Oh boy, this is going to be a massively longer update than usual, and I’ll try to divide it up pretty clearly so you can skip to the parts you want to read.
There will be discussions of Mental Health, Author’s Technology, Writing Goals, and basically whatever else I ramble to. The banners will be the color of the text here, just so that you can simply skim for the color if you want to.
So, recently I’ve been noticing a distinct lack of interaction from some of my writer friends on Facebook. I feel quite sad about this because I know that they miss hanging out in the discussions, but various other things bring them down. So, I decided to bring back the forums. It’s taken me a few months to get to a situation where I felt comfortable putting them together and starting a few subjects but they are now online. The forums can be found at ascribedworld.com/forum/ and I must say I’m pretty fond of the color scheme.
I know some of the people I spend a lot of time talking to don’t generally want to have more than one place to go for their writing things but at the same time, they’re also incredibly tired of all of the incredibly hard to avoid political shit on Facebook. I also know that a lot of my writer friends are tired of seeing so much non-writing related stuff in with the writing related posts. The forum allows for writing specific things to go in the writing forums, and the not really writing related things to go into other forums.
I am entirely excited to go ahead and get this forum going, and it technically opens for business on May 12th 2017.
Well, it’s been a while since I last posted a blog! I know, I’ve fallen off any sort of schedule again, but hey, life happens. Speaking of life, I’ve discovered that my book collection is both larger than I mostly remembered, and yet smaller than I distinctly remember.
I distinctly remember having almost all of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, from 1 to 56 each, but after a minor disaster in my home, I can only find something like 6 of the Hardy Boys books and there are serious gaps in my Nancy Drew collection.
Either way, I recently had to move all of my books out to the middle of the house, bookcases and all, because the bathroom next to the library had a critical failure and flooded. I both caught it early and not early enough. It managed to flood from the bathroom into the hall and a good 40% of the library, but only just reached inside the door of the guestroom on the other side. It stuck fairly close to the walls, and I managed to get everything out of the way and vacuum up most of the water with the carpet shampooing machine.
Thanks to this disaster, I’ve decided to absolutely push myself to try and get something together to be able to publish within the next 3 or 4 months. Just to try and bring in some extra money, essentially. I spent a few hours looking around my various works in progress and half or more completed manuscripts and decided to work on the one that’s basically short tagged as the steampunk serial killer story (part I’m working on at the moment is called Indigo). It’s got a lot of the world building done, and doesn’t require me to learn new writing skills so I think it’s the one to work on. I’ll be making an announcement about it on May 12th, come hell or high water. With luck, that announcement will be a definite(hard) publication date announcement, but at the very least, I’m hoping for a cover announcement, with a soft publication date announcement. Originally I’d set myself the goal of having it live for purchase by that day, but that’s just inhuman for me at this time.
I’ll also be trying to get back into the goal of publishing a blog post at least once a week, if not more, but they may or may not fit whatever theme I had originally planned to keep for that day. Hopefully, this will get me back to posting regularly enough to possibly grow the blog some.
Anyways, I’m going back to working on Indigo, and with luck, I’ll manage 2k on the story tonight.
So, last time I posted a fandom Friday, I get the impression it ran someone off. Oh well. Fandom Friday’s are more for me to track things with than anything else.
Today, I’m going to talk favorite Genres – because of something I realized recently.
I’d realized I didn’t have any strong likes or dislikes on genre that I can remember prior to 6th grade.
I’ve since realized why.
There aren’t really any genre books for the younger kids. In fact, the only two books I remember reading prior to 6th grade were both books that I’m not particularly fond of. (And to be honest, I probably shouldn’t have read either, but in one case there was honor at stake, and in the other, it was a trade to my parents to be allowed to read what I wanted – which failed because I never finished the book.)
My two loves in literature are Science Fiction and Fantasy. They are by a long shot, my absolute favorites and I can pretty much tie the entire interest to Anne McCaffery. I started reading Pern books when I was in 6th grade, and I’ve not once looked back. I’ve read all but two series of hers, and I’ll willingly admit I never could get into reading the other two. I admit to having expanded to reading many other genres since – there are still a few I just won’t touch, but for the most part, there is little I won’t read. Currently the four authors who take up a whole five shelf bookcase themselves are: Christine Feehan, Jayne Ann Krentz (mostly under her Amanda Quick pen name), Anne McCaffery and Tamora Pierce. Those four have actually outgrown the bookcase that they’re on, and I’m stacking books on top of each other now.
I’ve read Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, in fact, I have near complete sets of both of the first 56 books. I’ve got all the Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. Harry Potter, Agatha Christie, there’s a few Dan Brown, my shelves are pretty far ranging. Covering easily everything from Political Thriller to Urban Fantasy to Paranormal Romance to High Fantasy to hard Science Fiction. Maybe I’ll manage to remember a lightbulb for my library and post a series of shelfies over the next few weeks, would anyone want that?
Almost all of these are from the “Adult” part of the book stores. There are a few in the YA areas, and two that I find in the children’s section. Then there are quite a few that physical bookstores have phased off the shelves because the titles are older and the teens of today want the hot new book with the love triangle and the sparkles. Or the vampires and werewolves, but not so much the Lady Knights or Lady Provosts proving themselves.
The hottest genre today is definitely Urban Fantasy or Urban Paranormal. It puts the weird alongside the believable things of today, and right now, that’s selling like wildfire.
What’s this? A second post this week already?
Why yes, yes it is!
This one is actually one I promised a bit back, a final review of my wireless speaker (literally it’s initially covered in Technical Tuesday 0003).
I’ve now had my little Anker soundcore for a couple of months.
It lives in my purse.
I literally have only one complaint about it at all, and that’s that it did not come with an aux cable, but hey, those are cheap as hell so it’s not the biggest of big deals. It’s compatible with ANY aux cable you have laying around, so the cord to my high quality skull candy headphones that are massive has gotten hijacked for the wireless speaker for those days I want to be able to actually hear netflix on my writing laptop. Ironically, this laptop does great with onboard media. But the instant I want to watch netflix or youtube, the max volume drops by half, it’s really weird.
I haven’t charged him in a little over a week and according to the icon on my phone, he’s still at roughly half battery. I’ve not had any issues with battery life at all.
Only actual time I’ve had a moment of concern, I was running one of my binaural beat apps and it stopped producing sound at all. As long as I’m not running that sort of sound through it, everything is fine. (Besides, Binaural beats work better through headphones anyways, but I was testing it.)
It’s got decent sound levels from lowest to highest, good sound for something as cheap as it was. No serious complaints at all. No matter how you look at it, I 100% recommend this little guy for his volume levels and portability as well as battery life.