BibliophileBullpen

Thank god for Ramen eh?  On those oft times when the bank accounts echo like the TinMan’s chest and you are just waiting around for someone to actually PLACE an order.  Ten cents a bag Ramen provides that warm comforting  that at least you won’t starve feeling.  And before you even START, i just use the noodles and toss away the flavor packet.  I don’t need the salt, I prefer whipping up a broth from bottled noodle sauce, lime juice and sesame oil.

So far this week, I have managed to update several websites that are not my own and edited text that is also not my own, and started publishing a cookbook that is. . .not my own and none of these things will pay me the price of a packet of peanuts ya dig  and it’s not even Friday yet.

What I really could use right now is a book shopping trip.  I miss trolling for books every day, now that the majority of them are rather worthless.

i want a nickel for every hour i have ever spent waiting around for the plowguy. doesn’t really matter too much, I wouldn’t be going anywhere anyway. just moving piles of paper from one side of the desk to the other.

I opened this file about 4 hours ago when i sat down. I kept saying, lets do it when I am done all the other work…but the trouble is the other work is never done. there is always more email to answer, more book keeping to do, more website maintenance. I just had to stop and process a book order…YEAH, I know a BOOK order? when’s the last time i sold one of those? I do have some paranoia about it. I think this is the customer who set off all my alarm bells last week, I may have to actually ship this book certified. Though that won’t help me if they decide to cancel their payment. Sometimes you just get a bad feeling you know? but alas it’s an amount I can’t turn my nose up at just yet. So I will cross my fingers and ship – assume benign intent.

On the bright side i got hired to actually BUILD a website the other day, I am still juggling a lot of non profit work….i mean A LOT, so it’s nice when i can actually wrest some money out of the machine. Now if the customer would only give me the rest of the data, I could get finished and get paid,

I am also trying to put together a community cookbook for the rescue group, my labors to be paid for at a later date of course, but at this moment it’s like I am pulling a steam engine with my teeth.

Sicpress is doing intermittently poorly, every so often there will be a spike in sales, usually from someone doing it a good turn and talking it up somewhere on the net. Then I have to scramble to fill a bunch of orders with product I have yet to restock. I make just enough money from it to keep going, but not enough to live on.

There is a rumor of a bartending job that i have to chase down, and that online mag thing is still in limbo..and lets not forget Uncle Sam…if the census people take me on again it won’t be until April just in time for it to all go right back into Uncle Sam’s pocket book.

I get the feeling i need to write another book…what can i get you all to buy? porn? nah..tried that i can’t write porn..i get bored after 2 pages and start looking for food. hey i got it…i could write an entire book about how to avoid writing.

Sorry i wigged out so abruptly…i really HAVE been busy I swear.   I just finished editing a friends magazine article and i have  a review to write of a new comedy club in town.  no, neither are paying jobs, but my buddy and I are working on a proposal for her editor that MAY net me an online content editor’s job  so cross your fingers and your friends fingers and anything else laying around.

And last week i WAS wicked sick, what started as a chest cold quickly became bronchitis and while i was laying in bed highly doped to the gills the only thing I felt like doing online was shopping.  An aloha shirt and a tiki mug came in the mail and i have no actually memory of buying them.  So tonight I made my first zombie….i don’t really think i used enough ice and definitely not enough types of rum. BTW  i whole heartily recommend come midwinter february bluesdays…..everyone get your tiki on. It’s silly and loud and fake as a Kardashian implant, but it’s fucking february and everything in new england is gray….the sky is gray, and everything you can see including the cars and snow banks is covered with a crust of salted sand. PUT ON A LOUD SHIRT AND FILL A TALL GLASS WITH FIREWATER AND FRUIT DAMN YOU.

many of us spend a lot of time whining about how the internet has ruined bookselling (i should know, I have done quite a bit of it myself) and that there’s no way mere mortal bookselling can compete with the all knowing all powerful all reaching internet.  and meanwhile in some booksellers are quietly getting on with the business of selling books.

I have in hand Howard Prouty’s new catalog Skirts, in Jackets: a couple of hundred books BY – About – for and sometimes against Women.”  from ReadInk: which is heartbreaking, there isn’t one book in the catalog I wouldn’t be happy to have.

what more of my friends have been up to:

Chris Bunje Lowenstein’s of Book Hunter’s Holiday Catalogue #1: Dante Alighieri.

Joslin Hall Rare Books “Recent Aquisitions for Winter 2010″ featuring 146 books and catalogs on all aspects of antiques and art, including furniture, folk art, silver, glass, ceramics, textiles, and Orientalia.

an article from the IOBA Bookseller : So You Want to Be a Bookseller? by Vic Zoschak Jr. from Tavistock Books