Proof reading material I've been reading for a couple of years, contending with reluctant printers (why don't printers like me? is it because I resent the cost of ink?), attempting to build a website (ahem), watering a garden, and canning fill my days.
The canning prep may be tiring, but at the moment I look at the pickled onions (made for myself) , the dilly beans and sweet pickled carrots (made for others) with some satisfaction. I've got electricity and so I'm using the immersion cooker as a canning tool, eliminating boiling water baths in overheated kitchens and constant attention to a timer. Also known as Sous Vide cooking, the tool sits in the water bath and heats it to a specific temperature, your food is vacuum sealed and resting in the water bath. It never gets hotter than the temp you set the tool to, so it never overcooks.This means I can pasteurize a quart of tomatoes (a rubbermaid tub of tomato quarts!), exhausting the air and killing the microbes within the jar in two and a half hours without boiling anything. No longer doing tomatoes, but I still make pickles. I've made jugged hare this way. Quite good. https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/make-crisp-flavor-packed-pickles-on-the-quick Which is a Very Exciting development in my life. Kind of snuck up on me while I was just taking care of loose ends.
I finally got almost all of the pre-publishing prep work done. What remains is a bio for myself as an author. This puts me in the uncomfortable territory of, “selling myself”. Makes me feel dishonest and pushy, as though I have a back lot full of nearly broken used cars or a coat lined with watches... And yet it has to be done. Something has to be composed to make my mundane, old lady, self interesting, to intrigue readers (all younger than I) enough that they'll give my work a try. I've managed cover photos and back cover blurbs, found a photo of myself that didn't offend me and met the requirements (300 dpi), formatted and reformatted and picked at all the odd places in the text until there isn't much left for me to do in that department. And I still rather like the stories, a point that surprises me when I'm also sick to death of looking at them. Even the covers and the blurbs aren't that bad. Maybe not professional, but I haven't made much money writing, so I'm NOT a Pro. I'm doing this through Create Space, which offers a “preview option” that will allow me to publicly post sections of my novels. I'll be doing that soon – watch this space. I've gotten it marginally functional and maybe – MAYBE – I'll be able to look at it with slightly less critical eyes once it's a working page instead of a frustration in process.
I really do need to have this page working, I find, things are backing up and need to come out. I used Facebook for that for a number of years, but I am no longer comfortable exposing myself in that manner. I don't wear mini skirts anymore, either. I suppose that I will feel some satisfaction at having traversed the minefield of a Weebly template once it's published, and I am assured I can change things – except maybe a font or a color or a position. Templates are like coloring books, and coloring books always frustrated me... There were these LINES, you see. They were intended to limit where the colors went. The lines required conformity, not a easy matter for me. I tried, I really did, I tried to be like the others, but they read comic books and played together and I read library books and played alone,as isolated from my peers as the colors in a neatly completed coloring book. My kindergarten teacher told my mother that I didn't take my coloring seriously. My mother laughed all the way home, but it was true. Even at five I didn't find putting colors in cages made by lines a very satisfying occupation. Finger painting was a different story. The tactile experience of the smooth paint, the way colors blended – this was freedom. If the colors got muddy it was easy enough to start over.... But coloring inside the lines? Very limiting to my mind. And now it's time to see if this works. More Later, I'm sure. So I'm dealing with a template and I don't get the option to choose which font I'm using for my blog.
Weebly isn't actually a presence, doesn't have anyone at home to talk to. No "live chat" whatever the advertising may say. They don't get back to the "email" option, either. And the phone number on their web page is no longer in service. So I get to be frustrated. I've already learned that Forums and "help sections" are useless if you actually need information about anything specific. So. This site won't be a work of art. It's WYSIWYG and since I doubt that I have an audience (do let me know if I'm mistaken) I don't really care. I'm doing this because I'm supposed to do this to sell books, not because I actually like doing web pages. |
Avery Milieu Writes
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