New book!

 

Dear Senator Hawley,

You're a pencil-necked, sanctimonious, viciously ambitious jackass.  I've disliked you since you were instrumental in getting rid of what would have been the best governor Missouri had had in decades, then used that to springboard yourself from Missouri AG to U.S. Senator.  Seriously disliked you, to the point of voting against you when you ran.*

That said, you spent your first few years in office doing things that I liked.  I started to like you in spite of myself.  However, I have never trusted you.  I have never forgotten your ambition, and I assumed it would have you turning on us, your constituents, the second you felt you had a better offer.  Or someone had something on you.  Or...you felt like it.   

Because you?  You're not an honest politician.**  You're a reform politician.  And recently, someone got to you.  

You came out and said that Medicaid must be expanded, not cut.  This is not just wrong, it's so wrong that I'm absolutely certain that you could probably give yourself a visual cardiac examination without having to use any equipment to do so, other than maybe a flashlight.

Senator, Medicaid is never in the people's best interests.  It is a shitty program that gives shitty service to people who don't have a choice between accepting being treated like shit and potentially dying.  Expanding Medicaid takes a limited amount of dollars and spreads it over more people, which means that they'll get shittier service, because there's less resources per person. 

Not only that, but it costs everyone more.  Including the poor people you're trying to help.

And I swear unto God that if you succeed in expanding Missouri Medicaid, I will never vote for you again.  If you vote for it, I won't vote for you.  Hell, if you continue to advocate for that, rather than beating back the ACA requirements that forced people into it that shouldn't be on it, I won't ever vote for you again.  Because you'll have proved yourself an utter moron that shouldn't be anywhere near the levers of power.

Most sincerely,

A disgusted voter

Update: Yeah, no.  With this he's lost my vote.  Period fucking dot.  I do not want him going in with a NY D on a "mental wellness" bill for first responders.  First, because I don't trust a D to have anyone's best interests in mind, and second, because fuck them, they lost, they can suck it, no mercy, no cooperation.  It is, after all, how they roll. 

*Senators should not be up for a popular vote.  The amendment that gave the people the vote for senators should be repealed.  There was a solid reason why the senate was made up of individuals appointed by the governors of the states for the six year terms: senators were to keep the state's interests in mind in their votes, not the popular interests.  

**Heinlein said it best: an honest politician, once he's bought stays bought.  A reform politician, though...all you have to do is convince him that what you want him to do is in the best interests of the people, even when it's patently not, and he'll turn on his constituents.  

Of all the elitistst, condescending bullshit...

I will admit, I have been ignoring national politics.  I can't afford the energy it takes to keep up with everything happening.*  I have too much other work to do as a housewife, stay-at-home-mom, and writer.**  So, I may very well be terribly late to the party, but I caught wind of a rumor.  

Apparently, there's a possibility of Robin Hood giving back some of our tax money that our illegitimate government entities have been stealing from us, via USAID and other vehicles: the DOGE dividend checks.  President Trump says that it could be coming; that it would be a $5K direct deposit, in a similar manner to the COVID stimulus checks.  

On the one hand, it's an utterly brilliant publicity stunt.  

On the other?  Well.  We're still riding out the inflation caused by the previous stupid move; the DOGE dividend would be more of the same, but worse because bigger checks.***

And then...then I saw the whining.  Of course the hard left is whining.  USAID was paying the media to denigrate us.  All of us.  Our tax dollars went to pay for anti-American propaganda to be sprayed thicker over Americans via the legacy media than shit on a field at fertilizing time.****   

The whining is always glorious, but so mouth-breathing, drooling stupid that I tune it out.  

And then something got past my filters: "DOGE dividends won't change anything! They're too small! What's $5K going to do for low income families, anyway?" 

Fucking what.  

Even if this just goes out to families that, y'know, fucking pay taxes, this is absolutely going to make a difference.  Most families are straining.  Between being underpaid because of the mass importation of next-to-slave-labor to keep paychecks and salaries artificially low, and inflation, and stupid fucking regulations laid on production by un-elected bureaucrats,***** most families are having to use credit cards to stay afloat.  We're not living paycheck to paycheck.  We're living hand-to-mouth. 

Would you like to know what our "betters" think we'll spend it on?  They think we'll spend it on groceries (whose fault would that be, fuckers?), or on alcohol, or on vacations, or on other things...and that it won't buy much.  Some admit that we might use it to pay down credit card or student debt--but again, it won't make much of a dent.  

They're right, on the student debt, by the way--but again, that's their fault.  

Besides.  Who are they to decide for us what's best for us?  

That dividend check, should it come, would be used for postponed household repairs, in this house.  Or on tuition, given the utter shit that is the public education system.  Or maybe used in part to set up so that they can't impact our grocery bill by PETArded regulations on animals they have no idea how to fucking care for.

The other bitch-and-moan I've heard from the left is that the checks won't help the American people more than once.  That it would not change things for us long term.

On that front...they're not wrong.  Even if reducing the amount of debt we're all carrying by that much would be helpful in both the short and long term, that's just a one-time help, not something that will change things for most households permanently.

Want to know what will?  

Having the slave labor deported.  All of it.  From the illegal aliens invading from the southern (and northern) borders to the H1B workers in tech and medicine, get rid of the slave labor.  Let wages come up to where they should be.  

Repeal the income tax amendment.  Cut all capital gains taxes to nothing more than the officially stated inflation rate.  Free our business sector to grow.  

Institute tariffs on goods coming in to match tariffs placed on our goods by nations importing from us.  Double the tariffs on goods produced by slave labor. (Yes, China, I'm aiming at you.). The money coming in from that funded the federal government's Constitutionally-required responsibilities for more than half of our existence.  It should be able to continue to do so without any issues...so long as the government remembers that it is limited by the Constitution to these responsibilities.   

That means no more money being taken from us to go out in the form of foreign aid to people who hate us (Europe, China, Korea, Middle East).  No more money laundering (as DOGE has found out, 90% of that money was being laundered, and paid to entities in the US working against our interests).  No more hostage puppies. 

No more gain-of-function research paid for by our taxes, but done in enemy nations because we have laws against it, and they don't. 

No more paying to prop up legacy media that has lost most of the American trust.  No more paying to prop up communism--it's a bad idea that should be taken off life support.  

In short?  I'm absolutely in favor of DOGE.  I'm in favor of everything the President is doing.   

Hell, I'm sitting back with a huge bowl of popcorn.  Want some? 

 

*There has been a lot happening.  I was paying attention for the first few days after President Trump took office, but there was so much I couldn't keep up, so I stopped trying.  

**Before everyone weighs in, as a HW/SAHM, I'm juggling four full-time jobs' worth of work.  And then add another part-time job writing for some income (and sanity)...it gets overwhelming.

***The COVID checks for my household were just over $3K.  The predicted DOGE check is $5K.  Not sure if that's per taxpayer or per household, but there it is.

****No farmer worth his salt would spray that much manure on any field--it would burn the plants.

*****Egg production.  Between the "cage free" requirements laid on factory farms by people who've never fucking seen a chicken in person, much less how they behave, and requirements that one bird in one barn testing positive for bird flu means that all chickens in all barns must be slaughtered, we simply do not have enough layers. 

Dear Amazon,

Yesterday, I got an email with a link to a survey over your search function.  I went to click on it...and it took me to a page that told me to get my mobile device.  That I would need to search on my phone.  And use that, and the results from it for the survey.  Like I would do if I were shopping.  

Y'all have made some assumptions, here.  You do know what they say about assumptions, right?  

I didn't take the survey, because I do not use my phone to shop.  I don't use it to browse the internet.  I don't use it to play games.  I don't use it for day-to-day anything.  My phone is a safety device, not a leash, and definitely not something I can't do without.  In fact, half the time, I forget to make sure the damn thing is charged.  

That said.  I have a lot of friends who have taken your survey.  And they, and I, have complaints about your search function.  

First, the haystack.  Sure, you've got an enormous haystack to search through.  Biggest in the world.  Most types of hay...only, you've got a problem.  We aren't looking for hay.  We're looking for a needle.  

That's right.  Your search dumps thousands upon thousands of results on us...mostly unrelated to that thing we're actually searching for.  

That tells me that a) your coders and other employees are utterly incompetent at the jobs you've hired them for, which is a waste of your time and money, or b) you're wasting my time, hoping to get more of my money.

That's...not the way it works.  You waste my time, you don't get any more of my money.  I'll take it and go somewhere that the search function isn't broken.  Or at least, not broken as badly.  

Which leads me to my next complaint: you done fucked up the Boolean searches.  I remember using them.  "And" narrowed the search down.  "Or" expanded it.  "Not" filtered out the things that were almost right, but not what I was looking for.  

I used those all the way through grad school, doing keyword searches through literally billions of words in articles, in millions of articles, in hundreds of thousands of subjects for the fifty or so journals that might have the dozen or so sources I needed for my research papers.  It worked there.  It should work in your shopping site.   

It should work especially well in doing searches for Kindle reading.  

But it doesn't.  I don't know why, but y'all done fucked that up long before you fucked up everything else.

Here's the thing: I already subscribe to Kindle Unlimited.  I buy a lot of books otherwise, too.  I have preferences, and those preferences do not include the kind of crap your searches show, and I can't narrow the searches down to find the things I do want to read.  

So, instead of reading new things, I re-read the old.  Even when I'd rather have something new, I simply can't find anything.  Because you fucked up the search functions for it.  I'd love to give you more money (I'd love to have more--I'm pretty sure my books would show up in more searches for people who'd enjoy reading what I write if your search wasn't broken), but I don't buy things just because you shove them in my face.  Hell, I won't even borrow things just because you shove them in my face.  I don't like the sort of things you shove in my face; I'm sure as fuck not wasting my limited time and money on them.  

Please.  Fix the search function.  Make it actually, y'know, functional.  

And then?  Then, we'll be spending a whole lot more of our disposable income.  We could even have more disposable income.  

 Thanks,

A dissatisfied customer 

New book!

 

 

 

I had a new book go live, yesterday.  I was planning on embedding the link so y'all could see it, but...apparently Amazon's decided that us authors don't require that as an option in the share button anymore.  Or at least, not an easy one.  Let's see if I can't find a work-around that I am capable* of doing...

 

 

Click on the cover.  If  that doesn't work, here's the link at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DNX9VNJH

This is a bit different from my normal works--it has a little more in common with The Last Pendragon than it does anything else.  I'd intended for it to be a short story, but...yeah.  Character went, "Wait.  I'm the bad guy?  I don't wanna be the bad guy!  Let me fix it!"  And...eight thousand words of short story turned into more than forty thousand of short novel.  

No, I have no idea why it turned out that way.  Characters just...occasionally...hijack my stories and run off cackling with the plot.

*I am not, by any means, computer literate.  I am, at best, a competent user.  I don't do stupid things that break critical stuff like my mother and aunts did.  I can use a few programs, but that's about it. 

Indeed

This morning, my fourteen year old daughter summed things up: "2025 has started on WTF."  

And really, it kind of has.  I'm still reeling over not having had the election stolen last November.  I'm waiting with a sense of dread for January 6*, then January 20.  I don't know exactly what's going to happen.  I know what I'd like to have happen--a quiet, peaceful transition of power from the commies back to America--but I doubt the party that considers itself as carrying the banner of progress** has that kind of maturity and dignity.  

I can't predict anything that might happen.  The hard left has broken too many things.  The only thing I can predict is toddler-tantrums from the perpetual children that think they should be the ones running the show.  In fact, we're already seeing some of them ramping up.  Unfortunately for the sulking snots, Musk's cockroach-trucks*** have proved to have more in common with the Volkswagen Polo than it does the Ford Pinto.   

WTF may well set the tone for most of the year.  And if it does? 

It at least will have warned us, first.

*January 6.  Four years ago, we had the shameful conclusion of the stolen election, with the worthless piece of shit backstabbing the nation by certifying an election I SAW flipping votes FROM Trump TO Biden, and the protesters who left their weapons at their homes or hotels arrested and held as political prisoners for heeding the invitation to enter the Capitol building, unwittingly participating in the dramatic not-insurrection, and giving the drama-llamas excuse to panic and screech about a coup that wasn't happening to them. And then last year, I lost my mother.  So...kind of a shitty date.  

**The Democrats/hard left aren't carrying the banner of progress like they think.  They've actually forced a regression to the late '70's, economically. 

***There's a brown Cybertruck that drops off/picks up kids at the private school my two attend.  It struck me as familiar, and triggered revulsion.  After about three days, I realized that it looked just like a cockroach.  The brown ones that are damn near impossible to get rid of, once you've got an infestation. 

A review

 So.  A few years ago, I bought a copy of Office '03.  It had five uses.  I used my last one on my last laptop.  

Which died last April.  Well, started dying, probably in March or so.  

My laptop is my livelihood.  I do everything on it: writing, publishing, budgeting, household accounting, planning, communicating with the kids' school, checking their grades...everything.  I can't do that with a dead laptop.  I mean, sure, I can use one of the desktops, but there are times I'm not physically capable of working at a desk, but the work goes on.  

I ordered a new one from Amazon.  And a thumb drive (well, pinky-fingernail drive--a 500 GB one the size of a dongle) to put all my files on.  The drive arrived the last day of April, and I was able to copy everything onto it before the old laptop gave up its last gasp, and the new laptop came in on the first of May.  

It had a year of Office 365.  So, I pulled it up and started using it.  Finished the final draft of Certified Public Assassin on it, and pulled the trigger on publishing...

...and something about the newest Word threw tantrums about working with older Word.  To the point of breaking even LibreOffice.  Oh, the electronic copy of Certified Public Assassin worked okay, but I could not get the print version to fly.  No, Word insisted on fucking up with the margins.  It did not matter what I did, I could not get the print version to work.  And I hacked away at that, on and off, for six fucking months.  

So, my Office subscription runs out at the end of next April.  I could re-up for a hundred bucks a year...every year.  I could. 

But I don't wanna.  It's a cheat.  I don't replace a laptop every year.  I don't pay for a new computer every year.  Why should I have to rent my software every year? 

I figured I'd have to switch over to LibreOffice at the end of the year, when my subscription ran out, when I bought the laptop.  

And then...a miracle happened.  I've made money, this year.  Not a lot, but double what I did last year.  And I'm producing again.  

That changed the dynamics a bit.  And changed my mental dialogue a lot.  I mean, if I'm actually making money,* shouldn't I have tools to make money with?  

Keep in mind, I'm categorically opposed to renting software.  I talked it over with my other half, and when Black Friday deals hit, I purchased a new writing/formatting software: Atticus.  

On a whim, I uploaded Certified Public Assassin, and put it through the formatting.  And then, I uploaded the file to Amazon, and looked at the internals. 

Lo and behold: the text stayed within the margins.  Everything looked good. The cover took some extra work, but everything worked.  Everything worked.  I could publish a print version.  Atticus fixed what rented Word broke.  And Certified Public Assassin is now available in hardback!

So I can definitively state that it works as a formatting tool.  It's worth the (one time) cost for that alone.  

However, that's not all it does: it works quite well as writing software, and allows you to set writing goals, too.  And uses reminders to keep you  on task when you sit down to write.  Something Word does not help with.  It also keeps track of your word count by chapter as well as by book file.  Yeah, it takes some getting used to, but it really is intuitive, and a good bit easier to use than Word.  Your screen's less busy, less distracting, you're only looking at one chapter at a time; while yes, that means you have to dig into it to look at how your entire document is looking, you can get a page estimation by the trim size you want to use for the project you're working on.  It shows you previews of your project by how it'll look in print, or in any of several e-book readers/reader software on a tablet. 

I would say that this is probably one of my best investments into my career as a writer.  I am honestly blown away by the sheer awesome.  I mean, maybe there's better writers' software on iThing platforms, but this is, I think, perhaps hands down the best one out there for anything else. 

I cannot recommend it highly enough. 

*Double last year's income is a bit under half what I made in my first year teaching for MSSU.  A hair under a semester's pre-tax income, in  other words.