Monday 16 June 2014

It's June, and half way through already. May disappeared in snow storms, frosts and floods! This is unheard of as May is the last month of autumn and therefore usually grey, louring and foretelling of winter. It does not act like winter and dump on us with cold snow and heavy rain.

Seems to me the climate is crazy. Could it be that thing the Americans don't admit is happening? We know all about climate change in the Pacific. All those tiny atoll islands now losing their drinking water as the sea rises or suffering violent waves washing over their homes. Some islanders have already had to leave and come to New Zealand.

Last winter we even had icebergs off the South island coast. Antarctica is melting fast and the glaciers are slipping. I think we should move all climate change nay-sayers to Antarctica and let them measure the effects.

The floods have made my land a revolting mess of squelch and mud. So much so that I nearly lost my gumboots this morning. I cannot open my road gate without wearing gumboots and have to travel to town with boot on board. Our local council is useless. We need a new larger culvert at my gateway to replace the inadequate one already there. No response from the council officials, of course. They spend their whole time saying NO and dodging what is legally council responsibility.

No change at Amazon and Goodreads either as they dodge their responsibility to prevent cyber bullying. Having watched, with horror, the bullies at work and then have Goodreads tell me that their so-called reviews, without having read the book, were allowed. Ah me! I'm trying to get Goodreads to allow readers a private review system where they can be as nasty as like but their one star nastiness is not counted against the poor writer's rating. I will keep trying. I have stopped giving star ratings to any book I read and can't give 4 or 5 stars to. It seems to me to be grossly unfair to affect a writer's rating for the simple reason of personal preference which has nothing to do with whether a book is badly written or not.

PR work for Writer's Choice goes on. I am learning daily of new sites and newsletters where I can get our books mentioned. It is time consuming but I hope the work will pay off and in future I will know which sites work for us and how to do it so that I save time.

The technology is killing me though. I never think the way the website designers do and consequently I spend ages on each website searching for pages hidden behind weird buttons or incorrect labels. It takes me ages. I'm wrestling with shelfari right now. I've seen its icon on several authors' websites and thought I ought to have one too. Looks neat. Joining up was easy, moving the darned icon has proved impossible.

It's going to be a cold snowy week so thank god for the huge log burner and the 20cubic metres of firewood. I can write and stay warm.

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