Two things for those who have been following my story Bian in which I play with a language I madeup called Bloddish:
1. Yes, I am working on the next episode (along with work on the next episodes of Vector and Hired Girl and other outside work, besides the other stuff I do around here and on DopplerPress. :)
Because Sephrena is an important part of the community here, people should know that there is a situation involving her that may turn more serious or may be soon resolved. We're not comfortable sharing details at the moment but will try to keep everyone appropriately informed.
Hugs to all,
And especially Sephrena,
Erin and the crew
Piper will be tuning the intranet and switches connecting our various servers; so expect brief outages, probably lasting no more than a few minutes as she disconnects and reconnects various cables and occasionally reboots machines to activate new configurations. Please be patient and forbearing. :)
While Piper, Cat and I will have our phones and laptops with us, none of us will be home for several hours. Piper and Cat will be at the server farm, installing equipment and getting things ready to move our servers into our new cabinet. I'll be goofing off at a friend's house playing boardgames and drinking coffee.
Some years ago I was running a tabletop RPG in which my players were exploring an underground ocean. They had their own ship and were attacked by another ship. The crew of the pirate ship seemed to be made up of human-sized spiders carrying cutlasses and firing muskets. Except some of them seemed to come out of nowhere and attack with nunchuks, sais and shurikens. And some of them seemed to be undead and unkillable.
During the course of the battle one of the players said, "Wait, wait! Stop! We're fighting Zombie, Ninja, Pirate Spiders?"
Bookmarks are back on the My Accounts page, I don't seem to be able to make the link work from the front page. Sorry about that. Will look at it again later.
Please put spaces between paragraphs and don't make paragraphs longer than 5 to 7 lines because reading on a screen is hard.
If you're using MS Word or other word processor, there are options that fake a space between paragraphs while viewing the file in the word precessor. Those are not visible when converted to HTML. You need actual blank lines.
Went to see Suicide Squad Thursday night, it was very good. Good story, good atmosphere, good acting. Okay, the dialog is a bit weak but the actors nail the characterization and hold the script up.
The critics and a certain subset of comic book fans dislike it; that mystifies me. A movie is supposed to be entertaining and I found it very entertaining. So much so, that I'm going to go see it again while it is still on the big screen.
You've probably been seeing a few postings about Kindle books on BC. This is nothing new, Maddy Bell's Gaby series has been on Kindle and before Kindle on Lulu for a long time. Also works by several other authors including Tanya Allen, Katie Leone and me.
Cut up one slice of bacon (streaky bacon for Brits) into small pieces. Fry in your favorite deep skillet till nearly crisp. Add 1/2 cup chopped brown onion and fry until onion is beginning to brown. Add two cans (three or four cups) of beans, pinto, black, kidney or white. Add two tablespoons molasses, brown sugar or honey. Stir. Turn heat down to medium low and cook uncovered until well-thickened. Cover and turn heat to low and keep cooking until beans are quite tender.
Keeping it simple, we need money to pay bills and I personally am overdrawn on my bank account because I have not been paying myself in order to pay BC bills. Anything anyone can send will be appreciated.
Update: We just got notice from our Denver hosting company. They are going to force us to upgrade the hardware we are hosting with them. So, we will have a onetime expense of as much as $1000-$2000 and our monthly $240 a month is likely to go up too.
The May story contest ended last week and the voting is still going on. Tonight I will take a snapshot of the current Kudos count for the contest entries and tomorrow will announce the winners.
1st Prize has been upgraded to a 1-year subscription to Hatbox.
2nd and 3rd prize are 3-month subscriptions.
All other entries will receive 1-month subscriptions.
Right now, today, Sunday 21 of May, we have hit our goal for the month. Your support is much appreciated and I will update the sidebar tomorrow to show today's numbers.
Continuing gifts in any amount will be applied to next months goal and much appreciated.
Last month's expanded goal was nearly reached so we carried the shortfall over to this month. The hope is that next month will be more regular in our other income. We have bills coming due and not that much in the accounts, I'm pinched pretty tight myself so I can't make up much in the way of shortfall. Anything you can send will be greatly appreciated.
{Refreshening this announcement} Time for a new story challenge (Not a Contest™)! :)
This is for any story or chapter of a longer work based on the theme of "Fools Rush In" posted in the month of April, 2016.
It's just for the fun of it so there are no prizes but there will be a feature spot on the front page for entries, once we have a few. Any length, solo or serial chapter or whatever. Go for it!
I just got the news a few minutes ago. Felix, Katie's boyfriend texted me. Katie passed away after they got home from their paper route this morning. Heart attack, apparently.
Remember Katie who just wanted to touch people with her stories. She was my friend. And think of Felix who loved her.
It's that time of month. We have about 1700 due by the end of the week and we are about 400 short on our expected subscriptions and gifts.
Anything you can give will be appreciated and we have some new stuff happening that people will be finding out about soon. Piper has been very busy. :)
We're going to turn off new member sign-up for the weekend as this seems to be part of the code that is causing the problem. So if you want to join the site, please be patient and we will fix this as soon as can be.
We're still about $300 short of this month's goal. And we got hit with an unexpected expense for almost that much, just last night. So, we're pretty much broke.
We have about $180. We owe about $1375 on Friday, though we can put a lot of that off. Shortfalls are made up by me, Erin.
So, if you can help, please do. The link for a onetime gift is: Hatbox and the link for a subscription is: Subscribe.
I just added "2016 February - The Crush Mini-Contest" to the "Contest" list which can be chosen when creating Fiction. This way, it will be easy to look at all the entries and check to see which ones you have read or haven't and vote on them.
Note though that Melanie and I have entries on the list but we aren't eligible for prizes. :)
Piper and I are back from our vacation in Florida. For me this means going from 65°F damp days to 65°F dry days but Piper has been dropped into the deep freeze of New Jersey. :(
We had fun. We're tired and we probably all have colds. I expect to do very little today and maybe not much more than that tomorrow. And Piper still has some personal stuff on her plate to take care of. So, please, continue to cut us some slack. :)
Update: I just put one of our bills for about $200 on my credit card because there is not enough in the PayPal account to cover it. This is how after sixteen years I am about $16,000 in debt. $1000 a year isn't bad, huh? :)
Anyway, thanks to everyone who has given and please, if you can send us something this month, we would appreciate it. There is lots of work going on here to keep the site functioning into the future that no one really sees. Good things are happening behind the curtain. :)
We've almost made it halfway to our goal but the end of month bills are coming and we are nearly broke. Please, if you can, I know it is a hard time of year to send money to strangers but we do need to pay our bills. Thanks.
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.
