Weekend Assignment: #279: This Changes Everything!

Following on from last night's entry:

Weekend Assignment: #279: At one time or another, we've all had some kind of good news, expected or unexpected, that made a big difference in our lives, or at least gave us a sense that things were getting better. Tell us of such an incident.
Extra Credit: Who was the first person you told about your good news?

When I came up with this topic yesterday, it was going to be my excuse to tell you about Pepper not limping any more and the three job leads I had yesterday. But I wrote about all that last night, so I'm not going to do an extended rerun here. Suffice it to say that having three people call me on the same day to express interest in my resume is a major boost to my confidence, giving me real hope that I will soon be fully employed again.

With that rather obvious observation out of the way, let's go back a little over three decades, to two bits of related news that had a greater impact on my life than I ever expected at the time.

Me at Clarion, July 1977.

When I was in high school, my major extracurricular interests were Star Trek and the writings of Harlan Ellison. I also read and enjoyed lots of other fantasy and sf, but Harlan in particular was a big deal to me. He wrote the original version of my favorite Star Trek episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever," but that wasn't the main reason for my interest. I was hooked on his collections of award-winning short stories and edgy, personal and often political essays.

I've written about my interactions with Harlan a few times over the years, but for the purpose of this entry, the thing to remember is this: he was my favorite writer, and a huge influence during my teens and early 20s. He was having a surge in popularity back then, fueled by several awards and a deal with Pyramid Books to republish many of his earlier works plus several new collections. Meanwhile, I was struggling to get a certain novel past page 2. (Yes, that novel, the one I'm still intermittently revising all these years later.)

One book I bought about the time I graduated from high school was titled Clarion 3. It was an anthology of sf short stories by people associated with the Clarion Writers' Workshop, interspersed with essays about writing. The editor was Robin Scott Wilson, founder of the workshop. The last piece in the book was the essay "When Dreams Become Nightmares: Some Cautionary Notes on the Clarion Experience" by, you guessed it, Harlan Ellison. Harlan had taught at several Clarions, but wasn't going to do it anymore. That was unfortunate, I thought as I finished reading the essay in our back yard in Manlius. At that moment, I really, really wanted to go to Clarion and be taught by Harlan Ellison. Apparently, I'd already missed my chance.

So: life-changing good news incident #1. My first two years at Syracuse University, I was majoring in Creative Writing and TV-Radio. (I switched to English Lit and Film my junior year.) My problem with Creative Writing was that I could never find the department head in his office, and consequently spent a lot of time hanging out at his closed office door. That's where I saw it: a little paper notice about the 1977 Clarion Writers' Workshop. Robin Scott Wilson would be teaching, as would Peter S. Beagle, writer of one of my favorite fantasy novels. These facts alone would have been enough for me to want to go, but there was more. Harlan was also teaching. I was stunned, almost shaking with excitement. It was like the Universe was saying to me, "Karen, the thing you wanted really badly but thought was impossible is possible after all. Now find a way to do it!"

Fortunately, both my parents agreed to let me try, as long as I was willing to work a summer job until the workshop began. So I sent Chapter One of The Tengrim Sword (as it was called then) off to Michigan State, along with a self-addressed, stamped manila envelope. Weeks passed, and then that envelope arrived back at my dad's apartment. When I saw it, my heart sank. It was too heavy and bulky to contain just an acceptance letter.

Then I opened it anyway - and a map of Michigan State fell out. Joy! Unbounded, whooping joy! And there you have it: life-changing good news incident #2! I was going to Clarion!

I assume that my dad was the first person I told of my good news.

I've written before about the Clarion workshop I attended, the people I met and worked with, the personal relationship stuff, and the not-entirely-positive effect the workshop had on my writing. (I put the novel away for years after that.) There were a lot of things about "the Clarion experience," as Harlan put it, that still influence me, all these years later, in my writing and in other ways. Harlan was part of that, but only a part.

The biggest impact, by far, came from an unforeseen consequence of my six weeks in an East Lansing dorm in the hot summer of 1977. I started hanging out with one of my fellow Clarionites, this guy named John. Last name Blocher. 22 months later, I married him.

How's that for a bit of good news that changes everything?

So how about you? What bit of good news made all the difference for you? Please tell us about it in your blog, and include a link back here. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below, so that next week I can direct people to your blog, thus:

For Weekend Assignment: #278: Time to Blog, I asked you about your blogging habits, particularly your blogging schedule and frequency. Here are excerpts from the responses:

Julie wrote...

What it boils down to is the more I have to do, the less time I have to blog. That may be a good thing. Or not, depending on what I have to do. This is one of my busier times of the year, and some days I sit down at the computer, and the next thing I know, it's 3:30. Where has the day gone?

Florinda wrote...

"How often I blog" and "how often I post" are two different things, usually. I try to post here at least five times a week, and most of the time I have something up on one of the weekend days as well. But most of my posts are written ahead of time, and then I schedule them out daily; posting time is 5 AM Pacific time weekdays, and 6 AM on weekends.

Mike wrote....

Well, for me, there isn't a straight up answer. I certainly don't have a schedule. I pretty much blog when I can, or when I have something I want to say. I participate in Karen's Weekend Assignments, but I don't have a certain day that I do them. That's why I'm writing this at 10pm when I should be going to bed. That's dedication for you, people.

Your turn! If you've ever considered participating in the Weekend Assignment (or used to participate but dropped out), please help us out with your thoughts on this topic, or else the next one. You've got until Thursday night to post your entry, and in a pinch I'll even take a late one. And if you haven't considered participating, why the heck not?

Also please, if you have an idea for a future Weekend Assignment, email me at mavarin2 (at) gmail.com. Thanks!

My Round Robin entry will follow in a few hours.

Karen

Weekend Assignment: #278: Time to Blog

Tonight's Weekend Assignment should be relevant to anyone who blogs:

Weekend Assignment: #278: How often do you blog? Do you try to maintain a schedule, or just blog when you're inspired and have the time? How do memes affect your blogging habits?
Extra Credit: Are you blogging more or less often now than you were a year ago?

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that my blogging schedule has gone all to heck in recent months. For years I blogged every single day, no matter what. There were at least two occasions when I pulled all-nighters at hotels with bad internet connections, trying desperately to connect long enough to get a blog entry posted. Okay, so I might have gone 30 hours between entries one day, 18 hours the next, but the rule was, I always posted before going to bed. Or if I had connection problems or was just too sleepy, I would take a nap for a couple of hours, and then get up and get the entry done.

But several months ago, between Facebook, CPA review assignments and a suspicion that obsessive daily blogging was not necessary a good thing, I gave myself permission to miss a day. And then another day. Soon I was only blogging three or four times a week! It eased my immediate time pressures, but it didn't make it any easier to blog effectively, to come up with good pictures to post and interesting things to say. And I feel that I've lost a measure of self discipline and good writing practice, without gaining anything substantive in return.

I have never, ever missed a Monday Photo Shoot or a Weekend Assignment, not since John Scalzi started the former and I first discovered the latter, both in his now-defunct AOL journal By the Way. It used to be that I always posted my entries on Monday and Thursday nights, respectively, without fail. Now it may take me several days (in one case almost a week) to get to the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot. And even as the current host of the Weekend Assignment, I've often let Thursday night become Friday night. Having written over 250 WA entries as participant or originator, I now find it a little harder each week to come up with a new topic that might entice you to write something. It's much easier to keep up with the Round Robin Photo Challenges, because they're only biweekly, and we have a pool of suggested topics that we periodically manage to refresh. I'm sorry to say that despite my frequent dog-blogging, I haven't managed to participate weekly in Feline and Furball Friday, which Steven may be passing the baton on soon as his elderly cat Pickle is reaching the end of his life. My heart goes out to him; the death of a beloved pet is never easy, even when it means the end of months of worry about your furry friend's prognosis and quality of life. We went through this with Tuffy Toro, exactly a year ago on August 1st.

This blog is not just about the memes, though, nor will it ever be. I still appreciate the opportunity to write a nice cathartic rant, or tell an amusing anecdote, or show off my dogs. I may not be adding to it daily at the moment, but don't expect the Outpost to be deserted any time soon.

So how about you? Is your blog primarily a place to share family news, or keep up with all the photo memes? Do you try to post daily, or on certain days of the week, or just when you feel like it? Please tell us about it in your blog, and include a link back here. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below, so that next week I can direct people to your blog, thus:

For Weekend Assignment #277: Running the Gauntlet, I asked you to recount your experiences with government bureaucracy. Here are excerpts from the responses:

Julie wrote...

Most of my dealings with the city and county have been via their web sites, which, amazingly, work fairly well. I can pay my water bill, renew my car registration (except I forgot, so I'll be standing in line later this week), get hold of city and county departments, and so on. It's not perfect, but it beats sitting on hold. Now corporate entities are another issue.

Mike wrote....

This year was a little different. We tried to file our state return electronically ourselves but we needed a PIN number for some reason. Since we have someone else do our taxes usually, we had no PIN. And since I was being the typical me and waiting until the second-to-last day, when I tried to call the number I got the, "We are experiencing and unusually high call rate. Please try again later." Yeah, right. I ended up mailing it in.

Your turn! And please, if you have an idea for a future Weekend Assignment, email me at mavarin2 (at) gmail.com. Thanks!


Karen

Multiblogging

Native dance performers in the St. Michael's Labyrinth at the Advent Bazaar.

I've spent basically the whole day blogging, tweaking, widgeting and microblogging, and yet I'm just now getting over here to the Outpost for still more blogging. Most of my effort today was spent on St. Michael's-related pages. The latest announcements have been posted to the Life at St. Michael & All Angels news blog, newly-edited photos of the Advent International Bazaar have been posted to Picasa and the St. Michael's Arts blog, and a widget showing St. Michael's news blog entries has replaced a single static photo on the church web site's main page. I've also added a Twitterfeed for the second church blog and my other two main personal blogs, so that a new entry on any of them will appear on Twitter as a title, a first line and a link. And the fiction blog has a new entry - well, okay, most of it's over a year and a half old, but who's counting?

An Aztec dancer arrives...

So what's with all the blogs? None of them are new, and they each have a different purpose. Father Smith started Life at St. Michael & All Angels over four years ago as the parish's first web presence, a place to post news and sermons. He soon turned it over to me, and I spun off a conventional web site and, eventually, a second parish blog for art, poetry, photography, etc. from parishioners. Unfortunately, I've been darn near the only person ever to contribute to it, but it's still a good idea.

...and two more behind him, as Kevin looks on.

Way back when I first started blogging in March 2004, my only blog was Musings from Mâvarin over on AOL. Nowadays that exists as an archived version on Blogger. I don't know whether I will ever post to it again; the Outpost basically replaced it in November 2005. By then I had started two more personal blogs. Messages from Mâvarin was for fiction, and for a while I was even able to keep up the posting schedule. Mâvarin and Other Inspirations was to have a LiveJournal account for commenting to friends' LJs, and secondarily for writing about writing plus the occasional meme. At the moment I'm using it to geek out on Doctor Who.

Keeping up with multiple blogs by one person can be a pain, including for the person doing the blogging. After successfully completing three long-running serials on Messages, I got stuck on a fourth one, fiddled with other, allegedly easier content, and then basically abandoned the blog for many months. I stopped doing quizzes and most other memes besides Round Robin, the Weekend Assignment and the Monday Photo Shoot, so I let Inspirations slide also.

But I've recently picked up the ball again, for a couple of reasons. A little over a week ago, I urgently wanted to write about Doctor Who not just in a casual reader, "you should watch it" way, but in depth, carrying on about stuff you've have to be a fan to have a clue about. I don't want to bore non-fans with that, so it went into Inspirations. Then on Saturday I learned from Scalzi on Whatever that AOL's Ficlets site was going the way of AOL Journals, AOL Hometown and AOL Pictures - which is to say, into oblivion. Ficlets are (or were) a sort of microfiction, extreme short shorts limited to 1024 characters each, including spaces, which you could sort of get around by stringing togher a bunch of "sequels." The darn site glitched every time I tried to log in with the OpenID under which I'd written my paltry five contributions, but today I managed to save all five to M.S. Word, and tonight I posted three of them to Messages.

Does this mean you need to start checking all my blogs to keep up with what I'm posting? Only if you really want to. Fortunately for us all, there are now a number of easy ways to keep track of such things withough email alerts or a blog feed reading service such as Bloglines. I love Blogger's "followers" function in conjunction with the blogroll sidebar gadget. If you follow a blog, you can see a snippet of its most recent post toward the bottom of your Blogger dashboard. The blogroll gadget will display the same thing on your sidebar. It's a fast and easy way to see what's new, and whether it looks interesting enough to rush off and read. Much the same thing is accomplished by Twitterfeed, which is now telling Twitter and Facebook what I've recently posted on all five blogs. More and more lately, I'm using Twitter or my own sidebar to get to friends' most recent and intriguing postings.

So that's how I'm getting around these days. How about you? Since installing yet another widget on my sidebar to track where people are arriving from, I've been fairly fascinated with the results. Many the hits it's recording are on archive pages from months or years ago, in search of an image seen on Google, or "Played Jimmy Bean in PollyAnna", or jobless toy maker begging street. (Huh?) A few people are looking for porn, and and disappointed. And I'm a little suprised to learn that my #1 and #2 all time entries are "Fairness to George, Part One" and "Fairness to George, Part Two." Apparently I'm far from the only person who still remembers and cares about poor old George Maharis.

Karen

A Break in the Routine

Today (by which of course I mean yesterday; my days run from afternoon to the following early morning) hasn't exactly been filled with "adventure, excitement and really wild things;" but it has been a bit of a rutbreaker. Just for starters, I was interviewed today by a reporter for the Tucson Citizen. It would be nice if the interview were about my wild success instead of dismal failure, but that's how it is. The reporter was looking for a story on how the recession was affecting people who recently became unemployed here in Tucson, so I emailed and told him. It seems to me that my particular story is kind of noteworthy, not because of me but because of the way it illustrates the larger problem. Every "permanent" job I've had in the past 15 years was with a company that has now gone bankrupt, closed its doors or both. I went back to school to get a degree in a high-paying, high-demand field, and it's currently doing me no discernible good. And I didn't even mention the whole health insurance issue. The article is supposed to run on Friday. I'll link to it when it comes out.


The other thing I did today, besides the dog park and watching Doctor Who, was follow through on the second email from AOL about AOL Pictures shutting down. As with AOL Journals, American Online has made arrangements for a simple conversion process to another service. This one is called PhotoWorks, and it's free. Well, sort of. I read part of the new member FAQ, and there's a catch. The site is run by American Greetings, and they want you to buy something, at least once a year - prints, calendars, custom greeting cards, something. If you don't, your free storage goes away. After that, you would presumably see the image on the left instead of your lovely pictures. I got this result tonight one one of my entries, and I'm pretty sure it was my fault. I had accidentally deleted a couple of images, and copying them back into that album didn't restore the link.

I had already saved everything stored in AOL Hometown (which is also gone now), but had not grabbed this stuff. Fortunately it was extremely simple and quick, at least for the relative handful of pictures I had on YGP/AOL Pictures. I logged in from my Mavarin screen name, which isn't even my main email account, although I treat it as such. It didn't matter. It grabbed everything I had stored from any screen name, including the images that used to grace my earliest entries from my old AOL Journal Musings from Mâvarin. I had already gone through the Blogger versions of most of those entries and relinked to the same images as stored on mavarin.com, but it was still good to grab what was there.

For one thing, I rediscovered some 2004 Tuffy pictures that I didn't seem to have on my hard drive. They were taken with the old Mavica, an early, bulky digital camera with such low-res photos that we used to get twenty of them on each floppy disk, which is what the camera used for storage. Unsurprisingly, they're not great pictures, but I'm fond of them. I still remember the day I took some of them. One thing I did tonight was save them back to my hard drive and clean them up with PhotoStudio. It helped a lot.

My PhotoWorks albums were kind of an odd lot. There was an entire album of someone else's fall foliage shots, and another one of somebody's messes from a discussion I had with other journalers back in 2004. I also had a "scratchpad" album with one photo, a "shoebox" album with 51 photos, a few albums I put together on purpose for various incarnations of AOL profiles and AIM pages, and a bunch of albums named after individual Musings entries. Most of the latter had one or two photos each. Surprisingly, there were also a number of journal-based albums with zero photos each! I'm not quite sure what happened there, but nothing seems to be missing. I deleted the empty albums and consolidated the onesies. From here they could be re-linked to the relevant entries on the Blogger version of the old journal, but as I say, I'd already relinked to most of the same images as stored elsewhere. Just as well, really.

The most annoying part of the process was dealing with a few old Woohoo slideshows. These were the cool AOL Pictures slideshows that had various effects available for the transition from one image to the next. My favorite by far was the "Ken Burns" style, named for the documentary director's technique of panning across still photos while zooming in and out on them. I had one of those set up for a slide show of a 2004 trip to Las Vegas, and another one was on the main page of the St. Michael's website. With the transfer to PhotoWorks, those Woohoos were gone. I had to fuss with the St Michael's page for a while to get the more boring Picasa version of the slide show in place, realign the table it was in, and fix some text that the site's host service, GoDaddy, kept resizing as tiny.

While I was at it, I also put in a bit of time tagging a bunch of the Musings entries. There are over 600 entries, so it's way too tedious a job to do all at once. Another problem with some of the old entries is that spaces between words went missing in a number of places. This used to be an ongoing glitch in the early days of AOL Journals, and the transfer to Blogger seems to have exacerbated the problem.

You may have noticed that I've been fussing with the sidebar for the Outpost in recent days. Blogger recently introduced much better sidebar widgets, now called gadgets. My favorite is the blogroll-style linking lists, one which you can display the most recent entry of each blog and the first image in that entry. I found that very handy last weekend in keeping track of who has posted their Round Robin entries. It's also a very fast way to see what interesting things people are up to generally.

Anyway, I've set up a more exclusive "Recent Robins" list in place of the old static one, listing only the people who played last weekend. If you play along with the next one, "On My Table,", your blog will be added to the list. A second sidebar gadget section, titled "Weekenders," will similarly link to everyone who does one or more Weekend Assignments. Everyone else whose blog I visit with any frequency (or feel that I should) is on one or more of the other sidebar lists. If you're a regular reader and I'm not linking to your blog, let me know and I'll probably add it. I purged quite a few inactive or defunct blogs with my recent update.

Karen

What I've Done, and What I Ought to Do

Ow! Pepper!

Pepper!

Darn it, Pepper!
(She was much less visible than in the first shot here.)

Done:

• Went to church, barely on time, too late to serve at Mass. This was just as well, because last night I stubbed my toes badly on a wooden bookcase, tripping over a certain black dog in the dark. Limping up the aisle with candle in hand probably wouldn't be a good idea. I may have a broken toe or two, but since I can't afford a doctor I'll never know whether this is the case.
• Did a sinkful of dishes. One down, one to go.
• Took a much-needed nap.
• Sat on a bench at the dog park with an acquaintance there, a journalism student, as the dogs tried to work out what to do if they couldn't follow me around the track. They managed to have fun anyway. My new friend, who broke a toe recently herself, said that all they can do for broken toes is wrap them, and maybe have you wear a special boot.
  
• Bought groceries (and first aid tape) and made dinner.
  
• Returned a friend's phone call.
  
• Made minor progress on my unread mail.
• Admonished Cayenne for stepping on my toes. Yes, those toes.
  
• Spent an hour or two editing a version of last night's entry, and submitted it to Huffington Post's Off the Bus pages.
• Fussed around with a few more avatars so I could submit a choice of headshots to HuffPo.
• Experimented with templates and template widths on my test blog and on the Musings from Mâvarin archive blog. Musings now uses the Minima Stretch template, which makes the posting area wide enough to accommodate much larger photos than you see on the Outpost. I've tried to widen the template I use here, but the code is harder to parse than Minima and I haven't been able to make it work properly so far.
• Did another load of dishes. My mistake: two down, one to go.
  

Need to Do:

• More dishes, and clean up the kitchen generally.
• Open the Peachtree Accounting software I bought in 2005 and familiarize myself with it before tomorrow afternoon. Why? I finally have a job interview!
• Catch up with my Twitter feed (okay, so that's more of a question of what I want to do).
• Clear out more email.
• Design more buttons on request, and print out. That can probably wait until tomorrow.
  
• Soak my feet and wash my hair.
• Get some sleep!
  

Karen

A Final Indignity for AOL-J Land

From my email of a few minutes ago:

Subject: AOL Journals is closing October 31, 2008
From: AOLMemberInfo
To: that word @aol.com
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 4:54 pm

Dear AOL Journals user,

We’re sorry to inform you that on Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Journals will be shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

It’s very important that you save your Journals content before the shutdown. We're working on a way to easily move your Journal to another blogging service -- you can expect an email within the next week with more details about how to do it. We want the transition to go as smoothly as possible for you, so you’ll have two choices. You can either save your information manually and find another place to blog on your own, or choose to automatically transfer your Journal to a different blogging service we’ve selected.

In the meantime, please bookmark the People Connection Blog, where you can find out more about AOL Journals. You can also subscribe to the People Connection Blog RSS feed to stay informed about any changes. We’ll be updating the People Connection Blog often, so please check it regularly.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we make this transition.

Sincerely,

The AOL Journals Team

Wow.

Mostly I think this is another sign that AOL is on its last legs after years of bad decisions and major changes in Internet technology and culture. It's very sad, for both the people who left and the people who stayed, and a final betrayal for those who stayed. They didn't leave AOL-J, so AOL-J left them.

I just hope they make it easily portable into Blogger. That is, after all, where most people went in the Exodus. And many of them, myself included, still have entries they never ported over, one painful copy-paste at a time.

K.

Weekend Assignment Results: Online Gadgetry

Some of my current Firefox add-ons.

For Weekend Assignment #233: (Virtual) New Toys I asked whether there were any new online toys, gadgets, widgets or gizmos that you've found particularly useful or entertaining. Our response this week was a bit light, but highly informative:

Julie said...

Like Karen, I've tried Twitpic. Kinda cute. Possibly useful. I'm also using a new app called Twhirl, that lets me see my Twitter and FriendFeed feeds on my second display.

Florinda said...

I'm not really an "early adopter" when it comes to new tech stuff, but as far the online world is concerned, I'm willing to give something a whirl if it won't cost me anything and it doesn't require knowledge of coding, so I look for tip-offs on what's new out there. My source of information for new features in the tech products I use most is usually Lifehacker; I'm not sure how many truly essential blogs exist, but this is one of them, if you ask me. In addition, since most of my online life belongs to Google in one way or another, I've found the blog Google Operating System is an excellent independent resource for just about everything Google-y.

(Florinda has a bunch of great tips, actually - take a look!)

Mike said...

Okay, online things. Hmm, I do play around on Twitter, though I am mostly a follower. (That sounds so stalker-ish, I know). I have a Last.fm account now, though I got that for my Ipod Touch and it doesn't seem to be working after the last software update. I have a Flickr account that I will post pictures on occasionally. That is about all that is exciting. The rest of the stuff I have is pretty standard, Google Reader, and...um, e-mail.

Thanks, folks! I know I'll be checking some things out that you mentioned. Meanwhile, I'm tracking something called Widgetbox, which I was invited to by email but haven't tried yet. (It has you classify your blog in one of their "Channels" - e.g. Art, Music, Pets, Women - and so far there's nothing that fits a blog as diverse as this one.) And I've finally dumped FeedBlitz from my sidebar. It was a good idea at the time, but there are so many better alternatives now that everyone has long since unsubscribed from the Outpost on FeedBlitz anyway. Their front page makes it sound still vital and widely-used, even though it's not doing this particular blog any good. If you still find it useful, go for it.

The new Weekend Assignment will follow in an hour or two.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #233: (Virtual) New Toys

If your online experience over the last few weeks has been anything like mine, you may find the new Weekend Assignment a timely one. If not, just fake it!

Weekend Assignment #233: The online world is constantly evolving, to the point where I'm surprised I'm not reading about Web 3.0 by now. Google's service Blogger is just one example of an online resource that's been rolling out new features and gadgets recently. Are there any new online toys, gadgets, widgets or gizmos that you've found particularly useful or entertaining?

Extra Credit: Are there any new online features, gadgets, etc. that you've been disappointed with?

As for me, I've been trying out a number of things lately, most of them related to either Google or Firefox. On the Google front, I've fiddled extensively with their photo organizing and sharing program Picasa, added widgets to iGoogle, and tried out some of the new "Gadgets" for Blogger. For Firefox, I went wild several days ago and installed a number of third party add-ons.

Picasa, as far as I can tell, is basically two programs, an online and an offline one. The offline one, Picasa2, is good for finding out what folders full of photos you have, sorted in various ways to help you get it all organized. From there you can upload to the online service, Picasa Web Albums. If you have a blog on Blogger and have uploaded photos to it, you already have at least one web album, which can be made public if you so choose. Or you can make an album from scratch, copying or uploading photos to it and giving it a name and description. Like this!

Someday I'll be able to take better butterfly pix.

I realize that other people already use Photobucket and Flickr and such, but it's nice to know this one is available, too, and already somewhat integrated with Blogger and Google. It's free, up to a point, but if you upload a massive, massive number of photos, you will need to pay for extra storage. I've been uploading about five photos a night to Blogger for years, and I'm only using 192MB (18%) of my 1024MB of storage.
There's also a more oddball photo sharing service, as I mentioned last night. Twitter, as you probably know, is a sort of mass distribution instant messaging service. Until now, you've basically only been able to enter 140 characters into your "Tweet," including any links. But now there's a sort of spinoff service, TwitPic. You upload a photo, and the link to it goes into your tweet, along with any additional text up to the usual 140 characters. You end up with a photo page (or a series of them really), and your photo has its 15 seconds of stardom on a feed that shows the most recent uploads, appearing and disappearing over a map of where the photos were taken. Neat!

The new Blogger gadgets I haven't fully explored yet. I see there's now an RSS feed thingy, and a "Followers" thing and some other cool-looking stuff. But so far, I haven't been able to figure out how to follow a blog that doesn't have that gadget on its sidebar. (Never mind. It's on the Blogger Dashboard, at the bottom.)

I'm afraid the Firefox add-ons I've tried so far mostly fit into that extra credit question. There's something called BlogRovR, which claims to tell you about the posts you're interested it from the blogs you subscribe to with it. Umm, no. So far, it mostly only wants to tell me about Round Robin entries, and I can't find a way to tell it to look for anything else. There's also something called Yoono, which notifies you of new AIM and Twitter activity, and lets you make little comment notes about web page you're viewing, and supposedly recommends other sites like it. This last bit only seems to work for major sites such as CNN.com or the BBC's Doctor Who site, but it does pick up a few suggestions for Whatever readers. For the Outpost, nada. Well, I didn't really expect anything, but it would be more useful if Yoono actually looked for blogs with similar tags or something. And there's something called Minimap, which I downloaded but haven;t played with yet.

Your turn! Have you come across any online innovations lately that seemed worth trying out? Were they any good? Write about them in your journal or blog, preferably with a link back to this entry, and then come back here and link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week to share what we've all found. Have fun!

Karen

Saturday Night's Blog Entry

My only edited "camera" photo from Saturday night

My blog entry for last night was never going to be long, because, well, when you'd been on the go for 21 hours on 3 1/2 hours of sleep and just promised two close friends that you'll be up and ready to go seven hours from now, it's not a good idea to spend the next three hours blogging. There was one photo I edited for you out of the 200+ I took on Saturday, not counting the 70 I took using the phone after the camera battery went low. I couldn't transfer those to my computer because I neglected to bring the memory card adapter.

The most interesting of the phone's Fantasmic shots

As it turned out, I could blog last night at all. The hotel's wireless network was offline part of the time, and when it did turn up asking for a login and password I've neglected to arrange for when checking in at nearly 1 AM, Norton was convinced it was some kind of malware site. I've jumped over worse hurdles to blog from the road, but last night, it simply wasn't worth it.

So, what was I planning to say about my Saturday at Disneyland with Sara and Sarah?

I was going to call it "transcendent."

Really, I was. I was extremely happy to be one of my very favorite places, with two close friends who had the same interests in what to see and do next. I was happy that we got along as well in person as online. I was happy that a random stranger gave us three Splash Mountain FastPasses, unasked, at exactly the right moment. I was happy that we got in nearly all of our must-sees the first day, even the Finding Nemo update of the Submarine Voyage. I was happy with the great 80s cover band Stellar, which had replaced the Radio Disney crap at Tomorrowland by the time we were in line for Nemo, and played for us as we waited. I was happy that Sarah's parents were interesting and personable and cool, and that they got us a great spot from which to watch the 10:30 PM show of Fantasmic! I was so happy at seeing Fantasmic, properly, for quite possibly the first time ever, that I spent much of it in tears. (What a softie!)

So what did my transcendent day transcend? That's easy to answer: fatigue and pain. I really should have replaced those worn out shoes long before walking around in them for 21 hours on Saturday, through airports and hotels and Disneyland and the streets of Anaheim. By the time I went to bed I was thoroughly sore from the knees down, and feeling every minute of my 51+ years. I was even more sore today.

So, how was your Saturday?

Karen

Maintenance

I just spent the last three hours updating my "Active Robins" list on my sidebar. (I'll have to leave any work on the one in the Round Robin blog for tomorrow night.) I accidentally saved just before adding the last person, which kept me from properly counting the names being added. But I think it came to a total of five veteran Robins who became active again in recent months, and another eighteen who started participating since I last bothered to update the list. Wow! And there were at least three people listed twice before, two of whom, if I recall correctly, haven't posted a RRPC entry in the past six months. What a mess! But it's better now, and you folks finally get some well-deserved linky goodness.

Why did it take me so long to do this? The short answer is that I'm terribly lazy about stuff like that. Give me photos to edit or an entry or article to write and I'll happily slog away at it for hours. But blog housekeeping duties? Not so much. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I have blogs listed on my sidebar that haven't had a new entry in a year. I don't like taking people off my sidebar, so rather than checking things out properly I tend to let it slide. The only reason I finally faced up to it tonight, aside from the fact that it fit in with the vague idea I had for tonight's entry, is my desire to acknowledge all the wonderful Robins who have come along recently, and the early Robins who migrated out long ago, only to fly in this winter and snatch up a juicy new Challenge or two. (Yes, I know. Annoying metaphor, ain't it? I'll stop now.)

But it's got me thinking about the advantages of steady effort, and my usual failure to take advantage of them. The Round Robin blog's sidebar I try to keep up with at the time of each Challenge, and although there are some errors and omissions it's not nearly the mess that my personal list was. I should update the church's new blog every week, not every two or three weeks. I should do dishes every night, rather than wait until we're out of forks. I should start walking the dog every night, as a prelude to getting back to the gym. I should put books away as soon as I finish looking something up. I should spend ten minutes a day cleaning my desk. But I don't do any of that. Not on a regular basis, anyway. Whatever it is I'm up to tonight always seems more urgent, more rewarding and fun. Then suddenly it's time for bed, and then some.

I know I can do better than this. I got through all that homework in late 2002-early 2005 to finally get my bachelor's degree, in accounting, yet, while working full time. Before that I wrote 1100 manuscript pages of Mages of Mâvarin in something like two and a half years, all but about 30 pages of it new stuff, taking only two nights off in all that time (one to have my gall bladder out, the other on suicide watch). I lost 70 pounds once, long, long ago.


Maybe if I tackle one thing successfully, I'll get in the right mindset to make a steady effort in other areas. I've only missed on night this year on the novel, for example. That's, well, not fabulous, but it's a start, even though some nights it was only for fifteen minutes at the end of the night. I'm on page 247 of the Heirs edit. That's got to count for something. And hey! I updated the sidebar!

Okay, okay. As I head off to bed in five minutes, I'll take a moment to at least put some dishes away. And tomorrow evening, Tuffy gets a walk! Feel free to nag me if you see me online, and I haven't announced my fulfillment of this little plan on Twitter or AIM.

Karen

Celebrate Him Home

As we know, AOL will soon be parting company with John Scalzi, creator of the AOL Journal By the Way, the Weekend Assignments, Monday Photo Shoots, and a handful of nifty Ficlets. This is one of those "by mutual agreement" situations; AOL is contemplating a change in direction, and Scalzi is contemplating how much easier it will be to meet his deadlines for writing books if he's not busy amusing us with news of phosphorescent cats and fun games and pictures out hotel windows.

I already did my main Scalzi tribute entry, so I'm not going to go on and on about him tonight.

That's where you come in.

Are you one of John Scalzi's many fans? Was it because of him that you first learned how to upload a photo or a video, or had at least one thing to write about each weekend? Has By the Way or the Ficlets blog always been a "must read" for you? As time ticks away to the end of the year, when Scalzi's AOL contract runs out, would you like to show your appreciation for his four years of fun and inspiration and community building, and share your favorite Scalzi memes or moments with other readers?

If so, we've got just the journal for you!

It's called

ScalziCelebration

and it just went live tonight. Carly (whose idea this was), Steven and I have put it together on AOL as a centralized place in which we can all thank John Scalzi for all his good work, and leave links to our own tributes, favorite Monday Photo Shoots, Weekend Assignments, Ficlets or other Scalzi-related fun. We've got three entries to get things started, and we'll be adding more over the next three weeks, featuring YOUR links and tributes, plus several surprises. So click on over and see what you think. Let's gather our scattered journaling community one more time, and give our Blogfather a big send-off!

Karen

The Comment Manifesto

I tend to get suspicious when an older entry from the Outpost gets a new comment. Sometimes it's because someone was Googling for pages on a specific subject (I get lots of hits on my George Maharis posts, for example), but more often it's comment spam.

But this one tonight was in a class of its own. It was posted to "The Curse and Promise of Change," an entry from November 16th that has recently aged off my blog's main page.

Let's start with a copy of my posted comment in reply, slightly edited for typos, and then I'll say something new. Here we go:

I am deleting a comment that begins,

rafael said...

AUTHENTIC RECORD AND GEOLOGY SCIENTIS CAN’T CALCULATE THE AGE OF THE EARTH.
The subject of evolution among those who understand it, they must be aware that there is the danger of excessive subjectivity concerning one owns knowledge. This is not healthy, is a means of cultivating the mind with vain thoughts, and be fill with self examination. Is better, to be objective.

...and goes on for a total of 20,661 words, most of it in one paragraph. The bulk of it is an attempt to use Biblical quotes to disprove evolution. It contains misspellings, poor grammar and punctuation, logical fallacies, and pure gobbledegook. My favorite (by default because I haven't the patience to read the entire screed), is the following:

Darwinism was accepted by eugenics which was Hitler idealism or dream, never accomplished in Germany but applied in North America, where is up to now working, nevertheless the biggest lied on humanity is ending microscopic world.

Looky there! A genuine Reductio ad Hitlerum!

I would leave this misguided comment up in the interest of fairness (and so Paul et al. can laugh at it), but the fact is that it fails my comment policy. There is no indication whatsoever that the person read my entry, which was mostly about my job changes and Tuffy's cancer, and secondarily about change itself. Evolution wasn't even mentioned. I'm assuming that the person Googled the buzzword "species" and pasted in comment spam everywhere the word turned up. Sorry, rafael. Your manifesto, pasted in as a response to a posting on an entirely different subject, does not constitute intelligent discourse. Bye-bye.

Anyone who knows me, or even reads this blog on a regular basis, can probably tell that I'm not the most confrontational of people. I hate, hate, hate interpersonal conflict, and do my best to avoid it. It makes me physically ill. And I really do believe strongly in tolerance for other points of view, and not dividing the world into Us and Them, and all that other ethical stuff I sometimes rant about here.

So believe me when I say that I don't really want to belittle or make fun of this "rafael" person. That's not my idea of a good time. The deficiencies in English may be an ESL issue, and if it's not, it mostly just makes me sad to see the language mangled. Nor am I going to refute this manifesto, which when I paste it into Word comes out as 32 pages. The final paragraph is over 28 pages long, and consists entirely of interpreting Bible quotes as "proof" that Darwin was wrong. At least, that's the impression I get from glancing at a few lines here and there.

And that's kind of my point. Even if I were to leave this ridiculously long comment visible, I doubt that anyone would read it through, least of all me. It's not necessary, when it's possible to get a sense of the thing from reading bits and pieces of it. I can overlook deficiencies in punctuation (well, let's pretend I can) if the words themselves make sense. But there seems to be precious little sense to be found in this one, even beyond my gut reaction of "I disagree with you, and therefore you're wrong," which is a fallacy in itself. If I were to read it through, it would probably be to play "count the fallacies."

But let's not, and I'll tell you why. First off, this was an anonymous comment, in the sense of having no contact link for the commenter. It is unlikely that any attempt on my part to educate this person about science or critical thinking or paragraph breaks would ever reach its target. Second, even if the person were to turn up again, and I somehow overcame my aversion to confrontation, I doubt I could make a dent in the person's illogic. Third, evolution has plenty of defenders online, with far more knowledge of the subject and far better arguments than I could manage. It doesn't need me to jump in there too. Fourth, at least one of my friends has issues with the subject, and I don't want to open that can of worms. Fifth, I really do respect the right of this person to disagree with me. And sixth, it would be too darn much trouble!

What annoys me about it, though, and the reason I clicked on the trash can icon, is that this person posted 20,661 words of comment to my 1,519-word entry, not one of which related directly to what I wrote about. That's rather rude, isn't it? Here I am, going on about jobs lost and a sick dog, and trying at the end to turn it into something philosophical and uplifting. And does rafael call me by name, sympathize about Tuffy, or indicate in any way whatsoever that he's read a single word that I wrote? He does not, unless that single word is "species." And what is my grandiose claim, requiring 32 pages' worth of passionate but clumsy refutation? As far as I can tell, it was simply this:

Species die out, the Earth gets warmer, and new superviruses arise.

Y'know, I wouldn't have thought there was anything terribly controversial about that sentence. The passenger pigeons unquestionably existed, and don't anymore. Icebergs are melting, and polar bears are having a difficult time as a result. And hospitals find themselves battling highly drug-resistant viruses that weren't around a decade ago. One can debate about dinosaurs, or whether humans have an effect on global warming, or why and how viruses seem to get more virulent over time. But the facts stated in my little sentence are pretty hard to refute at this point, short of some elaborate twisting of both facts and logic. Notice that I didn't say why or how any of that stuff happens. I never used the word evolution. I was merely listing three examples of change, which was after all the subject of the essay.

Still, I doubt rafael even knows this, or cares. And that, more than anything else, is why I deleted the comment.

Karen

Commentary

Blog comments folder

I've been having this thought. It's been coming on for a while, since before I put a comment policy thingy in the sidebar, inspired by great comments people sometimes leave for one entry or another, and by what I've seen other people do in the comments sections of their own blogs. What will happen is this: someone leaves a comment, containing an interesting insight, a thoughtful question or additional information, or some combination thereof. The host blogger then replies in the comments section, and maybe emails the commenter as well. The result is a nice little interaction, of value not only to the blogger and the commenter, but potentially to other readers as well. For most blogs, this give or take will never expand into long, amazingly entertaining comment threads such as are found in (the) Whatever or Making Light, but they're certainly a step in the right direction. The thought is this: maybe I ought to make an effort to leave comment replies, not for every comment, but at least for the ones that are particularly insightful, questioning for informative.

Over the last week or so I've actually done a little of this. Two or three of my Halloween entries from past years had new comments this past October and into November, particularly the one about Danse Macabre. That got four of them (plus two from me), as people sought and posted info on a Danse Macabre filmstrip from the 1960s and a possible modern-day upgrade thereof. Becky's left a few comments that I've either responded to or thought about answering. And just today, I got a long comment on another 2006 entry, this one about Charlie Rocket. Apparently this person became interested in the actor after seeing him on Quantum Leap, was shocked (as I was) upon learning of his suicide, and did some research into his life and death. The narrative she put together on her MySpace blog is somewhat speculative, but I have no doubt that she's got the gist of Charlie Rocket's sad story: abused as a child, scarred by the SNL firing, chronically depressed, relatively isolated and not getting many roles, which all added up to his cutting his own throat. I would send Yasmin the text of my Rocket tribute for The Observer, but I don't have her email address and don't to join MySpace to get it. So I'll settle for plugging it here and in my original posting.

And that's the iffy thing about replying to a comment. Will the original commenter ever know you did it? I'm guessing that the answer is no, probably not. Heck, I can't keep up with the actual blog entries or my closest online friends, let alone revisit their comment threads. I'm guessing that many of you are much the same way.

Ah, but now there's a link at the end of Blogger entries, allowing you to subscribe to comment threads. Online services are starting to make it easier to keep up by sending alerts only when there's something new to see. So if you do leave a comment, and especially if it's insightful, questioning and informative, you may want to subscribe to that comment thread, in case I remark on your brilliance.

some of my new Who stuff

Meanwhile, obsessive Doctor Who fan that I am, I've now listened to the brand new Murray Gold Doctor Who soundtrack 67.5 times (okay, no, but perhaps 15% of that in a day and a half), and I'm already listening to the commentary for "Utopia", the first episode of the season's 3-part finale. It's been a hoot, particularly listening to David Tennant, Murray Gold et al. make off-the-cuff remarks about Axons and Kinda and The Green Death from the show's classic era. I love that these folks are fans, too! Once I get through the rest of the episodes and DVD extras I'll probably go through the box set a second time right away, this time to watch with subtitles instead of the commentary, and to listen to the musical cues. I love, love, love the new soundtrack, but there are still a few tracks that don't automatically bring the relevant scenes from the show to my mind's eye and ears.

Enough. I suddenly feel a profound need for bed/sleep. Good night!

Karen

Grrr. Arrgh. Whimper. Wail. Sigh. Moan.

Good grief, what a yucky day!

First, I was stressed out because I thought it was my predecessor's last day, and I wasn't anywhere near ready to take over the job on my own. I'm still not. It turns out she's there tomorrow, but I have no great hopes that we're going to get any serious training in; history suggests otherwise (Say no more - I can say no more). I'll manage, though. Whatever I can't puzzle out on my own, I'll get explanations for from someone else.

Tuffy shows off her good side.

Then, of course, there was the phone call this morning from Tuffy's surgeon. I know you folks are waiting for details, but there's only so much I can tell you at this point. Dr. K. said that they got all of the cancer but a little bit at the back of the tongue, but that's enough to grow back if left untreated. Dr. K. has to examine the tongue before she'll be able to recommend what to do next. I'm very much afraid that Tuffy is headed for a third operation. As expensive as it is, an operation would be both cheaper for us and easier on the dog than the alternatives. To say that John and I are seriously bummed is both obvious and true.

Meanwhile, Dr. K. had no words of wisdom to offer on the lack of eating, unless something went wrong with the stitches. But she's not bleeding, and there's no evidence of pain or lethargy. She just doesn't want anything but meat loaf or sausage or possibly hamburger. Even high-end canned dog food doesn't interest her - and this is a dog who would reluctantly eat dry food if we added a little canned stuff to it.

I really wasn't expecting the long-awaited pathology report on Tuffy to be bad news. Now I don't know what to think, but it can't be good. There's only bad or worse. And we've a week to get through before she gets in to see Dr. K. and the oncologist.

And if all that wasn't enough crappiness for the day, there was also this. AOL, in their infinite cluelessness, has laid off Joe Loong, better known as Journals Editor Joe.

Y'know, I really thought I was through being angry with AOL. Annoyed at times, yes, bemused by their short-sightedness, definitely; but not angry. But I was angry today. Here is a guy that the AOL J-Land community - that extended family of past and present AOL bloggers - saw as their friend and advocate. If there was a glitch or an upgrade, or a glitch in an upgrade, Joe would tell us what was happening and why, and when it would most likely be resolved. If there was a new feature, he'd explain how to use it. If an individual had a problem with a blog, Joe would try to solve it. And on top of all this, he kept us informed and amused with tales of online foolishness, thoughts on the business, ethics and philosophy of blogging, the weather in DC, and the current page on his Hello Kitty calendar. Much as I appreciate John Scalzi's work as our Blogfather, Editor Joe was the real go-to guy for journalers, the guy who was always there for us, the human presence that made interactions with AOL almost infinitely better than they would be otherwise. Even when the banner ads tore us apart and split us asunder, Joe was patient and helpful as always, never judging someone harshly on the basis of where they blogged or their level of expertise with HTML and such.

For AOL to lay off such an individual is not merely unfair or foolish. It's highly destructive to what's left of the AOL-J community, and equally destructive to whatever tattered shreds of goodwill remain between the company and the journalers. Already people are asking who will help them when problems arise, now that the one person who was always there for them has been shown the door. I'm sure some of the other corporate bloggers at AOL are fine folks, and maybe a few of them even survived today's layoff. But we knew Joe. We knew he cared, and would help if he possibly could. It's hard not to see this as another slap in the face from AOL. No, that's not quite it. For someone to slap your face means that they care about you - negatively, perhaps, but at least they're paying attention. Whoever put Joe on the list of layoffs clearly has no idea what an asset Joe was to the company, because he or she has no idea that Joe's constituency has any value. Journals.aol.com is just another generator of pages on which ads can appear, profitable insofar as they're fed by consumer-generated content, but perhaps more trouble than they're worth based on what happened two years ago. A "suit" who thinks of AOL Journals in such terms is certain to undervalue Joe's huge contribution to keeping J-Land alive. With his endless helpfulness and enthusiasm, Joe made it possible for people to overcome their dismay about the ads, and stay with AOL while people like me jumped ship.

He and John Scalzi even made it possible for those of us who left to retain some ties with J-Land, and even a smidge of loyalty toward a company that wrote us off. Do you know when I finally converted my paid AOL account to a free one? Tonight. It's taken me two years to get on the cable modem and a wireless LAN, work out how to save my email, and change my billing plan to the one marked $0.00. I'd be lying if I said my making the change today was in direct response to Joe's departure, but it's true that were it not for Joe and John, I would have found a way to drop my paid account a long time ago, whether I had the high speed connection or not.

Just a few days ago, I wrote about the dwindling of the old AOL-J community, as people get bored with blogging or fed up with AOL or both, and wander off elsewhere. There are more blogs out there now than any of us could read in a lifetime, but we've lost our personal connection with most of them. The ones branded AOL represent a small, often disregarded backwater of the blogosphere, with few new screen names and a distinct tendency for old ones to migrate to other platforms. We've gained a lot since AOL Journals were first launched - more choices, more versatility, slideshows and video and other widgets, gizmos and gimcracks. But we've lost a lot, too. We're lost the joy and enthusiasm that came with the novelty of this fun new means of expression. We've lost online friends, who dropped out, moved on, even died in some cases. And now we've lost Joe - not as a person and fellow blogger, but as our cheerleader, ombudsman, tutor and advocate. That's probably not the greatest loss we've had as a group. But aside from the people who have actually died, it's got to be right up there.

I've read a number of comments today that asked where Joe can be found, outside the confines of AOL. Not to worry - I've already added his personal blog to my sidebar. Here's the link:

Dumb Things I Have Done Lately

All the best, Joe!

Karen

Thoughts on Marketing, and the Crisis Du Jour

I put this entry off too long tonight, so I won't do the first subject in any depth right now. But here's the short version. I've been thinking about that nice, nearly indisputable form letter from DAW. It's true: publishing a first novel by an unknown writer is a risky proposition from a commercial point of view. Very few people, of any, go into a bookstore looking for a book they've never heard of by an author they've never heard of. In the fantasy market especially, they mostly look for more books in the series from someone whose work they already know.

So how does one get that first book in the series out into the stores? and once it's there, how does one ensure its success, so that publication of the next three books by that author is economically feasible?

Dunno, really. But I've been playing around with some ideas. They mostly involve marketing and self-promotion. Most of you have probably long-since realized that I've been making concerted "branding" efforts for years, putting the name of my fictional country, Mâvarin, in almost all my screen names and blog titles, commissioning portraits of my major characters, plugging the books at www.mavarin.com and generally mentioning Rani and his friends at almost every opportunity. I sometimes wonder whether you folks get sick of reading about these books and characters that Tor and DAW and a handful of agents apparently find less than compelling. But your comments on the subject are always encouraging, so I carry on.

But is it enough? Well, enough for what? It's clearly enough to get friends and some regular readers of this blog interested in reading the books when and if they are published. It's just as clearly not enough to establish an undeniably large reader base, to get Mâvarin off of everyone's maps of the obscure and risky, and into guidebooks to popular destinations.

I keep thinking of John Scalzi, and what he did to get his fiction into the literary marketplace. He posted a novel online as shareware, and it worked: people sent money for fictional content that we freely available online. Eventually Patrick Nielsen Hayden signed him to a contract, and Scalzi became an award-winning novelist, with four novels in print (excluding the limited edition reprint of that first novel), and more on the way.

Could I really do something like that? Could I convince agents and editors that the Mâvarin books are commercially viable, on the basis of online marketing efforts and a large ready-made fan base? Is there a way for me to develop my online readership to the extent that such a claim would actually be true?

I'm not sure, but I kind of doubt it. The Outpost is currently averaging just under a hundred readers a day, and my fiction blog is getting about six a day, mostly people accidentally landing there based on fairly unrelated search strings. If I made a point of commenting to lots of other blogs, I would probably build the readership, but not to the extent that would impress a publisher or agent. Scalzi has been blogging a long, long time, and has many thousands of daily readers. I don't have that kind of time to spend on blog-jogging any more, and even if I did it wouldn't land me among A-list bloggers anytime soon.

But are there things I can do to improve my visibility and make the Mâvarin books more attractive to agents and publishers? Yeah, probably. I'll have to think about it some more.


We had a minor crisis today with Tuffy. She somehow managed to pull open one of her surgical sites. The vet's office said to bring her in, either right away on an emergency basis or on Monday morning. Well, you know what's happening on Monday morning: I start my new job. So John is going to work tomorrow so that he can take Tuffy to the vet on Monday.

Meanwhile, We needed to cover up and protect that open wound, which she had been licking. After three trips to Walgreen's and much frustration, John managed to bandage her as shown above, without it falling off seconds later. Tuffy isn't thrilled, but she's not trying to escape from it, either.

Poor doggie.

Karen

In case I don't see you later...

...this will probably have to stand as my blog entry for tonight. See, John has been battling for hours with command prompts, MAC addresses, unhelpfully labeled screens, competing connections and none-of-the-above options. In short, he's been trying to get my computer on the cable modem that his Mac uses. He's finally done it, after hours of frustration. But that's only half the battle.

What we're trying to do is this: there's a Linksys wireless router that I bought at least a year ago, that theoretically should enable us to create a wireless network inside the house, so our computers can talk to each other and, more importantly, the cable modem. This would mean that I would finally be able to dump the excruciatingly slow dial-up connection and its attendant problems, and cancel the paid AOL account while retaining the Mavarin screen name.

Thing is, though, this is proving exceedingly difficult to do. The CD that came with the router had no interest in running on John's Mac, for one thing. For another, the various bits of equipment expect the user to know all about PPP and other protocols, how to find all the settings and configure them with no guidance whatsoever. At one point John crashed my VAIO, ejecting the Linksys CD during an attempted shutdown. The computer refused to turn on again no matter what I did. It eventually turned out that it wasn't quite turned off, and holding down the on/off button for a long time finally got it off. Once it was off, we could turn it back on.

Anyway, he's finally got the cable modem working on the laptop, but not wirelessly. That's the next step, and he probably won't tackle it tonight. So the VAIO stays in his office instead of mine for now, and chances are good that he plans to plug the cable modem back in to the Mac overnight. If I want to work on Return to Mâvarin, I'll have to do it in here after John goes to bed. And John himself advised me to get my blog entry in now, in case I can't do it later.

I'll let you know how it goes from here. Meanwhile, I'm most of the way through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which means I'm most of the way through my rereading of the saga. And I'm now planning to back through Mages of Mâvarin from the beginning as soon as I get to the end of the current edit, this time for the specific purpose of deciding whether each scene is really necessary. The characters certainly have to think about and talk about what's going on every step of the way; it is their reactions in such situations that determine my plot, not any cleverness on my part. But there's no reason every one of these conversations and soliloquies has to be reported verbatim in the books themselves. Each scene needs to accomplish something that is not covered elsewhere: a bit of character, key info, action, conflict, something. If Rani spends 1100 pages just talking (which he doesn't; I'm exaggerating), then it makes for a dull and redundant story.

Unfortunately I have a bit of the writer's disease called Every Word Is Golden Syndrome. I love these scenes, and I will probably feel that they're all important. Will I be able to get past that, and make a good determination which scenes should go and which must stay? I have no idea - but I expect I'll find out before the autumn is well advanced.

Karen

Answers and Updates

In no particular order:

ARR! Update

My first day at Anonymous Regional Retailer (ARR!) wasn't bad, but my second day was better. I was too wound up about starting a new job to get much sleep Sunday night, and I've never had a first day on any job in which I wasn't a bit stressed and nervous. Everyone was wonderful, though. I was encouraged by other factors as well, from the similarity of the accounting software to what I've used before, to my job title and the fact that I have an office instead of one of the cubicles.

Last night I went to bed a bit earlier, but kept waking up, at one point having dreamed that I woke up at 11 AM, two hours late for work! In reality I awoke for the last time of the morning at 7:53 AM, just before the alarm went off, and made it to work a few minutes early. I got my computer log-in, worked with someone one learning one major accounting process and getting an introduction to another, and was able to do a little actual work in addition to watching other people and asking questions. My new boss took me out to lunch and then took me around to the business office, where I got to meet one of the company's founders. Carly, you may be interested to know there there are a few ARR! stores near you, though of course that's not what they're really called.

At the end of the day I organized some notes my predecessor(s) left behind about a variety of procedures, and tomorrow I'll be typing up some of the handwritten ones, as much to learn what they say as to get the info in one place and one readable format. Then I'll get more hands-on training. One thing I will need to overcome is my shyness; part of my job involves making the rounds and chatting with co-workers, getting a handle on what people are doing, learning their names and all that good stuff. I'll manage it, I'm sure, but it will require more effort and spunk on my part than anything else. Still, so far, so good!

Oh, and I think I've found a faster route for the painfully slow drive across town, after three days of experimenting.

Cavities Can Wait

My dental appointment last Thursday (the 23rd) revealed two small cavities, so I made an appointment to have them filled on Wednesday the 29th, before the First Magnus health plans were scheduled to run out. Then on Friday the 24th, the Arizona Daily Star reported that on Thursday, FMFC canceled its health insurance policy. The company had previously stated that the insurance "should" be good to the end of the month, but the article seemed to say otherwise. Rather than take a chance on being stuck with the entire bill, I canceled the appointment for the 29th. Heck, I can live with a few cavities for a while. I just feel sorry for the ex-FMFC employees that still have no job, no $2,000 check (which was only for Southern AZ employees) and now no health insurance. For people with more serious medical issues, this is a disaster. They can't even get COBRA coverage now.

About a Dog


ColleenG asks,

Hi Karen,
Fell across your blog last night(midnight in Aus), interesting, I have to ask, why does Tuffy have a blueish tongue? Is she part Chow Chow or had she just been eating something that coloured her tongue when the photo was taken?

Yes, the vet's office and Tuffy's trainer have both said that she's part Chow, mostly on the basis of that tongue, but also because of her personality. Sorry to say, she's not the friendliest dog in the world. I doubt that the average Chow is as afraid of strangers (and anyone outside the family, really) as Tuffy is, but I gather that the breed isn't big on instantly making friends with everyone they meet. Still, she's a good little dog and we love her.

The Kindness of Bloggers

My good friend Carly was recently awarded a "Kindness Matters" award by Suzanne R, and generously passed on the honor to a number of excellent bloggers and, well, me. Thanks, Carly! I'm not really very good about passing these things on (just ask Pat and Bea), but I'd like to add my hearty endorsement of all the blogs Carly mentions, plus the one's I've linked to in this paragraph. Carly has been going through a rough summer, having recently been diagnosed as diabetic, but she's hanging in there. She has also posted some truly amazing photos recently, especially a series of shots of the moon on the night of an eclipse. (Heck, I didn't even know an eclipse was coming!) Good stuff!

Looking for the End

I'm on Chapter 12 out of 11 in my edit of Another Mâvarin, and pretty much spent the whole evening tonight fussing with that chapter and the ones around it. Aside from tweaking and some minor continuity stuff, I'm mostly trying to select a chapter capable of at least pretending to be the end of a book. Chapter 11 wasn't so much a reasonable stopping point in the overall saga as it was a series of cliffhangers involving a number of major characters. I have hopes that 12, as I get through it, will resolve things enough that I can revise it to give the reader a semblance of closure before Return to Mâvarin, the third volume in my saga-disguised-as a trilogy, throws my characters back into crisis mode.

And now to bed.

Karen