The new dresser arrives tomorrow, gotta finish moving some stuff and get ready for people tromping through my house. Friday is nutrition counseling at my doctor's insistence. He's right, I stalled out, but the last batch of homemade ice cream is gone now. I didn't tell him about the ice cream. Next Tuesday I start the physical therapy roller coaster again.
My Xanga blogs expire on Halloween. I've resigned myself to the grunt work of just moving everything. Well, I doubt I move the private stuff. If Xanga closes down, I won't be able to get into it, but since I downloaded the archives last year, that doesn't worry me. I'll probably pay to keep 2 or 3 of the original public blogs open, but I can't afford renewing that much stuff for so little return. My traffic numbers have more than doubled and tripled since I started moving stuff to free hosts that support mobile viewing.
I have a new submissions rep with my publisher. The last one mysteriously disappeared about three months ago, but I've been so distracted that I haven't missed the weekly touch base calls. And now they're going through this huge upgrade to make their software more compatible with new tech, so I have all new book ID numbers in my author account. I'm hoping this makes it easier for them to handle my questions. I'm so into coding my own stuff for ten years that I have a really hard time talking to a rep that doesn't understand I probably know more about Word's automatic software recoding glitches than their own techs do. Just throwing stuff over on Word and beaming it into the cloud and then them grinding it through more software could do ridiculous things. I've seen drastic mistakes in Terry Pratchett books. Don't tell me your paid proofreader will catch everything and I won't look like an idiot. With all the experience I have transferring files from blog to blog to blog, I know stuff like this doesn't travel well between blog hosts and stuff gets stripped. I don't believe in a universal editor that automatically makes a page pretty and nice.
When Xanga migrated, my html turned into such a mangled mess I could barely untangle it at first, and it took longer to recode than it did to write the posts in the first place. Entire posts wound up reformatted and looked like a third grader got into my editor. Then they updated the editor and wiped out ALL scripts, total facepalm, had to go back through the same posts again replugging code back in differently so you could see what got stripped out. I think I can confidently call myself an expert on tech probs in blogging just from gritting my teeth and hanging in there through all that.
I see people freak out when facebook goes down for half a day, what if all your blogs disappeared for 7 weeks and then showed back up looking like they'd been through a grinder? And then after you fixed them as best you could they got screwed up again? And then after all that, there was the possibility they'd get locked up and/or disappear again? Forever?
Imagine the old days. You spend months typing out and editing and retyping a book on a manual typewriter and you have a stack of paper to take in to a publisher. But that stack of paper winds up in a fire or flood and you lose the whole thing. THAT is what losing ten years of blogs might be like. And then when you go through a big illness that makes your brain so glitchy you can't remember stuff very well, and you depend on those blogs to piece together something that can turn into a product. Yeah, THAT.
So yeah. Not really whining, just working. The depression I went through last year over this is gone. Now it's all grim in there, in my head. I'm gonna do this, come hell or high water, as they say. Living the nightmare, haha. I know, I've really gotta stop whining about this and just GET TO WORK!
