Tag Archives: website exclusives

Ugh…

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.

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Maybe tonight…

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.

 

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Lowborn, Website, and Beauty, oh my!

Still waiting on M.L. to get through the read of the second draft, so that’s up to her schedule.  I’ll jump on it as soon as she gets it back to me, though.

I’ve written a little more on Lowborn, and I’ll get some more done tonight.  Wrapping up a couple of other little things right now, so I’ll probably charge forward on it as the week rolls on.  Either tomorrow or a little later, depending upon when M.L. gets back to me on Beauty.

That essay I mentioned a couple of days ago got rejected at Lit *laugh*  So, I added it to the Unpublished ( Lost ) work page.  You can reach that from “My Work Extras” if you want to read it.

Speaking of my unpublished work, I tweaked the style sheets on those and my ancient stories ( found in the “Genesis” section of “About” ) to increase the font size, which I hope makes them easier reading.  I meant to do this long ago, but only remembered when I added the new story today.

You can probably look for the inactive “Misc” link on the main page to vanish sometime in the ( sort of ) near future.  What’s going to replace it will be a link that says “Shorts”.  When that happens, it will be an active link.

What that link will lead to will be some short stories exclusive to my website.  Odds are that they’ll be little mostly-sex tales about the characters from my stories.  The one that’s been knocking around in my head today is a Devan story taking place before the first Arts Ardane.

These aren’t going to give any real big insights into the characters, or have any major plotlines.  They’re going to be short adventures ( again, mostly sexual )  Odds are that I might write little continuations of some stories that people want to read more bumping and grinding from, but I don’t think have enough substance to submit to Lit or Storiesonline.  What comes to mind there is a “the next day” for Stocking Stuffer.

I’m planning to add commenting ability to these stories, and the comments will be listed after the story, in much the same fashion as at Literotica.  Unlike Literotica, the comments won’t appear immediately, but will instead move into a moderation queue.  I’ll likely approve them in less than 24 hours, but I’m not going to give certain trolls that like to follow me around the opportunity to post something dumb and unconstructive like “it sux0rz!” on my website *laugh*

Constructive criticism will post, as it does on my Lit comments.  I only delete the most worthless of comments, as you may have noticed — and even most of the worthless ones stand.  I believe in letting the story speak for itself, for the most part.

There’s a chance that I might add this same functionality to Unpublished Work and Ancient Stories, but that’s a thought for another day.

Back to writing, I have another unfinished series that’s been stewing on the back burner for quite a while that I’m likely to pick up soon, as the roadblock in my head that had stalled it is eroding in random muse thoughts.  That will be probably 4-5 chapters in addition to the 9 for Lowborn that shouldn’t be too far away.

One of these days, there’s going to be a flurry of regular weekly posting from me, dagnabbit!  *laugh*  I have a lot of partial stories sitting around, just waiting for the right spark to get them finished.

Anyway, back to wrapping up those odds and ends so I can get some writing done on Lowborn tonight.

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Figuring things out

Finally getting the hang of one of the elements of the software suite that runs the forum and the website that I haven’t previously delved into.  It’s going to prove extremely useful for the LST3K pages.  What it will allow me to do is to accept uploads of documents even if the person donating a story or auditioning to be a riffer hasn’t signed up for the website.

The former makes a lot more sense than the latter.  Eventually, it will make a lot more sense for riffers to sign up, because I’m going to code utilities that let us work on the riff in concert on the website, rather than sending files back and forth via email.

It’s an important element of making those pages truly useful to me and to users.  Another will be the ability to paste complete stories or riffs into a rich text form as another means of donating/auditioning.

Now that I have the basics of that down, I’m going to work on hooking up the anti-spam database to my various contact forms.  Once I have those working correctly, I’ll be in position to hook up the LST3K pages as well.  Initially, that will just be protecting me from spam, but as I roll out the user interactive features like uRiff, it will be keeping spammers from tossing cans of spam at people reading user submitted riffs as well.

I’m also seriously considering some website exclusive stories ( beyond my unpublished work on “My Work Extras” and the ancient porn stories on “About -> Writing Genesis” if you haven’t noticed there’s stuff not available anywhere else there )

Odds are that these will be interludes — heavy on sex, or stories with no sexual content from Danica’s World.  Likely examples would be:

Telling Geflon’s backstory that fits in with Casting Off Convention, To Catch a Merchant Princess, and the forthcoming Lowborn.

Things like relating how the girls managed to ‘borrow’ Andrea’s toy and learn the command word for it several chapters back in SOTM.  All of that happened off-screen, and only the aftermath is in the published story.

Stories about Andrea before she ended up at Zoraster’s complex.  Because she was a virgin before meeting Danica, it limits the potential for stories I can post on Lit or SOL, but there are plenty of stories I could tell to highlight her life before the story.

I’ve just had a lot of ideas kicking around that aren’t really right for publishing in my traditional venues, but which I believe regular readers of the stories in Danica’s world would very much enjoy.

Feel free to comment here, email, or post on the forum if there’s a story you’d like to see told.  Much of Blackhawk Hall and the whole of Ebon Genesis owes its origin to a reader’s suggestions.  Many times, those are inspirational and really get me moving.  At the same time, that inspiration gets other stories moving as well.

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