Oh No, More Damn Joe Stuff!

Margaret Secara (Pierce) "Maggie" A friend died unexpectedly Friday night. She and I were chatting on facebook a couple of hours earlier (giggling over pictures from us with friends at a party in 1977 which she had uncovered) and a couple of hours later her husband heard a thud from the next room. He found her on the floor, CPR and 911. She was pronounced at 11P. A friend who was in the pictures notified me Saturday morning before it was announced on Maggie's webpage that afternoon – after her family had been notified across many time zones. Within the next few hours over 500 people responded. Grieving requires simple honestly. First about the shock, then about the loss, but for me, it has had to move into a celebration - say that name, tell the tales, keep them alive in memory, and introduce them to people who will never get to meet her. It keeps her alive for just a bit longer. And grief is best processed in the sharing with the other people who know that spec...

At 16 reviews Adobe/Kindle will open new promotional tools to me for promoting the current book and, hopefully, the several that are about to follow. I have 11 reviews so far. I'm hoping my readers will post, even if they didn't buy from Amazon. So that means I just need five more to open the tools. Five isn't bad. And if you have reviewed, tell your friends. Or you enemies if they might like the book. It will confuse them, and isn't that satisfying?

Well, this self-publisher. I'm not a believer in Astrology but there is the amazing coincidence that the most negative experiences of my life have happened during Mercury Retrograde. My heart attack, diagnoses with Diabetes, death of my father, and other such landmarks. A friend warned me that Mercury would be Retrograde until the middle of August. But I didn't know that until after the next event. Immediately after getting CLIMBING THE SPIRAL MOUNTAIN up onto Kindle my computer decided to take a shit on me. It has happened many times in the past two years (I'm on a Macintosh) but I've gotten very good about paranoid backup prices. It only two days to diagnose the degree of the problem, erase, install Mac OS 10.14 from the ground up, restore documents, Adobe programs, and start the nightmare of restoring online accounts for things like Amazon, Kindle, a dozen email accounts, and many other websites where I visit for information (almost all of which need new passwo...

An Unrelated Photoshop job to distract me from the pain. I said I was going to track what I was doing, but got distracted with the Mac acting up, slowing down, freezing... again. I'm now an old hand at restoring the system from an Internet install. I had backups set but it looks like the last couple of days work (work on Segment: Sho-Caudal #13, More Than This, and the I Don't Wanna Cook Book, and other juggling). One of my regular tools (Dropbox) put up a notice than I had too many registrations on their server, all for the same account. I have to re-register every re-installation of MacOS as a "new computer" and Dropbox has a limit on the number of "machines" I'm allowed to connect to the servers. I went thru and deleted twenty accounts - that that was not the total they showed. Just what would bring me under my limit. So I know that I have recreated machines twenty times, according to DropBox. I allow that this includes defunct iPhones (two...

In addition to the Kindle store, CLIMBING THE SPIRAL MOUNTAIN is now available on most online bookstores and professional library services. https://books2read.com/u/mdK7d3 It's a start. Now I have to push for reviews from people who have actually read the book. No paid revies, no "called in favor" reviews, and nothing by me under another name. Real readers. Who else would you trust? --- Now I start with the existing playbooks and the re-release of THE SONG OF ORPHANS. I hope to have my existing catalog updated by the end of the year. It is satisfying to open the new edition of my favorite novel to any page and not be embarrassed by what I find. It is also gratifying that every page moves me forward in the story.

Out for a sweaty Sunday drive. I have a lifelong tendency to feel like I have not done anything. Sometimes that is a bleak view of my entire lifetime of accomplishment, but more often it is simply feely there has been no progress in any of my activities.  Recently the old self un-appreciation has started to creep back, so I think I'm going to use this blog as a diary. Just to remind me. I probably won't keep it going very long. But it might be good for me. In the last ten days... My novel CLIMBING THE SPIRAL MOUNTAIN is being read by a few people around the country. And out of its 186,000 words, a friend found three problems. Two were simple spelling errors where the error is actually a word, therefore invisible to the A.I. spellchecks, and the third is a simple logic problem where my lead character packed his bags with old and new clothes, and pages later, he decides to wash the new clothes to get some of the stiffness out of them. Three  DONE . The skids have been...

Rolling with a lot. CLIMBING THE SPIRAL MOUNTAIN with Kindle, tonight should be live with D2D, working on the print release. I really like the final cover. And I think it will be the final cover. Hot on its heels is the new edition of THE SONG OF ORPHANS, my first novel. Fantasy. Still reads well. Behind that comes the revised collection of short stories, THE TASTE OF FIRE. Three books should all be out by September. And the three plays will be folded in, so ... lots. On Channel Jorune there is SSC #13 and ORFA, the One Roll Fits All RPG system for Jorune, and that is leading to the Pulp version. ORFA is a freebie, ORFA: JORNE goes to all SSC subscribers and may go up on DriveThruRPG.com. The Pulp will be separate on DriveThru. Then I work on the two finished collections, DANSTEAD TRAVELLER and BORKELBY'S FOLLY. Channel Jorune is chugging along. The COLLECTED SHO COPRA JOE, 2020. I haven't had need to juggle beyond Fiction and Jorune, but the non-fiction is ther...