Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.
Merry Christmas!
I bear news that Wednesday’s installment will be posted late in the day. Usually, I prepare the uploads 2-3 days in advance, but sadly, I came down with a nasty sinus infection/cold Saturday afternoon that (at 9:30 pm on Christmas Day) I still haven’t shaken.
Thank you for all the pitchforks and lit torches. They will be a lovely addition to my Doomsday stash.
I did, in fact, put all the chapters in one file instead of individual chapters per file. The latest chapter will be in the back (natch), but in the PDF, your reader will open up to the correct chapter automagically. The Kindle and EPUB have links on the title page that will take you to the latest chapter.
I did this beginning with chapter 23, but I failed to let you know. For new readers, if you download chapter 24, you’ll get the whole thing up to this point, so you will have no reason to go back and fetch each chapter individually. And welcome to my world!
I received a wonderful email the other day from someone who found the serial and is now following it. I was asked if, instead of uploading one chapter each week, could I instead simply add the new chapter to the file so all the chapters would be in one spot. (I assume you would then delete the file from the week before and download the new one.)
This question came up at a good time for me, as Dunham is running right at 350-400 downloads per week now (not including page views). There are enough people now who might have a solid preference one way or another, and my goal has always been to provide the most value for the least amount of hassle.
So I put it to you: Would you rather a) leave it as it is (one chapter per week, in individual files) or b) have one master file that contains all the chapters and that week’s installment?
[poll id=”8″]
I have/had a Dell laptop I’ve had for 5 years. That thing has been a workhorse, but it had been having a couple of problems I either found a workaround for or put up with. It was on and cooking 12-18 hours a day every day. It had been reformatted twice, hauled around on vacation and to the library to work on it.
I go through keyboards like crazy because eventually the letters wear off and the fingernail grooves get too deep. That’s not why I get rid of them. I wear them out until they stop working. But I have an external monitor and wireless keyboard and mice. The most vulnerable parts of the machine were protected.
So my laptop’s been well taken care of, the keys are still relatively pristine, as is the screen. I was running XP Pro with Office 2000 (you can see my reasons why here).
But 5 years is a long time and beyond its expected lifespan. Dude was getting worried it would die in the middle of a huge deadline. We decided to get a new laptop. Now, I trust Dude with these decisions and he’s an ASUS fanboy, so I now have a shiny new ASUS.
Intel Core i5-2430M CPU @ 2.4GHz
6.00G RAM
64-bit
Win7 Professional
We’ve had it since April, actually. Dude’s been using it. I customize a computer to beyond an inch of its life and I really didn’t relish the fact that I would have:
1. a completely new operating system
2. incompatibility of my preferred work tools
3. unfamiliar new work tools
4. moving data
5. customizing those new work tools
I also had a Western Digital external hard drive we bought in 2004-2005 that held all my archives. Since it WAS the backup, I hadn’t felt the need to HAVE backup on it. Oh woe was me. Little did I know that it was on its last legs and this move killed it. I may or may not have unplugged it from the computer before it was supposed to have been.
Dude spent three days with a very kind Samaritan retrieving the data. There are other issues with the data now, but it’s there. I have it. This guy is a peach for helping us and here is his information: James Litten Watch the video. Seriously, people, give this guy business. He deserves it. I cannot stress this enough.
So I’m almost totally moved in. I cannot stand the fact that this OS’s changes seem to encompass how it looks. As far as I can see, the only reason it exists is to make the roundy corners on dialog boxes transparent and wavy. Whatever else it does, I don’t know. Please feel free to enlighten me below.
The first thing I do when I move into a computer is change the theme to resemble, as closely as possible, Win95. The new start menu was completely unintelligible and/or takes more clicks than it needs to. I started pinning things to my task bar immediately. But I still couldn’t deal with the interface. So I found this tool: Classic Shell XP (because XP was good about letting you have the 95 look). I still have the little wavy in the toolbar, but okay.
HOWEVER, my hatred for moving was borne out by the fact that while Office 2000 and Acrobat 7.0 Standard WILL run on Win7, their functionality is rendered nearly useless for my purposes. Every time I closed Word 2000, it said it had crashed. Acrobat 7.0 can’t be installed as a printer driver at all. This is purposeful on Adobe’s part and I’m coming to despise Adobe almost as much as I despise Apple.
Then I found XP Mode/XP Virtual Machine, which…crashed when I tried to install Acrobat 7.0 as the printer driver. I was despondent, thinking I’d have to buy an upgrade. Why? Why is this necessary, Adobe? What functionality have you added that I actually need? None.
I went on eBay, where I always get my software a couple of versions back and for CHEEP! I found this listing. Then I Googled what this is selling for everywhere, so clearly this listing was the JACKPOT! Now, I’ve been on eBay since dirt and have had about two bad buying experiences and it’s because I know how to read the listings. What’s wrong with that one? Rant in the comments below. (Now I see there are new listings.)
So I’m back to the sinking feeling I’d have to buy Acrobat X. I had some difficult (for me—shut up, this is traumatic!) decisions to make.
In the meantime, I needed two antispyware and antimalware utilities, which CNET conveniently had. Both gave me viruses and/or adware and/or spyware. CNET, you are worse than useless. You are perpetuating computer disease and whatever trust you have built up over the years is gone. I want everyone to know you are destroying computer health with these bullshit downloads.
Dude had a copy of Office 2010 he got from his work for a minimal charge, so I sucked it up and installed it after I read that it had a function to “save as PDF.” Another reason was because I had to do a quote PDQ and needed a PDF that wasn’t created with some cheap-ass generic PDF maker. Getting my normal.dot into this fucker was a nightmare. I still don’t know where the normal.dotm is stored, but I was FINALLY able to find where to point it to my preferred folder for templates.
That’s another thing. I’m very specific about where I want what stored. I have C: for the OS and program files. I have D: solely for data. Something I consider data is my Word and Excel templates. So I put those in D: and boy did Word 2010 make me work to find the way to set that. It imported all my macros and styles, but it still didn’t import my toolbars from normal.dot, but that’s because Microsoft has totally borked the purpose of toolbars. Don’t these people actually use the products they design? So now I’m faced with the task of rebuilding my toolbars and preferences and getting used to it. Cry for me, Argentina.
Well, I found out that Word 2010 really DOES “save as” PDF. HALLELUJAH. I may have done a victory jig. (Pix or it didn’t happen.) Until…I tried to print to a different page size. It seems that 8.5×11 is the default with no way to edit the page size to 6×9, for example. And I still don’t know if those PDFs are acceptable for Lightning Source. I also don’t know what effect using Word 2010 will have on the Smashwords documents I create. I guess I’ll find out next week when I upload the next installment of Dunham.
My next problem was Flash. Isn’t it always. The Shockwave Flash plugin for Firefox was crashing like crazy. I had to disable the damned thing and trust me, after having been denied access to Flash on my iPad, I was not willing to do so on my PC. Apparently this is a common problem, as evidenced by posts and no solutions. How the fuck do you not have a solution after two years?
Really, it seems many of my problems are caused by the change to a 64-bit system from a 32-bit system.
This has been going on since last Tuesday. What used to take me around 8 hours has taken me almost a week of dedicated effort. (No, I don’t use a moving wizard because I like to customize as I go.)
What I still have to do is:
1. transfer the data from my dead hard drive (currently on Dude’s computer)
2. customize Word and Excel 2010, and…
3. wait for and install Adobe Acrobat X that I ended up buying.
UPDATE 7:14PM CDT: It appears that Firefox and Google want to protect me from myself, but because I hadn’t updated Firefox in FOREVER, I was unaware of this bullshit, and now that I’m running the latest version of Firefox, I’ve got brand new annoyances to deal with.
It appears I’m not the only writer with her knickers in a twist over The Book That Shall Not Be Named, and not only that, but it appears the writerly collective conscious had gotten its knockers knickers in a twist somewhere between Sunday night and Monday morning. Usually when the twist in my knickers gets too tight, I simply avoid the source. In this case, I can’t. It’s everywhere, including my snail mail box after my 70-year-old aunt in Salt Lake took the time to cut an article on it from Deseret News and drop it in the mail to me. I can’t get away from it.
Between this and the incessant banging on the marketing drum, I’ve pretty much had all I can take of the business side of being a writer. (Note: Being a publisher is an entirely different thing.)
Monday morning I went whining to a couple of people, one of whom was utterly unsympathetic and the other who sent me to Cliff Burns’s latest blog post. Lo, there not only did I behold my own frustrations laid out in more articulate language than I’ve been using lately, but on the same day I was having my existential crisis.
Building character through self-flagellation | Cliff Burns – “Books not selling, readers indifferent, preferring to spend their hard-earned shekels on dry-humping teen vampires and spank me-fuck me fan fiction. Not a brilliant stylist, so I can’t even hope for the consolations of posterity.”
Then a friend, who thinks something must in the water:
The rise of the published first draft | VacuousMinx – “I fully agree that TBTSNBN has an alchemical appeal for readers, one that transcends its many flaws. But while its appeal cannot be copied, any more than you can catch lightning in a jar, the (lack of) process can and will be. […] So we will get more barely-altered fanfic and more un-self-critical writers who are proud that they can write 100,000 words in a month and send the resulting manuscript off to a publisher.”
sent me to yet another writer writing at the same time:
Striving for a WIP that’s actually “in progress” | KZ Snow – “Does it even pay to write well? Maybe I should follow the lead of some of my peers and strive for quantity, compose a few tearjerkers or sex romps or chuckle fests every couple of months. There’d be nothing wrong with that. Readers seem to enjoy the output of speed writers as much as or more than that of poky writers.”
I’d already decided to do the Dunham serial a couple of weeks ago, so I did feel as if I were actually taking action and could prove to be a boon. We shall see, but at least I was trying something different, doing something with the words I’d written that otherwise wouldn’t see the light of day for another year. I’d also already decided to rebrand the Dunham series with new covers and new classifications and unveil them all next year with the release of Dunham.
So between the time I announced the serial and the time I got to Cliff’s post, I had spent hours revamping my websites, which I find oddly relaxing. And because I do like this thankless, background, zero-revenue activity so much, I slowly came to the realization that writing novels and the act of publishing them is a hobby. Given that I hold my hobbies sacrosanct, this wasn’t a step down, but a step up. In that respect I also decided to get out of the business of publishing other people. I needed to let go of the pressure of selling, the pressure of sales (or lack thereof, as measured against those of the snake-oil salesmen of our business), and the pressure of bookkeeping. I needed to rejuvenate my love for creating and disseminating my own work. The constant marketing of myself and publishing other people is not part of the hobby and not part of the love.
So now it’s Friday. Nothing about the situation has changed except that I feel as if I have taken some action AND changed my outlook. My frustration level is way down and I can once again stop to see what I have: a wonderful family, a good job that pays the bills, a nice house with a gorgeous porch* upon which I sit with my Tax Deductions and discuss the nature of God—and a hobby I’m mad about and am excited about sharing over the next year.
That’s far more than a lot of people have.