‘Her Majesty’ is curled up on a pink pillow here in my office. She doesn’t venture too far now. Just wanders a bit until I pick her up, take her to be tempted with a bit of canned food, or some water, or a litter box.
* * * * * * *
I just finished proof-reading Her Final Year. This is the version formatted for print-on-demand, so it was a painstakingly close look to make sure that not only had we caught all the little typos and whatnot, but that the layout was right. It took me four days of very close reading to do this – but not nearly as much work as my Good Lady Wife put into preparing the text.
This afternoon I’ll take care of setting up everything for publication of both the Kindle version as well as the print-on-demand version. Probably upload the files tomorrow. Also this afternoon, go over the website design with my GLW, so we can get that going and ready for ‘beta testing’.
* * * * * * *
There’s almost a fear being at this point. A trepidation. Did we do everything right? Will people find the finished product of value? Will we be ignored, laughed at?
I don’t know if it makes sense. But we have a solid 30 months of work in this book. Not just me. Not just me and my wife. Not even just me, my wife, my co-author and his wife. No, we also have about a score of people who have done test-readings and provided feedback. And plenty of friends and family who have encouraged us.
It’s that moment, standing on the edge, looking down, wondering just how insane you have to be to jump out of a perfectly good airplane, trusting to so many things going right or at least not horribly wrong.
* * * * * * *
The emotional sense is right. The echoes of the final days of caring for Martha Sr that come from reading about that experience jibe perfectly as I pick up the cat, settle her on her pillow for one of the last times. The clock clicks, wheels turn.
And soon we will see what happens.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Gardening, Guns, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing
So, as my last couple of posts have indicated, almost my entire focus has been on . . . well, a lot of things, to be honest. The first part of May was the marathon BBTI testing, then there was another weekend of that in June. And a major push to get the garden in and secure from the deer and other critters. Weekly articles for Guns.com. Even a bit of conservation work here and there. But yeah, the vast majority of time and energy has gone into working on Her Final Year, the care-giving memoir.
So, almost all of my attention has been turned inwards. Which isn’t a bad thing, but it does show up in how things have been going for the two projects I tend to track: downloads of Communion of Dreams, and hits to the BBTI site.
I must admit, part of what’s happened with Communion of Dreams has been due to frustration with the publisher who had been wanting to publish the book. After all the work I put into multiple revisions, he went silent on me in the middle of sorting out the minor contract issues. Not a “we’ve reconsidered” or anything, in fact the last thing I had heard was a confirmation that they were committed to doing the book. But for six months now I haven’t had a response to my emails. I’ve pretty much just given up on it, poured my attention into the other projects. And that has been reflected in declining downloads – just 231 in May and 181 in June.
BBTI is a different matter, since my excitement over that hasn’t changed. We did get a bunch of excellent data during the last two test sequences, and plenty of people are eagerly waiting to see that – and we’re eager to provide it. But I haven’t done any real ‘support’ of the site, and so monthly hits have dropped off there to 279,656 in May and 256,179 in June.
But soon, soon I’ll turn my attention back to these things. First a revamp of the BBTI site to include the new data sets and freshen it up a bit. Then with CoD, we’ll see what happens – if Her Final Year launches successfully, it may mean that I’m able to attract a different publisher. Or, having gone the route of self-publishing once, I may just decide to do the same with the novel. Like I said, we’ll see.
As noted last week, we *are* closing in on being done with Her Final Year. I think it will be a very polished & professional product, much more so than most self-published books. Certainly, the amount of work which has gone into it has been massive. We’ll probably have the book(s) ready here in a couple of days, and then may have the supporting website ready for a test drive this next week – I’ll keep you posted.
Cheers to one and all . . .
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to the BBTI blog.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Writing stuff
A follow-up to last weekend’s post: Where I’m at…
We’ve moved ahead on all fronts. The ‘interior design’ of the book (both Kindle and print-on-demand versions) has been basically done, and the final decision on the front cover layout pretty much accomplished. We still need to position photos of both Martha Sr and Georgia in the text, tweak a couple of entries, as well as design the back cover. Most of the accounting stuff has been done, and things put in place for the website domain and hosting. Now that the cover design has been resolved, we can be thinking about the website design, but that should go really smoothly.
In other words, we’re closing in on being done, and being ready to “launch” the book. My Good Lady Wife has done an amazing amount of work with all the nuts & bolts of this, and it shows. My co-author and his wife have also put in countless hours reviewing, revising, and responding (graciously) to my incessant pushing to get this project completed. Well, I’m good at being annoying, so I was the logical person to annoy everyone to keep working.
It’s exciting. Stay tuned for official announcements, perhaps even a sneak preview.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Guns, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Writing stuff
No, this isn’t a “Find Jimbo!” puzzle. Just a reference point for those who wonder about my sparse posting here.
Sent this in a friend a bit ago, in an email exchange:
Have a good weekend,
Yeah, thanks. The latest round of unexpected storms cleared out early enough for me to get in a walk after my PT. Now a shower, and then lock in for a prolonged session of looking for typos and formatting errors on HFY. Following that, due diligence with Amazon’s print-on-demand system so I understand what tweaks we need to make for that formatting.
In other words, the book is coming together pretty quickly, and we’re in the final stages of that. Got the necessary LLC bank account opened this week, next week I’ll set up the stuff with Amazon and Paypal. Tomorrow Alix, I, and John (the co-author) have a Skype session and we’ll probably outline the website design – the FB, LJ, and Twitter accounts will all follow suit, once that is up. We should be able to test drive the whole thing a few days before our scheduled July 1 ‘launch’, but that arbitrary deadline can be moved easily enough if we need to do so.
It’s fun doing this, I admit. Nice to be using a lot of different skills I’ve acquired. Regardless of how the book does, at least I have that.
And then there’s the book conservation & binding backlog, getting articles to guns.com, and general life stuff.
It’s good to be busy.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Book Conservation, Gardening, Guns, Publishing, Science Fiction
Sorry I haven’t been posting much. It’s been a long and busy week. Had bookbinding and gardening stuff to do, as well as getting a couple of things written and sent to guns.com. But the most important and time-consuming task has been working on Her Final Year. As I noted on my Facebook page:
97,982. That’s how many words are in the main care-giving book. And it’s now closely edited and all formatted. Whew.
The last couple of chapters are especially emotional and hard to read, even now three and a half years later. But it’s done.
And now I need to wrap up another article (this is a fun one, on guns in Science Fiction) and then get on the road for another weekend of BBTI testing.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Brave New World, DARPA, Firefox, movies, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech, YouTube
So, the massive ballistics testing is done. Most everything has been cleaned up and put away. My head has stopped throbbing from the repeated low-level concussion of firing over 7,000 rounds of ammo, much of it very powerful and from very short barrels. Now it’s time to see if I can get my attention shifted over to all the other stuff I’ve ignored for the last couple of weeks.
Like this wonderful glimpse of the future here now:
I think it says something – a lot, actually – about the state of the world today that some of the first applications of functional brainwave-controlled mechanisms would show up in this kind of consumer product rather than a military application. It’s not the first such toy, either. Which isn’t to say that DARPA or some similar organization hasn’t been experimenting with such tech, but still.
Again and again, I am surprised at how quickly some of the predictions from fiction (including my own) are coming to be actuality. But that’s just the nature of the beast – what you think is going to happen later happens sooner, what you think is going to happen sooner sometimes doesn’t happen at all.
Related, I’ve just about given up on ever getting a straight answer from Trapdoor about if/when Communion of Dreams is actually going to be published. I’ll worry about it after I see to getting Her Final Year out. Some things I can control with brainwaves (indirectly), some things I cannot.
Jim Downey
Got a call from an old friend this morning. We talk pretty often. After chatting for a bit, he asked me if I could send him something I had written back when my wife and I were taking care of her mom. Since all of that material has been transferred over to the Care-Giving book, and I have been working with it extensively for the last year, I figured I’d know exactly what piece he was talking about and would be able to send him the relevant excerpt immediately.
“Sure,” I said. “What was it about?”
“Oh, about you losing your temper, yelling at Martha Sr. I know someone who is a care-giver, and this just happened to her. I thought that piece of yours would help give her some perspective.”
Hmm. It rang a bell, but I couldn’t identify it immediately. Still, I figured I’d figure it out after I got off the phone, and said “Yeah, sure, I’ll track it down and pass it along.”
We finished our chat, and I started poking through the manuscript, which is basically finished, just getting some formatting tweaks worked out.
And poked. And poked some more.
Nothing. Yet, my recollection of the blog post was becoming stronger. I knew I had written the piece he was talking about. But I couldn’t recall exactly which one it was in the book.
I decided to try a search through my blog posts. I now have almost 1100 posts, over 4 years, but I had an idea about when it had to have run, and after a few minutes tracked it down.
It was this one: I am not a saint.
I went back to the book. Searched for that post.
It wasn’t there.
That’s very odd. I re-read the blog post. Yeah, it is embarrassing, but no more so than a lot of the stuff in the book. And more importantly, it is *exactly* the kind of thing we want to share with others – because it is a very normal and human reaction. Now that it has been brought to my attention, we’ll get it edited and integrated into the book.
But what a curious coincidence – to have a friend think of the one post from almost 4 years ago that I had managed to skip over in the process of collecting and editing Her Final Year.
Curious, indeed.
Jim Downey
With a thanks to my friend Jerry for helping make the book more complete.
The National Institute on Aging has come up with new research guidelines and two new clinical diagnosis relating to Alzheimer’s. From the NIA news release:
For the first time in 27 years, clinical diagnostic criteria for Alzheimer’s disease dementia have been revised, and research guidelines for earlier stages of the disease have been characterized to reflect a deeper understanding of the disorder. The National Institute on Aging/Alzheimer’s Association Diagnostic Guidelines for Alzheimer’s Disease outline some new approaches for clinicians and provide scientists with more advanced guidelines for moving forward with research on diagnosis and treatments. They mark a major change in how experts think about and study Alzheimer’s disease. Development of the new guidelines was led by the National Institutes of Health and the Alzheimer’s Association.
From NPR coverage of the news:
The new definitions, which were just published online by the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, acknowledge this dimly understood early phase of Alzheimer’s. Now there are two new pre-dementia phases: mild cognitive impairment and “preclinical Alzheimer’s.”
In mild cognitive impairment, a person’s changes in thinking are noticeable to himself, friends, or family. They would show up on tests of memory and recall, but don’t interfere with everyday activities. Alzheimer’s is just one possible cause. Because there are no treatments to prevent or stop Alzheimer’s, many people may not consider this diagnosis a blessing.
The second new phase, preclinical Alzheimer’s, is much squishier. There’s no list of symptoms that a doctor can whip out to say you’ve got it. Rather, the goal in creating this category is to see if scientists can define when the disease starts, and track it through biomarker tests, brain imaging, or other yet-to-be-invented tests. If that happens, it might someday lead to ways to prevent Alzheimer’s. But for now this category is useful only to researchers.
As I noted four years ago, I have faced the question of whether to be tested for a disease I may have, but for which there is very little in terms of treatment options (and no cure). From that blog post:
It is a very difficult decision to be tested for a genetic disease which you may have, and for which there is no known treatment (let alone a cure). If you test positive, you know exactly the sort of future you face. And, if you test positive, it can have a significant impact on your employment and insurance possibilities, even decades before you might experience any onset of symptoms.
There is a similar disease which runs in my family called Machado-Joseph. In terms of statistics, there is about a 68% chance that I carry the gene for it, though I do not have the other familial characteristics which seem to track with the disease. So I have elected not to be tested. Besides, at nearly 50 years of age, if I did have the onset of the disease, it would be likely that it would progress so slowly that I would die of something else (the younger the age of onset, the more rapidly the disease progresses).
That said, I have told my sister (who has the disease) that if her doctor wants to do the genetic test on me in order to have that additional bit of information, I would do so.
And I suppose that is where I come down on the issue of whether or not to do any of the new testing for Alzheimer’s: if it will help science better understand this disease, how it develops, and to chart possible treatments, I would participate. It may not be something I could benefit from myself, but I have to look at the bigger picture. I think we all do.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Alzheimer's, Ballistics, Guns, Health, Publishing, Writing stuff
I usually try to avoid posting things on April 1, since *I* don’t trust hardly anything I see online on April Fools. So I held off, other than the link to my Guns.com article.
Anyway, some interesting things to report. First off, the numbers. March had 768 downloads of my complete novel, which means there’s been over 2,000 downloads so far this year, and some 31,000+ total. No, I have no idea when it will be actually published by Trapdoor, so don’t ask.
Hits to BBTI have slowed a bit – down to only 350,650 for March. That puts us at 5,759,535 total hits. Even with it slowing down, we should break 6 million total hits sometime before the end of this month.
Writing for Guns.com has been fun, and seems to have gone well enough. The articles are being well received from what I can tell. I’ve been asked to start also doing ‘Editor Reviews’ of some handguns, and those will start to show up here any day now, if you are interested in such things.
I had another CAT scan this week, following up on the ongoing health issues. Preliminary report from the scan is that things are clear – no major problems show. Which is good – there’s nothing serious going on. But also somewhat frustrating, since it doesn’t show what is causing the lingering pain I feel in my ribs on my right chest. I see my doc next week to discuss things, but mostly I think it will be a matter of just dealing with the pain and getting on with life. Best guess is that it’s probably some kind of muscle/tendon damage that can’t completely heal because I keep breathing. And I’m not willing to stop doing so in the hope that the pain will go away.
But the real news is that yesterday we filed the paperwork with the Missouri Secretary of State to form “HFY Publishing, LLC.” Yeah, on April Fools Day. Seemed appropriate.
No, seriously, while this is a small and largely symbolic step, it was an important one. An even more important one is that I’ve now heard from all of the beta readers, and gotten some very valuable feedback. We (my co-author and I) need to expand the introductory material of the book, to better explain how and why the book is structured the way it is and how to use it to best advantage. We also need to tweak the layout of the book for clarity. Neither of these are major changes, and we should be able to get them sorted in the next week or so.
Well, that gets everything up to date, I think. Now time to go do some home repairs.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 