Fiction is not the easy way out

Recently I have read a spate of disappointing historical novels, and I appear to be a few chapters into yet another one (although there's still time for this one to pull it out of the fire), so I'm going to vent about unsatisfying historical fiction.

What annoys me about historical fiction? More even than preaching, or obvious anachronisms?

When the person doesn't seem to be aware that they are writing fiction!

What seems to happen with some people is that they get enthralled with a particular historical event. So they want to write a book about it. But they don't want to go to the trouble and expense of researching a nonfiction book. So they don't research it, and they call it historical fiction.

The result of this process is basically a picaresque novel: This happened and then that happened and then another thing happened and then something else happened. The End. It's not very satisfying because it's not really about anything--there's no arc of any kind. If you already know about the historical event (and oftentimes even if you don't), it's staggeringly dull.

The other problem is that this kind of writer rarely takes interesting risks with the characters. Either they slavishly follow real life, regardless of whether or not that works in a story, or they create a character...well, a character like Biftad Kennedy.

Who's Biftad Kennedy? He's the character I just created for my historical novel on the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was going to write a nonfiction book about it, but that's too much work! Instead I'll write a novel--wait a minute? Who's going to be the main character?

Oh, it can't be John F. Kennedy or anybody who had any actual responsibility for what went on then--that's too hard. I'd have to do research, and I know whatever I write about someone like John F. Kennedy is going to piss somebody off!

So, I'll invent--Biftad! He'll be a ne'er-do-well distant cousin of the real Kennedys--you know, some loutish Roger Sterling/Paris Hilton-type who never bothered to graduate from prep school because he has a trust fund and plans to just drink his life away. He'll have no influence on anything, ever, because he didn't really exist and I don't want anything in my fiction that didn't really happen. Biftad will just occasionally stagger through the White House and say things like, "Wow, cousin, that looks important. You got any gin?"

This isn't going to be like the movie Dick, where ditzy teenagers bring down a president. This isn't going to be Happy Gilmore Saves the Free World. That would be too risky and too hard. Instead, Biftad will never do anything. The reader's experience will be: I'm reading things I already know, and I'm forced to rehash them through the point-of-view of a completely useless character who just sits around drunkenly scratching his testicles, while two doors down, the world teeters on the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Wouldn't you love 600 pages of that!

The problem as I see it is that these people are writing historical fiction because they think it's easy. They think it's easier than nonfiction, because you don't have to do any research, and they think it's easier than other genres of fiction, because you don't have to be creative.

None of that is true. Good historical fiction does not come about because the writer is lazy. It takes a lot of research, and more important, it takes the exact same amount of care given to story and to character as any other kind of fiction.

Otherwise you get the exact same thing you get with weak fantasy and science fiction: A humdinger of a setting, but nothing to engage you and carry you through the book.

Progress report

I'm doing noise removal on the second half of Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook, yay.

I haven't gotten back into writing, which is a little annoying to me, especially since noise removal is hardly the most scintillating of tasks. Part of it is just getting back into the swing of that, and part of it is that it takes some time for me to recover from a week-and-a-half of disrupted sleep. But I went ahead and did an overall word count, and I'm at 32,550 words for Trials. So yay for that, too.

Progress report

I re-recorded all the things that needed re-recording from Chapter 1 of the Trang audiobook through the first half of Chapter 6, which is now officially done. And I did a little noise removal on the second half of Chapter 6.

Spring may not be quite as horrible as I had thought

It sounds like things may actually happen on the out-of-state elderly relative front without my having to basically spend the entire spring there, doing every last thing myself. That would be wonderful, plus it would mean that I don't have to buy some kind of portable computing device in hopes of getting anything done, which is good. I may even be able to attend Norwescon!

I'm thinking about some beta tasks to do once the Trang audiobook is done. As it turns out, recording an audiobook is a good way to find typos (at one point Cheep is called Chip--funny how hard that is to catch when you're reading silently, but how glaringly obvious it is when you're reading aloud). So I've been marking those up as I find them, and I'll clean up the e-books when that's done with.

Of course, with the new computer, how should I do the e-book files? I think in the interest of efficiency I'll just use Calibre again--I'll save the learning curve for when I convert Trials.

Speaking of new software, I want to spend a little more quality time sorting out GIMP. Obviously, if I'm doing Norwescon, I'll do some flyers, but the other, more-sophisticated project I have in mind is to re-do the lettering on the cover of Trang and Trust. I think the author name should probably be a bit larger and easier to read, plus the title lettering could stand to look a little more elaborate (which I hope is something this program lets you do--my old program was pretty limited). The tweaking should also give me some practice with GIMP, which I'm going to need when I get around to doing the Trials cover. 

What else? David Gaughran had a good post about the importance of mailing lists--it's nothing that I didn't know, but I've been very lazy about creating one of those, mainly because I just don't think I have it in me to do a full-fledged newsletter. But I could just do new-book alerts and sale alerts--that sort of thing. I'll put it on the list, anyway, along with getting on Pintrest.

Why there is no Lactose Intolerant French Huguenot History Month

I periodically read WhiteWhine--it's funny, but it's also capable of completely destroying any good opinion you may have of humanity, so I try to take it in small doses. Anyway, to celebrate of Black History Month, they have the obligatory selection of "Why isn't there a White History Month?" whines.

Putting aside the fact that these people are assholes, let's rephrase that question and take it a little more seriously: Why is there only Black History Month?

Or rather: Why is that you only hear about Black History Month? Because there actually are a lot of other heritage months and days and whatnot. But they definitely don't get the same kind of press.

Why is that?

Having worked for a multicultural educational publisher, I can reveal the reason to you. As you might imagine, it's an elaborate conspiracy, masterminded by this nation's most-celebrated secret society, The Illuminati! Yup: Jay-Z, Nicky Minaj, and Black History Month--we really are a full-service secret society!

The other reason? Black people buy Black history.

Yeah, that's the real reason. It's not guilt, or political correctness, or African Americans being "superior," or what have you. It's capitalism: African Americans identify as a group with a common heritage, there's a lot of them, they have money, and they don't mind spending it to learn about or to commemorate their history. And what do you know--Black History Month is a big success! There are books and TV specials and concerts and all kinds of things, because these things attract an audience.

Hispanic Heritage Month? Not so much. Women's History Month? Oh my God, if women bought women's history the way African Americans buy African-American history, multicultural educational publishers would be rolling in dough. But they don't.

German American Heritage Month--wait, that's a joke, right? I ask only because a good chunk of my family was Not German. You know about the Not Germans, right? Their ancestors came to this country before World War I from Saxony or Bavaria or Prussia or some place that was Not Germany. Once they came to this country, they called themselves Pennsylvania Dutch or just plain old Not German. When World War I rolled around they changed their names just to make sure everyone knew that they were really, really Not German. My father the amateur genealogist found it easier to handle the revelation that his family owned slaves than he did the revelation that his family's heritage was largely German. Let's just say that I'll be surprised if German American Heritage Month ever makes the kind of splash Black History Month does.

My point is, while it might make seem like a good idea to have a lot of heritage months (especially if you publish multicultural educational books), the fact of the matter is some groups will rally around such products, and others won't.

This is true for the wider world of genre, too. Some people really identify as readers of a particular genre--they read voraciously within that genre, and they even socialize around these books. It's why you have to go to the trouble of putting things into categories, even if you think genre categories are arbitrary and kind of stupid.

And it's why you have to market your book to the categories that already exist, even if that's a little tough to figure out. As Jaye Manus wrote, "[F]ocus your book description on what the readers are actually looking for." You don't want to find yourself stuck marketing "German Pride!" to a bunch of Not Germans (who might, however, buy a book about the Pennsylvania Dutch).

A tiny hint that retailers are maybe starting to pay attention

So, Apple is starting to highlight self-published e-books in its store.

It's something, right? I mean, if you compare Amazon, which has been great to self-published writers, and Barnes & Noble, which has pretty much sucked for self-published writers, and you look at who is seeing more e-book growth, it might occur to you that appealing to self-published writers might be good business.

Might be!

Of course, you have to actually appeal to them, which is harder to do than saying, "We just love us some self-published writers!" To actually appeal to self-published writers, you have to make the service easy for writers to use (time is money, after all). And then you actually have to be good at attracting readers (helpful hint: hiding the free books is a bad idea), and then you have to make it easy for those readers to find and buy and read stuff, because what self-published writers really like is sales.

Apple does not have a great reputation on any of these fronts.

With Apple (and Kobo, too) it seems like they're making a lot of promising noises. And that's great--I'm glad they're thinking of moving into this sector more aggressively. I think more sales platforms are good, because then writers would have to rely less on Amazon. I think if people really gave it some thought, they could create real competition: Passive Guy has a great post on how much book discovery could be improved by making a search engine that works more like Lexis-Nexis--which is a very robust search engine, to be sure, but hardly a new technology.

But if Barnes & Noble is proving anything, it's that the devil of selling e-books is in the details. So far, I don't see a lot of retailers really nailing those details.

With a pin-pin here, and a pin-pin there

Lindsay Buroker had a recent article on using Pintrest. Once again she takes something I would never have considered doing (Pintrest? For a book?) and notes that with, oh, about 30 seconds of effort you can have a presence on yet-another social media site.

And in one of those serendipitous things, another social-media savvy person I know (who works in the nonprofit sector) linked to this graphic about Pintrest's demographics and how the people on there like to spend money (especially on food, it seems).

The focus on food and the fact that the site clearly skews toward young mothers makes me a little skeptical that it's worth doing for books like mine. (Of course, if I were writing, say, women's literature with recipes, this post would be about how I'm already on Pintrest.) On the other hand, there is Buroker's (eternal, and eternally valid) case that, "I didn’t have to work very hard for those visitors." So I think I will get on there eventually.

Ah--"I didn’t have to work very hard for those visitors." Her lodestone and mine....

Progress report

The roof was completely finished today (and there was much rejoicing). The gutters still have to happen, but I'm assuming that will be done tomorrow, when I'm looking after the kid anyway.

Other than that, it's been a lot of focus on the Trang audiobook this past week (even on days when the roofers couldn't work, I still had to get up at the crack of dawn in case they did come, so writing was just not happening). Audiobook work is a good beta project precisely because it's repetitive and not especially creative, so I can do it when I'm too sleepy or distracted to write. But the downside is that it does get pretty boring after a while, especially because events resulted in my having a whole lot of noise removal to do.

So today I was looking at that pile of files and going, NOOOOO!!!! but I set the timer and did a slog in the theory that it wasn't like I wasn't going to have to do it all later if I didn't get some of it done today. And I completed noise removal on the first half of Chapter 6, so yay for me.

I have a line to re-record there, but I assume gutter replacement is no less noisy than roof replacement, so I'll do that and the fixes on the first five chapters after that work is done.

And I'm going to be very happy to get back to writing, especially because I think I sorted out how to start the book.

The beginnings of later books

One of the things I did with Trust was go to great lengths to make it accessible to someone who hadn't read Trang. Since I haven't been able to write this week, I've put a lot of thought into how to do that with Trials, because the current opening would be of zero interest to someone unfamiliar with the other books, and I wanted to fix that.

It's been surprisingly difficult to work out (although I think I have a fix now), so I've been wondering if it was even worth doing, since it is book three of four--shouldn't people who haven't read the first two books expect to be left behind? But that line of thinking was recently debunked for me by a fellow author. This person is writing a VERY long series, and there was a production glitch with, oh, let's say book #23 that didn't affect the text, so they gave the defective copies away to a random group of people that included me.

It's not necessarily the kind of book I'm interested in, but I'm always on the lookout for presents, so I tried giving it a read. And it reads like this:

MO: Did you hear about Jo?

BO: Jo? You're asking me about Jo?

MO: Well, I thought you had a right to know--Jo is thinking about visiting Akron.

BO: Mother of God!!! Not Akron!

MO: I know it sounds crazy.

BO: Especially now that--he can't be thinking of Akron!

MO: Well....

BO: And--he's not thinking of taking Ko to Akron, is he?

And on it goes. There is never any attempt to explain to the reader the nature of Bo, Mo, Ko, and Jo's relationship, or why going to Akron is such a big deal.

I'm planning to struggle through, but I have to say I'm not optimistic that it will get better for me. Since I'm not enjoying the book now and probably won't be able to, the chances of my buying the first book in the series for someone else are quite slim.

So much for that working as marketing.

In contrast, take Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books. I have read the entire series, and in every one last one O'Brian manages to 1. tell you who the major characters are, and 2. orient you to the world of the 18th-century British Navy.

By book #18, did I need this information? No, I did not. In fact, I'd skim or skip those sections. Did that put me off the books? Oh, hell, no. I was hooked. It didn't matter to me if I had to jump over most of pages 3-4 to find out what those two were up to!

Likewise the Vorkosigan Saga--when, say, Miles' cousin Ivan gets introduced, I'll breeze right over the part that explains who he is, exactly, because I already know. I know it because I've read all the Vorkosigan books, so clearly, I don't resent it.

My point is, you never know how someone is going to get into your books. (And even with series I really like, often I'll let a year or two lapse between books, so refreshers are welcome.) A paragraph I skim over hardly even qualifies as a minor annoyance. Feeling like I've walked into a party and no one will give me the time of day, because they're all so excited to be talking to each other again? That's a lot more irritating.

Progress report

The roofers finished the roof today, although there's still gutters and some miscellany to do. I listed to the MP3 files through Chapter 5 of the Trang audiobook and found some fixes.

I also realized that I can't really create a final MP3 file, because different audio- and podiobook outlets have different requirements. It was worth generating these MP3s so that I could give them a final listen with earphones, but given how many different versions I'm going to have to generate. there's no point in doing more than a spot-check of the MP3 files I actually release.

Progress report: Pay-attention-to-that-language-advisory edition

The roofers are here! The cats are freaking! I tried doing noise removal on the first half of Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook, but the banging is just too much--I'm going to try listening to the MP3 files on my earphones instead.

Oh, and I got another 1-star review on Amazon by someone who quit after the first page upon seeing profanity. At least 1. he did not insult me, and 2. he acknowledges that he should have noticed the language warning. But he also says that he "read the blurb up through 'Heinlein.'" Um--where does "Heinlein" appear, exactly?

(I actually do like me some Robert Heinlein, and it is social sci-fi, but I hate Starship Troopers, and I know a lot of so-called Heinlein fans are actually Starship Troopers fans. Which means that they don't like books with actual stories in them, so I assume they wouldn't like Trang. Or pretty much anything else Heinlein wrote.)

I do honestly think people who don't read a book have no standing to review it (not just MY books--every book, and play, and movie, and song, and piece of visual art. The sad thing is, there are "cultural critics" who strongly disagree), but I did not report this guy's review. Mainly because he's a lot less infuriatingly sanctimonious, but also because, once again, I think it will help ward away the prudes and attract the literate.

Progress report: Compression edition

The weather remained unchanged, so I was able to finish re-recording the messed-up lines in Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook.

And then I compressed it. Have I ever explained dynamic range compression? No, I have not, and that's because I'm not entirely sure what it is. Here's the Wikipedia article--it's full of terms like "side-chaining" and "attack and release" and "flux capacitator," so maybe you can understand it, but I can't. I just set my compression tool to what ACX tells me to and let 'er rip.

My guess from working with it is that dynamic range compression basically does what it says: If you imagine a range of sounds from very quiet ones to really loud ones, compression adjusts all those sounds so that they're all at medium level of loudness. That's helpful in getting rid of clipping and fixing any places where your voice gets timid. It also just generally helps keep the volume constant, so that nothing's inaudible but nobody's ears get blown out.

Compression is less helpful with breath sounds, which it makes louder. That's why you always do your compression before you do your noise removal.

A quick note about January and Trust

So, since I enrolled Trang in KDP Select, I had one set of free days in late December and another set a few days ago. As I've mentioned, I have given away scads of copies of Trang.

That's all well and good, but it's not like I can make money giving away free copies, right? In my accounting, free copies are not tracked and don't count.

But sold copies count. How has giving away so many copies of Trang affected sales of Trust?

Well, they've had quite the impact! We're still not talking huge numbers here, but in January alone I sold 85% as many copies of Trust as I had in the last six months of 2012 (Trust came out in June). And that percentage is probably a hair smaller than it should be, since presumably some of December's sales happened after the late-December giveaways.

But of course I lost revenue on sales of Trang, right? Actually, it's been a good month for Trang sales--not as good as Trust sales, but good. (Let's hear it for the also-bots!)

Of course, if I make Trang permanently free, then I'll completely lose any chance to make revenue off that book, and as it sells more, that becomes a tougher call. On the other hand, all this is happening because Trang had free days! So I'm still confident that free is the way to go.

This makes me laugh, but not in a good way

PV linked to this article, about how Amazon's 70% growth in e-book sales is actually really bad news for the company and e-book sales in general. In fact, as Edward Grant pointed out, once again double-digit growth in e-book sales has magically becomes a reduction! 

Got that? SEVENTY PERCENT GROWTH is reason to swig down a bottle of antifreeze. I'm sure Jeff Bezos will get right on that. After all, remember what a 34% growth rate looks like? So sad....

Meanwhile, over at Publishers Weekly, publishers are arguing that a 5% growth rate in the sales of paper books is fantastic!!! (OK, fine, it is actually a nice number for a mature industry.)

Having worked in publishing, I know that many people in it are not great at math. But I would think that even my fellow English majors would realize that there's a HUGE difference between a 70% rate of growth and a 5% rate of growth, that one segment of the market is growing much faster than the other (helpful hint: the one with the bigger number is growing more), and (stay with me here) growth in a market is not a decline.

Pigs fly! And Amazon releases sales info!

Here's some FASCINATING news: Amazon released a teeny, tiny bit of information about e-book sales! (Via PV.) OMG! This is especially exciting to the people in Hell, who also received a glass of ice water.

What did Amazon say? That e-book sales increased 70% over the past year!

So, here's the score so far on e-book growth in 2012:

Amazon: 70% increase

Publishers: 34% increase

Barnes & Noble: 13% increase

Just looooook at those numbers. Looooook at the big fat gaps in growth rates.

Look askance at any projection that relies on just one of those growth rates.

A good link about editors

Kris Rusch has a good post on editors--what kind you actually need, what kind you can probably replace with insightful beta readers. I've done a couple of posts on the subject, too. She talks about having a proofreader go over your layout after a copy editor goes over your manuscript--I've done fairly well by laying out my book first and then having a single person do both jobs at once. Saves money, anyway.

Progress report

It's raining today--hard enough that the roofers couldn't work, but not so hard as to create a lot of noise. So I figured I'd better record while I could. I recorded Chapter 7 of the Trang audiobook, the warning for Chapter 1, and a quick fix of a flub I had come across while looking for something else on Chapter 4. I also re-recorded enough of the flubs in Chapter 6 to divide it into two halves--the first half I can work on without re-recording, but the second half will have to wait for another quiet day, because I'm bushed.

There's a person in my Meetup group who does a lot of voice work, and she suggested that it's a good idea to stand while you read. I'd already found that it's easier to read chapters if the microphone is high and you have to sit up, so I thought that sounded like worthwhile advice and did that for Chapter 7 today. I don't know that it's actually going to make me louder--that pretty much is handled by input volume and compression--but it meant less restarts because the chair made noise, and I think it's easier to stay well-placed at the microphone that way.

The bad old days

The Passive Voice has this link to a post by a writer who wasted five years of his life and career with a literary agency, but who still thinks getting a literary agent is a really good idea.

(Think about that one. "I wasted five years of my life shooting heroin. You should totally try it--it's the best!" ETA: OK, now he's getting sucked into the PV comments and hopefully is beginning to realize that There Is Another Way. Run to the light, Scott! Run to the light!)

The thing that really makes me wince about his post is that he has a little pep talk about how writers should feel free to contact their agents about stuff:

[W]e writers usually are introverts, and the idea of bothering anyone (especially someone that promised to make us rich and famous), is just too nerve-racking an idea to consider.

What if I said something that ruined everything? What if I make them change their minds? Our creative minds will reel with horror possibilities that could all occur because of one simple phone call or e-mail.

OK. Do you know why people think that you risk total rejection every time you contact a traditional publisher or agent to ask what's going on?

Because it's true. Or at least it was when I was doing it.

How true was it? Well, when I was first submitting Trang, I submitted it to a large sci-fi publishing house that didn't require an agent. Thinking about it later, I decided that I didn't want to submit it to them after all--it was too niche for them. I knew that big publishing houses took forever, and I didn't feel like waiting years for what was basically guaranteed to be a form rejection. Under the unwritten rule of traditional publishing, I couldn't possibly submit my book to more than one publishing house at a time--only agents were allowed such a privilege. As a lowly author, I would need a rejection from this publishing house before I could submit Trang to another.

So I sent the publishing house a letter saying, I'd like to have a decision on my book.

I got my form rejection shortly thereafter.

I should note that my letter was perfectly polite--publishing is a small world, and I didn't want to get a reputation as a scary crank. But, as I knew it would be, a simple, polite request was treated with extreme prejudice, and I got my rejection.

There is so much wrong with that story, isn't there?

I seriously doubt anyone at that publishing house ever even read Trang--the letter was a lot shorter. But the letter nonetheless gave them something everyone in traditional publishing is looking for--a reason to reject a book. Remember, traditional publishing is no ordinary industry: It is an industry forged in an environment of scarcity. That makes it extremely risk-adverse.

Which is a huge problem for you the writer, since you basically are the risk. That's why you get treated like crap: Chances are, you're career kryptonite.

Why would you want that? Why? When I hear people say, "I finished my first book, and I'm sending it out to agents," I want to throw my body in between them and the danger, the way you would if a small child ran past you toward a busy street. I yammer on about how you'll be in a better position to negotiate if you self-publish first; what I'm thinking is, Nooooooo!!!!! Don't do it! Noooooo!!!!

As Laura Resnick writes in the PV comments:

The problem [with agents] is not specific individuals whom you can readily avoid by taking down their names.... The problem is the business model–and the sh*t the writers keep putting up with from agents as the “normal” s.o.p. of the biz....

Thoughts on targeting ads

As I mentioned, the latest Facebook ad campaign was less efficient than the one before--I had a lot of people clicking who didn't download the book, unlike the last time.

So, how did I target differently? And why do I think it was so much less efficient?

The last time, I targeted two groups: Science-fiction fans who liked stuff I thought was similar to mine, and Kindle owners. It will tell you how naturally adept I am at this that the group that I didn't think to target until the last minute and that I basically targeted by accident, the Kindle owners, responded the most to the ad.

This time around I targeted Kindle owners and many more science-fiction fans. I got many more responses from the sci-fi crowd. Unfortunately, as I've noted, overall that response was more clicks than downloads.

I can't determine which group responded which way, but I'm going to guess that the Kindle people did more of the downloading, and the sci-fi people did more of the looky-looing.

Why? Well, to my way of thinking, the average sci-fi fan is, you know, interested in science fiction. So when they hear of a new book, they go check it out.

How do they check it out? They click (and I pay).

Then once they get to the Amazon page, they see that, yeah, if you've got a Kindle, that book's free. But does Joe Sci-Fi Fan on Facebook actually own a Kindle? Maybe, but maybe not--he'd click anyway, because he's interested in sci-fi.

If Joe doesn't have a Kindle, well, then Trang is $13.99! Oy! That's a pretty penny for a book you've never heard of by an author you don't know! Maybe Joe should get a Kindle. Maybe not. Maybe next Christmas? He'll think it over. In the meantime, he's on to other things.

In contrast, Bobby the Kindle User on Facebooks (they are distant cousins, both members of the storied o'Facebook clan) definitely has a Kindle and is able to pick up that book.

What he's not going to do if he's not interested in that kind of book is click on the link. Period. There are a lot of free books on Amazon, and after an initial phase of gobbling up tons of free books, most Kindle users get way more selective--they realize that getting a bunch of free crap still leaves you with a bunch of crap.

In fact, that greater selectivity probably contributes to looky-looing from the Kindle users as well--Bobby likes sci-fi, decides to check the book out, and then looks at the EIGHTY BILLION unread sci-fi novels on his Kindle and says, Never mind.

But I do think that it's likely that most of the looky-loos came from the sci-fi side. I think the difference between the two campaigns supports that hypothesis, and logically it seems to make sense.

Looking ahead to when I make Trang free everywhere, the nice thing is that you can target different retail populations on Facebooks. I don't know how this works for other online advertising platforms, like Project Wonderful or Google AdWords, but Facebook's targeting is extremely precise. You name the group--Nook users, Smashwords fans, even Sony Reader users (both of them!)--and you can pick it out and market just to it.

Progress report

I finished editing Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook--uf. The sucker is almost 50 minutes long! I'm definitely going to have to split it into two for a podcast! Not shockingly, my reading toward the end of the chapter is mighty mumbly.

The roofers are coming tomorrow and will be here all week. Which is a very good thing, but it also means I'll be getting up at the crack of dawn and there's going to be a lot of ambient noise...oy. We'll see if anything gets done.