my door didn’t quite lock. They had a fridge and microwave but no coffee. I found coffee in the lobby in the morning, and I survived.
On my return trip, the client put me up in a casino.
Casinos are crappy places to stay when on business. The Avi Casino, south of Laughlin proper, gave me a room with no fridge, microwave or coffee. It’s like they don’t want you spending time in your room at all.
In fairness, the casino cafe (Feathers – I think) is open 24/7 and I was able to get a decent breakfast and out the door in half an hour.
I had a better time in Las Vegas, as you might imagine. I don’t gamble to speak of, but I drink, and prefer to drink with nerds. For that, Vegas features the Millenium Fandom.
Yes – I have a girlfriend.
True confession: I have never been much for cosplay. Cheryl (my girlfriend)
Cheryl
is an actual costumer, though, and views these events as marketing among other things. I now own a pirate shirt, and several other items of clothing I would not otherwise possess.
I’ve done worse things for romance.
Closer to home:
I have finally bottled the mead I tossed last summer. It is sweet and fruity and bubbly – like magic unicorn sweet and fruity. I’m mildly disturbed. It’s called Wildflower, and she be recovering from bottle-shock by late April, early May.
The internet promised me that replacing my two exterior doors would cost about $800. I’ve had bids from $1800 to $3600. So … that’s a little more. Curiously, the two estimators who quoted me around $1800 took the most measurements and asked the better questions.
It likely come down who provides the better actual door.
There is a 4-6 lead time with door installation.
The tool of choice for removing dandelions from gravel is a pick-ax. A 30 gallon garbage bag stuffed full of decapitated dandelions weighs the better part of 50 lbs. I filled 9 bags.
You can’t win them all. In fact, most of us lose about half the time. It’s how you respond to losing that determines the cost of the loss. We’ll get into some examples, but first, a self-serving announcement:
There is a new version of Are We Lost Yet? With content. Right now.
And more to come.
Anyone who feels sorry for poor Brett Kavanaugh should reflect that he is now on the Supreme Court anyway despite his poor performance in the worst, surreall, contrived job interview ever seen on non-fiction television. He won. Don’t feel sorry for the losers. That defeats the point of that sentiment.
The Suns fired Ryan McDuh a year too late. (Did you really need to keep him around to draft DeAndre Ayton at #1? My daughter could have made that pick, and she uses words likes “sportsball”.) The Suns went from having four starting quality point guards under cintract to having zero under contract – and no prospects of acquiring one. They have run out of time to rebuild. They must at least flirt with .500 THIS SEASON or even guys like me are lost to them.
The big lesson I learned was that knowing SEO isn’t enough. Even if you can build links, write content, and climb to the top of Google fast, you won’t stay if people hate your content (or product/service).
On a more personal note:
Last Saturday [10/6/18] I wrenched my back but good trying to wrestle an 80 lb chain hoist back into its box. The box in question was above my knees, but below my waist, so I really had nothing to work with but my arms and my back, and despite what we may have learned watching the Six Million Dollar Man in the 1970’s ou can’t do much with your arms without involving your [crunch!]… OWWW Dammit!
I swear I heard a crunch sound.
Before anyone panics, it is my opinion that I strained one muscle, and aggravated my arthritis. It’s arthritis. It’s not a bulge or a rupture or anything of the sort.
One of my rules of this blog is that it is not for whining, but there are some aspects of dealing with lower back pain that are less obvious, and perhaps instructive.
A good night’s sleep is about the worst thing I can do for my aggravated back. It stiffens up to wrought iron, and every move hurts. I have to psych myself up to put on socks. Worse, getting ready for work involves standing for 30-40 minutes, and bending slightly to deal with this or that on the dresser or counter or desk.
But Ibuprofen, and an ice-pack for the drive in help a lot, and by the time I get to the job-site, I have been able to get out of the car with less drama than it took getting into it.
This situation, and the single malt scotch I bought to “medicate” it with, not house guests have helped the word count. Low level pain will absolutely compound exhaustion. Leading to that good night’s sleep that is nearly the death of me every morning.
Can’t win for losing.
I don’t know what that says about my character, but that is how I’m dealing with it. It has been getting a little better every day – so I continue.
As I am calculating my word count for the week, what value, in words, do I put on sitting most of Saturday at the Payson Book Fest?
Sure, it took all day, but I only sold 2 books – and that counts a trade with another author. And this is at a book festival – presumably my target audience.
And it’s not as if no one was selling. The well-known and extroverted author across the aisle was selling a book an hour. He had several titles, the ability to cut deals, and a well-worn patter: “Hi! What do you like to read? Well, right here I have a book that’s vaguely like that. But just today I’ll sell you the whole series as a bundle for $12…”
My informal tracking had him landing a sale one out of three times.
I sold one, and she bought every separate title at our table, and had her money out before I even made my pitch.
I am not shy, but I am not pushy. I lack the chutzpah to pull people in like a carny. And, for the record, I am totally one of the people the extroverted author does not sell a book to. I have an elevator pitch “The adventure of Jack after the Beanstalk...” and a few other lines from my marketing pitch, but you would have to come to me.
A few did, and they listened to my pitch, and said they would think about it and maybe come back. None did.
How do we value a well-intentioned waste of time?
Or was it wasted?
Besides the fact that I sold two more books than I would have binge-watching Narcos, there may some real, if hard to quantify value for doing these events. Because a lot of people go to these things and only buy a small fraction of the books they will eventually purchase. And a lot of them just come to window shop.
There is a vague thing in sales called the Rule of 7, which states, essentially, it takes seven contacts, or “touches”, with a potential customer before they even begin to think about a purchase. Those seven touches (on average) (and this theory varies widely by source) are why sellers add marketing on top of sales.
So if I think of it as marketing, then maybe some good? Maybe those two or three near misses I had will buy the book later.
The book you didn’t buy. There! I touched you!
That’s an awful lot of maybes to clear a Saturday for. But I camped afterwards in the coolish pines, and that was definitely worth it.
The part that was worth it.
WORD COUNT:
Last week’s WHWL? = 1000
Last week’s Monday night group = 500
Editing Go Action Fun Time with the new mechanic, and just cleaning up the copy, 3 hours at 500 words/hour = 1500
Yesterday (Jan 22) was my birthday, which is less of a thing to me than it seems to be on Facebook. There is no particular party planned, past or present. I mention this because people ask.
Even though just about every particular of my life has changed in the past 12 months, in a lot of ways, nothing has changed at all. If that seems contradictory you are not watching me putter around the house. I’ve learned some important and hard lessons, but they are mostly deeply personal and peculiar to the people in my life. For more general wisdom, I will refer you to what I wrote a year ago, which I still stand by.
Here’s what you can do while not attending my non-existent birthday party:
You can also meet the man who put together this poster
Saturday, January 27, 2018
10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
The Library Comicon is an annual event featuring costume contests, artists & authors, shopping, and activities for children and adults alike. Fans of Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Wholocks, Trekkies, and more are invited to gather at the Tempe Public Library in costume for a celebration of pop culture.
I’ll be in the booth with a good pen and my sparkling wit. I hope to see you there.
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE
It appears that I gave $50 to Barefoot Writers* so I could get 3+ e-mails a day detailing other exiting opportunities to spend even more money, but only if I act right now. More grievous is the inrush of spam mail aimed at the economically desperate – spurious investment opportunities and credit cards I qualify for no matter what.
If copy-writing were really that lucrative and/or understaffed, I’d get like one letter with a take-or-or-leave-it offer. Because they have copy-writing to get back to. The hard sell I’m getting likely means they make more money off of desperate wannabe’s than desperate marketing clients.
Compare/contrast with Marketing Profs Today, a more generic marketing resource, from which I also get regular e-mail. They also offer plenty of opportunities for me to spend more money. Their newsletter, though, will have links to five articles, four of which will have actual content and free – once you click through the pop-ups (this is typical)** . (The fifth will be behind a pay wall.)
All I get from AWAI (the actual acronym for the organization behind Barefoot Spammers) is bland advice I could get following writers on Twitter, followed by a thousand word hard-sell.
I’ve blown $50 on dumber things, and I had ti to blow at the the time. I’m not wealthy, but I’m solvent enough that $50 by itself does not threaten the budget. Even so, the next bit of curiosity I might satisfy is: will they really give me my money back as claimed?
[*] I am not going to dignify these people with a link. They are not hard to find if you are curious.
[**] You’ll have to give info for a free membership/subscription.
WORD COUNT
1200 words of transcription duty on Taliesin’s Last Apprentice (sequel to Beanstalk and Beyond) on Monday, and then another 1200 original words on that same project on Saturday.
I will be running 
What Have We Learned? 