The Joy of Learning

Spent Sunday doing edits on my first official Harlequin Intrigue. The edits weren't bad at all, but they do everything by HAND. Have you seen my handwriting? Even "I" can't read my handwriting. So it was a complicated mess of writing "see attached" then attaching printed pages of the document with the changes highlighted, etc. And of course, since I'm an accountant it all had to be coordinated and individually paperclipped, so my editor will either love me or want to have me psychologically tested. But she was happy with the book, and the edits were very minor, so all is well.

Lately, I've been working on a new project - a website for writers. I am on different writing forums and get asked a lot of questions about fiction writing, the publishing industry and most of all, taxes. So I decided it would be easier to have a website where I could make that information available and just send people there by link. Of course, it's not full of information yet - that will happen over time, but the first step was building the darn site.

Yes, I decided I needed to learn how to build websites. I searched around and finally decided on WordPress for a platform. Mainly because you can update it from anywhere and if I screw something up, I can probably high any 10-year old to fix it for me. So I searched and found good html code-building software and all was good. Well, except for the banner part. I didn't want a stock banner that 42,000 other people were using. I wanted something custom. But the problem is, I am NO artist.

So I decided to purchase some graphics and go about creating my own banner using Photoshop. Now, I want to preface this by saying that I am not sure if I have a mental block on the Photoshop software or if it's just that hard to use, but it just about killed me! It's simply NOT intuitive. Mind you, my full-time job is documenting software and I've literally done hundreds of software conversions, but Photoshop is an entirely different animal. I needed to figure out how to cut one piece of a graphic away from the others, then make it transparent, then add it to the banner and change colors. No problem, right? HA! I swear, I would get something to work and then have no idea how I made it happen.

I started working last Saturday at 6 A.M. and finally got it finished at 8 P.M. Then I increased the third-quarter stock at Coors and went to bed exhausted. But finally, but Monday, I launched my official site for writers. Check it out and if you have a question you'd like to see answered, please post it.

Louisiana Liar

Have a great week, all!

Deadly DeLeon