With forlorn heaviness, my eyes absorb the tranquility of Plaster Creek as I sip my coffee and lament the untimely passing of a five-day holiday weekend. On the bright side, though — I have stuff to share.

In no particular order:

• I’ve pretty much finished the consolidation of my social/Web platform. When I started Gillikin Consulting nearly a decade ago, I split my personal and professional social media and Web into separate properties. I’m now healing the divide. This blog has everything, as does my Twitter account and my still-mostly-dormant Google Plus page. I’m putting professional stuff on LinkedIn and my Facebook fan page; personal stuff will go to my normal Facebook page for the usual friends-only audience. And although I have a buttload of email accounts that all go to the same place, I’m streaming them into this domain. In fact, “jegillikin” is pretty much my handle everywhere, now. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, blah, blah ….
• My experiment in self-publishing has been realllly interesting. About three weeks ago, I uploaded a novella (roughly 23k-ish words) to Amazon. This project, which I started in February, was designed to validate a specific hypothesis that I encountered while reading Jane Friedman’s Publishing 101 — basically, that genre trumps platform in terms of sales generation. So after doing some careful research, I picked a niche genre of erotica, I wrote the novella, then I uploaded it. (Of course, I used a pseudonym; the story can’t be tracked back to me.) The results so far have been intriguing. I’ve managed to sell 16 copies of the Amazon e-book with literally no promotional activities and with a totally made-up author name that has no built-in readership. In addition, through the Kindle Direct Publishing program, I’ve made the novella free to read for Amazon Unlimited subscribers. I see that as of this morning, I’ve had 4,962 normalized page reads. Given that the novella clocks in at 128 normalized pages, I’ve had the equivalent of 38.77 additional readers. My royalties payable so far are $22.67 + £3.54 + €1.72. It’s difficult to infer the compensation off the Kindle Unlimited program — Amazon puts X dollars into a monthly pool, then it’s divided by total page reads, which becomes your multiplier — but if the rates today are similar to what I’ve seen published about a year ago, then on top of sales royalties I should see between $25 and $30 additional in KU revenue. Not bad, really. And it puts into perspective the amount of time and effort we’re putting into promoting literary fiction and poetry, at Caffeinated Press. I am toying with the idea of expanding the experiment by writing five more, similar novellas — but then creating a social platform de novo for the author pseudonym and seeing if it makes a material difference. And after that, collecting all six novellas into a Createspace print volume. The chance for passive residual income, even if it’s just a couple hundred bucks per month over the long run, is too tempting to pass up.
• This past week, Scott, Richard, Tony and I met for a cigar night at Grand River Cigar. Tony had to get home early, but the rest of us went back to Scott’s condo at Riverhouse. He has a to-die-for view, as evidenced by a brief video of the evening G.R. skyline I shot from his balcony:
  
• Speaking of Tony, he and I were able to knock through a whopping six back-to-back-to-back episodes of Vice Lounge Online last week. Talk about a marathon! At one point we took a cigar break on my front porch. Then we noticed the ginormous swarm of bees in the tree line on the other side of the street. See this video? Those little dots aren’t pixilation.
  
• Whilst cleaning out the living-room closet yesterday, I discovered I have a Snuggie. Huh.
• The feline overlords have been mostly content to let me write in peace from the living room, instead of demanding to sit on my arms or chest every time they see me approach a keyboard. It helps that they have soft places to rest:
  

OK, all for now. Chores await.