Today we talked about editing standards and decided on Word/OpenOffice/LibreOffice as our editing platform.
The workflow will be nomination, choices and priorities, permission, conference with author, editing revisions, approval from author, final edit, proofing, layout, final approvals.
Stories that get hung up in the process will probably be allowed to slip to the next volume. We now have about 150 stories nominated, though some of them are too long. At any rate, we have no dearth of stories to go into Volume 1. :)
It can't make up its mind. First it rains hard enough to scare the dog with the rattle of big drops against the windows and roof then we have ten minutes of big wet flakes falling in stillness, then the sky whistles and chuffs and it rains again, drops as big cashews, twisted by the wind.
We had a productive but fairly technical chat meeting last night and hammered out some details of how the book will look and calculated again to be sure we can get 150,000 words into 320 pages of an 8x10 trade paperback with nice margins and typography. It is not only doable, I think it will be quite a handsome book!
Here's the idea, a trade paperback of around 300-320 pages featuring some of the best stuff that has appeared on BigCloset over the last eleven years and perhaps some new stuff, too. The book would be 6x9 inches, more or less, and retail for $15. That's around 100,000 words, btw. The book would be available to be ordered here on BC, through Amazon and possibly through other channels. There might be an electronic edition which would probably be sold for $10. And we might put the electronic edition into the Hatbox for contributors.
It's my dog Cuddles birthday today, she's seven and is getting a small bite of blueberry waffle to celebrate!
Oh, yeah, it's Groundhog Day, too, and bright and sunny here so that probably means six more weeks of winter for us, but luckily it's cloudy or even worse in most of the country. :)
A few minutes ago, Cuddles killed her toy Skunkie that I got her for Christmas. Skunkie had been on life support since Cuddles bit the squeaker out of the tail on Sunday. Now, both of the squeakers are broken and pulled out of the plush. It's the nature of dogs to kill the toys they love the best fastest. She's never killed a toy quite so quickly before, just 6 days; it usually takes more like four to six months. But she had never loved a toy quite as much as she loved Skunkie.
Skunkie is dead. Long live Wheelie, the toy that squeaks AND rolls like a wheel!
We've got rain here. After two days of sunshine it's back to rain again. It's getting downright soggy. I don't live in any of the mudslide-threatened areas but there have been evacuations and road closings. Even one of the freeways was closed because of boulders loosened by the rain rolling down the mountainsides and into traffic.
Properly capitalization in the title box really isn't that hard. In most browsers, if you just start typing the new title, it will fill in the most recent one, then you backspace over the number and retype that and the title is correct. But there have been a lot of misspelled, misspaced and miscapitalized titles lately. They look bad on the story and they look bad on the site. Sometimes titles are in ALL CAPS and if they are more than one short word long, I feel that should be fixed, too.
We've only had SEVENTEEN stories posted today. What's the matter with you people? :)
For the past month, from November 16 to December 15, we've AVERAGED over 19.5 stories a day.
For the past week, we've averaged almost 17000 visitors a day! For the busiest five hours of the day, we're averaging about 1000 visitors an hour. Sometimes, there are as many as 390 people all visiting a page within the same five minute window!
My dog has food allergies. Poor Cuddles when she gets exposed to corn, soy or wheat breaks out in a rash and runs a fever. I had a solution to this problem in that for six months I fed her nothing but homemade dogfood, guaranteed not to contain any of her allergens.
At the end of that time, I started adding back in small amounts of commercial dogfood touted as not containing any of those ingredients. Slowly her allergies returned. Yesterday, I made the decision to go back to homemade dogfood, at least for another four or six months to clean her system.
The site was out for about an hour due to an attack or just a clumsy bot hanging the site by trying to use the search. Search is off while we keep trying to figure out what was going on.
There are folk who are hungry,
But we have food.
There are folk who are cold and in danger,
But we are warm and safe.
There are folk who are alone,
But we have each other.
There are those who have sacrificed
Peace, comfort and joy
That we may have all of those things.
Let us be thankful then,
In memory of them.
My heat came on earlier, woke me up. "What's that sound?" The dog didn't know.
Five days ago, daytime temps here were above 110F (43C), last night, temps got below 50F (10C). I've actually seen swings that big in a single day but it isn't common.
When writing fanfiction, like the current Comics Retcon Universe stuff, it's polite and considerate to acknowledge the current copyright and/or trademark holders, when known. Especially if using artwork or logos.
Just a line near the top or bottom of a story, or on the Title page is enough. And it isn't required here, it's just a nice thing to do for the original owners of the stuff.
Someone raided my PayPal account for $400. Paypal was suspicious so they flagged the transaction but NOT before charging my credit card. I contacted the seller and they have agreed to refund the charges so it will get resolved. Meanwhile I have to wonder who the heck got into my PayPal account and charged $400 against a social networking sites internal accounts.
I may not be on much today, there's thunderstorms and flashfloods predicted for this area from now till the early morning. We're pretty safe from flashfloods, there are arroyos either side of me to channel the rainwater away but lightning, winds or floods may take out the power. I'll be staying off line, mostly, till this blows over, using my laptop or phone to access the site.
That's a record number of visitors to BC on Monday, August 9th. It's also 177% of the average number of visitors in August of last year. The average for August this year is just about 150% of last year.
Bob had to turn off the PDF module because of too many users, apparently. It slows things down and things were backing up. Going to investigate and it may be turned back on.
It means treat everyone like a friend. If you don't feel you can make a public post that says what you want to say without being unfriendly, then don't make the post public. Friends talk over problems in private.
Don't bring an attack on a BC author from another site over here and expect to be allowed to rant on my time. And especially don't do it as visitor. This will get your IP address banned from the site and just did, so you ain't the one seeing this unless you login using a different computer. There can't be a clearer signal that one intends to act as a troll.
No trolls allowed except as characters in stories. This meant you, but you don't know it, trollass.
Checks can be made out & sent to:
Joyce Melton
1001 Third St.
Space 80
Calimesa, CA 92320
USA
Note: $6000 is the operating, maintenance and upgrade budget. Amounts received in excess of the $6000 will be applied to long term debt accrued over the last 19 years.
