12. April 2011 · Comments Off on A Miscellany of the Writer Life · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, Rant

Just spent most of my working day editing a MS which features lots of chapters which are transcripts of various late-night radio shows, of which the less said the better, since this client have actually paid me money in advance.

Paid a large part of the SAWS bill, and also on Saturday – thanks to that same client – paid the tax bill due on my California real estate. This land, which is about three acres of howling unimproved wilderness in the neighborhood of Julian, California, is currently on the market. At this point, I do not think I can, want to, or ever will go back to California to live and to build a nice little writer’s wilderness retreat on the property, which is what I hoped when I bought that land, ever-so-many-years ago. But I am damned if I will let it go for lack of payment of taxes, which is why a good few parcels of eventually-valuable real estate that my G-Grandfather George owned were lost to the family treasury during the Depression. G-G George was a wiz at this sort of thing; unfortunately his wife had neither the skills nor the pocketbook to hold on to them all. If she had, Dad and I might have been real estate/trust fund babies. We might have taken different paths in life – I am sure I would have been a writer, no matter what.

Daughter of Texas is launched, with lots of review and pre-paid copies going out this week. Just have to see which ones will hit the interest and resulting sales jackpot. Da Blogfaddah – Instapundit – probably won’t be one of them. I didn’t bother sending a copy or a query to him . . . it seems that we have been dropped from his blog-roll. Anyone notice at all? Meah – I didn’t, for weeks. It has never seemed in the past couple of years that being on his blog-roll got me any notice as a writer or as a Tea Partier – thank you very much and I otherwise would be rude about this – but this is Instapundit that we are talking about, and the occasional lordly-dispensed link was very good. I guess this is just an ordinary unobserved milblog once again. There is a review for Daughter of Texas posted on Amazon. The first of many, I should hope.

I am kicking about the notion of doing a hard-cover version of the Adelsverein Trilogy, through the Tiny Publishing Business that I am now a working partner in: I would like to offer a hard-bound version of all the separate volumes of the Trilogy, at slightly under the rate of buying all three in paperback. So, what would please all the fans – a cloth-bound and paper jacket edition, or a hard-cover version with just a bright-color laminated cover. Let me know – the laminated cover is slightly less expensive to publish than the cloth-bound and paper dust-jacket version – but the cloth and dust-jacket version just looks so classy! This wouldn’t be something I would look to put in the big-box stores, since to do so would involve a discount more than would make this doable, economically.

So – are there any readers out there?

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