7:09pm

I sent out a newsletter last night. I’ll get to why a few lines down.

I just finished spending about an hour deleting all the recipients whose email address failed. By far, the vast majority of those were some flavor of “the mailbox is full and cannot accept new messages.”

I saw a few “the mailbox is out of storage and is inactive.”

There were even a handful where the domain of the email address failed DNS resolution. For those of you who may not be aware, if your email address is jackson[at]gmail.com, the “gmail.com” is the domain. So, for an email address to fail DNS resolution on the domain, it means they gave me a fake email address. I can’t blame them, I’ve done the same thing, though I tend to use nyb[at]fuckoff.com. So, either these specific signups were bots or they thought by submitting the signup form, they’d go straight to the download link for whatever newsletter story they chose.

Yeah… that’s not how it works.  😈

I will think about the signup automations I have in my Email Service Provider to see if I can do more than I’m doing to weed these out without adversely affecting the funtionality for the actual people who want to sign up.

But that’s enough of that.

I sent a newsletter last night for a few different reasons.

First, I finished proofing the audio for Colfyr yesterday. My narrator will have the corrections (which were very few and occasionally funny) back to  me quasi-soon, depending on her current workflow. As soon as I have the finished audio, the audiobook will be available for purchase on my site. All the other audiobook sites will follow over the next week or so as they process the new title and update their catalogs.

Second, I finished Torvalin last Saturday (October 18th). I did a low-hanging fruit pass and fired it off to my editor. She’s already working on it. I would like to get this published by the end of November, but we’ll see. It all depends on when my editor sends it back to me.

Third, I have scheduled the narration for the next three titles in Shepherd Security Services after Colfyr: Lynxeen for December, Torvalin for March, and Vorcalix for April. I just sent an email to my go-to narrator to ask about May for Sol, but that will have to be a future announcement.

I let myself get sidetracked in October, so everything I wanted to have finished on my site isn’t finished yet. But it’s finished enough that I just need to update a few storefront links, since I switched how my books get to Apple Books.

As has unfortunately been the case, I find myself in the post-book slump. It seems like I hit a period of two weeks to a month where I need downtime before I can start a new novel. I’m not a fan of that at all, but I’m not sure if I can get around it. I’ve always been a “mind over matter” kind of guy, but as a friend told me, neuro-plasticity only goes so far.

Hrmmm… I think that’s it for tonights update.

I hope the days treat you and yours well. Stay safe out there.