Keith Graham

I have not been updating this blog - mainly because blogs are irrelevant these days. I tried SubStack.com for a while and still not relevant. I’ll come back from time to time, but don’t count on it.

Keith

Amazon has 12 million books for sale for Kindle. I see pages suggesting that there are 30 million active kindle users.

My problem is how to turn my book, 1 in 12 million, into a 1 in 30 million, Kindle user.

The first solution is based on my Harmonica book. I receive two or three sales a month, making $50 or so a year. This is because I have a unique book on a topic that is interesting in a category that is not overly clogged with similar books. I have the only book that teaches a person how to play in the style of Sonny Boy Williamson, an interesting and important harmonica play from the 1950s.

So rule 1 is to write a unique book that appeals to an audience that is starved for this type of book.

I have three books of Science Fiction short stories. Amazon reports that there are at least 20,000 Science Fiction anthologies for sale on kindle. My best book is ranked at 2,770. I do not believe that this is high enough to generate any sales through organic Amazon searches. My other books are ranked 4 or 5 thousand.

My anthology is rated 2,770 because I recently put it up with for free using the KDP promotions options. You get 5 free days for every three months. The book was #1 in FREE kindle for all of last Sunday. The book got about 100 downloads. 100 free downloads results in 86th percentile for rank. If you consider that it is a log curve, without doing the math, I guess that it might take 1,000 or more free downloads to make it into the top 100.

Clearly, the way to make things work is to somehow connect a book with a subject that is in demand. My book claims to be hard Science Fiction, which seems to improve my odds, somewhat. My Cyberpunk book does poorly, about the same as my Weird tales book.

I will be releasing a novel, soon. I have given up trying to sell the novel to a publisher or an agent. It seems a stupid idea. I need to go over the book, making corrections, one more time. Everyone who reads the book comments that I have enough characters to write another volume in a series. I am thinking that series of books do better than single novels.

I still haven’t come up with a formula. Google gives me no answers that are useful. I will ask Bing chat to see what it says.

Bing’s answer:
There are several ways to sell more fiction books on Amazon Kindle. One way is to use targeted Amazon ads that capitalize on your keyword strategy 1. Another way is to build an author platform over the course of several years 1. You can also optimize your title and subtitle, choose the right Kindle keywords, and hire a cover designer 1.

Kindle keywords are the words a shopper types into Amazon when looking for a book or Kindle ebook. They help make it so that your book gets discovered without having to do major marketing . By selecting the right Kindle keywords, you can increase your book’s visibility and reach more readers .

In order to find profitable Kindle keywords, you need to find phrases or words that shoppers actually type into Amazon and are willing to pay money for. You also want to make sure that the competition for those keywords isn’t too hard. One way to find the most searched Amazon book keywords is to use Amazon’s autofill function in their search box. This function guesses what you are going to type into it based on the popularity of particular terms from other shoppers typing things into it .

To use the autofill function to find the most searched Amazon book keywords, you can follow these steps:

Ensure you are using Incognito mode on your browser so that your previous information doesn’t affect what Amazon shows you.
Go to Amazon.com and start typing a word or phrase related to your book into the search box.
As you type, Amazon will suggest popular search terms based on what other shoppers have typed into the search box.
By using this method, you can get an idea of what terms shoppers are using to search for books like yours on Amazon.

Step 1 – Write the book.
I write chapters (or stories in the case of my anthologies) and I keep it separated into word style .docx files. This is convenient because the small chunks can be run through the LanguageTool.org website. I signed up and magically, and for free, I get some really great grammar checking. I use LibreOffice Writer because I am too cheap to buy MS Word. I am also using LibreOffice because eventually I will want to export to PDF, and that is a no-brainer in LibreOffice.

Step 2 – Grammar check the contents. I use the built-in LibreOffice Writer spell checker. I have the LanguageTool extension in LibreOffice, which helps. Be aware that LibreOffice will freeze if you try to grammar check anything more than three or four thousand words at a time. I make a second check at the LibreOffice tool. Each version of the tool catches different kinds of errors, so you have to do both.
I write very fast and often leave out words. I leave out most commas, and I mess up things in unexpected ways.

Notes on Scanned documents. Recently, I scanned a typed novel for a friend using a scanner and OCR. I got all kinds of problems, including hard carriage returns where there shouldn’t be any, and many letters that the OCR messed up. Dirt on the paper frequently wound up as garbage in the text. Scanning a document is much more work than dealing with a word processing file. If I were doing it for money, I would charge at least double for converting a print document to a file.

Step 3 – Omit needless formatting. Your manuscript parts should all have minimal formatting. All paragraphs should be the default paragraph style. Remove all direct formatting and convert things like italics or special indenting to use a style. Try to limit things like bold or underline. Chapter titles should use the “Chapter Title” style. You can modify the style itself to change fonts, size and alignment.

Step 4 – Create the combined document. I had no luck with using Master Documents in LibreOffice Writer. Maybe MS Word works better. I have not researched other kinds of word processing tools. Google Documents did not have enough formatting features. I created the blank document and copied the individual files into it. Scan the document quickly, just to make sure that nothing is missing.

Step 5 – Download the manuscript templates from Amazon. These have a left page and a right page and basic styles for paragraphs, including one for chapter titles. Import the one you are using into Word or LibreOffice. Save it in your personal templates. Start with the paperback version. 6 by 9 is the most common and easiest to work with.

Step 6 – Add page styles for Left and Right pages without numbers. Add page numbers where you want them to the normal Left and Right page styles. You should have page styles for pages with and without numbers. The only difference is that the main body of the book has page numbers, but the front content, like the title and perhaps the preface, will use the styles that do not have numbers. Modify the default paragraph style to use a font less boring than the one in the template. Modify the chapter heading style so that there is a page-break before the style.

Step 7 – Add the table of contents. You may have to tell it to use your chapter title style. Make sure that you uncheck the “protected” option when you create it. I find it annoying if I can’t fiddle with it.

Step 8 – Make sure the pages are on the correct side of the page. The title starts on a right page (without a number). The next page is a left page with copyright and some other notes. The next page is on the right, and it could have the preface, introduction, dedication or the first chapter.

Step 9 – The first chapter or the beginning of the book proper should start on page 1. This means inserting a special page break that will start the page numbering at zero. It took a lot of googling to figure this out. It is not trivial. I spend more time on this one part than any other part of the formatting.

Step 10 – Export to PDF.

Step 11 – Start your book on Amazon KDP. Fill in the details and load your PDF into the contents page.

Step 12 – Design the cover. You need to download a template from the KDP cover size generator. Do some magical artwork and save it. I create the cover art using Paint.net, because it is feature rich and free. I use LibreOffice Draw when I am done and modify the page properties, and insert the cover image. Then, I can export to PDF in a way that KDP will be able to use. Add your cover PDF to KDP content and then use their checker to see if you did it right. It usually takes a few times to get it right.

Step 13 – After KDP thinks that everything is good, you need to order a proof copy or two. Don’t go wild, because when you see the book, you notice all kinds of terrible things that need fixing.

Step 14 – Fix things several times. Try not to spend too much on proof copies. You will eventually reach a point you can publish your book.

Step 15 – Once the paperback version is done, make a copy of everything in another folder. Edit the document and change the page sizes, margins and gutters for a hard cover version. Stretch out the Cover document, if you can, otherwise fix it up for the larger size. Start the hardcover settings and print a proof copy when you get it right. Nobody buys the hardcover version, so you might want to skip this step.

Step 16 – Create a copy of the document and take out the table of contents. Use the Kindle Create program to make a Kindle version. This is so easy compared to the paperback version. Enroll in the Kindle select program. You actually make more money even though the royalties are less. Take my word for it.

Step 17 – Start next book. Go to step 1.

I submitted my novel to Baen Books last week. I am beginning to regret this, and I went back to the Baen site and re-read the guidelines. I found a line:
Reporting time: usually within 12 to 15 Months. (Sorry, we get lots of manuscripts.)
Well that sucks!
I am not capable of waiting 15 months for a likely rejection.
I also did a search on agents that might accept the book. I found www.fineprintlit.com and submitted to a person named Laura Wood. She is starting to handle Genre fiction, and she sounded nice and smart. I expected an email response, but I didn’t get one. I think that I would have set up an auto-respond email if I was doing this kind of thing, but, of course, she did not have the expertise to do that, and it makes me worry about her credibility.
So, I have to pick a date where I publish my book at Amazon.
My brother, Larry, is actually reading the book, and making notes. He is not a reader, but he is enjoying the book and is making many very good suggestions, many of which I had already thought about. When he finishes marking up the proof copy, I think I’ll check it out.
I finished the book on March 12th. Maybe I’ll pull the trigger on April 12th, that would make it four months from starting the book to publication.
I have to be clear about the time it took to write the book. I wrote the first two chapters in 2003, so technically it took 20 years to write, but I could not find the time back then to work on a novel, so I kept it in a Work In Progress folder for that whole time. Elapsed time was a few hours in 2003 and then three months in 2023 and now a month of hesitation.
I found another novel where I wrote the first two chapters. It is called “The Glass House”, It is even older than Murder in Luna City. I tried to pick it up, but it did not flow as easily as “Murder” (original name was All it Takes is Brains.) I think that I need to add some characters and let the characters pull it forward. Its other flaw is that it is about a Neural Net, which is actually the dead ringer for chatGPT. I think it may be too technical for most people. (I am also reluctant to mention chatGPT in a time when publishers are being inundated with LLM fakes.)
The other novel is “To Become A Dragon,” which meanders too much. I have chapters stretching over several years, and I don’t know how to tie them all together. 30K words, so it at least it has a good base to fill in the missing parts.

I have Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud and OneDrive installed on my computers. That’s a lot of shared drive space. I just added pCloud so that’s another 10 GB. I don’t need that much more shared space, but it is nice to experiment with. EVERYBODY needs Google Drive, and Dropbox has been around for many years. iCloud, goes with Apple, but I can do without. I have OneDrive, but don’t use it on this machine.

If you need some new slick, easy to use backup space, for free, try pCloud.com. The free account only gives you 10 GB, but that’s good for backing up some important stuff.

I finished “Murder in Luna City” yesterday. It is the first novel that I’ve ever written. It is 91,000 words long, 250 pages. It took three months to write, which is not that long a time.

I submitted it to Baen Books this morning. I will look around tonight for somewhere else to send it. I am all set to pull the Amazon Self-Publish trigger as soon as Baen says no. It is fully formatted for hard-cover. I have to reformat the MS for paperback and Kindle. I ordered two “Proof” copies just to see how it works out.

I found another Novel that I started, and I will use this recent experience to work on this new one.

I fell down the stairs backwards last Sunday. I am in intense pain. I don’t think that I broke anything, but if I don’t feel better I will go to the hospital.

In similar news, I broke a tooth biting into a stale bagel. The temporary tooth broke within two hours. My tooth hurts.

I am taking Tylenol and trying not to think about it.

I ordered two packages of bees. These are boxes with 10,000 or so bees in a three pound package plus a queen.

For the last two years, my bees have struggled. I have not been able to harvest any honey. My hives all seem to do well and then they crash. Ward claims that I am not treating them for mites, so maybe this year I’ll treat them in August and see how it works.

I think that the problem is the neighbors spraying their lawns to kill mosquitos. It kills my bees. I am moving the hives to the cemetery side of my property, as far away from the stupid people who live next to me. I think that they would be happy not to have my bees anywhere near them.

This is my last year for bees anyway. I think that by this time next year, I will be moving up to Maine.

Just hit 45,000 words on my Moon novel. I’ve been averaging 2,000 words a day, which amazes me. I write while watching TV with Erica, so the book is influenced by the political thrillers that we like to watch. I am struggling with internal consistency, and I will have to do a rewrite from beginning to end eventually. I want it to be at least 75,000 words eventually, but I am not sure that I can make it. I’ve been listening to Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, because his vision of the Moon has greatly influenced my own. He spends lots of words with characters arguing or discussing, using his signature approach known as Heinleining to introduce information into the story without actually stopping to explain things.

My book Space, Time, and Other Dimensions is out in Hardcover. It is 175 pages. I priced it at $15. I don’t really expect to sell many, except the paperback wound up being $10. I don’t make any money on either of the books. Amazon takes the lion’s share of sales.

My book To Become A Dragon is stuck. I’ve finished about 20,000 words, but I don’t see how I will go much further than 30,000. I may have to sell it on Amazon as a short novel or a Novella. My experience with the Moon novel might make things easier. I have learned that nothing eats up words faster than characters talking to each other. I may have to go back and give it the Heinlein treatment of moving the plot along without sentences that tell what characters did, and instead have characters propel their own action through their own words and feelings.

I’m up to 35,000 words in my novel. I have been doing between 1,000 and 1,500 words a night.

I am rapidly approaching what may be the end, but I need the novel to be more than 60,000 words, preferably as much as 100,000 words.

Tonight I am going back to the beginning and add a little meat to the first few chapters. Originally, I was writing them like short stories. Short stories are terse, getting to the point quickly. In novels, you have to spend more words to set the scene, flesh out the characters, and include lots of conversation.

I am not sure that I’ll get to 60,000. If not, I’ll self-publish, but I’d like to get this out through a real publishing house.

I think that I may take a little time from Novel writing to work on a program.

Ward had an idea and wanted me to work on it. I am very tempted to try. The program would automatically direct missing images to the correct one. Images are lost when people change web hosts or reinstall WordPress. The link to an image points to the wrong location. This has happened to me a number of times.

A WordPress plugin is not a good solution because the html link is outside of WordPress’s purview. It would have to be standalone. That is not to say that I could not make a plugin to configure the program and run some of the functionality.

Ward and I kicked around some ideas for making it work. I think it is quite possible, and I could make a little money on it. If Ward never did any work, then I will see what I can do.

Currently, I am a copy and paste sort of programmer. My mind is not so clear that I can just put my head down and code. I think that’s OK. I will not be trying to do anything extraordinary. I think, though, that it will be novel enough to be useful.

I found another issue with web hosting. When I reinstalled Apache and PHP, I did not tell them to automatically start up. As a result the websites did not work. I fixed it. Adding this entry is one of the tests that I am making.

I do not have any WordPress sites left. All my websites are just simple web pages linked together to make a website. This is very 1990s, but I feel quite comfortable with it.

This website is the last website that I have that is presented using PHP, and I want to get rid of that and just do my own “Roll Your Own” thing. I have thought about going back to Blogger, or one of the other blog sites, but I don’t know how I would export the data, easily.

When I restored my web server installation, I lost a couple of websites. Ward called me up to tell me.

I had to restore one of the sites from the Wayback Machine, which is a website archiver. The site used Wordpress, but the pages that I got were flat webpages, which is fine with me. I used a scraper that runs under Ruby, which I have never used. I installed it and it worked just fine. There was only one screwy entry, and I think that was from the Wayback Machine and the way it stores the websites.

So I had to spend New Year’s morning messing with stuff that I only half remember.

I published Space, Time and Other Dimensions a couple of weeks ago. I set the Kindle version to go on a free promotion for the three days on December 23, 24, and 25. This way I could take advantage of people at home during Christmas.

Why would I want to give away my book for free? The answer is that I wanted to make it into one of Amazon’s Best-Seller lists. It worked. My book made it to #3 in Kindle Science Fiction Anthologies. It was also in the top ten for Kindle Hard Science Fiction and Kindle Cyberpunk. As a result, I made about $20 in sales and got lots of interest in the book.

Today is Boxing Day, and the book is no longer free. It has dropped to about 1,000 in the lists. I hope that enough free versions have been delivered that it will create interest, and maybe get a few reviews.

This is how you game Kindle KDP. I will let you know next month if it was worth it.

Three years ago, I had a series of seizures and had to be heavily medicated. Nobody was able to figure out why I had these seizures. Every doctor that I talked to told me variations on “Damned if I know”. My diagnosis was “Partial Complex Seizure Disorder”, which is a catchall for seizures that can’t be localized or explained by injury or tumor. My brain is clear, so I just have seizures for some reason which cannot be pinpointed.

The good news is that I haven’t had a seizure since I’ve been taking my pills. The bad news is that seizure medication works by slowing down your brain’s reaction time. I was severely slowed down. I had short term memory loss, “tip of the tongue” syndrome, and I have lost about 30 or 40 IQ points. I can’t write programs. I can’t write stories. I fell down the stairs several times and trip over things, all the time.

I have nagged my Neurologist to find me a medication that lets me function the way that I used to. I have been taking a pill, now, for about a year, that is pretty good. I have been slowly and carefully experimenting with reducing my dosage. The doctors don’t like me doing this, but I can’t stand the status quo. I am down to a little over half of the recommended dosage.

Before I had the seizures, I would have occasional feelings of a loss of the moment. I would suddenly realize that, for the last minute, I had lost all thought. This is what I think is a mini-seizure, and a precursor to a full-fledged flop around on the floor seizure. Since I have been reducing my dosage, I have not had any indication or any clue of a problem.

Today, I feel good. I have started writing again. The other day, I wrote a computer program. I reconfigured my home Web Servers, which is not a trivial task. I think that the old Keith is mostly back.

I started working on my two unfinished novels. I have finished three short stories. They aren’t great, but they aren’t half bad.

I reworked and republished my Anthologies. I put together a new collection of short stories with 18 stories and published on Amazon.

I have been practicing playing harmonica and I think I am getting much better.

Wish me luck.

I’ve been working on a new collection of stories called Space, Time and Other Dimensions. I was saving my Classic Hard Science Fiction stories for this collection. I only had 15 stories, so I’ve been writing a little. Since I have dozens of stories that I have started but never finished, I found a couple of these that looked promising. I finished them and included them in the book.

I am not real happy with the way they turned out, but they are decent enough. I’d like to finish a couple of more.

I’ve already published a version of Space, Time and Other Dimensions. The Kindle version actually sold a little. It did well, for a moment. The book was #16 in new Kindle Science Fiction. It was 240th overall in Kindle Science Fiction sales. This was quick, though. I haven’t had any sales for a few days, now, so I don’t believe it will do very well in the future. None of my other books have sold in a long time.

There seems to be an issue here with someone uploading a Trojan to my websites. My virus software catches it immediately, but it is annoying. I wish there was a way to find out which page is doing it. This blog is the primary suspect, so I am considering ways to turn this site to 100% static.

I use FlatPress to publish these pages, but it is not static. Flatpress creates the pages, but then it uses another PHP program to present them.

I need to do some more investigating, but I don’t want to learn a new language to do it.

I upgraded my Wamp server and I find that the code that I have been using is full of problems with “Deprecation” errors.

I had to do some quick lookups and some global changes, and it is fixed. I have to keep testing, but I think I got it.

So if you haven’t been able to read this blog in the last few days, now you know why.

I haven’t finished a story in a couple of years.
I found a story that was about half written. The first version I found was from 2004. It was one where I had no idea how to end it. The story’s direction obviously wouldn’t work, so I dropped it around 2011 according to the date on the file. There are a bunch of ideas in a file from 2017, but they involved a lot of silly action and escape scenes.
I started writing at the end of the story, adding romance, and the ideas started to click. It wound up being a far future cyberpunk love story, which I am better at than action with guns and complicated plots.
I went back to the beginning and started foreshadowing the ending, and getting rid of some of the stupid things that I had added along the way.
The name of the story is “The Short Run,” but the story might be better called “The Long Run,” from the John Maynard Keynes quote: “In the long run we are all dead”.
Now I have to wait on it and then reread it so that I can find any stupid errors. The story is about 4,000 words and I will be sending it out to some pro sites later this week. There is no chance that the story will sell. Pro sites get more than 2,000 subs per month, and it is hard to get by the first round of slush. (I am convinced that slush readers think that SF is something like the Marvel Universe movies, either that or Star Wars.)
This story rightly belongs in the Error Message Eyes anthology, but it does involve space travel, so I’ll be putting it in the hard sf book that I am working on.

It’s been about two weeks since I put the Honey Supers on my hives. I opened up the hives to check and there is no honey, yet. I do have honeydew, which is watery honey nectar that may make it to honey eventually. The honeydew means that the bees are working and that if they buzz their wings over it and reduce the moisture content I will have honey.
While checking the bees, I noticed some bees going in and out of a box that I had set aside. I thought that the hive had died. I popped the top, and it was full of bees. I have a free hive. I will have to put a honey super on it to see if it makes me any money.

I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to publish Error Message Eyes Release 2.0.

I am not able to concentrate well enough to be sure things are right. Amazon is reviewing things now. They don’t review much other than to make sure that I am not doing anything illegal.

I find that the act of correction causes new errors, sometimes many new errors. Several times, I pressed CTRL-F in order to find something, but I missed the CTRL key and wound up inserting an F and a search string into the text. I hope that I caught all of these.

With luck I can make an announcement tomorrow. I wanted to do it today, but many things got in the way that were far more important.

Wish me luck.

I can’t believe the number of errors that Shaun has found. One or two (out of hundreds) I’ve either not changed, or else changed in a way different from his suggestions. Technically, I could launch tomorrow. I want to launch on a Thursday to take advantage of the weekday and weekend potential readers, but I will need a day to apply the corrections and order the proof copy. It looks like the book will launch on the 16th.
I started trying to edit the stories myself, starting at the end and working my way back. Now I am nervous because it has become obvious that most of my mistakes are made in the revision process. I will now go through and check again (introducing even more errors.)

I have finished installing MacOs X under Virtual Box. In previous posts, I talked about upgrading my PC with this in mind. I used the following tutorial: https://www.makeuseo … -10-virtual-machine/
The only issue that I have is that the mouse is not responsive and jerks around as I try to select something. This may not work out as a development machine as I wanted.

Shaun just messaged me and told me had started proofreading the book. He said he had found a great many errors and would let me know when he finished.

Well, that puts the kibosh on launching tomorrow. I hope that I didn’t screw up my free kindle promotion. I unpublished the book, so let’s hope that the Amazon programs will show that.

5/26/22: Here we are a week later, and it still is not ready for prime time. Maybe I can get it going by June 2nd or 9th.

I knew that you could host web pages on GitHub.com, but I did not know how to go about it. The tutorials are all for Linux, and involve Jekyll software, which only runs on Linux.

95% of the world runs on Windows. I started slogging through the documentation, trying to figure out how to make things work. You can see the results on https://www.ErrorMessageEyes.com. Getting to the point where it worked was not easy.

I use Cloudflare as a domain registrar, so it was easy to set up the domain and DNS.

The rest was not obvious. I downloaded GitHub Desktop software, which is not all that useful, but it was good to set up a new repository and a branch for the project.

I keep the websites that I have on Google Drive so that I can work with them on any of the computers that I use.

I use Kompozer to create the website. The days of me being able to code CSS by hand are gone. My brain no longer works that way.

GitHub Desktop updates my repository and branch easily.

I had to log into GitHub on the browser to get at the options to use the GitHub pages option. It is a menu item hidden deep in the settings menu. I can’t remember what I did exactly, but I fiddled a bit with the settings, and when I set the custom domain to ErrorMessageEyes.com, it all magically worked. If I had to do it again, I am not sure that I could get it to work at first. If I wanted to add another domain, I think that I would have to add another repository and branch.

One last thing, if I make changes to the HTML, I have to clear the cache in Firefox in order to see them. There is some option that tells the browser to use the cached version of the page, even if the page has changed. I find this annoying.

GitHub looks like a fairly dumb hosting option without Java, PHP, Perl or any other scripting language. That’s why you need something like Jekyll to make it work. I wish that someone would create an easy way to create a static website that I could push to GitHub using Windows.

Tomorrow Eventually, my book goes up for free on the Amazon Kindle store. I feel like a mad scientist trying to conquer the world. I have this crazy plan to reach the top 10 in the Amazon book store Best-Seller list.

I will hit Hacker News with a link to my new domain, www.ErrorMessageEyes.com. I am emphasizing the word “free”. If it hits, it will be good for a few hundred downloads.

I joined six Facebook user groups that are based on cyberpunk or Science Fiction. Each group has 50,000 or more users, although I suspect that most of the users are either bogus or inactive. I will spam each group with a link to the new domain. With luck, they will be good for another few hundred downloads.

I can count on a dozen or so downloads from my FB friends. They might even share the page, helping me get a few more.

It is possible that I will be able to hit 500 downloads, and if it goes viral, I may make it up to a few thousand downloads. This would be enough. When the free period ends, I will still be high in the Amazon bestseller algorithm and may sell a few dozen books for real money.

But it is more likely that I fizzle and get 100 or so downloads at best. I’ll know better on Tuesday morning.

In a previous post, I talked about upgrading this server to 16Gig of ram. I had problems on the system after that. It threw all kinds of errors and this morning I came down, and it was frozen. Anyone trying to access one of my sites got the Cloudflare copy of archive .com.
I finally opened up the case and pulled two of the 4Gig chips and put in the two old 1Gig chips. Now I have 10Gigs. So far, so good.
I am going to wait awhile to see if it stays good. It has been running for about 6 hours now and there hasn’t been an issue. I have been using some memory hog image editing software, and it never burped.
Keep your fingers crossed.

I put 16Gig of memory in my machine and the 256M SSD. I formatted the new SSD as exFat, but I am willing to bet that’s not what a Hackintosh needs. Everything seems to be working, so far.
I have the old 4Gig of memory in a bag. Erica’s machine has 6Gig. I don’t know how the memory is configured. If there are 8 slots on the motherboard, I should be able to get her up to 8Gig. I have to wait until she is not using her PC.
I suppose that I should order Erica’s new SSD. It will cost around $85. I think I might order a power supply, too. Hers has lots of fan noise.
Update
Erica’s computer has 4 slots on the motherboard. This means that she probably has two 1Gig and 2 2Gig memory cards. There are other possible combos, but my lowly 1Gig cards won’t help her.

In 2010, I put together 13 computer related stories and published Error Message Eyes. It made me a couple of hundred dollars over the last 12 years, but it was not what I would call an overwhelming success.
It occurred to me recently, that I had written quite a few more computer oriented stories in the last 12 years, so I started collecting Error Message Eyes, Release 2.0. The new book has 24 stories, but I only used 5 from the last book. I took all the Mizuki stories and put them in order. I then wrote three new stories by assembling fragments and finishing them, so that Mizuki is now a novella.
One of the things that I hated about the first book was that it was riddled with errors and typos. I used a combination of straight quotes and curly quotes. Every time I read it, I cringed.
This time I installed something called LanguageTool, https://languagetool.org/. I have to absolutely recommend this software for anyone who is suffering, as I am, from brain fogging drugs to treat seizures. The Firefox and Chrome plugins make your web writing much cleaner (although not 100% error free). I use LibreOffice and the installation there is much more complicated, but worth it. It freezes up LibreOffice regularly, but CTRL-ALT-DEL lets me kill it, so I can start again. You just have to save your work whenever you stop to think. In spite of its faults, I like it.
Shaun Lawton volunteered to do the artwork, so I am eager to see what I get. I like Shaun’s art. It is high-tech, bold and colorful. He said it would be done quickly almost two weeks ago, but I think he underestimated the time investment he would have to make.
I have done two proofreads of the book and am 30 pages (out of 220) from finishing the third time through. I like to rewrite as I proof and wind up adding new typos. I will be starting over again tomorrow for the final proof. I don’t want to be surprised when I check the book and find typos that I missed.
I want to do a major spam operation to all the editors, forums and FB groups that I can find. The digital version of the book will be free for the first 4 or 5 days, and I hope that it will get enough downloads to make it to the Amazon top 10 list. If I do this, I might even make money when I start charging for the book. I’ll charge as little as I can for the paperback.
For vanity’s sake, I want to make a hard cover version and buy a few for myself, and one for Shaun and one for John Shirley. John was a major inspiration for the stories in the book.

I have been listening to Gibson’s Count Zero while I take my walk. The weather hasn’t been cooperating, so I am only 1/3 of the way through after two weeks.
Gibson uses a phrase ‘The Hard and the Soft’ meaning hardware and software. I have not done anything for my computer upgrade plans.
I want to upgrade my old Dell i5 that has 4G ram and a 1 TB drive. I bought 16G of ram on eBay. I have a 256G SSD that I want to add as a second drive. At the same time, I want to take the 4G chips that I replace in my machine and put them in Erica’s old Dell, so she has 8G of ram. I figure I should get another SATA SSD, so I can upgrade her and get rid of the clunky old hard disk.
Recap: Replace ram on my machine and add another SSD. Add removed ram to Erica’s machine and replace HD with SSD.
Replacing Erica’s HD involves cloning her current disk, which is time-consuming. Adding ram is trivial.
Replacing my ram is trivial. Adding the new SSD is only a matter of figuring out how to format it for a Hackintosh.
I need a SSD SATA data cable for my new SSD and one to use for Erica’s new SSD to run the clone.
I have a 256G SATA SSD WD Blue for my addition disk. I need a 1 TB SSD for Erica’s machine, which will cost me $85. WD Blue are best rated, so that’s the way I’ll go.
I ordered a handful of SATA cables because I can’t find my stash (brain fog). I need to order Erica’s SSD, and I am thinking about doing that.
While I have Erica’s machine open, I’ll vacuum it because I think that it is full of cat hair.
So you see, I am still working on Hardware, just not moving forward very fast. I need to finish this step before I can move onto creating my Hackintosh.