Everything But The Job

Sigh.

We've got a postal situation up here -- our post office has gone postal.

It's sticking mail in the wrong post office boxes.  Since that's all we can get up here -- and I don't know why, unless the postmaster is just lazy -- that means envelopes with bills, checks and even medication are disappearing.

Stupidity?  Vindictiveness?  Theft of checks and drugs? That's always a possibility.

One of the people who used to work at our post office during the last time this happened, said, "The postmaster is doing everything but her job."

Which I can believe.  Half the time it seems she's running some charity or on the phone with her relatives.  We need volunteers up here, and kids have to be dealt with, but first of all she's the postmaster, and she needs to focus  on that job during working hours.  We can all screw up on the job, but repeated mis-delivery of important mail in a small town where many people can't get it any other way is inexcusable, and damaging.  People tell me the way they cure the problem is to move their post office box to Sekiu -- but what about those with no cars?  We do have them up here, among them the sick and elderly who live downtown.  When they need their mail, do they walk two miles along a twisting highway with intermittent shoulders, between cliffs and salt water, or do they wait until they can beg a ride?  Do they take the early bus -- for three dollars they might not have -- and wait over an hour for it to come back?  Or lend out their box key to somebody else?  Is the postmaster aware of any of this? I doubt very much she's trying to get somebody killed on purpose.  I'd never accuse anyone of that, but short-sightedness and sloppiness in a very important job like this can be lethal.

Anyway, for anybody up here, don't let our postmaster force you to move your mail.  Call the United States Postal Service and start a case file: 

Call 1-800-ASK-USPS®  (1-800-275-8777)
M-F - 8:00am-8:30pm ET  Sat - 8:00am-6:00pm ET  Sunday - Closed.  Holidays - Closed except for: Martin Luther King Jr., President's, Columbus, and Veteran's Days, 9:00am - 6:00pm ET.

The Creative Life

As a creative freelancer, all you need to read is this number of Mistress Matrisse's Control Tower. Forget the how-to books, the seminars and workshops. This is all you need to know.

Naked Peacock

Sorry about going on about the publishing details, but after 20-some years of writing and arting, I'm putting in a couple years on marketing and publishing. About now I'm the go-to girl on all levels of publishing, self, print-on-demand and Naked Peacock.

Naked Peacock: a site that is very simple and basic, like a plucked chicken, that automatically pays authors for their books, the webgang a fee, and tracks everything through a simple site like CCNOW (credit cards and Paypal, both). Even pay back customers who help promote the site (why not?P). The users stick all the pretty feathers on the site to make a peacock, but the chicken stays simple.

The entropy can only happen to the feathers, and only if they're not properly groomed by individual users. The chicken stays fresh. CCNow has stayed sleek and useable because they don't care how any of us build our carts, as long as they're legal.

Amazon is an example of confusing the chicken with the feathers; at this point they're reverse-engineering to a dinosaur.

I don't even know if CCNow even has this capability to feed fees into the correct lines, but because they're a Naked Peacock themselves, I will bet they can tweak it to work for a book industry site.

(Another nice NP is ProjectWonderful)

Hercules Rising

Head over to my website, and you'll see why I took Amazon off my website. No one should buy books or CD's from Amazon because of their warehouse system and their 55% markup. Just google the author and buy direct, for nearly half the price.

Amazon forgot what it was about. Entropy happens. Am going to be looking into linking up a few free sites so authors can sell directly and I get a few pennies off each sale. It IS possible. Amazon just tried to play gate-keeper on the web, and we all know what happens to censorship on the web.

And the Desert Peach continues!

Working up "An Insupportable Light" a bit and will probably post it for sale at Lulu. I'm seriously thinking of finding a regular publisher for it. Okay, okay, I'll probably have to bite the bullet and make it a furry publisher, but that's where genres are taking us. We'll see.

If I can get my funky little webcam to work, how many people would tune in once a week to a livecam broadcast? That is if you want to hear me driveling on to myself about my latest mania. Now if I could just figure out how to make it two-way....

On The Road: Cartoonists Northwest

This is the yearly great trip to Norwescon, in Seattle. I started this week to by giving a talk at Cartoonists Northwest, and to put in a long-promised visit on a friend's farm.

First day out. The lovely forest scenery along Highway 112, designated a Washington State Scenic Byway:















That evening, me trying to make the multi-leveled world of publishing -- and the battle make modern technologies work with antique (medieval, literally) distribution systems -- clear to my colleagues at Cartoonists Northwest:

















These are my people. I miss them. It was so relaxing being with people I don't scare, who aren't church-ridden and timid, and who don't associate war with a competition between sports teams.

After the talk, we went to the Hurricane Cafe (formerly The Dog House). This is where CNW always hangs out after the meetings. It brought back a whole hot-dog boiler of memories, including the time we were all in the dark back dining hall -- telling Halloween ghost stories, as I recall, because all writers have garbage brains -- and one of our members rattled at the dark window before climbing in and practically gave us all heart attacks.

The Hurricane has cleaned up the smoke-ambered walls, and if you throw a playing card at the ceiling, it won't stick any more, but they still serve the same delightfully nostalgic, greasy, old-time American diner food. You wouldn't want to eat it every day, unless you like hearing your arteries snap shut, but who can't survive the occasional plain fried chicken -- without the KFC baloney spices -- crispy BLT and chips, or old-fashioned vanilla milkshake? This is the real deal, with waitresses with names like "Ruby." This is the kind of place the other diners try to be -- and fail. If you're in downtown Seattle, and you gotta have a burger and a smoke, don't fake yourself out with a chain. Blow over to the Hurricane.