Lately, I’ve been stuck at my desk with the mind numbing task to trying to schedule a covid vaccination. The poor health department website is so overwhelmed that you have to retry the page endlessly. Yesterday I clicked on that site for thirteen hours straight. It turned out that they probably shut down because of the ice storm, but I had no way of being sure, and I’d done the same thing many previous days when other people in the social circle, including my wife, had lucked out and gotten their appointments.
But, I wasn’t totally bored. I put up an ebook reader software on the right hand side of the screen and the website on the left and read and clicked at the same time. It’s been fun, reading some of my earliest books, some of which I hadn’t read in years. Yesterday it was Lighter than Air and I’ve started on Roswell or Bust. In the past few days I’ve reread Pixie Dust, Extreme Makeover, Bearing Northeast, Follow that Mouse, Breaking Anchor, and Falling BAKward.
It’s been pleasant to get into those books again. I have the bad habit of losing confidence in my work if I get too far from it. These are good books.
Sadly, there are a few typos as well. Some of my earliest ebooks, especially those that I converted from Word, have some dropped characters, causing a variety of problems. Most of them aren’t worth fixing, but I’ve reissued Extreme Makeover to fix it’s problems. Sadly, some marketplaces make it easy to fix these problems and other don’t. Kindle and Google will take a replacement book file and swap it in with no fuss. Barnesandnoble required me to make a whole new second edition and then unpublish the original. I don’t know what problems that might cause for the readers who have purchased the original. I may just fix it on the sites that make it easy.
So, I need to get back to my clicking and reading. I’m in the early chapters of Roswell or Bust and Joe is figuring out how to drive Judith’s car.