Monday, July 14, 2008

Tales from the Mel-o-sphere

We managed to get the code working for the eBay connection ... well, I saw 'we' but I basically stood back and watched while DreamCraft's tech-head and fixer did something to it which made it, uh, work.

All of which means, if you've been hunting around for the old GMP versions of my early works, and if you were predisposed to shop via eBay, and didn't mind giving me a click from the blog here (or the website), when the sale goes through, a percentage comes this-a-way like a royaly. Which would be very nice indeed.



It's been a long time indeed since GMP passed into history, and like many people (writers and readers alike) I still mourne their passing. Something very like GMP desperately needs to be launched right now ... a publishing house that caters to both new and sesoned writers, delivering books with gay themes or issues, characters or content. If I had the time or the investment capital, it's a project I'd be in without hesitation.

(Fair enough, I'm doing nicely as a writer, but -- you have to be realistic. I have 20 books at Lulu, and about 25 at Payloads, and a half dozen more in the works, plus giftware galore at Zazzle, and a marketing campaign working for me. Now, what writer just coming along with his (or her) first book, or first couple of titles, is going to be able to do that? There's a vacuum left behind with the extinction of GMP, and I'd be delighted to see it filled by a new publishing house with eclectic tastes and the ability, and the compassion, to give new writers a try.)

Work continues in jigsaw-like bits and pieces; there's an odd sense of dislocation right now, where various projects are complete, others not quite begun, loads of loose ends to tie and fiddling details to be resolved -- like the eBay code, which wouldn't work till it was given a swift kick. (It worked on the webpage, I admit; just not on the blog. Turns out, Blogger runs on a software platform which can be persnickity when it comes to add-on code. Ain't computers wonderful?! Mind you, can you imagine trying to live without them? [asthmatic whining sound]

Little of interest is happening in the Mel-o-sphere ... it's bucketing down, which is good, because we need the rain; the high winds in the last couple of days tore the TV aerial loose, so it was pointless even trying to watch the new Doctor Who, with two words out of three being snipped by a digital feed gone bonkers. David Tennant turned into a lot of little colored squares and danced off the side of the screen, and that was that ... and I spent the afternoon writing an article for the 'write your novel' website, which is due up in August or September.

When it goes up, I'll give you the link and invite you to the launch. It's actually a hell of a good idea for a website, and is turning into a very attractive website to boot. (Jade strikes again: some of the best looking sites on the web start right there. Apparently, the knack comes from spending 12 years reading code, and 15 years before that designing for the print media. Makes you cringe, doesn't it?) Put it like this: the new webpage is already the kind of website I'd have been damned glad to find when I was a late-teen trying to figure out what the hell I as writing!

And if the quality of a lot of the writing on the web is anything to judge by, there are several million people out there, all trying to answer the same fundalemental questions. Like, "How many b's are there in 'rubbish?'," and "do you put a a 'K' in pathetic?'") I've been surfing around a bit on fiction sites, right across the spectrum, to get a feel for what's out there. Damnit, some people need help.

With nothing interesting happening ... at least, nothing I care to blog about ... I'm not going to talk about politics; I swear to gods, I'm not going to talk about politics! ... I'll cut this one short.

Oh -- before I go:

I wanted to put in a link on the blog here to a really great video on YouTube, where John Barrowman gets halfway eaten alive by a racehorse, but the vide (which used to play just fine six months ago), is playing vertically-squeezed. Does anyone know how to configure a YouTube feed to get the damned video to playu right? If anyone knows the answer to this one, great. Because the video will be enjoyed by all and sundry. Advice would b appreciated muchly, guys. I don't have much more than a nodding acquaintance with YouTube.

Ciao for now,
MK

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