It's only words, and words are all I have to steal your heart away

[annathepiper]

Apparently, at least two of my characters now each have a fan apiece. Someone on TM is regularly hassling me for the next chapter every time she and I are on at the same time, and that same person reports she really liked what I did with Chapter 20, especially what I chose to do with the main character. I take all of these as comforting signs, especially given my recent spazziness over the fact that I'm ALMOST DONE WITH AN HONEST TO GOD BOOK.

Also, someone off the Gruntland board has volunteered to be a beta reader for me. She says she's got a Masters' in English, and if nothing else can nitpick my grammar for me. I'm not officially asking for beta readers yet, and won't be until I'm actually done, but in case anybody on my Friends list is specifically interested in performing beta reading on this book, please to let me know. (Those of you who are busily working on your own prose are exempt, so don't fret!)

In related news (related to the book as well as the spaziness), janne sent me and solarbird a box of mocha-flavored chocolate morsels shaped like coffee beans. She says it's a show of appreciation for the writing as well as a thank you for stuff like giving her an account on the Murk and such. Awwww! There's just enough chocolate in each of these little morsels to balance out the coffee taste for me, so although I don't normally like coffee I'm going ahead and eating this chocolate anyway. But oh the caffeine hit out of it! It's above my usual threshold for caffeine, and I say this as a woman totally and thoroughly addicted to diet Mountain Dew.

I have realized that at least five of my friends have weblogs courtesy of the folks at Movable Type. I find myself tempted by this, because weblogs of this variety seem to have something that I haven't managed to get out of Livejournal yet--i.e., the ability to seamlessly blend with the rest of one's web page. Now, I know in theory that I should be able to customize my journal to make it match my site, but 1) I am not exactly swimming in copious free time right now, thanks to trying to write like a crazy writing thing, and 2) every time I poke through the LJ style system, my head starts to spin.

Lots of intense work at work this week, as I'm finally doing another full BVT run on a current build of one of the products, and am for once not only triaging all the failures myself, I'm even fixing a couple of them in situations where the failures are caused by obvious problems in the test cases. I'm hoping this looks good later to the boss types. Go me!

Written tonight: 598
Chapter 21 total: 1,870
Story total: 77,156

Comments

[tinlail.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking of writing some code to suck entries and comments out of LJ, and post entries into LJ so that a weblog on my site can still interact with the LJ links.

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

It shouldn't be very hard at all, given that livejournals automatically have an RSS Feed:

http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=149 (http://www.livejournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=149)

And, of course, Movable Type has built-in RSS, so you can suck a Movable Type blog back into your livejournal friends list, so that works too. There are a limited number of these that people can have for free, though.

[annathepiper]

Yeah, I know that elflad actually has his LJ set up as a mirror of his Movable Type log. However, I am given to understand that if you set up a syndicated account that pulls in the RSS feed from elsewhere, you can't actually post to it or make comments from it like you would with a conventional LJ account.

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you can't post to a syndicated blog feed directly at all.

You can make comments on it, but those are only viewable on lj, and not mailed to anyone.

I find it handy, though, to read certain journals as part of my lj friends list, and then if I want to comment, click on the link and comment on the source journal. For insance, see mizkit_feed.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Sure, now I've clicked through and looked at all my own entry headers, which are awful and repetitive. Hrmph. :)

[annathepiper]

Oh, like we're going to grade you on your entry headers? (Says the girl who has 'word count for tonight' in HOW MANY of her recent entries...?)

[annathepiper]

Ah-ha! I didn't know Kit had that set up. ^_^

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

*grin*

I know the 'fan hassling you for a chapter' thing. Certain persons on LJ who are part of the proof/beta-reading circle for my graphic novel/comic script 'Dark Places' have been doing it for *ages*...

[annathepiper]

I didn't know you do a graphic novel/comic script thingie. :) Where's this at then?