Random updates…

This has been a mostly decent week for me, though I’ve had a few problems with weather-related fatigue. I still managed to get about a third of a new novella written, although I have no idea what the title for it is. I don’t even have a working title, so I’ve been saving the file to my desktop as Unnamed Werewolf Story. I haven’t had this much trouble naming a story since Touched, and it’s driving me nuts because every idea I have is lame as fuck. Seriously, the muse is offering shit like Moonsong, Under a Sparkling Moon, and How to Date a Werewolf. Gag me with a werewolf paw.

I had tentative plans this week to buy Resistance: Burning Skies, but just like Unit 13, the demo refuses to play in English. This time, instead of French, the game comes up in German. I know it’s just a coincidence, but I will note how both games with a lack of proper language support are FPS games put out in half-assed fashion. Both titles clearly needed more effort put into them before release. Anywho, this means no new game reviews until after Gravity Rush drops June 13. By then, the American gamers will all have had a chance to gush over it, but at least I can give my impressions for the readers still not convinced.

On a side note, I think it’s weird how I don’t know any other language besides English, and yet, I can identity many languages after just hearing a few words. A good example is when I first heard Aganju in Lumines. I immediately looked at hubby and said, “That’s Portuguese, isn’t it?” And it is. (I Googled the song.) So, I may be a linguistically ignorant person, but I apparently know just enough to tell the difference between various languages.

In other video game news that’s slightly guitar-related, last year, I was getting all hyped for Rocksmith, an Ubisoft game that promised the ability to plug my guitar into my Xbox and play along with their songs, scales, and chord progressions. This idea was so awesome that I bookmarked the preorder page on Play.com and checked back every day for months. And every few months, Ubisoft would push back the release date. I decided to check the other day, and the current preorder page lists the release date as October 11, 2012. I still want the game, but I’m starting to think Ubisoft is just trolling me and other wannabe guitar heroes.

I still suck at guitar, by the way. I practice chords and scales, but it still isn’t natural to me, and I can’t do a single chord progression and stay in a proper beat. I also still can’t tell which notes are which, not listening to them or reading them from sheet music. I feel like I’m going to be about 50 before I lean how to play right, and then all I’m going to know how to play is John Denver’s Country Roads…slowly. It’s things like this that make me wonder why anyone ever called me a genius, because I’m just about the stupidest person I know.

I haven’t talked much about this year’s garden, but yes, I am doing the garden again. I’ve got carrots, onions, tomatoes, strawberries, basil, oregano, rosemary, and thyme. Not quite as much stuff as last year, but during the summer, watering everything was really a struggle. So this year I scaled back just a little bit to make my hobby more manageable.

I want to bring up the Indiegogo campaign for my editor. We’ve got 26 days left, and we’re at $140 of $555. Someone even donated $50, meaning my editor will be baking cookies for them to go along with all the ebooks they’ll be getting as incentives.

I want to be happy about this because this is about $140 more than I was expecting us to have at this point. But it’s hard not to compare our campaign to my other online friends, and right now there’s like 10 projects I’m helping to promote that are celebrating being over their projected goal with plenty of time to spare. This led me to have a bit of a depression this week, and it didn’t help that one of my regular readers didn’t know I was promoting a campaign. This despite my tweets on the topic and my many reminders here.

Which brings me to the topic of promotion again, because I don’t know what to do to help improve my visibility. I think promoting more often is a mistake, because it turns people off, and then I start losing followers. I can’t go back to Facebook, first because I hate the company, and second because I don’t want to build up a list of writers who will spam me for their stuff. I don’t mean timeline updates, which is cool. I mean blog invites, virtual blog parties, and invitations to group discussion about their books. I get so burnt out by all this “me-me-me” crap, and it makes it even harder for me to sort out what to put on my own update timeline because I don’t want to be egotistical like that.

I’m sure there’s a better way of promoting, but nothing I’ve tried is quite as effective as doing nothing at all. Which is a puzzling puzzle that has me pulling at my hair and screaming “Why is this so fucking hard?!”

And that’s the update. Time for me to get back to this novella and sort out how to introduce the bad guys.