They say itll snow tonight

Today I typed up all the hand-written pages from this week and the typed pages I did in the store today (I’ve been getting sick of how slow a pen is compared to typing, and carried one of my best typewriters down to the store so I could work while I waited for people to come, look, and not spend any money in our store), and my word count so far for NaNoWriMo is a paltry 5838. That’s just over 11% of the way to the minimum word count.

Well, for this novel. I couldn’t decide (at first) which of two ideas I had to work on, and worked alternately on both for a while, but between the two (totally un-integratable) novels I’m still at less than 7500 words. If I were on pace, I’d be at 25,000 or more! If I were writing with the speed and focus that I put into Forlorn (now re-written as Lost and Not Found) last NaNoWriMo, I’d be done twice over by now. What’s going on here? I think there’s a lot of distractions… last year it was just me and my novel. This year I can hardly get a day alone to work on it. And when I do (a la Thursday), I find myself unable to concentrate or create … blocked and stressed and … I even got a pretty bad headache there for a while… that wasn’t fun.

Cafepress still seems to be saying November 17th for Perfect Bound books. I won’t be ready by that date, but I’m working on it. I have a basic idea for the cover design and I’ve written my own copy … so, yes, it is self-aggrandizing, thank you very much, but it’ll have to do, as no one else seems to have the time to read a book these days. I did finally get back the copy of the book with Angela’s notes in it, and I will be working dilligently on at the very least fixing all the typos she spotted. I will look into other possible changes as they come up. I will also begin recording the audio version … soon. I think that reading the entire thing aloud will be the best way to work out any totally messed-up sentences and mis-understandings and unnatural dialogue, so the print and PDF versions will likely not see the light of day until the audio version is ready, too. I am thinking of offering the ATOMS versions of the book only through Cafepress and the BITS versions of the book only through BitPass… despite the fact that they will be priced well above a penny… I think that since you can buy BitPass currency with PayPal or a credit card without facing a transaction fee and their gateway automatically secures access to the digital files I sell that it will be easier than trying to secure it myself or manually emailing the (huge, in the case of the audio) files to people who pay via PayPal… so, yeah. That’s what I’m thinking. Also, here are some links to Pre-Order the Novel in various formats via PayPal at an extra discount (these links will be de-activated when the novel is finally available):

links removed

In other news, Betty is done, priced ($195 in the store, $147 for internet orders), and hanging in the store. I will try to get a photo taken soon. Depending on weather, I will try to take photos tomorrow. I want to re-photograph all my art so I can crop it all properly and adjust the size and quality to reasonable amounts and put together an easier-to-use interface for the whole ‘Art’ section of Modern Evil … but it has to start with new, good pictures. Of everything. So, we’ll see how that goes, but yeah – Betty is ready, and I think it’s some of my best work yet. I look at it and I’m just struck. Wow. People are already doing double-takes and coming back into the store to have a second look at it. Hopefully someone will want to take Betty home with them sometime soon.

Oh yeah, and the ScreenPrinting business accidentally fell into the time machine. It was set simply for “Spring, 2004”, so hopefully it won’t land too hard on anyone’s foot when it suddenly appears… we won’t know exactly when to expect it, except sometime between now and next summer, I guess. Looking through the time vortex as it plummetted, I think I saw over two dozen new designs available… must have hit some turbulence in the vortex and expanded from two designs to so many. Keep your eyes peeled next year for an explosive appearance of Modern Evil T-Shirts.

Also visible through the shifting vortex (it was only open for about eight minutes or so, since the time machine was actually working only that long – never trust cheap parts from sources in the future for your only time machine; it’s impossible to get them to honor their warranty in the event of a problem, since they don’t exist yet (and your time machine is broken)), this from an unknown point in the future, was a now secret project I’ve recently started on coming to fruition. Suffice it to say I am now actually working on my first short film, and that from what I saw through the vortex, it comes out pretty good. Looking forward to that.

And now, to go work on another VERY abstract painting, the cover for LaNF, and the recording of LaNF… and then, on to Solving World Hunger!