Well, I resolved the bureaucratic stuff with the utility yesterday, thankfully. I talked up the gruff customer service rep and actually won her over about halfway through our interaction, which made the whole deal easier. I'm polite to nearly everybody, but am always extra-polite to customer service, retail, and wait staff, just because their jobs have to suck and why throw sand in the gears by being an asshole? Almost any human interaction can be a dance or a death march, and the former is much preferable to the latter, so I hew toward the former, and everybody wins.
I'm continuing to work on Book 5. I'm about halfway through this rewrite/revision. I don't know if anybody'll be able to pick up this one. It's a good book, but it's also an odd one, and for a new novelist (I chafe at that term, since I've been novel-writing seriously since 1999; but since nothing counts until a novel's published, I'll still be a "new" novelist at some point), it might be a hard sell. I guess I'll see if anybody picks it up. The important thing is just finalizing it, so I can move onto the next one, and so on. It's an uphill climb, by the way -- as I'd mentioned at the outset, my triage had the quickest finalizations coming up first, the ones that required the least amount of tweaking and rewriting to go out the door first. As I move through the catalog, the pieces require more from me. The sanguine outcome of this is that once they're finalized, I can set them aside (and send them out) and focus on new works. I won't let a backlog like that pile up again.
It's easy to do, because the writing of books is more fun for me than the marketing of books. But, as I see it, the writing of them is the hard part for most. Plenty of people think they can write books, but the vast majority don't ever try, or give up along the way, or find better things to do. I've got the book-writing part down; it's the book-selling part I need to master next.
