Category: General

This morning, about 5AM, we were awakened by a yowl from our 14-year old Lynx Point Siamese cat, Frankie.  Those who know, know that he was affectionately known as the Lord High Preventer of Work, or LHPoW for short.  He’s the cat sitting on my desk in my current author picture on Amazon and at the back of my books.  And he spent a lot of time on that desk, “helping” me write.

As it turns out, he had a bad case of congestive heart failure and had thrown a blood clot that cut off circulation to his legs.  Though we got him to the emergency vet very quickly (we were there within 30 minutes), there really wasn’t anything they could do for him.  They gave him methadone to kill the pain and get him back to a comfort level where they could examine him better, but the conclusion was simply that his time had come, so we authorized euthanasia at around 6AM.

Needless to say, my wife and I are both in shock.  Frankie was fine last night when we went to bed; he jumped up and lay down on the pillow above my wife’s head as he has done for months.  And there was no indication after that of any problem until he started yowling several hours later and woke us up.

Frankie was something of a feral rescue.  I won’t say he was entirely feral but his mother was more or less feral and of course daddy cat was a traveling salesman.  We got him in 2009, when he was five weeks old, and our older cat, Tiggr (RIP) sort of became a mommy to him.  They were great friends until Tiggr passed away in 2015.  At any rate we always spoil our cats and Frankie was no exception to that rule.  And now he has left a paw-shaped hole in our hearts that will, eventually heal…but there will always be a scar there, just as there is for our other cats, Snoopy and Tiggr.

So the mantle of Lord High Preventer of Work now falls to its fourth holder, our void cat Tux.  The LHPoW is dead; long live the LHPoW.

Rest in peace, little buddy.  Your remembrance shall be for a blessing.

I will be at LibertyCon 35 in Chattanooga this coming weekend.  I don’t have a table and I’m not a guest, but I will have paperback books (in the new covers) if anyone wants them.  See the price list below.  However, I will have only a LIMITED number of copies, and these prices are good until I run out of them.  The four “short story” book special at the bottom is good only until I don’t have all four in hand anymore.

Also, note that the four “shorts” are priced at Amazon with a minimal royalty to me.  So yeah, I charge a little more for them than Amazon.  Sorry about that.

I’ll also have a few of the books in their original covers — same prices.  Though in those covers all I have are The Lion of God, The Lion and The Lizard, and The Cross-Time Kamaitachi.  (Left over from last year before I finished the others.)

Autographs are always free, whether it’s a copy I sold you or a copy you bought from Amazon.

Major credit cards accepted with Square.  Or cash money of the United States is always good…until suddenly it isn’t, but that’s a government problem, not a personal problem.

Price list	Amazon Price	My Price
The Lion of God	$15.22	$8.00
The Lion and The Lizard	$15.22	$8.00
The Lion in Paradise	$18.22	$10.00
The Cross-Time Kamaitachi	$22.24	$12.00
The Tale of the Crane Princess	$15.22	$8.00
The Reason*	$4.75	$5.00
A Fox in the Henhouse*	$4.75	$5.00
A Dragon in the Foie Gras*	$5.75	$5.00
A Huntress on the Rocks*	$4.75	$5.00
Set of the four shorts (books marked with *)	$20.00	$15.00

Just look for the old fat guy in an aloha shirt who looks like that guy with an HBO series who can’t finish the books.  Yeah, cruel, but I am a curmudgeon.

Something I’ve noticed for a while is that Amazon doesn’t automatically update your already-owned books if a small change is made (like typo fixes).  The same is true of cover updates.  You can get the covers to update inside the books themselves if you tap and hold the book cover in the library to get the menu, then “Remove Download”, then tap and hold again for the menu and hit “Download”.  This shouldn’t break your notes or set you back to the beginning of the book, but it will pull down the latest version of the book, which should have the new cover at the beginning.

Unfortunately this does not update the cover shown in your library.

The only way to update the library listing covers is apparently to clear the Kindle app’s cache.  This can’t be done by simply terminating the application and restarting it.  And at least in current (16.x) iPadOS or iPhoneOS, there is no method provided in the Kindle app’s settings to clear the app’s cache, neither in the app itself or in the iOS settings app (Settings/General/i(Pad or Phone) Storage).  (Couldn’t tell you about Android.  Don’t use Android.  Google is evil.)

No, to get the new covers to appear in the app’s library listings, you must remove the app from the phone or pad (which deletes all of its cached data) and then reinstall it.  Which works and doesn’t seem to break anything since most of the data concerning which books you read last and where you were in those books is kept in the Whispersync cloud.

But it’s a pain in the ass to have to delete the app and reinstall it to do something that ought to be handled with a button in the app’s settings to clear the cache on demand.

I did find, at least for the Kindle Oasis (which I own), you can get the library covers to update by removing the download, re-downloading the book, and then opening the book.  This apparently convinces the Kindle device to re-cache the cover.  Which begs the question of why the same isn’t true of the iThing Kindle apps.