I spent the weekend cleaning and rearranging, not least digitally. You may notice the surroundings look a bit freshened; not only did I get a new theme going but also some graphics (that Depositphotos investment through AppSumo when I thought I was going to do a few book covers is paying off bigtime) and just…brushed everything up a little. I’m dismal at CSS, but fortunately WordPress has come a long way.
Block editors are lovely.
The dogs were unhappy that I spent a majority of time staring at a glowing box rather than moving around doing things they could stick their noses in, but soon they fell to taunting each other instead of poking at me, and were reasonably happy. It’s also nice that the inversion–or whatever was keeping everything stagnant–has broken up and we got a band of rain through last night. The air is a lot cleaner and the persistent weight in my lungs has mostly left.
Of course every time I cough I think “Is it the plague? It’s probably the plague.” Which isn’t a fun time.
I redid the contact form, offloaded the newsletter signup since formatting that embed was a pain, and spent the bulk of the time getting every book page neatened up and consolidated. I should probably go back and do the individual volumes in the Valentine and Kismet books instead of just listing the omnibus editions, but I’m tired, my wrists hurt, and I would really like to leave webmonkey work for another day.
On the other hand, I have the structure of every page fresh inside my head, so they’ll be all standardized with little trouble if I hold my nose and do it today. Choices, choices.
I’m also thinking of brushing off the ol’ Twitch channel. Fifteen-minute “Tea With Lili” streams might not be up to their standards, but it’s what I’m comfortable with. My agent wants me to do TikToks but I’m not sure I’m ready for that. It seems a great deal of work for very little return, and I do enough of that already. On the other hand, putting on a fedora and performing as The Masked Writer seems like a hoot. Or getting a tiara and channeling my Muse for a few seconds. It would require a great deal more performance anxiety, and I already have enough of that. But we’ll see; the point of having an agent is to listen to their advice.
It’s the last day of the Selene sale, and I should put together a sale for next month if I’m gonna do one. It would be nice to have something around to celebrate Imbolc with. Plus the HOOD omnibus came out this month–January has been very busy, despite me attempting to take a vacay from all social obligations. I needed the rest, but life had other plans.
As usual.
The coffee is almost done, I need some version of breakfast, and the dogs are very eager to get their walkies in. Not to mention I have to run today, and whatever cleaning I didn’t get done while I was banging on the site’s innards and swearing should probably at least be eyed before I laugh and decide it can wait another week. Such are Mondays all year round; it will be a relief to write Veece’s return to the pub in Hell’s Acre and the fight with the tentacled thing in Sons of Ymre #2. (I do have a date for #1’s launch, but no preorder links yet. When I have the links, you’ll know, my dears.)
So here we are on the last Monday of January. I suspect the day is going to try for something special to make itself memorable, though I devoutly wish it wouldn’t. One last swallow of coffee, then we’re off to the races.
See you around.