One of the joys of British computer magazines is that they come with cover disks that more often than not contain useful software. This month's useful software was a free ftp client, which I was most grateful for after half a dozen failed attempts over the last month to download one from the web. So I can now update my website myself instead of having to email the files to that nice Waveney Webs man who provides my server space.
Of course, I'm still having to do this over a dialup line. A
metered dialup line. Ladies and gentlemen, please read the rant in Ramblings about minimalist websites. Everything I said in there several years ago still stands, apart from which browser I normally use (I finally abandoned the Spawn of Redmond a few months ago after the revelation of a security hole wide enough to fly a generation ship through...). If you cover your websites with gratuitous graphics, I'm not going to sit there for five minutes while they download. And no, five minutes is
not an exaggeration, I've had one or two of those in the last week. As for Middlesbrough Borough Council, whoever designed your website should be locked in a cell with only a BBC Micro with no mouse and an acoustic coupler modem for access to the outside world.
I really, really miss my DSL connection.
The good news:
The Syndicate: Volume 3 was given a five cups review by
Coffee Time Romance. There's
a copy of the review in the Brag Book.
I received my contributor's copies of
Alyson's Ultimate Gay Erotica 2005 anthology last month, and very nice they look, even if I haven't had a chance to read the book yet. The book isn't officially released until the 15th of December, but I finally had a chance to check the websites yesterday, and it appears that the book is available for pre-order from
Alyson's own shop,
Amazon and
Amazon UK.
Alex and I have offered a prize for
Romance Junkies' Christmas competition. More details when we have them, but we've offered a download of any volume from
The Syndicate (or alternatively a download of
Promises to Keep), plus a set of prints of the cover art from the three Syndicate books published to date, signed by both of us, and as a suitably geeky extra, a gmail invite code.
Got back into the submissions routine, starting with sending a query to
Zara about a potential submission for
Charm, Beauty, Strangeness. The various "Best of..." anthologies are also open for business, so doing some selecting and printing out of suitable prospects.
Loose Id provisionally accepted another submission, although the acceptance is subject to me revising the story to bring it within their guideline restrictions. It's a perfectly reasonable request, but it remains to be seen whether it's possible to do this without damaging the story--the problem scene is there for good plot and character development reasons, and it it's not going to be simple to achieve the same effect while staying within the guidelines.
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