{"id":3290,"date":"2016-05-04T10:23:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-04T15:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/?p=3290"},"modified":"2016-05-04T10:23:00","modified_gmt":"2016-05-04T15:23:00","slug":"this-soap-smells-like-rich-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/?p=3290","title":{"rendered":"This Soap Smells Like Rich People"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, I thought I&#8217;d chart my progress as I stumble along this new path. March is going to be an incredibly stressful&#8211;*listens*&#8211;I&#8217;m being told it&#8217;s May. Holy rolling shitballs, it&#8217;s already May 4? Fuckity fuck-spigots.<\/p>\n<p>Right. Progress. I&#8217;ve made none. Well, that&#8217;s not entirely true. I took a few dozen showers, in which I just kinda stood there sudsed-up and wept. The good news is, this soap smells like hoity-toity froo-froo. My eyes might be puffy and red, but man I smell fancy. That&#8217;s progress, right?<\/p>\n<p>Let me sum up, in case I&#8217;ve lost you. My publisher, Booktrope, is closing its doors May 31st and a large hunk of my catalogue will vanish from my shelf. Excuse me for a second&#8230; *panic-vomits* Where were we? Oh, yes. I&#8217;ve got eighty bajillionteen things to do in order to get my shit together so that when the rights revert to me, I can get back in business. So far, I&#8217;ve collected those things in a handy dandy To Do List, cried, stared at the list a bit more, then I ate all the things and curled up in a ball and rocked myself to sleep. When I woke up, it took a half hour for me to remember this was going on, at which point I seriously considered having vodka for breakfast, or running away to Alberta. Then I heard that Alberta was on fire, so I guess that just leaves the vodka plan. I&#8217;m calling that Plan V, which could also be Plan Vagina, except I ran out of batteries.<\/p>\n<p>Serious step one, though, is taking care of my team members. Plan M for Moneybucks. See, according to our creative team agreement, if the publisher ducks out of the whole dealio, *someone* has to compensate the team, and since the author is the one who ends up with a product they can sell, that *someone* is me. I don&#8217;t have a problem with that, but it&#8217;s come as quite a shock to many broke-ass writers who got into this hybrid publishing plan specifically for the team royalty structure. Some writers haven&#8217;t even made any royalties themselves but are now looking at thousands of dollars in payouts. So, yeah, step one is making sure I cash out my team. They did wonderful work, I&#8217;m very grateful to them, and though my bank will be emptied, the edited and proofread books and covers will be mine, and my slate will be clean.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve focused on this week; my team members have been contacted, I&#8217;ve tried to be as fair and generous as I can, and so have the other team members. I&#8217;m relieved to say I&#8217;ve handled all that, and all that&#8217;s left is to cut some checks. Plan M will be off the list.<\/p>\n<p>Next up: prepping the files I do have, and making sure all my legal Ts are crossed and Is are dotted. Notice, nowhere in my To Do list is there mention of writing new things. That has been put on hold until next week. \u00a0I&#8217;m hoping the stress of all this hasn&#8217;t conked the muse on the noggin, because I need him all next week when I&#8217;m away. This is our chance to get some solid word counts. I won&#8217;t get much done if I&#8217;m still hurling up the knots in my belly.<\/p>\n<p>What I need now is some quiet, some space, and a little luck. And some more of this smelly rich-people soap. Plan S for soap. It&#8217;s good. It&#8217;s good stuff.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3291\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/images\/6871_897266350369919_6137352836249508146_n-250x300.jpg\" alt=\"6871_897266350369919_6137352836249508146_n\" width=\"250\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/images\/6871_897266350369919_6137352836249508146_n-250x300.jpg 250w, http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/images\/6871_897266350369919_6137352836249508146_n-158x190.jpg 158w, http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/images\/6871_897266350369919_6137352836249508146_n-60x72.jpg 60w, http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/images\/6871_897266350369919_6137352836249508146_n.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, I thought I&#8217;d chart my progress as I stumble along this new path. March is going to be an incredibly stressful&#8211;*listens*&#8211;I&#8217;m being told it&#8217;s May. Holy rolling shitballs, it&#8217;s already May 4? Fuckity fuck-spigots. Right. Progress. I&#8217;ve made none. Well, that&#8217;s not entirely true. I took a few dozen showers, in which I just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinions"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3290"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3290"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3295,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3290\/revisions\/3295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ajaalto.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}