st louis « Robin Writes

Here’s our general plan for the layout of our new place (note the two arrows—switch the supplies and storage sheds; I haven’t had enough coffee yet to aim for perfection):

It might be a little hard to read, since I’ve made a few changes—work in progress, you know—and we’ve gotten new and exciting information!

We’ve been having some issues with the house itself, particularly the size. It seemed to be, um, growing.

So I took a different tack. I wrote down the size of each room by the minimum needed. For example, our current bathroom (yes, we have only one) measures 5 x 10. That’s just 50 square feet (I can actually do SOME math!), so the only thing to add was room for the washer and dryer; our current utility closet is 4 x 7, or 28 square feet. Ergo, the new bathroom/laundry could easily be just 100 sq. ft., not 120.

I did this with the bedroom and office too—how much space do we really “need” in order to fit in the furniture we want to keep? Besides that, we’re thinking of heating and cooling costs as well as one of the reasons for the move: being outdoors.

And that means we’ll spend a lot of time on the deck and porch and garden and in the woods. So who needs a bigger house? Not us.

In the end, we had 640 square feet.

And THEN!

We found a local place that will deliver AND BUILD a 640 square foot house (on our concrete pad/subfloor) for just under $8000!

So our tent option/idea has changed—we’ll save at least $500 there—and the plan is to get that shell up in the spring/early summer. 2015. Then we’ll finish it out over the next year, or less.

Cool, huh?

What makes a “bestselling” author? In my book—heh—it would be making the NYT bestseller list. Of course, you could have a “Top 100 Amazon Bestseller,” or a “local bestseller.” There are quite a few variations possible.

Some are defined by time, such as “2013 AOTSP Bestseller.” We had a list every year, in our store, of the top ten bestsellers by local authors. Yes, my books were on the list, and yes, I’ve said I was a bestselling author—WITH THESE QUALIFICATIONS. In fact, it’s on my website—WITH THESE QUALIFICATIONS.

See, that’s the important part: qualifying. Otherwise, you’re just yanking someone’s chain. At best, it’s false advertising; at worst, it’s fraud.

When I see “bestselling author,” I don’t expect a book written as though the author barely passed third grade; I don’t expect that author to have a dim grasp on English, so that something reads like captions in a bad foreign film.

Neither do I expect to see an Amazon ranking of over 1 million . . .

What’s especially irritating to me are those “writers” who toss up a “book” every month—many of these are more like blog posts; many come it at around 30 pages. Or sometimes less. And believe it or not, some people pay $4 for that. SMH. Don’t even get me started on “fan fiction.” Sheesh.

A novel is 80K words. Thereabouts. Use YOUR imagination and write a story. Beginning, middle, end. Not a high school paper, a BOOK. That may not take you ten years to write, or even one year, but it takes a lot more than throwing 20K words together and hitting the publish button, week after week.

THIS is why self-publishing still has a bad reputation in many bookstores.