Analysis: Turning Federal Buildings Into Housing. Louis Shalako.

The balconies take up interior space, but are an option. (Google Street View).

 

Louis Shalako

The federal government is in the process of selling off or otherwise conveying surplus land and buildings in what is stated to be a stimulus for building more homes faster.

The man in charge of tens of millions of square feet of federal office space is aiming to double the government's lumbering pace for off-loading buildings.

Mark Quinlan, assistant deputy minister of real property services at Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC), said the department has a "special group" in place to speed up property disposals.

"Historically, the government is not very good at disposing of surplus properties," he told a city building summit organized by the Ottawa Board of Trade Tuesday.

Policies require PSPC to consult with provinces, municipalities, other departments and Indigenous partners before putting a property up for sale. (CBC)

Analysis.

Turning an office building into residential units will require a huge retrofit of plumbing, drains, electrical, and firewall barriers between individual units. There will have to be heating, cooling and ventilation for every unit. Units will require child-safe, screened windows that open, and all of this takes time, labour and capital. It takes vision and financing. It takes zoning, something of a hot topic in the housing debate, and a factor in the success of NIMBYism. The structural addition of balconies, which is desirable enough, adds more time and complexity to any project. Now we are cutting holes in a building’s exterior, sticking in and fastening steel I-beams, forming up the typical concrete pad, adding in a sliding balcony door, adding proper railings and the like. Yet an apartment or condominium unit without a balcony makes it a somewhat harder sell.

Pictured above is the old Polysar corporate headquarters, now housing. We can see the ‘balcony problem’ has been solved at the expense of interior space. Yet it is an option.

In the building I live in, the company redid the balconies some years ago. Once the railings were down, our patio doors were screwed shut, so you could open up about five inches but children and adults could not go out onto the balcony—which, obviously, were a hazard as they had no rails. Old concrete was broken up, and what was left was a series of I-beams sticking out. You don’t just bolt that to brick walls. It has to be tied in properly to the rest of the structure. Any kind of angled truss-type bracing would interfere with the balcony and patio door directly below it, and the balcony above your unit would do the same. It’s not impossible, but it might be unsightly with a heavy frame and angle-brackets down the walls.

Cutting holes in long expanses of load-bearing structures, in order for every unit to have their own door is another consideration. Each doorway would have to be framed in heavy steel, in order to take the load of previously-existing reinforced concrete above. One way around that would be ‘vestibules’, with one (heavily-reinforced) opening from the hallway into a small common area—the vestibule. Entrance to several units would involve openings in the new, concrete-floor-to-concrete-ceiling firewalls. The vestibule would be a common area, and requires cooperation to succeed, or it becomes a hazard, with bicycles, patio furniture, when it really ought to be in storage. This area becomes a little more like a co-op, where tenants are expected to pitch in on common chores—asking folks to help shovel snow off the sidewalks and vacuum the halls is a bit of a tough ask.

However. This saves a few holes cut into load-bearing structures on a common hallway.

Here, the door framing only has to support the load of concrete blocks up to the reinforced concrete ‘deck’ of the floor above, without reference to the weight of the building above.

Baseboard heaters, all would be based on the individual unit, replacing common heat for a large corporate building, with such costs factored into the leases. This implies each unit has its own thermostat, its own electrical and water metering…another complication in the conversion process.

Reinforced concrete before the pour.

This is why old schools are not particularly good prospects for conversion, whether single or multi-story, no matter how structurally sound. In a single-story school, with no basement infrastructure, that would require all services to be overhead, in a false ceiling which must carry the water pipes, for example. All of that has to go through fire-rated wall structures. Drainage, requires cutting concrete and digging trenches below frost level…we are beginning to get the picture now.

Theoretically, one classroom, in terms of square footage, would make one small apartment. It is the services that are lacking. Each unit needs a kitchen and a bathroom, with plumbing, drainage, ventilation, all up to modern standards. With only one door, it might need some method of fire escape…

In and of itself, offloading surplus federal lands and buildings is not necessarily a bad thing.

Okay, so we’re offloading lands and buildings for a nominal sale price of $1.00, a building for a dollar, ladies and gentlemen. This is a form of subsidy, and yet most would agree that any form of subsidy is desirable, in our current very tight housing market.

That in no way makes the job of conversion any faster or easier—whether it makes it any cheaper remains to be seen.

This plan may be of great interest in the Ottawa area, Toronto, other large centres. Here in Sarnia, Ontario, there really aren’t too many federal buildings or even federal lands available for conversion or new-build housing. There is the ‘federal building’ downtown, presently housing the Post Office. Service Canada operates on Exmouth Street, this looks like a simple leased space to this observer. The courthouse, whether federal or provincial, could be leased space in a mall somewhere, and only then would the building, right across from the county jail, become surplus.

So let’s say the federal government leases space somewhere suitable and releases the old Post Office to some form of development. 

Fair enough, but waterfront property is at a premium. The likeliest outcome would be a proposal for demolition and then the construction of high-end condo or rental/leasing units. This does little to reduce housing costs in the missing middle and the low-end of apartment units. It does nothing in the face of NIMBYism.

It’s also fair to say that the process of disposing of federal assets is likely to be slow and not likely to budge the needle on the housing crisis anytime soon, although it is part of a longer-term solution.

Around here, not much joy, in other words.

Additional: In the major earthquake in Turkey, large numbers of apartment buildings came down, partly due to the magnitude of the quake, but also due to lack of proper building and construction inspections. This was exacerbated by unauthorized, un-permitted building modifications where landlords and unqualified persons were cutting windows and doors in structural elements, in order to create more units by subdividing spaces within. This comes from news sources such as Reuters and others. I really should have included this in my analysis.

#analysis

 

END

#Louis

 

Here is the full story from the CBC.

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon, in ebook, paperback and one, Speak Softly My Love, in audiobook format.

 

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

 

I, Dill Bennis, Armed With Strong Mayor Powers.

Dill Bennis, Strong Mayor.

Dill Bennis

Guest Columnist

Heads will roll when I become Mayor of Sarnia, armed with the Province of Ontario’s Strong Mayor Powers, and I would sure like to thank Doug Ford, the Premier for that.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, on my first day of office, the new broom will sweep very, very clean, as the saying goes. Disruption is good, continuity is bad, as are any sort of intellectual considerations at all, as those are mostly theoretical and have no real application in life.

Up first, are all those weak and incompetent City Hall bureaucrats. I’m going to fire every little Baby Jesus-denying one of them in one fell swoop. It will be a veritable Symphony of Destruction, and about time, too. They should have been aborted at birth, and that way, at least their mothers might have learned some responsibility. (A technical point. They have the right to life before they are born, after that fuck them as they’re all probably going to grow up as weak, incompetent socialists, study piercing, or esthetics and sticking bones through their noses and plastering their hair in white mud and wearing saffron robes in some sort of anti-social, and rather gay fashion statement.)

Let them sue the city for wrongful dismissal. No cost is too high to rid the city of these appointed socialists, these sandals and shorts and floral-printed shirt-wearing pinko commie basterds…tax-sucking parasites, every damned one of them.

Let them call the lying press, let them go to the Human Rights Tribunal, which takes forever anyhow. No price is too high—we’ll get the money from the disabled, who have no reason to live because they just can’t afford it anyways.

They stand slightly to the left of Chairman Mao. Well, just so you know, I stand slightly to the left of Adolf Hitler; and I shall show no mercy to these pedophile Liberal child-groomers and polyamorous, effeminate slobs with their tattoos and their Prius hybrids and transvestite dogs and cats that lick themselves in all the wrong places…

While there may be some disruption, it will be short as we will be skipping the usual recruitment and selection process. As Strong Mayor, I will quickly appoint their successors, with minimal professional input by Liberal Elites…obey the right. Conform to the norm. I read that somewhere…

These strong and highly-competent appointees will of course be selected outside of their particular areas of expertise, as I distrust expertise, even though no one knows more than I do, and I gave up a half a million dollar a year job to become Mayor. Which as you know only pays about fifty grand a year.

That’s how much I love my city.

***

An extremely conservative person, I believe ever so strongly in democracy. One of my first bylaws will be the Democratic Freedom in Sexuality Guidelines. Under these guidelines, your neighbours will have the right to determine your gender, your orientation, and therefore, your worth as a human being, bearing in mind you should have been aborted but technically we are against that sort of thing. If they don’t like your name, they will choose a more appropriate one for you. A simple majority will rule, unless the verdict is wrong, in which case I will cast the tie-breaker in all cases, or I will phone that in from my palatial but characterless home in Bright’s Grove, to my designated deputy; who quite frankly could use a transfusion of good, red, Canadian blood and maybe a bit of a chin transplant.

The only exception shall be lesbians. Everybody loves lesbians, who, at the very least, can’t get pregnant and if nothing else, they can pretend they’re just friends and share an apartment and everyone, even their mothers, just sort of accepts it…what saves them is a physical inability to bum-fuck.

Lesbians hate kids, so we don’t have to worry so much about that. And I promise not to create a toxic work environment, not like that last guy anyways.

...lesbians hate kids, ladies and gentlemen...

But the truth is, you cannot be trusted to decide who (or what) you are. That especially holds true for children, who cannot be trusted to choose for themselves, and it is too important to leave discretion to the parents. That sort of thing is best left to guys like me, and it will be. All decisions are final, with no recourse to appeal, and all of you child-grooming sickos will just have to live with our decision, made in the interests of society, which above all requires order, and in order to have order, we must have authority. Trust me, I lie awake all night sometimes, worrying about your children.

Under this bylaw, accusation is proof of guilt and you’re lucky we provide you with a letter to sew on your prison coveralls free of charge…

***

I have always believed, like Ronald Reagan, that the best social program is a job. For that reason, all unemployed persons and other undesirables, will be employed on a rock pile, with big hammers, smashing out gravel, which will be sold at the going rate, about three dollars per ton—their income potential is unlimited, all they have to do is to put in the hours, never mind that conscript labour, harsh conditions and no real reward with which to better themselves, is the most inefficient labour of all. After costs, we will be subsidizing builders and cement workers to the tune of five or sixteen hundred dollars per ton, as the rocks will have to be trucked in, and the workers fed, clothed and housed, however temporarily. These will be accessible workplaces, as I have always believed in physical disabilities, although the cognitive ones not so much—there are too many ODSP scammers out there and we need to crack down on that too. The truth is, when you were renovicted, you made your bed and now you must lie upon it. But it’s okay, I have a plan to create hundreds of sampans, anchored in Sarnia Bay, and you can cook your tiny silver little fish on twigs and moss in an old Volkwagen hub-cap. You’re all pansies anyway.

You’re just a big bunch of fuzzy sock-lickers, that’s what I always say.

That being said, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as society, even though there is something, and if nothing else, I will be in charge of bogus aphorisms around here from now on.

***

When the Sarnia Police Services request a 27 % budget increase, I will bring down my gavel, which is real enough as I got it off of Ebay, and rubber-stamp that in a heartbeat.

A Sampan.

The police are always heroes, all of the time, in all circumstances, without exception, always have been, always are, and always will be, selfless and unselfish, for all of time past and present, and no price is too high to pay for men, women, whatever. We’re not too sure about one or two, but we will weed them out, trust me on that one. I will never vote to defund the police, which one has to admit, isn’t much of a bargaining position but I said it in the paper and now we’re sort of screwed, but hey—that is who I am after all.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for these fairies to learn how to suck the cock of the fire god.

Thank you for listening, and please vote for Dill Bennis, Strong Mayor, in the event you turn up to vote at all. Quite frankly, the fewer the better, in which case I might even stand a chance—be that as it may.

Incidentally, you don’t have to click any other boxes on the ballot, one click in the right place would be enough.

Those other folks are all weak and incompetent. I would give their names, but even I am smart enough, with good legal advice from a free half-hour consultation, which I would advise for any well-to-do person, not so much their victims; ah, not to engage in libel, slander, or defamation of character.

Oh. They’re stupid, too.

 

END

 

This weird-ass Louis Shalako guy has a free audiobook, A Stranger In Paris, available from Google Play.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

A Three-Dollar Calculator Cuts Through Endless Bullshit. Louis Shalako.

The world's safest, most effective #penis_enlarger

Louis Shalako

A three-dollar calculator will cut through endless amounts of bullshit.

How much is the ‘carbon tax’ per litre of gas in 2024?

As of April 2024, the federal minimum price is set at CA$80.00 per tonne of CO 2 equivalent. This roughly translates to 14.3 cents per litre of gasoline. Provinces and territories with their own carbon pricing systems can use the proceeds as they see fit.

(This is the result of a quick Google search on the internet.)

So, if I spent approximately $2,151.00 on fuel in 2023, and if the average price of a litre of fuel is roughly $1.50/per litre, then I bought 1,434 litres of fuel. Multiply that by 14.3 cents...that's a little over $205.00 in increased fuel costs. I get $134.00 four times a year in carbon tax rebate, (that's going up to $140.00 this April.) Four times $134.00 is $536.00 per year in carbon tax rebates, for a net gain of $536 - $205 = $331.00 in cash, in my pocket, that I did not have to work for.

Any money that I do not have to work for is good money, ladies and gentlemen.

The carbon tax rate was 23 % less in 2023, so the savings are actually 23 % greater. Much has been made of a ‘23 % raise in the carbon tax’, this roughly equates to the raise from $65.00 per tonne to $80.00 per tonne.

Yet it’s only an increase of three-point-three cents per litre at the pump. You could save 10 % in fuel costs simply by slowing down, or you could get similar savings by planning your trips and cutting out unnecessary cruising for entertainment. Interestingly, I haven’t heard the term ‘energy conservation’ in over thirty years. Not in this country. Not while we’re sixth overall in terms of global energy production…not while there’s piss-pots of money still to be made from it, and that is for sure.

No one wants to talk about that ‘conservation’ sort of thing anymore. Oh, and when the federal carbon tax goes up three-point-three cents, and the cost of fuel goes up by ten or fifteen cents, that tells you more about the refiners than it does the federal government.

Admittedly, fuel conservation will not be a popular option for younger people, who may be experiencing that first taste of freedom, (for the most part, without the onerous burden of additional responsibility), or possibly just out having fun with their first vehicle. It’s not like I haven’t done the same thing myself. In fact, my first vehicle was an Austin Mini, which had exactly 38 horsepower. They don’t make cars like that anymore, do they. On a paved side-road, cruising in fourth gear at 60 or 65 kph, you could easily get thirty or forty miles per gallon. 

Funny thing is, it is their future that we are talking about…the kids, I mean.

When I pull up to the gas pumps and the readout shows that the person before me has put in $150.00 worth of fuel, that is not my problem. That is your problem. Not mine—

I’m just here to put twenty bucks in the tank, and maybe, hopefully, make it through one more fucking day.

All pissed-off at the carbon tax. It's like they have a God-given right, somehow.

***

We could divide $80.00/tonne and find out just exactly how many litres of fuel it takes to generate one tonne of carbon dioxide and spew that out into the atmosphere. What is most disturbing about the carbon tax debate is the sheer sense of entitlement that some folks seem to feel about their right to poison an atmosphere, which is, after all a common good.

It’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything. The atmosphere was put here so that poor people wouldn’t starve to death, and that seems to bother some people more than it should. It is the tragedy of the commons. What once belonged to all is exploited, enclosed, and engrossed, and ultimately spoiled, all for the profit of the few. And to hell with the rest of us—

Somehow their rights come ahead of yours and mine—and your children, and your grandchildren. It’s like they haven’t spared a thought for all of those cute little unborn fetuses…that the very same folks profess to care so deeply about, and that goes for all them little black babies in Africa as well.

The math: 80 divided by 0.143 = 559.44. So, if I burn 559 litres of fuel, in six months or a year, I have generated one tonne of carbon dioxide and put it up into the atmosphere.

Please, feel free to check my math, as I dropped out of high school in Grade 10, and if the truth be told, journalism school is sort of lacking in math-related subjects. Why, I have often wondered. It’s like they don’t want you to know, sometimes. Maybe they’re just fooling themselves.

***

In a more perfect world, we would all have the right to propose one rule, only problem, is that we would also have to live by it; with no power of compulsion over the rest of the human race.

In a more perfect world, every student of journalism, on the first day of journalism school, would have to demonstrate, to the satisfaction of their future readers, (or maybe just the instructor), that they owned a three-dollar calculator and actually knew how to use it.

Poolever bought a doughnut or something...

At the time of this writing, Monsieur Pierre Poilievre, leader of the federal Conservative Party and head of the Official Opposition in Parliament is leading in the polls by twenty points. His first priority, day one, if he should become Prime Minister, would be to scrap the carbon tax. I don’t think he will do it—I think he will keep the tax, by any other name. All he has to do is to rename it, and simply stop paying out the rebates to low-income Canadians, and that, somehow, magically, will suddenly make everything all right again.

The bourgeoisie is all too predictable, sometimes. Hatred is blind and unreasoning, and it poisons every mind that it touches. Funny thing is, they’d be the first to tell you they hate the carbon tax, they hate Justin Trudeau and they hate Liberals. While claiming to love Canada, (and freedom), they don’t seem to have too much regard for their fellow Canadians, no matter who they are or where they came from. They have a long list of hates and a very short list of things they love.

Anyhow, that’s my opinion, and I see no reason to change it.

 

END

Images: Likely stolen from the internet. 

Here is Louis Shalako’s free audiobook, A Stranger In Paris, available from Google Play.

Check out this free, online calculator.

Thank you for reading, ladies and gentlemen.

 

A Rational Plan for Affordable Housing. Louis Shalako.

No basement required...

 

Louis Shalako

The federal government has promised a series of 'pre-approved' housing designs, meant to speed up home-building and address the shortfall in available housing stock.

One has to cringe at the thoughts of what they will come up with, and how that will be received by developers, home builders, and the bougies, who are presently occupied with houses six times the size and footprint of these homes, pictured on a quiet block of the 'tree streets', here in Sarnia, Ontario.

I think it’s safe to say the old 1 ½ story ‘wartime’ housing will not be much of a contender in this plan. Three bedrooms, one bath, and an unfinished basement, in a development of essentially identical housing, would be a bit of a hard sell, but then perhaps we have become spoiled over the years…ah, but what if they were brand, spanking new houses, going for $299,000.00? What if the feds split the down payment with you? What if your income was taken into account in the mortgage agreement?

What if someone had an actual, serious plan, ladies and gentlemen…???

What then.

What then, eh? Many of the kids I grew up with lived in this neighbourhood. Some of these have no basement. Some of them are two bedroom, as far as I know it is presently illegal to build a one-bedroom home. You would have to go to city council, and ask for a variance from the bylaws. Resale value would be impacted by the fact it is only one bedroom. The bank don’t want to mortgage it and no one wants to build it.

The dreaded, 1 1/2 story 'wartime' housing.

It is my opinion that you could build six to ten of these little two-bedroom houses in the same time it takes to build one massive bougie house along Blackwell Road, for comparison. Building large numbers of million-dollar houses is not going to solve the housing crisis, which does not involve the upper and middle classes, only lower-income Canadians. And apartment living isn't for everyone, the fact is my rent and other costs could cover a small mortgage assuming some rational, long-term and low-interest scenario.

Assuming some rational down payment, affordable payments, low municipal taxes, efficient heating and cooling, low maintenance costs, low insurance costs, and low transportation costs in the so-called ‘walkable city’. That is, admittedly, a lot to ask.

In Sarnia, basements are made to flood. Who needs it? A ground-floor utility room is just as good and probably cheaper to build. In terms of objections, there would have to be some federal and provincial subsidy, just to get the thing started. A certain class of person is already howling at how unfair that is—to them, mostly. Why, I do not know. They just like to bitch about every little thing, this among the most fortunate, most privileged bunch of people on the face of this planet. It really is unseemly, ladies and gentlemen, but that is indeed who they are.

As far as infrastructure hookups, the same bit of street that might serve one bougie home, can now serve two or three of the smaller homes. All of whom pay municipal property taxes, in the aggregate, contributing more to the tax base than one really big home, and when it comes to infrastructure, we are constantly being told that density is good—right up until someone goes to build it, and then it doesn’t happen. In Sarnia, we presently have about 3,200 unit approvals, and project after project seems to fall by the wayside. It amounts to one new apartment build on London Road at Afton Drive, and one currently under construction at the old Sarnia General Hospital site. Approvals mean nothing, what counts is shovels in the ground—and workers to build it. Capitalists don’t really build anything, ladies and gentlemen. Their purpose is to accumulate capital. What good is it, if you don’t do anything with it?

Yet big, upscale houses are going up all over the place, in the north end, along Lakeshore Road, where the houses weren’t exactly working class to begin with, and in Point Edward, where what was working-class and middle-class housing once stood, buildings are being knocked down and replaced by behemoths three to four times the size. Every second farmhouse is being knocked down and being replaced with upscale housing.

The big, bougie houses are not going to solve the housing crisis.

Location, location, location, right? It ain’t exactly cheap to knock down what was a viable house, and then put up another one of any size and configuration. The bet here, is that the investment will pay off. In other words, the folks building these have no interest in an affordable marketplace, one that would benefit a greater number of Canadians. But to put that in perspective, you’re investing three or four hundred grand, just to get a building lot in a desirable location. Clearly, this kind of market and consumer behaviour is not going to solve the housing crisis.

My apartment is about 740 square feet. As a standalone building, I wouldn’t want to make it a whole hell of a lot bigger. The galley type kitchen is small, so is the bathroom. If we took it up to 900 square feet, we could address these issues simply by bumping out extensions on what would be the front elevation of the building. Simply put, instead of a rectangle, we end up with a thick ‘L’ shape and some revision of the interior floor plan.

The younger crowd buy a house, all of a sudden, they’re tearing it apart. They’re renovating the kitchen, putting in another bathroom, a hot tub on a new deck out back, they’re installing all new windows, doors and siding. They’re also throwing a roof on the place and maybe putting in a new furnace. They have the income to support such projects, and the energy and optimism required to complete such projects.

It’s an investment, I agree. It’s also a pain in the ass to live in a never-ending construction zone. With the aging of the population, some of us just want a nice, small, clean, well-built and efficient house where, essentially, we don’t have to fix or renovate a single damned thing. It doesn’t have to be anything real special.

Just a nice, clean, simple little house—I’ll bet they can’t do it.

It’s too hard.

Their minds just don’t work that way, ladies and gentlemen.

Cabana style living, at an affordable price.

 

END

 

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon.

Grab a free audiobook from Google Play. You have nothing to lose, after all.

 

Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

 

 

 

2023 In Review. It Was a Very Good Year. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

A couple of weeks ago, I began my new audiobook on Google Play. It’s been a long year.

My attention was wandering, and I basically saved it as a draft. I’d probably had enough, at that point. I went off and did other things for a couple of weeks. I was grabbing free, public domain short stories from the internet, finding images, publishing them, putting in links and posting them all over. At some point my eyes were rolling back into my head. I couldn’t focus for the life of me…I’d probably had enough, by that point.

I'm back at it now, no rush, no hurry, no worries. My Criminal Memoir will be available as an audiobook within a day or two.

So, 2023 was fairly productive, after a hiatus of some years. It took me three winters, to write a mystery novel, A Stranger In Paris, the ninth of the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series. That was three winters where I wrote about 20,000 words, and long periods in between when I didn’t write a damned thing except the very occasional blog post. Publishing that on Smashwords, Kobo, Amazon, and finally, Google Play, I saw the notice. Click here to publish your book as an audiobook narrated by AI.

People are scared shitless by AI, and no one can blame them. They know themselves best. They are at a distinct disadvantage, one has to presume.

I thought, why not, why not learn how to use the fucking thing. I have all these books and all these stories. A series of assets, and it’s all about tending that little garden. I spent the next five months, producing what turned out to be around one hundred and thirty audiobooks in terms of full-length books and short stories. I have five different pen names, writing in any number of genres. I now have 285 titles up on Google Play. This does not account for paperbacks in two different sizes, or a number of different ebook formats available from Smashwords, just to clarify. Where I failed, was in getting that up as an approximately 4x7 paperback on Lulu (dot) com, where I have sold exactly three books since 2011, and I will never see a penny from that website…so far, I haven’t even attempted to produce a paperback of that book on Amazon. I was completely used to making paperbacks through Createspace, which was purchased by Amazon and is now a dead portal. I suppose it’s time to learn a new trick—

Having done all of that, all within a few months, I started looking around, and I had this story, The Black Orb, which had originally been published by New Myths. It had been hanging around in a folder on my desktop, the big hurdle there was the question of a cover image and a half-decent book cover.

I bit down hard on the bullet, and found a free, black and white, public domain image and produced a book cover, got an ISBN number, wrote some kind of half-assed blurb and published that as an ebook on various platforms, and as an audiobook on Google Play. I found the material and published One Million Words of Crap. I didn't even have to write it, only collect it, format it, and publish it in the usual fashion.

All of this is free to do, incidentally.

When I went to publish my new ebook on Lulu (dot) com, they wanted $4.99 to publish an ebook. They claim two million authors, (all of whom are happy and successful), that part is credible enough. It is also a drop in the bucket compared to some other platforms, and the truth is, I have sold exactly three books there since I joined the platform fifteen or more years ago. Why in the hell would I ever want to do that.

By this time, it was October, I was looking at a long, boring winter square in the eye. I had been thinking of writing my memoirs, I had some other ideas, but I just started writing. I wrote down a heading, and then just said what I thought. Whatever I could recall, from a certain period of my life. I didn’t even have to lie, to write fiction…that one’s about 54,000 words. A bit short for a novel, but this one is non-fiction. 

Publishing that, chapter by chapter, on my blog, was a motivating factor. People expect you to follow through and to finish that thing.

So did I.

That is exactly what I did.

At the present time, I need to go back, publish two paperbacks through Amazon’s KDP portal, assuming I can trim and fine-tune the book covers for A Stranger In Paris, and My Criminal Memoir.

I have three ebooks hung up due to formatting issues at Smashwords, in terms of wider distribution through iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Scribd, etc. Basically, I just got tired and parked it for a while. If I could trouble-shoot all of that, I would be just about caught up for 2023, and that would be that.

In that sense, it was a very good year.

I have no idea of what I might do next.

No promises, okay.

#Louis

 

END

 

A Stranger In Paris. Amazon.

One Million Words of Crap.

My Criminal Memoir. Google Play, (Audiobook).

The Black Orb.

Louis Shalako on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading or listening, whichever the case may be.

 

#Louis