The Laughing Vulcan and His Dog

"Disaster" was the ST:TNG episode on the H&I channel Wednesday night. I made the comment that I wanted to learn the song Marissa mentions she sang in school. DH said, "You know someone has written it."

So I went on the internet...

Amazon Speaks, Trad Publishing Folks Cry

After Monday's announcement on the KBoards, you knew the backlash would happen. I won't link to all of them. You can't miss them on the 'net. The gist is pretty simple. Amazon is a bunch of lying liars!

I'm reminded of Wile E. Coyote. You know the cartoons.



Yep, Wile E. is always fine until he looks down.

Here's the thing. Folks in trad publishing and folks related to trad publishing know they've gone over the cliff of change. They really believe that if they don't look down, they won't smash into the ground.

Except this is real life, not a Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoon. The ground's coming up fast. So they're blaming everyone else. But contrary to their beliefs, Amazon isn't the Road Runner. The 'Zon didn't push trad publishing off the cliff. They jumped off the cliff of their own free will years ago when 'Zon was still a tiny business in Jeff Bezos' garage.

Trad publishing is about to crash, and they have no one to blame but themselves.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I feel like trad publishing are the Plastics of Mean Girls,



but the indies are Missy trying out of the cheerleader squad on Bring It On.

Where's Suzan? Definitely Not in Waldo's Happy Place

After all the drama of the packing and move, after all the trauma of broken laptops, and after all the stress of not getting as much written over the summer as I'd planned, I went to the movies Wednesday night.

It was one of those places that serves food and alcohol, and they have a chickflick night once a month. Wednesday's offering was Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, a movie I hadn't seen yet even though I love Alexis Bledoe Bledel (sorry, I always get her name wrong).

I got there five minutes after the start of the film (which totally isn't like me). The pepperoni pizza I ordered was cold. And I didn't get my Diet Pepsi until an hour and a half into the show.

(Good flick though, and I'll do my review on Monday.)

I figure this just isn't my week. I'll go home, take a nice hot bath and go to bed. When I got home, water was pouring out of the bottom of the water heater as fast as the intake was dumping it in. I turned off the gas, but the water shut-off valve was corroded so bad it refused to budge. So I had to close the house's main before I started moving stuff out of the path of the flood.

*sigh*

Several phone calls to find an available plumber and $650 later, we've got a new hot water heater.

And for some strange reason, I'm exhausted. On the plus side, I got some work done on Blood Sacrifice in between phone calls and during the installation.

Disruption Sucks

Right now, I'm feeling a tad bit of sympathy for traditional publishers. Disruption in your work environment throws you off your game. You get disoriented because things aren't were you left them. You reach for something and your hand meets empty air because the item moved.

The last couple of weeks have been insane, and not just because of the move of 1200 miles.

As I said before, Isabella, my trusty Inspiron 700m, died. DH and managed to get everything switched over to Ivan, my backup Inspiron 700m. These were the lightest laptops on the market eight years ago, which is why I loved them so. We planned on getting me a new work computer after the end of the year, mainly because we've been promising GK a new machine for some time now, and we thought, "Hey! Great Christmas present!"

But I have had problems with arthristis for three years now. Yeah, I know I'm too young, but it's part of the whole screwed-up endocrine/immune system thing I have going. And well, you know where this is going.

I had gotten several work tasks done Saturday morning while curled up on the loveseat. I stood up to take Ivan to the kitchen, one of the few places I could safely plug him in to recharge without someone tripping over cords. And i watch in horror as he slid from my suddenly non-working hands.

And to top things off, I'd just received two new covers from my designer by e-mail and had not saved them to a flashdrive or the external harddrive yet.
I had a good cry and a shower, then DH and I sat down to analyze the damage. Even though the impact hadn't broken any external bits, it cracked the motherboard and screwed up something in the memory. Or so we thought initially.

DH, being the cool tech guy he is, performed emergency transplant surgery. But despite his best efforts, neither machines' screen would work. So now, I'm tethered to our wide-screen TV in order to see what the hell I'm typing on the Bride of Frankenstein.

Like a traditional publisher, I can get by for now, but the long-term prognosis sucks the big one. This means investing in new resources to make me more productive again. Because I doubt the local cafe owners would be happy with me dragging a widescreen TV into their establishments.