#writing

Break Time!

galby68, , , , , , , , 6 Comments

This might be more of a Hail Mary post than an actual blog entry. So expect to be appropriately underwhelmed.

That said, this email from yesterday caught me off guard, enter the Hail Mary portion of this entry.

About a month ago, I skeptically clicked on a link on the Facebook that I fully expected to create a full blown spam implosion of my account. It was from NORC, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. As best I can tell, they are a legit entity, even though they are new on my personal radar.

They were offering a paid opportunity to participate in their election survey, specifically the influence social media has on people during an election cycle. The whole 6 week enchilada pays about a tenth of my monthly nut, so it’s not significant, but it’s also not nothing.

But it is a 6 week break from the BS that is Facebook, so I happily signed up – after doing my due due diligence.

Haha. Doodoo.

I was just surprised to get the email yesterday that said “Boom, bitch, it’s now!”

Well, maybe I’m paraphrasing.

The long and short of this Hail Mary is, basically, maybe they signed me out of the Facebook, but maybe that act does not keep any of my tethered accounts – such as WordPress – from syncing up. If that’s the case, my ALIHAFG followers there will see this entry and understand my silence. I mean, I only had about a month to get ahead of this thing and failed…

So either this works, or people come to the understandable leap of logic that I’ve obviously died. More on my personal experiences with that later.

Maybe.

In the meantime, I’ve apparently got to go be asocial. Also in the meantime, I’m using my one-less-distraction existence to get shit done. I’m halfway through editing – and I humbly discovered a few obvious typos in doing so – my revised book two of No One Of Consequence, splitting book two into books two and three to keep my price point palatable and my earning equally low, I’m sure.

Hehe.

Gulp.

<starves to death>

Kidding, I’m very lucky to have parents – in my damn fifties that would never let that happen! In the interim, I look at this social media break between now and November 3 as freeing up my time to complete this book two rewrite and wrap up a tangental project called Longtime Survivor – which will probably result in a Cease and Desist order coming my way – ahead of November’s NaNoWriMo event…in which my plan – such as it is – is to get a first draft of what I’m calling Fifty Gig – my second non-fiction entry in the Oldie Hawn trilogy. The first of which was dating. Fifty Gig is work and the third entry will be (I think) fitness, now that COVID has iced my physical shitness cupcake.

We’ll see how that optimistic planning plays out.

Break Time!

Always Begin With The End

galby68, , , , , 2 Comments

It’s official!

As can sometimes be the case, I finished early.

Let’s call it “ahead of schedule”.

My goal was to have this available on 4/1. To that end, I released my Dating Into Oblivion compilation in the second week of March to get a feel for what to expect of Amazon’s publishing routine. Better to know what to expect ahead of time versus missing a deadline, right?

Can you believe I can’t get a regular job with that attitude? Truth.

Here’s what I learned from my first crack:

– Cover design is pretty easy in Amazon, no need to pay for any software to create one. Ask me how I know…

– Except, the back cover. That’s another story. But I figured it out after the first dozen or so copies were ordered, so there’s some collectors edition Dating Into Oblivion hard copies out there with nothing on the back cover but my face. Getting that kink out basically came down to making the assumption that you should paste or enter content into the space where the dialogue box was. Somehow it just works out.

– PDFs are formatted as 9×11 documents. Have you ever seen a book that size? Too big for a paperback, too small for a coffee table book. The cool size paperbacks are 6×9, so I had to overcome a “I can’t fucking do this on my own” moment when I previewed that.

Therapeutically yelling

I need a 20-something!

was helpful in reducing stress. Alexa, on the other hand…

Calling Felipe…

Not as helpful.

– It’s better to start the publishing process with your hard copy and then go to your e-book afterward. I don’t know why…it just is.

– There seems to only be spellcheck in the paperback process, too. So…yeah.

My impatience taught me another lesson:

My first stab at publishing warned me that it could take up to 72 hours for formatting to be approved and the book to go live. It took 4. For this second effort, it took 34.

That could have been a real problem had I found myself in possession of a normal timeline versus arbitrarily picking April Fool’s Day as my live date. Because that just wasn’t going to happen.

But, what are ya gonna do?

As it was, my novel went live on 3/25 and I’m just going to be content with that reality.

Now, since I’ve had this blog for four years, officially and never bothered to monetize it, I’m gonna drop a link for y’all.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/f.html?C=Z9SQXHR9LXA4&M=urn:rtn:msg:201903130222099bb62a7a858d4eb8b682ee7bd520p0na&R=V158RSV9LR9Z&T=C&U=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fauthor%2Fchristophergalbreath%3Fref_%3Dpe_1724030_132998060&H=DHROTLNEXOMIGVARF6X15DAUPM0A&ref_=pe_1724030_132998060

Wow. That’s a terrible link.

https://www.amazon.com/Christopher-Galbreath/e/B07PLNKTHB?ref_=pe_1724030_132998060

That’s better.

That’s my author page on the Amazon. It has kindle and hard copy versions of both of my books.

If you’re a longtime reader, just enjoy knowing Dating Into Oblivion is out there, you’ve read about 80% of it here for free. However, No One Of Consequence is a largely fictional work that I hope you will enjoy in either format.

And, please, if it’s not too much to ask…share this post if you think you have folks in your readership I’d appreciate you reposting or sharing this to get it in front of them.

Thanks in advance!

And in the meantime, enjoy this picture of what I encountered when searching for myself of the Amazon.

Yeah. Sometimes you straight folk don’t make such clever kids. We’ll talk about that later. For right now, just know that this was the progression of my childhood nicknames:

Grade School – Gallbladderbreath

Middle School –

Girlbreath

High School –

Ballbreath

Now, even though I knew they were onto something with that last one, when my brother coined the nickname Galby, I was on it.

But I’m glad the Amazon is there to help pick at that emotional scar.

Always Begin With The End

My $.02

galby68, , , , , , 6 Comments

You’d think that this whole blog page should be called My $.02, since that’s pretty much what every blog I read is…just people sharing their daily stories or opinions or recipes or product reviews.

But it isn’t.  It’s AtLeastIHaveAFrigginGlass because no matter what life throws my way, good or bad.  Glass half full or half empty…at least I have a friggin’ glass.

Now, that’s an optimistic turn for ya.

So, here’s my two cents.

Penny 1:

People I know personally – and a couple of direct messages – have picked up on a recent theme of me exploring dating again and made mention of the fact that they totally think I should date again.

Nice to have my life decisions affirmed, it is.

Over the last few – maybe six? – I’ve quickly begun to second guess the wisdom of that declaration.  Hearing people tell me to “go for it” keeps the old chin up when I start to think maybe becoming a Log Cabin Republican would be less exasperating.

But, seriously, I think “trying” might be putting too much effort into process.  It does it seem take two to tango, and I’m meeting a lot of guys with two left feet or who are really just into break dancing.  I’ll give you a moment wrap your mind around how break dancing works against the tango in my dating analogy.

I recently quit one dating app and jumped to another.  Last night, before bed.  

I woke up this morning to the learning experience of knowing what 17 fuzzy profile pictures guys’ junk looks like.  So, I guess that’s good news if any of them are congressmen.  Somehow I doubt that’s the reality here.

Seriously, though, how can you not have a clear headshot and the photos of the areas around your taint are better than my grandmother’s glamour shot?

Selfie-porn, people.  That’s what America has to offer.  

That’s fine.  When the most decent guy I’ve met was an in person chance encounter, maybe analog is the way to go.  I mean, his only problem was working too much – same – and not being able to directly say, “I’m in a five year relationship with someone who moved halfway across the country to be with me”.

Oh, look at that.  That wasn’t so hard.

One thing I did learn, that I’m trying to decide whether it’s practical or jaded, is to only commit $20 to a first date or two.

It keeps the date to a meet and greet type thing, getting you into real life with someone without getting you stuck at a table for an hour with Quasimodo if that end up being the reason for the poor quality profile pic.

Tabling that for now, because all it’s really providing me is blog subject matter and I doubt I could keep up.

Which is a good transition to Penny 2:

I just published blogs seven days in a row, which is a personal record for me.  That’s 10 of the last 11 days, too.  Plus one for this entry.  So, yay me.

That’s about 10,000 words in seven days.  I’m proud of that because I talked myself out of participating in NaNoWriMothid past November simply because I was traveling and that made my month only three weeks in which to scribble/tap out 50,000 words.

Man, I had an idea and everything.

But this past week has both exhausted me and proven to me that I can do this.  I’d estimate that about 5% of my comments and DMs – such as they are – involve suggesting that I write a book.  I’d enjoy that, methinks.  It’s not the writing part that intimidates me, it’s the “What next?” factor.  I could probably crack out a couple different drafts in 2018, that’s hardly putting James Patterson in any danger. The larger question remains then what?  

Does anyone know any agents or publishers?  

Is there a Publishing for Dummies?

There are people I know who have self-published.  I get mixed reviews from them. They allegedly earn more but suffer the consequences of limited distribution.  Plus, if I wrote a book, I think my vanity requires a physical book over simply an e-book.

I have one friend who has had several children’s books published but the last time we spoke about it, the data she had had publishers looking for very specific genres and author profiles.

If I wanted to deal with people disqualifying me based on arbitrary criteria, I’d date.

My $.02