A BIG Announcement…Plus Retreating, NaNoWriMo Prep, and Stupid Game Ads

I KNOW. I know I said I was back to more regular posting, then disappeared. Again. But friends, everything is still so hard and the blog-post idea machine in my head just doesn’t seem to be working the way it used to, and I don’t want to launch into a post without an idea. We’ve been there before, and even though I don’t think it was terrible, it’s not my preferred way of doing things. I really hope to continue to churn out the good, quality content you know and love (I’m not sure how that sentence combined dripping sarcasm with a ginormous presumption, but there it is).

Anyway, I’ve teased a BIG announcement (it’s right there in the title), and I thought about saving it for last so you had to read the whole damn post to get to it, but I’m going to front-load it here, since it’s really big and exciting, and I hate it when I have to read a bunch of stuff I didn’t want to to get to the thing I did. So, here goes: about ten days ago, I hit the PUBLISH button and Whatever Will Be will be available for sale as a paperback and ebook on September 27.

It’s been a very long time coming, and as soon as I pressed publish, my first thought was, “WHAT THE FUCK DID I JUST DO?” I guess that never goes away, even though I keep hoping it will.

I recognize that it’s possible that only I’m excited by this, but I hope some of you are too. As soon as I hit the publish button on this post, I will update the Books page with the ISBN numbers, and when the book is for sale, I’ll put some links there too.

It’s hard for me to anticipate your FAQs, but here are a few I thought of:

Can I preorder? It doesn’t look like it. September 27 is the release date (and my late grandfather’s birthday, too) and I don’t think you can order before then. Give it a try?

Should I buy a real book or the ebook? Of course, that’s a matter of preference. I switched from real books to ebooks ten years ago and I’ll never go back, mostly because I’ve hit that age where the print of a real book is too small for me to read. Plus, real books are cumbersome to read in bed, which is frankly where I do most of my reading. In the interest of full disclosure, I make more money from the ebook than the print copy, but buy whichever you prefer. Heck, buy both. I won’t mind.

Will you sign my copy? Of course I will! If you live locally (in the Reno/Sparks/Carson City area) or are visiting, we can meet up and I’ll scribble my name in your book. If you live out of the area, it will be trickier, but we can figure something out. Message me somewhere (like maybe the contact button if you don’t have another way to reach me) and we can work on it.

If you have questions that aren’t one of these three, let me know. If there are a ton of them, I’ll make them their own post or page on this website.

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I am writing this post from a cute table in a charming cottage two and a half hours away from home. I booked this lovely place some months ago to have my own writer’s retreat (real writer’s retreats are EXPENSIVE). On the agenda: this blog post, with it’s BIG announcement; some NaNoWriMo prep; and whatever else comes to mind. Reading counts. There’s no TV, no chores just begging to be done. Only me and my computer (more on that in a sec), and I’m going to Pomodoro the shit out of the next three days.

Getting here was it’s own challenge. I left from home yesterday, with everything I needed. Or so I thought. I was an hour away from here (an hour and a half away from home, for those doing the math at home), when I realized I left the backpack I so lovingly packed that morning on the couch with my computer in it.

Friends, I am here to tell you that no heart plummeted quite so quickly. That same bag contained my iPad, my Kindle, and all my notes. All I had was my phone. And though I can (and have) written on my phone, it’s less than ideal. If I had my notebooks, I could have written longhand; it would have taken longer, but it would have been something. But they were also packed in that same backpack.

As soon as I had a signal, I planned to call my daughter and ask her to meet me at some point halfway, only to have a text from her asking me to call her as soon as I could. Uh-oh. She had a migraine and was going to call into work. With that headache, she couldn’t drive. So I did what any middle-aged, separated woman does in a pinch.

I called my dad.

To make this already-too-long story much shorter, my dad and stepmom drove to my house, collected my backpack and its contents, and met me at that sort-of halfway point. I finally got here just before five o’clock, a good three hours after I planned to be here, and it was a blazing 112 degrees. It’s supposed to be a balmy 109 today. Thanks, climate change. But at least I can work in this glorious, air conditioned cottage.

The little bedroom in this place has a closet, but it doesn’t have a door, just curtains. (Aside: Can the Closet Monster exist in a closet without a door? God, I hope not, because a curtain seems much easier to breach than a door. Unless you have a cat like mine, who is forever opening closet doors and releasing my Closet Monsters. Damn cat.) As I was puttering around, getting ready for bed, I saw this:

I thought to myself, “What are the chances I will wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and think there is a serial killer in the closet?” The answer: 100 percent. I shoved them behind the curtain.

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Just a few quick words about NaNoWriMo Prep. I started to get really nervous around the first of August, with NaNoWriMo quickly approaching (three months is not as long as it seems, my friends), and I hadn’t been struck with AN IDEA. The Idea Machine in my head isn’t just stuck on blog post ideas, it seems.

So I pulled out my list of ideas. Some of these are really just half a sentence, but they capture the gist of whatever hit me when I wrote it down. I made a separate list of possibilities, with the intention of flushing them out a little more to see which was the loudest.

As so often happens, I didn’t even get that far, because something unexpected and unrelated narrowed it down for me. The next day, I was working my day job and listening to a podcast, which hinted at a way to come at one of those ideas I hadn’t considered. For now, that’s the idea I’m going with, unless one of the others stands up and demands to be heard.

Hopefully, when I leave here I’ll have a list of scenes and maybe even an outline. But if I don’t, that’s okay too. I’ll do what I can.

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You know that stupid game you play on your phone or tablet (don’t lie, we all have one. I actually have separate dumb games on my phone and tablet)? Those games usually come with ads (unless you buy the ad-free version, a thing I have done with some games), and though in-game ads are frustrating, I find myself irrationally livid over two really stupid things.

The first is the cartoon finger. You know what I’m talking about. The dumb cartoon finger that’s showing you how you are supposed to play the game, then proceeds to make the dumbest move possible. I know this is a trick of advertisers to get you to download the game to prove you can do it better than the dumb cartoon finger, but do they have to insult our intelligence to do it? I guess it must work, because that cartoon finger continues to do stupid stuff in every single ad.

Then, if that stupid advertising trick really works and you download the dumb game, it’s never actually played the way the stupid ad showed you. I’m here to tell you as a long-time player of Fishdom, that it is primarily a match three game (I love a good match three), not whatever they are showing in those dumb ads.

I know why they do it, but I reserve the right to be mad about it.