The Circle of (Retail) Life

For those not aware of this fact, I'm NOT a "New York Times Bestselling Writer". To be that, you have to have your books in bookstores, as it's all based on sales in bookstores. Until the past month, none of my books have appeared on bookstore shelves. Until I get the books on more bookstore shelves I don't stand a chance of selling enough books to be noticed by the New York Times, and without those sales, my writing career is moving along as slowly as a herd of snails traveling through peanut butter...

So I work retail, and I notice things that stay in the back of my mind, keeping to themselves and staying out of sight, rather like a coyote living in Central Park, but then I accidentally shine the flashlight in the wrong direction when I'm looking for some other lost tidbit of information and catch the gleam in the thing's eyes....

Such as when I found two packets of pens that are supposed to hold 8 pens in 8 fun colors this past week...

Both packets were missing the purple, the pink, and the turquoise blue pens. Both had to be written off as "stolen", the entire package, because no one wants a package of 8 fun colors that only contains 5 rather more normal colors.....

And as I wrote them off, some little train of thought left the station, traveling around my mind in one big circle that started with "Why would someone do such a thing?"

The answer, according to some on the reality crime dramas I sometimes catch when I'm looking for something to play in the background while I do some work, is that "Prices have gone too high, and I don't have enough money left over at the end of paying my bills to do anything fun, so when I see something I really want, but can't afford, I try to steal it. And when I get away with the first thing, I come back and steal some more.".....

If you ask corporate America what the number one thing is that drives the prices higher, they'll tell you "Theft and the things we have to do to prevent it." There are security cameras that companies now buy, security guards in some stores, little boxes and wires with alarms that products are put into or wrapped with, and little stick-on tags that will set off alarms at entrance and exit doors should you try to leave with the product. There are even security tags on clothing now that will destroy the product you're trying to steal buy shooting dye onto it - and sometimes you - if you try to steal it.....

All of the security measures needed to prevent theft cost money. Although the products we buy now are usually made in sweat shops to save on labor costs, the costs for the security needed to keep the finished product on the store shelf long enough for an honest person to walk in and purchase it has skyrocketed, so the cost is added to the cost of the product, putting the costs of things up so that the average human being can't make enough to be able to afford all the necessities, so some turn to theft....

And so the circle of life progresses, and makes me want to knock the wheels off this train by stopping the thief and saying "YOU'RE why we can't afford to buy nice things!"


[There is the sound in the background of a train whistle, sounding almost terrified; the screech of the iron wheels against the iron rails as the train tries to stop suddenly; the crash of the cars tumbling in disarray on the trees lining this part of the train track; and then, blissful silence. We have successfully derailed this train of thought.]

Just when you thought it was safe to step into a bookstore.....

Like most humans, I sometimes step up onto a soap box on Facebook to rant a little and get opinions from my friends....

254 on my personal list as of the writing of this post (May 14, 2016)....

And about 150 of them are related.....

Of the rest, they are fairly equally divided between current and former co-workers, people I've known since Jesus was a child, and folks whom I met in various places who are none of the above...

But before I reveal what happened with this little verbal diarrhea post from last week, let me step back about 18 years ago.

*cues the organ music and the smoke machine used in old movies to indicate a time shift*

I had been struggling to find the time to finish my first full length novel for a couple of years, and then I did some damage to my lower spine. Under doctor's orders of "no bending, no lifting, no twisting" for two months in the fall/winter of 1997, I finally completed the book. Over the next year, I did the laborious work of editing, then sent "sample pages" to various publishers who said in the Writer's Market (because I had that in my home in book form, having only just been introduced to the internet) that they accepted queries from unagented, new authors...

I got turned down repeatedly - usually with the excuse "It promotes violence against women."

(Interior thought, which even now interrupts, is always "My little heroine, at the age of 16, decides the best way to escape from a man who wants to kill her is to disappear into the night, explaining who she is and why, when we see her again, she's using a different name. It promotes what?")

I sent out a "spam" email to everyone I had on my list, asking if anyone had any idea where I could find an agent who'd work on commission....

and a friend suggested someone who was doing a new kind of publishing called "ebooks", but since she couldn't get any of the big authors, she was looking for unknowns who would accept a portion of royalties on each sale instead of an advance. This was before Kindle and Nook, so she actually sold a file that one could read right on the computer..She was having as hard a time getting books to offer as I was having getting someone to read my book all the way through instead of judging on the first few paragraphs...

So "Night of the Tiger" was first published because a friend made a suggestion.

Jump forward to two years ago, when I did a verbal diarrhea post about paying a friend to photoshop a cover for my second book, but some strange things happened when the publisher printed the first book (different colors, spots in the model's hair, things that got corrected, but were quite annoying...)
and someone said "Have you ever thought of becoming an independent publisher?"

And I had already been looking at the printing company they suggested....and then, as I was putting up a fan page and got in touch with a model to request permission to print some of their photos to represent the face and form of my character.....

and he offered to do the cover.....

and the rest, as they say, is history, with Northern Bard Publications producing "A Wild Tiger's Heart" with a little help from my friends.

Shortly after NBP's first foray onto Amazon, someone suggested redoing the others in a matching size...and friends volunteered to become "partners in crime" at my independent company because they want to help me out. So I have someone who truly LOVES to play with photoshop and take photographs that mean something to my words (or to another author's words, should we ever have a client).

Friends helped me get "The Tiger's Cub" and "Night of the Tiger - The Author's Cut" (because I corrected a couple of things that had been bugging me all this time) up for publication within a year of our first book.....

Anf last week, when I was grumpy because here I am, a Maine author being published in Maine and with characters FROM Maine, but I can't seem to get any bookstores to put me on their Maine Authors shelves in their bookstores, many because I'm not with that big publishing house that they have special deals with, a friend made a suggestion that I speak to a friend of hers in one of the cities near me....

As I keep seeing a meme on Facebook say, "It was deja vu all over again"....

A small Maine bookstore wanting to have Maine Authors on her shelves, but can't afford to do the deals with the big publishers because she has a very small budget meets a Maine Author tying to get her indie publishing company books onto bookstore shelves. A consignment deal is struck, the details are ironed out, and I'm still in shock....

This is her business card

but if someone sees it on her shelf and tries to pick in up someplace else for a friend and it's a bookstore I've tried to cut a deal with in recent history.....

*cue Pink Floyd's "Money" as I fade back with a smile*

Addendum 5/18: When I arrived home from work yesterday evening and checked my emails, I was in for another surprise. Having contacted Bull Moose Music & Books, another Maine-based company who had turned me down when I was publishing through Write Words Inc because she wasn't offering enough of a discount for them to be able to offer the books at the price they prefer, I suggested that, at least for the stores closest to me, I would love to be able to do a consignment deal with them as well. They turned me down for the consignment, but because my contract with my printing company allows for the books to be offered through the catalog they send to bookstores and libraries....

I HAVE A SECOND BOOKSTORE!

I'm not sure when they'll appear, but the buyer for Bull Moose was thrilled to be able to order some books to go on their shelves the next time she's placing an order! I may walk into one of my favorite places to shop and find myself there very soon!

And here is the logo for the SECOND bookstore:

I'm hoping that, if I go into a few more of the local bookstores while I'm out and about on Saturday, I can have a few more pick up the books for their Maine Author shelves....and then, perhaps, some of the larger chains will pick the books up when people are coming in to try to get them after seeing them in the local shops.....

As my husband has been joking, the starving artist part has been well played for the past 19 years. It might be nice to have me be able to take us out to dinner before the end of the year....*grin*

Let me introduce you to Uncle Daddy.....

Genetics.

I've mentioned it in prior posts several times, and it's being talked about among myself and several relatives on Facebook this week as we try to figure out where the gene for fibromyalgia may have come from. Until this past month, when two of my husband's nieces found me on Facebook, we were blaming the fact that my mother's ancestors came over on a boat from Normandy in the 1600's, settled in Canada, and started inbreeding.....mostly because, in this new country, there were fewer people available to chose from when wanting to marry and reproduce.

And, of course, just about the time that the nieces both told me that THEY have fibromyalgia, which my husband shows no signs of, but probably stems from his line with three of five females from my husband and his sisters having it, there was a show I caught on PBS about why Prince William was allowed to marry a commoner in England....

which, in turn, started me on a new tangent with the whole research into my family tree part of my life. I started researching when, exactly, man caught onto the fact that inbreeding, incest, etc. were "very bad things", but I still haven't found an exact year or instance that caused the research to think about recessed genes and such. There is an article that mentions animal husbandry in the British Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century, but that's the closest I've come to pinning down when, exactly, this started being noted as the reason for congenital defects. Obviously, it wasn't noted soon enough to bypass some of the mutations I've been speaking of in other posts that have come into my life as I age, but since the same article also mentions that the bible and other sources can trace the negative connotations of imbreeding to over 1500 years ago. Too bad humans tend to use the bible to "cherry pick" what they want to shove down someone else's throat, but didn't note the "don't do this, it's bad" for anything other than what they wanted to quote....

*smile*

But for a shortened history of what the television show pointed out (and which I've confirmed through a couple of sources since),. humans seemingly recognized inbreeding in animals long before we caught on that inbreeding in humans was just as bad - and it exists in the history of every country. Consanguineous relationships (second cousins or closer) result in birth defects, among other things, and the House of Habsburg, which is what the television show was about, shows how one family's attempt to rule the entire world by marrying royalty to royalty, limited the gene pool for "purity", resulted in a bunch of hemophiliacs. In short, if the Russians hadn't put an end to the Tsars by murdering Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family (including Anastasia, much as the Don Bluth film of the same name would have had you believe she survived), the Tsesarevich Alexander III, who suffered from hemophilia and could well have stepped on a tack and bled to death.

Over the past week, as I've been doing more and more research into this to see if there is a way to trace some of the "family health issues" and my daughter has been finding other family members who were diagnosed with fibro a couple of decades ago (giving her someone she can trust to tell her what to expect for her own life), I'm starting to be rather glad that my mom had the common sense to say this to me when I was coming home from school, all doe-eyed about some guy I'd just met.....

"You may want to talk to your grandparents on that one. He MAY be related....."

and, as more and more familiar last names pop up in the family tree and I'm able to trace those last names to the parents or grandparents of my very brief "crushes", she was right.

If I had rebelled by insisting on dating those men, I could have had my own little inbred babies with issues much greater than fibromyalgia......  

Take my stomach....please!

Yes, I know. I've just made Henny Youngman roll in his grave by mangling his joke, but it was the only thing I could think of to title this mixed-up mess with....*shrug*

While trying to concentrate on a small, red-haired female with dramatically pale green eyes and the snobbish Englishman who encounters her in the New World in 1700, I keep getting sidetracked by other things....

First and foremost is the fact that, at the end of next month, my hubby is going through a heavy-duty rebuild of his left ankle. After years of abuse, he needs to have his ankle fused before he steps wrong and ends up with a wooden peg from the knee down. (Yes, okay, so that's a bit more dramatic than the truth, but they have seriously told him that a prosthesis is in his future if he tries to just "keep on keeping on" as he has been for the ten years since he was told he had bone spurs. It might not be a pirate leg, but he doesn't like the idea of having more missing parts when he's cremated.)  His surgery means eight weeks of "non-weight bearing" and me out to assist him for the first two weeks.

Needless to say, my boss is THRILLED by the fact that I'm going to be out for three weeks - one week of vacation (so that Bill can have some fishin' time before he can't leave the house for the rest of the summer) and the two weeks of recovery post surgery right when we'll be starting "Back To School" sales.....

And then there are MY "old wench" problems, for which the doctor just told me on Tuesday is coming down to some very interesting choices, since my menopause doesn't really WANT to happen (a result, I suspect, of my mom's non-branching family tree, since this has plagued at least three generations that we know of...and maybe more):

Choice One: Continue on birth control pills until August, when she wants to do a "trial off" to see if we've managed to reset my hormones so that they'll work properly again.

Choice Two: Put in an IUD, which my husband HATED when he dated ladies who had them and may cause even more problems if it punctures anything internally.

Choice Three: A lovely procedure called "Endometrial Ablation" (see the full description here: http://www.webmd.com/women/endometrial-ablation-16200 ), which basically means they want to burn the interior of my lady parts so that we will stop trying to set up for a baby to live there.

Choice Four: A hysterectomy, which happened to my mom, my grandmother, two of three aunts, a great-aunt, several cousins....just to name the ones Mom has rattled off to me so far. This used to be Choice One before someone figured out that removing the lady bits shouldn't be the first option.

Needless to say, the doc is pushing for Choice Two or Choice Three, but we opted for Choice One because of Bill's pending surgery. I, personally, want to go for Choice Four, but the insurance companies want you to exhaust your options first....

And I want a second opinion for the insurance opinion.....*smile*

To add to all the confusion, there are little things that I need to do between now and the end of June, such as go to an eye doctor to renew my license, get the dog in for his vet visit/dental that we put off last year, learn to drive the riding lawn mower so that I can keep the lawn mowed while hubby can't do it, get the yard and gardens ready for summer, etc....

So Amy and Sir Maxwell, much as I hate putting them off yet again  - and they both sigh, as the story got written by hand in 5 notebooks, then was tucked into storage for the past 25 years while I researched America in the 1700's so that I could have my facts straight before I started the current work it's undergoing.  Those poor souls have been patiently waiting for their turn at being introduced to the public, and I feel guilty for not having the tale ready for market yet.

Ah well. Perhaps this madness I'm living through is necessary, as it took a two month "no bending, no lifting, no twisting" order back in 1997/1998 before I was able to put the finishing touches to "Night of the Tiger". As several of my religious friends keep telling me, "God moves in mysterious ways"....

I just wish his "ways" were a little more healthy for hubby and I......