FREEBIE IS COMING SOON

Yay! After struggling umpteen dozen weeks, I have ordered the “Freebie” book, which is a sampling of the stories in the “real” book that I’ll be publishing soon. As soon as it arrives, I’ll let you know and either mail you one or deliver it in person.

I invested in this freebie as a tool to promote my upcoming book. It only has six sample stories. The real book will have at least forty. Let me see: If X = 6 stories and Y = 40 stories, and if X = upteen dozen weeks, then Y = upteen dozen times about 7 weeks = several years. No way! (My algebra is a little rusty.)

But I’ll clue you in. The stories in the real book are already written. I just have to select which ones to use, edit them, create a cover, and get the pictures ready. And oh my! The pictures. They need to be at a resolution of 300 dpi.

I plan to finish this by the end of February.  Ha ha ha ha ha ha

RESOLUTION

I thought “resolution” was a New Year’s diet plan, but in technology it’s all about making a picture look sharp and not blurry, as in “This TV has good resolution.”

When you’re publishing a book (like a Hugh Mouse book or something), it means you draw a picture of Hugh Mouse, scan it, crop it, insert it into the story, shrink it to fit, run it through a test, find out it doesn’t work, read about it another hour or two, call your son about it, reset the scanner, re-draw it the correct size, scan again, crop again, insert again and DON’T resize it.

Hey, I’m just a mouse. Just give me my mouse pad and leave me alone!

BIKE FOR CHRISTMAS

Ken said he had decided to get me a bicycle for Christmas. I forced a big smile and tried to make the words “thank you” sound more like “Wow, that’s great!” than like “What were you thinking!!?” I said I needed to ride it before he buys it. He said the store wouldn’t allow that and I said yes they would. He said he doubted it and I said, “They haven’t met me yet.” 

Eventually we found a bike low enough to allow my feet to touch the floor, but the wheels were too small for me to navigate easily. I said, “This just isn’t going to work.” We did the rest of our shopping, and neither of us mentioned the bicycle again. Until two days later. 

He said, “Let’s go bicycle shopping again.” What part of “This isn’t going to work” did he not understand? Maybe he thought we’d work it out somehow, but there’s working out how to do something, and then there’s working out what a woman is really thinking.