Larger in concept because it means I would be working as a bookseller and not just as an author or publisher selling my own titles. Larger in concept because it means all the book-keeping and accounting problems that a business normally has would not just be for my own press, but also include several others. That is, if any other small press booksellers are interesting in taking part in the project! And there lies the crux of the problem: how many small or independent publishers would be willing to provide me – on a Sale or Return basis – with a small stock of their titles to sell to the public?

This may seem like a no-brainer for some: well, all of them! They all want to sell their stock as best they can! It isn’t that simple, though. A stock of ten books for each title offered on the new site would be quite a big investment for any small press. Fine, the books are out there, but I have no record in the bookselling business, I don’t have a ‘name’ as an independent bookseller. Would many be willing to trust a new name in the market with a fledgling web site in a foreign country? Or, rather than many, would any be willing?

The thing is, the most practical e-shop on offer allows one thousand items, and that is something my small press will not reach for many years to come, no matter how hard I may try! This ‘most practical’ solution offers all the invoicing and stock control built in. It has links to all major payment methods – from PayPal down to credit cards and direct debit – as well as the possibility to link all items to Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook and so on as separate shops with a far wider range, a wider audience. It allows multiple categories and sub-categories, a good range of delivery options and a large photo gallery with about 50 GB of dedicated space. And at a very competitive price, over what I have seen elsewhere, as well as a good track record with over 25,000 other users.

The shop, once initiated, would be mine and not a sub-domain kind of shop, which means full control, and that is important. It is already SEO tuned and with a built-in sitemap.

It is, to put it bluntly, very tempting indeed. But…

I need to find other people who would be interested in taking a piece of it, in offering their publications on the site right from the first launch day. No financial investment as such, the running costs are good and easy to handle and would be integrated into the commission I earn on each sale.

Is it a viable idea? What do you think?

Love & Kisses, Viki.

I mean, it’s all great fun and I do simply laugh at these poor fools for wasting their time, but I can’t be bothered with them any more. If they want to find another post, that’s fine by me, but that one allows no more comments. Perhaps I should close down comments on all posts after fourteen days or so: few people really read back and comment on the older stuff anyway and such a change would be put through automatically by the software on WordPress. Much better to have comments on my newer posts!

Love & Kisses, Viki.

Give it up.

I mean, yesterday I had over five hundred attempted spams on one single post here. Think about it, five hundred! And not a single one of them got through. The post in question does not have any comments on it whatsoever. Shouldn’t that be enough of a hint to the spammers that it isn’t working?

Clearly not, since the deluge continues, without any form of success whatsoever, today.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

By market I mean a platform through which the book can be sold, along with the other two titles awaiting publication and the future titles which are forming in my mind and on my computer at home.

I’ve had a look at a few already, with mixed success. Some simply don’t get back to you – well, that’s a good marketing strategy – and some are simply out of my league because of the costs involved. For example, if I want to market the book myself through Amazon – that is, without the need for an ISBN – just in Europe I must sell an absolute minimum of fifty copies each and every month. For a small press, for an author right at the start, that is a lot of copies. I have no delusions of grandeur here, my small book is not going to top any bestseller charts within the first week and pay for itself without promotion, and that makes such expenses too great at the moment.

So, what to do? Well, there are the usual routes of selling it through this blog and through the small press web site. They are going to happen any way. Set up a personal shop? Also a possibility, but for the price if you happen to be using a separate service. Market through smaller online booksellers? Also a possibility, if they get back to you with information!

The answer is, perhaps, a mixture of them all. A small shop linked to the publications web site, either direct on the server which I run myself, or as an add-on. An ISBN for all books: this is actually a must for anyone serious about publishing despite the amazing costs involved and the amount of work it involves. Occasional mentions on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus? Most certainly, but not too often because otherwise you lose people’s interest. Spam doesn’t just come through your inbox!

So, even though I have the first proof in my hands, there is still a long way to go, a lot to be done. Time to get at it!

Love & Kisses, Viki.

He seriously needs to upgrade his girlfriend. If she’s this plain in her prime, imagine her at 40!

Not that we need to expect anything else: attacks on David Karp and Marissa Mayer and, of course, President Obama and the Democrats.

The comments about Rachel Eakley, Karp’s long-time partner, are telling though. If a person suddenly has so much money, then they clearly need to change their entire life; move out of the small Manhattan apartment, go to the gym, get some sun, change the girlfriend.

Plz upgrade your girl…

Do younger, successful entrepreneurs really do such things? Does the monetary success go straight to their heads and make them change as a person? It certainly didn’t work as far as Mark Zuckerberg is concerned, who married his long-time partner shortly after the IPO for Facebook. His lifestyle may well have changed, but has he changed as a person, in his tastes and his loves? I don’t think so.

It’s so weird to see young girls dress so conservatively–in go to church dresses, which seem so anti feminist to me. I suppose they are feminist, but it’s like wearing a disguise to me. Ah well, they are young and hipster and I am not. Yeah, I understand irony and I get that it’s a choice to knit and cook and all…still,so weird to see these young women looking so bourgeois. My two cents.

But if you’ve nothing else to say about the business world, attack the people behind it, no matter who they may be and no matter what their connection with the firms involved.

He’s a lucky guy, not just for his business success but for his lady.

The problem is, too many people outside of the inner circle are short-sighted. They cannot view potential in the same way as someone who is right at the hub and has all the facts and figures at their fingertips. This short-sightedness is one of the reasons why so many people do not make it in the real world, why many businesses fail within the first few years or even months. People take a set formula and fail to move with the times, fail to upgrade their business according to the needs of their customers.

his woman will take 80% of that in 5 years time

And outsiders only see what has happened in the past; previous mistakes and errors of judgement. Anything from the time before Melissa Mayer has little or nothing to do with her potential for success as CEO of Yahoo! but will still be put firmly at her door. That she has a plan is clear, and that this expansion into micro-blogging could well be a very smart move is something that only she can justify or prove in the coming months.

Hope he marries his girlfriend and has some kids. Quit the shack-up. Good luck to them.

For the users on Tumblr itself it is a very different matter. Will a new owner change the site? Will all the adult blogs which make up a reasonably small part of the whole be banned? It is rare that any changes are seen as being good for the users themselves; sometimes this is proven – StumbleUpon is a good example – sometimes it is all hot air and people pushing others on with their fears and worries.

Cute girl. She looks like an actress.

For Tumblr it is still early days. That the site will be monetized is a given, Yahoo! cannot afford to run a site which doesn’t bring in some form of revenue. There will undoubtedly be links to the main news portal, cross-references, inserted news items and advertizing. Is that any different to any other major blogging site?

Prime examples are, of course, Facebook and Twitter. Both survive on advertising revenue, on collecting and evaluating users activity and selling the information on. With Twitter it may well be just the occasional insertion of a sponsored Tweet or profile, for Facebook it is a much more aggressive marketing campaign with the emphasis on micro-advertising. Such as could work on Tumblr too, if handled carefully.

You can get a much better girlfriend pal

But for the bulk of those commenting on the acquisition of Tumblr by Yahoo! spells doom, death and destruction. Nothing will ever be the way it was, nothing will be as good as it was. And here they fail to see the changes which have already taken place on Tumblr, changes which have enhanced the site and made it much more of a modern concern, rather than just a plain and simple micro-blogging platform. Tumblr has great potential for the future, no matter who owns it, providing that the owners remember it can only function, can only be profitable when the users remain happy with their interface, with their small place in the Internet world.

Twitter has succeeded, Facebook has succeeded, despite changes, despite advertising, despite competition. And Melissa Mayer is only the CEO of Yahoo!, she doesn’t make all the decisions on her own, there are other people involved who have vast market experience but remain outside the limelight.

And Rachel Eakley? At least the comments haven’t been as vicious as those published against so many other women who are faithful to their partners despite the potential of failure. Not everything needs to have a business taint, somethings are personal and love is definitely one of them.

• Viktoria Michaelis.

Photo Source: kindawarped

One of the last, not the last. But I shall explain that now.

You see, as you all know, lives change. We all move on and we all have wishes which change with time. I’m no different to anyone else in this respect: my life has moved a considerable distance away to what it was, back home in Kansas, and it will never go back that way. My mind has matured not just with the experiences of seeing and living life here in Europe, here in Germany, but also through the many books I have come into contact with – and my thanks are due here to those who have pointed me towards certain titles, authors and subjects and especially to those kind few who have sent me books to read – through the people I have come into contact with and through college life. It is, as anyone who has been through the same events will confirm, a revelation.

Photo Source: flavors

No matter what the outcome of my college course, which runs for a few more years yet, I see my future within the written word. I see it as being the creation of written works for publications and the closely connected work with other authors to get their works published. I see it as the setting up and running of my own small publishing company which will run alongside whatever it takes to help me earn a living. I am not so naive as to believe that my enterprise will make me a fortune, nor that I will be able to earn a living from writing and publishing in the first years. The bulk of writers, near to one hundred percent, in the book world do not earn their living from books alone, they have a day job too.

Photo Source: funtasticus

And then there is the slight problem of my being a mute. I already know many of the problems that this ‘disability’ brings with it, and I am more than aware of how limiting it makes any future career I may wish to pursue. The world is geared to the spoken word, no matter how far electronic communication makes inroads into our daily lives. Someone who cannot quickly grab a telephone receiver and communicate, clear up problems, make arrangements and so on, has little or no chance of success.

Photo Source: planetsuzy

There are too many people who cannot understand, who are unwilling to adapt. Rather, they push anything which might cause change in their own lives to one side and follow the old, trusted path which has always worked in the past.

As a writer I will not have these same problems. Sure, there will be times when I am expected to meet up with people, but that is something different. Living in Germany – no matter how long I may stay here – makes that side of things much easier: I am here and my potential audience, the English-speaking world, is there. No one in the States is going to call me up and tell me they’ve made an appointment at short notice which I can’t afford to meet. Even for a speaking person that wouldn’t be feasible.

Photo Source: bitpusher

But it is far more than that. In many ways I need to change the whole impression people gain of me and what I do. The crowd-funding failure – this one company – has shown me something I hadn’t thought of before. Rather than exploring the history of a company – or potential company – they go into the background of the individuals involved with it and their private lives, their private interests. The fact that I love women, that I am a lesbian, is a deciding factor here. The fact that I have not hidden this love, and my love for some of the most beautiful women to be seen as well as sharing images of them, is another down point in their minds. I am an adult in the worst sense of the word.

Not that any of the banks here, in Germany, are going to be so narrow-minded and stupid as to refuse me a banking account because it might ruin their perceived image, I don’t live in the States at the moment, so this prudish idiocy doesn’t come my way.

Photo Source: luxfon

So, as I say, this will be one of the last shares of erotic images of extreme beauty. Not the last, but most probably the last one where more flesh is shown than photographic quality. My inner self will always remain true to itself, though, no matter what. And I may well continue to write erotic fiction, but perhaps under a pen name. Everything else, as far as the public image is concerned, has to change. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used my real name right from the get-go, but that is a matter of experience more than anything else. We all learn as we go on, we all mature, we all see and adapt to the realities of the real world around us.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

Turn your sound on, sit back, and laugh over a little bit of good old man-hating!

Well, I found it amusing.

Love & Kisses, Viki

You will undoubtedly recall that I wrote a post quite a while back on SEO and used all the most popular search words from the previous month to fill it out. An interesting experiment, I thought, but not quite what I had anticipated. The post dived. Despite the fact that pretty much the same search queries are being used and showing up on my Dashboard, this post hasn’t been the one being hit. It remains by the usual culprits: collections of beautiful women; a few of my erotic writings; popular but short-lived commentaries on recent events.

And the most popular post for comments? Well, if you look at the post (I Knew It! from May 1), you will see that there is not a single comment there. So how can this post be the most popular post for comments – there are 2114 comments on this blog at the moment – when not a single one shows up there?

The answer is simple: it is a spammer’s paradise post! Every single SEO word that spammers appear to use must be contained in that one post. Either that, or spammers use their preformatted text as a search criteria when trying to find where to send their next wave of crap. The current major promotion is clothing sites with TLDs of France and Italy, and it looks like the work of one very sad person – or automated software – which has signed into the page and is just adding comment after comment without leaving the page. And every single one of those comment is being picked up by Akismet and automatically thrown into the spam bucket for deletion. Nearly four hundred today. On this one post.

During the writing of this post, right now, there are five new ones.

Well, I guess some people have plenty of time on their hands and absolutely no life whatsoever.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

That, however, is obviously not the case as she clearly indicates in a post on her blog. She has decided to pull the book from publication, at least as far as the eBook version is concerned.

And why?

Apparently a few people have posted negative criticism of her work. There are actually people out there in the real live world who do not appreciate her amazing skills! People who do not recognize her talent or, even worse perhaps, do not understand what it is she is trying to say with her work.

This is, as we all know, highly unusual. Every single book ever published has always been received with acclaim and produced revelations in the mind of its readers which have changed their lives, lightened their path, made them into better people. No one has ever, ever been subjected to rudeness or vilification or, going back through history, been banned from their home town, sent into exile or burned at the stake. No one has ever gathered to destroy books which their government doesn’t agree with.

Getting back to reality: of course there are always going to be books which some people do not agree with; there are always going to be stories which some people cannot understand; there are always going to be jokes which have to be explained. The job of an author is to write, that’s what they are there for and that’s what they wish to do with their lives. Some do it well, some not so well. Some deserve to land on the slush pile and a very small number are worthy of the laurels as a good or even a great writer. But not every one. Competition in the book world is very high indeed, only a few authors make it onto the bestseller lists, and even fewer stay there for any great length of time.

Books are published and sent out to reviewers specifically to be reviewed with no prior knowledge of what a reviewer will write, or whether a review will appear at all. With our Internet world authors have to accept that every single Tom, Dick or Harriet can write a review on a published work and have that review published; many if not most of the online bookselling services almost demand that readers give their opinions on what they’ve bought, what they’ve read.

If you can’t take the criticism… Critical acclaim is good, but the bad reviews, the ones which pick up mistakes or errors of fact (or possibility!) are also good. They cleanse the author of the pride which makes them write rubbish. They force the author to concentrate on their work more, to learn and to improve. The next work should always be better than the last one, always. If it isn’t, well, readers simply move on to a new author, a new work.

I wrote a few days ago about one author who has taken the negative criticisms and turned them to his own advantage, using them as a form of further publicity. Do people want to see what all the fuss is about? Of course they do! They want the chance to make their own decisions, to see whether a negative – or a positive – criticism has been earned. Not that everyone is going to rush out and buy a copy of that book which has been slated, but they do listen a little bit more, they do show an interest. The name of an author is printed on their minds for future reference.

And if we all reacted in such a way to negative criticism? I don’t think that there would be a single book left on the shelves. Every single published work has received negative comments. Every single one. No exceptions.

It’s not the author’s responsibility to tell a reader what they should see or understand when reading. It is their responsibility to put a story across in such a way that it can be understood, that an image is built up in their minds, that the story comes across and makes them think. Perhaps think is going a little far in some cases, but a book is there to take the reader out of their own real world and place them in another. Whether they agree with what they read is another matter entirely, but not the author’s problem. It is a highly individual thing, and no author is ever going to be able to tell every single reader what they should experience whilst reading. Nor should they try.

A hissy fit? Most certainly. Is the author right? Most certainly not.

• Viktoria Michaelis.

cookery programs.

Now, can someone explain to me how you hear a perfect trifle, even when you’ve got a television?

Love & Kisses, Viki.

I must admit, I have been a little bit lazy recently. I have relied on my spellchecker a few times and, reading back over an article or post later, after it has been published, I’ve found one or two words which are completely wrong. This is not a good thing! Not the finding of the words, but the fact that I haven’t bothered to check what has been written and make sure that no errors have crept in.

We all do it: we write something quickly and try to get it out to the wide world of the Internet as quickly as possible; we make a spontaneous comment on something which is happening right now – my post on the Eurovision contest last night is one example – and concentrate more on the overall content and being the first to write, the first to make an observation. Actually, trying to be the first is something equally silly because no matter how quick you may be it is going to take time before anyone gets to see what you’ve written anyway.

And with my future plans which involve care and attention to detail, especially when it comes to spelling, grammar and layout in a short story designed for publication in print, this is deadly. When you have a story of, say, eighteen thousand words and have already committed it to print, already moved it to the next stage in the publishing process, correctly errors can be a very costly procedure.

So I guess I’ll just have to slow down a touch, have to learn a little bit more patience, practice a little more care and do the job properly the first time and, above all, not rely either on my spellchecker or those little red lines which appear under a word when the software recognizes it as false.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

But it is running on Twitter with up-to-the-second appraisals, and almost impossible not to catch a glimpse of as a result.

In fact, reading it on Twitter is a little bit like listening to someone cooking a souffle on the radio, another Tweet I caught recently!

You try to build up something of a picture of what is happening, but it doesn’t quite work that way. Or the picture that you do manage to conjure up isn’t anything like what reality must be.

There is too much of a mix of visuals being created here!

And that, believe me, is a very good reason for not watching the thing, just following the various conversations as they unfold. The imagined is much better, I am sure, than the reality.

Although there are perhaps one or two scenes which might be interesting in real life, I’m not sure I want to see anyone trying not to win such a competition.

And some visuals are a little bit too graphic.

Clear cut but….

too graphic.

I’ll pass on that one too.

Perhaps a lack of dancers will help them, judging by the other comments! And this is why television will never be able to kill the art of reading books.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

You can check the comments from others alongside the article yourself, I shall merely make this comment: Physician, heal thyself!

The built-in WordPress spellchecker does not accept WordPress either.

[Edit: all that said, I have had to put the lowercase p in parenthesis because when published it is automatically corrected! One for you WordPress!]

Love & Kisses, Viki.

and a few people have decided to live up to expectations!

Abuse takes many different forms: mild through to vicious and obscene; mental through to physical. To invite abuse in normal circumstances is not something many people would consider, and they’d be right. This, however, is a different situation: all press is good press, all publicity is good publicity.

And there are a few positive comments appearing on his timeline, perhaps even a few – in both directions – which he hasn’t managed to catch because the person Tweeting wasn’t brave enough, or intelligent, as you will – to link their comment direct to his Tweeter name.

You have to remember, he has invited these comments, so perhaps a few are made up too just to get a link, a reTweet or even a rise from him. The latter isn’t likely to happen, Niven has remained remarkably calm and, clearly, has gained a little bit of pleasure from the whole thing.

Imagine, though, what it is like for your average Joe / Jolene or even for those celebrities out there with Twitter accounts who haven’t invited such comments, who come across them completely unprepared? I mentioned it a few days ago – in Nastiness – and the fact that I’d seen four videos on YouTube where the celebrities actually read out one or more abusive Tweets people had sent them. This is people that they don’t know, people they probably will never want to know either. Ordinary people from all walks of life abusing someone else because they feel they have a certain  Right to do so, a certain level of anonymity.

And then there are those who cannot restrict themselves just to the Internet; those who are personally abusive in a more intimate way. Those who know where a person lives, or are prepared to take advantage of a group thing and attack a youngster of twelve or fifteen years. Yes, those people. We’ve all heard about it, we’ve all seen it at some time or another, perhaps just on the television, perhaps personally, direct at us. At you and me.

Some people can’t take it as being just humor, can’t turn it to their best advantage. Some people really do take it personally and it does much more than just ruin their day.

Good on John Niven for his stance, for his maturity. I wish many more people could see the other side of the coin though, and help to stop such abuses.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

I don’t think there can be a serious question about Dan Brown, though. For my part I shall be waiting for Inferno to come out as a film, the writing style is so much better! What did someone comment on recently? Oh yes:

He answered the telephone with one of his two hands.

Real quote or just making fun?

Love & Kisses, Viki.

Photo Source: brokendollmodels

Especially if you happen to have looks and a figure similar to Krista Dawn!

Just sayin’!!

Love & Kisses, Viki.

Now, I can handle refusals without any problem, and this one is no different but for a few small points. Firstly, and very obvious, it took so long for anyone at the company to get back to me. Two messages through the so-called ‘support’ system remain unanswered. A promised ‘deeper’ mail ‘tomorrow’ took several days (nine) and only came after I contacted the company again.

The reason for the refusal? Hard to tell really, because it sounds either like a sort of ‘we can’t be bothered and the law backs us up here’ excuse, or personal homophobia. My Publications company, not linked to this blog, is unacceptable because of feelings against lesbians and gays where they – the crowd-funding site – are. Here we can note that my company has nothing to do with erotic literature and no plans to publish any form of erotic literature, straight or otherwise, on the books. So I guess that’s where the feeling it might be plain homophobia comes into play: could it be me? Could it be the fact that I am a lesbian stepping out into a business world still conceived – and undoubtedly wished for by many – as a male domain?

I don’t know and, to be honest, it makes no difference to me. I’ve added a third title – no erotic here! – to the list of publications due this year: a short story called A New Beginning and we’re working on another right now. Our funds are limited but we’ll get by.

The present Dalai Lama said:

It is worth remembering that the time of greatest gain in terms of wisdom and inner strength is often that of greatest difficulty

and that can be our motto for the coming months.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

However, it might be a good idea if some of these ‘people’ out there first take a look at who they or contacting or, as in this case, what.

Obviously a very popular offer, judging by the number of people who’ve either passed it on to their friends or marked it as one of the favorites!

I wonder what the person sending the message would have said, or done, had their offer been accepted?

Love & Kisses, Viki.

Enjoy!

Love & Kisses, Viki.

As to the other crowd-funding attempt, which hasn’t appeared anywhere as yet, I think I can forget that one too. A maximum time of sixty days to run the campaign online and the time starts ticking as soon as you hit Submit. One question sent to the customer service which has never been answered. One answer by e-mail promising more information ‘in the morning’ which has never been followed up on. Time left: forty-eight days. The campaign is still awaiting approval. I can neither amend the run date, nor the contents, nor discontinue it. It’s just sitting there waiting for someone to take five minutes to look at it, to make a decision.

As with all things, a person’s patience has to have limits. I think mine is at about twelve days for this campaign. It’s a part of my history now, a thing of the past. In the next few days I will remove the failed campaign from this site and from my publications site and we’ll go it alone. Seventy Euro is better than nothing, I guess. At least my plea for help with the stolen laptop gained some attention, and some more than welcome assistance.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

And that means research on the Internet as well as contacting other people who have knowledge in certain areas. Receiving replies from them, often something which doesn’t happen is, therefore, something of a pleasure. I wish a few more people out there in the real world would take a moment just to pen a quick reply to a query with an answer…

Love & Kisses, Viki.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

I mainly pick out Tweets which have something to do with the things I am interested in, although now and then a really interesting one catches my eye and I go look for more. The self-shot reference here is quite clear: how many times have I written about people taking photographs of themselves? And how many times have I wished they’d reacted in just the same way and simply hit delete rather than send! Sadly not everyone has good taste, especially when it comes to images of themselves…

Also something that I can relate to! It’s a bit like that perfect reply to a comment from someone else, it always comes to mind far too late. Ideas, though, come mainly at the most inconvenient times, as if your mind wants to be inconsiderate and throw you off. In the shower, on the bus, at three in the morning, they are all there, and always when the idea is good, but the circumstances not. Thus, as I have often said, my notebook. Although, in the shower, well, it doesn’t work quite as well as it might…

Personally I get the feeling that someone selling something is far more of a pain than life itself. Especially when that someone sends mail through the post or clogs up my inbox with absolute rubbish. Is there some way to tell the world that I am not interested in anything to do with male potency or television? Apparently there is a list you can put yourself on which should stop commercial spam, but I’ve heard it doesn’t work. Another way for those less scrupulous beings to get addresses.

Oh, everybody believes they are somebody. It’s part of our make-up, part of the way we are brought up right from kindergarten through college. If you want to be someone you have to do this and that and everything else. And be good at it, if not perfect. Yes, Twitter fulfills a need for those with nothing else and can bring real(ish) online friendships and conversation, perhaps a little bit of happiness. But it is soon taken over by the need to have a big Follower list. People on Twitter with a small number of followers are still nobody. Mind you, people with a big list are usually also still nobody in real life. Sometimes that is a good thing.

The truth of real life. Little thoughts which bring a smile to our faces, a wry smile at that.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

Now, this may seem strange, but there is method. You see, when people know you, they tend to come and greet you or try to start some form of a conversation. After all, you’re only writing something and it can’t be that hard to get back into whatever it is that you are writing, can it?

It’s the same with reading. How difficult can it be to get back into the world you have immersed yourself in when someone brings you back – well intentioned, I am sure – to this one?

I have my favorite writing and reading places, and they are all where I am not really known, where I can work in peace and quiet, without the fear of being interrupted, without losing the thread of what I am working on. Because people just do not understand the need to be totally inside a different world when you are creating it, when you are living it in a book.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

I’ve been lucky today, broken the first five hundred words for a new short story and that makes me feel good.

I could have gone out into the sun all day today, aside from a short shower which put a dampener on everyone else’s plans, sat around in the small garden and read a book, or joined in with the bicycle rally and seen more of the local area. None of these things. Today is a holiday in Germany – May is packed with them – and tomorrow a free day too. So I am half listening to the birds outside, half seeing the beautiful blossom on trees outside my window all through one eye. My other one is squarely fixed on the computer, on the words as they form and take their place.

Now and then I go back and re-read, change, correct, edit. I prefer working that way. Write a few hundred words, then go back and revise. Not the only revision I do, far from it. Everything I write gets a good revision every single time I turn the computer back on, every single time I call up the work in progress. New ideas come at the spur of the moment, often when I am doing something else, and need to be added, refined, made to fit with the whole. In the middle of the night – she hates this – I sometimes wake up with a new idea for a small portion of text, or a better idea for something which has already been committed to the computer’s memory.

This is the ideal. Writing, creating, enjoying the feel of the words, the images they create in my mind.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

Love & Kisses, Viki

Losing such a means of communication is more than just a loss, it is heartbreaking at the same time. Not because of what is on the laptop – which I can write off forever, despite a password protector for logging in – since everything was backed up and saved elsewhere, but because of the awkwardness of going back to a medieval means of ‘talking’. It is the problem of not being instantly in touch when I’m away from home.

Fine, cell phone, I can still message. I can still write something on my cell and show it to people, but I can’t write, I can’t work that way. It’s a disability which is hardly to explain then a lack of speech.

So now, with a little bit of help, I am getting myself together and looking for a replacement. The same model? Possibly: it was comfortable to carry around and easy to use. Is it still available? I don’t know. If not there are plenty of others on the market. I just wish whoever has it, wherever they are in Bremen, gains as much joy and good usage as I did.

And then, once they’ve had all that, may they burn in their own personal hell, or something!

Love & Kisses, Viki.

Let me give you an example. I came across a site through Twitter, no personal contact on my part or theirs, just a reference from someone directly involved. Having exhausted the number of sites easily found, I wandered over to take a look. And, on the surface it looked good, successful campaigns, a good looking front page layout and so on. Fine, no pay-as-you-go, but that isn’t of great importance when your fundraising target is relatively small. That, however, was it.

The problems began with trying to sign up. Fill out a simple box with your name and another with your e-mail and you’re in. Not a bit of it. I did this and remained at exactly the same page with no response on the Internet site or through e-mail. Am I signed up or not?

Frustrated I tried to sign in, even though I hadn’t given them a password suggestion, and it worked. So, first thing to do is set a password, logical. Logical but impossible. To change your password, which you’ve never entered and which has never been issued, you need to enter your old password, and that means that you cannot do it as you’ve never been issued with an ‘old’ password. So, log-out and try logging in again. This time the log-in without a password doesn’t work, obviously, put there is a ‘forgotten password’ link. And it works, so I had my first contact with the web site and was able to follow the link and set a ‘new’ password. I also discovered that I could log in through Facebook, using the Facebook mail address I have, but that wasn’t on offer initially and I haven’t been able to find it since.

Set up a campaign. Also easy, on the surface, but for the fact that ‘edit’ doesn’t work, although it is there, you have to go through ‘manage’. It is only, as far as addresses are concerned, geared up to US addresses, but will accept anything you put in providing there is a State included. Enter all the details of the fund raiser and upload photographs – the profile one works, the main header doesn’t. Fine, click further and see what happens.

The fund-raiser isn’t published, you have to do that as an extra task. Not a problem, but I can look at the page in draft mode. One section is missing: above the description is a field to tell people why they should donate, but nothing on the ‘manage’ or non-existent ‘edit’ page to update this section. So it has to be left, and it doesn’t remain blank, there is a silly text there saying that you should enter your text, but not telling you where or how.

Let’s suppose that I really go through with this: how do I receive payments? Direct to my bank account on the fifteenth of the following month, according to the Help section. Good, but where do I enter my bank account details? There is no form, nothing.

In theory there is also strict verification of all those who want to raise funds, but no automatic mail to check my e-mail address is real, the first and most basic check any web site performs. My campaign is, however, published and live, in theory.

Well, not quite. It may appear to be so, and the time may be running down to the end date, and I may be able to look at it through a search for one of the keywords in the title, but it isn’t on the (very badly laid out) feature pages. At all. So I guess that it hasn’t been published, even though I can find it when I am not logged in. Is this manually updated during office hours? Help doesn’t help at all. In fact, Help has very little of real help, despite a ‘troubleshooting’ section. How about using Chat Help?

Chat Help is a wonderful thing. You get connected to a live person and they answer your questions immediately. If there is no one there, the chat tells you so, for example outside of office hours. Not this one: you get connected and your question is highlighted and it tells you someone will be there soon. Except that no one is there, the Chat Help runs and is connected, but there is no one home. Hello? How about turning it off when the office is closed?

Crowd-funding is a wonderful and useful thing, geared up for the masses who have no other option and for those who are prepared to help with small amounts. There are, however, a whole mess of amateurs out there, ones only interested in making money from fees and providing no service whatsoever. Could this be such a case? I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll get a confirmation mail, at the very least for creation of the account or to check the existence of my mail address, sometime over the next week. I’m not holding my breath, though; I suspect anyone who donates their hard-earned cash has lost it.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

Apparently I’ve won two million British pounds, which is interesting because the mail is written in German and comes from an Italian address and, of course, I’ve never, ever entered my e-mail address for any lottery or other scam.

All I have to do is send out all of my personal details (why did they only put sex in capitals?) and they will send me the money. And everyone knows that all of your personal details are absolutely vital for collecting your winnings: vital for the scammer, of course, who can then get in touch with you in person and push the scam further while selling your personalized details to others.

Under German law the sender of the mail is required to pay me: it is a clear winner with the sum included and, therefore, a contractual obligation to pay. But I don’t think that I can be bothered going through all the hassle of finding this scammer. I’d rather have them in my trash can where they belong.

Love & Kisses, Viki.

As explanation for the damage on his car, the driver told police he had driven against a tree in order to test the airbags.

Tests showed that he hadn’t taken any drugs and he also hadn’t been drinking. Further tests, according to the local newspaper, will now be conducted to see whether he is psychologically suitable to even drive a car.

It takes all sorts, I guess, but even so, testing airbags by driving against a tree? This brings new meaning to Crash Test Dummy!

Love & Kisses, Viki.