INFINITEFREETIME NO LONGER. This blog is now called InfinitecomplaintsaboutAmazon.
Nah, not really. But in the midst of all this nonsense about the goddamn books we ordered some boots and shoes for the boy, because apparently November is just too ridiculously late to do something crazy like walk into a store and buy boots.
(I feel less sorry for brick and mortar retail every time some shit like this happens. It’s November. We haven’t had real snow yet. Leave some fucking boots on the shelves, you jackasses.)
Right, I forgot to complain about Amazon. So, we couldn’t find boots at the shoe store nearest to our house, or the Target nearest to that shoe store, so we ordered him a pair of boots and a pair of new shoes, because why not do both at the same time and OH HEY you missed out on that sale too. The boots got here the other day; all good.
The shoes got here today. Now, this was one of those “fulfilled by Amazon” things, so Amazon isn’t directly responsible for this, but I opened the box and there was still a fucking ink tag on one of the shoes.
Come the fuck on, guys. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow, and my appointment is near an actual Dick’s, so I’m gonna just swing by there with all my receipts and everything and see if they will remove the tag for me. Alternately, we’ll just cut the fucking laces off and buy new ones. I don’t have the damn energy to deal with a return right now.
(Wonders how effectively the internet can help with removing the tag.)
Anyway. The image up there isn’t there for any reason other than that I’m listening to Shimmy Shimmy Ya right now. I am officially on Thanksgiving vacation, meaning that I don’t even have to think about any children other than the one that lives in my house for the next several days. Virtual hunting is about to get way more important to my lifestyle than it used to be. It turns out we’re not leaving town like we thought we were, so we’re hosting Thanksgiving, but we’re gonna keep shit simple. The other four days of the weekend? Relaxation, motherfuckers.
The Amazon books showed up today, finally, and while I didn’t do page-throughs on them, at least the covers look okay. A little more orange than I’d like, but I can live with it.
Been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 all night while my wife does a puzzle and my kid plays with slime. So it’s been a quiet evening. I can live with that, especially when the alternative is blinding rage.
I know, typically three posts in a day is a bit on the excessive side. But this is going to get worse tomorrow, and there will probably be another post about it tomorrow, so I need to get this one out of the way.
A moment to provide you with context, for those of you who aren’t obsessive readers: I tried to order books, on October 27th, for an author event I had on November 11th. It was initially a bit of a risk to get them here on time, so on Friday the 2nd I upgraded my shipping to two-day, which guaranteed them to arrive on the 7th, a Wednesday. Then things began to go wrong:
Amazon update: I got a notification from them on Friday that they had shipped me … wait for it … one book out of the 28 or 29 that I ordered. It is supposed to arrive today. The cover will be on upside-down, inside-out, and no doubt on the wrong book altogether.
Welp. I got a buzz on my phone that my package had been delivered about an hour ago, and ran outside to collect it from the mailbox. I showed the package to my wife. “Wanna take any bets on whether this makes me happy?” I asked.
“No,” she said.
And I opened the package:
So. This is the one mystery copy of Searching for Malumba that, for no clear reason, Amazon has sent by itself. I am, remember, ordering these books at author cost (I charge about $15 for SfM, and the cost to me is just over $6) so that I can sell them to people at conventions.
This book is already borderline unsalable, just because of the cover. If it were for me, I’d be kinda pissed, but I’d probably not do anything about it, because books are made of paper and shit happens. This isn’t for me. It’s for someone else. So we are already sending this book back.
(Brief sidenote: another one of the fun stupidities of the new editor? If I try to write something in italics, it tends to erase spaces for no clear reason.)
So. Yeah. This is already going back. But what the hell– let’s look through and see what else is wrong. Because there’s no way that there’s just one thing wrong, right? There’s gonna be a printing error or something in this motherfucker somewhere.
And then I find out why Amazon sent me one copy by itself, before sending me the rest of my print-on-demand author copy books:
You motherfuckers.
I was wrong about one thing: there was apparently one copy of a Luther Siler book out there somewhere at a secondhand bookstore. And, to be clear, I’m not mad at “Taelor,” whoever that is. I vaguely remember being proud of myself that I remembered to ask how to spell his name. I don’t remember what con or how long ago it was that I sold him this book. Maybe he didn’t like the book, maybe he isn’t the type to hold onto books after he reads them, maybe he just moved or came up short on cash or whatever. Taelor and I are cool. He can do whatever he wants with my books after he buys them.
But, uh, Amazon?
I bought this book from you. I sold it at a convention. That person sold it to a second-hand bookstore. I paid Amazon again, much later on, in a different transaction, for additional new copies of this book.
And y’all thought it was okay to send me, not only a used book, not only a damaged used book, but one with my own motherfucking signature already in it?
I am an author and I literally don’t have the words for how fucking angry I am right now.
I’m not gonna bother calling or emailing their fucking useless helpdesk motherfuckers just yet. Because I supposedly have another box coming tomorrow, with the other goddamn 20-some-odd books, and there is absolutely no Goddamn way that I believe there’s even a single chance of them getting that order right. The @ in the post title will ensure that someone sees this and lies to me some more. But we are about to have a motherfucking reckoning about this shit, and when we do, I’d better be talking to a motherfucker who speaks English because they are in America and said motherfucker had better know what the fuck KDP is.
…I just spent some time looking around in WordPress’ forums. Guys, my goals for this software are simple: I want it to: 1) allow me to write and have that writing appear on the Interwebs; and otherwise to 2) get the hell out of my way.
During the last post, one of the things that was frustrating me was that I seemed to be generating an awful lot more typos than usual– like, easily twice as many errors as I usually have when I’m writing, if not more than that.
A short amount of time investigating– be aware that I had time to take a shower since the last post, so this is a really short amount of time I’m talking about– has revealed that this “Gutenberg” thing, which is a text editor, is apparently so slow that it is possible to type too fast for it, which introduces lots of dropped spaces and missing letters.
The number I’m mostly seeing is 100 WPM or more.
I type about 120 WPM.
I type too fast for my text editor to render my letters properly, in 2018.
I’d say “unbelievable,” but I really need to purge that word from my vocabulary, because no level of incompetence or malice in any context whatsoever should be “unbelievable” any longer. The world is just that stupid a place now.
If we were having coffee, I would kind of feel sorry for you, because man, am I not fit for human company at the moment. I was snarling at my son before I even managed to get out of bed this morning, the news makes me want to cut people, and this new WordPress editor continues to be annoying. I’ve figured out (with help from Steve D) how to do inline graphics like I want to, but the procedure for it is so ridiculous compared to the last editor that I almost wish I didn’t know.
Also gone in this new editor: the ability to copy a post, again, which is something I use all the time. So, yeah, I’m still not onboard with this nonsense. Not at all.
Oh, and the image appears to be moving down on the screen the more I type, which isn’t how inline images are supposed to work. I don’t know what the deal is with that. Maybe just wrap the text, WordPress? It’s been something HTML has been able to handle for literally as long as there has been HTML.
Yep, still slowly moving down the screen. So maybe the “Media & Text” block isn’t what I want here.
(Tries to fiddle with settings in this block, somehow all the sudden the entire block is in what looks like 30-point text, swears, gives up, copies what I’ve written, starts over.)
Okay. There’s a “classic” block that seems to work? And when I looked in Preview, not only did the “Media and Text” block look stupid in general, but it resized the image to super-small and awful. So literally none of this shit works at all anymore and this cannot possibly be how they want this to be. I am tired of everything being bullshit, coffee person, and you really shouldn’t be sitting with me right now, because I’m not fit for human company.
Amazon update: I got a notification from them on Friday that they had shipped me … wait for it … one book out of the 28 or 29 that I ordered. It is supposed to arrive today. The cover will be on upside-down, inside-out, and no doubt on the wrong book altogether. I got an email this morning that the rest of them have shipped and will be here tomorrow. I fully expect them to be completely destroyed or otherwise unsalable when they arrive. I also expect to have to spend most of my winter break reformatting everything so that I can use Ingram Spark for my printing needs now rather than Amazon. I’m in too deep with them to even pretend that “Oh, I won’t buy books from there anymore” is a viable option, but I can sure as hell move my POD business elsewhere.
Later today– in about half an hour, actually– my son is having a friend over for a few hours, so there will be twice as many seven-year-old boys in the house as I’m used to. This, for once, is not me complaining; one of the disadvantages to only having one kid (and my wife and I both being temperamentally disinclined to socialize if we don’t have to) is that my son doesn’t have as many opportunities to play with other kids as I want him to. Yesterday he tried to get me to play a game with him that he was making up as we were going along, and it became increasingly clear the harder he tried that I am a terrible father, because I don’t have the patience for the seven level-ups and eighteen unlockable weapons and two thousand interminable fucking rules that he wants to have for what boils down to “we are surrounded by invisible enemies that we must kill.” There is no actual play, only endless iterations on the rules of the game.
A topic for later: how my kid’s conception of play has been irreversibly altered by role-playing video games. Because whenever I was making games up with my friends as a kid, they sure as hell never involved lining up every toy sword and Nerf gun in the house so that we could “unlock” them as we played.
My solution to this, by the way, is that I want him to have friends over more often. I always felt that my house was where all my friends always ended up when I was a kid. I want him to feel the same way. The problem is I don’t think my parents did it that way because playing with me gave them headaches. Maybe it did, though; I dunno. Dad will no doubt chime in and let me know. 🙂
I like the drop caps, coffee person. They will no doubt get annoying eventually, but for now I enjoy them.
Later today I’m making cornbread and chili. With luck, it will improve my mood. In the meantime, I’m off to the shower; one of the other fun things about the boy having a friend over is that it’s one of the kids from Hogwarts whose parents have way, way, way more money than we do so everything must be looking nice when they get here to drop the boy off and I cannot allow myself to be lazing around in my sweatpants like I am now. My pointless and, it should be made clear, utterly unnecessary status anxieties can be something we investigate later, I suspect.
ETA: I found a typo and jumped back in to edit it and this is what I was greeted with. Also, I’m done with drop caps already because I don’t like how they look. But, yeah, WordPress, you really think this editor is ready for the public?:
(can’t figure out how to add an image this far down in the post)
(Oh God FUCK THIS)
(Okay, there’s a button in the top-left to add a new “block.” Sure, THAT’S TOTALLY INTUITIVE, WORDPRESS.)
This is what the top of my post looks like now……and this is what I get if I click “Resolve.” Oh, and choosing “upload image” doesn’t actually upload an image when I try to do that. It just crashes.
You have no idea how much swearing I’m doing over here right now. I hate this SO MUCH.
Every time WordPress decides we need a new editor I spend some time wanting to murder things. I’m not sure who exactly was clamoring for being able to start blog posts with drop caps, but what the hell, I’ll check them out. Only everything is “blocks” now, and I seem to have somehow lost the ability to insert an “image” “block” into a “text” “block,” so I don’t really see how this shit helps me any. I mean, hey, drop caps, though.
I’ve had nothing going on for the last couple of days. I spent all day reading today, after finally finishing The Monster Baru Cormorant last night. Which I still will need to reread at some point in the future.
Still can’t figure out how to put a picture into a block of text. I mean, I can set wrap options on the picture, but I can’t move it. Does that make sense? No. No it does not.
I can do a drop cap on every paragraph, though.
(It’s at this point where I realize that the new editor, which is going to “level up my layout,” really doesn’t seem to have an option to do images inline with text, lose all will to live, and switch back to the old editor. Just once, just once, motherfuckers, I’d like you to roll out a new feature that works when you roll it out. I don’t have the patience for incompetent dumbfuckery right now. I just don’t.)
(Also, I want to point out that when I switched back to the “classic” editor, the one that, to me, is still not up to snuff with the editor before it, it got rid of one of those drop caps for no clear reason, but kept the other. Fuuuuuck this.)
So Amazon’s still fucking with me. I don’t really want to generate another 6000-word post right now but the latest is that they’ve pushed back the delivery to Friday the 23rd– another two entire weeks— and that 1) their Twitter help team promised me a phone call within 24 hours that never happened, then 2) I got back on online help and actually got someone who seemed to know what KDP was who promised I’d get a different response within 24 hours, and then two days later I got a response that was in such broken English that I can barely comprehend it that basically boiled down to “it says they’re getting delivered the 23rd, what’s the problem?”
None of these fuckers know what KDP is. It’s their service. They are literally the people printing the books. There’s no way it takes this long. And most of the time the people I’m corresponding with don’t even seem to know what the service is. Clearly I need to move my entire production over to Ingram Spark, because I can’t have this happen again. Redoing all the files is going to take a lot of time and cost an obnoxious amount of money so I’m not looking forward to it. Hell, at this point I don’t even know who to gripe to at Amazon. I need a motherfucker who lives in America, speaks English, and knows what the hell KDP is to get my shit moving, and hell if I know how to get ahold of that person right now.
You ever feel like you’re being unfair to a book because of your timing while reading it? I lovedThe Traitor Baru Cormorant, ordered its sequel on the day it came out, and started reading it almost immediately, only to hit a massive goddamn wall when I realized that 1) I didn’t remember the first book all that well, what with having read it three years and probably 280 books ago; and 2) I just have not had the brain space for the last couple of weeks to read something with the complexity of a Seth Dickinson book.
So I’m like 100 pages from the end of Monster, and I can barely tell you what it’s been about, and I should have just put it back on the shelf a week and a half ago until I had the time and the headspace to reread the first book and then go straight into this one. It’s not a bad book, but it’s going to prove unreviewable because I can’t trust my own impressions of it. Trying to read this thing the same month as the election has just completely undone me. I’ll probably finish it this weekend and four-star it just for the hell of it, and I need to reread it cover-to-cover before the (I assume) next book in the series comes out. And then I need to spend some time reading, I dunno, picture books until I get my brainmeats back. Because right now, I’m not reading this book. I’m just looking at the words. It’s a shame.
Someone has decided I’m done blogging for the night, so … yeah. Have a good evening.
INFINITEFREETIME NO LONGER. This blog is now called InfinitecomplaintsaboutAmazon.
If we were having coffee, I would kind of feel sorry for you, because man, am I not fit for human company at the moment. I was snarling at my son before I even managed to get out of bed this morning, the news makes me want to cut people, and this new WordPress editor continues to be annoying. I’ve figured out (with help from 
You ever feel like you’re being unfair to a book because of your timing while reading it? I loved 
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 