The Beat Goes On

I enjoyed seeing Stephen, Wendy, Eric, and everyone up in Ada this week. I think the signing went very well.  Tammy, I'm so glad the Skype worked, but I'm sure we can do better if we have to do it again. I know Stephen had some things he would have liked to see turn out differently, but I think it was the best it could be at that time.  Wendy was phenomenal at finding new homes for her series. She had an amazing "elevator pitch." Gail Henderson was a pleasure to meet, and I look forward to working with her in the future. The Quart House was my favorite restaurant on the visit, but Delicias's fajita salad is excellent, so it was close. The Tour de Ada revealed fascinating aspects of the town that a casual visitor would never know, so thank you Eric and Stephen.

I got the FM Test Site restored to what it should have been -- that was an excellent learning experience. I see there's a class that's just coming out on the upgrade process, and I'm seriously considering taking it.

I took a few more steps in my web site optimization process today.  I moved Philosophical Meanderings out of the root of jeanschara.com and set up a redirect to send anyone going to that URL to the Rantings and Ravings blog (RandR will be moving to that domain in the near future).  I troubleshot a problem with a plug-in I'd installed and discovered the problem came about when I didn't complete the set up and someone tried to use it.  Fortunately, I knew the person who tried to use it, and she helped me figure things out.

Philosophical Meanderings doesn't have a large following, but I still have subscriber settings that need to be tweaked with the move, and this move should minimize the things I miss when I move the primary blog. For instance, I had to redo the blog post broadcast. So far, everything has been very simple to do, but forgetting to do it means things don't work.

I finished my Scrivener class, so I updated Scrivener on all my machines.  I'm downloading the OS X Yosemite to the Retina now (hours and hours). I installed it with no trouble on the Air last week.  The only thing that seems to be causing problems is chat clients in Adium, but they are causing problems anyway, so they aren't a valid reason not to update.

Got most of what I needed to get done last week done.  Still so much to do.  Heading to San Antonio this week.  Saturday will be partially devoted to a friend's 60th birthday party. Here's what else I plan to work on:

The Week Ahead:

• Pay water bills and half of house and shop taxes (that gives me until the end of June to pay the other half, I plan to pay the balance by the original due date of Jan 31).
• Research the ballot. Bexar County has nine million judges up for election. We're heading to SA on Tuesday. We should make it there well before the polls close. Our polling place is in the Visitor's Locker Room at the far end of the football stadium across the street from the house.
• Watch the Paramount site and score our tour tickets as soon as they're up. TCM is having their big shin dig while we'll be in town, and Mr. L fears a lot of participants will also want to do studio VIP tours. So far, they only have through February on the ticket site. Maybe March will be opened up on Monday?
• Polar Bear on the Loose type-in
• Return to looking at posts for A-Z 2013 and A-Z 2014 for packaging into an ebook.  One will be a subscriber gift, and the other needs to find it's way to Amazon, but I need a strategy for that.
• Consider preparing my Threads and Ties short, but that would be best released as promotional material for Threads and Ties, which comes after Twilight (must choose new title!) in the revision stack.
• Is it too early to begin pulling things together for the Twilight revision?  I still have a lot to do on Polar Bear on the Loose, but once it goes out to beta readers, I want to be ready to start.
• Begin planning for A-Z 2015.
• Have websites updated and mailing list tweaks done well before April (which means in February, since we're traveling in March) in preparation for new list sign ups with the A-Z Challenge.
• Continue fleshing out a Granite Hill series.  Happily Ever After Not Guaranteed.

Have a great week.  I shouldn't be on line much later this week.