I'm heading to bed for the night, nervous about tomorrow morning. I'm hoping the first few hours of writing set a good pace and that the notes I made don't mess with the process, but help and keep things moving. I've got that nervious feeling in the pit of my stomach that's a combination of apprehension and excitement. I'm not sure I'm going to sleep much tonight. So, you may see pages posted just after midnight as I'm only a few hours from being able to start without breaking the rules. I've got the novel page set up to always display the latest saved pages. I'll upload whenever I close the editor and the refresh date should show right on the manuscript. Maybe I'll just go read some of "No Plot, No Problem" to keep my mind busy, but still keep in the mood. If I do fall asleep, I'll "see" you all at 5:00 tomorrow.

With the furor over Google Print (with the Author's Guild suing them over indexing printed books), I'm reminded of the last time the Author's Guild sued someone high profile: Amazon.com. They objected over the sale of used books in the past, as have lots of others. Recently, I've heard people wondering why Amazon is OK with putting the used items right up there next to the new ones. The thing a lot of people don't know about Amazon's pricing and their selling programs is that in many cases, they make MORE if you buy the used copy than the new one. Leaving aside the $0.01 novels, if the used price is anywhere near the ballpark of the original price, their commission is often enough with the extra shipping profit to make them more money for sending you as a seller an email and making a deposit in your account than they are getting the big warehouse to ship something. What that gives Amazon is effictively the same revenue stream as Ebay has: connecting buyers and sellers and taking a cut of the transaction. Oftentimes, it helps to think not of what it *looks* like a company is selling (new books, new movies, new CD's), but rather what they are after: profit. If you ran a pizza joint and discovered you made 3x as much revenue and profit from your chicken wings than from your pizza, should you be upset, because you're a "pizza joint"? Or, should you get the word out about the wings and not worry about it?

Wherein J buys a $9 ebook from Amazon, tries to print it, discovers that it is printing too small, realizes he can't print it again until nearly 2007, learns that he can't read it on his lunch break on another workstation and wonders, not why ebooks haven't "taken off", but why as many have been sold as have been.
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Sunday is the highest holy day on my personal calendar. It's the 25 hour day. The day where even getting up at 5am comes an hour later. It's a glorious thing, though it only barely manages to edge out Thanksgiving. 2 holidays within a few weeks of each other that bring us all together to celebrate the 2 great advances in human history: extra leisure time to sleep and abundant food. Let's celebrate. The virtual pumpkin cheesecake's on me!

The recent flurry of conversation and activity around the large lottery prize converged in my head with much of the reading I've been doing about writing books, publishing, building businesses, building blogs, etc. into a principle that I think applies to many areas of life. In whatever you are looking to work on or build, if you treat "it" like a lottery ticket, you need to expect lottery odds.
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