Thanks again, Kobo

Just wanted to praise Kobo yet again.  Their in-house promotions don't cost anything up front--well, some of them don't; others do--and they almost always result in a non-zero number of sales, and that makes me happy.

In other news, I've started the mobi edit of book 4 of Wheel of Fire.  The manuscript is currently at 101,000 words even.  That will fluctuate as I go, of course, but not terribly much.

I've only got twelve days left to get in the Christmas spirit.  I still haven't watched my slate of favorite Christmas movies: Die Hard, Trading Places, and Death Race.  I need to get on that.  It's not Christmas until Hans falls off Nakatomi Tower!

Second draft is done

Finished it last night.  Word count is just over 100k.

Third--and final--draft is up to bat.

Update

Well, I made it through Thanksgiving intact.  It actually went off pretty smoothly.  Much food was eaten, much football was watched, and no children got hurt or threw tantrums.  Definitely a success.

The day after was a bit rougher for me.  I had a migraine, so I was in my usual migraine fugue state.  That's never fun.

Both days had one thing in common: I didn't get any writerly stuff done.  :(

But I'm back in the saddle now.  Continuing to work on the second draft of book 4.  Word count is around 95k, I think.  It continues to creep up as I edit, which was expected, so I'll probably hit my goal of a final product in the 100k-110k range.

And I still haven't started my Christmas shopping.

Clouds of Venus promotional listing

Roxana at proofreadebooks.com was generous enough to promote my book on her site.  Here's the link:

https://proofreadebooks.com/2019/11/26/clouds-of-venus-free-space-trilogy-book-1/

She's a proofreader/editor, too, so if you're an author in need of that sort of stuff, you might want to check her service out.

Broker war ceasefire

Remember when I made this post about competition spurring online brokers to race to the bottom and offer their customers zero-dollar-commission trades?

Well, that war didn't last long.  I found out today that TD Ameritrade has been bought out by Schwab.


Charles Schwab to buy TD Ameritrade in a $26 billion all-stock deal


So, at some point in 2020, I guess I'll have a Schwab account.  And I was just starting to feel at home on the TD Ameritrade site since its acquisition of my Scottrade account.  *sigh*

R101

I learned something new recently.  I'd heard of the Hindenburg airship, of course, and I've even listened to the "oh, the humanity" recording from the onlooker.  But I'd never heard of the R101 disaster.

R101 was a British airship that crashed in France in 1930.  At the time, it was the largest flying machine ever built.  Forty-eight people were killed.

Iron Maiden wrote a song about it.

Slow speed resolved

The other day, the internet was running very slowly on my laptop.  I didn't know the reason.  Maybe it was my internet provider throttling the speed, maybe it was heavy traffic that the system couldn't handle, or maybe it was an issue with my laptop.

I'm now pretty sure it was the latter.

I downloaded some Windows updates, and I thought they were done downloading, but I guess they weren't.  I think they kept downloading, and that's what was sucking up bandwidth.  In any event, that all appears to be finished, so things are back to normal-ish.

What bugs me is that Windows 10 doesn't tell you much about what it's doing.  It likes to hide menus and processes.  It likes to spy on you and change your settings during updates.  When the OS does notify you about something, it's often a useless fact like "You just plugged in headphones" or whatever.  Well, duh.  I know what I just did.  Don't tell me what I'm doing.  Tell me what you're doing.  It's a lot easier to tolerate slow internet if I know the reason for it.

I like the OS for the most part, but it's a naughty rascal.  One must keep it on a short leash.

On the plus side, the updates went off without a hitch.  :)