C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 170

Ok, I just blew off a number of Jane's site members…

You're used to going over there to have a look—but do Closed Circle a favor and actually go over there and register. Jane's site

Give her the support of real people.

Ah, it's a spammer morning…

I've deleted 8 of 'em this morning trying to sell us various wonderful items. If you are a legitimate member attempting to sign aboard, do NOT use a highly commercial-looking name such as isellstuff trying to get through this gateway. Also doomed—anybody with lots of dots in their name. Looks fishy to me.

a new Facebook site: Backlist E-books, a multi-genre clearing-house.

This is something we've been talking about—a central location where readers can find authors with e-books to sell.

Past the halfway mark on the book…

I've got all the pieces gathered up. There are soooooooo many threads in this one, and if I don't keep them coherent and related to each other, it could all explode.

Betsy says sales are holding up, and she is definitely interested in more.

We have finally! gotten the weedcloth across the front…

We are out of weedcloth pins and are now stealing them from areas weighted by mulch, but I have ordered some off the internet—the internet to order stupid weedcloth pins, for gosh sake!

It's starting to look good out there. Jane is approaching the fracture point, and in a minor heat wave (the temperature ran up to 80) I was dizzier than a hoot owl every time I had to bend over and pin fabric or worse, position and trim it with an increasingly dull knife. I'd work a bit, sit a bit, dip up...

Well, I got the Wacom board!

I had blamed Amazon and the seller—but guess what: there's almost always a stack of books awaiting signing sitting in my living room, and when a box from a bookseller arrived, it got piled there—nearly a month ago.

My brother, who gave it to me for my birthday, was preparing to use his lawyer skills to get the thing replaced—and I just happened to look crosswise at that stack, and thought, you know, that's a funny box to ship books in—thin. I picked it up—definitely from a bookseller—but...

Anyone asks my personal koan…I'm a Zen Stoic.

Nothing happens to us unless we permit it to.

If you let unhappiness and resentment, bitterness, jealousy and fear past your personal gate, you simply have to round them up and herd them right back out the doors again. That kind of visitor can rage and howl and perform outside, but simply cannot be allowed inside to track up the floor, behave badly and break the china. Inner peace means occasional intruder-hunts and as good gate-keeping as you can manage.

The corollary to this is: Friendships a...

Writing again…after the upset.

Writers are delicate creatures. We live on imagination of the worst possible outcome, and we spot clues to moods in others with the zeal of a confirmed paranoiac. When things are going really well, we hear voices.

When the noise of life or general stress drowns out the voices, we are not healthy or happy creatures.

I can report I am now back on track and have recovered the threads, and have faced the day with renewed happiness.

Moving those 3 damned rock piles out front has helped.

I have seen Jane's next cover…and it is gorgeous.

She intends the book to come out on Halloween. I'm urging her to get the cover up so you guys can see it. This has GOT to be tee-shirts.

A better morning so far.

Yesterday began with finding a piece of my favorite set of glasses, an etched Great Wave pattern that Jane got me long, long ago, broken in the dishwasher.

And escalated into a birthday present probably involving an internet scam artist on Amazon…

Then the Books LLC hassle— I now know how to reach the more sensitive parts of Amazon and various other sellers. There is a magic address, and if you are a writer with infringement troubles, ask me: I don't want to publicize it for fear these...