Thursday Thoughts: There’s always a catch.

After several months dealing with the Customer Service Reps at Amaz—Oops, sorry. Force of habit. Let me start over.

After several months dealing with the CSRs at … Canva, wow, that really doesn’t sound right. Moving on. Let me back up a bit.

When I finished the last chapter and epilogue to the final book in my sci-fi trilogy, I was a bit saddened and teary eyed (yes, they’re that good), and nothing bring out a piece of music than emotion. So, I sat with my guitar and began to compose.

It took a few months, but the piece became an homage to the characters and the story. I then decided to make a video with it as a way to wrap everything up for the readers of the trilogy*.

When I finished, I downloaded it only to find that hours (lots of hours) of work resulted in several effects not working. They worked on the Canva platform, and on the preview links, but each time I downloaded, all the fade outs did not work, and there is nothing more jarring than having objects blink out of existence when they really need to diminish gently away as the music rolls on.

After several weeks of back and forth with Ama— (Canva, Canva) Canva reps with no resolution, I finally recieved this message:

“Due to some limitations on our end, we are unable to prioritize this issue and the fix that we are waiting for might take longer than expected. For now, we will close this ticket.”

I guess that’s one way of saying, “We don’t know what’s wrong.”

So, for the past 2 months, I have been paying for the Canva subscription so that my video can be viewed without any issues. I did finally figure out a work around by doing a screen recording of the working playback, then uploading that video back to Canva, cropping out the extraneous perimeter, and using the original audio track.

So simple … [insert eyeroll here]

Now that I’ve peaked your curiosity, here is the catch: You kinda hafta read the books. The video won’t make sense if you haven’t, and there are some spoilers.

The good thing is that, The View from Here is currently 99 cents, and if you haven’t heard it yet (from the last time I posted it), I will share the guitar music I wrote for it.

This could have been a Tuesday Tirade, but then what would you read today?

-Leon

*If those last two paragraphs sounded familiar, they are from my post in January. I could have linked it but most people don’t bother to click on those.

Leon Stevens is a multi-genre author, composer, guitarist, songwriter, and an artist, with a Bachelor of Music and Education. He published his first book of poetry, Lines by Leon: Poems, Prose, and Pictures in January 2020, followed by a book of original classical guitar compositions, Journeys, and a short story collection of science fiction/post-apocalyptic tales called The Knot at the End of the Rope and Other Short Stories. His newest publications are the novella trilogy, The View from Here, which is a continuation of one of his short stories, and a new collection of poetry titled, A Wonder of Words.

My new book page: http://books.linesbyleon.com/

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