Or download, as the case might be. I can’t believe it. It’s actually done. Wow….Next up, Blood Red Moon…unless I change the title…
Or maybe…sleep….
Just…check out the link, okay?
(Disclaimer: The following is intended as a tongue-in-cheek window into my own psyche, not a complaint about critiques of any kind!)
Today we got a heads up from buddy Elaine about a post on a site called TeleRead about Lynn’s comments on AvsM and the CC site. I’m glad she let us know. It was a very nice post and the comments were all very encouraging and understanding… except for one chap who, while very positive about the whole idea, voiced some… concerns… about the CC site, implying the webdesigner was (erk) incompetent and old fashioned. 
Now, I tried hard not to take this personally, and you all know I’ve been more than open to constructive criticism, and overall, his observations were constructive. I’m glad he mentioned his concerns, and maybe he thought he was dealing with a professional webdesigner, which I most decidedly am not. I’m sure he didn’t realize how hard we’ve been working to put all this together. But as I say, he definitely made some legitimate points: mostly things I’d been meaning to address eventually anyway… So I spent all Sunday evening checking out the site and trying to “fix” that which probably wasn’t all that broken in the first place.
First, he said there was no access to the store other than from the main page. This one truly had me scratching my head. Isn’t there a “products” tab at the top of every page? The one right on a line with “Home” “About” “CJ” “Jane” and “Lynn”? That’s a live button to the catalog. Now, that “products” tab arrived with the plugin that gave us the shopping cart. I wasn’t sure if it was safe to change it, so I’d never bothered. Seemed clear enough to me. But evidently it wasn’t as obvious as I thought. So, I went and checked out some other sites that used the same shopping cart and saw that they called it other things, so… back to CC where I changed it to “Catalog”…which is what it says on the page, right? Because that page isn’t all there’s going to be. We do still plan to have Cafe Press and maybe more. Calling it “catalog” put its tab right after the “about” tab and before CJ’s, (the program puts the tabs in alphabetical order—except for “home”) so I thought, OK. That’ll work.
And went on to the next constructive criticism.
“A short synopsis of every book would be great…” Okay. That’s definitely legit and something I, at least, plan to do. Lynn and Carolyn can handle their own books however they want. I’ve got to draw the line somewhere where it comes to working on the page. But so far that project has been cursed. Every time I start working on a format for the individual pages, something like this comes up and I never get around to it. Someday. In the meantime, each of us has written a little piece on each project under our names. (His comment said he didn’t know anything about us or our books…Ummm… That’s what those extra pages are all about.) But now, rather than on the backburner, the indi pages are on the front, so I imagine I’ll get it done tomorrow.
Next!
He said the page looks old fashioned with funky colors and lots of pics! I mean…
well…we like color! And pics…here I thought I was being so conservative, with just the little slideshow of our bookcovers and my single “indulgence” of the horse-drawn shopping cart. I mean, sure, we’ve got specialized buttons, but we need buttons! and there are the pictures of us in the “about” section, but that’s pretty innocuous. Other than that, it’s just the catalog. I mean…what could he have been talking about?
But something gave him that impression…So…I went back to the page(s) and actually addressed another minor problem that’s been bothering me ever since I put the little animated shopping cart up: I put the slideshow on the left rather than under the shopping cart. Now the page is sort of “generically active” rather than just on the right side. It does balance better. Of course, when I moved it, it naturally had problems with positioning. After about an hour and a half work, I finally got it to look acceptable, tho it’s still not what I want. And…the pix I used were pngs, which I should probably changed to Jpgs, which are smaller…but…sheesh. Ah, well. It’s just time. (After finishing this post, I brought up PSP and made the change to jpgs….I’m such an obsessive-compulsive.)
Then, on the catalog page, I again did something I’d been meaning to. I sent all the “how to” stuff to the other “how to” page and got the product up where it should be. I also, thinking of his “graphics heavy” impression, changed the “Name” buttons out for simple text. I have to admit, it does look better.
Then, being wide awake, I sat down to write this post and suddenly, I found myself thinking about that first comment, where he said the only access was from the entry page. So…just what did I call it there? I checked and (ack) it was “store.” So, I changed the page name…again. Then thought, maybe I should clarify further, just in case someone thinks that dropdown menu for “cafe press” is the “store” in question. So I called it “E-book store” but that put it in between CJ’s button and mine, which looked dumb. So I named it CC E-book Store, to put it ahead of CJ’s, but that looked even dumber, so I went searching for some way to make the tab go where I want it and found a little square well down the edit page that lets you force the page order.
Snoopy dance! I put a little 6 in that little box, renamed the page one more time to E-Book Store, saved and called it good.
The real point of this post is, given a hint that something might possibly be problematic, the creative mind can make it be a problem and find some way to change it. Whether that change makes the end product better or not is frequently debatable.
In this case these comments basically gigged me into doing some things I’d been meaning to do anyway on a project that is near but not necessarily dear to my heart, and far from finished. I’m actually glad he made an issue of them, as it got some round tuits off my list. But imagine if we allowed book reviews on the site? Reviews we would have to vet in order to maintain the site. What if we got a review that had the same sort of nitpicking, but possibly marginally legit comments on one of our stories? Or even one that praised it to the sky, but for all the wrong reasons? I know I at least would start second guessing myself and my story, maybe even fight an ongoing battle with myself against editing the book yet one more time, since that’s so dangerously easy to do on ebooks….
Yup…I think maybe it’s best just to let people review our books someplace else. Now, I’m going to have a nice cuppa tea and go to bed.
I know it’s silly, but I do a little snoopy dance inside every time somebody says they like my writing. The comments here, the emails…well, I just want to thank everyone.
I’m experiencing a curious dilemma…I’m sitting here with six new books that I just want so badly to put up all at once, but marketing sense (not to mention the fact I haven’t done covers for any of them yet) cautions me to dole them out slowly, even after I have them ready to publish.
For one thing, we need to keep CC fresh with new material. Every time we put something new on the main page, that generates web activity, which hopefully brings us new visitors. For another, there are two other people involved here and we need to coordinate so we don’t all put new stuff up at once.
And there are the problems involved with a new publication. If we screw something up and need to send out links to new “versions” that’s a whole lot easier with only one publication involved! Thankfully, most people who bought Heavy Time bought Hellburner and vice versa so I could just send the “new links” email to everyone. But if we had like five new books up there by all of us and had to sort out what to send whom, well, that w/b intrustin’!
Anyway, I’ll be playing with section illos for Ring during Nationals and will have it ready to post in a week or so.
I’ll also be working on ideas for the covers of those six new books.
So much to do…and the pond is beginning to wake up. I’m thinking I want to put up my little “incubator” for “hatchling plants” soon. (A metal rack with a plastic cover.) I’ve never done that before. Any advice from my fellow gardeners? When do you start seedlings?
are up and those who have purchased s/b receiving emails with links for new copies. Please check your junque mail folders!
Hopefully, this is the last time. If anyone is having a specific problem with one of the unusual formats, please let us know. I’ve zapped the extra spaces between paragraphs that Calibre was leaving in the RTF files, but it’s still there in some of the more esoteric formats. Sorry. I just don’t have any editor that can get them out. If anyone uses these and knows a freeware for editing them, I’ll happily do it, but for now…this is about the best I can do, m’friends.
Enjoy!
After some predictable last minute struggles, we got Heavy Time and Hellburner up last night. Thanks to all you hard-working little scanners, Carolyn remains sane and ready to move on to the final chapters of her current book.
(And the crowd goes wild!)
Lynn is posting regularly and you must check out her posts. She really should put them together eventually for a mainstream market…you know, those collected essays by humorists? They are wonderful!
And the joy you “hear” in her writing voice it back in her real voice. It’s sooooo cool!
I’m back to finding where I was in the copyedits on RoI. Was up til 4am and back at it this am at 8:30. I’m trying, but we keep having little mini-disasters…like the hacking and recalcitrant files, and, well, life! :D It’s hard to get the brain back onto this particular little 52 card pickup.
This is turning into a nightmare of painful memories and a massive jigsaw puzzle. Picture three 2500 piece puzzles, very similar but not quite identical, all mixed up…with pieces missing from all of them.
I could just put the ms up the way it is now. There’s nothing “wrong” with it that every published ms ever set by human beings doesn’t have…i.e. a word missing here and there, the occasional it’s instead of its….you know the kind of thing. (In fact, the versions of the GT, UL and Harmonies are all of them sans CE…which I kind of regret, as it it another layer of polish, but I don’t have the CE for them…lost in a move somewhere, darn it. But those are the “raw” versions with another very careful pass by me for errors…and a lot of corrections for the typesetters’ typos that made it into print! 
)
The problem is, any time you let me at a ms, I find things to tweak, and I wouldn’t tweak them if I didn’t think the changes improved the story and/or prose. In this case, I was presented with the copyedits and page proofs all at the same time, with a very short deadline. The problem is, so much of what was in the copy edits was just plain wrong, and most of the other changes were not the way I wanted to present my work to the world (predominantly spelling choices, as referenced elsewhere). But there were some very legitimate errors of the nature expressed above, so I really want to get those into the CC version.
But that requires sorting them out from the CEs.
Well, Carolyn went through one copy of the CE, I went through another. I then went through the changes we wanted and put the ones I thought I could get onto the pageproofs, which were then sent to DAW. Which means, the page proofs hold the bare minimum and those CE hold the changes I’d really like to have.
To add to the fun, these three versions were all mixed up. (The joys of moving several times, and flooding disasters…and thinking I’d never reference them again.)
And have I mentioned, the file I’m going from, while very close, is not the file I actually printed to send to DAW. I thought it was, but I’m finding some formatting differences that imply otherwise, so I’m having to be on the lookout for Significant Differences between my file and what I think of as the “real book”. Anyway, I’m just about through the page proofs and after that, I’ll do a scan of the CE for missing words and rejected changes, then I s/b golden.
As I recall, Lightning was the worst. After that, I knew not to request my stylistic choices, so the constant spelling changes and single quote changes aren’t hiding the legitimate CE changes.
Well…this has become TMI. Big time. I’m just a little foggy this AM and trying to get my braincells back on line.
Caffeine…that’s what I need. Serious caffeine….
Later!
Oh, enjoy the new books! I love this set, and haven’t had time to reread the e-versions. DS and Cyteen and 40,000 are great books, but I really love these “smaller” stories…HT, HB, Merchanter’s Luck, TriPoint…These are the type of books that made Carolyn’s A/U universe come to life for me.
Oooooo…I’m so excited.
Hi, y’all,
Sorry to be so non-communicative. Been working on getting Ring of Lightning ready to post and it’s proven to be more work than I’d expected. The file I had was the original that I sent to DAW, but a) it was written in Volkswriter, which meant some manipulation, esp to resurrect italics, and b) there were some things about that version that always bugged me, so I went through it line by line, mostly to get rid of word salad, but also to adjust some relationship issues that become much more important in the subsequent books (those things you don’t know when you begin a story…)
Anyway…then I figured I should go back and check the copyedits to insert whatever was valid in them . . . including the changes I’d made by hand … and they were as strange as I remembered them. I mean, there were the changes due to stylistic issues we had, which I’ve just ignored. i.e. single vs double quotes for ironic use of language in prose as opposed to actual dialog, and spelling issues…grey vs gray, traveling vs travelling…that sort of thing, but I was looking for the (very small…as in fewer than ten?) typo errors (it’s vs its) that spellcheckers don’t catch (I caught more in my line by line) but mostly, it’s the on-going question of…you got it, hyphens.
When I submitted the ms back in the pre-internet dark ages, I’d run the VW spellchecker and I got a lot of words it didn’t recognize that were two words “run together” so I hyphenated them to be on the safe side (except for my created terms). In the copyedits, it was sooooo weird. It was like, everything I hyphenated, the CE ran together and then the CE inserted hyphens in instances that even the spellchecker recognized as a single word. A word I ran together one time and hyphenated the next would quite reliably be reversed by the CE.
One of my favorite examples: storm-wracked. The CE wanted stormwracked, something I’d never ever ever have even considered and which cannot be justified by any dictionary I’ve found. And some of you wonder why we’re amused at the notion that our editing might somehow be lacking compared to books that have come out of the NY sieve. 
Fortunately, this time I have access online to a much more complete dictionary than the spellchecker dictionary in WordPerfect, so I’m checking as I go along. Which all takes time. But I’m getting there. Hopefully RoL will be available in a couple of days.
…answers pending. We’re closing in, folks. I have nothing really to say other than tackling the nit-pickies trying to get this thing up and running.
Of course...I have no product yet. Just covers. :lol: Oh, and a few, mostly-corrected files. Now that we’ve got Carolyn’s test file up on her site, that’ll help a lot. Once we know the process, it’s all mechanics.
Have faith!
I’ve begun checking out the behind the works stuff at the CC site at last. Should have a long time ago, but…have I mentioned I’m a bit obsessive? I’m on the hunt for good manipulation extensions. If anyone has suggestions, I’m all ears. It natively uses (yuck) the basic TinyMCE word processor which SUCKS when it comes to image manipulation and other forms of page setup…like tables and such.
Anyway, I’m in there massaging some of Carolyn’s hard work into submission and we’ll see if we can’t get that navigation cleaned up a bit. I know some of you have found it confusing…frankly, so have I. I love what Lynn’s set up visually, but the structure has had me kinda confused. I wasn’t sure how easy/hard it would be to adjust it while she was figuring out the Joomla thing, but looking at it, I think it s/b doable now.
I’m thinking we should have the Closed Circle logo segueing into the main index page with the three names and CATALOG right dead center of the logo. (no PPF on that page) My thinking is, for those coming in from an ad who are unfamiliar with CC, it will ground them in the company and let them know just who’s involved.
The names would take you to the “past present future” for each of us individually, where we could discuss our backlist, with a link to our websites, our current new releases, with a link to our blog and what we’re working on for future release, with a link to…us on our knees begging y’all to keep us in business? 
:D:D:D The Catalog would take you right to… our catalog! That would be a simple list of books with thumbnails, a teaser and purchase buttons. With links to individual pages with excerpts and such. The catalog would have all the books available, in order of publication, plus a link (however that works) to Cafe Press goodies. As we get more books, we might have to structure it differently…maybe a backlist and current releases, or something, but this would get us started.
Anyway…does that sound like a viable structure? would love your feedback before I ask Lynn to restructure.
Back to Joomla!
Ja ne!
And it was even better than I remembered. Might have something to do with the edit Carolyn did on it, but even so, it’s just a cool story. It’s one of her anthropological type fantasies and she does such a great job of capturing a mindset based on bits and pieces of religion and language. And Dubhain’s priceless. Sometimes he’s very much a horse.
I’m really curious now to go back and read the original, which I haven’t done in years. I love comparing versions of stories.
And maybe we’ll get a bit more of these two, now that she’s got an outlet for short stories. That would be fun.
On the garden front…I called the store where I got my weeping pussy willow and found out that two of the guys who work there have had the same problem (no growth) and returned theirs. Knowing I’ll have no problem with the return, I’ve decided to try something a bit odd. I’ve tented the entire thing in plastic and am misting it several times a day. I found out it had been shipped bareroot. The little pussy willow buds dried and hardened before they were fully out. I think it might have needed to be soaked, not just the roots, but the whole tree, before it was planted. Don’t know if it’ll work, but I’ve got nothing to lose. So far, the branches are noticably more flexible.
I’ve still got a couple of months before I have to return it. We’ll see what a week of this does.
Such fun!
Ja ne!
Today, I donned my editorial hat to work on CJ’s Faery Moon. Thought you all might be interested in the kind of stuff we do for each other. Read the rest of this entry »
New at Closed Circle!
