October 2022

Website difficulties and other problems

The website builder and host site I use has been pestering me to update my login via their commercial partner for the past few weeks. I wouldn't mind except every time I try to do the update I get thrown onto an error page because the next page in the update line is having issues. I have limited time to use a computer between my writing, new furry companions and running a household that my late mother used to keep running smoothly. So far that error page thing has happened every time. It's not like I require the commercial site in question as I'm a writer, not an e-merchant. I let my publishers and their distributers take care of all the selling, I just promote my work a little with chapter excerpts when I have the time to post them and this monthly post to let my readers know what's going on. I'm hoping to get back to work properly on the two books I was writing before my mother became terminally ill, or rather before her heart began to fail. Time has been an issue as I've had to take over the task of looking after my father, who is only now starting to come to terms with what happened last November. I never used to be that close to him, but mutual grief can forge a very strong bond between family members. It was my mother I was truly close to.

As far as ongoing projects go, I dusted off Feline's adventure between Separated Soul and Secret Sorcerer and began editing it once again a couple of months ago. The first three chapters of Stolen Sorcerer have been out in a publisher's slush pile for the past month or so now, which means I have another couple of months in which to wait for a yes or no reply. I wrote Feline's adventure away from Moon Child and La Lune basically by accident. Events in the Adlamar Galaxy (based on M81, the first galaxy I ever saw through binoculars) have repercussions on the second Moon Child Novel so I had to know what happened, inevitably a novel was born. Oddly, my sighting of M81 was just as accidental as the writing of Feline's novel. I was about nine or ten years old and my parents, who were avid star watchers and backyard astronomers, were trying to show me Polaris. M81 was a happy accident, as was its sister galaxy M82. Lots of people yammer on about Andromeda as she's so close and the most visible galaxy in the northern night sky, but spiral M81 and spindle M82 are very special to me. I guess that's why I had a character end up there when he followed the North Star. I must say I had a lot of fun inventing the races in that galaxy, as well as assigning minerals in their blood to be the oxygen carriers, just because we have iron in ours doesn't mean others can't have copper-sulfate or even pure silica doing the same job for them. That's as much of a hint as I'm going to give, except that it's lucky for Feline that in his non-sorcerous spare time he's also a jeweler. We'll just have to wait until a publisher decides to give the book a try to find out more. Unfortunately, anyone who has already read Secret Sorcerer knows how Stolen Sorcerer will end, for Feline anyway.