Website!

The domain name is www.kassandras-song.com. I thought of using my name, but I am constantly amazed at how people butcher my last name. So I went with the name of a book (my first one). I also chose Yahoo Services.

My reason for choosing Yahoo! were many. First, several local writers I knew had done so, and they all reported being happy with them. Second, the price compared to the others (1on1, Intuit, and GoDaddy) was a wash. Third, I figured I could master the tools fairly quickly, though that was also a wash. I'd be doing this site myself.

Back in my Premera Blue Cross days I designed the web pages for the Tech Services department. I shocked the company Webmaster by using native .html and Notepad. It wasn't that I didn't trust FrontPage or the others, but I wanted to know what the code did. I did load it up with plenty of comments, though, for whoever would maintain it after that (was this premonition?). There wasn't a line of code in there that I didn't know what it did. It was nice and tight, and used several visual features I'd learned in document design. That's because I treated it as a document, though I printed to screen, not paper.

I treated my website the same way. I wanted a certain look to it, and while I'm probably only 98% happy, I do like what I have. There are tweaks I want to make, but (and this is important), I realize a website can be an enormous time sink. Time spent on that is not time spent writing, and since my stay in the hospital in 2010, I keep in mind: "So many stories, so little time".

Other things -

Different World wrapped up on www.beyondthefarhorizon.com, and I didn't solve the mystery. The costabulary have the killer, but who sent him? That will be book #4, and has a working title of Cold Case.

I'm also filling in bits and pieces of the Families. The latest installment starts on Nov. 6 for two weeks, Wolfhound Six, about an Imperial fighter pilot woulnded at Medina. There was Homecoming, this is one from the other side. And the one about Sir Livan and his putative associates is chugging along. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are done, 3 is a work in progress.