The wife is gone to Oklahoma City, helping our daughter and son-in-law out with those two precious grandsons of ours.

The taxes are filed. I completed my income taxes a couple of weeks ago. I also do my mother-in-law’s taxes, and completed those last night and today made the copies, had her sign them, and put them in the mail. My stuff is filed, and her’s is organized for filing. My tax spreadsheets are in better shape than they ever have been, and a few clicks will put them in the 2012 taxes folder, ready for next year.

So, with the quiet at home, and with my major non-writing projects out of the way, I should be kicking butt on word count. Yet, I find myself unable to write tonight. Don’t even feel like writing this post. I feel kind of deflated over the whole publishing thing. Writing is still a joy, but not having a single sale for about six weeks is the pits. Having blog page views tank is the pits.

Obviously I’m doing something wrong, but I don’t know what. Over at the indie writers Facebook page they are advising me to do “tag swaps”, that is asking people to tag my books with certain keywords and with me reciprocating.  None of these people have read each other’s book, mind you. One writer says, “Please tag my book with the tag “teenage grief”, and the other writer believes that’s what the book is about, and makes the tag. These tags are used in search engines, I guess. If 50 people tagged your book with “teenage grief” and someone searchers for that, your book will pop up as number one.

To me that seems like gaming the system. Yet, that’s what you’re supposed to do, they say, to get noticed by Amazon’s search engines. I have to decide if it’s unethical, regardless of being allowed by Amazon’s Terms of Service. My gut is telling me not to do it.

Today I was served with a subpoena to give a deposition in a lawsuit related to the time I was city engineer (by contract) for Centerton. The deposition is next Wednesday, which isn’t a lot of time to prepare, given the reams of documents and drawings to review for this troubled project. I spent a lot of the day reading old correspondence (2004-2007) on the project, and the problems associated with the project made me sad.

So writing is making me sad today, and engineering is making me sad today. I’d drive down to Wal-Mart and pick up a half-gallon of ice cream and eat the whole thing as comfort food, but that would spike my blood sugar, which would just make me sad.

Oh, and it didn’t help that I was the only one who showed up for writers group last night.