Sunday, busy Sunday

My wordcount usually slows a bit on the weekend because the family's all home and that's when I have to do all my running around. (It's weird, you'd think I'd do any shopping etc. on weekdays when the stores aren't so busy, but then I'm usually so focused on my writing I forget everything else.) I am still plugging away on Troy's story. I'm at 32,000 and I figure I'm slightly over halfway through the story, maybe a little bit more. It's a little frustrating because this time last year I was only a few pages away from completing 50K and I'm so far behind. But I'm determined to type "The End" on the first draft by the end of the month. Even though it means I'll have to write about 3K per days which is tougher some days than others.



On a totally different note, you may have heard that you can now give ebooks to friends over on Amazon's new "Give as a Gift" button. You don't have to own a Kindle to receive a Kindle book, you can read it on your computer and such. I immediately thought "yay! This is great, now I can send prizes to my contest winners that way!" Um. Nope.

As a trial I 'gifted' a book to Angela James. I chose a book from Angela's wishlist (really handy and I'd never set on up before--why?). I clicked on the "give as a gift" button and was told I couldn't purchase that book since I was in Canada. Shoot. So even though Angela, the receiver of the gift, was in the proper geographic area to receive the book, I couldn't send it to her. Strange thing was if I went to the book's page instead of through Angela's wish list, I was allowed to purchase it and send it to Angela. My credit card was properly charged, Angela received a very pretty email saying she'd received a gift from me. When she tried to download it however she was told she couldn't because she was in the wrong geographic area. She ended up having to change her Kindle's location by changing her address to Harlequin's Toronto address before she could download it. It was a US book for pete's sake. Being delivered to a US Kindle owner. Another author tried to send a book to someone in Europe (possibly England?) --- same thing happened. The receiver had to change their account address, and then received a bill for UK's VAT tax and Whispernet charges. So it looks like Amazon still has a few bugs to work out.