Keeping You Posted

A short general update, and then a technical update for the handful of people who receive this blog via email:

In general, my life is going pretty well, for which I remain grateful. Thanks to vaccines, I was able to travel to see my family, and I feel so fortunate that I got to have those happy reunions. I know that most of the world is not so lucky, and that insufficient vaccine uptake in this country means our window of increased safety could be receding.

In writing, other than occasional continued puttering on a story revision, I haven't been doing much. I don't have any specific writing goals at the moment, and that's keeping me somewhat adrift. I've been feeling more excited lately about the idea of diving into a new project, but I'm not yet sure what that project would be, so I have thinking to do.

And now, the boring announcement for my dozen or so email subscribers: The service (Feedburner) I've always used to automatically send my posts as email messages is discontinuing that feature. I've migrated my subscribers to a new service that will email the posts instead, but I'm still figuring out the details. If everything goes as expected, you'll receive this post from both services (probably at different times). Subsequent posts should only come from a new service, but the look (or the service itself) may change. Hiccups are of course also possible, because technology is fun that way.

Since this has required me to start messing around with the technical workings of my blog after years of barely touching it, I might even get inspired to make some bigger changes. So if there's anything (or everything) about my decade-old design that you think desperately needs an upgrade, let me know your thoughts.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Maria Kuznetsova offers Writing (and Life) Lessons from Finishing Two Novels That Didn't Sell: "Find the axis that your novel turns around. You can have as many plots and subplots as you want, as long as there's a clear focal point. In my first book, I lost track of the fact that it was about how Chernobyl affected my narrator—every scene, whether it was her love for her friend's grandpa, or the friend's accident, should have revolved around that. When I lost track of Chernobyl, my narrator was aimless."