Windfall

Based on the huge amount of money ($500, no I'm not forgetting a 0) I just received from Avalon for a novel titled Love In The Air scheduled for publication next year, I just treated myself to a refurbished Nikon 55-200 vibration reduction lens.  The kit lens the camera came with is total crap.  It's always just a little out of focus.  I've been watching this one for about 2 years and it finally came down to a price I can't pass up--$146.  If it's also crap, I'll sell it.  I don't expect a lot from it, after all it's not a "good" lens which would cost oh I don't know, what the camera cost originally.  I should just send my old Nikon back for tweaking but who uses film anymore.  Yeah, I'm not going back.  Unfortunately the old lens doesn't fit on the Nikon D50.  I wonder if there's some kind of mount that would facilitate such a thing....

PIZZA PRINCESS that has languished since I published it in April, sold a copy yesterday.  I think it must be the cover changes, the title and the fact that nearly 100 people have looked at it on Scribd.

I have an idea for a cover for Sweet Cider.  First I should say for some strange reason, habit more than anything, I keep thinking I should at least show this book to an agent.  Now, given that only 1 agent who saw it thought it was interesting should tell me what a stupid, time-wasting idea this is.  What I may wind up doing is publishing it to kindle and then showing it to an agent.  I think the new title will be Bad Apple.  And there will be an apple on the cover.  In order to get the right image, I'll have to do it myself and obviously the kit lens stinks.  So I had to get off the fence about a new to me lens.

The last agent who saw it liked it but was put off by the fact that the sort of victim/villain is a gay guy.  This is so politically incorrect to put in a book.  Not all gay guys are pedophiles, right?  But some are.  It's politically incorrect to tell that story tho.  Better to have a white, straight, Christian male of indeterminate age, height and ancestry be the predator. 

Now I don't have the weight of dunce-ish politically correct traditional publishing machine writing my story for me.  As in the actual, true,  real life event, the victim is a gay man.  If I'm not going to tell the real story, the point of this exercise eludes me.

The art is by a marvelously talented and impossibly young (24!) Dutch woman, Maj-Britt Elferink.