If there are difficulties, chances are it's technical...

Leading up to the release of Ghosts of Camp Erehwon I have been utterly, exhaustingly, plagued by technical difficulties. My Amazon launch fell flat, since my books were not displaying AT ALL if a reader typed in the titles of my books, a problem that Amazon has absolutely done nothing to resolve. Well, they did assure me that they have guidelines for how search lists are populated. It didn't matter when I explained that the books would not come up in the listings even though the Amazon website would autopopulate my titles, but then fail to direct a searcher to my books. Then the series function went on the blink at Amazon, so I had to disconnect my two stories from one another. Again, I was told by tech support that everything was working fine. Well, we are a month after launch now, and things certainly are anything but fine. My apologies to those of you who have been trying in vain to find my books! I have been assured by Amazon, in very childlike terms, that all anyone has to do is type the books title, the author's name, and maybe the ISBN and the book will definitely probably maybe come up in a search. Perhaps they don't understand that no one knows the ISBN unless they can find the book in the first place...

Tonight I logged into Camperehwon.com to see that there had been zero activity at my site in two weeks. I did a quick visual and discovered that the entire page list banner was flat out gone. No one visiting the site could redirect to any of the pages, and that meant no one could read the blog, post comments, contact me, or use the purchase links at my site. Digging back I found a correlation between the disappearance of the navigation banner and my use of the SEO toolkit that the site came equipped with. Would have been nice to know that using it to improve the site would also cripple the site entirely. Fortunately I had a backup that I could use to restore a working version of the site. I did lose a little progress, but nothing that can't be replaced.

So what's the point of all of this? Well, stuff happens. That's the point, because that is the way life is. There's no conspiracy. No shady dealings. No yelling and screaming in frustration about how unfair something is. Things are broken in real life, in our homes, in our country, and in the world at large. Don't bother with the news. It's all bad or vanity without filters. That doesn't mean that we can't press onward doing the right thing. It isn't the end of the world, no matter how many people shout it on the street corners or on X. The sun will rise and set again and it is up to each of us to decide how we spend that precious cycle. Do we join in the yelling and screaming and blaming, or do we become part of a force to make things better without comprimising who we are, without selling out to fad, without separating ourselves from the really important things in life? I know where I stand on the matter. How about you?