Sometimes going forward will set you too far back. Sometimes the only direction you can take is down and out. I am not at that point yet. But it is now on the horizon.
Am I sounding suicidal? I hope not. I was glooming about publishing and books that I am trying to make live. I have paid Page Publishing practically all the payments I stupidly agreed to, and yet, I am stuck in an endless loop of editing where they ignore my emails and appear to be proceeding without me. The clueless case manager sends me an email saying, “Go ahead, take all the time you need to edit” after I have already emailed them the final instructions and requested the process continue to the next step. I re-sent that email and asked them if they have gotten my last email. No responses, though. What the hell am I paying them money for? I’m editing the book myself. Their proof-reader makes changes that I have to change back to the original, and then they don’t even want to take the next step?
I admit that my illustrations for this rant are only pictures saved for other posts that never got used before. Like this cool Kingdom Hearts one;
But I am not ready to kill the project yet and hire a lawyer to sue the publisher to get my money back. I want to see this book, Magical Miss Morgan, live.
And I need to see Snow Babies live too.
But from here on we go with the cheapest possible options. Free if possible.
Here is another Wizard Donald to look at while I continue to stew about publishing problems;
I have always tried to make the best of what I already have. I have always lived by the idea that other people are all my equals, even the really stupid ones, and I have nothing that I am not obliged to share.
I have little left besides wit and wisdom. And I have tried hard to share that here. But I sometimes feel like I am alone and pointless.
But the captain always goes down with his ship. And if my ship is sinking, then at least I will soon know if there are mermaids down there willing to teach me to breathe underwater, or possibly not.
Catch a Falling Star 
Re-bubbling the Old Enthusiasm
It is getting harder and harder to climb the new day’s hill to get to the summit where I can reasonably get a good look at the road ahead. At almost-64, I can see the road ahead is far shorter and much darker than the highway stretching out behind me. It is not so much a matter of how much time I have spent on the road as it is a matter of the wear and tear the mileage has caused.
This weekend I had another depressing free-book promotion where, in five days, I only moved five books, one purchase, and four free books. I have made $0.45 as an author for the month of June.
I was recently given another bit of good advice from a successful author. He said that I shouldn’t be in such a rush to publish. He suggested taking more time with my writing. Hold on to it longer. Polish it and love it more. And now that I have reached sixteen books published on my author’s page, I have basically beaten the grim reaper in the question of whether or not he was ever going to silence me and my author’s voice. I can afford to live with the next one longer.
But the last one, A Field Guide to Fauns, practically wrote itself. It went fast from inspiration to publication simply because the writer in me was on fire and full of love and life and laughter that had to boil over into hot print exactly as quickly as it did. The additional writing time afforded me by the pandemic and quarantine didn’t hurt either. Once in print, my nudist friends loved it.
This next one has the potential to boil and brew and pop out of me in the same accelerated way as that last one did. Of course, it has been percolating inside my brain basically since the Summer of 1974. So, this is no rushed job. The Wizard in his Keep is a story of a man who tries to take the children of the sister of his childhood best friend to a place of safety when their parents are killed in a car wreck. But the only safe place he has to offer is in the world of his imagination. A world he has bizarrely made real. And that best friend comes searching for the children. And so does a predator who seeks to do them all grievous harm.
In many ways, it is a story already written.
So, I am rekindling the flame that keeps the story-pot boiling. And more of it is already cooking. And I am recovering from the cool winds of disappointment, as well as the dark storm clouds of the nearing future.
This is now actually a two-year-old post. Both of the books mentioned here are published and available from Amazon. As far as holding on to the books longer, there is no problem with that on Amazon. Editing, improving, and re-publishing a book is actually easier than publishing it the first time. Nothing about this old post has been made untrue by the passage of time. I am still probably the best author of books like these whose published books almost never get read.
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