Saturday, October 23, 2010

Funky Day

No other word for it--it's been a funky day. Spent the morning making meatballs with brown gravy, sort of a complicated process. You mix meat, egg, parsley, summer savory, salt, pepper, and so forth, then put it into the blender until it's paste-like. Then you bake the meatballs for 30 minutes; then brown in butter and olive oil; remove from pan and make brown gravy with red wine, beef broth, and tomato paste. Took me parts of most of the morning, and I find these days a morning of cooking tires me--hate that!
It's rained all day, some of it with thunder and some of it quite a hard downpour. At some points it was almost dark as night. Scooby thought it was a good day to be in, but he stayed close to me--thunderstorms terrify him. I thought it was a great afternoon for  reading and napping--finished Air Time, by Hank Phillipp Ryan, another great read in her series about Charlotte McNally, a Boston TV investigative reporter. Since that's what Ryan does in her daytime job in Boston, so she really knows whereof she writes. But better than that, she creates credible characters that you like and identify with. There's the requisite tension, and though you know it will all come out all right (or mostly so), Ryan still keeps you reading. I think characters are so much more important than plot in mysteries. I don't want to read about people I don't like or care about.
Spent some time exploring promotion options on Amazon (haven't had many sales of my e-book, Sue Ellen Learns to Dance) but the options thoroughly confused me. Brandon sent me directions for downloading a friend's book from Smashwords to my Kindle--they made sense on paper but confused me in practice. Both failures sent me further into a funk, but I'll recover. I did manage to write some updates for my web page and send them to the designer, so that's one thing accomplished. But I really want to be able to update my own page--others do it, so surely I can. Brandon's opinion about that was that I really don't want to learn HTML and he surely doesn't want to teach me.
Jacob was supposed to come tonight but his mom doesn't feel well and decided to stay home. When she first mentioned this, I saw a light--I wouldn't have to keep Jacob away from an already nervous dog, I could do the writing I didn't do this afternoon, and I could finish my cooking without distraction tomorrow. But of course, when she confirmed that she was keeping him home, I was disappointed. I will write--try for 2000 words.

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