Smashwords sent me an email some time ago, saying they're having a Summer Sale. They wanted me to "sign up," which meant that they would sell my Stories at a reduced price (which I had to approve,) an then, on August 1, the prices revert to normal.
Well, since nothing was moving, and since I suspected that a few dozen Kay Hemlock Brown fans have been hoping something like this would happen, I signed up. Since they were already at the minimum price of 99c, this meant that they were now free, which means Smashwords would not make any money from them! It was already July 29th when I signed up, so for two days, 25 copies of my stories were sucked up by various people. What they did with those stories I can only imagine; they're probably putrefying in various hard drives across the USA (and other parts of the world, but I suspect that in other lands, people actually read the stories).
And Now For Something Completely Different. I have hit a block in finishing up the various things I had wanted to do with the existing stories and story lines. Having said that, I have various issues on my mind:
- What with the recent interest in racism across the country, I feel that there are too few people in my stories who are non-white. There certainly are a few; in Jane, there are Italians, Hungarians, and Jews, who must certainly be considered as contributing to racial diversity in our society, but not many others. In the Helen stories, there are Indians, for certain, and French, and Germans, too. But the stories are too white.
- The changing weather patterns--climate change--are really in our faces; it might be appropriate for fiction to reflect this.
- I wanted to incorporate COVID into a story.
