Good and bad

      Howdy! Sorry I've been away from the blog. The past few days, I've had some interesting things happen, both good and bad, and I've been occupied.
      Good things first: Mikey came to visit this weekend. We had a wonderful time. We watched Justice League and played football, baseball, and golf. Mikey drove his electric Jeep around as well as his push scooter and his bicycle. (He's still in training wheels, but he's getting there.) We ate pizza, cereal, and grilled cheese sandwiches. We played computer games and video games. It was a wonderful visit. I'll post some photos of him playing football soon.
      Those were the good things, and they basically overshadow the bad things. Which were:
      1) My IBD continued to give me trouble. That got old really quick. I'm wondering if my ACTOS is somehow involved in that. I just seem to get sickest soon after I take it. I'll have to ask my doctor.
      2) I worked on Endless, my collection of poetry, and got it sent to Lulu. That's actually good news. It still needs a different cover, and I know I have some formatting errors that I'm going to fix as soon as I get the proof copy, which should be here in a week or so. The bad news is that Lulu has raised their cost in producing both soft cover and hard cover books. It's going to be priced higher than I had hoped on Lulu. And if you add the retail markup for Barnes & Noble and Amazon, it basically doubles. I'm very disappointed in this. I'm probably not going to buy a distribution package. It will be available only through Lulu.com and at my book signings. At least, that's what I think at present.
      3) I made two huge blunders on Murder by the Acre, and instead of getting new words, I was correcting my mistakes. My first mistake was opening an old version of my book and then typing new words on it. That wasn't too hard to fix as I simply cut and pasted the new words into the correct version. The second mistake was in entering in the corrections that Crystal gave me -- nearly 50 in all -- in the old version. I also found some mistakes of my own that I corrected before I realized that it was the old version, but I didn't realize it until I came upon a clue in Chapter Three that I had eliminated completely. Sigh. I have to spend tonight reentering the corrections and comparing the old version to the correct version to find all the corrections I did myself. Whee.
      4) Speaking of Murder by the Acre, the same price per book problem is deviling it. It looks like B&N and Amazon will price it at or over $20. Not good. Even worse: I make even less money per book than I did on the first one. For Murder by the Mile, I'm going to have to look around and see if I can find another publishing company that has better prices. (Has anyone out there used BookSurge? I'm curious how they are.)
      5) I didn't get the second podcast up yet. I was uploading it onto my own personal webspace when I discovered that I didn't have room to do so. I'm going to have to find a hosting service (free, I hope) to host it. Sigh.
      Anyway, I have plenty to do over the next few days. I'd sure like a day off in which to accomplish a few things, but that isn't going to happen any time soon. Time to get ready for work. I hope things are going well for you. Have a great day.