Sunday, March 22, 2015
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Mystic Press Re-Reborn
Mystic Press became Rogue Phoenix and has now morphed into Dark Storm Publications. This seems to be a shell game rather than any actual change.
Friday, March 20, 2015
Blame-O-rama
And not, for example, going down in a cloud of recriminations blaming self-publishing authors for "cluttering up search engines" or churning out “unedited slush piles” (while simultaneously saying your downfall is due to Amazon discriminating against small presses [?] )
IMHO whether you make bagels, bangles or books if you cannot outperform a one person producer or the mass of eager amateurs, you are the one doing something wrong--not them.
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Storm Moon press "downsizing"
Posted on the Absolute Write forums: "The press has downsized greatly, so apart from a couple ongoing projects
that we already have contracted in our queue and our open anthology
calls, we are closed to submissions."
Friday, March 13, 2015
Facebook: Are Groups the New Pages?
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| Photo credit: dkalo / Foter / CC BY-SA |
However the algorithm is not in force for posts made to Facebook Groups. Groups can be about any topic, are easily found via search, and have many of the features of Pages plus some handy dandy administrator/moderator tools.
Seems like a good solution? Has anyone tried it?
Google Exposes Anonymous Bloggers
Many people who register their domain through Google, and anonymize it with Enom, had their full name and address exposed for a short period after this year's renewal. ZDnet reports that a flaw effecting 280,000 users lead to their domain being renewed, but not their Enom -- so their legal name and address was listed in the public WHOIS data.
Google's official letter described this as only effecting "a portion" of users. Well, I suppose 94% is technically "a portion".
On the up side, hardly anyone noticed this even during the six days the privacy setting were not in force and effected users got a free year of registration. But that will be small compensation to any user who suffer serious consequences from being exposed.
Google's official letter described this as only effecting "a portion" of users. Well, I suppose 94% is technically "a portion".
On the up side, hardly anyone noticed this even during the six days the privacy setting were not in force and effected users got a free year of registration. But that will be small compensation to any user who suffer serious consequences from being exposed.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Romances Someone Should Write: Designated Survivor
Romances Someone Should Write--a chance to describe that book you could never write yourself, but somebody out there should.
Designated Survivor (romantic suspense)
As Secretary of Agriculture, brilliant but humorless 82-year-old Porsche Smith-Barton is not especially effective and not particularly well liked. What she is, is a survivor. That may be why the President, as a joke, chooses her to be the senior politician sent outside of DC during the State of the Union address; the 'designated survivor' in the unlikely circumstance of every senior politician being killed while attending the speech. A security escort accompanies Porsche on a trip to rural Missouri to have dinner with her ex-husband Frank "Fatty" Barton, an irreverent cattle rancher who understands Porsche no better now than he did when the married sixty years ago, or when they and divorced ten years after that. That evening they are watching the speech on TV while eating some excellent steaks when the largest conventional bomb ever detonated on Earth destroys the entire metropolitan DC area. Porsche Smith Barton has just become President of the United States, and the only person she can even halfway trust to help her is Frank Barton. Porsche's job is to keep body and soul together while leading America through some of the darkest days it will ever face, and Frank's is to throw everything he has into the unexpected role of first (ex-)husband. Because if this unlikely couple cannot learn to pull together, the entire nation may fall apart.
Send your own "Romance Someone Should Write" to veinglory@gmail.com, cross-posting on your own blog very much permitted and I will link back.
Designated Survivor (romantic suspense)
As Secretary of Agriculture, brilliant but humorless 82-year-old Porsche Smith-Barton is not especially effective and not particularly well liked. What she is, is a survivor. That may be why the President, as a joke, chooses her to be the senior politician sent outside of DC during the State of the Union address; the 'designated survivor' in the unlikely circumstance of every senior politician being killed while attending the speech. A security escort accompanies Porsche on a trip to rural Missouri to have dinner with her ex-husband Frank "Fatty" Barton, an irreverent cattle rancher who understands Porsche no better now than he did when the married sixty years ago, or when they and divorced ten years after that. That evening they are watching the speech on TV while eating some excellent steaks when the largest conventional bomb ever detonated on Earth destroys the entire metropolitan DC area. Porsche Smith Barton has just become President of the United States, and the only person she can even halfway trust to help her is Frank Barton. Porsche's job is to keep body and soul together while leading America through some of the darkest days it will ever face, and Frank's is to throw everything he has into the unexpected role of first (ex-)husband. Because if this unlikely couple cannot learn to pull together, the entire nation may fall apart.
Send your own "Romance Someone Should Write" to veinglory@gmail.com, cross-posting on your own blog very much permitted and I will link back.
Not Your Everyday Rights Grab
An amusing article from Boing Boing describes an unusual attempt to grab rights for images and onions... about an apartment. Most authors might be used to carefully scanning a contract for rights grabs over unrelated material, but would you every think you needed to look for this in a lease?
The lease to the Windermere Cay apartment transfers copyrights of any text or images the residents might create that are about the apartment complex to the owner of the complex, with the intend of having anything "negative" removed from any public site under the DMCA. Oh, and there is a fine of thousands of dollars attached as well.
Thus leading one naturally to suspect that the apartment complex must be horrendous in pretty much every way to require such draconian "reputation management". A tactic that is already backfiring badly on apartment review sites.
See also: Huffington Post
The lease to the Windermere Cay apartment transfers copyrights of any text or images the residents might create that are about the apartment complex to the owner of the complex, with the intend of having anything "negative" removed from any public site under the DMCA. Oh, and there is a fine of thousands of dollars attached as well.
Thus leading one naturally to suspect that the apartment complex must be horrendous in pretty much every way to require such draconian "reputation management". A tactic that is already backfiring badly on apartment review sites.
See also: Huffington Post
Sunday, March 08, 2015
A Shade Too Far
Author Stephanie Dray recently issued an apology, as did Laura Kaye, over comments relating to the known sexual contact between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slave and minor child.
As authors we enjoy the privilege of writing about whatever feel moved to. And as writers of erotica and erotic romance we have probably become rather used to our genre being the butt of jokes and "50 Shades" of this and that being tittered about all over the media and social media. But to extend these jokes to the idea of "hilarious" BDSM/historical mashups and to the very real experience of Sally Hemings and her children who lived and died as slaves, including sexual slavery.....
Well, it reminds us all that some things are not all that funny and will no doubt cast a very long shadow over Ms Dray's actual historical novel about one of Jefferson's children with his legal wife. Especially as Kaye chose to explicitly mention that book by name in the midst of her apology, thus cementing the connection between joking about child rape and the release of this book for some time to come.
As authors we enjoy the privilege of writing about whatever feel moved to. And as writers of erotica and erotic romance we have probably become rather used to our genre being the butt of jokes and "50 Shades" of this and that being tittered about all over the media and social media. But to extend these jokes to the idea of "hilarious" BDSM/historical mashups and to the very real experience of Sally Hemings and her children who lived and died as slaves, including sexual slavery.....
Well, it reminds us all that some things are not all that funny and will no doubt cast a very long shadow over Ms Dray's actual historical novel about one of Jefferson's children with his legal wife. Especially as Kaye chose to explicitly mention that book by name in the midst of her apology, thus cementing the connection between joking about child rape and the release of this book for some time to come.
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