(A mailbox in my neighborhood)
I couldn’t remember how long we’ve been locked down, so I looked it up. It has been since the middle of March. I recall Anita and I picking up corned beef and cabbage for St. Patty’s Day. We got it from one of our favorite local restaurants. When we went inside to pickup our food, tables were stacked along the side of the room and the ones that remained on the restaurant floor were all socially distanced. There were only a few diners at those tables. The whole place seemed kind of glum. That was when the impact of what was going to follow hit home for us. By the way, the corned and cabbage dinner was delicious; the corned beef so tender we cut it with our forks.
At the time, I was lucky to be in the final stages of finishing and working on the publishing of my new novel The Hanalei House. It seemed to take a lot longer than I wanted it to take. Amazon’s shipments of my proof copies took forever to receive. I say I was lucky because since the book’s publication I have found it hard to write, concentrate, and focus on a subject to write about. Maybe, it’s a form of PTSD. I’ve heard from other writer friends who have experienced the same thing.
There’s an awful lot of things going on in the world, but for me, writing about them seems redundant and who wants to hear what I think about the current events. I’ll just say I’m deeply moved by the pandemic, the subsequent quarantine/lockdown, the impending financial crisis, the president, and racial disharmony and unrest.
This is the most consistent writing I have been able to do. I guess I’m doing well. I’m at a half a page so far.
Since my new novel’s publication, I’ve managed to get the word out about the new book. I’ve been trying out Amazon advertising to sell books. I’m also looking into Facebook ads. They don’t seem as difficult to use and to understand how they work. So I’ll experiment with them. I miss being able to do readings at libraries, bookstores, and book clubs. Online marketing and word-of-mouth is about the only way to reach reader’s right now. I’ve done some readings from my new book and Unassisted Living. You can find them on YouTube on the Bob Puglisi Channel. You can also listen to an excerpt from The Hanalei House at the following link and scroll down to Videos:
I’d also like to mention that I have updated my website www.bobpuglisi.com to include the new novel. Last year, I created the website using Wix and have hosted the site on Wix. It looked great on my laptop but when I looked at it on a mobile device there was a discrepancy. One of my menu items, didn’t work. I could live with that because you could just scroll down to that portion of the website. Wix support told me there were inconsistencies between laptop and mobile devices. They said, they’d let me know when that is fixed.
A year has gone by and it hasn’t been fixed. Now, when I added my new book the problems compounded. Several other things didn’t work right, looked different, and weren’t carried over from the laptop version. When I called Wix for help, I got the same answer: things don’t look the same on a mobile device. If you are familiar with Wix for developing websites, they have trouble handling “Anchors” for mobile devices. Most work but some don’t. A friend in IT told me that it’s pretty common for software on mobile devices.
Yesterday, I revamped the site with workarounds to circumvent the problems. I’m not particularly happy about how I had to fix it, but I didn’t want to have the mobile version work differently than the laptop version.
I hope I didn’t completely bore you. I’ll try to end on an upbeat note. Retail businesses have started to re-open in Santa Fe. You can dine inside our local restaurants at 50% capacity. We still have to wear masks in public except when you eat or exercise.
I turned 75 this week. I’m not happy about it but at least I’m healthy and active. Then again, we can probably write off this entire year because of the lockdown so I will remain 74 for another year. I share my birthday on June 1st with Marilyn Monroe. Yes, we have the same birthday.
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Stay well and stay safe.