In which I investigate

Luther M. Siler5 Comments

Huty1913428I’m issuing a qualified thumbs-up to the new text editor, guys, and I’m surprising myself by doing so, believe me.  The only thing I’ve found that doesn’t work like I want it to is moving images around, and that feels more like a temporary bug than a deliberate decision someone made.  It’s also pretty easy to fix in HTML if the image won’t slide around properly in the WYSIWYG editor.

One thing I’d like to see is a way to copy posts straight from the new editor; I actually use that feature quite a lot what with the various hashtagged posts I do every week, and it’s kind of annoying to have to go through the My Sites menu to copy a post or to just hope the original (as in, the black-and-white one from three years ago) editor pops up.  However, now that I’ve typed enough that I don’t want to cancel out, I do seen an “All Posts” arrow in the upper-right hand corner, so maybe that’s where I’d go before I start writing if I wanted to copy a post.  (EDIT: Nope.  As of right now, you need the admin page to copy posts, which is unchanged from the last version of the editor.)

Another minor annoyance: Choosing a category does not unclick “Uncategorized” automatically like it used to.  They should fix that.

Continue reading “In which I investigate” →

A #Scrivener help beg

Luther M. Siler6 Comments

The internet isn’t cooperating.  I love the hell out of Scrivener’s Compile feature, especially the way it builds the Table of Contents for me without me having to carefully hyperlink everything.  But:

Screen Shot 2015-08-30 at 6.42.09 PM

Does anyone know how to prevent it from actually adding the “Chapter Seventy” part in front of the chapter title?  Because it’s doing that throughout and I’d prefer that it not do that.  I’ve been fiddling and haven’t figured out what the problem is yet.

(EDIT: Figured it out, naturally.  Leaving the post up so you can get a gander at some chapter titles.)

On the learning curve

Luther M. Siler9 Comments

scrivener-512One of the fun things about learning a new piece of software is that you can completely screw yourself if you do things wrong and not learn about it until it is deeply obnoxious to fix what you did.

I have committed myself to writing Searching for Malumba and Starlight in Scrivener, and I intend to keep to that.

Searching for Malumba has, at present, about 140 individual essays.

I have just discovered that each of those essays, which are technically each chapters, needs to be in its own folder in order to compile properly.  And I keep accidentally clicking the wrong things while trying to create those folders.

You may fire when ready.

Okay, this is some bullshit

Luther M. Siler5 Comments

I am– once again– trying to get a clean manuscript of The Benevolence Archives uploaded to Amazon.  The version on Smashwords hasn’t been touched, because that’s the one I actually get movement from and I’m not fixing it until this is ironed out.

If I look at my document in Word, it looks like this:

Screen Shot 2015-03-14 at 6.03.05 PM

(“Queris” is yellow because I used the search function to find this particular spot.)

Note that there are spaces between all the words.

Now look at one happens in Amazon’s online previewer after it converts the file for Kindle:

Screen Shot 2015-03-14 at 6.02.52 PMNote that the space between “to” and “the” has been arbitrarily removed.

Note also that this happens all over the damn place.  And it appears to not only be arbitrary and random, but unfixable– and Amazon’s spellcheck isn’t even finding those mistakes any longer, as it reported this manuscript to be free of typos, ignoring not only the spacing errors it introduced but also words like “Queris.”

I am angryified at the moment.

EDIT:  I think I’ve got it.  There are still a couple of spots of wonkiness but at least it doesn’t look like it’s filled with typographical errors any longer.  God, that was annoying.

In which I need a nerd

Luther M. Siler5 Comments

Hire engineersI need y’all to understand something: when most people say they need a nerd, they’re looking for me.  And I am vastly unqualified to perform this task on my own, so when I say I need a nerd, I need a nerd.  Like, nerdery is how you make your living.

Gotta be a couple of y’all out there somewhere, right?

Here’s what I want, and I can already think of three ways it’s complicated without knowing anything, so basically what I’m expecting is that the first person with any experience in app development who reads this will leave a comment telling me why it’s impossible.  I am fairly obsessive about monitoring my sales numbers, right?  I’m sure I’m not the only one.  But as of right now that means monitoring three different websites several times a day.

(“Be less obsessive” is not the answer I’m looking for.  I want a nerd, not a psychologist.)

I want a mobile app that monitors those websites for me, sends me a notification whenever I get a sale somewhere, and aggregates everything together in a bunch of lovely graphs and charts and other things.  If it can monitor royalties and ping me when I get a review, too, that would be superb.  Also an awesome bonus: exporting to Excel.

You can have all the credit for this awesome idea, which will surely make you a multimillionaire.  Go go go!