I spent most of yesterday getting some work done. Actually, I got a lot of work done. At least by the end of the day, I felt like I had been working.
Of course my work never involves any kind of physical labor if there is any way at all to avoid it. And since I’ve had almost 60 years to perfect the art of shirking real work, I’m pretty darn good at it! 🙂
After starting the morning with the usual round of checking and reading e-mail, reading my favorite RV blogs, and checking my stats on Amazon to see if I’d sold anything overnight, I spent a couple of hours sorting through photos on my hard drive and deleting a bunch of them. When I’m putting the Gypsy Journal together I convert the color photos into gray scale (black and white) and save a copy in what is known as TIFF format to use on the interior pages of the paper. But I don’t need those photos for anything else, since I keep the original color photos also, and they begin to add up. So ever so often I go through and delete them.
About the time I was finishing up with that, Greg came over to visit for a while and adjusted a couple of settings on my new laptop computer to make publishing the blog easier. The new computer has Windows 7 and all I will use it for is the blog, since WordPress does not have a version I can use on my iMac. The version of WordPress on the new computer is newer than the one I have on my old Dell desktop and there were just enough differences that I couldn’t figure them out. Since Greg uses the newer version, he was able to show me what I needed to know.
After Greg left I started formatting a new travel book, Overlooked Arizona, which is 37 stories about places to see in the Grand Canyon State that have appeared in the Gypsy Journal over the years. I worked on that the rest of the day, knocking off about 5 o’clock so we could have dinner at a place in Batesville that somebody had told Greg and Jan about, called Acapulco Mexican Restaurant. It’s hard to find good Mexican food in the Midwest, but this place is a winner. Miss Terry said it was even better than El Maguey in Elkhart. We timed our arrival just right, because we were shown right to a table when we arrived, but by the time we finished our meal there were people lined up waiting.
Back home I picked up where I left off on the new book, and by the time I had knocked off about 11:30 PM all I had left to do was insert hyperlinks into the table of contents to make it searchable as an e-book. Once I get that done and design a cover, I’ll upload it to Amazon’s Kindle bookstore.
Speaking of e-books and tables of contents; while we were in Celina for our rally, John Huggins from Living The RV Dream and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour showed me how to insert a searchable table of contents into Overlooked Florida, which I published a few weeks ago. For some reason it wouldn’t work on Amazon, and after going back and forth with their tech support for a while, they acknowledged that it was probably on their end. They did get it resolved, because yesterday I got an e-mail saying that it had gone live with the table of contents added. If you already bought a copy of the book, you should be getting something from Amazon in a week or two to tell you how to download a free revised copy.
It looks like today will be another exploring adventure for us. We plan to drive to Dayton and check out the Air Force Museum if the weather cooperates. But as I write this, about midnight, the rain is really pouring down. So we will wait and see what the morning brings.
Thought For The Day – The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary. – Vince Lombardi
Nick Russell
World-Famous, New York Times Best Selling Author, and All-Around Nice Guy!
Luke’s military service and his career as a civilian with the Department of Defense were all with the Air Force. We have visited many, many military museums in our RV travels and Dayton ranks among the best.
BTW, I think the Air Force just celebrated a milestone birthday this week. (It’s late so someone else can research it.)
— CoolJudy
(Writing from Kirtland AFB FamCamp in Albuquerque, NM.)
Don’t miss the AF museum Nick! The C-141 66-0141, Hanoi Taxi is there. I have about 7500 hours in the 141 as a flight engineer. During Operation Homecoming, I was in maintenance stationed at Clark AB, PI and was on the block-in crew when that airplane returned from Hanoi with the first POW’s. I watched the off-loading standing under the left wing.
Looking forward to your new book about Ariona and having a table of contents for my Florida book. I’m really enjoying re-reading the Big Lake series. As to you being lazy I really doubt that. You are lucky that you have a job you enjoy doing and are very good at. Please tell Miss Terry that her spinach recipe brought back memories of my uncle as that is how he taught his nieces to make it. Have a super day!!
Marilu
Good Morning Nick,
Tell Greg thanks for us ..he got rid of the error 404 stuff that has been on your blog (for me, anyway) for a couple of weeks…I thought it was the tengo connection but it’s gone this morning.
Nick, I hope this “Overlooked … ” book series takes off. I know myself, and even if I had every issue of the Gypsy Journal, (and Motor Home and… and… ) I could never find the really cool stories when I wanted to. That’s why I’m not subscribed to travel magazines as the the information can’t be easily collected and used when needed. Maybe I’d have time to read your mystery series if I had your “Overlooked” series and was not researching so much on where we are going next – grin…
While tooling along the interstate, I was thinking about how you could turn your archives into more usable and valuable resources… nothing I thought about beats these targeted ebooks which is a perfect idea. Now that you are not doing a rally, is it possible that we might see more “Overlooked” books? You have loads of knowledge that can be shared !
You might become the Rick Steves of the RV roads…that’s our “gold standard” for travel info in Europe. Advice on the must-sees, but also tidbits on lots of things the normal tourist will miss.
There’s your new opportunity !
PS -after AZ, could you do CA, OR, and WA for us ? No rush, plenty of time.. we won’t need them until next spring :-))
I’ll jump right on that Breck. I should have time to whip them out before breakfast. 🙂
If these two sell well, I do plan to do more. I have hundreds of stores from past issues that can be recycled and used again this way.
The AF museum is totally awesome. Please allow plenty of time to see it. If you have a military ID card you do not have to wait to take the tour of the second half for the tour. We took two days to do the museum and it was worth the time. Just be safe on the journey to and from.
Don’t forget the bus ride onto the base (it’s free) to see the experimental planes and the former Air Force One planes. They weren’t as plush as you might think. Very crowded.
JC
I agree with Breck. I have been trying to save all my old copies of the Journal for when we hit the road full-time (or at least half-time) but realize how hard it would be to access the relevant articles when needed. I think the “Overlooked” series is a great idea. I hope itis profitable enough for you to pursue. I for one will buy all that you publish. Keep up the good work!
I’ve recently begun reading your blog and really enjoy it. I see from your posts regarding book publishing that you publish through Amazon. Are your books available anywhere else for those of us who do not use the Kindle? (I own a Nook, which uses the ePub e-book format.) Although I am not all that interested in Florida, the Overlooked Arizona book sounds like one I might be interested in, especially since I do not have all of the back issues in which these stories appeared.
One other question: to what extent are these stories updated? I’m assuming that some of these pieces appeared more than a couple of years ago. I’m further assuming that some of the information could have changed in the interval. Of course, I could be wrong in each assumption, making me an assumption without the “umption”. 🙂
Walt, many of my books are available on http://www.smashwords.com for Nook owners. The stories are as updated as possible before the books are published, but things like hours of operation or entry fees could change at any time.