No, I’m not talking about street cred. My mum says I will always be cool. But as the temps climbed inevitably towards summer, my long-faithful air conditioner breathed its last. A circuit board died, and this thing was so old that there was no way of replacing it. Thankfully, you, the generous taxpayers of Australia, stepped up and covered the expense, since the aircon was in my office, where I work daily to accrue legitimate deductions to my pre-tax income.
I got some Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Supermax Arctic Zone thing that I doubt will last as long as my old LG Art series a/c, but then neither will I. I’m currently sitting on the far side of the office, feeling the gentle, frigid kiss of Japanese technology on my withered bones. It’s good.
No, seriously, it’s great, I love it…
The install took a couple of hours, though, so that cut the legs out from under my best intentions to write a new Lonesome Jones chapter for 3.3 today. I got it dictated, but the three-hour grind of editing was delayed by the aircon guys, so I decided to fail constructively and spend most of the middle of the day reading the second novel of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, The Story of a New Name.
Holy shit, this thing goes hard. At one point, a couple of the characters did something so terrible that I had to put the book down and give them a good talking to. Yes, I sat in my reading chair, scolding a couple of imaginary characters. Ferrante has broken my brain.
Rather than pretending I can fire up the writing engine this afternoon, I'm gonna spend a couple of hours working on some advertising for 3.3. I’m just about to pull it back from wide distribution to Amazon exclusive. As I expected, even after distributing to every available online store, Amazon/Kindle still accounts for 90% of the earnings, and that was without getting any income from Kindle Unlimited page reads. Hopefully I haven’t fucked myself by leaving that a month to let a handful of readers get a Bezos-free copy, but I guess we’ll see.