When Gremlins attack

October 21st. 2017 Just when you think things are running smoothly, a gremlin hops into your daily routine. My PC went belly-up on Tuesday: it wouldn’t boot up. Took it into the shop, got it back on Friday and now I can’t access the internet. I’ll be going back to the shop on Monday to have a “talk” with them. Obviously I’m not without a PC or the internet, but I have to use my laptop, which is not geared up like my main PC. These problems, when they come, always seem to pick the most inopportune moment. I am supposed to be preparing a Newsletter promotion for a fellow author. In return he will be posting about my book, A Dangerous Game. It means seven days of tweets, FB and social media, and now I have to come up with something satisfactory so I don’t fall short of the agreement I made. Another hurdle I have to cross is that my church has asked me to preach on Sunday week (October 29th). No big deal really, but the access I have on line to research the stuff I need is already part of my ‘Favourites’ on the main PC. So now I’ll have to go hunting via my laptop. On top of that, a very close friend of ours has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. I had to give up two mornings this week to ferry a very distraught husband in to the hospital. Plus I was asked to sit in with him when the doctor delivered the sad news. His grief, and my friend’s condition, make my problems pall into insignificance. Naturally I have made no progress with my WIP, but it has never been too far from my mind. My foray into Facebook advertising was pretty disappointing too, but I’ll survive the trauma of handing Jeff Bezos (FB founder) my money for so little in return. I will do nothing now until next month because I reached my self-imposed budget limit. I’m thinking of having a look at Amazon ads. According to Mark Dawson, a prolific user of FB and Amazon, they offer a more direct way of directing your potential readers straight on to your Amazon product page. It makes sense: an FB ad asks someone to click a link to an Amazon product, whereas with Amazon Ads, the product appears and the click takes the reader to the place where they can purchase the book. Plus the fact that the product page contains so much more information about the author, the book, the also-boughts, the reviews, and a host of other stuff, which would cost a fortune to place on an FB ad. We took our dog down to the beach for her routine walk this afternoon, but had to turn back because the beach has been battered by the strong winds brought on by “Storm Brian”. I despair of the naming culture for hurricanes and storms etc. The name ‘Brian’ suggests a gentle nature. I have a couple of friends with that name, and neither of them is violent. Why don’t they pick names with connotations of strength and danger? Attila, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon, Brian? Spare me, please. So what happens next week? I might have a serviceable PC, and I might even have got back to my WIP, but whatever happens, as always: wish me luck!