Today is the big day. 21 writers of Austen-related fiction have been working like mad to get the new Austen Authors blog going. I’ve had the chance to get to know my fellow authors better, and I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say.

I’ll be blogging there on September 8.There are lots of giveaways, including my books, so please stop by!

Austen Authors Blog

I came out of the writer’s closet a couple of months ago. You see, for a long time I kept my writing secret from everyone outside of my family, and even they weren’t allowed to read it. After a couple of years, when I had to explain why I was going to writing conferences, I told a couple of close friends, or more accurately I muttered something vague about writing romantic fanfiction, and they very kindly didn’t laugh at me. I didn’t even tell people in my real life when I self-published my books. Meantime, thousands of complete strangers I’d met on-line knew all about this important part of my life. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long and not particularly productive couple of weeks, mostly due and birthday season at my house and various illnesses. In my spare moments, I’ve been trying to write a bit each day, and I’ve been thinking about various issues surrounding publication. I think that’ll be another post, though!

I’ve also paid a few visits to one of the JAFF boards, 50 Miles of Good Road, where there have been some interesting discussions about possibilities for different kinds of sites in the JAFF community. I’ve been thinking about this on and off for the last year or two, not coming to any good conclusions but wondering about different options. When AI became independent again, we discussed various ways for AI authors to interact with their readers, and these blogs are the beginnings of that. There’s still exploration to be done in this format, like posting stories in blog form with comments as reply, similar to the way some writers post stories on Facebook. So AI is meandering off in its own direction, but I’ve been intrigued by the discussions. Read the rest of this entry »

The last couple of days have been consumed by AI’s server outage. There wasn’t anything we could do about it from this end, but we got a backup of the static parts of AI set up at www.austeninterlude.pemberleyvariations.com. Read the rest of this entry »

This post actually isn’t about writing, but about JAFF politics and its chilling effect on my muse. So if you’re not interested in JAFF politics, skip this post and go to a more interesting one. It’s not a fun post, either. Read the rest of this entry »

So, everyone wants to know why I’m never at AHA anymore. I’m not there because my membership was suspended at my request. Why would I make a request like that at the site I’d poured my energies into for the last year? Well, the admin team and I had a long set of differences about the direction of AHA, leading to my removal from the MLS Board of Directors and from my tech functions at AHA, as well as AI leaving AHA and MLS. It was unpleasant and bitter, but I was willing to put it behind me and be a regular member at AHA.

Then the AHA team took away my ability to send and receive PMs and made it so that I couldn’t post anything on the board unless it was pre-approved by a moderator. They were angry at me because of the previous conflict, yes, but I didn’t feel those actions were appropriate. It was also rather silly, since I just went to another site and sent my PMs there. I gave them a few days to cool down, hoping they’d realize their actions weren’t warranted (not to mention that it was a bad precedent to set), and communicated to them via another team member that I wanted my privileges restored. It didn’t happen, and I got no explanation for why it didn’t happen or whether it ever would happen, or even why my privileges had been suspended in the first place. None of the due process that we’d set up for when there were troubles with a member was used. I still haven’t gotten an explanation for those actions.
Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of days ago I was reading an article on Wikipedia and I wasn’t sure what an icon meant, so I went looking for it in the Help section. Naturally, I never found the icon because I got distracted looking at all the other interesting things under Help. See, I’m such a geek that I not only read the encyclopedia, but I read the rules of the encyclopedia!

Anyway, one of the things I found was the Etiquette section, which, given the events of the last couple of months, struck me as being filled with incredible wisdom. It made me so happy I decided to post a condensed version here, not as rules for etiquette in this blog, but to think about how different the world would be if we followed them everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »