No rest for the wicked

I hadn’t realised just how much time I’ve spent on publishing recently until I found my belt had shrunk. That trim waist, honed by four years of heavy physical work, has been undone by eight months of solid writing and publishing. I have to get back in shape to deal with the monster garden. It’s all starting to grow fast now.

Four books in eight months. Three of them multi-author books. Not bad for a one-man-and-one-woman-who-also-has-a-full-time-job operation, I think.

Yes, Transgenre Dreams is done. The eBooks will show up fast, the print book requires me to proofread and approve it after Amazon manually check it’s going to print okay. Could take a few days, but it’s all loaded up and ready to roll. Just have to hope there are no mistakes in it or the process goes around again.

The eBooks have a complex linking system with three menus – a main menu, a poetry menu and an ‘about the authors’ menu and of course, all those ‘back to menu’ links. I’m just waiting for someone to find a glitch.

The print book is quite pricey this time – for those ‘who funds you’ obsessives out there, I’ll make 30p per book. My investment in it was just shy of £250 plus a lot of time. As with all the others, I doubt it will make breakeven any time soon. I’d have to sell about 900 copies, at a rough estimate. That could take a while.

That wasn’t the point. Not for any Underdog Anthologies. They come under ‘advertising’. They showcase the authors and the genres Leg Iron Books covers, which is pretty much anything legal and halfway decent. I’d rather see the volume sales in the single-author novels/anthologies and we have some brilliant ones in the catalogue. Also some of mine.

There are at least two novels and a technical book on the way that I know about, but fortunately none are imminent because, frankly, I could do with a rest.

I’m not going to get one. My parents arrive for a visit tomorrow and I am slated for jury service on the 10th April, halfway through that visit. The house is not quite ready for visitors. CStM has worked her fingers to the bone while I’ve been swearing at the slow connection while loading up the books. If she wasn’t here, this place would have become a shithole over the last eight months. Once this visit is over I have promised to buy her that soft ice cream making machine she’s been ogling. She really has earned it.

The spiders and beetles are awake and I have no idea what those spiders hope to catch but some of their webs are immense. There are webs appearing all over the place. On the plus side, the mice have stopped coming in since the dog found out she gets bacon every time she kills one. Now she’s actively hunting them. The mousetraps have seen no action at all this winter.

Tomorrow I have to move this office upstairs because this room is also the guest room. My father is 80 and doesn’t cope well with the long steep twisty staircase here. I have until about 2 pm to do it. The room I move it into is the one room the spiders don’t seem to like but we mostly use upstairs for storage because there’s no heating in any of those rooms. That’s not too bad now and okay in summer but really, nobody goes up there in winter.

I love this house and its inbuilt weirdness but I won’t buy it. Renting will do. It really needs a family or someone who can afford staff. There are servants’ quarters but they would need a lot of work – we use them as attics since there’s no heating in them and the fireplaces are sealed. They are also 1600/1700 style servant rooms. No modern staff would even go in there. It would take a lottery win, a big one, to convince me to buy this place (Since I don’t buy lottery tickets my chance of winning is slightly lower than someone who does) Even though it is older than two local tourist attractions – and has a more mature garden too.

Open it to the public? What? Why do you think I moved way out here in the first place? It was to get away from the public. I’m not going to invite them round.

I’ll take a break from publishing and writing until the end of April, I think. I’ll have considerable grass cutting and planting duties after the visit and jury nonsense is over, and I really do need to lose some of this winter fat layer.

CStM also needs a rest. She has worked hard to keep this place in some kind of shape while I’ve been tied up with writing and editing and publishing. It’s too big for one person to deal with. Even though we live in the same house she has seen little of me for eight months. Fortunately she’s as unsociable as I am so it kind of works but it’s not a good long term plan.

To be fair, someone could move in here and we wouldn’t notice until things went missing from the fridge and the toilet flushed at mysterious times. But we’d probably just blame the ghost.

I would like to get back to blogging about politics and antismokers but really, both have become so unbelievably silly that it is impossible to parody them now. Even the Church of Climatology is beyond parody – warning about warming while ice sheets gain millions of tonnes of ice. Yes, sure, it’s not a religion, but you have to Believe or we will face the End Times…

I’ll just put it into stories. Maybe it’ll trigger some sense in someone, somewhere, who thinks they are just reading entertainment. I bet someone is thinking ‘Goebbels’ now. It’s Legiron’s Law, a subset of Godwin’s.

Oh hell. I’m going to post ‘Pandora’s Lost Luggage’ next. It’s from Transgenre Dreams and I don’t think it’s the best story in there by a long way even though I wrote it.

Well, life is like a train delay. You just have to put up with it until it’s over.