12 | February | 2016 | YOURS IN STORYTELLING...

This is the first weekend coming up in almost a month that I will have completely off. Last weekend I worked on a Sunday. The weekend before I had a Saturday night meeting for a local book committee that I was serving upon. The weekend before that I had to work. There was some snow shoveling in amongst all of that but that’s just a cold gray blur in my memory right now.

Best of all – today is Employee Appreciation Day. Once a year the company I work for gives us four hours to step outside of our cubicles and mingle. There is pizza and trivia and karaoke – and we still get paid for it. That is a pretty sweet deal – even if the staff fund that we raise funds for pays for a significant percentage of the costs.

Sometimes that is what is life is all about. Those quiet little oases that seem to wondrously materialize along the way. The big trick is to realize that they DIDN’T just materialize. They were there all along. That cold glass of root beer that tastes so wonderful on a hot summer day. That hello from the bus driver – who isn’t the crank that usually drives the bus and is still happy to be working at something productive. The feeling of warm fuzzy socks on your feet on a cold winter day.

All of those little things that you sometimes take for granted – you have to learn to spot them and to celebrate them and to lift up your hands and sing a simple song of gratitude – at least until somebody gets around to calling for security.

So that is my mission for all of you readers out there.

Practice your Snoopy dance of happiness.

Golly – but don’t I get an AWFUL lot of mileage out of his one photograph of me?

Play Pollyanna and look for that silver lining that hides inside of every day-long thundercloud.

Today I am still on the Hot & Trending list.

That’s something that I am happy about.

I’ve been on that Hot & Trending list for 149 hours out of the last NINE days. Today is my tenth day and I am one-third of the way through my Kindle Scout march.

Will I stay upon that Hot & Trending list?

Who the heck knows?

Will the Kindle Scout gods shine favorably upon my meager efforts?

I don’t know that either.

All that I know is that I am doing everything that I can manage to do.

One happy development is that several folks have begun to follow my blog and several other folks have begun to tweet and mention on Facebook and to talk about my 30 day campaign. Word is slowly getting out – and if out of every 100 people who happen to stumble across my campaign ONE of them happens to nominate KELPIE DREAMS – well, I might be onto something.

I did find one important thing out about HeadTalker.

I guess that the gears and cogs of Kindle Scout do NOT recognize certain shortened links, such as Bit.ly. Which means that if someone pops in over to your Kindle Scout Campaign page through a Tweet or a Facebook mention that USES a shortened link it might not register as an actual VIEW of your campaign page. SO – do not use the Bit.ly or any other link shortening method because Kindle Scout can’t track views from shortened links. They will count any nominations that come from the shortened links but you won’t get any page view data on them.

I want to thank Katherine Hayton for that last tidbit which she shared over on the kboards Kindle Scout thread – and if you AREN’T hanging out regularly there what the heck are you waiting for?

I have sent an e-mail to the founder of HeadTalker to ask him if there is a way around this. I’ll let you folks know when I hear back from him.

NOTE: HE GOT BACK TO ME AND THIS HAS SINCE BEEN DISPROVED!

I have sent an e-mail to the founder of HeadTalker to ask him if there is a way around this. I’ll let you folks know when I hear back from him.

So – if any of you have actually read down this far without nodding off and have learned something from the experience – PLEASE take a moment and shout-out my blog on your Twitter feed or Facebook page or even scribble down the link in the women’s washroom at your work today. I want to see if I can out-trend Donald Trump this weekend.

So that’s all I have for you today. I’ll write a little bit more tomorrow when I have the whole day off but I have to get ready to go to work now. Try and not to think too badly about me eating pizza this afternoon.

🙂