While We Were Out
/Hey, everyone. Did you have a good November break? I hope those of you in the U.S. had a good Thanksgiving.
My break was bonkers. If I’d had a rubber snake in my overalls, I may have taken the easy way out.
What got me in such a state? Well, mainly my own idiocy. Although I’ve been doing this site for over five years, I haven’t really figured out the best way to schedule everything out. So that means this past week, which should have been a relaxing holiday time, was instead spent finishing the next book, writing a 30 page newsletter for the supporters, working on some stuff for upcoming posts, and meeting a deadline for a non-magic project as well.
I know this sounds like a real “woe is me” sort of thing. But I don’t really mean it that way. I more mean it like: “Wow… is me!” I’m impressed that I’ve managed to keep everything coming out right on schedule. I certainly don’t always have that steadfastness with everything I do.
I realize that I made a mistake early on with this site. I should have been really sporadic with my postings and constantly pushing back the publication of the newsletters and books. I should have disappeared for a couple months here and there. And then had supporters waiting years for a book that might never come. Maybe Kickstart a project and just take the money and run. That’s the smart way to handle this sort of thing. Take my advice, people. Get yourself a reputation for being flakey. It’s just too much work the other way. That’s why no one else really keeps this sort of publishing schedule.
What about Annemann? He put out 151 issues of The Jinx over just a few years.
Yeah, and then he put his goddamn head in the oven. You don’t think that was related?
Here’s a live shot from my webcam.
It’s not really that bad. In fact, it’s not bad at all. Everything is pretty much a joy. It was just my own poor scheduling that led to having a lot to do all at once. But, on the positive side, I think I’ve come up with a better schedule to use in the future that will more evenly distribute my obligations. That’s going to change things up for next year, but I’ll address that in a future post.
That’s book #4 you see there. The final step before sending the book off to the printers is to print out the pages on my home computer and to read the book out loud. Reading aloud from a hard copy allows me to catch some spelling and grammar stuff that, for whatever reason, my brain had started glossing over when reading silently on a screen.
So that’s one piece of advice I would recommend to anyone publishing a book, which is a subject people ask about from time to time, even though I don’t know too much about it.
(My #1 piece of advice for anyone publishing a book is to read up on how to balance your text so it looks best. Yes, having typos or grammatical mistakes in a book isn’t good, but those only affect the sentence they’re in. What really makes many self-published magic books look ridiculous is bad layout of the text in paragraphs. You need to customize the hyphenation settings, word/letter spacing, glyph scaling, margin alignment, and so on, in order to make your text look like a “real” book.
And for god’s sake, don’t have double spaces between every line of text. It doesn’t make your book look longer, it just makes it look like a 10th-grade book report on A Separate Peace.")
Last week, my friend who monitors the PO Box dropped off the first small batch of Christmas cards that had already trickled in after my request in the last post. I want to thank those of you who already sent one in. Initially I was just looking forward to getting them so I can pull off the trick I have in mind. But now I’m also enjoying getting them just because it’s fun to get Christmas cards in the mail.
I got an email that said:
I’m sending off a Christmas card to you as requested and initially was excited you were actually going to use them in a magical way. But as I put it in the envelope I realized it could be that you just want a shit load of cards to show off at your place. So when a new acquaintance walks in, she is hit in the face with cards everywhere. "Wow, I never knew you were so popular Andy!"
A social proof wingman. Very clever. —DKH
That’s an interesting supposition, but no, I actually have a trick planned. And I think he may be over-estimating how impressed people are by Christmas cards. I’m not sure how much social capital or poontang that Christmas cards generate. But, hey, if there is some of that as a byproduct, then I’ll happily accept it. I’d love to live in a world that worked like this:
The most important thing to happen while I was away was that I discovered these at Walmart…
That’s with pretzels, people. They’re good as hell, and get my highest recommendation. Five magic wands! (I probably should have waited until I was reviewing something magic related to break out that rating system.)