…eliminate the gappiness in the scanned files, no problem. I was killing myself trying to do it in Namo, and Word Perfect straightened it out like a champion.
My brother sent me the cover sketches that didn’t get broken, so we’re great with that—one of them nobody’s seen, and it may be a cover or the frontispiece. It’s lovely to be able to do things like that again.
We’ve got covers for Heavy Time and Hellburner. We’re ready to move with those. And Jane’s working on her actual manuscripts—yay!
The only glitch in the day came just as I served breakfast (two eggs) and the phone rang. It was Norton Customer Service/Troubleshooting. We spent at least 3 and maybe 4 hours today while first their troubleshooter and then their research department tried to figure out why the new Norton used its firewall to screen members of our housenet from each other. It took research about two of those hours, during which time we finally threw the right switches—and we concluded my installation of XP has a corrupt My Network Places file folder. If I go in through “Members of my Workgroup,” I’m fine. Just Network Places is screwy, and keeps making a new (and useless) copy of every computer on the network everytime you try to contact one. Isn’t that lovely? We had 2 problems, the first with the Norton firewall, and the second because my XP computer is the only one who can see (but not contact) everybody—but IT’S the one with the fatal flaw in Network Places. Now I think we have finally gotten things to where (without running a patch on XP, which, frankly, I have too many things in a fragile state for me to want to monkey with my system files)—Jane and I can trade files by housenet, thus eliminating the racing back and forth with little key drives.
Sigh. My Network Places has probably been screwed since 2004, when we caught T-Rex and Gravy intruding on our new housenet and realized XP Home had no protection. We killed the network, went and bought XP Pro, and upgraded with encryption, so we had housenet security, (as the current readers of the journal vol 1 may have noted) and I’m betting the corruption of my NP folder has something to do with that, from the git-go. Editing the Journal has made me the resident household expert on when things happened, and that’s my candidate for the official screw-up incident.
Ah, well, I’ve gotten along fairly well until Vista and the new Norton entered the picture—sometimes I can print, sometimes I can’t. I’ve never been able to contact Jane, whether on three different laptops, but I can always see the desktop computer, so we’ve been communicating via dropping files on it, which both of us can see. Now we can see each other, but the last I heard, the desktop wasn’t seeing either of us—so who knows what will happen the next time I look. You have to have a sense of humor about it or run mad in the streets. We think we have it fixed, so I think that probably means Jane got the desktop to find us both.
Just remember… computers make life simpler! 🙂
Yeahhhhhh…. 😉
Hi C.J.
My name is Rob and I have read all your novels. More than thrice.
I was wondering if you were going to set up an account at twitter.com & save your name like J.K. Rowling or use it to let your fans know when a new book is coming out, or book signings, etc like
Michelle Sagara, Tanya Huff, Kate Elliott, Robin Hobb, Terry Pratchett, Kevin J. Anderson, J.V. Jones, L.K. Hamilton, Charles de Lint, Jennifer Fallon, Robin McKinley, Michelle Rowen, Rachel Caine, Jackie Kessler, Holly Lisle, Kristine Rusch, Seanan McGuire, Neil Gaimon, Clive Barker, Holly Black, Rachel K. Vincent, Lilith Saintcrow, Katie MacAlister, Richelle Mead, Heather Brewer, Tim Pratt, Kelley Armstrong, Eoin Colfer, C.E. Murphy, Elizabeth Bear, P.N. Elrod, Pati Nagle, DAWBooks, Jody Lynn Nye, Kimberly Frost, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Jim Butcher, Doris Egan,Jim C. Hines,Edward Willett,Terry MacFarland,Bianca d’Arc,Julie Weathers,Anne Rice, Lynn Flewelling, Alex Prentiss, Diane Duane? 🙂
I also featured you on my blog http://rkcharron.blogspot.com/2009/12/author-spotlight.html
I hope you don’t mind.
Love & Best Wishes to you & yours,
Rob
Oops. I just remembered…turned my phone off at the Lion King and forgot to turn it back on. (No wonder OSG used the landline today.)
I’m not, I fear, apt to twitter: I don’t even chat on the phone as a rule. I fear it would be too intrusive on my writing. But thanks for asking.
There is a way to artificially trigger an update to a twitter account every time you post a blog.
http://twitterfeed.com/
I think what happens is that the subject line of a blog post you already make here would show up as a tweet followed by a link to the blog post here. A fan would get the tweet, click the link, and then come here. So it would be like a Bot running your twitter account for you without you ever needing to do more work than you already do. That is how some people twitter. It could also run a Facebook account in a similar way at the same time. It’s just a way of blasting information through social media and probably the most passive way of doing it as far as labor goes. It can become a full time job doing it the other way especially if it isn’t enjoyable. Twitter doesn’t bother me so much because interactions on there don’t usually happen in real time anyway, but instant messaging got banned from my computer years ago. I’d be in the middle of writing something and get a *BING* “What r u doing?” *BING* “R U awake?” Ack!
CNN on twitter works like this. http://twitter.com/cnn
Thank you, Sweetbo! A whole new world out there!
Well, my friends, the blog is now twittified—the twitter feed is CJ Cherryh:WaveWithoutAShore…to notify you when there’s a new post, via twitterfeed.com . I do not personally tweet, in the sense that I have no time in my life to be texting things like the guy in the commercial: I am now on the porch. I am going to the kitchen… But you will know, if you are receiving that sort of info, that I have posted a new post. Let me know if it works or has a glitch.
What’s exact twitter url so I can friend it? Doing a search isn’t bringing it up on twitter yet. At least for me.
We’re so new it hasn’t proliferated yet, (they say it takes an hour) but I’m
http://twitter.com/CJCherryh
and Jane is
http://twitter.com/JaneSFancher
I don’t know what Lynn Abbey is going to be, probably etc/LynnAbbey but she’s going to link up too.
Thanks for your expertise, Sweetbo. Anything else that’s good and effortless that gets the word around is oh, so welcome.
It works. Your next entry is a tweet. One small step forward to go with Norton’s giant leap back.
Actually, I was thinking about your marketing, as I’m sure you are.
Closed Circle is fine, sort of internally. But I think Y’all need a sexier one or two word lead in that will snap to the top of search functions. For example, Baen Books leaps out as something to do with selling books (and I’ve downloaded a couple of free samples to play with the readers I have installed.)
Seriously a telling key word or two, then “:The Closed Circle of ….” or some such.
Might come up more on searches and, more important, float in people’s memories. The three of you are lucky enough to be familiar names in the fan community.
Another thought Firewalls: Beyond my expertise, but in the past, Cutting edge Norton at the recommended settings has rendered my simple systems and simple needs inoperable in the recent past (2007)(I think I was reading your blog at the time of the 2004 troubles.) The constant labor and wasted hours keeping my system clean, even though I was an early migrator away from Intenet Exlporer, was one main reason I switched to a Mac.
Maybe Norton isn’t the best option. Scot Finney’s (sp?) Newsletter on firewalls/anti-malware software systems did extensive, months long comparison tests a year or two ago of various software systems. Just key in Scot’s Newsletter even though it’s now a blog, for a general overview. If you stick with Windows instead of going over to Linnux servers or the like, I suspect that in the long run System 7 will lend itself to more effective integration of protective software than previous Winos OS systems. It sounds to me that they’ve finally devoted billions of dollars to cleaning up the underlying coding, speeding up systems and, hopefully, closing back doors. But this won’t help you now, it will still take several years of upgrades and testing to truly realize this otential.
Many thanks, my friends. 😉