July 5, 2010
Wooden Sword is in the store!
Volume 1 of the Walensor Chronicles. After a terrible war and an almost unexpected victory, peace has come to Walensor, even to the tiny village of Gorse on the verge of the ancient Weychawood. A young shepherd, for whom the new peace will be a decidedly mixed blessing, tends her flock beside the stream that separates Gorse from the forest. She prays for something--anything--to rescue her from a marriage, contracted before she was born, to a man she both loathes and fears. Then, as if in answer to those prayers, a fire-eyed fetch appears on the far side of the stream... Sample here
Price: $5.00
there’s a two-chapter sampler here
and a discussion page here
April 2, 2010 –
Daughter of the Bright Moon is in the store!
Born in a lightstorm, trained as a healer and a warrior, Rifkind has never been on good terms with her clan, but when they are massacred she faces a dire choice: join them in death or leave the steppes forever. She chooses exile and heads for the fertile wetlands, hoping to find gold and adventure. Instead, she will find her destiny. Sample here
Price: $5.00
there’s a 2-chapter sample here
and a discussion page here
Living here in central Florida, home to the largest collection of theme parks in the world, I’ve become familiar with the concept of a “soft opening.”
Soft openings are when Disney wants to fine tune the settings on its new roller coaster with real tourists (rather than engineers — which is why so many people got sick on their Mission to Mars ride…but that’s another story).
In other words, soft opening are betas…and that’s what Closed Circle is right now: a roller coaster waiting for its first paying customers.
I’m pretty sure it’s not going to kill you, but I’m not really expecting it to work the way it’s supposed to, either.
So, why has it taken so long to get to a mere beta? I’ve put together quite a few old-fashioned websites using a program called NetObjects Fusion.. I’m most proud of the PHS Alumni Website I put together for my dad, but my dad’s only 10 miles away. When something goes wrong, it’s easy for us to get together to fix it–because, really, only one of us can be working on a Fusion site at the same time.
That wasn’t going to work for Closed Circle, not with Jane and CJ up in Washington State and me in Florida. I had to figure out how to mount a website to which we could all safely add content. My choices narrowed down to Drupal and Joomla! In the end, I chose Joomla! because it seemed to have a larger and more active developer community.
I don’t regret the choice. Joomla! can do exactly what I want it to do, once I figure out how to use it.
I’ve been programming computers since punch cards and COBOL back in the early 70s. One concept has remained the same: we love standards; that’s why we have so many of them. We’ve got php, html, css, xml, xhtml. And what’s legit in one, ain’t legit in another. I got a book on Joomla! (several, in fact — authors love books) and I’d never have made it this far without them. But the copy-editting! When a copyeditor swaps a colon for a semi-colon in one of my stories, that’s an annoyance. When it happens in a book from which I’m trying to figure out how to format a Joomla! CSS file, it’s a twenty-four-hour disaster.
Joomla! has made me feel both old and stupid many times in the last few months and I know it’s going to do it to me again. But, to the very limited extent that Joomla! is like COBOL (my “native” programming language, or at least my first one) it does appear that things get easier once you can actually see output.
Still, life intervenes, and I’ve had to tend to family and friends for several emergencies, besides breaking my a-key finger on an opthamologist visit (go figure!), so CJ and Jane have volunteered an assist: we’ll be WordPress, at least until Joomla! behaves, and they have put together a home for Closed Circle that will get us up and running in the interim, so our faithful readers can buy books.
So, by all means, make yourselves at home and expect my books to be available on this site as soon as I can put them together—and having my broken finger out of the cast is going to help in that.
In the meanwhile I have prepared several short stories from various periods of my writing. Enjoy!
(Links to my “store” are in your-left sidebar, or you’ll find them here )
Lynn
