My concentration is zip the last few days.  I can muse and muse away, but when I sit down to try to write it, my brain grinds gears.

Work’s been irritating, and the young one has been uncooperative.  That’s probably it.

Weekend is coming, and I still have a nice, large bank of time-off hours for work.  I need to save at least 7 in order to do what I do every year, which is take off every Friday between Thanksgiving and New Year’s ( plus a spare day in case I get sick, the car breaks down, etc., so they can’t take away one of my scheduled days off *laugh* ) but I have at least ten right now, plus I should get another one in October, plus I don’t think they’ve added in the Labor Day floating Holiday yet ( not sure )

Regardless, I have at least a couple of days I can take off over the next couple of months.

The young one has been sleeping in on weekend mornings, so I usually have a couple of hours of quiet time in the morning.  If I can get woke up, I can usually get some writing done then.

In the meantime, since I can’t concentrate on writing ( mainly visualizing ) I got a few more things done for the Shorts.  I finished my two utilities to approve and reply to comments on short stories.  I also fixed a bug in the actual story display page that was only showing up in Chrome ( dumb tag omission that Firefox and IE both ignored )

Reorganized my admin main page while adding the links for better efficiency as well.

Added the email push to alert me when a new comment comes in, but it’s pretty basic right now.  I’m going to add a little bit to it so that the email actually tells me what story the comment is on, etc.

The anti-spam code is sitting, waiting to plug in.  I’m just holding off on that until I’m fully done testing comments, so I’m not hitting the anti-spam database with unnecessary queries while making fake comments to play around with and check my code.

The only real thing left for the shorts now is the utility to populate the shorts database.  I need more than one complete story to truly test it, but I can cheat and copy the complete one into multiple copies during the testing phase, and then delete them afterwards.

Well, the young one appears to be down for the night, so I’m going to try to wind down a little and see if I can get some writing done.

The young one is acting like he might go to bed at a decent hour, so maybe I can get some writing done tonight.  No luck last night.

Finished the comments page earlier, and it’s working as expected.  Only thing left on that page is to add in some code to push me an email when a new comment is made ( so I know to come approve it ) and to add in the spam database check.

The next step will be my moderation utilities for the comments.  I decided to make myself two easy utilities:  One to approve comments, which will only show unapproved comments, and allow me to delete them from my admin panel if they’re spam or pure asshattery.  A second will work off another bit in the database that will show me new comments I haven’t responded to.  That way, I’ll always know when I’ve thanked someone for making a comment.

On the comment page, if you’re logged in, you’ll have the option to comment under your member profile.  If you tick that box, all you need to do is enter a comment, and it will link up to your profile for me to respond.  It won’t be linked on the public side.

If you aren’t logged in, or don’t tick the box, you have the option of leaving an email, so I can respond, but it’s not required.  You can also choose a name to attach to the comment, but it isn’t required either.  The comment will be listed as anonymous ( even if you enter an email ) if you don’t choose a name.

The only thing you have to enter on the comment form is a comment.  Everything else is optional, and only the comment plus your chosen name ( if any ) will be displayed to anyone but me.  Never your email, for sure.

I’m going to code the backend utility for the shorts database to import from the story database, where the information for the short stories will reside along with the stories posted on the story sites.  That way, all I have to do is enter the information once, as I always do, and it will import what’s necessary to make the short stories page work.

As I’ve mentioned ( at least indirectly ) short stories will show up on the “My Work” and “Latest Updates” pages the same way stories I’ve posted to the story sites do.  If a short is part of a series, it will also show up there.  If it’s in Danica’s World, it will show up on the Danica Timeline page.

Each short story has a “Chronology” listing, which will let you know where it fits in with other stories, as these will almost certainly be connected to existing stories.  They may be prequels ( like the Devan triad I’m working on ), sequels, fall between chapters of a story, or even be expanded scenes from within a chapter or story where I ‘faded to black’ or only mentioned something happening in passing.

So if there’s a scene in one of my stories where the characters hop into bed and I don’t give you the details, feel free to suggest that as a short story for me to write 🙂

I do believe the young one is down for the night.  He’s been in the bedroom and quiet for a little while.  I’ll take a brief wind down from coding, then open Lowborn and SOTM to see if my muse is singing tonight.