My writing week 4 (26)

I Survived Another Trip to the Dentist.
 

The big news of the week is that I seemed to have survived yet another trip to the dentist. This one was to no ordinary dentist, it was to an oral surgeon in Melbourne. I visited him on Friday to have some teeth out. I was particularly concerned bout one wisdom tooth that he had to remove. It had a vicious hook that went very close to a nerve in the bottom jaw. So far so good, I don’t seem to have lost any feeling in my lips or mouth. I got the teeth out in the chair, while awake, saving $2600.

The oral surgeon was adamant that I should be accompanied by someone when I left the surgery. I had originally arranged for my sister to accompany me. But she is currently in hospital dealing with bacterial meningitis. The first operation to stop brain fluid leaking out her nose didn’t work, so she underwent a second operation on Tuesday of last week. We are hopeful that this altered surgery worked.

So I arranged for an Aunty who lives in Melbourne to accompany me to the oral surgeon. She told me about Red Cross cars being available to country people returning from surgery in other locations. I had planned to catch the afternoon train/bus home, but what happened if I had excess bleeding? So after much messing around we arranged for a Red Cross car to drive me home.

On the bus on the way into Melbourne on Friday my Aunty rang, she had had severe pains in the stomach and had been at a hospital most of the night. So she would not be able to accompany me. I wished her well and then waited for calls from the Red Cross and oral surgeon, but they did not come.

My recovery from the ordeal was hampered by my white trash neighbours. They decided to have a party on Friday night. I went next door at ten to ask them to keep it down. They told me it was garage boy’s birthday. I told them I had just had oral surgery and they seemed to agree that the party would not go that late. At 1.30 am I rang the police. Probably just as well I did as the drunken/drugged youths could have gotten out of control. Five minutes after my call the party moved from the backyard back into the garage with the volume of the music turned down.

Successful Ebook Authors Don’t Make that Much Money.

I read an interesting article about author John Locke who has sold over a million downloads of his self-published ebooks. He sells them for 99c. And even with those massive sales, he only gets a return of about $35,000 an enovel. So if one of the most successful enovelists is only getting about half the average yearly wage for his novels, what do the millions of other enovelists get?

Interesting that the author of the article suggests there are two distinct markets, one containing people who buy only ebooks priced around 99c and another group who only buy ebooks at around $9.99. There are a lot of ebooks priced between these values, I wonder how well they sell.

My Goodreads Reading Challenge.

Half way through the year and I am falling behind in my Goodreads challenge of reading a book every fortnight. I have read only eight books so far this year. But I have not helped my chances of achieving the goal by choosing thick epics like Under the Dome by Stephen King.

Still Having Problems with My Broadband.

Problems with my broadband connection continued. So I bought a new modem on Thursday. The link to ISP didn’t drop out for the rest of week, something it had previously been doing up to 20 times a day. But the link still seemed slow.

My Writing.

On the writing front, I started some research for my next article for Divine magazine. This one is about recycling televisions. How have you disposed of old televisions?

I also did a bit of writing of my short story during the few minutes I was not dealing with life.