Robert Fishell's Blog
May 23, 2022
Writing For Ukraine
Image Credit: Rospoint — Ukrainian Photographer/ShutterstockAround a year ago, I watched a documentary about Operation Barbarossa, the savage invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. As they had done in Poland and throughout western and central Europe, the Wehrmacht swept across Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, and western Russia in the summer and fall of 1941. In their wake, they left a swath of blood and fire on a scale never before seen. By the end of August 1941, the Nazis occupied or controlled a vast expanse of Soviet territory extending from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea.
These early successes would not last. The formidable Red Army would regain its footing and push the invaders back. Hitler’s invincible war machine would be turned back at the gates of Moscow, humiliated at Stalingrad, and crushed once and for all at Kursk. Still, it was not until late 1944 that the Wehrmacht would be driven out of Ukraine. For more than three years, Ukrainian civilians would endure some of the harshest conditions of any population affected by the war. More than 1.5 millions Ukrainians would die of starvation and disease alone. By the war’s end, nearly 1 in 5 Ukrainians would lose their lives. With a population of 40 million at the war’s outset, this is a staggering number.
I wondered what life might have been like for a Ukrainian family during the invasion and occupation. This had the makings of a story, which began to tell itself in my head. In the spring of 1941, a close-knit family of four sit at a table talking about the events of the day in a rural village near Kyiv. Katya, a slender, pretty girl of 16 dreams of being a dancer. Georgi, her older brother, is arguing with their father Pyotr about joining the military because he wants to become a pilot. Maryna, a smart and gritty woman in her 40s, keeps the peace among her children and husband.
When the invasion comes, their lives are torn asunder. Georgi has left, against his father’s wishes, to pursue his dreams of flying. Pyotr, a skilled mechanic, is conscripted by the invading Nazis to perform forced labor in eastern Germany. When a German soldier takes an unhealthy interest in young Katya, Maryna kills him with an ax, and the two women flee to the forests where they join the partisans to fight the invaders. Katya becomes the central character of the story, but each member of the family has a story line of their own.
I realized that I did not know enough about life in Ukraine before and during the occupation to provide an effective backdrop for the story. What little I did know was tainted by anti-Communist propaganda from my formative years during the Cold War. Far more objective information had become available in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, so I began an ambitious campaign of research. What I learned was shocking. Learning of the horrors inflicted on the Ukrainian people by Josef Stalin in the years preceding the war forced me to question whether I could, as a fledgling novelist with only one title in print, even attempt such an ambitious story. At the outset, it seemed clear to me who the bad guys were. Who could be worse than Nazis? The more I learned, the muddier those waters became.
I learned of the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомо́р), a campaign of deliberate starvation inflicted on a people who lived on some of the world’s richest farmland. More than 5 million people, many of them innocent children, would die between 1932 and 1933. The idea that a government ostensibly founded on the Communist ideal, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” could commit such an unspeakable crime against its own people filled me with both sorrow and rage.
Many more innocent Ukrainians would fall to Stalin’s executioners during the Great Purge of 1934–1938. Those who were not killed were sent to gulags where more likely than not, they would succumb to the severe conditions of imprisonment there.
Even at the war’s end, the outrages continued. The forced repatriation of slave laborers who had managed to survive the brutality of their Nazi overseers often resulted in their being sent to a gulag or worse, for “treason” against the Motherland. Stalin’s campaign of terror against those he deemed “enemies of the state” would continue until his death in 1953.
Perhaps the sensible thing for me to do would be to abandon my writing project altogether. Yet how could I now look away as the world had done in those horrible years? The more I learned about the Ukrainian people, the more my affection for them grew. I had seen photographs of starving children and emaciated corpses similar to those taken in the Nazi extermination camps. Yet I had also seen images of idyllic rural villages set amid vistas of vast fields of grain beneath a crystal blue sky. Images of pretty young girls in festive costumes with flowers in their hair. How could I turn away? I resolved to press on with my story idea despite the enormous difficulty of providing a historical background that would not overwhelm the story lines of my characters.
In late February of this year, 2022, Vladimir Putin, the malevolent dictator of Ukraine’s powerful neighbor to the east, ordered an invasion of this country I had come to love. The news was once again filled with images of blood and fire so much like those from WWII. Shock and outrage overwhelmed me. One photo in particular burned itself into my brain, an image I will never be able to unsee: a family of four, so very like the family in my story, were struck by a mortar shell while trying to cross a bridge, fleeing for their lives. A woman, a boy, and a young girl were killed, while the father was severely wounded. They had been deliberately targeted by Putin’s forces, part of a widening campaign of terror aimed at demoralizing the Ukrainian people.
I was terribly upset by the photograph and the story it told. I did not sleep well that night, and I remember sobbing. I was overwhelmed with emotions — sorrow, despair, grief, and rage. How could this happen? What must I do? I cannot turn away. I cannot stand on the sidelines. In the weeks to come, I learned of the ferocious defense mounted by the valiant Ukrainians. Putin had sent in his thugs expecting a swift and decisive conquest. Instead he found his advance stalled and even repelled by fighters both skilled and cunning. My rage became tempered with pride, my sorrow tempered with hope. Yet still I was filled with frustration at being able to do little but to express my outrage at Putin and my solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
My local Ukrainian friends came by with a yard sign proclaiming I STAND WITH UKRAINE.
I placed a Ukrainian flag in the back window of my car. I pledged a monthly donation to the International Committee of the Red Cross. I changed my social media avatar to the colors of the Ukrainian flag. I told my Ukrainian friends I would be proud to host a Ukrainian family should the U.S. admit Ukrainian refugees in any number. Yet I still wanted to do more. Were I a younger man, one with military training, I would gladly pick up a rifle to help Ukraine repel the invader.
But alas, I am 73 years old and disabled, at times barely able to walk around my house with a battered wooden cane that is my constant companion. I worked as an engineer and programmer before I retired, but I have little to offer the Ukrainians there that they cannot do better themselves. Yet I do have one skill that I can offer Ukraine: I can write. Three years ago, I published a novel Joshua, a coming-of-age story that has been well received and supplies me with a modest flow of passive income. I have been paid for my writing before, but I’ve never cared so much about the money than about the idea that I am reaching an audience.
Right now, I am reaching out to an audience of my fellow writers with a pledge and a challenge. I have pledged to donate the royalties from my novel to humanitarian aid for the Ukrainian people, for the duration of the conflict and the reconstruction that will follow. I am challenging my fellow authors to do the same. If you have just one title in print that you could dedicate to this cause, I challenge you to join me. If you receive income, be it regular or not, from your writing, I challenge you to devote part of that income to helping Ukrainians who so desperately need it. If you are a bestselling author and this missive somehow reaches you, think of the good you can do by dedicating just one title to this cause. And whether your writing brings in a little or a lot of money, please ask other writers of your acquaintance to join in this effort.
Contributing money is not, however, all you can do. If you are angry, saddened, or frightened about what is happening in Ukraine, write about it. If you believe the world is not doing enough, write about it. If you feel that Ukraine may be slipping out of the public’s consciousness, write about it. Remind anyone who will listen, or whose attention you can arouse, that tyranny and oppression affect us all and must not be tolerated no matter how far away it seems. This conflict will not end before the next news cycle, or before the next crisis threatens to push Ukraine off the front pages. As writers, we do not fear to speak our minds. We have the power and responsibility to speak for many. If we speak as one, we can make a real difference.
How to help:There are many international organizations working to provide humanitarian aid to Ukraine. I have mentioned the International Red Cross. Here are some others, provided to me by fellow Medium member Tatyana Deryugina. Dr. Deryugina is an Associate Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois and a Ukrainian native and activist.
Слава Україні!
December 26, 2020
Wait, What?
When you get old, your mind doesn't work the way it once did. This is not (necessarily) a sign of dementia, but rather a result of having piled up a lot of time consuming oxygen. I would call this phenomenon "Non-relativistic time compression." Days and weeks run into one another, and every year seems shorter than the one preceding it.
In a way, it actually is. The reciprocal of one's age is a diminishing quantity. 2020 has been a smaller fraction of my life than 2019 was. I would argue that it is perceptively smaller. Maybe this is just a result of my having done more in 2019 than I have this year, but I cannot say for sure. If I look at the past 11 and 24/31 months in terms of how much I might have done on a daily basis, did I really do less? I know I did something different.
The global nightmare of COVID-19 has been good to me in a couple of ways. It's led to an enormous spike in the demand for bicycles. People want to get outdoors, so they've been buying bicycles so fast the market can't keep up. They have also been taking their long-neglected bikes out of their garages. When they discover that the bikes do not work so well, they turn to me. Yes, me, Bob the Bike Whisperer. That title was bestowed on me by my brother-in-law, but it's stuck in part because of the exposure I've gotten from him and others on the neighborhood website.
About 3 years ago, I ran across a post from a neighbor who wanted a tune-up of his bike. The shops were all backed up, but he wanted to ride, like, right now. I know the sentiment well, so I responded, publicly, that I did that sort of thing. He brought me his bike. It needed some adjustments and a new derailleur cable. I turned it over the same day, and he was delighted. Not wishing to look the fool and give it back to him gratis, I decided my work should fetch $25/hr. - which is around a third what bike shops charge, and billed him accordingly.
He told some of his friends about me, and mostly by accident, I had a business. Fast forward to the spring of 2020, and all of a sudden, I was nearly turning customers away because of the demand for repairs. Although my infirmities keep me from working more than four or five hours a day, I had a steady stream of business throughout the spring, summer, and fall. My last paying customer came in on November 3.
Needless to say, my new career as the neighborhood bicycle mechanic had completely distracted me from my new career as an author. I thus failed to notice that, after a long period of dormancy, people were reading my books. Now, I am not about to crow that I have become the new James Patterson, but I have sold more books in the last three months than I had in the year preceding them.
I do not know, but I suspect that COVID-19 is the source of my good fortune as an author just as it has been for my bike repair business. After smiling at my latest sales figures from Amazon. I thought I should have a look at my site here to see when was the last time I posted something. I was rather shocked to see I hadn't been here since October 2019.
Non-relativistic time compression.
It has occurred to me that perhaps the same people who have been reading my books might be looking at my long-neglected website to find out a bit more about me. Well, here I am. I'm not working on any bikes at the moment, and I'm also sorry to say that I have no writing projects in the works right now. I did, however, come up with an idea for a novel after watching a Russian television documentary on WWII. I don't know whether I'll run with it or not, but it's been a while since I had an idea for a larger writing project. I'll let you know.
October 11, 2019
Friday Freebies
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PD2RFL1/
I guess I should be using my blog to plug my own books, right?
September 27, 2019
Testament Of A Bullied Child
The blogger who emailed me about the story also told me, and her readers, that she believed the bullying I portrayed in my story was a little too brutal, a little over the top. I found this puzzling at first, as I did not believe that bullying was a central theme in the story. After giving the matter more thought, I realized she was on to something. Joshua is a bullied child, and he thinks like one even when no one is actively picking on him. That's the real damage inflicted by bullying. It gets into your head and sticks there long after the bully has had his fun.
Joshua finds the courage to confront his tormentors, and the story wraps up with a nice, happy ending. I've explained that Joshua is a lot like me as a child, but unlike my young hero, I didn't have so happy an ending. I just grew up. In time, I found my center, just as Joshua does, but it was as a grown man who'd spent too many years as a lost child, a bullied child. Long after I grew into a man, I remembered the shame and intimidation inflicted on me, not just by other kids, but by adults who thought it was the only way to knock some sense into me.
I'm an old man now, and I no longer cut such an imposing figure as I did in my prime. I walk with a cane and park in the handicapped spaces in the parking lots. You would think that by now I would have put all of that childhood torment behind me, but through my writing I discovered that it was still there, looking for a way to come out. The blogger I was corresponding with thought that maybe some of it was gratuitous. If she were to realize that I went through things I still can't talk about, she would see that I merely wrote those passages when the feelings were closest to the surface.
It's difficult for me to admit that I was bullied. It's easy to say that it wasn't my fault, but when you do admit to such a thing, you're taking a risk no matter how old you are. The bullies are still out there, looking for any vulnerability, any opportunity to ridicule. And they're not just looking, they're looking hard. Well, here I am, scars and all. I am, however, not so easy to intimidate these days. I've known for some time now that these situations can almost always be dealt with by remaining cool under fire, letting the other guy make a fool of himself until he realizes he's not going to get what he wants from me.
This is, however, a luxury afforded to an adult. It's not so easy for a child, or even for an adult who is so damaged and vulnerable as to know to avoid taking the bait. Just seeing it now makes my blood boil, so I suppose that if you want to get to me, all you have to do is pick on someone else.
September 26, 2019
Whence Joshua?
She wanted to know where I got the name and why I chose it as the title. I told her, truthfully, that the names of my characters just pop into my head as I start writing about them. She thought the title was not something that would reach out and grab readers, but to that, I answered that Joshua is a quiet boy who doesn't like to draw attention to himself. Perhaps this isn't a good way to choose a title for something you want to sell, but I don't think I could have given it any other title, and if I could, what would it be?
This leads to the question of where I get the ideas for my stories. This takes a bit of introspection. I have a pretty good idea of where other authors, many of them, get their ideas: from other authors. I don't have a problem with this; nothing succeeds like success, and if you can ride an idea that has captivated other readers while making the book your own, that's fine. It's called writing in a genre, and it's pretty much expected of you.
Let's look at a genre that's very popular right now. It's called Vampire Romance, and at its root is the novel Twilight by Stephanie Meyer. The novel itself is the first in a five-part series – I'll get to series later – but it has spawned hundreds, if not thousands, of derivative works. Vampires in general have been in vogue for a while, in large part because of works like Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice. Ultimately, all of these works stem from Bram Stoker's Dracula, first published more than 100 years ago and immortalized by the 1931 film of the same name. Vampires themselves, however, come from folklore that originated centuries earlier.
Other authors, in particular Jeff Kinney and James Patterson, gave me my initial ideas for Joshua, but as the story developed, it resembled the works of those authors less and less and started to look more and more like my own life as a child. There were clearly a lot of emotions in me that were looking for a way to surface, and when I started to write a few stories about a 12-year-old boy, they found their way out.
A few of the scenes in Joshua were taken directly from my own experiences, but most of the story arose from feelings about my experiences, rather than the experiences themselves, and the empathy I feel for other children who struggle as I did. My brief experience as a high school teacher provided some of the ideas, while my experiences as a parent provided others. The story is fiction, but the feelings, my own and the feelings I've sensed in others, are real.
As I look back at other things I've written, and at my ideas for things I have yet to write, I realize that all of my stories have some basis in my own experience even if I have borrowed an idea or two from the works of others. For example, my character Spike Bike is loosely inspired by the films Mad Max, First Blood, and Robocop. What Spike feels, however, is all me.
I think this is a good explanation of why I'm not more prolific as an author, and why my stories may seem unusual to some. I think I have the mechanics of writing down well enough that I could write in a popular genre, telling stories that people want to hear even if they've heard some variations of them before. Were I to choose such a path, it would be a simple matter to create a single character in a single setting and write an entire series of books with the same theme. The most successful authors of our time have followed this formula so consistently that it's almost an expectation.
My life, however, isn't part of a series unless you believe in reincarnation. I've lived a long time and I've done a great many things, but like most other people, I don't have an unlimited number of stories to tell. I am still building new experiences all the time, learning about the lives of other people all the time, but it's only rarely that I'm inspired to write about any of it.
This goes against the grain in contemporary literature, and because of that, I don't expect to make a lot of money or to garner a lot of fans. Most people would rather read spy thrillers, romance (with or without vampires), science fiction, or historical dramas, to name just a few of the more popular genres out there. That's all right with me. I read fiction, too, and most of it is the same stuff lots of other people like. Nevertheless, I never feel like I can do justice to any popular genre when so many others have gone before me and have done so well.
While my life experiences are not altogether different from those of other people, it's a fair bet that no one else has perceived them and felt them in exactly the same way. This is what makes us individuals. When I am inspired to write about something, then, a reader can be assured that it won't be a story they've read before. If they find my writing entertaining, or if it touches them in some way, then I'll have written something successful even if it never becomes a best seller.
Also published on Medium
September 12, 2019
привет всем моим друзьям в россии
According to the stats for this blog, I have far more fans in Russia than anywhere else. Спасибо.Unless, perhaps, you're just looking at everything published on Blogger, trying to find vulnerabilities, like personal information that could lead to identity theft.
Trust me, you don't want my identity.
August 20, 2019
The Witches Of BookBoggin
It's been a while since I wrote any short fiction, save for the new episode for my Spike Bike collection that I published last spring. Back in the days of Usenet, I wrote a lot of it, more than I can remember, much of it now gone to the Great Bit Bucket In The Sky. One thing I do remember well, however, was that even in those early days of what is now the Internet, there were trolls. I knew even then that the best way to deal with them was to ignore them, but once in a while, my temper would get the better of me, and I'd blunder into a hot mess that at the end of the day wouldn't matter to anyone.
My favorite tactic for dealing with the trolls that I did not or could not avoid was to write caricatures of them into my stories. Being able to laugh at them, and myself, always proved to be a tonic for any residual resentment I might have felt–particularly if I could get a chuckle out of my readers.
It is in such a spirit that I have written The Witches Of BookBoggin. Since it's in the tl/dr category for a blog entry, you can read the story on Medium. Should you find yourself paywalled, use the contact form to your right, and I'll send you a link.
July 28, 2019
Reviews And The Tyranny Of Averages
Both bloggers find fault with the reviewers themselves, a point of view I can mostly agree with. Many are just trolls, while others are trying to stand out as contrarians, while all they are actually doing is making themselves look petty and mean. Both bloggers also mention that their opinions of 1-star reviewers stir up quite a bit of controversy on social media. Evidently, some folks think that these people should be able to speak their minds no matter the consequences, even if they are petty and mean.
When a book has hundreds or thousands of reviews, as best-sellers do, a smattering of one- or two-star reviews is to be expected, but they're not going to have much of an effect on sales. But when a book has very few reviews, a serious and widespread problem for unknown, self-published authors like yours truly, even a single bad review can have serious consequences. This is not, however, because of the review itself, but because of the effect it has on the author's average star rating. This is the first thing you see when you land on the product page for the book on Amazon or Goodreads.
Let's say a book has a total of five reviews that break down like this:
Five stars - 1
Four stars - 3
One star - 1
OK, that's four good ratings and one zinger. No problem? Not quite. The total number of stars for this book is 5+4+4+4+1=18. This makes the average star rating for the book 3.6, which Amazon will round down to 3.5. That looks like this:
Three and a half stars. If you are a reader browsing titles to buy, are you going to look any further than this? Probably not, when there are so many other titles with better ratings to choose from. This will lead to fewer sales of the book, which means fewer reviews, and the thing becomes a death spiral. Thus the solitary 1-star review this book received proves to be its undoing.
Now, our inquisitive book-shopper will also see that the title has a total of five reviews, but there's no help here: "Oh, it's a three and a half star book only five people have bothered to review? I'll pass."
I call this the tyranny of averages. It's a cruel fact of life that mostly affects struggling authors, but even best-sellers by well-known authors are somewhat affected by it. For a case study, I chose Isaac Asimov's The Gods Themselves. Asimov was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, known for some of the most enduring works in all of science fiction. Although The Gods Themselves is somewhat lesser known than Asimov's classics like I, Robot, it won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel in the year following its publication. In the sci-fi world, these are the equivalent of the Oscars and Golden Globes for movies.
I reasoned that such a title would have close to a five-star average, but when I headed over to Goodreads to check, I discovered that the Good Doctor's masterpiece is barely in four-star territory, with an average rating of 4.09 stars across over 48,000 ratings. What gives? To find out, we have to dig into the details, something few people will do when they're just browsing titles looking for something to read.
As a lifelong Asimov fan, it's astonishing to me that over 2,000 people rated this book negatively. It's even more astonishing that over 9,000 people rated it as just OK. An overwhelming majority of readers gave it 4 and 5 star ratings, so does it seem to you that this is really a 4.09-star read?
Let's see what we can find over on Amazon:
Only 4.2 stars? Not much better, but at least Amazon doesn't make you dig for the histogram. Here, we can see that the skew is a little more favorable, but the all-important average is still dragged down by the 1, 2, and 3 star reviews.
If an award-winning, best-selling book by an iconic author can be hurt by a relative few bad reviews, what's a struggling indie author to do?
July 5, 2019
Announcement for prospective reviewers
Amazon expressly prohibits paid reviews, a good policy that protects authors and readers alike. Nobody likes to be scammed. When I launched my authoring career, I expected come-ons like this, so I didn't get upset about it. I'm just serving notice here that I was not born yesterday.
June 27, 2019
Mobi Dick
It turns out there are a few bookworms out there who do indeed take a chance on self-published authors, although it seems like a lot of them do it just to make money. However they do it, though, a lot of them prefer to get manuscripts in mobi format so they can be easily read with a Kindle.
Mobi? I have to confess I never heard of it before I started my quest for reviews. I've heard of lots of file formats, but this one is unique to Kindle users. But no biggie, many have told me; all I need to do is go to my book details on my KDP page and download my manuscript in mobi form. There. Done! So I go there, and I get:
WTF?! did they lose my manuscript or something? No. The problem is that I uploaded my manuscript as a .kpf file, something spat out by Amazon's Kindle Creator app when you feed it your manuscript. In order to download your book in mobi format you have to have uploaded it in mobi format.Anybody see the disconnect here? What kind of idiot would clobber their original mobi file, thus making this expedition necessary? Don't answer that.
But the problem here is that it leaves me without a coveted mobi file to send off to the legions of book bloggers who are clamoring to take a look at my novel. Well, I'm told once again, that needn't be a problem, either, because I can just snag a free, format conversion app called calibre that will do the job for me with just a few clicks of a mouse. So I snag it, click it, and I end up with a decently rendered copy of my book in mobi form. There. Done!
But there are a few problems. It substitutes my cover photo for the little picture of Robert Fishell I use in my About the author section of my book. That's not too big of a deal, since nobody wants to look at me anyway. The bigger deal is that calibre is not parsing my chapter headings in such a way as to create a table of contents.
I fiddled with the app and my manuscript for a few hours trying to fix this issue, but I didn't get anywhere with it. I surmise that the reason calibre is choking on my manuscript is that I produced it with something other than Microsoft Word. Now, I have a copy of Microsoft Word, but it's very old. It's too old to export a manuscript in .docx format, which is what calibre wants for conversion purposes.
Joshua began life as a couple of short stories about a boy who gets into all kinds of humorous predicaments. I wrote them in HTML. After I wrote a few more of them, I started to get more serious about the project so I abandoned the HTML and converted the text to a Google Doc. There are a number of advantages to working this way as you are developing your manuscript. Everything you write is saved in real time to your Google drive, which you can access from anywhere, on any device that supports it. When you're away from your PC and you have an idea for your story, you can just whip out your phone, open up the Google Docs app, and start writing. I wrote a significant portion of my manuscript for Joshua in this way.
Once I was done with it, however, I needed to format it for print, paying attention to paper size, margins, and text placement in order to conform to Amazon's standards. I could not do this in Google Docs and I didn't want to do it in my severely outdated copy of Word. What I really did not want to do was pay for Office 365, the latest bloated atrocity of an office suite from Microsoft. I did, however, have a copy of Apache Open Office that was up to the task. Sort of.
I tried exporting my manuscript in Open Office's preferred format, .odt, with some funky results. Things I had formatted within Google Docs went all wonky when I opened them in Open Office. Trying to fix them all piecemeal proved to be too much of a challenge. I finally went back to Docs and stripped the manuscript of all formatting, re-exported it to .odt, and painstakingly reformatted everything from the chapter headings to the italics. After several days' hard labor, I had a manuscript that was fit to publish as a paperback that met Amazon's standards. It was extremely quirky, however. It was very easy to mess up my page numbers. I had to input my TOC manually. When I finally had it ready to publish, I exported it as a PDF, and hooray, nothing got trashed in the process.
But it turns out that .odt is not an acceptable format for Kindle Creator. I went back to Open Office to export it as a .doc, and it trashed my page numbers again. This wasn't really a problem, however, since Kindle Creator strips out the page numbers anyway. So I imported it to Kindle Creator, went through it page by page to fix up things that didn't import in a way I liked, and finally, I had both a print-ready and Kindle-ready manuscript to upload to KDP. A couple of days later, both were live on Amazon. Yay.
But troubles still lurked unseen, surfacing when I tried to make a mobi. Calibre doesn't accept .doc files for conversion, and Open Office doesn't produce .docx files (no idea why). Calibre does (purportedly) convert .odt files, but thus began my problems trying to generate a mobi (or ePub) with a working TOC.
Most of the book bloggers will condescendingly accept PDF files, which is what they're getting. But since problems of this kind inevitably intrude on my thoughts when I awaken at first light to go to the bathroom, I'm going to have to find a way to produce a viable mobi file eventually. Without paying for Office 365. I'll keep you posted.
