What I’m working on today
Before I get to the rest of this, my romance alias Layla M. Wier has a story out now in the anthology Snow on the Roof, from Dreamspinner Press. This is an M/M anthology of stories about men over 40. I’m very happy with the company I’m in; the final story in the anthology in particular, “Granddad’s Cup of Tea”, is just really good fiction, nevermind romance. And it’s a pleasantly less-tropy-than-usual collection of romantic fiction. Here’s its Goodreads page. I’ll also have a novelette with a female protagonist (F/F and F/M pairings) in an anthology coming out from Storm Moon Press in July. Small steps, yes, but hey, I’m selling stuff.
Anyway, right now I’m making WordPress sites for Sun-Cutter and for the Annotated Raven’s Children. Having already created an account on WordPress.com for my (rarely updated) romance blog, I discovered that it is incredibly easy to create new WordPress accounts and manage them all from the same hub. So now annotatedravenschildren.wordpress.com is a go, and so is kismetsuncutter.wordpress.com. (No real content in either place yet; I’m still getting them set up - well, at the moment, trying to figure out how I can stop the site scheme I chose for the Sun-Cutter site from putting a line around all my images. Knock it off, CSS!) I also figured it would be a good idea to lock down the “laylalawlor” name at WordPress too, since in both the above cases, the addresses I really wanted (“ravenschildren” and “suncutter”) were already taken.
… which is partly because WordPress’s rules for deleting accounts are STUPID. You can only delete an account by completely locking it out of the system, so that no one else, including you, will ever be able to use that address again. Why would they do that?! I much prefer LJ’s system, where a deleted username can either redirect to your new site or become available for other people to use. Once you select a WordPress username, no one can EVER use that name at WordPress, and if you delete it, you can’t ever change your mind and undelete it. Right now I have a spare WordPress account that I (somewhat stupidly) made in the beginning, back when I was futzing around with different romance aliases and thought I wanted to be Lenora Glass. (Turned out I didn’t.) But I like that pseud and I’m keeping the account even though it’s just visual clutter on my dashboard, because otherwise I can never ever use it again at WordPress.com.
(Seriously, why would they do that, WHY.)
Other than that, though, I like WordPress a lot. Most of my site management on my website is now being done that way; I still have some tag cleanup to do at LJ/DW to get the two of them in sync with the way I’m handling tags at WordPress, but, now that I’ve managed to staunch the tide of spam by setting it to registered users only, I’m quite comfortable working with it. When I start updating the Kismet and Raven’s Children wordpress accounts, I will probably crosspost them to LJ & DW much as I’ve been doing with my main laylalawlor.com blog (where I’m typing this update right now); there’s no reason, I think, why you can’t crosspost from multiple WordPress blogs into the same LJ account.
A partial website “to do” list for the next couple of weeks:
- Get the Sun-Cutter and Raven’s Children archives set up on WordPress, so that I can start updating RC again.
- Somehow figure out a good fiction archive interface for my website. (I want to start posting free short stories and putting up ebook versions of the fiction I already have online, but I’m not sure exactly how I want to handle it. Right now it is, like all else, a scattered mess.)
- Set up a website store, selling books, art, ebooks, etc. (Aargh, so overdue!)