Ah, mid August... it kinda slipped up on me. I had intended to write a week or so ago. I had intended to start writing again at least once a week. Stuff happened. Stuff always happens. Family stuff. Financial stuff. Weather stuff. Just stuff. And it all rolls into one big ball and days slip past and here we are in the middle of August and the youngest is getting ready to go back to school on Tuesday. And...
SIGHS! I'd wish for more hours in the day but I'd mismanage those too, so why bother.
So, what's going on now?
Nothing. Watching that storm, still way out in the Atlantic even though it should not impact me even a little bit. Because, where there's one this time of year, there's sure to be others. The twenty year anniversary of another hurricane that was way out there about this time that wasn't supposed to impact me either is coming up. Let's just say Katrina was the worst hurricane I ever went through, before or since. And leave it at that.
Hurricanes happen here a lot. The Mobile Bay seems to attract them like flies. It's not something I take lightly, even one still way out in the Atlantic. We watch. We plan. We prepare. With Ivan the year before Katrina, I learned that evacuating isn't feasable. I'm forty to fifty miles inland so ocean surge will not ever be a problem here, just wind. And I'd much rather just stay and ride it out than risk the chance of getting caught in the path in a car that's going nowhere. Or try to get back after one hits hard. Again, another lesson learned from Ivan 21 years ago.
We did evacuate for Ivan. We took the dogs, the new cat, the kids and drove both cars to my dad's house in Sneads, Florida. At the time Mobile was projected to get an almost direct hit and be on the bad side of the eye. We made the decision to go the morning before it hit. And we drove in rain squalls the two hundred miles over I-10 with little to no company on those roads. We were going east, not north, it seemed stupid to others. But that area of Florida was not supposed to be impacted. The key words were NOT SUPPOSED TO BE.
Tornadoes spun up in a town just to the west of where we went and we lost TV and at times power. But we didn't lose all power at Daddy's. Just off and on. The cable would take another week or two to come back on, but that wasn't our problem.
What was our problem was we didn't know that all of our routes back to Mobile were gone. All of the bridges over Escambia Bay at Pensacola had been wiped out. A bridge we'd just been on a few hours earlier just gone, but it was worse than that. A semi-truck dangled from one of the sections, the driver lost.
That could have been us. To get home we had to go north into Alabama and take a long route past the damage to I-65 then south again. In bumper to bumper traffic. We almost didn't make it home. We put our last money into the gas tanks hoping it was enough to make it. After spending an hour in line to get said gas.
Mobile was hit by Ivan. But not the way it was forecast. We got the west side of the eye wall instead of the east. Pensacola got the worst.
We had no power for nearly two weeks. We had no food or air conditioning. Gas was hard to find. It was horrible. But we survived.
For Katrina, we went from it hitting Florida Friday night to sitting in the house Sunday watching a tree in the backyard be twisted around like it was a washcloth. That tree lived. It was deformed but it lived. The house wasn't as lucky. Insurance didn't cover anything. FEMA didn't cover anything because we had insurance. Eventually we stopped paying the mortgage and let the house go to foreclosure because it was rotting around us and there was nothing we could do to stop it. The one two punch of Ivan and Katrina did that.
I think about that time often. PTSD I guess. The price of living in paradise they say. But, I still watch them and worry about them. And know that there's nothing really to do but start filling jugs with water and charging solar lights and getting batteries and charcoal and hoping for the best.
So that's what I'm doing. Watching the tropics. Getting the kid ready to go back at the literal ass crack of dawn Tuesday, and wanting to put up the Halloween decorations early. Because we are living in the absolute worst of times and I know if we get hit this year, it will not be an easy recovery. But we don't talk about the orangeshitstain here...
And now to the topic of books and what's going on... if you're still here and still give a shit... that is.
As I stated in a post or two back, I can't remember which, I said I'd pulled everything from Apple and Barnes and Noble for several reasons. I thought about that for a while and decided to go ahead and use Draft 2 Digital to relist everything again. I prefer to go straight to the book sellers that allow indies to use their service because I make more money. But Apple and B&N were not making things easier. Apple's European compliance issue was a problem for me personally. But that problem isn't there for D2D, I'm sure. At least I hope. And the issue of hidden books at B&N does not seem to be an issue now, sooo... I don't know.
For now, everything is either relisted, in the process of relisting, or waiting until they fall out of KU to relist on both Apple and B&N. So, if you shop at those two bookshops, or Smashwords, or the European sites D2D lists to, you're good to go. I still have books directly available through Amazon and Kobo, the last two books in KU will fall out Wednesday morning and be relisted elsewhere. And all but River's Edge are available in Kobo Plus to read free. RE is too short and does not register page reads so there's no point in that. Yes, I know this for sure. I read it through Plus. It has never once shown up in their accounting. So, yeah. Sorry. But it's cheap.
And before I go, it's weird to accidentally glance at the reviews for my books and notice that the one book that I credit with the end of my writing career and see that it has more than double the reviews of any other book, even my biggest sellers, of which it is one, and see that the majority of the reviews are positive... after all of the early negative and backhanded honorable mention that year that completely demoralized me... so... I don't know what happened there, but the last few years of positive kinda made up for the early shit stomping I got with that book. Maybe, there is some hope now that the people who seemed to hate my guts just for existing have forgotten I exist.
Be careful what you wish for... you just might get it!
BUAHAHAHAHAHA!
boy did I get it.
As always,
Peace,
Mercy
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