Changes are Afoot

I'm in this rock/hard place situation where Webs.com is not keeping pace with technology, specifically the improvements to HTML like iframes. I have changes I want to make to my website that I simply cannot do with webs. It's showing its age and my site looks much more amateurish than it did three years ago when I first built it. At the same time, having a bad ass HTML5 with JS/CSS rocking your socks doesn't do me any good without a book to promote, as I'm sure I'll want to change it as soon as I DO have a book to promote.

So I'm going to go against what I usually say and start using this blog as a website. I'm in the process of adding static pages. I have not changed my website domain name to point here yet, not until I get things up and running. The links are no longer visible in the right, though, and some pages are there that weren't there before. Others require more work and will be forthcoming.

Please pardon us during our construction. ...and stuff.

And the Blind Shall See

If I had known that I was going to attend Sara Megibow's Writer's Digest webinar today, I would have posted earlier. It was a last minute decision1, and boy am I glad I attended.

It was a seminar on querying. I have attended such a seminar before hosted by her boss, Kristin Nelson. That seminar was geared specifically for sff. I've also followed Kristin's blog for YEARS, so I've heard a lot from the Nelson Agency about what makes a good query. So why did I attend? Because I continue to suck at queries.

Actually, at first, I asked Sara on Twitter whether I would get anything new from the presentation. And while she admitted that their philosophy on queries is pretty similar, there was one fundamental point I was short-selling: Sara isn't Kristin.

It has to be hard for an associate agent to work for a popular and established agent. How easy must it be to assume she parrot's Kristin's opinions or is the "second" option at the agency. Attend a webinar hosted by Sara, and you'll have that misconception dispelled. I will go so far as to say I learned MORE from Sara's presentation (which wasn't geared specifically to sff) than I did from Kristin's.

The part that resonated with me the most is when she took examples of debut authors and showed us how she took their query letters and formulated her pitch to editors2. That made a REALLY big difference in how I see queries and how I will approach them in the future. I rewrote the query for JH but am waiting for the audio archive to become available and listen a second time before I finalize things. It feels like there's a hole in the middle, which probably means it's perfect.

Now, if you're counting pennies and this kind of topic doesn't seem worth the expense, I will also point out that the webinar ends with a QA session3 and then you get to submit your query to Sara for critique. This is like a free swing. Here's my query. *feedback* Okay, here's my revised query, no harm no foul!4 I have heard from other people that sometimes the expense is enough for this fact alone. Basically they're buying a query critique and the rest is just icing.

For me, querying truly is my biggest weakness5. I want to improve and I feel that I have. Looking back at previous queries, I definitely have. *shudder*

If this sounds like something that may be helpful to you or if you've been on the fence about this kind of thing, I strongly recommend it.


1 Okay, technically it was a last sixty minutes decision. I went and grabbed lunch and then came back and participated.

2 She even spoiled Roni Loren's big reveal of her new cover. I know a secret!2 1/2

2 1/2 A secret until tomorrow when Roni reveals her new cover.

3 Sara saw a question I submitted and said hi to me. I squeed like a tween fangirl. :D

4 The query I submitted after Kristin's webinar led to the closest I've been to signing an agent.

5 Shut up, Liz! I like my pacing just fine.

Malcolm Castle/Richard Reynolds

I was watching an episode of Castle recently (in itself not surprising since it's the only show on right now where I watch weekly [Psych being the other]) and I made a startling realization. Nathan Fillion is playing the same character he played in Firefly.

I will not explain to you what Firefly is. You should know this by now.

Now you may think, "How can you claim Richard Castle is the same character as Malcolm Reynolds?!?!?!"

And I say to you this: Watch the pilot, Serenity, and then have the independents win the war. Who is Malcolm Reynolds if he didn't suffer the horrors of defeat and the aftermath of Serenity Valley?

He's Richard Castle.

Ooooo *shivers* Do it again!

I just had one of those moments. I love those moments. Back in the day, the reason I never finished anything was because I tried to plot things out. I might get a ways into it. I tried to get a feel for it and then write an outline, but I was convinced I couldn't go forward without an outline. What that meant is I never finished anything. 40,000 words on a manuscript and then three days working on an outline and I threw everything out.

I don't outline any more. Now I write by the seat of my pants. The pants/plots paradigm (p3) is a well established discussion on the tubes and I'm not going to tell you to do things one way or the other. Find what works for you and then do it. I will say, however, if you're not finishing anything you start, you may want to try an alternate writing method.

No, the reason the topic comes up today is because I had one of my favorite moments as a pantser. You're writing your chapter and you know where you're going and you just have to craft it to have some kind of competent literary end to the chapter. And then you get to the end of the chapter and your fingers keep typing and all of a sudden something you never considered before has appeared on the page. And not only is it good, it's awesome. The reader inside you screams, HOLY SHIT THAT'S AWESOME! Let's call that tickling the reader.

I suspect (but have no evidence and no inclination to prove my claim) that pantsing allows you to tickle the reader a little bit more because you're engaging in a higher degree of discovery along the way (I won't say you don't know where that's going because such a claim is insulting and usually only made by plotters that don't know better or bad writers who have no actual substance to their work). *deep breath* It's a matter of degree. I may not know the exact route I'm taking, but I know where I'm going and when I need to show up. Sometimes, though, you see that there's a road you thought closed that is actually open so you take it to see where it goes. And that's when your reader gets tickled.

That's a good moment. I like me the tickles.

Flashback

So there's a lot of chatter on Twitter lately about blog designs and website builds and etc etc. If you have not been to my website, this is the minimum level of quality I expect for a user-created website. Blogger and like services are expanding their styles to blend the boundaries between blogs and websites, but for the moment, I continue to contend they serve two different purposes. There are different graphical designs and interfaces that best accomplish those purposes, and as such, the two should be separate entities. I am in the minority on this one. Most new authors and aspiring authors seem to think blogs are enough. Established authors have blogs integrated into their own sites, so either way you get a single-platform delivery, though the latter is an achievement that most of us could not do and most services do not make easy for us (or if it's easy, it's not cheap).

I saw a really nice website today and my first thought was, "How pretty. Too bad it's crap."

What what? Why is it crap if it's pretty. Well, obviously, something could focus on its esthetic without accomplishing its purpose as a platform to introduce users to you and your work. In this case, its splash page was covered with Flash animation. Now, me being of a certain age, I was on computers when the internet first became available to the public at large, so things like Flash animation still dazzle. I didn't just build personal pages in Geocities. I used Angelfire too. These are the old build-your-own page and fill it with animated gifs and blinking fonts sites. Flash? Super awesome compared to the way things were.

Unfortunately, Flash has not evolved fast enough. While you may not be thinking about it now, you need to start thinking about mobile delivery. View your site on an Android and/or iOS phone and see the difference. For me, unfortunately, the template service I used to build my site does not offer fill scripting functionality, so I have to (*shudder*) use tables to format the page to look the way I want it. Tables no worky on mobile platforms, which is why I'm formulating a redesign in my brain. The thing is, Flash no worky either. Sure OSes like Android and WebOS claim to have Flash functionality, and to a degree this is true. But it's not full Flash. It's a mobile Flash and Air support and both are reportedly buggy.

When you do all those snazzy things on your site with Flash like have your name come swooping in front the side? Unless your site is specifically coded to adapt to users that don't have Flash functionality, your name is missing from the page. Or worse, you get a big ass question mark because your phone lacks the necessary plug-in to run the animation. You want your website looking in tip-top shape in any format a user may view it in.

So when next you contemplate a redesign to your site and perhaps think on splurging a little for some professional work, here are some things to think on:

  • No Flash
  • NO tables. None.
  • No frames except for iFrames. Old-style frames are like tables except scroll bars appear at the edge of them, meaning you may have a scroll bar in the middle of your page, which looks dumb.
  • iframes are okay. iframes aren't like old-style frames. They're a little pop-up window that pops up within the page. It looks like a Flash animation but is actually JavaScript
  • If the producer is capable, make the build HTML5 compliant. Capable or not, they should be working with JavaScript (js) and cascading style sheets (css)
  • No files necessary for your site to function (such as .js files) should be hosted on the produces server. Get that thing for yourself and host it with the rest of your site. You are fully autonomous. If they flake out and delete all their content they ever worked on, this should not affect you in the slightest.
  • No audio/video auto-play. Only emo teenagers auto-play music.

New Things

The template for the blog has changed yet again. I liked that last one, but there were too many small things that needed fixing. Date wasn't displaying properly. The manner in which comments were listed was dumb. User pics weren't showing up like they were supposed to. I'll be the first to admit that my JavaScript isn't the strongest, but things I know should have worked weren't working, and I want to have a blog that I can customize to suit my purposes.

So I found this new thing. As good as the last? No. But better than the standard brown world thing and more readable than my original that so many people (*cough* Rich *cough*) complained about.

So we'll see if this one sticks.

Something else I did today is try out Google Documents. Oh, I've used it before, but never for anything that was important. Namely, I've never used it for my writing. So I created a brand spanking new super-secret Google account (you can't hack what you don't know is there!) and ran through some trial documents. I am unsure of whether GDocs is a suitable replacement for a word processor.

Why would I even be considering it? Because of THIS! My Eee PC is aging and the new models don't use XP as their OS any more. A netbook using Windows 7 is counterintuitive. More so when it's Windows 7 Starter (which isn't much of a starter). The Chromebook is a web-paced portal device but it allows you to work offline. This wouldn't replace my Asus laptop at home but my Asus Eee PC that I write on. That thing doesn't have anything on it other than Open Office. So not being able to install applications isn't much of a concern for me. Acer is making an 11-inch WiFi only (well, they're making a 3G version as well but I have no need for that). And with a cell phone that acts as a mobile hotspot, this may be the next logical step in my computing evolution.

The problem with Google Docs is A) the terms for which you have to agree to use it (they're standard stuff, but I don't like terms for my work), B) it indents lines using an indent formatting rather than a tab mark, and most importantly C) there is no custom dictionaries. You can add words to the dictionary, but you can never remove them. And you cannot have multiple dictionaries, which is exactly what I do for my books. What is a valid word in one novel may not be a valid word in another. So I make a new dictionary with each manuscript. I can't do that with Google Docs and that's a really big deal.

Still, the Eee PC hasn't kicked it yet. We'll revisit this proposition once it is gone and I need a new laptop.

Back to the Future!

So Blogger was reset to a previous back up. Anything you posted yesterday is most likely not there. Cool thing is, I actually scheduled yesterday's post Wednesday night so it was still saved as a draft. I pushed it live again.

It's a pretty big deal Blogger going down like that. Some people really saw the cloud as dark as it could be and are rushing to back up everything. This may be a good idea, but it takes enough effort that I am not one of those people. One of the benefits (risks) of cloud computing is that the external service maintains its own content integrity. I trust Google enough not to lose my entire site. I certainly wouldn't want to invest the effort backing up my site after every post.

If Google should somehow vanish from the earth and their content collapse, it's been fun talking to you all.

...some more than others. Some of you are too quiet, so how can that be fun? Talk more. We like that sort of thing.

Do Good Deeds

Perhaps the best benefit of a growing write-o-sphere on the tubes is that we can gather as a group for good causes. Charity auctions abound where you can donate to diabetes research, adopt a town in the storm ravaged south, or donate to the Red Cross general fund on behalf of the southern storms.

And those auctions are pretty nifty. Free books, a nook with a crap ton of ebooks, page reviews and phone calls by the likes of Kristin Nelson, Sara Megibow, Jo Volpe and a whole lot more. If you have some monies to spare, stop by these places and add your voice to the awesome (and get some awesome opportunities in exchange).

Brenda Novak's Annual Auction for the Cure for Diabetes where you can bid on for a critique and phone call with Kristin Nelson or Sara Megibow while giving money for diabetes research (and not the I ate too much and now I have diabetes but the I was born with this mess and it totally sucks diabetes).

Do the Write Thing where you can bid on a critique and phone call with Jo Volpe or a review by the slushmaster at Pyr publishing while raising money for the Red Cross general fund to help aid efforts as a result of the southern tornadoes (technically donations to the general fund cannot be directed to a specific cause).

All 4 Alabama where you can bid on a critique and phone call with Sara Megibow (lord she's going to be busy) while adopting small southern communities that could use the money for their disaster relief. This goes directly to local organizations of the auction's choosing.


On a side note, all of you go bid. People have been starting with timid bids on really awesome people, so I've been bidding what I thought should be the "base line." While some people agreed and outbid me, others are being more tepid. If I win all the auctions I've bid on, I'll be out much more money than I've budgeted. So all of you go do a good thing, both for your fellow man and for me. :D

Feline Masters



There are many reasons why I prefer cats over dogs. Many many reasons. Today's reason is because their genius knows no limit. We have three cats, an old man and a brother and sister we adopted a year and a half ago. The young boy fancies himself the king of the jungle and regularly mauls a string I run in circles for him.

Alas, I was unavailable yesterday and his sister wanted to play too. So the young buck (heretofore known as Wolfgang) took his string in mouth, hopped up on the kitchen table, and dangled it over the side. The young lass (heretofore known as Jitterbug) then proceeded to play string with him, no humans involved.

This level of complex thought staggers me. Truly they will rule the world some day.

A Tree is Just a Tree

Way back when, I meant to pursue a career in the United States military. At first I thought the navy and then found my place with the army. I was in an ROTC program, but because I had not started from the beginning, I was required to go to Camp Challenge (or basic camp). It's like boot camp but shorter and not as unpleasant depending your drill sergeants (my DIs did not hold to that latter fact and gave it to us as much as they could--still easier than trainees, but we lost a few people to medical because of hernias and the like).

Anyway, when I came home, I was unnerved by the changes. I loved nature. I loved going out to parks and climbing a tree and just basking in its wonder. But when I came home, trees and roads and become lines of fire and ambush zones and it all proved very difficult to unhook from.

I'm reminded of this because I've been pursuing publication for two years now (my first query was sent September 2009). And I draw closer to my goal, it's been harder to disassociate from that slog and just...be. I am competitive and like to win. No one likes to have the race end right before they get to the finish line. But that has required an emotional tax that is sometimes hard to pay. I am a writer is always followed by "Have you written anything I've heard of" and "Wow you must be rich" neither of which I can affirm.

Sometimes I feel that disconnection where I'm walking through the forest but the trees aren't trees and the roads aren't roads. Twitter isn't twitter and word counts aren't word counts. They're objectives and goals and requirements and all part of this grand social puppet show I've thrown myself into.

Today I'm feeling particularly zen. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it was the delicious chicken chili I just had. Either way, today I see the trees for trees. I enjoy writing. I enjoy what I write. And while yes I do want an agent and to be professionally published, it's enough that I enjoy what I do.

Strangely, all the self-doubt and worry about not being good enough lessens when you're not so concerned with being published. If you're not obsessing about whether they love you, it's much easier to love yourself.

Toof Fairy

Someone tell me if this has already been made into a horror movie. It sounds familiar. A friend suggested a story idea while we were goofing around, but it's one that's really stuck with me. The tooth fairy takes kids teeth because there's a bit of youth stuck to the tooth that the fairy can extract, ensuring it lives forever.

Is that a movie? It seems so simple that I figure someone else has to have thought of it. If not..DIBS! ;)