Two Orders of Important Business (Meta/Admin)

Hi folks. 

I've got an overbusy week at my other job this week, so I'm going to mention two quick things that I wouldn't normally get a chance to dedicate a whole post to (but are important).

First the really important thing that is always an issue but has been more of one lately….

I'm getting a lot of notifications of failed payment attempts. Usually I get a handful, but it's gone way up lately. Of course, if you are thinking of pausing or cancelling your contributions, I understand. (It's been a tough year for everyone, and my nanny schedule has meant you aren't getting the best of me.) However if you intend to be a donor, it might be worth a quick check. This month, I'm sorry to say that around 10% of my income isn't actually getting to me because of failures in charging various credit cards.

If you have signed up to be a monthly donor, either through Patreon or through Paypal as a recurring payment, it would be super awesome check to make sure the payment you have hooked up to the payment processor is still valid. 

Second is an issue related to our current Book Recommendation Post (for stand-alone science fiction written after 1980) and some of the recommendations I've been seeing. 

We're getting a lot of prequels, sequels, parts of trilogies and other books (sometimes with the caveat that they COULD stand alone). These recommendations may be very good, but they will be appropriate for OTHER book rec posts. (One of our categories is specifically "best could-stand-alone book in a series.") So please stick to stand-alone books or I'm afraid I'll have to skip your recommendation for the compilation. 

I'm going to extend the nomination period until…well in theory until Friday, but it might be until next week. Friday I'm going to be getting my second dose of Pfizer first thing in the morning, and that might be all she wrote for a couple of days. So if you've put a book on there that is part of a series or has a sequel, you may want to replace your current recommendation with something that will be accepted. 

And this isn't really one of my orders of business, but I wanted to remind you all that we're less than three weeks out from some scheduling changes that are going to give me more time to write, and you should see that affecting blog output right away.