Category Archives: Website

I have moved

I had a placeholder site maintenance here for a long time because I had intended to do things with this website that I did not end up finishing.

I'm going to open this back up as the legacy site and just point you to everything new.

  1. Notebook: The fiction and poetry archive of Liana Mir and scribblemyname (a work in progress, new work added every week)
  2. Log: My blog
  3. Dreamwidth: My blog minus exchange letters and sometimes plus additional minor or personal posts
  4. My Tumblr: good for fandom stuff
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Confession Time

I have been a bad girl in general. I went off on a Yuletide kick and have posted literally nothing here on this blog because I don't usually clutter it up with my entire fanfiction ouvre. (There are reasons. I'm prolific. And chatty. And...)

So to play catch up in the least valuable fashion possible perhaps, here are the posts that went on my LiveJournal and were not crossposted here (minus a few of expired interest):

January

February

March

I apologize for how heavily this skews toward fandom. That is the reason I have not been crossposting.

Now, I shall attempt to stay up to date for the rest of the year.

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On Spam

So lianamir.com was getting hit every two minutes by a spambot which made it really hard to fish out false positives. I bit the bullet and got a captcha. Sorry to pester my commenters, but now if you comment, I'll at least get the comment published, so a plus?

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My Website is Back!

So let's just say the move caused an ill-timed rearrangement of funds and I didn't even notice my website wasn't paid until I got internet back. But after I paid it, my site is back and it didn't take so long that the data was gone. Yay.

I consider April's numbers lost. They can't be correctly assessed at this point without more work than it's worth.

I'm still tired and involved in the last bit of the moving process and getting the home computer set up, etc. and still have the trope bingo, so don't expect much out of this brain fried individual just yet, but at least I live?

I have written some poetry and fanfic this month and I'll try to track the month at least. Next up on the reading docket is stuff from friends.

How is everybody?

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The Day After That, the Queen's Child Comes In

This entry is part 64 of 103 in the series Daily Scribble Reports

So that's a fancy way of saying I'm really happy with the things I got done/discovered even if it didn't result in a lot of new words yet.

Most importantly, I got my website issues resolved yesterday. I still don't know what went wrong and the solution was anything but simple and easy, but there's this handy Webspace Recovery option on 1and1, and I was able to recover my missing files.

Last night, I discovered how to do hardcover editions without going through Lightning Source and when to do casewrap vs. dust jacket. It got most of the mass market reformatted yesterday. There were some serious margin issues, which is a pity because now I have to do the justification all over again and hope the page count stays the same or close to it and possibly retrim the cover.

I did a huge amount of percolation/brainstorming with my collaborator and prepped Seven Days to finally to get written properly.

I wrote poetry of all things, one poem of which I've been trying to write for over a year. It just started playing in my ear this morning and I stopped, dropped, and wrote. I knew I wanted to write something about the fact that my great-grandmother dressed my grandmother as an Indian princess because of her actual lineage and that my mother learned English off the television and that I'm not the sum of my parts and am the product of legal immigration on both sides—from Mexico. So yeah. I wrote something. It means something to me.

Updated and resubmitted the mass market interior. That did affect the spine width and I'll have to update the cover. Again. :le sigh:

Compiled my data on an invisible fandom. I'm working out what the canon is in my head so I can write what my recipient wants.

Today is really a gathering things up in prep day. I was hoping for more of a throwing words down day, but oh, well. Both steps are more than necessary.

And there went the mass market submitted for review. The cover is tweaked and hopefully correct at last.

Lumping in yesterday's blog counts.

Word Counts:

  • Fiction: 0 words
  • Poetry: 57 lines | 392 words
  • Blog: 679 words

February Totals

  • Fiction: 5630 words
  • Poetry: 73 lines | 451 words
  • Blog: 3245 words

Pieces Started Not Finished

  • Fiction: Hear the Stars, novella.
  • Nonfiction/Blog: Indie Author Guide to Genre, book/blog series.
  • Fanfic: Invisible Ficathon Treat.

Completed Pieces

  • Fanfic: “Wholeness of Self,” 783 words.
  • Poem: "Tell Me," 8 lines | 37 words.
  • Poem: "Mother," 8 lines | 22 words.
  • Fanfic: Invisible Ficathon Treat, 269 words.
  • Poem: "Native," 31 lines| 232 words.
  • Poem: "Moderation," 6 lines| 20 words.
  • Poem: "I Should Think," 20 lines| 140 words.
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Wordpress Catastrophe

So overnight, my website decides that the files for my five most important plugins simply don't exist. I can't sort that out until I get home, but needless to say, that worries me a great deal.

Gone are:

  • LiveJournal crossposter
  • Organize Series
  • Subheading
  • Reaction Buttons
  • My social media sharing plugin

and a couple others.

I changed my password and have to accept broken functionality on various parts of my website until I can load the backup files via ftp. If the original files are even gone.

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Today's Trenches

This entry is part 55 of 103 in the series Daily Scribble Reports

Publishing

So I’ve been collaborating and publishing these last few days, and my fingers are itching to get back to my cover art to get it corrected for Createspace. I’m ready to order my proofs and get it off to bed, seriously.

Blogging

In the meantime, I discovered again a deplorable lack of information out there about genre. Most of the intensive information is workshops and classes. I want a reference book. So I’ll be adding into my already over-scattered writing schedule to put together a reference work called The Indie Author Guide to Genre, where I get to cover BISAC, Amazon, cross-genre, subgenres, and examples of how broad the scope of these genres can really be.

Then I’m also going to start putting together some tutorials on the Pods CMS plugin for my own benefit due to the fact that it is deplorably underdocumented and I use it extensively here and exclusively for my new series bible setup. I don’t know PHP. I don’t know SQL. I want an awesome site. Surely that's not too much to ask. :grins:

I’ll put both of these series under cuts so you can skip them if you want.

Writing

Didn’t do so good today, but it was a busy workday and I had to run to break on lunch. I got a chapter tweaked though and it’s off to the collaborator for editing and/or general assessment.

I look at how fast other writers produce and how they do it and I find myself wondering what in the world besides overthinking is holding me back, but then I remember it’s not always overthinking but sometimes sheer ignorance that must be rectified before my thinking actually produces anything of value again. Why do I insist on writing things that require me not to be ignorant?

Scribbling snippets here and there and not big ones, but they're coming.

Series Bible

As mentioned above, I think I’ve got a decent series bible setup now. It’s sparse because I’m focusing on canonical data and current WIP and building the site before focusing on filling everything out, but it exists. This is good.

Fandom

Sign-ups for the Invisible Ficathon start tomorrow. Yay!

Word Counts

Continue reading

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Where HAVE I Been?

This entry is part 47 of 103 in the series Daily Scribble Reports

Well, to be honest, reading The Drought, Honor of the Queen by David Weber, and getting ready to dive into The Flood while also working on getting all formats of Dowse and Bleed ready for publication while trying to resurrect my dead-in-the-water home computer (registry error).

I'll get back to updating after I start scribbling again instead of just percolating and tech supporting. Did I mention tech is not my color?

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On Blogging for Readers

A/N: So this post got lost in email to self oblivion, but since I just remembered it existed, I hereby post it for your enjoyment. I wrote this on November 18, actually.


So Catherine Caffeinated talking about blogging because you had something to say, and it got me to prop my metaphorical chin on my metaphorical hands, plunk elbows on the edge of the desk, and think about why I write. Do I write because I have something to say?

I have often thought about what would make a good blog for a fiction writer and finally thrown up my hands in disgust and realized I hadn't the foggiest idea. My nonfiction and fiction interests are separate and apart. Writing is for writers, not readers. But this made me think about: what is it I have to say when I write fiction? A lot, actually.

I said it once before: I write fascinated. I have found that I am interested in the same things that differentiate literature I love from that which I fangirl. I am interested in cost and sacrifice, power and strength, and mastery of oneself. I prefer the twists of complexity, characters who make hard decisions and pay high prices but accomplish their goal. I love order and making logic of chaos and impossibility. Fiction puts my world into perspective: it enables me to see the underlying patterns and constraints grant the freedom to make those hard choices. Selflessness, love, resolve, endurance, the ability to stand persecuted and not defend oneself—these things are power and a power I wish I had.

But how to put that into blog posts? M.C.A. Hogarth does it with meta and does it beautifully, but I have never been able to write meta. It pulls my characters out of their worlds and makes them constructs. They do not exist in my world to talk to me; they are not voices in my head, but people in their worlds. They are flesh and blood and mind and bone and heart and spirit and blood. I have tried meta and cannot do it.

I have written fanfic but that always becomes simply fic. I dislike writing descriptions of their history unless it is answering a question. Most readers do not read endless fic upon fic on a blog if it is not a serial. I'm fascinated by words, but even I am bored by other conlangers posts about the lexical features of their languages. I love the social structures of my worlds, but best when shown in fic.

En brief, I have a lot to say about love and power and strength and romance and angst and tragic choices, terrible sacrifices, and efficient success with terrible consequences, etc., but I say it in fic. I still don't know how to blog it.

But it has me thinking.

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