My laptop choked on two more CDs today. I guess I was just lucky that it would read the one I used to transfer my new Cat Faber album over with.
I guess I need to stick with digital downloads until I can afford a new drive. 🙁
My laptop choked on two more CDs today. I guess I was just lucky that it would read the one I used to transfer my new Cat Faber album over with.
I guess I need to stick with digital downloads until I can afford a new drive. 🙁
Google says I should send them a sitemap. I tried using an automatic sitemap builder, and it ran all day without getting anywhere so I shut it down. My site just isn’t very crawlable. That’s why Google could use to have a site-map in the first place.
But there is no way I’m going to try build and maintain a site-map by hand. My site has: 2 Webcomics up for betareaders, at 140 pages, and 302 pages each plus indexes. There’s two short stories and three novel samples… I don’t even know how many pages that involves. I have two perpetual calendars (lets count that as 2, not infinity X 2, shall we?), 4 writing tutorials, 20 pages of “Extras”, like character interviews, art galleries, and card game instructions, plus 6 more activity aka “Fun” pages: two card games that can be played online, a mad-libs story game, a personality quiz, horoscopes, and a space pirate “paperdoll”.
There are 53 Information pages, 7 home pages — one for the site and one for each of the story world sections, and an additional 27 pages that list characters, or stories, or other pages. Plus a page for every character I’ve added to my character database… that’s 349 pages. And a page for about a third of my images… that’s fifty or so. And a page for every song/poem, that’s over 80 more. If you want to push the point you could say that there is a page for every location in the database (256), but only a handful of them have actual descriptions, so perhaps we should just mention that the computer generated location pages can display locations on 12 different maps.
I think we’re at around a thousand pages, and we haven’t even got to the blog yet.
I probably need to build my own automatic sitemap creator that can use my database files to build the sitemap instead of trying to crawl the site itself. Yet another thing to go on the to do list, I guess.
So my daughter Azure told me she wanted a blog. Naturally I set her up a blog. (It’s nice to feel like I’m actually doing something for someone else, instead of the other way around.) And her sister Lisandra thought that Azure’s blog was pretty darn cool, so I offered to make her a blog too. And then Alloria asked me, “If I had a blog, would it be able to do…” Well of course I could do that!
You can check their blogs out at http://azure.aircastle.org http://lisandra.aircastle.org and http://alloria.aircastle.org or, if chasing around to everyone’s own site is too much bother, you can follow all three blogs at once (and my blog as well) at http://family.chaoscircle.com
I got a present from the Canadian government today. It only arrived one day late. My PASSPORT!!! Now I can go home to visit, without getting stuck there. Yay!
I’ve been storyboarding the changes I want to make in Black Flag, and am enjoying the task.
I have heard a number of writers complain about revisions, but for me, as long as I understand what it is that needs changing and why, it’s always been one of the fun parts of the job. I like figuring out how to fix things, and the actual work of making it better is just as fun as creating it in the first place. Best of all, when I look back at what I’ve got and can see the improvement, it’s a real thrill.
I’m sure finding a lot of stuff that needs to be redone, though. I’ve got 40 pages of new storyboards from just the first 6 Chapters. Some of those are for brand new scenes, some are insertions into old scenes (added clarifications, usually), and some are pages in need of rearranging so that the new material will fit more smoothly into the old.
In theory, I’ll need to make fewer and few fixes as I get further along in the story, though. ::crosses fingers::
…So naturally there are a bunch of things that look odd, or don’t work, or whatever. 🙁
I fixed the first one. The card game I coded a while back didn’t work when I first put it up online. Apparently the code snippet I used for sorting your hand neatly by rank and suit works great on my computer, but is too advanced for the server. So for a quick fix I took out the card sorting, and the game now works.
I still have a bunch more to track down and deal with, though.
Yesterday I managed my best performance ever in a round of disk golf (that’s the kind where you throw frisbees into baskets). I actually finished all 18 holes. I’ve never done that before. I’ve always collapsed wheezing and shaking with exhaustion somewhere in the middle.
Of course, it was the least atheletic of all the full-sized golf courses we go to — with only one notable hill to climb. Still, the last time I tried this course I only managed 11 holes, and the time before that about 8. So, go me!
This makes up somewhat for the fact that the family greeted the New Year with a round of stomach flu, and when 2012 arrived I was curled into a ball moaning instead of celebrating. Everyone else in the house followed suit a couple days later. Um, yeah, great way to start the new year. Luckily I don’t believe in omens. I think that I was out of bed and finishing a round of disk golf less than a week later, is far more indicative of how 2012 is going to go, than what I coincidentally happened to be doing when it arrived is. I’m pretty tired today, though.
I’m feeling proud of myself, because I went a little further than usual on my evening walk two nights in a row.
Here’s to hoping the new distance becomes the usual one. ::crosses fingers::
Would the person who sent me private feedback asking me a question about my “8 Kinds of Camera” writing tutorial, please get in contact with me again? I received the question just fine, but somehow no email address came with it. So I have no way to send an answer back.
This is the chapter with the climactic fight between my two male leads. It involved me doing lots and lots of renders that were deemed not good enough, or not right, or not whatever. The one pictured above, made no sense. Which I knew when I did it, but I liked how it looked. So, instead of it going in the chapter, I’ll be adding it to the Black Flag Art Gallery, as soon as I’ve finished rewriting my website. (Sometime this year, I promise.)
And now I’m off to Marcon.