Here you'll find the rantings of a blogging fool and sometimes writer. My more personal posts, including progress reports on my various writing projects, are Friends Only. General posts on writing are Public. Please see my user profile for my other LJs and my friending policy, and browse through the sidebar for nifty goodies and useful info.

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Writing only leads to more writing. (Colette)

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Visitors from 1/30/05:

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Thanks to pjthompson, I found out about the Writer Beware Blog from A.C. Crispin and Victoria Strauss. Writer Beware is the place to go for info on agents. The LJ feed is writer_beware if you want to friend it.

I found the link for Evil Editor on Miss Snark's blog. Entertaining and educational, both are must reads if you want to know the ins and outs of getting published and literary representation.

Not really. Not as we've come to understand blogs, anyway. These will be a way for authors to communicate with readers, via something called Amazon Connect. I'd meant to blog about this days ago, but I got lazy. And busy making icons. And uh, other less than constructive endeavors.

From Amazon:

" This program allows authors to post messages directly to their readers on a wide variety of subjects. Currently, messages will appear on the detail page of an author’s book as well as on her/his profile page. As part of the program, authors may create a profile page with personalized information."

MetaxuCafe, Tobias S. Buckell, and if:Book had good posts on the subject.

It's an interesting concept, but since I'm not a published author, I can view this only from the perspective of a reader. I read the blogs of a number of authors, and I don't spend much time on Amazon, maybe a dozen times in a year. I usually buy my books in brick and mortar stores and use Amazon almost solely as a backup to check a title not in the library's catalogs.

So, would any of you published and wannabe published writers want to join Amazon Connect? I'm not sure if I would, or if I'd stick to my own blog and hope my readers found me there.

Gather.com is a new (launched 11/05) online service geared to bringing publishers, readers, and writers together. The idea is centered around the concept that bloggers would like a built-in audience, something a site like this can provide, like, oh, an online community. Founder and CEO, Tom Gerace, according to an article about the site in Publishers Weekly (12/12/05) says about the service that it "seeks to do for user-driven media what eBay did for user-drivien retail." He pointed out the overcrowding of the blogosphere and hoped to bring bloggers, wannabe authors, and readers together. He said the beauty of the site is "that you can publish anything you want and we will make it widely available." No mention was made of TOS.

Publisher Houghton Mifflin is encouraging its authors to join Gather and hopes to not only find new readers, but new talent, too, and would like to see Gather duplicate the success with books that MySpace has had with music.

Not sure what this means, but I've been seeing it on a few blogs. Did it for Cyber Chocolate and here.

I created an LJ syndicated feed for my photoblog, Creative Endeavors. If anyone would like to friend it, you can use creativeend.

A discussion on rec.arts.science fiction.composition led to Patricia Wrede posting some exercises for someone to try to help her de-internalize her descriptions. It's been an active, interesting thread, so, for my non-rasfc readers here, I thought I'd post the link.

And I've been making icons. So what else is new. One of the new ones adorns this entry. I also deleted a few that no longer appeal to me.

Plus, my email submission to WordPress for a free blog there was actually accepted, so now I have a WordPress blog and no clue what to use it for. Suggestions or ideas would be appreciated. And I think I have some invites if anyone wants to give it a try. I just need your email, I think. Not that I'm giving up Blogger or LJ; I just like trying out new blogging toys.

As you can see, I've been playing. I hadn't been happy with the way this LJ looked. Digital Multiplex was the one style I liked that had the features I wanted: userpics on entries, sidebar links, etc. And I got the color scheme to one I liked and widened the content, but still, it wasn't quite right. And once I got a paid account and could do more, I couldn't find out how to add a header, which I really wanted, but I was able to add sidebar boxes. Then new styles were added (or are they layouts? I think of them as templates) and I fell in love with Flexible Squares. And there was an entry in the s2howto LJ on how to add headers. I am one happy camper. Doing the header, based on the little letters on keyboard userpic I'd made meant I could delete that pic and upload something else, which is the one on this entry.

Anyway, I hope you all like the new look and while I may tweak the colors a bit (I'm hoping the link colors are dark enough and that the overall contrast works — the original theme was too blue and pale, yet I wanted to keep the blue theme going), this should be it for a while, at least until someone designs something I like even more.