You can now purchase the paperback version of the First Edition of Lost and Not Found, my first novel.
I’m going to bed now, but I’ll update this post with a link to the Store I haven’t built yet and the BitPass link to purchase the PDF version of the novel … soon.
If you have any questions or problems, please comment.
And yes, the time for pre-ordering is now over.
Last night I pushed myself to finish going through reading Lost and Not Found for the Nth time, making little notes about changes that needed to be made. To give myself a clear mind, I hadn’t looked at it in a couple of months, and that seems to have worked. I fixed the couple of minor continuity problems that I noticed (not more than removing a couple of paragraphs or changing a few words here and there), and made a lot of little changes that will make reading it a lot more smooth and natural.
Now all I have to do is go through the entire thing and put it into the computer. I was working with a paper version, see. So once I have all the changes input into the computer, I can upload it to CafePress and you can order the “final” edition of the book. As soon as I re-modify the cover design to reflect that it is a final version.
And then I just have to put together a “Store” page where you can order the PDF version via BitPass or link to the CafePress store to get the paperback version, so it’s there and easy to access for everyone forever. And easy to link to. Yep.
Anyone have suggestions as to the way I should format the PDF version? Do you want to be able to print it out on standard 8’x11′ paper and read it? DO you only plan on reading it on your computer? Should I offer two versions? What do you think?
Anyway, I’m off to not work on anything at all soon. TTYL.
So, I was going through … a box of older papers and things … sorting some of it, some reading … I don’t know. All my tax papers for … ever … were in there, and are now … still just as messy. Most of the documents regarding my first pass at college were in there, but are now re-filed with the documents from my more recent pass. But there was some other stuff. All the remnants of my trip to Woodstock ’99 in one folder (now mostly in the circular file), and a surprising amount of other interesting stuff… notes from a high school girlfriend, a journal a fiancee wrote for me when we were separated for a couple of months (though I’d love to get a copy of the one I wrote to her, it was destroyed just before I asked for it last year), and from a similar period, a lot of pages and notes and things I wrote in and around the time of high school.
Including not less than 29 poems, 7 short stories, and 1 children’s book.
There are only one or two people I know of who visit Modern Evil who may have been exposed to my high school poetry, so I’m thinking I’ll share it with the rest of you. Mostly via BitPass. Say, 10cents per short story (50cents for all 7), 2cents per poem (50cents for all 29), and for $1 you get everything; all the stories, poems, and a scan (or perhaps an updated Flash version) of the children’s book. How many of you would buy that, eh?
Better yet, if I re-type all that stuff from the hand-written and other paper originals, does that count towards my “focus on: writing”?
’cause that would rock.
In his normal tradition of not giving instructions until after the fact, my dad frustrated me a bit today.
I have a piece of wood drilled through and sanded according to all the instructions he had given me at the time. From what he’d said so far, I thought the next step would be to pull the wire through, so I asked him for help doing that. Half an hour later he helped me pull the wire through. And just as soon as the wire was pulled through (by his own hand), he proceeded to explain to me the three or four things that needed to be done before trying to pull the wire through. Steps some of which I was vaguely aware needed to be done but wasn’t sure what order they should occur in, as well as steps that hadn’t occurred to me. So we pulled the wire back out again after fighting for several minutes to try to get it in.
And then, after I started working on the other steps, he also confronted me with the fact that we do not, in fact, have the hardware that it takes to complete the lamp (ie: the parts that actually make it a lamp), and that I need to decide what I need so he can order it. He tried showing me the sort of parts I’ll need, and tried to explain how it all goes together, but my brain just doesn’t seem to be able to visualize things the way he wants it to (or perhaps just in the way he explains them), so I had to give up for a bit. Partially because what he was explaining seems to mean that in order to properly fit all the lamp parts, I have to prepare the wood for them first and make other decisions like where to drill the hole for the electric &c. later in the process. In fact, from some of the things he’s said, the several days of work I’ve already put into this particular table lamp may turn out to be useless; this piece of wood I’ve been working on may actually be just a pretty piece of firewood.
And the floor lamp I’ve been trying to put together for a month may also be quite wrong.
Oh, and the soonest we could actually get the parts is perhaps a week or two from our order, so really, no matter how hard I work I can’t get a single fucking lamp done for two more weeks!!! Grrr! Argh!
I’m thinking of switching over to tables or something that doesn’t require me to buy extra hardware for it to be complete. I mean, sure, tables will cost more and sell slower, but maybe I can get one out for sale before the end of the month if I start now!
Did I mention lampshades? My dad thinks all lampshades are too expensive. We don’t really have any I could use with these manzanita lamps, and he doesn’t want to buy any. Sigh. So I have to figure out exactly what lampshades I want and convince him to buy them, somehow. Or sell lamps without shades.
Ooh! Or tables! No need to “waste” money on lampshades when making tables!
And in addition to little steps that come up after I need to know about them, other things keep popping up in conversation with my dad as well. Little things that aren’t what he’s been saying since he first started talking about all of us doing furniture, about how the business would run, and it basically comes down to more and more ways he’s taking chunks out of my share of the retail price of each piece. Now, I understand that the cost of lampshades and lamp parts and finish (and the cost of wood, were we not working with someone else’s garbage) all get subtracted from the gross income from the sale of a piece. And when he told me he would take 20% of every sale to cover business and equipment costs, I thought that was reasonable, since I’ll be using some amount of equipment on each peice and maintenance and replacement of disposables costs money. But now in addition to that I get to pay for all disposables (ie: sandpaper, small tools, drill bits, &c.) separately, in addition to the 20%. Plus he’s said that I’m going to have to figure out all my own income, sales, &c. taxes on my own, including … I don’t even know what … deductions and … I have no idea… as though I were running my own separate business. Which I simply cannot do. Just sitting here writing about it right now has got my pulse up around 120bpm and I’m sure my blood pressue is up, because I’m beginning to hear the blood in my ears. I do not want to “be my own boss and run my own business”, I do not have a business degree. My dad does, on both counts. I have no experience dealing with all those little money details of running a business, all the little governmental concerns and forms and procedures, and my dad has twentyfive years’ experience with it. I don’t understand.
If he actually tries to make me do all that stuff, I’ll just stop working and if I have to, go find someplace else to live.
That shit isn’t good for my health and well-being.
I don’t ever want to be anybody’s boss, hardly even my own. I don’t want to have to face the ridiculousness that the government has made running a business have to be. Worse, I don’t want to deal with my dad as a manager if he isn’t going to be doing any managing. ie: if I have to buy all my own supplies with my own money, report my taxes separately, and oh yeah, figure out how to do everything he already knows on my own because he won’t fucking tell me the things I need to know to get it done. Fuck
I’m going to go shop for lapshades and lamp parts now.
If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.
-Emile Herzog, writer (1885-1967)