ABNA jitters

I entered World of Mirrors in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Hope to get somewhere with it, but preparing to suck it up as usual. The Amazon contestants message boards are humming. Exceprts from a few novels have been sighted already, although one should by rights not be able to see anything until Jan. 12th.

In another life, I was part of a team that put up an Amazon store. and I know a little bit about the inner workings, actually more than I ever wanted to know. What was weird about Amazon was that they didn't have a test system, which means that once it's out on Amazon it's "live," and I'm wondering if this is what is happening with the novels. We went totally crazy jumping through hoops to create this store. It actually produced plenty of sales, so that was good, but there were always little glitches and returns were hell on wheels. We worked everything out in the end, or almost. I left the company in the nick of time before more hellacious hoops appeared.

These are things I've purged from my memory and my brain. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to collect all the garbage in your head and dump it to make room for stuff you really need to know like where are the car keys and did I send a Christmas card to so-and-so? Current stuff, rather than the name of your 3rd grade teacher (Miss Slack) that is useless information, or old humiliations and things better forgotten.

Of course, for a writer, things better forgotten are just what you want and need to remember, so it works both ways.

Today, Friday, is cat blog day and the cats have done nothing bloggable, so we can dispense with that. The cows are back in the pasture and finding nibblies by the fence. I have a big bag of fruit and veggie scraps for them tomorrow along with the bulk of a loaf of "stuffing" bread. 99 cents, such a deal.

No more robin sightings today, but we bought 25 pounds of thistle seed so bring on the finches and the chicadees!

Grapeshot