Writing update for April 13th 2011

Another week down and this week can only be described as an epic fail. My total writing on novel number two was 1,548 words. Add to my novel writing I got another 1,329 words on my previous post about Best Buy, makes almost 3,000 words or half of my writing for the week. I could give you excuses like I’ve been working late or not feeling very good, mostly because I’ve been working too hard, but I won’t bore you or make excuses for myself. Basically it boils down to laziness and not feeling motivated.

I started doing my daily writing partly as fun and partly to see if I could do it. I now know I can write a novel because I’ve finished one, albeit a poorly written one, but I did it none the less. I’ve also found if I force myself to write and I stay focused I moves along at a pretty descent pace for someone with no training, but I’ve also found the opposite. If I skip a day it can easily become two or three days. The more days skipped the harder it is to get motivated.

The other issues I’m finding is I’m a night owl. I prefer to stay up late an sleep in. I choose 9:00 pm until I finish as my writing time and at first it was great. By the time I finished my 1,000 ish words for the night I was wiped out mentally and ready for bed. What I didn’t expect is my mind is like a muscle and once I started working it nightly it got stronger and so after getting the 1,000 words down for three of four weeks instead of mental fatigue I would lay down for bed and my mind was still working on the story and not allowing me to rest. Since I have a day job I needed to get up for work and found many nights I was getting less than five hours of sleep and making me fell like crap.

The past week I’ve found it nearly impossible to make it through a night of sleep. Even after going to bed at nine o’clock one evening with my alarm set for seven thirty the next morning, I only made it until two before something inside woke me up and wouldn’t allow for rest.  After three hours of browsing the beast I call the internet I finally felt my eyes where heavy enough to find rest and I managed a 3 hour nap before I pulled myself from bed.

Now that I’ve poured out my guilty confession of lazy writing I plan to attempt to focus and get my writing going tonight. Hopefully I’ll report back next week with 10,000 more words on novel two.

Guess I should get to it, because I feel the lead sand from the Sandman’s dusting already taking hold tonight.

What the hell Best Buy

I have lived in Alaska on and off since 1982 and I’ve seen different company’s advertise there products on T.V. touting these wonderfully low prices. Seeing these unbelievable advertised prices sticking in my head and helping to sway where I might go for lunch or to buy that latest thing I have to have only to arrive at the advertised location and see the product for a much higher price.

After watching the advertisement a second viewing I learned of the small print at the bottom of the screen in the font sized perfect for a dollhouse storybook. What does the type at the bottom of the screen say? “Driving performed by a professional driver on a close course. Do not attempt,” is what it says often enough but I’m talking about the other fine print television subscript, “Prices many vary in Alaska and Hawaii.”

After discovering that bit of information I thought, “huh, that sucks.” So at that point I figured well it is part of living so far from the rest of the country, and so even at a young age I started buying into this belief that by living Alaska it was okay to charge more for a item.

Once I got older I started noticing some things had a set price. Books in particular had the price printed right on the back and more importantly to myself was comic books price was there on the front of every issue. I realized then that I wasn’t paying anymore for a book or a comic then anyone else, and that somehow made me feel a little more connected to my contiguous state brethren.

My next discovery of the shameful practice of price gouging the folks of the far north or the island folks was for these order now, $19.95 and we’ll through in a second one free guys. Everyone has seen these last night ads for these items that in the brightness of day your brain says that is ridicules, but something happens in the dark of night, when your brain sees the horrific flashing price getting slashed from hundreds of dollars down to that safe price just below the twenty dollar mark. It also seems your brain has checked out long enough not to question that if it is the last one you’ll ever need, then why do they throwing in a second one for free? You only need to pay for the shipping and handling.

That’s when I noticed the small print on that stuff. These guys have a shipping and handling mark up  for Alaska and Hawaii. I know that a first class stamp from the post office doesn’t have an Alaskan rate. I’ve bought stamps in Alaska to write family in the “lower 48″ and while on summer vacation staying with family in Tennessee I bought stamps to write letters to my mom. What did I find? They cost the same. Talking to the local post office I found that the postal rates had set rates for the United States. It didn’t care where you where mailing your letter or package. United States Postal Service (USPS) had flat rate and didn’t care that I lived in Alaska. Of course the small print here is USPS has a lot of different rates for there services and some are cheaper to some places than the other. I haven’t talked to anyone in the postal services in years about their rates and it isn’t like I did research to write this paper.

I digress, with the knowledge that USPS has flat shipping rates I wondered why if the shipping should have been the same price way was handling to Alaska more. In the end I just figured it was a way for the company to make a few more dollars off people who where far away and didn’t have the choices others might. I mean it wasn’t like we could just drive over to the next stat and see if their stores had a better deal, we where pretty much stuck with whatever we where told the price was.

Things changed in the 1990′s. The internet opened my up to stores all across the U.S. I never had access too. Although often they had higher shipping rates to Alaska and Hawaii the cost of their goods where normally much less then off the shelf in our local stores. Plus more and more large chain stores came to town. We got our first K-mart and Wal-mart in the early 90′s and the big boy book stores like Boarders and Barnes and Noble came to town. Sure I saw many of the small local folks close up shop when the big guys came to town but as a customer I loved finally having prices that didn’t seem so over inflated.

So now we have the modern age where many of my purchases come from internet sites the costs of items are lower than ever. Many of the online guys use shipping methods other than USPS and so I understand they have a tiered service for the miles something is shipped and although in a world where my Amazon purchases are often shipped to me for free, there are still companies that feel a need to jack up the shipping costs to Alaska.

The lasted price hikes that I’ve found on several trips to one of my favorite money waster stores Best Buy. First I must say I love Best Buy and shop there much too often. Even becoming a Silver member on their price club prize club thing that everyone seems to have these days. Even with my love of the gleam of their sparkling goodies and the fact I feel right at home talking it up with one of the great Geek Squad members, I have to ask, “What the hell Best Buy?”

On at least three separate occasions now I have looked online for a product, checking customer reviews, comparing  options, looking at prices and making my choice before walking into the store to buy the item. Only to find on these three occasion the store had at least a ten percent mark up over the online price. At first I just though oh the Alaskan mark up I was so used to, but after thinking a bit long I realized things don’t add up. As a silver member of Best Buy  I get free shipping from online purchases and if you order online to pick up at the store you can get free shipping as well so they aren’t marking things up for the shipping.

I asked someone at the store and they seemed trained on this issue because they had an answer right away, not need to bring a manager into this issue. I was told, just show the check out person the print out from the web site and they’ll change the price for you. Three times I’ve done this now all on items over a hundred dollars, but I wonder how much extra Alaskans and Hawaiians are charge like this on a daily basis? It has now become standard practice for me to go to Best Buy’s web site and bookmark the item page on my iPhone before I got to the store to buy anything over fifty dollars.

Look I’m not journalist and I’m not doing an in-depth probe into the underground world of the back room Best Buy cheating customers with unfair mark up practices. All I’m doing and letting you know to check this out yourselves. Save some money and do a quick search before your next trip to your big box store of choice and let me know if you find a store seeming to have strange pricing so I can save a few buck.

And to Best Buy, I don’t know why you have this practice, but maybe you should look at your policies before you become the next Boarders and are replaced with an online source for my and many others buying dollars.

Tuesday April 5th Check-In

So it has been a week since my last post. I’m not off like a shot on here keeping you informed but once a week is better than once a month or even once a year so I’ll applaud myself for trying.

So lets get to the stats, novel one still in the holding phase. Giving it time to settle in my brain before trying to do the first read through and mark up my edits. As for book two I am still plowing along with that one. Last week I had 1,100 and  tonight I wrote 1,586 words on that novel, bringing my total to 7,874. Which means I’m keeping my 1,000 words a day pace fairly well.

As much as I enjoy getting this story down that I’m working on, I am really want to get the first book edited so I can turn it over to my first reader.

I’ve heard mixed things about who a first reader should be. For me it was without a doubt going to be my wife. I’ve heard this isn’t the best person for the job, because a spouse or other family members can not be honest with the writer and give a fair opinion on the work. Well anyone who says that has not met my wife.

Although she drives me crazy sometimes, as I am sure she’d say the same about me, she is often brutally honest and often gets labeled a bitch for her efforts. Even with me it is not an uncommon assurance that I get the “your are acting like a d**k or I’m not sure what you are trying to write here, but what ever it is, you aren’t saying it right.”

Although she can be warmer to me than most others, we also have thirteen years history behind us and often we release on each other all the baggage and b.s. that comes with daily life in the pre-teens of the 21st century.

I also feel, like I expect many artist do; whether they be a painter, musician, writer or whatever they do to express themselves, that without an audience then the art they create isn’t able to truly be complete. I mean if I create a story or a painting but never share  it with someone else then it is almost as if that piece of art never existed. Of course anyone who has read my work might argue that to use the term art to describe it, brings down people who are true artist. To that I say screw you. have you seen a Picasso? I agree it is art but I for one don’t get it. I’d take a Frank Miller, Frank Fazetta, Tim Sale, or Salvador Dali over Picasso any day. Okay, so if an original was given to me I would take it but it would be up for auction fairly quickly. Unless it was from his blue period, I do like some of that, but I digress.

As I was saying before my mind started to wander like it often does, I want to get my work out there so people can check it out. I know in this modern age I am sure to get blasted by insults that I suck. To those folks I say, fine don’t read anything else I write and it is okay because Mur Lafferty says it is okay to suck. (FYI if you don’t know who Mur Lafferty is, shame on you go to http://murverse.com and check her out. She is a wonderful story teller and pod caster and one of the top three or four pod caster writers that let me feel like it is okay for me to express myself in written words).

So until we meet again,

Nanu Nanu