April 30, 2005
Blatant Product Placement
Back in February, Michelle and I went to Mandurah for our 12th anniversary holiday. It was blindingly hot--and humid, which is odd for these parts. We spent a great deal of our time in the Dome coffee shop, slurping up Pellegrino by the litre. Chilled, and with lashings of ice, and a slice of lemon, it can't be beat.
Mainly I'm doing this as a test of MT photo upload functionality after all my recent reinstallation shenanigans, but I also thought this particular photo would be a fun shout-out to a beverage we love. You don't suppose they'd send us a free case for mentioning it, do you? (Nah, I didn't think so, either.)
The temp this particular day maxed out at 43 C, btw. Our car nearly broke down from overheating going back to Perth later that afternoon.
Posted by adrian at 05:13 PM | Comments (1)
April 27, 2005
Now, Where Was I?
Blog repaired, all systems go, life can return to normal. I'm very sorry indeed for the tedious, seemingly endless hassle of the past several days. I did learn a great deal, though. I can now install and correctly configure perl scripts and have them work first time, for instance. I'd always looked very warily at that whole side of web development as something just too arcane for the bumbling likes of your humble correspondent even to contemplate. Now, though, well, who knows? Perhaps my first project will be to install MT-Blacklist to deal with the inevitable tide of comment spam.
The only sad part here is that my posts from the last three years can't be accessed--unless I put in a truly spectacular and incredibly tedious amount of work manually coding new links for each one of hundreds of posts. Before I embarked on this little jaunt I should really have exported all those posts in the official MT format, so that they could readily be reincorporated once all the faffing about was over. This is not what I did. I just downloaded the whole archives/ directory (and a big sucker it was, too, at 13 MB).
So this could be a good time to think about where I go next, blogwise. The immediate task before me is to get back to Author Boy adventures, and that means getting back to the scribble caper, where I belong. In this vein it turns out I have to come up with blurbs for ECLIPSE, my next book. One of these blurbs is for the back cover or jacket flap or whatever, but the other, more worrying one, is for booksellers' catalogues. I've asked Publisher Brian what the difference is between these two assignments. I mean, surely you could just make two copies of the one blurb and leave it at that, right? I'm guessing this is not the case. I'm also hoping for more guidance on this assignment than Brian simply and gnomically telling me, "sell the book," like he did a couple of years ago when he had me doing the miserable "story pitch" assignment. Interestingly, at that time, I did a whole bunch of these "story pitches" for ECLIPSE. I'm wondering if they can be recycled.
I'm also still waiting for my homework on HYDROGEN STEEL to show up. I was meant to have completed these last edits before the end of April. Hmm. [glances at calendar] Hmm. This is the aggravating thing about the publishing biz: it's all very "hurry up and wait". Not good for those of us inclined to stress and anxiety. I imagine this homework will turn up in due course. Stuff happens. Plans don't work out.
Which leaves me with the task of applying for the Australia Council Literature Board's New Work Grant. I've got the forms. I've got the (free) book explaining everything. Tonight I'll print out the forms and get busy filling things in. The application is due May 15. If last year is any guide, it will take but a few minutes to fill the thing in. They'll also want a resume, a sample of my work (a copy of ORBITAL BURN), and a synopsis for a book I propose to write with the money they front, if they front it. Publisher Brian tells me that the Oz Council has already fronted money to help pay for the publishing of ECLIPSE. Very decent of them! Now if they'd also front money to send us back to Canada and the US to promote the book, that'd be brilliant (but, he added in very small type, not likely).
Now. Time for a bite of lunch, then some staring at a blank page and a blinking insertion point. Mmmmm, my favourite thing.
Posted by adrian at 05:02 AM | Comments (5)
April 26, 2005
On the Blink
Hello. This blog is under repair at the moment. I find I'm learning a lot about handling and installing perl scripts and getting them to work reliably. Indeed, today I reinstalled MT (written in perl) three different times, trying to sort out mysterious problems. I've run out of ideas, though, and left a query with the MT Support folk.
Meanwhile, I'm planning to start a temporary blog on either Blogger or Typepad. I'll update this post later, once I know the new address.
I really must apologise for all this egregious nonsense. It seems like much too much faffing about for the sake of a mere blog, doesn't it?
Last: I'm fairly certain commenting here won't work. Feel free to try, and if you succeed, I'd love to hear about it. Sure isn't working for me, though. Ugh.
More later this evening.
* * *
Go have a squizz over at the Modem Noise Backup Generator.
I'll be posting there until this whole mess is cleared up.
Posted by adrian at 11:40 AM | Comments (0)