The most important thing you’re going to read all day

JellyBellyBeansLet’s talk about jelly beans.

You may recall from a couple of days ago that we just coated the tub surround in RedGard.  This is a waterproofing membrane; it goes on like paint although it has a slightly thicker consistency, and dries to a rubbery membrane.  It’s supposed to be put on at a certain thickness to be effective; we lack the tool (a wet film thickness gauge) to properly determine how thick the RedGard is going on the wall and thus have been using “paint it until you can’t see the words anymore” as a handy Internet-suggested shorthand.

Six fuckin’ coats of this Pepto-Bismol lookin’ shit later, I’m ready to say fuck what the internet thinks and that this has got to be thick enough by now.  Take a look at the size of the bucket in the middle picture, here.  That bucket’s almost empty and every bit of that shit’s on the walls right now.  The tub’s not that goddamn big; hell, I’ll do the math if I need to to figure out how thick it probably is.

(Hmm.  Maybe I should just do the math…)

(Just not right now.)

Anyway.  Jellybeans.  There’s an Ace Hardware near our house; we tend to try and frequent them whenever we have any sort of tool/hardware/home improvement needs because hey, local business, and also because they tend to have employees who know what the hell they’re talking about and are nice about finding out if they don’t know.

We’ve had to go to Ace a lot lately because this stuff is waterproofing material and thus doesn’t really do being rinsed out of brushes very well.  And we keep having to add surprise coats, thus two or three trips to Ace in just a few days to buy more brushes and rollers.

Our local Ace Hardware keeps a giant rack of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans right by the cash register.

They are demons, Ace Hardware.  Demons, I tell you.  Because the Jelly Bellies… I cannot resist them.  And so every trip I have made to Ace Hardware for the last several days has led to me scarfing a bag of jelly beans on the way home, because why the hell would I try and wait until I was actually home?  Who does that?

Anyway, on the way home on the most recent trip it hit me that jelly beans are really the perfect food of the future.  I don’t know what kind of Nazi-inspired demon-magic taste thaumaturgy goes into these fuckers, but any time you hand me a little nugget of gelatin small enough to fit in my nose and I eat it and I can taste every individual element of the best cheeseburger I’ve ever had in my life, you have either solved all of the world’s problems or doomed it; I’m not sure which.

Next task is to figure out how to pack a day’s worth of nutrition into one of these little bastards and once you do that I swear I’ll never eat anything else ever again, I promise.  Food pill, Jelly Belly people.  Get on that.

Holy whoa y’all

So I spent money on two things at Staples tonight; one of them I’ll likely talk about sometime in the next couple of days, but no promises.  The second one was this:

photo

This is, quite obviously, not going to be its final resting place– for starters, I’m gonna frame it, and second, there’s no way it lives in front of my prized autographed Dave Dorman Hoth print.  But I thought it thematically appropriate to put the two of them together for the picture.  Plus the cats can’t get to it up there.  🙂

And holy god does that thing look outstanding printed.  Have I singled out and bragged about the artist on this site yet?  Her name is Yvonne Less, but she goes by Diverse Pixel, and you can find out more about her work here.  She doesn’t know this yet, but she’s also doing the cover for the Benevolence Archives novel.  I don’t even have a title for the damn book yet and I can’t wait to see her cover.

(About the shower curtains: they’re a baby proofing measure, designed to keep the boy from trying to climb the bookshelves while still allowing me to see all my books.  There are twelve six-foot bookshelves in this room alone, so we had to come up with something.)

 

What is this I don’t even

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN BRAZIL RIGHT NOW.

Birthday weekend sale: the rounduppening

Man, it’s funny: I’m effectively unemployed right now, right?  I work one night a week at OtherJob and while I pretend that my full-time job is “Writer” right now, the fact is that without my own initiative “Writer” and “unemployed” look exactly the same and frankly at the moment are bringing in the same amount of income.  But hell if I don’t feel insanely busy right now.  I’ve hit my word count for the day as of 1:30, which is when I’m writing this, but I’ve got about ten thousand things to do before the wife gets home and SHIT THERE’S SOCCER TODAY.

Arrgh.  Anyway, point is, if I was ever worried about keeping my life full of stuff to do during the summer, I seem to be doing a pretty damn good job with that at the moment.  Granted, most of my “stuff to do” boils down to “read this” or “write this” (I have promised several people I’d take a look at manuscripts, work I enjoy doing, but… yeah, I probably ought to actually do it) so maybe I’m more of a grad student than an actual unemployed person but the point is damn, busy.

So let’s talk about this:Screen Shot 2014-07-08 at 1.25.44 PM

I’m gonna call this a success, I think, and I’ve learned something about Amazon.  With a minimal amount of promotion and a decent-sized audience (theoretically 3200 people subscribed here, although daily hits aren’t remotely that number, and around 800 on Twitter, with who knows how many seeing any individual Tweet, plus about 130 on Facebook who are likely mostly represented on other lists as well) you can hit #1 in a smaller sub genre for a couple of days.  I hit #1 in Short Stories and Anthologies, topped out at #4 in Space Opera, and maxed out at #1031 (that I saw, at least) in all Kindle free downloads.  In three days, I moved 311 copies of the book– 200 on Saturday, 72 on Sunday, and 36 on Monday, with three more that bled over into early Tuesday morning before Amazon officially shut the spigot off.  That kept me at #1 for all of Sunday and most of Monday, so I’m going to attribute those drops less to the dwindling effects of my own promotion and more to Amazon’s own ebb and fall of traffic on the course of a weekend.  I had not fallen out of the top 10 in Space Opera and was still #3 in Short Stories and Anthologies when I went to bed Monday night.

Suggestion: if you’re going to do a free day, do it on a Saturday.  Hella more hits.  This means that, combining this sale, the previous free days, and all of my sales, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 copies of my book in the hands of readers right now, which I feel pretty good about.  There are eight reviews on the site, another on Amazon.ca, a few on Goodreads, and at least one that is just on the author’s blog and to the best of my knowledge not posted anywhere else.  Three more are posted in the “Reviews” section in the mast up there because Amazon has removed them.  All but one are positive, and most of them are glowingly so.  I literally couldn’t be any happier with how the reviews have gone.

Now to see if the increased exposure over the weekend leads to any spike in actual money sales ($2.99 cheap!) this week.  I’ve not made any so far today, but the pattern thus far has been that since the first couple of days that the book was available I never make any sales in the morning or afternoon.  They’re always in the evening and sometimes very late at night for whatever reason.  So we’ll see tonight if I get a bump or not.  Here’s to hoping, right?

And let me repeat this one more time:  Thank you so, so much to everyone who downloaded/read/retweeted/told a friend/reviewed/hell, sent positive vibes regarding this book this weekend.  I appreciate it more than y’all could possibly know.

Now back to work on the sequel.  Well, after I finish murder-painting the bathroom and these ten other errands I have to do.  🙂

Get to work you bum

I posted this to Twitter yesterday after I came across it, but I want to put it here too because I like it.

One more sale roundup post later, for those of you who like the more numbery/process-based posts, and then I promise I’ll try not to talk about writing for a few days.  🙂

Bqjf_tSIcAA0nEg.jpg-large

Last day for BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES free promotion!

I’ve been tremendously happy with how The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 has performed over the last few days; we’ve spent a good chunk of that at first place in the “Short Stories and Anthologies” subgenre and top five for “Space Opera.”

…but it could be better.

You.  Yeah, you.  Have you downloaded The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 yet?  This blog has 3200 followers, so probably not.

Don’t you think you should?  It’s freeeeeeee today.  But just until midnight, and not any more after that.

Go for it.  Treat yourself.  You know you want to.

Terrible Decisions: Redrum edition

…and here’s what’s happening today.  This is after one coat of RedGard; there will be at least one more today and quite possibly two, depending on how well the second coat covers.  You’re not supposed to be able to see the letters on the cement board anymore and obviously the first coat didn’t manage that.

(The pictures are really blurry.  Don’t know why.)

photo 1photo 2

photo 3

It was determined that this was to be my wife’s job, as I have never been good at painting in any context, and painting with something that had been described as “runny mayonnaise” did not seem like optimal conditions.  (For whatever it’s worth, the texture is more like pudding– less gloppy than mayo– and Bek says it’s been applying just like paint, only heavier.  She’s not been having any problems.)

Next step is tile, although technically once the RedGard is on the shower is fully usable.  God please don’t let me fuck up the tile.  That should be next weekend.

Check this out

Have I told you how awesome Winter Bayne is yet?  Or recently, at least?  Because Winter Bayne is awesome.  Not only did she write an excellent review of The Benevolence Archives that, crap, I just realized I haven’t linked to yet , she did this for me:

bacover3d

(I only wish the thing was available in print.  It will be sooner or later, just not yet.  Haven’t had time to learn how CreateSpace works yet.)

Sales update:  We’re still #1 in Anthologies/Short Stories, after almost an entire day, and have slipped a teeny bit to #6 in Space Opera, even though sales have dropped off from yesterday– and the combination of those two facts makes me think it’s probably just Amazon in general that’s slower on Sundays than Saturdays.  Fifty copies moved so far today vs. about 100 at this point yesterday.  The book is still free until midnight Monday night, so go download it if you haven’t yet!