There’s so much I don’t understand. The uncertainty principle. Why Japanese men find crooked teeth sexy. Avocados. But those are the things that confuse everyone. In today’s blog, I’d like to talk about things that are specifically confusing me today.
 
Let me start with some of my website visitors. Every week or so, one of my two websites will get a comment on it that lasts only as long as it takes me to read it. Deleted, it’s never seen again, so why are they bothering? The most recent bit of nonsense read: 오피 of (retracted) has just posted a comment on your blog post, What’s better than true love?: You completed several nice points there. I did a search on the issue and found the majority of persons will go along with your blog.
 
This isn’t a comment from someone who’d actually read that blog post. I didn’t make several nice points in that particular bit of silliness. With the help of Forbes magazine, I provided an estimate of Scrooge McDuck’s fortune. Then I told those who didn’t know that “billionaire romance” was a fiction category. It’s hard to imagine that the majority of people give a dry whistle about either of the points I’d made.
 
Clearly, this is some kind of spam move, but where’s the value in it for the spammer? Even if I’d left it in play, the true love blog is three months old. No one visits either of my websites to read old blogs and, if someone decided to do so, it’s unlikely they’d use more of their day to check the comments. 오피 and his ilk are wasting their time. Why do they do it?
 
     # # #
 
Being a curious sort, I looked up to see if “오피” meant anything when translated into English. To my surprise, I learned it means, “Opie.” Do spammers think of “Opie” as a warm and trusted name? Or did Opie become a hot, sexy name and I somehow missed the memo?
  
This is information I need to know before I write my next billionaire romance. Handsome billionaire Opie Cooter had it all. Everything except what he truly wanted. What he desired most in all the world was the love of a middle-aged gourd artist who was confused by avocados. Look, you write the romances that appeal to you, I'll do the ones I like.
  
      # # #
 
Something else I don’t understand today: Why are there five people on Facebook named, “Opie Opie”, and why is it that most of them have so many more Facebook friends than me?
 
     # # #
 
While I’m on the subject of Facebook, I received a FB message from an editor, someone I didn’t know. He offered me a small amount of money to ($150) for the rights to one of our novels. Not that he was targeting my work, in particular. I’ve heard from others that they received the same message from the same editor.
 
I understand why he made the offer. Once the contract is signed, he gets a lot of words for very little investment. What I don’t understand is why some writers are wondering if they should take him up on it. If the online chatter is correct, he’s buying all of your book’s rights for all time. Run!
 
     # # #
 
Because I fear getting vertigo, I avoid caffeine. I’d direct you to an earlier blog about this but, as I said, people don’t read the old blogs. Thanks to Kirkland Decaf in the big green can, I can start each day with two cups of warm joe and all is right in my world. When my coffee maker abruptly retired (no advance warning, no written notice, nothing), I went online to find a replacement.
 
I checked Amazon, wanting to see what people had to say about the machines they’d purchased. When looking at questions in regards to different models, these are some of the real answer that I found:
 
How well does this coffee maker work at high altitude (7000 ft)? Sorry, not been to that altitude with coffee maker, only skis. Hope its invigorating for you otherwise.
 
Does this strike you as some kind of weird brag? It did me.
 
Can you turn off the beep? All you need is a trusty soldering iron. I'm not concerned about voiding warranty because it is what it is.
 
When did “it is what it is” become an understandable reason for voiding a warranty? This is a thing I don’t think I want to understand.
 
Gentlemen – because I know it was two guys that wrote these answers, it had to be – why did you take the time to write these responses to curious buyers? Educate me, I need to know. Did you believe that your words would benefit ANYONE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD in regards to whether they should or shouldn’t buy that particular model of coffee maker?
 
Are the water tanks stainless steel or plastic? Heat set setting to keep coffee war!
 
Oh, dear heart, I… I… I give up. Is the last word of your response supposed to be, “warm”? Even if it is, what are you telling Amazon buyers about that coffee maker’s water tanks? It escapes me.
 
Although, I did have some fun with your answer. When Glynn called from the kitchen, asking how long to reheat the chicken marsala in the frig, I yelled back, “Heat set setting to keep coffee war!”
 
There was the loooongest period of silence before he spoke again. ​

​Another glorious morning, blue skies and scattered white clouds overhead, but I woke up irritated at comic book genius/creator/writer/artist Terry Moore. This is not Terry Moore, the actress, who is also extraordinary. Oscar-nominated, the actress Terry Moore is still working in films at the age of 92; how fantastic is that? She’s practicing lines from one of the three movies she has coming out this year and next, while I’m losing sleep over which new coffeepot to buy. I’m impressed.
 
So, let me do my regular Tuesday thing. I’ll talk a little bit about writing, then I’ll rant about something that’s irritated me, and then we’ll both go on our way. It’s a plan.
 
In writing, there are plotters and there are pantsers. There are all shades in-between, but let’s not blur the lines here. A plotter lays out the story he or she or they are going to write, and they follow their outline. Sometimes, co-writers don’t behave (I’m looking at you, Glynn) or characters evolve and adjustments have to be made, but the building blocks are in place. A plotter knows how the story starts, understands the major character arcs, and has decided how everything shakes out at the end. In this house, I do most of the plotting. If things don’t tie up neatly, I notice. One of us fixes it.
 
A pantser does things differently. They’ll have an idea (“Our heroine wakes up inhabiting somebody else’s body. How did she get there and what does she have to do to return to normal?”) before they sit down at the keyboard, hoping the ideas flow from there. The really good ones can keep all of the story details in their head and never miss a step. Without an outline in place, a sloppy pantser will leave dangling plot points. As a reader, grrrrr.
 
Which is why we’re using a little bit of plotting and pantsing with our newest serial fiction. We started with the “inhabiting somebody else’s body” idea, then I loosely plotted the first chapter. Glynn ran with it. The second chapter started off in a place I hadn’t expected, but I loosely plotted that. Glynn took it in strange directions. The third chapter started off in a place I hadn’t expected… you get the idea. Five chapters in, neither of us know where the story will end up. It’s kind of exciting, writing a story in this way but, to make certain that we cover all of our bases, we keep notes as to what’s happened as we go along. Since we both have the memories of a pair of addled gnats, it’s important that we maintain consistency as we go from chapter to chapter. Glynn knows how I feel about dangling plot points
 
Bringing me back to comic book guy, Terry Moore. He’s a pantser, if you ask me, and he’s the reason I woke up irritated this morning. Let me back up: Glynn is a big fan of Mr. Moore’s Strangers in Paradise comics and his Rachel Rising series. As you might think, there are a couple of Moore’s story collections in the house. Having finished all of my latest BL mangas (go ahead and judge me. The heart wants what it wants), I picked up a handy graphic novel to end my evening. It was Strangers in Paradise: Love Me Tender.
 
**Spoilers ahead. Not many, but some. Consider this fair warning.**
 
This was a new story arc, so I didn’t feel entirely lost. The artwork was lovely and the characterizations were strong. Within a few pages, I’d learned that Francine (the adorable, klutzy brunette) and Katchoo (the adorable, hot-headed blonde) are in financial straits. They’re going to lose the roof over their head if they don’t come up with some scratch. This happens, then that happens, and, through a series of comical events, Francine is unexpectedly chosen to be the face of a condom company. Within minutes, she finds herself on set and being filmed for a commercial. Hey, it’s comics. The director tells her the commercial will be seen by 250 million viewers “every day for weeks, months, years!”
 
Yes, it was silly, but it was meant to be silly. I enjoyed it. Then the storyline drifts off a little, no one really acknowledges Francine’s career change, and the TPB ends without telling the reader what happens next. Since Glynn knows some of the SiP history, I asked him if Condom Girl became famous.
 
“Nope. Moore never mentions Condom Girl again. Never mentions the commercial again.”
 
“Nothing? Nothing? Not even a word balloon to say that the company changed their mind?”
 
“Not even that.”
 
“What about the women’s’ financial issues? Do Francine and Katchoo end up on the streets?”
 
“Moore kinda gives up on that part of the story, too. Nobody talks about it, anymore.”
  
Hearing this pissed me off. I asked him, “And this doesn’t piss you off?”
 
“He did the same thing with Rachel Rising. Introduced a bunch of plot elements, then ignored them when he ran out of time or lost interest. That parts that he did complete, they’re really good. You have to give a little.”
 
Maybe Glynn does, but I don’t. Damn it, Terry Moore, I don’t care if you’re a pantser, I expect you to fix this. Even though you completed the series fourteen years ago, you need to give Condom Girl some resolution.
 
Once you do, let me know and I won’t curse your name every time Glynn picks up one of your books.

​On Sunday, I pulled into this desert rest stop. Although it was early in the morning, it was already too hot. Flies were everywhere. There were no seats on the toilets, and there was a warning against drinking the non-potable water. That’s where I realized I didn’t have a blog for today. Or a picture to accompany the unwritten blog.
 
So, I took a photo of an outbuilding directly behind the desert rest stop. I was hoping the picture would inspire me to write a blog about… I don’t know. Balancing above a toilet seat while swatting at flies? Then I returned home and both Glynn and I got some surprising news. I had something to write about, after all.
 
Let me start with the good news. Yesterday, Amazon Vella emailed me a message. Their note read, “We are excited to inform you that you earned a launch bonus for the month of July.”
 
I don’t know why they were excited about this news, but I loved the idea. Free money! I was also surprised to hear it. While The Awful, Terrible NO GOOD Mail-Order Bride exists, it has some followers, we’re not making significant bank with the story. Not that the Amazon bonus was all that much. It isn’t new car money. It’s new car mat money, but only if you drive a Hyundai. By the way, I drive a Hyundai. If I need a new car mat, I’m golden.
 
How much was it? For us, the payment turned out to be a multiple of what we’ve earned on Vella so far. Still, only a two-digit payment. Talking to other writers, I’ve learned that Amazon sent out a lot of these awards, but most writers received less than a hundred bucks. I’ve yet to meet anyone who received as much as two hundred dollars.
 
Amazon didn’t reward everyone in their Vella stable, though, and the justification for who gets what seems to be built upon fairy wings and unicorn kisses. (I don’t know what that means, either. Let’s go with it. My week has been exhausting, and I’m scraping this together from scratch.) Why did the Amazonians do it? I think it’s fiscal encouragement, a (sur)prize to keep dissatisfied Vella scribes from bolting for greener pastures. So far, the pasture is pretty brown. There are a lot of people who’ve made nothing so far. When one of my friends posted that she’d earned nine cents after the first month, another friend posted, Lucky. She wasn’t teasing.
 
The not terribly-bad, but bad surprise? Yesterday, also, my partner in crime, Glynn, discovered that the voicemail on his Google Fi phone wasn’t working. It hadn’t been working for weeks. When a family member texted, asking why he hadn’t responded to a voice message, he replied that he hadn’t received anything. He was right, but he was wrong. His phone had recorded the words, but hadn’t told shared them with him.
 
Doing his own investigation, Glynn discovered this isn’t a new problem for the Google folks. Online fixes didn’t do anything, and the steps the customer service reps offered didn’t take, either. Finally, Google Fi customer service had to resort to desperate measures to make voicemail work again; the phone had to be returned to its factory settings. This morning, the missed voicemails of the last few weeks flooded in. Glynn had seventy-six messages to go through, including a few from me. When I asked him if he hadn’t wondered why no one had left him a voicemail in many days, he told me, “I’d hoped people were ignoring me.”
 
I don’t know if that’s a typical response for all men or just my man. Either way, like I said, it’s been a tough week. I’m using our launch bonus money on a bottle of wine and a roll of cookie dough.
 
 

​​Oh, how I wish it looked that good.
 
On the day I went to get a passport photo, a last-minute pic, I stood in front of the photographer while a certain someone danced silently behind her, making faces like a clown. The woman took the shot, never questioning why I wanted a passport photo that made me appear like a constipated chipmunk with murder in my eyes. Once I saw the picture, I didn’t have time to do it over again. Somehow, the State Department approved the ghastly thing to the consternation of airport security personnel everywhere.
  
I've since learned that people are allowed to take their own passport photos. If I’d only known.
 
The image above is a self-portrait, of sorts. A few years back, Glynn and I thought it would be fun to host a Murder Mystery Dinner on Halloween. We’d been to exactly one Murder Mystery Dinner in our entire lives, and it was a miserable thing. By the time the culprit was revealed, I wanted to kill the dinner’s organizers. Bad food, bad dialogue, and so borrrrrrrrrrrrrring.  
 
We thought a good Murder Mystery Dinner would be wonderful experience. We were certain we could write a better one.
  
We were mistaken.
 
Glynn and I each tried writing a scenario on our own, then we tried it together, and the “together” version was better but, still, the flow wasn’t quite right. It felt a little wobbly. Maybe a little boring. Ignoring these warning signs, we forged ahead. We made character lists and backgrounds, created some simple costume pieces for our guests to wear, and we collected a number of props. One of our props was this painting of me with my tongue stuck out and my eyes appearing a little glassy. The self-portrait was to be revealed after the murder. It was either going to get a laugh while providing a clue to solving the mystery, or its appearance was just going to confuse everyone.
 
(The clue? The victim’s tongue tilts to the right. I knew you were wondering, I wanted to share.)
 
Reading our multipage Murder Mystery Dinner scenario, the Good Witch appeared lost by page three. I could see by the fear in her eyes that she was afraid I’d invite her to the dinner. When Glynn shared that he might not be able to make it, either – and it was to be held in our own home – we decided it might be best to bury the project. The manuscript still exists, buried in a foot locker among a half-dozen other dead writing projects, but neither of us is excited enough to revisit it.
 
It just struck me that the only thing that died after all of our work was the Murder Mystery Dinner.  
 
Once it was scrapped, I turned the prop over to my guy to cut up and dispose of the painting. I can be a touch precious about some of my artwork, but not with this sadness. This week, sorting through a line of paintings to (a) keep, (b) sell, or (c) introduce to a reciprocating saw, I discovered that my zombie twin had never gone to its grave. Because my goofy expression made Glynn laugh, my partner had kept it.
 
By the end of this week, this ridiculous combo of oil and board is going on a date with the carbide teeth of a saw even if I have to do the cutting myself.

​That’s just some of the things my fellow authors are saying about Amazon Vella. Kindle Vella?
 
​Well, some kind of Vella, fella.
 
I was so excited that Amazon had a serial fiction app coming that I shared my excitement with everyone. Glynn and I went full in, too, disassembling our historical romance novel so that it would fit within Vella’s guidelines. Worked out pretty nicely, except for actual reader interest (I’ll talk about sales in a minute) and the story’s description.
 
In regards to the story’s description, Amazon limits their writers to “500 characters.” Not 500 words, that would be too easy. Five hundred characters. The description we’d prepared for the back of the upcoming paperback – in December – was way too long. After we shortened things, here’s what I wanted to use:
 
     “I’ve been corresponding with a gentleman in the West,” Deidre said. “When the train arrives in six days’ time, he’ll be at the depot. He’ll be waiting for his bride.”
     A sliver of orange biscuit escaped from Faith’s lips. “His – what?” 
    “His bride, his mail-order bride.” Deidre clapped her hands together. “Arriving on the train, traveling under my name, he’ll think you’re me, won’t he? Everyone will. The two of you can get married!”
     Faith choked on the remaining portion of biscuit.
 
Even if it didn’t say enough about the storyline, I found the dialogue intriguing. I’d want to see what happened next. But Vella descriptions are all crunchedtogetherlikethis, which is a miserable reading experience.
 
After much fussing, we went with this:
 
Faith Collins hopes her cat can forgive her. Having assumed another woman's identity, she's riding the nation's first transcontinental train in the hope of finding true love. Posing as a wealthy mail-order bride, she'll arrive at Harrington Station in a few days to meet her prospective groom. She doesn't know that the woman she's pretending to be has an enemy on the train -- or that he's plotting to kill both Faith and her beloved cat....
 
It's all right, I suppose. When The Awful, Terrible, NO GOOD Mail-Order Bride becomes a proper eBook, we’ll use our original paperback wordage and I’ll be happier. And, when that version launches, we might actually make a buck or two. Because Vella? So far, the most successful authors that I know aren’t seeing much in the way of returns. A low two-figure payout is the best I've heard. For that much money, they did everything that Glynn and I didn’t do. They notified their newsletter readers, they used every form of social media to inform their followers, they did giveaways and pumped their work as strongly as possible. They deserve the success that follows… except it isn’t following yet. This is a new experience for some of them.
 
For me, it’s old hat. When the story came out, I didn’t even tell you – and I like you. For writers who are used to seeing a flood of buys and good reviews? They’re shaken.
 
I know three people who are pulling their never-to-be completed serials from Vella. I had a casual acquaintance tell me that Amazon had “zero traction” among younger readers, and she was sorry she’d ever gotten involved with it. But here’s the thing: Vella isn’t even a month old. It’s in beta form, which appears to mean that Amazon hopes the format can learn to survive without any help. Of course, it’s going through some growing pains. Owning one of the biggest platforms in the world, Amazon isn’t using it to share the news about Vella with its customers. I’ve seen one advertisement on Twitter and that was just this morning.  
Why did they use Twitter? They think it appeals to a younger audience. Will a historical romance, like "Awful", appeal to a younger audience? That's not what we've seen in the past.
 
To date, our story has a few followers, no reviews, and I doubt we’ll see enough in royalties this year to buy a pair of fancy coffees at Starbucks. Not two fancy coffees with extra shots of expresso, that’s for sure. But our initial excitement about Kindle Vella – I just looked it up, that’s the official name, "Kindle Vella" – has helped us become familiar with serial fiction in general and a whole new writing world has opened up. I’m loving the new story we’re working on.
 
No money, but lots of fun? Yeah, not the worst trade.