Marketing, Crayons, and Cars

Marketing

Ugh. There’s a small part of me second guessing my plan to publish what I write into actual book form. It’s not that I don’t like what I’ve written, or I don’t want to write anymore. It’s the marketing part. Man, there is so much work involved in that end. I bet I’ve written a good novelette’s worth of stuff for marketing my poetry collection coming out in September, and that doesn’t include anything I’ve written here! I would guess I’m going to be pushing a novella’s worth of writing promo material by the time this collection actually hits print. Plus, all the requests for guest posts and author interviews and the like. Plus, the graphics shares and such. Then there’s the pre-order links (seems like a good time to stick it in for my book: https://www.books2read.com/u/4AYR6q). No one ever warned me about this until I’d gotten in far enough I would have felt silly backing out. Yeah, even if they had, though, I probably would have done it anyway. The idea of my words being in a book on my shelf and on the shelves of people all over is just cool.

Crayons

I ran into an interesting dilemma over the last week. My son’s school starts on September 4th, so we’ve been working on back to school shopping. He’s in first grade this year, so you would think it wouldn’t be that difficult getting his school supplies for the year. Yeah. Not so much. And the dumbest part to me is that I’m getting stuck on a box of crayons. Yep. Crayons. See, he needs two 24 count boxes of crayons for his classroom. Then, for art, he needs a 12-count box of crayons. Do you know how hard finding a 12-count box of crayons is? On top of that, the 24-count box was $0.50. The closest I could find to the correct box of crayons for art was a 16-count box. That one? $1.37. Seriously, the box with eight less crayons was over twice as much. Come on, now, this just doesn’t make any sense. At the moment, he’s got a third box of 24 crayons to take to art and the school will just have to live with it.

Cars

I am so happy for another reason, not just my book. My car is fixed! It’s only taken me almost a year since I got rear-ended to get this far. After the accident, the shop I was referred to by the insurance fixed the body work well. They even buffed out a few scratches and dings not related to the accident. However, they sucked at addressing the check engine light that had come on after the accident. I made like five or six trips in trying to get that addressed. Finally, I took my car to the dealer to have it looked at. There they told me it was my timing chain and the catalytic converter that were the issue. Thankfully the catalytic converter was covered under a special manufacturer warranty. The dealer tried to get the timing chain covered the same way, but it involved stopping into the dealer every 500 miles for a total of 5000 miles to have them check the oil. Turns out even after all that, my car didn’t burn enough oil so the warranty thing they were trying to use wouldn’t work. After all that rigamarole, it took me a bit, but I finally got an appointment with my mechanic. He just fixed my car and now it sounds and runs so much better. He said it was good timing, too, since the chain had been rubbing on some other part I can’t remember. If it would have worn through this plastic thing, it would have led to metal shavings in the engine and the engine imploding on me.