At war with myself.
By Mike Jastrzebski
Both Christine Kling and I have written in the past about the difficulties of writing and living on a boat. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, but after all, the subtitle of this blog is So you want to quit your job, move onto a boat, and write, and it seems only right that I should occasionally post about the obstacles as well of the joys of this lifestyle.
The problem is that right now I’m not even writing. While Mary’s finishing up the copy editing on Stranded Naked Blues, my new Wes Darling mystery, I’m attempting to play catch up with the business aspects of self-publishing. Along with trying (not very successfully at times) to keep up on my blog posts, I’m rewriting all of my book descriptions, redoing my web site, and working at setting up a mailing list so that I can notify readers when my next book is available. And although all of my books are still available on Amazon, they are no longer exclusive. This past week I put all of my books up for sale on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Apple and I am hoping to get a Facebook author page up and running soon.
Finally, I am following in Christine’s footsteps and setting up a design contest with 99designs for a cover for Stranded Naked Blues. This will allow me to have multiple designers work up sample covers for the new book.
Cold but beautiful, at least by Florida standards.
The only way I can get all of this done is by sitting and working in one location. In this case it’s St. Augustine. This also means that along with the effort it takes to shop and keep warm up here (we have been burning between 70 an 80 pounds of charcoal per week in our wood/charcoal stove over the last few weeks), I am putting off all non-essential maintenance on the boat. I know it will catch up on me and I figure Mary and I will need to spend at least 4-6 weeks just working on the boat before we take off again next fall, but after all there are only so many hours in the day.
Well, I’m off to work on those publishing projects, and for those of you up north I hope you don’t hate me for complaining about a winter that had only one night where the weather dropped to a very cold 32 degrees. And yes, I’ll admit that I’ve been really spoiled since we left Minnesota and brought the boat down here to Florida 11 years ago.
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