​First of all, I’m in it. That’s all kinds of wrong.
 
I’m not fond of having my picture taken and neither is Harrell, which is one reason we have so few photos in the house. This time, for whatever reason, he wanted a cell shot of me holding one of the gourds I was about to purchase last week. In a moment of weakness, I agreed.
 
I blame the heat, the dirt, a touch of dehydration, and that fact that we were both bone-tired. It won’t happen again.
 
I’m posting this travesty of a shot because this may be the last time I pose for a photo. That’s a shame, not because I should be in more pictures, but because… it’s this photo. I admit, I’m not an expert when it comes to taking cell pics. Looking at this one, though, it feels to me as if the large gourd in the foreground could possibly have been removed or repositioned before the shot was taken. Maybe I could have been encouraged to step to one side or the other. Perhaps the photographer could have shifted a little before snapping the image.
 
Because, in my opinion, no one looking at this photo is going to focus on anything but the large phallic-looking gourd that’s centered at the lower part of my waist. The good news is, people won’t be looking at me. The bad news is, I could be wrong about that. People might be looking at the picture and thinking, why did that woman want that large phallic-looking gourd positioned at her waist?
 
Enough about that. Let’s move on.
 
Harrell and I have just returned from a long overdue visit with family and friends. We’ve missed those people for too long. We had the opportunity to attend a spectacular wedding that was held in a beautiful wooded setting, without any bears in sight. (This only became a consideration after a bear visited the three-story cabin we were in the night before.) Toward the end of our 11-day journey, we visited the Welburn Gourd Farm, famous for its thick-skinned gourds. You might not care about thick-skinned gourds, but gourders (it is, too, a word) go out of their way to find such prizes. I loaded the trunk of our rental car with gourds of all sizes, and felt very happy to have them, indeed.
 
We made it home safely, but that’s the end of the good news. Writing-wise, the bad news is that the Kindle Countdown Deal didn’t do anything to help us find new readers for The Runaway Mail-Order Bride. The novel rose a little in the Amazon rankings, but that’s because a couple of curious readers paid full price for the book. They didn’t return it for a refund, either, which is increasingly a problem for some of my fellow writers. Oh, yes, that’s become a thing. Less for us, though, than for others. Mail-order bride readers tend to be honorable folks.
 
And, then, there’s the Amazon Vella saga. I had such hopes. Instead, it’s been such a….
 
I don’t want to get into it at this moment. Next week, okay? I’ll tell all.

Oh, please, don’t act as if you’re offended by the title. I did warn you about this last week.
 
Besides, those little asterisks could mean anything. There are buckets of four-letter words that could fill in the blank here. Foaming, for example. “Another foaming blog post.” Yes, it would make no sense, but why not? It’s not as if most of my blog posts make good sense.
 
When I went to WordHippo.com, they offered me nearly 200 options to fill-in this blank with four-letter f-words, all of which could be used in polite society, so if your mind went to a profanity-filled place when you saw the asterisks, then shame on you. But, also, congratulations, smarty-pants, because, this time, “f***ing” means exactly what you thought it did. The big F-word. A word I’ve rarely used in any of my writing.
 
Why bring it up today? I thought it was time I brought you up to date. If you remember, a couple of months ago in this very same space, I talked about trying my hand at writing a billionaire romance as a serial fiction. Financially, it seemed the way to go. With Amazon Vella launching this week, more people are reading serial fiction than ever; romance remains serial fiction’s most popular genre; and billionaire romance has been so popular the last several years that “billionaire” now qualifies as a romance sub-category on many of the most popular eBook distribution platforms.
 
As someone who is not a fan of billionaires, real or fictional, I find this astounding. In romances, billionaires are frequently lovelorn, brilliant, handsome, and sporting six-pack abs. They’re not as self-absorbed as real billionaires, and they don’t spend all of their time trying to make more money when they already have an obscene amount of wealth. They are pretend billionaires, which is exactly right for fiction.
 
It’s just that I have trouble separating the real billionaires that I read about (I’m looking at you, Elon and Jeff) from the adorable billionaires that exist in fantasy. In my opinion, there’s such a thing as too wealthy. When one person controls more money than the entire gross domestic output of a fair-sized country – say, Madagascar, GDP of $14B, population 27 million – something isn’t right. I might even say that it’s severely f***ed up. Elon and Jeff are probably glad I’m not in control of worldwide wealth distribution.
 
Since that’s how I feel, I didn’t believe I was the best candidate to pen a billionaire romance. But, then, I wrote on the May 4th blog, “out of nowhere, a new story title popped into my head.
 
I shared the name with G.W.
 
‘You can’t use that,’ G.W. told me. ‘It’s obscene!”
 
I didn’t share the title on that blog, but I’m doing so today. The name that grabbed me was, Another F***king Billionaire. I felt I could write that book if Amazon, the eBook distributor that provides most of the Anne Glynn royalties, was okay with profanity in book titles.
 
I shouldn’t have worried. It turns out, they are VERY okay with the F-word. Go to their site and you’ll find day planners, stage plays, novels and novellas that use the F-word as their primary marketing tool. You’ll see coloring books with the word in the title. Not all of the authors softened the word by using asterisks, either. They went full-frontal obscenity. Me and the Good Witch, we’re behind the times.
 
My partner and I forged ahead with a story outline. In the outline, the billionaire is brilliant, handsome, lovelorn, and sports six-pack abs. (We weren’t reinventing the wheel.) We went step by step, building a fantasy lover that met every expectation… until the very last pages of the story. At the very end of the tale, given an ultimatum, our amazing billionaire reacted in what we both considered to be a real-world fashion. Let’s just say, wedding bells don’t ring out.
 
The last line of our outline had the heroine saying, wearily, “Another f***king billionaire.”
  
I thought some readers would enjoy it, but a little doubt crept in. I took the outline to my writing group for their thoughts. Without exception, they all enjoyed the story until the clencher. They seemed united in the belief that readers who didn’t like billionaire romances wouldn’t read the story, while readers who did like billionaire romances would hate the wrap-up. Those readers might not feel very kindly toward the authors, either. We’d get a week of sales and a lifetime of one-star reviews.
 
It would be easy enough to change the ending. Easier still to file it away and continue working on our current project. Which is what we’ll probably do.
 
Probably.

​I wrote a post for today’s blog yesterday and remembered, this morning, that I’d failed to do the marketing thing I meant to do earlier. Instead of trying to sell one of my books in last week’s blog, I was blowing air kisses to my Eufy RoboVac 30C. Promoting someone else’s product is not gonna pay for my ongoing manga addiction, if you get what I mean.
 
The blog I’ve written but can’t yet use is riddled with almost-obscenities. The words aren’t real obscenities, but close enough for guessing purposes. Why would I want to put such words in a PG-rated blog? I have my reasons. Just know that it’s not because I hope to be seen as edgy and cool or, as a younger friend told me, sick and dope.
 
When I grew up, no one wanted to be sick or a dope. But I digress. Come by in seven days, and you’ll hopefully see why I wrote what I wrote. H*ll, yeah!
 
All of which brings me to where we are at this moment. A couple of weeks ago, a woman in my local writer’s group asked me what I knew about Kindle Countdown Deals. Being edgy and cool, I replied, “Huh?”
 
Later that night, after I returned home, I did some studying. According to the Amazonians, a Countdown Deal “lets authors… run limited-time discounts for eBooks available on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Customers will see both the regular price and the promotional price on the eBook's detail page, as well as a countdown clock.”
 
I have a few novels that would benefit from a little promotion. The Runaway Mail-Order Bride is one of them. Once upon a time, it had done nicely. On the Amazon charts, it went to #2 in Victorian Historical Romance, #1 in Western Romance, and the resulting royalties kept the manga pages turning for more than a couple of months. However, that was seven years ago, a lengthy passage of time in the eBook biz. When I peeked in on the novel last Thursday, the numbers told a much sadder tale:
 
Best Sellers Rank: #1,352,074 in Kindle store

• #10,787 in Victorian Historian Romance (eBooks)
• #16,202 in Western Romance (eBooks)

 
Let’s not pretend this is anyone’s idea of a “best seller.” I imagine the rank would be even worse if Runaway wasn’t in Kindle Unlimited, where KU members can download it for free.
 
I wondered how many eBooks are in the Kindle Store, but Amazon won’t tell. Author Derek Haines estimates there are between 6 and 9 million stories currently available, with another million being added every year. I’ve seen some other guesses at other 10 million available reads, with guestimations of over 30,000 new eBooks hitting Amazon every day. No wonder Derek tells writers that they’d better be prepared to do some marketing if they don’t want their words to vanish from sight.
 
The Kindle Countdown was easy to join and free when I did, so I dropped Runaway into the system and forgot to share the news until this morning.
 
Let me give you the scoop. From last Sunday until next Sunday, the price for Runaway Bride has been dropped from $4.99 to 99-cents. On the back of the paperback, the pitch goes like this:
 
She’d thought she’d met the man of her dreams. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
 
Donald’s letters had won her heart. Leaving everything behind, Lisa Hanlon is ready to start her new life as a sheriff’s wife. Her fiancé is attractive, influential, and eager to wed his mail-order bride. When she discovers that he’s also short-tempered, violent, and possessive, she flees for California, desperate to escape the man she’s promised to marry.
 
Arriving at a broken-down ranch in the middle of nowhere, Lisa is only seeking a place to hide. She’s dismayed to discover a rugged drifter, Pearce Folsom, in one of the outbuildings. Burdened with secrets of his own, Pearce hides the truth of his past, but he can’t hide his attraction to Lisa. When he steals a burning kiss in the middle of a midnight storm, Lisa knows this handsome cowboy wants more from her than she’s able to give. She can’t truly offer her love until she is finally and forever free from Donald.
 
And then, one terrible day. a telegram arrives: FOUND YOU.
 
Will this cost in price lift the book out of the million-plus sales ranks? I hope so.
 
How depressing will it be if it falls even further?
 

​That’s what a certain someone tells me, anyway. The Good Witch says this in the spirit of friendship, a little worried because some of my recent posts have been a bit on the negative side. This is exactly what I needed to hear, and this is why today’s blog is going to be so very positive and uplifting. Okay, maybe not uplifting; that’s a pretty distant horizon for a blog like this. And maybe not very positive, but it will be mostly positive.
 
That doesn’t mean I won’t express any quibbles today. I may mention, lightly and in passing, that my honey’s second pair of ridiculously-expensive Darn Tough Vermont socks has now blown a hole in one of its heels, too, but (positive, positive) what an interesting life lesson he has learned. He’d already learned similar life lessons about Arizona’s Greatest Hot Dogs and Tucson’s Best Pizza and many, many other things, but he remains dazzlingly receptive to empty promises. As one example, I promised to make a homemade supper this evening. Ha ha ha ha!
 
Nor will I grumble about the shoes that are pictured in the upper left-hand corner of this blog. These very colorful shoes were discovered when I was at a footwear emporium this week. I admit, I did a doubletake when I saw them. I took a picture to preserve the memory, then texted the photo to the Good Witch: So tempted to buy these shoes for the wedding, but the clown would miss them. When I saw them, I laughed at the price tag. And doesn’t everyone say that laughter is the best medicine? (Disclaimer: If you have a health condition that requires actual medicine, then laughter is not the best medicine. As an aside, do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.)
 
Let me tell you about a few things I like. One is the Dell laptop computer I’m using to type this blog. It was about as cheap a machine as Dell offers, cheaper still because I got it as a Black Friday deal, and I don’t care that it lacks all of the bells and whistles. It’s perfect for writing stories and doing internet research. Its biggest plus is that it’s not the HP laptop that it replaced, a several years-old curse which came loaded with bloatware. It harangued me constantly, pushing HP products that I learned to despise as the years trickled past. “Why won’t you die?” I asked it some months before I found the Dell. That’s when I realized one of us had to go.
 
Slid a little down the positivity scale there. Let me brush myself off and try again.
 
Another thing I like is Best Buy’s policy on recycling electronics and appliances for their customers. By the time 2021 had rolled around, they’d already recycled two BILLION pounds of electronics… including my miserable HP laptop. I asked if they could start the recycling process by driving a stake in its wee computer heart. Out of politeness, the salesman laughed. And doesn’t everyone say that laughter is the best medicine? (Disclaimer: If you have a health condition that requires actual medicine, then laughter is not the best medicine. As an aside, do not buy an HP laptop computer.)

I also like this mug. I like it so much, I showed it to my very nice neighbors. They didn’t understand why I was a fan, but they smiled politely.
 
Finally, I think I’m starting to fall for my Eufy RoboVac 30. I got the Frisbee-shaped device because dust bunnies were inhabiting every corner of my living room. I felt I could either spend my time vacuuming or doing something I found more rewarding – which is, frankly, everything else except for making supper this evening. The machine boasts that it “Works with Wi-Fi”, which is swell, except that I don’t want it to work with wi-fi. Using wi-fi would require that I be involved. Since the robotic vacuum cleaner came with a remote control, I decided to use that, instead. Pushing “A” for Auto Clean, I left the machine to do its job on its own.
 
Without direction, without instruction, without any course to follow, it traveled about randomly on my tile floors. It wasn’t real loud, it wasn’t completely quiet, and it frequently repeated the path it was taking, kind of like me when I get distracted. I wasn’t hopeful. Rather than watch it fail at its task, I went online to check Eufy’s return policy.
 
Ninety minutes later, or so, the Frisbee had returned to its docking bay. The floors looked markedly better; the dust bunnies had fled. When I opened the machine’s dust collector, it was filled.
 
“Best Buy’s not getting its hands on you,” I told the RoboVac, reassuringly. Now, if only I could teach it to cook.