Monthly Archives: March 2019

Welcome to the future.

The Process

I’ve been writing, well, since c. 1984 if we’re talking pencil and paper, but since 1990 or ’91 regularly. I was a 13-year-old who got a no-kidding stand-alone Brother word processor as a birthday present. Like, a computer that only made text files. Not really for writing schoolwork. For writing fiction, since I’d spent the previous couple of years scribbling in notebooks endlessly. However ornery I may be about my upbringing in some aspects, that was a boss move from my parents.

So it took me until 20omg19 to finally try putting a draft on The Cloud(tm). Not really because of paranoia, because a hacker may as well hack somebody who makes more than coffee money out of writing. I just felt like I had to get my money’s worth out of Scrivener. And I do quite like that program, don’t get me wrong. Still, shifting 70+ files back and forth between PC and laptop every time I want to switch my seat led me to just not work on anything at all. Enter… The Cloud(tm).

I can work on the draft from my desktop! And my laptop! AND MY PHONE! I quickly found that I cannot thumb-type more than a couple of paragraphs without getting frustrated. However, you know what I can do from my phone? Line edits. Correcting word choice. Skimming through to fix continuity. Making notes about what I want to do next. Wheeeeeee. (All that stuff that I spent years doing with Book 1, so yeah, moderation in all things.)

So when I say “hey I’m actually working on the draft I swear,” I am actually working on the draft, I swear.

Or playing Pokemon Go. I’m not made of stone.

Mistakes… were made.

website news

So, uh… funny story. Not so much “funny ha-ha” as “funny I think I’m going to hurl.”

I had to update my payment info for website hosting because, as happens so often these days, my card was compromised in a data breach. So I updated that. So far, so good.

Bear in mind, my website hosting skills and understanding are still pretty much mired back in the late ’90s, when you could hand-code a site in basic HTML, FTP it up to your host, and that was that.

After updating the payment stuff, I thought, you know, I don’t use one of the domains I’m sitting on anymore — at all, ever — so why don’t I just let that expire? I’m paying for it for nothing.

What I meant to do was to stop using that URL.

What I actually did was to delete everything based on that domain, including the previous incarnation of this site.

Because, originally, this domain piggybacked on that one. It was just inkandscissors.com/serobertsonfiction instead of, genuinely, serobertsonfiction.com.

I’m, uh… rather upset with myself.

So here’s the deal. I’m going to try to rebuild all this jazz. Better? Smarter? Hopefully? And I will do the giveaway, but I will do it properly on Goodreads like I should have at the outset. Links soon.

Edit: Today I learned that it costs a hundred and nineteen dollars to do a print giveaway on Goodreads. Woooooooooow. I mean, I’m not begrudging them their business model, but I can’t afford that. So. Email it is. Details on the Books page.