Attracting Wealth. Or Not

Blind Alleys and Dead Ends

Goal-Setting the A.D.D. Way

My eBaY store is on hiatus due to my being unable to pay my fees. I get scary e-mails from eBaY and automated phone messages from someone at PayPal who sounds exactly like Nurse Ratched. Naturally, I delete them, since I have no income at the moment and no particularly promising prospects.

The word "checkmate" derives from the Persian "Shāh Māt," "the king is defeated" (photo, Bubba73 at en.wikipedia)

I enjoy playing bridge and chess, but, being an Attention-Deficit-Disordered individual, I’m not very skilled at either, since they require the ability to hold a range of possibilities and responses in the mind. I felt very proud of myself for having mastered the basics of eBaY and Auctiva, except I consistently forget the part about having to pay eBaY at the end of the month.

At the top is a chart showing all my ideas about procuring money immediately, along with the reasons none of them will work. They are all blind alleys and dead ends. I’m definitely not cut out for a life of crime. When I was growing up, we lived directly across the street from the school, but I had to go to either corner and cross where there was a crossing guard. Once, when I was 7 or 8, I was running late, and it was very cold, and I jaywalked. My heart pounded all day in fear of having been observed and reported by a crossing guard. (The crossing guards were 7th- and 8th-graders back then, and we called them the “safety patrol.” Most of them were pretty laid back, but a couple, at my particular corner, really liked to tattle.)

The law of attraction

When I have a bit of money, I’m like an eating-disordered person looking in the mirror: I see much more than is really there. The New Thought people hypothesize, and I believe them, that some people attract abundance via their vibrations. If, for example, you believe that you don’t deserve the abundance, your vibration frequency will be low, and the abundance will notice it and be repelled and go off looking for someone to harmonize with whose vibrations are friendlier to abundance than to poverty.

Esther and Jerry Hicks and “Abraham,” in Money, and the Law of Attraction: Learning to Attract Wealth, Health, and Happiness, advise their followers to wallow in how you would feel if you had what you wanted — abundance, say, or the love of your life, or the job you’re perfectly suited for. I can carry this off until I open the refrigerator and see a couple of limp carrots and a soymilk carton that says, “Purchase before October 2, 2007.”

*Outlander,* by Diana Gabaldon

Attention-deficit-disordered persons spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between where they are now and where they want to be. If it’s a one-step process, they do pretty well. If there are unexpected obstacles or corners they can’t see around, they take a nap or read escapist literature. My escapist literature of choice, at the moment, is anything by Nora Roberts (or Nora Roberts writing as J. D. Robb), Diana Gabaldon (Outlander series, absolutely riveting), Jane Austen, or Philippa Gregory. In case you were thinking of sending me a present.

May Whoever Is On Duty bless you and your endeavors….

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Book Report

Voluminous

I just listed a dozen or so Nora Roberts novels on my eBay store. This week I’ll list another eight or ten. One advantage of selling books, rather than, say, Land’s End chinos or heirloom china, can be summed up in two words: Media Mail. It’s the cheapest way by far to ship eBay items… and books are unbreakable and easy to pack.

Why eBay rather than Amazon?

And what’s with Nora Roberts?

Why eBay? Why not Amazon?

It costs more to sell used books on Amazon than on eBay. “If you expect to have less [sic] than 40 orders a month,” you can “sign up as an individual seller… [with] no monthly fee but instead a per-product-sold fee of 99 cents.” In addition, there’s a “referral fee” of 15 percent.

Alternatively, you can pay a monthly subscription fee of $39.99 per month plus, as I read it, a 15-percent referral fee and a “variable” closing fee ($1.35 each for books). If there’s anything left over and you actually earn some money with your sales, Amazon doles it out to you every two weeks.

Most of the books I sell are paperbacks at $1 each. I add exactly one dollar, which covers packaging materials, to the Postal Service Media Mail rate. I’d lose my shirt on Amazon.

On eBay I pay $15.99 per month for my “basic” store. Listing fees for store items (priced under $25) are only 3 cents each, and the final-value fee is 12 percent.

The contrast in fees is reason enough to choose eBay, but there’s another strong incentive: On eBay the buyer pays me directly through PayPal and, since I have a PayPal debit card, the money is immediately available to me. eBay bills me once a month.

I might get more traffic on Amazon, but there’s also more competition. I still don’t understand – and if you do, please explain it to me – how the sellers who price their books on Amazon at 1 cent make any money at all.

What’s with Nora Roberts?

[Note: I wrote this panegyric to Nora Roberts several months ago as part of another blog, the Writing Queen, in which I express unabashed admiration for the works of Diana Gabaldon, Philippa Gregory, and Roberts. Since then, I have read all the police-procedurals Roberts has written under the pseudonym “J.D. Robb.” They’re superb, and they won’t be offered for sale in my eBay store any time soon.]

Dare I link Nora Roberts’s name with Gabaldon’s and Gregory’s? Nora Roberts, who has had 124 novels on the New York Times bestseller list? Whose books in print exceed 280 million copies? Who produces a new book more often than I dust?

After my most recent Roberts-fest, the “MacGregors” series, I asked myself, once again, “How does she do it?” How, that is, does she write the same story, over and over and over again, putting her characters into different bodies and different scenic locales (usually by the turbulent sea, Atlantic or Pacific), giving them different names and occupations, but telling essentially the same tale?

She does it beautifully, though I confess I cringe every time she uses disinterested when she means uninterested. Still, I am seldom distracted by careless grammar or poor editing. Her research must be fascinating, and exacting. The men and women who populate her books are very believable cops, boat-builders, cartoonists, witches, racecar-drivers, innkeepers, sculptors, carpenters, fashion models, certified public accountants, four-star chefs, and horse breeders. None of them, it must be said, is fat or ugly, and if a character in one of her books is short of cash, it’s only temporary.

Boy meets girl, boy is rudely antisocial, girl is fiercely independent, the barriers come down, the clothes come off, someone puts a fly in the ointment, it gets fished out, and boy and girl get married, have at least three children, and live happily ever after. If we’re lucky, as in the case of the MacGregors, we get to read about several generations of lusty young men and women repeating the errors of their elders, and always triumphing

The principals are almost always white (often Irish or Scottish, though there are French and Comanche strains running through the extended MacGregor clan) and robustly heterosexual, but their close friends might or might not be black, or gay, or both. One of her heroes cheerfully donates sperm (in a clinical setting, not body to body) for his sister’s partner so that, I guess it goes without saying, the couple can have a baby. Roberts writes very comfortably, never coyly, about interracial and gay couples, neither making an issue of “diversity” nor backing away from it.

Her gift, I think, is the ability to pick you up and plop you down in some irresistible setting – an island along the New England or Georgia coastline, a clifftop near Carmel, occasionally a sunset town in Montana – and then surround you with charming people – utterly innocent, thoroughly jaded, and everything in between… and you get to live there for a while, in the beautiful, kaleidoscopic whirlwind she’s painted, and watch people grope their way toward each other… and it’s just lots of fun. Every damn time.

And I learn from them all – these made-up people with genuine humanity – the creations of Gregory, Gabaldon, and Roberts. They inspire me, even if it’s only to have a tidy, well-organized workspace like Cybil Campbell in Roberts’s The Perfect Neighbor. They never let me forget – as engrossing and colorful as their lives and times are, there, on the pages, their affairs so tidy one minute, so messy the next – to live my own life first and peek in on theirs only after my chores are done. Well, except for that “sick day” I spent reading [Philippa Gregory’s] The Queen’s Fool….

♦

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May Whoever Is On Duty bless you and your endeavors.