BLOG.STEPHENMORRILL.COM

120306 TBOC is dead, other rants

2012-03-06T15:34:41Z

Tuesday, 6 March, 2012 I killed off my TampaBayOnTheCheap.com travel web site. Hated to do it but it seemed time. I WAS a little annoyed by the CitiesOnTheCheap franchise operation, similar sites in dozens of cities all across the US and elsewhere too. I paid for the franchise, received not a whit of useful help and then they sent me a short email saying they were shutting the whole thing down. I asked why. I received no answer other than to be ordered to remove their logos from my site by the end of February. Since, in the several years I've run it, I could never make it pay for itself and it was very labor intensive, I just spiked the whole thing. I may revisit Florida travel sometime in the future but I need the time right now to do other things.

On the plus side, eliminating the associated email box cut my daily spam by ninety percent.

Perhaps this is my week for being petulant. I also did away with the hits counter/web analytics I had used for 12 years on various web sites. WebStat.com charged me a small fee monthly for each web site they tracked. When I tried to cancel the tracking for the TampaBayOnTheCheap.com site I realized that (a) There were absolutely no obvious and simple instructions on how to cancel an account. And, (b), to send them a web-site-form email (I hate those too) I needed to supply my account number. I did so and was told that there was no such account. I was looking at my stats counter web page with that account number. One of us was crazy. Finally, (c), WebStat had no phone number to use to call them.

When an online company intentionally makes it very difficult o cancel my account, and clearly does not wish to receive email or phone calls from me, I need to look elsewhere. I did eventually manage to email them. They did call me (on an unregistered phone line so I could not get the number and the person to whom I spoke didn't want to tell me what it was). And I managed to cancel three accounts. I hope.

Now testing Google analytics and also StatsCounter. I don't think they are any better than WebStat but they are both free and GoogleAnalytics is available by telephone if need be.

Copyrighted by Stephen Morrill.

111101 Starting NaNoWriMo

2011-11-01T14:14:14Z

Today (November 1) is the start of NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a novel in 30 days. It need not be a novel in the strictest sense; contestants have to write 50,000 words in 30 days to qualify for the prize at the end. the prize is...nothing.

I did this year before last and got to 50,083 on the final day. It was one of the most despicable manuscripts I have ever cranked out, and that's saying something. But it was a good start on a fantasy novel and that novel is, today, about 83,000 words, looks damn good, and I'm marketing it now. Would have done so sooner but I was otherwise occupied; in the interim I have actually written a second in that fantasy series, not using the 30-day contest. My entry for this month's NaNoWriMo will be volume #3 in the Sorcet Chronicles series

I'll do a weekly update if I can remember. Meantime, to see samples of the Sorcet Chronicles, go to my fantasy novel web site at http://www.Sorcet.com

Copyrighted by Stephen Morrill.

110920 If we're post-labor day, can autumn be far behind?

2011-09-20T16:06:51Z

110920 You who live in the 'nawth' are already looking at new sweaters to wear and all that cool stuff. Here in Florida Labor Day happens pretty much in the middle of summer. Today is the 20th and it is still hotter than a three-dollar pistol outside. I had one good evening last week when I could open the front door for a few hours. Two of our 'palmetto bugs' (giant cockroaches, really but we call them something else to make the tourists happy) promptly scampered into the house. Spots, my four-footed assistant, got one and I got the other.

Writing life: So one morning I come into the office at 7 a.m. and the light is blinking on my phone. Weird, think I, who would have called me that early. Actually, it was late. When I played the message it had come in at 11:30 the previous evening. Normally I'm in the office until around then but not that night. Someone wanted me to write up her biography. I get these requests 2-3 times a year but not normally at night. She's a physician who lives forty miles north of me so it's not a time-zone issue.

I called back during normal hours. Got her answering machine. Left message. She returned that call, this time at 1:30 in the morning. I called back, left message suggesting we communicate by email or day-time phone.

Never heard from her again. We were two ships that pass in the night, I guess.

Copyrighted by Stephen Morrill.

Not-So-Charming advertising?

2011-06-15T21:07:00Z

How many blogs discuss toilet paper? Well, count on us to get the vital information and get it out to you as soon as possible.

Buying the all-essential TP is a problem for me. I live in a 90-year-old house with one bathroom and the TP dispenser is built into a tile wall. Apparently toilet paper rolls have...swelled...since 1927, so much so that it's hard to find any that will fit. I have to pick through the assortment, of which there is no end. So to speak. This being a literary (or so I claim) blog I have to quote Winston Churchill who, asked about his visit to New York, said, "Newspaper too thin, toilet paper too thick."

So I finally picked out a package of Charmin. And it said, on the front, "...for a CLEAN you will notice."

Now, to be honest - and I'm speaking only for myself here I know - this is NOT something I really want to be noticing. Oh, sure, I can understand advertising its softness though I never planned to use so much that relative hardness would matter. Absorbent might be a good thing to brag about. They also mention the "diamond pattern" though I confess that entire days go by when I don't think even once about what pattern my toilet paper happens to be. But, at least, softness, absorbency and pattern don't make me think too much about what it is I'm doing with the stuff. "a CLEAN you will notice" makes me, well, notice.

Advertising copy is written by my fellow nonfiction freelancers. Most people think of writers as novelists. When I tell someone I'm a writer they ask if I have written a book they might have read. And, by book, they generally mean novel. News flash, folks. 99 percent of all writing is nonfiction. And someone writes it.

If the Charmin company wants to get in touch, I can write toilet-paper wrapping copy too. I've done worse. I'd probably focus on the color. "It's white! When you're all done you can see what you did!"

Copyrighted by Stephen Morrill.

WritersCollege.com upgrade completed

2011-05-24T14:09:57Z

Tuesday, 24 May, 2011:

Finally! After months of off-and-on work on it, completed the major portion of an upgrade of my writing school web site. http://www.WritersCollege.com is about 200 pages in total, most not visible to the general public. That now conforms to the new HTML5 standard.

Next up is the http://www.Sorcet.com web site, for my fantasy novels. But that's a small site and should not take too long. After that I get to upgrade my own writing web site, http://www.StephenMorrill.com which, like the proverbial shoemaker's children who go barefoot, never seems to get my attention.

Copyrighted by Stephen Morrill.

Redid my schedule

2011-03-01T17:25:00Z

A favorite cult movie "Tremors" has Kevin Bacon saying, "We plan ahead. That way, we don't do anything right now." I admit to doing more planning some days than actual doing doing.

And the SteveMorrill.com web site is rather a case of The Shoemaker's Children - it gets no respect and is last to be updated. I'll get to it, but right now I', completing the huge overhaul of WritersCollege.com WritersCollege.com

... ³Ā�ƑŸ&

Converting several more blogs into GoDaddy too

2010-09-10T19:09:00Z

I have umpteen web sites and all but one are now hosted by GoDaddy. lately I have decided I need to do more social networking. You know-blogs. Like this one.

I pay for this blog, about $4 or $5 a month. I have an identical blog with Wordpress and that one is free. I have two more business blogs on Wordpress and another for a fellow writer whom I support with technical things. So I waffled back and forth. Until yesterday. Yesterday the other writer posted a new blog entry. I saw it and saw an item needing fixing. Couldn't do it. Somehow the several blogs/accounts had crossed wires in the Wordpress system and I could no longer administer a blog I had created. No problem, I say. I'll contact Wordpress and we can sort this out.

Foolish me. Wordpress has no phone support. Let me say that again because it is so astounding: Wordpress has no phone support. Their "tips" page covers problems that are very common but not problems complicated. For that you have to fill in a form (if you can find the page with the form) and they will read that and reply someday. Given the way that sort of thing works, you could go back and forth for a week to solve something a ten-minute phone call would fix.

But that assumes the fill-in-the-form thing actually works. When I tried it, I discovered a notice to the effect that the staff was away until September 19 (ten days from the date of my problem) and in the meantime, no tech support other than that they would "check in" at some forum once in a while. Let me say that again because it is so astounding: Wordpress' entire tech support team was missing in action for ten days. (At least ten days; I don't know how long that notice had been up there.)

What kind of company refuses to talk to customers and then sends its entire support staff away for (at least) ten days?

I picked up the phone, called GoDaddy, and lined up blogs with their Quick Blogcast system. Yes, I have to pay. But I'm a professional with several businesses here and I need business-quality support, not whatever is OK for teenagers and their online diaries. And GoDaddy tech support is a phone call away, doesn't live in India, and sits staring at their phones 24/7. Bob Parsons (GoDaddy Maximum Leader) knows that phone-based tech support is expensive, but he hires people anyway. Americans. And whenever I talk to other webbies and the topic of GoDaddy comes up, the one thing they always mention is the excellent 24/7 telephone support.

I'm still shaking my head. I have spent 25 years writing about business and I can vouch for the fact that some business people could not walk and chew gum at the same time. But just when I think I've seen it all....

Copyrighted by Stephen Morrill.

Emailed vs. Snail Mailed Queries

2010-09-01T16:10:00Z

A friend just sent me this quote from a literary agent:

Before the arrival of e-mail submissions, I used to receive perhaps one hundred queries a week. That was a lot of queries but it wasn't frankly unmanageable. The agency now receives more than twice that on a daily basis and it's becoming impossible to attend to much of anything else!

I wonder how much of that is really due to email being easier – and cheaper - for writers to use (a lot, I suspect), how much a result of other changes in the publishing industry that tend to attract more would-be writers, and how much a result of her agency simply becoming better-known?

Still let’s compare:

Snail-mailed letter:

30 seconds: Receive envelope and direct it to the proper person.
20 seconds: Open envelope. Remove letter and SASE. Lay SASE aside.
30 seconds: Read query.
30 seconds: Stuff query back into SASE. Locate standard rejection letter or card. Put that into envelope too.
30 seconds: Send rejected SASE back to front office for adding to outgoing mail.

Total: 2 min, 20 seconds. (140 seconds)

Emailed letter:

1 second: Open email.
30 seconds: Read query.
3 seconds: Hit “reply” and then macro with rejection text.
1 second: Hit “send”.

Total: 35 seconds.

Conclusion: The agent/staff can read queries four times as quickly using email as dealing with the mechanical/snail-mailed versions.

What this all means is anyone's guess. An obvious route for overworked agencies is to hire more help. Most businesses, overwhelmed with work, would do so. But literary agencies seem reluctant to do that; agents may bitch about the workload but they also don't want to hand off that next bestseller to someone else in the office. They want the gold found buried within all the dross but want the dross to somehow magically go away and stop bothering them.

I'm not unsympathetic. And I have noticed that some of my own queries to literary agents have come back rejected, not by the agents but by some intermediaries in their offices. Publishers used to have 'first readers' - usually young women on their first publishing job out of one of the Seven Sisters schools - whose job was to plow through the day's over-the-transom half-ton of paper, looking for the few items they would then place on an acquisition editor's desk for a further look. But publishers decided to save even those slave-labor costs and got rid of their first-readers and decided to accept queries only from literary agents, in effect turning the agents into unpaid first-readers.

It was a clever idea for publishers and agents alike. At 9 a.m. the following morning literary agents raised their rates from 10 percent to 15 percent. But now all those queries, 90 percent or more (I'm being charitable, most agents would peg it at 99% or more) of which are unredeemable garbage, land on the agents' desks. And now they are starting to hire first-readers for themselves.

I suppose that was inevitable.

Copyrighted by Stephen Morrill.

testing

2010-06-03T16:53:00Z

testing

Copyrighted by Stephen Morrill.

Second entry

2010-06-01T16:23:00Z

Set up this second blog to replace an earlier one I had neglected and then destroyed. Let's hope this fares better.

Copyrighted by Stephen Morrill.