On my activities so far today

On March 31, 2016March 31, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy7 Comments

I got up a bit earlier than usual because I needed to have a blood draw this morning and since it had to be fasting I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. I have the veins of a heroin addict; generally whenever I need to have blood drawn for any reason it will take multiple nurses and multiple sticks with the needle in various places before it works, regardless of the experience or talent level of the nurses involved. When I was hospitalized the second time in October I actually lost track of how many people it took before someone successfully got an IV in me; my record at the local phlebotomy joint is six sticks and three nurses.

In between sticks two and three this morning, I passed out. Second time that has happened, and I don’t recommend it. The nurses get real bossy when it happens, for starters, hollering about sitting up and keeping your eyes open and uncrossing your feet and breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth and all sorts of it would be inconvenient if you died here sorts of things. Just let me sleep! I wanna sleeeeep. But I did not die, and the third stick– in the back of my hand, where I’m going to start insisting they start— finally actually successfully drew blood.

True fact: I am legally unable to donate blood, due to a false positive hepatitis B test in college. I do not and have never had hepatitis, but apparently once you have even a false positive they blacklist you. Which is fine, because given my issues with getting blood out of my veins donating blood is not a method of charity I’m going to be partial to anyway, but it’s nice to have an actual excuse other than “I have no veins, and my arms are made of jelly.”

At any rate, I’m hoping the rest of the day improves.

Oh right this needs a title

On March 30, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

So far, Spring Break has consisted of a lot of Transformers cartoons interspersed with occasional attempts to teach the boy to read and preparing a neverending succession of grilled cheese sandwiches. He’s actually getting pretty decent with a list of basic sight words; we’ll see if I can get him up to Dostoyevsky in the week and a half remaining before school starts again. Probably not, but goals are a good thing.

Outside of that and stressing the fuck out about the job market, though, there’s not been much else. I’m growing rather unpleasantly tired of my own bullshit, and am in that stage of bored where I can think of a dozen things I ought to be doing (not least among which would be getting something done on the A to Z challenge, which starts Friday) but being so unmotivated that I’m simply noting that they’re still out there and moving on with continuing to do not a whole lot. Last year my A to Z posts were completely done by now. I have them all scheduled but not a single one written yet.

I am sure that this is at least as exciting to read about as it is to live through.

I have just noticed that the keyboard in that picture is facing the wrong way, and it’s really getting on my nerves.

…yeah, that’s what I’ve got. Gonna take the boy to the comic shop and maybe try to get a short story finished this afternoon. We’ll see.

I got nothing today

On March 29, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Music1 Comment

…it’s Tuesday, so have a Macklemore video.

Yeah. That’s right. Tuesdays are for Macklemore now. This is the world we live in.

SPRRIIIING BREEEAAAAAAAAAAAK!!!!!

On March 28, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting5 Comments

Is it a sign of something wrong with me that I Google the words “spring break” to find an image for this post and the first thing to come to mind is Jesus Christ, am I glad I never had anything to do with that? Because that’s totally what just happened.

Anyway: I’m unemployed, so depending on how you chose to look at it I either don’t get a Spring Break or every day in March and April is Spring Break.

The boy does, though. In fact, he gets two weeks somehow, the longest Spring Break I’ve ever heard of. So my current jobless status actually kinda works out for us, since the next two weeks can be Daddy Time and we don’t have to scramble to figure out what to do with him.

So far, after three hours of Spring Break, he has built a fort out of couch cushions and I have taken a shower. So we’re living it up over here.

Anybody want to give any suggestions for what to do with a four-year-old for the next two weeks? Other than mainline superhero cartoons, I mean.

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On March 27, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

I’m Luther Siler. I write books. Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.

I’m the author of Skylights, available for $4.95 from Amazon, and The Benevolence Archives. Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is 99 cents from Amazon. Volume 2, The Sanctum of the Sphere, is $4.95. All three books are available in print as well, and the print edition of Sanctum includes BA 1 as a bonus! My newest book is a nonfiction memoir about teaching called Searching for Malumba: Why Teaching is Terrible, and Why We Do It Anyway. The ebook is $4.95 and the print edition is $15.95.

Autographed books can be ordered straight from me as well.

Here’s where to find Luther Siler on the interwebtron:

You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. I am on Twitter pretty frequently; I use it for liveblogging TV, whining about anything that strikes me as whine-worthy, and for short, Facebook-style posts. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
Sign up for my mailing list here.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I accept any and all friend requests.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.

Thanks for reading!

In which the good news isn’t

On March 26, 2016March 26, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work7 Comments

So, in theory, I got offered a job last Wednesday, which ought to be good news. I had a company contact me out of the blue regarding a resume that I had posted on a job site and asking for me to come in and do an interview. The actual job itself wasn’t something I might have gone for on my own– sales, generically– but I suspected I could be good at it, and screw it, job.

Two interviews and some new clothes later, I actually got offered a position, asked for a couple of days to discuss it with my wife, and then found myself in the odd position of realizing that I need to have my scam filters up while interviewing for a job. Long story short: the position pays on pure commission, which is bad enough (I have had one commission job in my life, which I quit after my second shift by simply not showing up for my third) but the way the commissions are determined is… we’ll say shifty.

When the guy interviewing you says, during the second interview, “It’s like a pyramid. Not a pyramid scheme, but a pyramid!” it should throw up some red flags. And it did, but they didn’t really fully register until I got home and my wife looked up the company on some web job boards. And at that point… yeah. No.

So I gotta email this guy tonight or tomorrow and turn down an at-least-in-theory paying job when I haven’t been to work since October, which chaps my ass something fierce to have to do, but I should never have to use the phrase “at least in theory” when referring to the paying part of a job, and for this job I kinda do.

So, yeah. Still doing this: anybody wanna hire me? I’m good at stuff!

#C2E2 wrapup, for real

On March 25, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing3 Comments

Okay. I’m out of bed and have no intention of returning, so maybe I’ll post a blog thing longer than 200 words.

You may recall that I attended a convention last weekend.

I said this yesterday, but not everybody read that so I’ll say it again: the real short version of this post is “I had a lot of fun at C2E2 and I have absolutely no intention of doing it again.” C2E2 is a hell of a con, guys. You should absolutely find time to go to C2E2 as a fan. I’d love to go again just to soak the place up and hit a panel or two, which I wasn’t able to do since I spent the entire weekend at my booth. But I don’t see how anybody other than the big vendors is able to make money at this thing. I lost a shitton of money doing this convention, and had I had to stay at a hotel rather than with a friend, it would have been much, much worse. Now, again: I had fun, I met a lot of people, and I’m pretty sure I created a few fans, so it’s not like the weekend was a total loss. But I’m pretty damn sure there’s no way for a small vendor to make any real money at this thing.

Good stuff: I got to see the Goldens again, who swung by and bought another book. It’s amazing how something as simple as saying hi to one person who you met on Twitter or through blogging can make your day, and this is the second convention we’ve overlapped at.

On Saturday, I had a lady come by and immediately ask to buy all of my books. One of each, I mean, not my entire stash. I gleefully agreed but raised an eyebrow at it, and she said that she was a librarian and had a patron who had specifically requested that she look for me. Hopefully that person reveals themselves, because I let the name of the library fall out of my head and I’d love to know where the books ended up.

I had two different people buy books on Friday or Saturday and come back on Sunday for more. That, also, was awesome.

Cosplayers are just about my favorite people. The first day there was a million Deadpools; the second day was heavy on Harley Quinn. Both were represented well on all three days, of course– and, in fact, the first cosplayer I saw was a Harley (a male, Asian Harley, which was especially awesome) but it was interesting the way they seemed to cluster.

In general, moving in and out was well-organized, although the wait to get back out was kind of long. You can tell the folks running this convention are pros. I still can’t believe everything got set up on time.

Not as good stuff: You are invisible at C2E2 in a small booth unless you are forcibly and deliberately interacting with everyone who walks by. There’s too much to see, and people have to have some specific reason to look at you or they literally won’t even see you. Which means that my traditionally somewhat passive small-convention method of interaction wasn’t going to work, and we figured out quickly that we needed to directly hand bookmarks to people. Some of them would stop and talk about books, and some of those would buy, but without that initial “Hey, I’m right here” moment, it just wasn’t going to happen. The fact that the booths on either side of me were kind of vertical didn’t help. I handed out over a thousand bookmarks in three days. Traditionally after a con I’ve seen a bump in online sales, which hasn’t happened with C2E2, so I’m kind of begrudging that money, but if I hadn’t had the bookmarks it’s entirely possible that I would have only made five or six sales the entire weekend.

Speaking of, if I hand you a bookmark, and later I find that bookmark on the floor, you can be damned sure I’m going to pick that bookmark up and give it to someone else. That’s my money you just dropped on the floor. It only happened twice, though. 🙂

Day Three was Kids’ Day. Honestly, had I realized that and thought about it, I might have reconsidered the entire thing, because that meant that Sunday was probably 75% kids in Halloween costumes being shepherded along by stressed-out parents worried about losing their anklebiters in the crowd, and by noon it was 75% exhausted and tantrumy kids in Halloween costumes being either pushed or carried by those parents. Either way, that’s not a crowd that is interested in buying science fiction for adults. Somebody selling YA books might have had better luck, but that’s not what I write. Sunday was my worst day of the convention by a long shot; I sold three times as many books on Friday as I did on Sunday, and nearly five times as many on Saturday. Still fun, but the crowd that was nearly entirely my people on Friday and Saturday really turned on me on Sunday. Be prepared for this shift if you’re going to be a vendor at this thing.

So, yeah. I need to find some actual book festivals in the Midwest, actual readers’ conventions, because I can’t afford to keep losing money at these things. I can only say “It was fun and worth it for the networking and the experience” so many times before I’m just being stupid. I can afford to lose a couple hundred dollars at an InConJunction or Starbase, but the outlay necessary for C2E2 just wasn’t worth it.

“Regular blogging resumes tomorrow,” he said…

On March 24, 2016March 24, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

HA HA HA HA HA

So, right. I’ve changed medications, and I’m somehow still recovering from C2E2, and the side effects of both withdrawal from drug A and going on drug B are drowsiness, and the end result of that is that for about the third day out of the last four I got home from taking my son to school and fell asleep, today until two fucking thirty in the afternoon.

I am not a human being any longer, folks. I am a bag of flesh and sloth-scented humours held together by exhaustion and spite. I have literally never been as tired in my life as I have been this week.

And then a spring storm blew through, and knocked a couple of trees and a utility pole over in my parents’ neighborhood, and now Mom’s spending the night because they don’t have any power and for various reasons I won’t get into she needs electricity at all times, and it took a bit to get that settled, and the end result is that it’s 7:30 and I’m just now like oh right I have a blog.

I owe y’all a recap of C2E2; the short version is that I had a hell of a lot of fun and I’m not doing it again. And I’ll talk about the job offer from yesterday, too. For right now, I just sort of want to curl up and die, possibly after having watched an episode of Daredevil, but let’s not hold our breath. That would count as a major accomplishment, after how this week has gone.

Blech.