Click

It has been an interesting day. I wish I hadn’t been sick for most of it. The stomach bug interfered with my favorite preorder game. The game is called “click.” All I have to do is sit at my computer and hit refresh on my store info page to see how many orders came in since the last time I clicked. Click won’t be nearly as fun to play tomorrow when the orders have slowed down.

At least this time I wasn’t reduced to a useless pile of very tense Jello like I was on preorder day back in April. In April I was so tense that I couldn’t get anything done. Today had a little bit of tension, but mostly I’ve felt pretty relaxed as I fielded dozens of customer service emails. Fortunately none of the emails were outside my capabilities to solve. All of the requests were very polite, if occasionally frustrated. I think I was able to make everyone happy before the emailing was done.

It is a measure of my relaxation that I haven’t been frantically running numbers all day to figure out if we’ve brought in enough money yet. Howard keeps running numbers, but I’m content to wait a few days before I start doing my figuring. According to Howard’s numbers, we’ve paid the book production bills and about 2 months of Howard’s salary. Before preorders are over we need have enough money to pay out 8 months of salary. We don’t intend to wait 8 months before the next book, but financial margins make me happy.

My work is far from done. I have much organizing to do before we are ready to do a huge mass mailing. The storage room needs to be cleared out. Supplies need to be bought. Sorting of invoices must be done. And postage must be printed. But for today I can just relish the click.