Good morning, friends and fans!
Welcome to a “Peek Into My Week”, a behind the scenes look into the (I hope) noteworthy events in my life – August 15, 2022!
Here are some things that happened in my life this past week:
News About Writing & Publishing: This Is The Current State Of Things
I have mostly good news for you this week – and lots of progress!
- My book titles which were published through Moon Books Publishing’s KDP account have finally been taken down. Far from being a setback, this is exactly what I needed in order to put them back up via my own KDP account!
- I restarted this process (begun in May this year) on Friday! I completed ten outstanding eBooks on Friday, four more on Saturday, and the new units have already appeared on my Amazon page!
- While I was at it (I know, I know – that’s the most dangerous phrase in the universe!) I also updated the manuscripts for all the books at Smashwords, because some of them still had old contact and social media links in them that no longer apply, and also a couple of minor changes. I’m happy to say that my years of doing all this myself have been a process of continuous self-improvement and quality control! It could take a little while for the new versions to pass through SW’s idiosyncratic and anal-retentive “vetting” system, but when they’re done, I’ll let you know!
- Bearing in mind that I have over 30 books, and that each of these needs to be reuploaded once for each format (eBook, paperback and hardcover), including manuscripts and covers which need to be reformatted for KDP, the process really is quite an enormous undertaking! In fact, it makes my head hurt!
- Aside from my parent’s books (5 in total) I’ve finished uploading the eBook versions of my books to my KDP account. Yesterday (on Sunday) I started uploading the paperback and hardcover versions of the Galaxii Series. For the most part, everything went unusually smoothly, until Sunday when I hit a snag with “Dead Beckoning“. True to form, KDP found an error somewhere while I was uploading the paperback version – who knows, perhaps the KDP hamster fell off the little wheel or something, but it simply doesn’t (or can’t) tell me what the error was. In the meantime I can’t continue with the process of finishing that particular book, so I continued with others while I await Amazon’s inevitably nonsensical, inane bots to give me a rubbish reply claiming it was all my fault. As a sci-fi author I love the notion of AI and robots – but in real life it’s really not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s a bloody menace!
- I didn’t hear from Darla this past week, but at her last update she was already busy recording “Static” for the first of the new audiobooks! I’m looking forward to hearing how that’s going!
I have to say that this past week has gone very well as far as writing and publishing stuff is concerned! I’m very optimistic about the future!
Other Stuff:
Kay and I had a quiet, chilly weekend spent keeping warm under the covers with the cats! There were just a few things of note this past week:
The Slamming Of Doors: Another Death In The Family
Just more than a month ago I mentioned that my Uncle had passed on. On Thursday I was notified that my aunt – yes, from the same part of the family, had also died. It was quite a shock, I can tell you, because this was my mom’s elder sister – the last of her siblings, who for all intents and purposes, was my godmother as a child. We were very close for most of my life, my aunt and I, and I was very fond of her. Of course nothing is ever perfect.
In 2015, about two years after my mom’s death, I was visiting my aunt – the last time I was invited round, she started delivering a Christian sermon at me. I told her that I was longer a Christian in a polite and restrained manner, but she went off at me about that so much that my uncle (the one who died earlier this year) had to step in and appeal to her to stop. But my aunt was like that – she always held a black-and-white view of everything – there was never room for any gray in the way she saw things. It was never the same between us again after that, and as a matter of fact I wasn’t invited around for braai’s or birthdays or the like again. Suddenly I was completely shut out. Whereas my birthdays were usually remembered via phone calls, these were either completely missed, or remembered late. I made the effort to call on a number of occasions, but didn’t feel like I wanted to be heard from. Calls, if there were any, were short and to the point – and rare. Over the succeeding seven years until her death, I heard from them less and less. I never even knew she was in hospital before the Whatsapp message arrived to inform me she’d died.
I shouldn’t really be hurt or surprised by this, but after my uncle’s death I’d hoped to hear about his memorial or funeral service, but in vain. I wasn’t notified at all – in fact, one day not so long ago I realized it had been over a month already, and that obviously, I hadn’t been invited and hadn’t been welcome. My aunt’s death for me signifies that final blow – the final slamming of the door that means I have no more ties to my mother’s side of the family. As in the case of my uncle, I do not expect to be notified about the coming memorial or funeral for my aunt either, but at least I was informed of her passing.
Let me tell you all something, my darlings, with absolute sincerity: Previously, in 2019, while attending another funeral for a different favorite aunt, I had decided that that would be the very last family funeral I would ever attend – even if I were invited! That experience had been an exercise in humiliation, contempt and disconnection for me, because of a mix of various reasons: my being transgender, being gay, or even for not being a Christian. This is not simply something new, but is the final culmination of a lifetime of being an outsider and the black-sheep child of a pair of black-sheep children! It’s the closing of a circle – and the end of a very old, very long, tiresome story.
At the last funeral in 2019, I was shunned, dead-named and misgendered by my cousins and made to feel like a total outsider at my aunt’s funeral. Fingers were pointed at me in conversation at the tea service, while voices were raised in laughter. I took note that nobody – not even the aunts or uncles or cousins who’d allegedly accepted me – corrected them or rose to my defense. My wife and I were left by ourselves and made to feel most unwelcome and awkward. I won’t put myself through that again – I deserve better treatment than that.
They say you can choose your friends, but not your family – but that’s just rubbish that people say to force the continuance of abusive relationships. I wholeheartedly disagree. You have chosen, and so shall I.
That’s all for this week!
With that, I’m all out of news. As always, I’ll keep you posted about any further developments.
Cheers!
All material copyright © Christina Engela, 2022.