This is not impressive

So far I have 11 keywords up on the Bing campaign, and this is the message I get for 10 of them when I check to see if the ads associated with them are being displayed.

Yeah, OK. I've already had to contact support because my account was "suspended" (not actually suspended, it just told you that it was, because that's good design), and at this point I'm feeling like the PIA factor is pretty ridiculous. I know it's been a while, but what I recall of advertising on Facebook was that it was truly "set it and forget it"--you weren't expected to ride herd on it to make sure it did what it had to do in order for the company to make any money....

And, by accident

Hey! I'm actually doing a little promotion, entirely due to chance! I wanted to improve the search-engine optimization for BlockB.com, so I signed on to the Bing Web administrator thingy, and they gave me a coupon for $100 in free advertising on Bing, Yahoo, and some other search engine no one actually uses, I don't remember what it's called.

I never tried search-engine advertising before (I mostly stuck with Facebook), but hey, it's free, so I figured I'd put in a little text ad for Trang. We shall see if it has any impact or is worth doing.

It will also be interesting because when I last did this three years ago, I got the best results by explicitly targeting Kindle users. It will be interesting to see if that helps this time around, or if people are just so used to reading on their phones at this point that it won't matter....

Progress report

Not a lot done today (and even less done yesterday because of other responsibilities), but I did manage to sketch out how the next scene is going to go. I'm pretty happy with it--in this volume some minor characters become a bit more major, so it's fun to flesh out how they're going to sound.

Progress report

A little busy today, but I looked over the earlier chapters (I'm quite a bit further along than I realized!), did some tweaking, and hopefully have set myself up for some good work tomorrow.

And then I'm going to have to get a shot, but fingers crossed that won't be such a huge deal now that it's been a month since my last one.

Go, sis!

My sister has taken the plunge and self-published a novella! It's called The Brother on My Back, and it's a Sherlock Holmes story (he's in the public domain)--but Sherlock is, like, 14, and it's set in the 1990s. Let's say there was considerable debate over whether or not she should just rename the character, but a lot of the storylines are related to the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories, so she felt she could not in good conscience.

It's on Amazon, and she will be doing a five-day free giveaway starting Thursday, so give it a whirl, and if you like it, please review it! If you really like it, she's got others--I think three are basically written.

Now I remember why last fall was so unproductive

Yeah, the shots are...difficult. Last week was busy anyway, but this week isn't, and yet I can't focus. It's basically like dealing with a serious, 2-3 day hangover--I can run errands and do piddly crap, but anything that requires brainpower is hard. And then because I've lost so much time, when I do have a thinky day, I have to spend it on the other thinky things that have piled up.

I know I said I wasn't going to do shots twice a week, but there are only four shots left. Doing those twice a week would means just two weeks of living like major stoner, and then I should be back and able to write after that. So I think that will be the plan.

Non-progress report

Obviously things have gotten busier than I expected--we're actually implementing some of the stuff we've been wanting to do, so that's taken some attention (but should make life easier in the long run). That is winding down for now (although it will pop up again--all the players are on their own schedule), but I've also got my allergy shot coming up, so...it will be a few days before I can get back on Trials.

The shots may be more of a issue in the short term, because they got in a new batch of serum, and we're going to try getting me up to the normal maintenance dose. But I am not going back onto the twice-a-week shot schedule--that was just too hard, and because I'm already at a higher dose, there's no real benefit to doing it. So I'll try once-a-week, and maybe even drop back to once-every-two-weeks if once-a-week proves too much of a hassle.

Progress report

Not enough sleep last night, so I just tidied a few things and coughed up maybe 200 words. Also I realized that I've written so much (!) that I actually needed to figure out what was going to happen next, so I did that.