The silly season, and 2011 as a whole, is finally nearing its end. I have severely neglected this blog over the last few months. Actually, I’ve severely neglected my writing, my TBR pile and interactions with other humans as well. The house and my Detroit adventure have been a time suck of epic proportions.

Not that I mind all that much. Well, the writing part is a bit irritating. I tend to go a little batshit when I don’t write for long periods of time.

Work on the house has progressed well, though. About half the house is wired. Friends of my son gave me a refrigerator, a stove, a washer/dryer, a table, a couch and a chair for which I am eternally grateful. After a great deal of cursing, I have hot and cold running water upstairs in a temporary sink in the kitchen. Oh, and a flushable toilet. What a joy!. Despite the cold weather and my lack of a furnace, I’ve been keeping fairly warm, hunkered down in a small back bedroom.

All in all it’s been fun. Many an idea surfaced over these last few months. Ideas for stories, ideas for a non-fiction book, thoughts about the next novel. I did manage to finish the update to Secrets of the Golden Gate Bridge and get it uploaded to Amazon. Hit a hangup with the upload to Smashwords. They want me to dumb-down the look of the book to fit their silly restrictions for distribution. More on that, and many other things, later.

Happy 2012, everyone. And, if the Mayans are right, we won’t have to worry about a 2013.

Ally Carter had a post on her blog a couple of days back where she talked about The Crazies. She summed up The Crazies this way:

The Crazies are a hard thing to define, but most of us have had them—the what if this book sucks, what if this book tanks, what if my career is over, what if my career never really starts anxiety that comes with this business.

Having just released my first novel, Stealing The Marbles, I can certainly relate to those feelings. The temptation to know where your book stands, how many have sold, whether it’s flying high or sinking like a stone is a strong one.

I find a lot of this post-release time very frustrating. How do you get interviews? Reviews? Who do you ask to do a guest post on their blog? How do you get the word out to the Independent Bookstores? Where the hell do you find the time to work on your next book?

On the one hand, you’re proud of your book and want to shout its name from the rooftops. On the other, you certainly don’t want to annoy people on Facebook, Twitter, total strangers who have book review blogs, shoppers at the local grocery store, strangers you run into on the street, by keeping up a constant barrage of ‘I wrote a book, please buy it’.

I keep pushing the best I can, not really sure if the push is doing anything, but feeling like I should do something to promote the book. What I find really frustrating is, after figuring out a way to make a contact for a review or an interview or trying to get some information on how to go about doing this or that, I don’t get so much as a ‘fuck you’ in reply. How hard is it to hit reply and type ‘Thanks but no thanks’? You could even set it up as an auto reply if you’re that damn busy or uninterested.

The one thing I haven’t been doing is checking to see how well the book is selling. Not that I’m not interested, mind you. It’s just that I haven’t a clue what any of the numbers you can find out there mean. I heard this morning that Stealing The Marbles is number 15 on Mobipocket’s best seller list. That sounds pretty impressive but what exactly does it mean in terms of sales? I haven’t a clue.

A quick check of Amazon shows the Tree Book version of Stealing The Marbles has a ranking of 180,564 while the Kindle version has a ranking of 78,883. Does anyone reading this have a clue what that means? I sure as hell don’t.

I had a feeling from the start that this whole post-launch time was going to be a time of elation and frustration and my intuition has, thus far, been spot on.

So, I will leave you with this: Hey, I wrote a book, it’s a really good book, please buy it.