[About the] Smashwords Price List

Dear Readers and Friends,

A few days ago, I went on Smashwords and assigned prices of mostly 99c to almost all the my books.  As usual, I anticipate that the downloads of these books will plummet, but I believe that most readers who follow me (using the phrase in the most liberal sense!) have already acquired almost all the books they really want, which means that only Smashwords members who are new to my stories will have to shell out 99 cents for books!  Some of you get the books from Apple Books, and I have no idea how that works.

In the scheme of things, that's not an exorbitant price; most readers can afford a dollar for even something they might not want to keep.

As I blogged on Helen a few days ago, I'm anticipating a new cover for Helen On The Run, which would be lovely.  The cover I had put for it was somewhat offputting!  Our artist, who has just begun to attend college last year, is working like mad over the summer, and trying to keep up with schoolwork.  I sincerely hope she does not get infected with the Coronavirus, that dastardly enemy of good artwork.  A pox on it.

Well, keep healthy, all of you, even if it means not attending large Thanksgiving dinners.  Especially those of you who are diabetic (like Helen), or older (like Olive), or who carry a few extra pounds (like Olive, again), stay home, and give them any excuse, and plead for your portion to be dropped off!  (That would be a lot of packing, but they may oblige!)  Trump survived the virus, so how bad can it be?  As some of you might be able to guess, I personally don't like turkey, so I will probably have a little roast chicken, which is easy to make, and easy to eat.

Hey, I might write a recipe book one day.  That gives me a lot of satisfaction!  Shall I call it Helen's Favorite Recipes?

A happy Thanksgiving to all you!  I think we all deserve a good Thanksgiving, even if great doubt has been cast on the motivations of the participants of the original feast.

Kay

A Broken Society Someone Has To Repair

We won!  Or, at least, the Democrats won, and I was solidly behind the Democrats.

I should explain why I was behind the Democrats.

(1)  I felt that only the Democrats were concerned about the poorest citizens among us.  I just can't believe that the rest of the country seems to be unconcerned about the poorest of the poor; those who are hurt most by being required to work during the COVID crisis.  I'm sure there are some among the Republicans whose hearts are moved by the plight of these workers, but perhaps they have some reason why they feel that helping them is bad for somebody.  The facts will come out over the next year.  Maybe it is that they do not believe that the Democrats will actually help these people, and it is all a lie.  Maybe it's racial prejudice; a belief that only minorities are in this group of poor citizens, and need not be a concern for us.  This is sad, and need not be a permanent state of affairs.

(2)  I felt that only the Democrats were concerned with the Environment, and with the COVID pandemic.  I know why Republicans did not believe in these issues; they do not think that they are important.  They also do not believe in Clean Energy, because they feel that Clean Energy will not be enough energy, and will not be cheap.

(3)  I felt that the Democrats' promise about helping pay back student loans was a huge idea; I hope that if this is made into law, that those Republicans who benefit from it give the Democrats a second chance, and consider helping the Democrat plans for the nation.  At the very least, the interest rates for college loans should be fixed as low as home mortgage interest rates.  I don't think a college degree helps everyone to be a better citizen.  But I firmly believe that the young person with an inquiring mind can get an enormous amount of information from a college education.  On the other hand, a young person who has to be handed everything on a plate could easily not acquire an education, because the last thing a college professor wants to do is to stuff an education into the head of an unwilling student.

(4)  I firmly believe in consumer protection.  Businesses, with the best will in the world, will not voluntarily be honest about the problems with their products.  This is why there are so many rules about what they have to do.  Don't we all depend on the ingredients list in food?  I don't know exactly what regulations the Trump Administration threw out; when I find out, I will be better able to defend why they should be reinstated.

Above all, I think we have to engage young Republicans in talking about government, and in making reasonable decisions about what regulations should be kept, and which ones should be thrown out.  Handicapped individuals are now part of our society, and any rules about  handicapped accessibility should remain.  But it is important that, as individuals, we do not make the divisions wider between ourselves and Republicans; we must learn to agree to disagree more politely, or with a willingness to try a second time to understand their point or view, or the third time, or as many times as needed.

Kay

Unexpected News about Trump Supporters

Well, what do you know.

I had subconsciously assumed that Trump supporters only tolerated him because they had somehow gotten to believe that his policies would ultimately help them; or, if not, because they had bought into the glamour of his personality, such as it is!  But just yesterday I got a call from a friend who lives in a rather liberal city, and she says that, watching the progress of the vote-count, Trump fans—who are a minority there, of course—are practically in tears!  This is completely unexpected.  I had assumed that people were only interested in Trump from a political point of view.  Instead, they appear to be very hurt by the fact that Trump isn't sweeping the election.  (And Trump appears to be confounded, too.)

In my own view, I thought the attraction of Trump was that he was not a Washington insider, but had spent ages deploring the actions of Congress and former presidents, and had ridden to power as the glamorous outsider, who said what he thought, and made remarks off-the-cuff, which his fans loved.  His unscripted speech was welcome to those who felt put-off by the gramatically 'correct' sentences of ordinary political leaders.  But the fans seem to actually identify with him far more than the rest of us imagined.

Now, carefully crafted sentences might be offputting to many, especially those to whom conventional, grammatical language does not come easy.  But to the typical lawyer—most congressmen and senators, and even presidents, start out being lawyers—writing a sentence whose meaning is unambiguous is second nature.  If you're writing up an international agreement, for instance, you can't shoot from the hip.  So Trump's sloppy language might be refreshing, but its refreshing-ness should have worn off after four years.

If we're to have all these people who have strong emotional ties to Trump, life is going to be very difficult.  I can just imagine an unending string of Trump Tweets about every little action of Congress or the Senate or the White House, which will start off being annoying, and end up being highly disruptive.  This looks like the future that's facing us.

On top of all of this, Trump fans are fed an endless stream of untruths and misinformation.  This is possible, because these fans do not like the Media, either.  They only watch Fox News, I suppose, and listen to Rush Limbaugh, but claim to not entirely trust those sources either, but only trust Trump himself.  This makes it difficult or impossible to reason with them about reality, because their own reality, roughly thrown together by Trump, has such a strong hold on their imaginations.  In their minds, vote counting centers are filled with suspicious people, ready to slide in fake ballots at any opportunity.  In actual fact, they are filled with very serious people, half Republican, half Democrat, who labor for hours, trying to be as careful as possible about recording the ballots.  I know at least one of these people personally, and she was in physical pain, after crouching over a table from six in the morning to ten at night, working with mailed-in ballots.

The voting in every state is different, but in Pennsylvania they take elections very seriously.

Mailed ballots come in an envelope with the details of the voter written on it.  All that information is recorded carefully by hand, checked against the voter rolls, in case the voter is trying to vote twice.  Then the envelope is opened up, and inside is another envelope, which contains the ballot.  That one is anonymous, and is put in another pile.  A second pair of workers opens that envelope up, and runs it through the vote-recording maching.  This machine reads the votes—scans both sides of the sheet—and stores the result.  (Sometimes it rejects the ballot, which must then be re-scanned in all possible ways, backwards and forwards, etc.  Very much like feeding a dollar bill into a machine in a rest area on a highway.)  This proceeds as efficiently as possible, but cannot be sped up very much more.

Because of the mail-in ballots—which are being used widely for the first time, because of convenience, and the virus—the procedure is necessarily complicated.

The scanners are not connected to the election center.  This is for fear of hacking.  The results are called in every hour or so, which is then reported to the news services.  The total ballot counts are known already, at the times the ballots are closed, by simply counting the people coming through, and the total mail ballots sent out.  Only the actual votes are counted slowly.  So the news services know the percentages of how many votes were counted, e.g. 86%, or whatever.

Now, there are calculations the news services can make.  They set how much error they can stand, and figure out what percentage of the votes must be counted to keep the error in their estimate of the total vote below that percentage they have settled on.  This part of the process cannot be easily explained to laymen; in fact, I only understand the mathematics in the broadest outline.  So the news services have to wait until the probability of error in their prediction (of any particular state result) is less than, say one-tenth of 1%.  Until then, all they can say is that it looks like Trump is ahead, or whatever.

Finally, the Electoral College adds another wrinkle to the mess.  Trump is careful not to criticize the Electoral College, because he was convinced that it is the E.C. that allowed him to win in 2016.  This year, the Electoral College seems to be giving the win to Biden, and the popular vote seems to be going to him too.  There are a long list of things that Trump will love or hate, depending on the outcome of the election.  His lawyers have entered lawsuits against three states.  We don't know how far these lawsuits will go.

Kay

My Sales Over the Last Few Weeks

I think that I have cracked the code.

I used to puzzle over the seemingly random distribution of book sales reported by Smashwords.  Now, I believe that I have figured out an explanation, and it is something that makes me thoughtful.  I believe there is just a small number of readers who are interested in these books, really.  I think they wait until the books are offered for free, and snap them up.  The total number of copies of each book sold is more or less the same.  I suspect that some readers download multiplie copies of some of the books, perhaps to read them on the various devices that they own.  (I do the same, but once you buy one, you're usually allowed to load them on each of your mobile devices at no extra charge!  But downloading fresh copies gives the illusion that I'm attracting new readers.  I don't mind; I don't do it for the money; I do it for the FAME!  Just kidding!

I have said before that I wanted to base a book that was intended to follow Concerto on our present day existence, but because the political news so dominates the attention, there seems nothing interesting going on except political activity.  That would kill interest in any book, so I'll wait on things to settle down, or I'll just give up the whole thing.

Things are sure to turn out all right.  Some people are terribly worried that the ultra-left people will take over, and change the US beyond recognition.  That will probably not happen.  There are urget needs that have to be taken care of: support for those who have been reduced to abject poverty by the Virus (some of the relief money has been soaked up by employers to benefit themselves, and not shared with their employees); schools must be gradually made effective again; some investment must be made in preparedness for epidemics; and we must seriously put the brakes on fossil fuels, which make life easy and fun for those whose lives depend on big gas-guzzling vehicles, or whose lives are made much more fun  by them.  Well, we have to move over to other ways of having fun.

Commuting to work is not fun for those who work in large cities, like New York and Los Angeles.  I have spent time in those places, and getting to work is miserable.  It can be changed so that commuting is a lot less miserable, and the pollution is highly reduced.

Finally, it is time to urge those heads of businesses who have been accustomed to enormous profits towards helping to pay for government services; in other words, we have to raise their taxes.  (Some quite middle-class people have gotten alarmed, thinking that their incomes are going to disappear into government coffers.  I don't know for certain, but I do not think this is going to happen.  But it is nice to imagine that you are a lot richer than you are; you know who you are.)

So, happy reading, all of you!

Kay