Oct 30
2005

Thank you, Bill Katz!

For explaining in easy to understand steps how to get my NaNoWriMo tag on my site!

Oct 30
2005

Easy to use. Not easy to change.

So this is a pretty nice looking site, I suppose. I’m using a template created by someone else, on a program that I vaguely understand. Only problem is that this whole thing doesn’t have a lick of html anywhere that I can find to modify in the event I want to change a few things. (Which I do.) The files are all php files, except for the style sheet, and that shit looks like greek to me. Arrgggg… I want to change the order of the shit on the sidebar, I want to make this comment area wider so that I don’t have to shrink my pictures down so far to, and I want to add a couple of links that don’t fall into the ready-made categories such as Links, Pages, etc.

It’s very frustrating when I don’t know how to do stuff that seems very basic to others.

Oct 29
2005

Me, not looking like crap for a change.

Diana and Anna, with Diana actually clean and wearnig makeup for a change

Oct 29
2005

November happenings

I will be at WFC in Madison, WI, arriving late Wednesday afternoon and leaving the following Monday. I’ll be staying at the oh-so-lovely Best Western, which was the only place where I could find a room since I made my plans to go at close to the last minute. Fortunately it’s only three blocks away from the convention hotel, so it shouldn’t be too bad. If any of my readers are going to be attending, drop me a comment here, or just look for me in the bar.

Okay, I won’t always be in the bar, but in the evenings it might be a good place to start looking.

Also in November I’m going to be doing a modifed version of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month.) I really don’t want to work on a novel right now, but I do really want to get cracking on more short fiction, so my goal is to write at least 50K words of short fiction in the month of November. They may suck, but at least they’ll be written. I think it’s important for me to really get serious about the short fiction for a while, and get more stories under my belt and on the market. Yeah, I won WOTF, but that’s not going to mean dick if I can’t follow up on that. I’ve looked at the lists of past winners, and yes, there are plenty of names that are Names now. But there are also a lot of names who have done nothing since that win.

So, I want to get 50,ooo words written. That will probably be ten or so stories, unless a novella suddenly pops into my head. But the next thing I want to work on is NOT rushing through the rewrites and getting those stories on the market as fast as possible. I’ve been down that road before. I think it’s a trap that a lot of new writers fall into. We’re SO hungry and we want to be published SO badly, that we send the stories out as soon as we’ve filed off the rough edges a bit because it feels like there’s just no time to waste. And then the story makes the rounds of all the major markets, and maybe some of the minor ones, and after a fistful of rejections, only then does the writer stop and look at the story and say, “Hmmm.. okay, there are some problems with this thing that I didn’t see before. But, hey! They’re fixable!” Only problem is, even if you fix it and it becomes a Hugo-worthy story, you can’t submit it to any of the decent markets because it’s already been there. So you end up trunking it in the hopes that another market will come along.

I have several of those in my virtual trunk right now. I’d like to not add to their number. So my plan is, once December comes along, to set all of those stories aside until after the first of the year. Let them steep a bit. Then go back through them nice and slow. Do the rewrites and edits. Put them through my critique group. Then let them simmer a bit more. Then set the fuckers free and see what happens.

Oct 29
2005

Eeeek! The place isn’t ready!

Well, I hadn’t quite planned on publishing the existence of this site and making the switch over to this domain, but Kent dropped the nickel on me in the latest issue of Speculations, so I guess I need to straighten up just in case anyone notices the new URL.

Actually, this journal section is fine, but the front page is most assuredly NOT in its final form! Please don’t judge the site by that silliness. :)

Oct 25
2005

Protected: More cuteness

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Oct 25
2005

Been too long…

…since I’ve posted pics of PB.

This isn’t the greatest picture of me, since it was taken about ten minutes after I finished working out, but it’s a cute one of the kid. Even if she does have a dirty face.

She’s growing up so fast! [sniff]

Oct 25
2005

Side Effects

Sunday night I noticed some red bumps on my thighs. I figured that some insectoid creature had feasted on me without my realizing it.

Monday morning I woke up to a full-blown case of head-to-toe hives. Sigh. Shit. I’ve been down this drug-interaction-allergic-reaction road before. I’m pretty well convinced that it was the antibiotic eyedrops that I’ve had to use since the Lasik. Antibiotics and I do NOT get along well at all, but I had hoped that I wouldn’t have problems with eye drops. Immediately discontinued use of said eyedrops and took two benadryl. Called eye doctor who advised that I cease using the offending eyedrops (yeah, no shit, sherlock) and then called in new prescriptions for me. Itching and hives subsided slightly after benadryl, but flared up a bit again in the evening. Took two more benadryl. Woke up at 1AM itching. Took two more benadryl. Woke up at 5AM to my alarm and duly noted that while the hives are somewhat less than they were the day before, they are most definitely still there. Took two more benadryl. Called my family doc to get a shot of steroid in the ass. Waited on hold for ten minutes. Gave up.

Used new prescription eye drops this morning. No hives yet, but instead have an ungodly bitter chemical taste in my mouth. I’m not sure which is worse, the hives or the taste.

Will soon try again to get a shot in the butt.

But at least I can see.

Oct 25
2005

Mirror mirror

I’m going to start mirroring my posts from JournalScape over on this site, to gradually get things shifted over. I’m hoping that by the end of the year I can get all my peeps coming here to read about my so-very-fascinating life.

Oct 10
2005

More experimental posts

Now I’m just trying to see if the time is posting properly. I’m using Wordpress as my weblog/journal engine, simply because it’s the only one that I’ve been able to get running. Fortunately it came highly recommended and was not as daunting to install as I’d first feared. (Unlike Movable Type which was a friggin nightmare and never did work properly. And then there was Blogger which for some unknown reason simply refused to run on a domain other than blogger’s.)

I’m really not much of a nerd. I mean, I can fake it, but I tend to get very upset and throw things when things don’t work properly. Heck, it took me forever just to get a template other than the default one, and even this one isn’t all that great. I haven’t found any that are Just What I Want, which means that somehow I’m going to have to figure out how the hell to rewrite an existing template to give me What I Want.

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