It's been a busy couple of weeks at work. Work had a huge release/update for website that went live on May 1st. It was making some radical changes to some of our programs, which we knew would require a lot of testing. However, no one seemed to be on the same page when the testing began, and communication was failing left, right, and center.
As a result we had to retest everything - not once, not twice, nor three time, but four times! ACK!
But the worst is over and now we're just trying to fix all the little defects we didn't catch.
Writing was put on pause for a little bit as a result of this craziness. Now that I'm free to write again though, I'm finding that I'm still hung up on my TUO progress. Trying to jump ahead in the story didn't help matters either. I think I need to revisit some of the rules I've created for this world. The contemporary story has also hit a bit of a snag - suddenly the heroine has become quite shy. And I refuse to work on the third project anymore until one of those two are done.
I had articles I've been saving up regarding writing and e-publishing that I wanted to share - but Google Reader is being a pain today, and I didn't think to book mark them at Bloglovin (which I really should start using more as Google Reader is going under). However, Maureen Johnson, a favorite author of mine, has been ruffling some feathers lately. She recently wrote an article discussing how female authors rarely show up on school reading lists, and how they are not given as much credit as their male counterparts. Also, she mentioned how some seem to believe that reading a book by a female author is beneath them because it's either romance or chick lit. She pointed out that covers for books by female authors are usually more light and girly, and suggested an experiment where people gender flip the covers of books. If the book has a male writer, give it a girlier cover and vice versa. It's been interesting to see the results.
You can read Maureen's article here, and see the Cover Flips over here.
The girl who writes, and knits, and sews, and does many other things...
I just recently discovered Feedly to keep up with all my blogs. It's nice, because until Google pulls the plug on Reader, Feedly works with it, and when Reader goes away, Feedly takes over the work. At least theoretically.
ReplyDeleteSoftware testing almost drove me to serious drink. I feel for you.
I have to admit to not liking 'girly' covers much - puts me off - enjoyed those flipped covers very much - I agree with her too, women are sidelined into 'romance' 'chcklit' ' not proper writing' dead ends often, not always, but often. Thinking about school -decades ago now - we had mainly classics which by the nature of when they were written would have been male - I knew about boys boarding schools very early! but the austens and woolfes, elliots were there - really good books will get there. I agree on the lack of female heros for us but I just put myself into the role and changed the gender for myself.
ReplyDeleteFrustrating though that it still continues.
best of luck for coming week:)