Current location:	The Homestead
Current mood:	crushed
Current music:	"The Room Got Heavy" by Yo La Tengo

Notes From The Underground/Weekend . . .
1. Went to see Borat on Saturday. It was pretty aggresively offensive although also pretty funny in parts.

2. Finally got started on my Nanowrimo novel. After a couple of days work I'm almost up to enough words to count for what would be one day's contribution to be able to 50K words in a month. Then again, it's not how you start--look at me last year--it's how you finish.

3. The Dallas Cowboys. Gah! Shades of the Thanksgiving Day game against Miami 10-12 years ago. Gah!

4. Tomorrow--or, rather, much later on this morning--it's time to head to East Texas to scout for book projects. I tried to arrange this trip so my blushing bride Mel(ody) could go along and yet the details on her end didn't quite work out anyway to let this happen.

5. Next Thursday I have to do a presentation about publishing to the new instructors at the school who are in the BITC (basic instructor training curriculum. or someting) class. Shades of Spinal Tap: I'm gonna send you back to BITC school!

6. Now that the trip to Mississippi over Thanksgiving is out--not enough money--we had an endless series of discussions this weekend about where we might go instead. Supposedly we're going to Little Rock but to be honest I could give a rat's ass about that as a destination. It would be easier and much less painful to just bite the bullet and go to the the in-laws an hour and a half up the road. Basically, I haven't had a vacation kind of vacation in well over a year--a week and a half off to lay on the couch clutching my head in agony with shingles doesn't really count--and despite taking the week of Thanksgiving off it looks like I'm not getting much of any vacation this year either. Oh well, maybe next year.

7. Had the idea, as I have every few months, that I could write genre novels and then sell them--hard copy and ebooks--online. It might be a fun hobby even if it never really did anything other than, at the most, breaking even. As an idea it didn't get much traction when I floated it at The Homestead this weekend. Oh well, I might throw some energy at this during all those lunch hours I never take but need to start taking.

Basically, what is the upshot of starting a small publishing operation like that? Well, based on my experience, there are all kinds of logistical things that need to be done--doing the paperwork for a limited liability corporation (LLC), setting up a DBA account, buying ISBNs, getting an (e-commerce) online site, setting up accounts with Amazon and Ebooks.com, buying Adobe CS2 sofware for layout and design work, buying Quickbooks to keep track of money, getting a post office box, sales tax ID #, and so on down the line to the smallest details--but the most important thing is to have content. That is, you can do all that stuff but you're only wasting money until you have some product to get a real return off of. The best thing to do is to have 1-2 manuscripts ready to go and then all the procedural stuff could be taken of in the space of about six weeks. Taxes, that's the only logistical thing that worries me. (Hey! Find out some sunny day that you've got a $4,000 tax lien against you like I di about three years ago that I had to then pay off in 24 hours so we could close on the house we were buying and tell me that taxes wouldn't worry you!) Product, though, that's the key thing. That's what put me so far in the hole at the school: it took us like 14-15 months to get our first two books out. If we'd been able to hit the ground running we wouldn't be nearly so much in the hole. Of course, until we got a couple of books dones--any kind of books--nobody would have taken us seriously enough to hand their book projects over to us anyway. Who knows, it would be nice to have a couple of genre novels next fall to push. Just for fun. Just for a hobby. Something to give me work some kind of inherent interest other than seeing how many lab manuals and workbooks we can publish a year.  

Oh well. It's almost one-thirty in the morning. I'm feeling pissed off and thwarted about eighteen ways from Sunday. Maybe there will be some kind of f'ing miracle and I'll just magically find myself in a better humor, if not tomorrow, at some point in the not-so-distant future.