Mea Culpa -- I'm Sorry

I've mentioned before that I am double-blogging these days. Compose over here on Dreamwidth and crosspost to LiveJournal. For a long time I was using the LJ link to blog entries to crosspost to Facebook, because for some reason, LJ links would get preview pictures and DW would not.

But something changed in the last couple of months -- no news there, Facebook has never met a harebrained "upgrade" they didn't like and immediately implement without ever once considering whether anyone ever wanted such a feature (bug) or even curious how its users might actually be USING FB to communicate -- and I noticed that FB wasn't doing a good job of showing preview pics. Also I do my blogging on Chrome and my Facebooking on Firefox. When I clicked on a link to a blog entry on Firefox, of course I wouldn't be logged into LJ or DW, and I discovered that LiveJournal was doing these really obnoxious Sign Up NOW For LiveJournal popups Every Single Damned Time. Yet Another LJ Fail In Place.

That's not fun.

So I started using the Dreamwidth links instead. Sometimes I get a preview pic of an icon or a picture -- but of course I can no longer CHOOSE which of several pics in a post that I get to use -- and sometimes I don't at first, but one shows up later. Who the hell knows what Facebook is doing?

ANYWAYS... the point of this post is that I ran into something I should have thought of it earlier. But really it's not completely my fault! See, the problem is that 99.9% of the comments that I get on blog posts is over on LiveJournal, mostly from other LJ users. Yesterday I got a nice bit of fanmail exchange with someone who'd been to my ConFusion panels in 2013 and 2015 AND has read some of my stuff online and needed to know the title and link to "Brooding in the Dark" published at Interstellar Fiction in November 2012 -- you can find all my Publications on my web site -- which was very cool. Even cooler, when I investigated the LJ user, they had created their account that day. Wow, set up an LJ just to comment. I'm either impressed or annoyed that LJ's popup signup ploy worked.

But there's that other 0.1% of comments, which show up on Dreamwidth. On both LJ and DW, I screen Anonymous comments. So today, I just happened to click on View Recent Comments on Dreamwidth and got three Anonymous posts from a friend of mine. First was on Tuesday, followed by another that said, "I could have sworn I replied to this, dang it." and repeated the first message. The third was also from the same friend commenting on another post.

So... (1) To Anne -- Sorry I left you so long in the Moderation Queue. You can see by the graphic above how long it's been since I've had anyone comment on Dreamwidth. And I didn't even have Moderation Hell stocked with Oreos and Jack Daniels. They are so hard to squeeze through those danged wires. (2) To All -- We'll try to do better. Especially with me using the Dreamwidth link over on Facebook, where most of y'all actually access my blog these days, as near as I can tell.

And hopefully it won't be another one or two weeks before I see your comments. (contrite-grin)

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Yikes! A Whole Year Between 2020 and 2021 Disappeared!

Or more accurately, I misplaced it or forgot about it.

So yesterday I posted at noon with the current progress report about The Lost Kingdom YA project. Did some more writing, but for the late night session after midnight I decided it was time to do something that I had been meaning to do for a long time -- pull all the chapter titles out into a file.

I did that with the last novel I wrote, which was handy for tracking things and setting up the Table of Contents. There's little point to doing it before things are quite far along, because of the organic way I write. I guess the in-crowd amongst writers talks about Plotters vs. Pantsers. Do you plot out everything ahead of time? Hardcore would be the outlines who merely have to insert the words into their outline and voilà they have a novel. I hate those people. Full contact Pansters write off the seat of their pants. I'm much further over on that side of the spectrum, but sometimes I make notes, and I do insert chapter titles with no text into the manuscript file or with just a phrase or minimal setting or a line.

But yesterday I began to get the nagging feeling that maybe I had a mistake or a problem or something with the chronology. It all came when I had to put a date to something and I chose March 2020. It worked, it had some significance and I did some research to make things come out right. But was it really 2020?

Turns out that after I finished my chapter titles across five books, I had 100 chapters, but a couple of them are just titles and two are Chapter NN - XX placeholders without even a title yet. Insert Finished Novel HERE. Just add water and stir. Done! Currently not resetting the numbers for each book, so they're just Chapters 1-100. Looks like I am running around thirty chapters to a book -- the last three books have far less writing completed that the first two. As it should be.

So I started marking up the printout and realized that current Chapter 45-47 can't happen in 2020. With the story starting in 2016, they have to be 2021.

Crisis. Horror. OMG. All the usual.

Then the brain takes over, despite the 2am hour. What happened is that the main character's sophomore year Fall semester in college was direct connected to their junior year Spring semester. (Okay, so I'm actually using academic quarters not semesters, but since most of you haven't worked under the superior 10-week quarter system, I just translated it for you. You want to know what goes on? Read the books when they come out.)

This is right smack in the middle of Book 2. And the split between Books 2 and 3 is Really Important. Geesh, do I have to break Book 2 up into Book 2A and 2B, making the whole project even longer? Well, that could still happen, and there is a critical juncture where that split could work and I might even do it. But let's not go crazy here, just yet. It's terrible, merely writing down this as a possibility and I had to pencil in the possible 2A/2B split and start thinking about it. When Will This All End?! NEVER! It's the Infinite Book Series! (If only I knew it was sold and I had an audience, I could live with this...)

ANYWAY... at the moment the big panic is down to a simmer. I can safely fly through some months in the middle of college. I mean, I'm not detailing every single damned day and hour, so clearly some time jumps are going to occur.

But... I have to redo some of yesterday's researches. Still Active: How long do shaved legs last? (Sorry, this has to be a research question as I've never shaved my legs -- and the last time I shaved my beard was Friday 1 May 1981.) Konzentrationslager Auschwitz liberated on Saturday 27 January 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Foreign language tours, i.e. not Polish, are 40 złoty -- 30 złoty for those under 26 with a student ID. There is a French tour starting at 12:30, the same time as an English tour. The złoty is currently at 0.27USD, so about $8. There is a left-luggage window for travelers. The Mourners Kaddish (קדיש אבלים). The Arbeit Mach Frei gate at Dachau was stolen in 2014. (What? WHO would do such a thing?) Szaraka Zimierz is a top Kosher restaurant in Krakow -- menus online. Marynowany śledź is pickled herring. Discards: 2020 is the 75th commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. The 2019-2020 NU calendar has Spring Break end the week before Palm Sunday. Central European Summer Time begins Sunday 29 March 2020 at 2:00 AM -- applicable for Rome and Frankfurt airports. Sunset in Frankfurt on Sunday 29 March 2020 is 19:53, which is after a 17:10 departure to Toronto.

Because of the changes, I closed out Version 1.07 and started in on 1.08. The final shiny counters for Version 1.07 are:

The Lost Kingdom Project YA Trilogy Version 1.07 (01-24-15 Sa -- 638 pages)


Book 1 (starts page 92)


Book 2 (starts page 334)


Book 3 (starts page 573)


The Lost Kingdom Fourth-Fifth Novels Version 1.07


*** Note: the numbers for Books 1-3 don’t add up, because there is text which is in a section which hasn’t been assigned to a Book and Chapter yet.
**** Note2: Page numbers are subjective. I do not write in Standard Manuscript Format, so this is Book Antiqua 12, single spaced, extra space between paragraphs, 1¼” margins for readability.
*** Note3: Decided to go ahead and insert a book between Books 3 and 4, so the extra file is technically now Books 4-5. We’ll see if I keep this configuration. The extra file version number was jumped from 1.03 to 1.07 to stay current with the main trilogy efforts.

Whew. But really, better to figure this stuff out now, when everything is fluid, than wait until we are into editing the second draft. (evil-grin)

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal