I suppose winter is now officially over, even if there’s still plenty of snow on the ground — our snow removal contractor just took away the driveway marker signs which have adorned our front yard since last November. I tried paying his invoice for the extra work stemming from our massive snowfall this winter via PayPal, as he prefers, and ended up so annoyed I cursed out loud. Listening to me go on didn’t do much for my wee dog’s nerves. Thankfully, his understanding of human sounds is rather limited, otherwise I think he might end up scandalizing neighborhood canines with salty language learned from his human.
But back to bloody PayPal. First, they held my payment for over a day, then reversed it without explanation, leaving me to mail my contractor a check. When I asked PayPal why they did that, their customer service responded with a simple apology for any inconvenience. Not a word of explanation. Argh! This wasn’t the first time they screwed around with transactions in recent months and left me without explanations or recourse. I had to shut down my online ebook store because they started holding up customer payments, leaving me with understandably frustrated buyers and in one case, out of pocket. I’ll be shutting down my PayPal account as soon as I sort a few things out, since I’d rather not do business with incompetent, useless, thieving buggers who still hold money owed to me but refuse to release it.
Ashes of Empire: Imperial Twilight is now at the two-thirds mark and, as usual, I expect my daily output to increase now that the end is in sight. The goal is to have the first draft done by the end of April, then take a week off before preparing it for my editor.
