Jules Jones

I've been more or less off the air for the last three months, for a variety of reasons. Those reasons include the purchase and setting up of a shiny new computer, all the better with which to run Dragon. Which is a good thing, because having finally come to the end of a long run of reasons why I don't have time to play with my new toy... my shoulder's gone again. I've been reliant on Dragon to type more than a sentence or two for the last couple of days. I'm also now on enough codeine to be in "hello world, hello sky" mode, which does *wonders* for the concentration needed to use Dragon, let me tell you. This is because without codeine I will be on not enough sleep, ditto.

List of stuff To Do, for triage tomorrow, because PicoWrimo starts tomorrow:
--private commission
--review of Being Small (sorry, Chaz, really wanted to get this done earlier, but wasn't up to it)
--review of feminist historical romance series (is brilliant, lots of you will love it and need to know about it)
--book log
--revise novelette originally written for Dreamspinner anthology, then check current markets it might suit.
--work on one of the novel WIPs
--one or more of the ideas for porn short stories lying around in the ideas file

Any of the above to count towards 150 words a day for PicoWrimo, because it may be entirely random as to what I can focus on well enough to dictate. I suspect mostly porn shorts because I can dump snippets into a text file for later revision without worrying too much if they link up with an existing story.

Also need to
--update website
--check current calls
--send W9 forms to Smashwords
--trawl trunk for stuff to put on Smashwords
--put profic pseud and free pieces on AO3 (per discussion at Absolute Write)
--look over possible story for current Dreamspinner anthology call
--contemplate present to leave under the Gauda Prime tree farm this year

The WIP came to a screeching halt during the migraine fuzziness earlier this week. I've perked up enough that I can do some writing again, but I may need to noodle the next 1000 words or so anyway. Plus my tendons hurt, and extensive typing is not an option at the moment. Other stuff to look at over the next few weekends:

Book log! Especially as I now have two LTER ARCs outstanding, plus Growlycub would doubtless like to see my at-length opinion on The Duke's Perfect Wife and whether it does or does not break the promise made in earlier volumes.

Putting together a small collection of my short stories, in order to reprint a couple where the website has vanished. Self-publishing is the most realistic option for several of my shorts, as I can't offer unencumbered rights to another publisher. (This means I may be looking for beta-testers for the formatting.)

Finish the edit of that test I did with dictating fiction with Dragon, and put up a compare-and-contrast page on my website.

Oh yes -- website needs more updating work. I think I've hunted down all the old Loose Id links that no longer work after The Great Database Crash, but I need to do a full check that all the other links do what they're supposed to. And then have another bout of updating the stylesheet on some of the older pages.

Write some more of that story I was using to test Dragon, even if it's just jotting down notes on the plot before I forget it.

Ditto some other story ideas I've got floating around.

And nab Watervole and/or Predatrix for some story brainstorming on the above...

If I put it here, some of it might actually get done over the next couple of weekends. I hope...


1) Put one or two of the free stories on one of the distribution channels as an experiment. This is going to require some consideration of pros, cons, and loss of control of rights. Some possibilities:
Amazon (who are Evil Scum, and have a bad agreement)
B&N
Lulu
Smashbooks
Feedbooks -- who are where I get my public domain ebooks from, and look like a distinct possibility, *if* I can figure out exactly what licences are available.

2) Update website
- clean up the links on the "free downloads elsewhere" page -- bit rot's got some of them
- clean up the bibliography page, ditto
- put the bit rot victims on my own site (and see item 1, which was inspired by this problem)
- sort out the blog page -- one of the reasons for paying for my LJ was so that I could embed it on the website blog page instead of manually copying
- put CSS on a few more pages
- put link to LibraryThing on the "book reviews" pages

3) Check the current state of the short story markets, and submit something from the file if there's anything appropriate.

4)Substantial posts on my own blog on topics that have come up elsenet over the last few weeks, none of which I was in a fit state to comment on at the time.

eta:
5) Post to Bearing Witness about "The secret lives of fossils"