I could relate to the character of Mark Watney in the book. I'm not stranded on Mars, but I am alone a lot and spend a good deal of my time fixing things that break. Like Watney, I also spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about poop. I'm not in a desperate race to save my life, but I do feel like I'm trying to save my sanity at times. This book should be an inspiration to any aspiring writer. Andy Weir couldn't find a publisher, so he put the book on his website for free, one chapter at a time. Fans encouraged him to create a Kindle edition and sell it on Amazon. The e-book quickly rose to the top of Amazon's science fiction charts where it eventually caught the eye of traditional publishers. Five years after Andy started writing the book, it made its debut on the New York Times Best Seller List.
So, maybe there's hope for my dog stories yet. Not very likely. They'll probably be available free on my website forever. That's OK though. I never made any effort to get published. I kind of prefer doing things this way. There's a lot to read on my website if you're so inclined, but if you're not, that's OK too. At least you're reading the blog.
One of my clients asked me today if I'd be interested in taking over the SEO duties from another company they are currently using. Maybe. I asked the client what the current SEO experts were doing for them. He didn't know. "What do you mean you don't know," I said? "What are you actually paying for?" He really didn't know. "Have sales picked up since you hired this company," I asked? Nope. I'd say this was a pretty good sign that my client is wasting his money. I guess the question now is whether I could do any better. I'm not sure. A lot of SEO campaigns are totally worthless.
I'll probably finish reading my book tomorrow morning. I could have read the entire book in one sitting if I wasn't interrupted so often. I'm slow at a lot of things, but I'm a fast reader. I'll have to pick up some more books this weekend. They are a remarkably good way to kill time. I'm not even sure what interests me at this point in time, but I'm sure there's more to life than the trade journals and B&H photography catalogs that are my current reading matter.
I tried and failed to take pictures of dragonflies today. At this time of year, there are hundreds of them hovering over the meadows in the park in the afternoons. I've seem cool looking pictures of dragonflies in flight before, but the little critters are devilishly fast, fly in erratic patterns, and are almost impossible to keep in focus when you're using a zoom lens. Maybe I'll do better tomorrow.
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