What's an Author to Do?

I'm wishing I'm not harboring a vain hope that an occasional writer reads these posts. I'd like to ask what advice one might give when the options offered by a small publisher are: (1)stick it out, or (2)take the book back--and decide within 72 hours. The contract is now over 2 1/2 years old, and no release date suggested, let alone promised. I understand (all too well) that I blew it when I signed on, but that's water over the dam. Any suggestions now?

Don't Change Your Server!

Can you believe 7 days, average 6 hours per day, to establish correct settings on Outlook Express? We've just survived (barely) this ordeal. I understand very little about the mathematics involved with figuring out the possible number of combinations when dealing with 5 pages that have from 4 to 8 possible choices on each one. I do know it's a lot. It took 7 technicians (in India and the Philippines) to set up our computers.

Okay, so who needs 4 computers? But that's not the point. We have 2 desktops and 2 laptops, one of the latter equipped with Vista. How many more possibilities are now added to settings?

It took 4 days (3-hour sessions twice a day on average) to set up the first desktop. By the time it worked, I was feeling pretty cocky, so I decided all I had to do was to duplicate the settings with a different e-mail address for the second one. Wrong.

Another day to get the second desktop going. Finally--good.

I moved on to my laptop, thinking I'd just duplicate the settings. Wrong again. Another half day. Well, now I'm really getting the hang of this. It should make setting up the second laptop with Vista less of a problem.

Definitely wrong again! 2 full days to discover that a virus protection had to be completely un-installed (not merely disabled) before that mail program would work. After my husband re-installed his protection, we heaved an exhausted sigh, and I returned to my desktop. It had been the first one set up and running.

You guessed it. Seven days into the exercise, and that computer would no longer work.

By this time I've become an expert at changing settings. This upsets the technicians on the phone because now I can make the changes faster than they can tell me what to do. Not to worry. I wouldn't bother the poor girls any more. By now I can do everything except set up and run in Safe Mode to make basic changes to the whole system (I do leave that to the experts). I spend another 2 hours changing Outlook Express settings, and at last -- the promised land of e-mail is mine again!

Now to claim the incentive monetary rewards promised in the promotion that started all this. You'll see more here if they don't come through. Believe me, the time spent doing this was worth a lot more than $225!