Everything Is Exhausting

It was just one of those days when I didn’t have enough spoons and I tried to do too much.

I suck at time management, and for a writer, this is a productivity killer.

I have so much to do in terms of cleaning up the house. The eBay biz won’t run itself if nothing is listed on there, I need to do an actual garage sale, the big camping trip needs massive preparation, and my office is a wreck.

All of these things mean I haven’t been writing, and I’m worried about not staying in the habit of writing every day, not just blogging. Don’t even get me started about exercise.

My crap is everywhere, there’s not enough room to store it all upstairs, and not enough airtight storage or space to store it in the basement, where the spiders and centipedes live. I HATE centipedes.

When I worked in the basement on my old computer years ago, it was almost impossible to tell if I was seeing a centipede crawl across the floor or dreaming it. I had to rub my eyes, stand up and jump back, just in case. Half of the time it was real. We live in front of the woods. Our backyard basically drops into a valley with a stream and a forest on hills. It’s pretty, It also had mounds of dead leaves that we shovel and heave down the hillside every fall, and as any insect expert will tell you, centipedes just LOVE dead leaves and wood.

Did I mention we have stacks of wood near our house?

Yeeeeah.

Honestly, until the rest of the fam becomes as obsessive about organization like me and stores all items in the basement in airtight plastic storage, we will have spiders. This means we will have centipedes. If only cats ate centipedes…

Tags: centipedes, cleaning, eww, organization, procrastination

I am NEVER moving to NYC until they kills those bedbugs.

I just spent hours devouring link after link about bedbugs, and I don’t even remember why. Damn you, G00gle! But I am again horrified to discover that the problem with bed bugs has not only not abated since public awareness grew in 2007 of the new wave of the epidemic but has actually worsened in the past three years! I won’t bother to terrify other people, except to say this: include a bedbugs clause in any housing contract, and if you move to NYC, hire a real estate lawyer first to vet prospective buildings. *shudder, shudder*

Tags: be bugs, bedbugs, creepy crawlies, eww, infestations, NYC

Book Trailers

Zoe Winter is talking about book trailers over on her blog. Are they necessary for a successful book on the brink of Web 3.0? Should we as authors, accept book trailers as standard in the new publishing landscape? I think it’s obvious how Zoe feels about the matter from her post (heh), and I find her arguments in the comments compelling:

I think if someone likes book trailers, that’s fine. If someone likes making them, that’s fine. I am just annoyed by this creeping attitude that authors somehow “need” a book trailer.

So perhaps I’m reacting against that. If people just saw it as a fun thing to do and a way to get in front of people who also read, but spend a lot of time in youtube, that would be cool.

But it seems like there is an increasing attitude that a book trailer is something you NEED to succeed as an author. And I resent the idea of having to put another thing on my to do list. Especially when it’s absolutely not practical for me. I’m very Type A. I couldn’t make a book trailer that wouldn’t lessen my work and make it look dumb. That’s counterproductive.

I tend to agree with her on all of these points, although I have seen awesome book trailers that made me want to buy the books. Most of them, however, are terrible.

It is NOT sufficient to make a slide show of low-resolution stock photos and set them to public domain music, ESPECIALLY if the accompanying text describes the plot in a trite, hackneyed way. I watched a book trailer just this week that did a brilliant job of displaying exactly why the author in question ended up using a vanity press, and that’s not counting the flaws of the actual video aspects of the preview.

If you’ve taken film classes, if you know you’re good at editing film and can make a live action or animated trailer yourself for little to no cost or  have a bunch of film and production friends, if you can “see” the trailer in your mind and know what to do to catch people’s attention, if you’ve won awards for your film-making skills, if you have better software to edit than Windows Movie Maker, and if you have the time to spend on a big project, then go for it.

That rules out AT LEAST 99 percent of you.

Probably you.

Seriously. I’m not kidding.

You are not a special snowflake. If you want your writing to be treated like a profession, then treat your work professionally.

Tags: book promotion, book trailers, books, marketing, professionalism, promotion