Things Are S-l-o-w-w-w

Maybe these are the January doldrums.  

There's just not much happening worth a mention. It's not as if I don't have a bunch of potential material---my email in-box is stuffed with unopened messages (I really need to start culling it), but none of the subject lines look the least bit interesting. I think the senders, too, are feeling the blahs, but they're marketers, so they have to keep on keeping on.

I discovered an X post yesterday by a reporter who linked to her article about smutty romance novels and their proliferation. As you well know, I have a particular scorn for romance novels in general---I don't care about the smut one way or the other---I'm not the one reading them. But I sensed she was a kindred spirit, so I responded to her post with my usual whining about how romance novels crowd well written books out of the market. She responded, "Unfortunately, that doesn't come as a surprise." It was nice to "talk to" another person who understood. I know; this is hardly worth noting here, but I rarely get to talk to real people.

In other news: 

I've reached the second round in the AllAuthor "Cover of the Month" contest, although as far as I know, there's no actual prize attached, so...wait---I just looked, and the winner will get a pro membership. Still. The site was never useful to me, which is not a knock against them, because no site has been useful to me. Of course, participants are encouraged to solicit votes, so I did halfheartedly post one of their pre-fab blurbs on X, where I have very few followers and zero friends, so I make a lousy campaigner. I barely even remember entering my cover, but I must have been so thrilled that the month's contest involved a genre that actually applied to me for once, that I couldn't resist.

I think I might have my 300-word article featured in the next issue of either Review Tales Magazine or RT Book Review Magazine (I never know which is which), but I haven't received any notification of that yet; just a prior promise. I do trust that it will be forthcoming, however, unless some kind of glitch occurs.

I offered Touching Home as a Free Kindle Promotion for a couple of days---purely on a whim, and it only garnered eleven takers. But hey! It didn't cost me anything, so there's that. 

(Can you feel the excitement?)

It all comes down to this: These little things are handy time-wasters, but nothing more. The most interesting thing I've done in ages was to design the cover for my novel reboot. I was thinking the other day that I might want to have a polished manuscript to go along with the cover and with the blurb I've already written, but have I taken any steps to edit it? Nope!  

It might well be that other writers are as busy as little beavers right now, but I suspect I'm not alone in my lethargy. It's my stance that the month of January should be outlawed.