Shocking Revelation!

A M Jenner

Deep breath. Ready?

In the past, A M Jenner has actually been a group of three related authors all pretending to be the same person. That past is over. Some of us are making career changes, and our opportunity for working as closely together as we have been is changing. One of us is a recent college graduate, another is just finishing a long career out in the real world and is coming home to write full time, while the third has recently finished with formal education and is now pursuing a more useful informal path of education.

Rather than deal with the extensive accounting changes that would otherwise be necessary, we have decided to become separate business entities. We have all signed with the Electric Scroll, a wonderful publishing house which has agreed to re-publish our back-list under our proper names, so the credit – and the royalties – will be given where they are due. We'll be editing the books as they're republished; some will have only slight changes, while others are getting massive rewrites. They'll also be publishing our new books as we move forward. They even agreed to put up links to the old, self-published versions of the books until each is republished. Told you they were wonderful!

Natalie Peck

A M Jenner will continue to write her intense romantic suspense novels, while Natalie Peck will receive due applause for her sweet heart-felt romances, and Scott Ashby will be made to claim his wonderful SF and fantasy. And you wondered why we never put author pictures anywhere!

Please take note that we’re not angry at each other, and this isn’t some sort of a terrible break-up. Rather, it’s a changed life situation where three literary artists no longer have the opportunity to work together in the same way they have been. We still intend to proof-read for each other, and work together via email as much as possible. However, our working arrangements have taken a radical change in new directions that are very good for each of us as individuals, while at the same time resulting in a change in how we present ourselves as authors.

All three of us have signed with the Electric Scroll, and have decided that maintaining our separate author pages there will be much easier than asking poor Scott to create and maintain separate web sites for each of us. The web address is www.electric-scroll.com.

Scott Ashby

Our shared website, www.am-jenner.com, will be going away shortly, and this blog will eventually dissolve as well, though all three of us will be contributing to the Electric Scroll's blog from time to time. You'll find us there, writing about things we find interesting, and hopefully things you'll like as well.

We’d like to collectively thank you for being our good friends and loyal readers, and hope that you continue as our friends and readers into the future. Expect the same sort of good writing you’ve enjoyed in the past, and join us in wishing the best to each other as we pursue our writing with a little less help from our friends.

A M Jenner
Scott Ashby
Natalie Peck

Still Breathing

Did you ever have one of those sorts of days when you knew beyond doubt that life was out to get you? Me either. If I did, though, it might resemble the weeks I’ve been living through.

I’m being pulled in a lot of different directions right now, which is making things just as close to impossible to write anything as they can get.

I’ve started a physical fitness program with the help of the Walking for Fun website. I’m virtually walking the Chemin Le Puy trail in France. In the last month I’ve walked almost sixteen miles. I average about half a mile a day, but that’s half a mile more than I was walking before, so it’s a great improvement for me. Mom walks with me at night when it’s late enough for the mosquitoes to have gone to bed.

Dad is still working on healing his decubitus. (That’s a pressure wound, or in the common cant, a bedsore.) Part of the problem is that diabetics heal very, very slowly. What this means for me as his medical coordinator is that he has more people trying to work with him to see it, more appointments that have to be scheduled, and more rides to those appointments arranged. To make matters more complicated, his primary doctor has a problem in her office with getting paperwork processed in a reasonable amount of time, and we are therefore searching for another doctor who can handle all of Dad’s challenges, who takes his insurance, and who is taking new patients.

Mom is getting ready to retire after eighteen years of service to her current employer, and some thirty-six years of full time work throughout her lifetime, most of it as a single mother and primary supporter of the household. It often takes her a while to absorb all of the information that is dished out at high speed in various retirement meetings, and the opportunity to ask questions is often gone before they are thought of. My brain is always looking for the catch, though, and I’m a bit quicker to spot the need to have a particular question asked. I’m not saying that she’s mentally impaired in any way, mind you, just that our brains work differently. She tends to gather all of the facts and absorb them before asking questions, while I come up with questions before I have all the facts in hand. That makes us a good team!

Her pending retirement means I get to go with her to the various meetings and help make arrangements and decisions that will affect her finances for the rest of her life. It also means that a serious effort has to be expended to make her home office ready to work in, which would include filing approximately sixteen boxes of papers.

Last Monday (the 8th), while we were on our way to a retirement meeting (this one with her current employer), we were sitting in the left-most non-turning lane at a stoplight and started to smell smoke. Then we started to see it. It was coming from beneath our car’s hood. The light turned green and we dove across three lanes of traffic and into a parking lot, where we switched off the car immediately. It was smoke, not steam.

We opened the hood. A Hispanic gentlemen dressed in the t-shirt and jeans uniform of the day-laborer who had been waiting at the bus stop came running over to the car and practically pushed us out of the way. He was afraid we were going to open the radiator cap. I told him I knew better than that. He still refused to let me anywhere near the car, but told me that he was a mechanic who had once built the monster truck “Gravedigger”. I disbelieve that claim because a mechanic of the caliber to work on that truck would not be hanging out at a bus stop during regular working hours – he’d be working somewhere, even if he was not still with that race team. Additionally, no mechanic of that caliber would tell me he wanted my glass of ice cubes to pour onto the engine part that was smoking.

I refused to give him the ice, so he took a bottle of water from another man who had come over to the car, and poured it on some part, even though I was yelling at him not to touch our car. Twit.

In the end, we got rid of the volunteer “mechanic”, and managed to get a ride to the meeting (we were on time) and back to Mom’s workplace. My brother-in-law, who is a real mechanic, checked the engine over and we got it to the workshop of the mechanic we pay to work on the car. The air conditioning motor is dead, and it was an electrical almost-fire that caused all the smoke. However, we stopped the fire from bursting into flames when we shut off the car’s engine. The car will take more money to fix it than we are willing to put into it. We’re now borrowing my sister’s car, and working on getting together the money to buy a new-to-us used car that will hopefully last us a good many years.

Remember those sixteen boxes of filing? I spent a goodly chunk of today going through them looking for the title to the car. Found it, too, but not until the end of the day and the very end of the boxes, of course.

All is well, or will soon be well…and in the meantime, I’m still working like mad to get caught up on my homework, redesign my website from scratch, and squeeze out a few hours to work on my writing association’s website and get enough sleep to function each day. Yes, I know…good luck!

Chairs and Creaky Joints

As many of you already know, I have osteoarthritis throughout my entire body. This makes a lot of simple things that most people don’t think about into challenges, sometimes monumental challenges. For example, it’s now winter. Yes, I do live in Arizona, and I know that people who live with several feet of snow sneer at the idea of Arizona even calling a season winter. I used to be one of them. I would even wear shorts when we visited my grandparents for Christmas.

However, Arizona does have winter. It does get cold here, even in the desert part. The low deserts have spent the last week with a hard freeze warning. Warning is weatherman speak for “it’s happening now or going to happen”. Even the Phoenix area where I live had a freeze warning. I saw pictures taken not more than an hour’s drive through city traffic, of a volleyball net with icicles hanging from it. I haven’t seen icicles of any size since I moved from Utah.

For most of my life I have preferred cold weather to hot, because you can always put another layer on, but in taking layers off, there are certain guidelines of how much you can take off and still go out in public.

As the arthritis has attacked one joint after another, I’m finding that more of my life is being controlled by the weather. Heat feels good. Cold hurts. Even indoors in a temperature controlled environment, I hurt more on cold days and on cloudy days. When it’s cold outside my joints all ache. Moving anything hurts. Even typing hurts; the arthritis has spent much of the past year moving into my hands and wrists.

That’s the bad news. I don’t share it to evoke pity, only to let you know what is happening in my life. There’s also good news. Ibuprofen is a wonderful drug. On most days, it’s able to chase away enough pain that I can concentrate on what I’m doing. I also have both a cane and a walker I can use on really bad days. Working on my books is something I can usually do even when I don’t feel in top form, though every task demands more time and concentration.

This last week has been difficult, physically, but the weather is slowly improving and I’m really looking forward to those hundred-degree-plus days that will be here soon. From where I sit, the sooner the better.

During this week I started editing The Castle Project, bugged one of my outside editors to finish and return Just a Name, and sent Mind Touch out to beta-readers. I also looked into some methods of being able to update my website more easily, and make it look more spiffy at the same time. The program I use on my writing association's website is very easy to use for updating the site, but I found it very difficult for setting up my own site. I inherited control of the association's already set-up site. A second program which I own but had never even opened was considered, and I signed up for a free class through my library that will teach me to use it. I'm already loving it, so watch for changes on the website as I learn more about how to use the program. It's a six week class, and they won't let me work at my own pace, so those changes are coming, but don't expect them in the next day or so.

Also this week I worked on the chairs for my dollhouse project, but discovered that dowels don’t hold together well when secured by hot glue or by Elmer’s glue. At least, they don’t hold together well enough to stand any sort of strain, such as being held by one leg and painted. I got nine chairs cut out, four chair frames constructed, and watched them crumble apart as I painted them. I’m now devising a plan to make sturdier joints. If the chairs were full-size, I would simply drill holes in the uprights and make the crosspieces have pegs on the ends of them, but that doesn’t work when the entire chair is only two inches tall. I need the chairs to be able to stand enough pressure that I can take thin jute and embroider seats onto the frames, and pretend it is woven wicker. Because they all fell apart there are no pictures, but hopefully I’ll have some pictures of half-completed chairs next week.

~Marie

Bookcases

 Bookcases. Nice, aren’t they? Where else would you put a book? In my home, bookcases are not just a decorative item, they’re put to use. Every bedroom has a bookcase “for personal use”. There are bookcases in the office, the kitchen, the living room, and about 20 bookcases in the library. My official author bio isn’t kidding when it says I live with around 5,000 books. I can’t be more specific than that, because I only have about half of them cataloged. I have a lot of ebooks too, but they don’t take up nearly as much space to store, and are much easier to catalog.

Before I resume the cataloging, though, I need to finish my huge filing project – in between the time I spend on…making more books.

During this week, I released a new short story collection, Bits and Bites. More info on that is over on the “Other Books” tab at the top of the page. I also finally got back to working on my dollhouse project.

What’s my dollhouse project? It began initially with the intention of creating several photo sets which could be rearranged and decorated to make my website a photo interface. The first piece that was going to be made was a book shop with a flat above it. Designs were sketched, the walls constructed, and interior wall treatments begun. Then I realized that what I was building wasn’t going to suit my needs for the website, so that part of the idea was abandoned. However, I was having a lot of fun creating a dollhouse on a small budget, and decided to continue with it, just for fun. The bottom floor is a book store with a small office in the back, and the upper floor is a small flat with a kitchen, sitting room, and two bedrooms. The house is meant to be owned by a middle class person in a small town in rural Europe in the mid 1800’s – so the lack of indoor plumbing is deliberate in this “hundred year old building”.

At this point, I have the book store and office hardwood floor in. The book shop walls have wainscoting and a chair rail beneath a plastered surface, while the office walls are just plastered all the way up.

The next step is furniture. For a book store, that means bookcases. Lots of them. I’ve got four made so far. The picture at the top of the blog is of my book cases. The picture at the bottom is more zoomed out so you can see my computer behind them and get a sense of scale. Each bookcase is 2 1/4” wide, 4” tall, and 1/2” deep. Each of those books has been individually made, painted, and glued into the book case. I think I’m still going to need three more of them for the book shop, but this week I’m working on making chairs.

Dollars to Donuts

We’ve all heard the phrase, but where did it come from, and what, exactly, does it mean? My online friend wry me asked me about the phrase “dollars to donuts”, and I thought I’d share my research with everyone.

In searching (and re-searching) for the answer to wry’s question, I found a wonderfully entertaining and educational website called the Phrase Finder.

There, I learned that the phrase "dollars to donuts" refers to something that is certain. It’s such a sure thing that you would be willing to bet your valuable dollars against your opponent’s worthless donuts, because you are that certain you are going to win the bet and not have to fork over the money.

It’s an old phrase, from the mid-1800’s. Other phrases with the same meaning are “dollars to buttons”, “dollars to cobwebs”, and the (older) English “a pound to a penny”. Apparently the donut version has had the longest staying-power because it’s alliterative. And cute.

This week has still been busy with all the stuff that has to be done after you get out of the hospital. Of course, it was Dad in the hospital, not me, but I get to do all the follow-up stuff for him. I’ve been running all over doing various errands, sitting on the phone on hold making appointments, waiting at the pharmacy for prescriptions and so forth. I also am in charge of setting up his medications for him, and with new prescriptions, I had to take out some of his usual pills and put in the new temporary ones.

The weather in Phoenix has been colder than my body likes, and I’ve been struggling against my arthritis all week, as well. Although I only briefly succumbed to the icky sore throat stuff, I just can’t seem to get warm unless I burrow under my electric blanket. Interestingly, you don’t get much writing done from under an electric blanket.

I had a meeting with the communications director of my writing association, and she taught me “all I need to know” about the association’s web site, where I will be doing the maintenance from here on. It shouldn’t take a lot of time, at least once I get to the point that I don’t have to look up each step and refer to a cheat sheet as I go.

I had a lovely visit with new letterboxing friends Mighty Oaks of Barlow and Hot2Molly who were in town for the Fiesta Bowl and came over to my home to meet me.

Interestingly, I only got a little actual writing done this week, and that was at the store. Mom and I had gone to CVS looking for some stuff we needed for Dad. Y back started hurting very bad while we were there, so I sat down to wait while she finished the shopping. I have been trying for almost two weeks to get a certain conversation written between Bunny and Carrington in my still-unnamed book, and all of a sudden the right words flicked into my head. I carry a small notepad and pen always, for quick jotting of ideas, but it wouldn’t do for writing of dialog. However, I was at CVS. I hobbled over to the stationery department, grabbed a notebook, hobbled back to my seat, and started writing like mad. Five pages later I finished the conversation, and the chapter, just as Mom walked up to retrieve me. We paid for the notebook and were on our way to other destinations.

With luck, next week will be a little better organized, and I’ll have more time for taking care of the website, doing the updates on my website, and actually making progress on my book.

Welcome to the Future!

Today is the first day of a new year. The year behind has closed, and the year ahead awaits, a blank slate to write upon. It can be sort of scary to contemplate a whole year, knowing that every day I will be making choices that affect the contents of the rest of the year. Choices I make in January can mandate what choices will be available to me in November. It's also a lot awesome, knowing I have the power to make those choices!

In December I read 9 books containing 1218 pages. My year-long reading total was 210 books, most of them novels, containing 45,844 pages. I have to say that before this year my only experience with "Victorian Authors" was Charles Dickens. While I had read - or tried to read, some of his works in the past, I hadn't succeeded in finishing any of them and had written of all of the authors of the era as extremely wordy, inordinately fond of long words which have now fallen out of use, and utterly boring and depressing.

This year, thanks to the wonder of ebooks, I've been able to read a goodly chunk of the works of Mark Twain and H. G. Wells. Not all Victorian authors are of the same stamp. I finally understand why Mr. Twain is called a humorist. His observations of the human race and the manner of his sentence construction had me laughing out loud on more than one occasion. I love his fiction; his essays are entertaining, and his travelogues absorbing. I'm very much enjoying Mr. Wells' fiction. His guesses on where technology will take the human race in the future are entertaining. What is amazing is how many of his predictions have come true, and which things have largely not changed, as I look back on his looking forward. I'm not so fond of his political, philosophical, and religious writings (which are sometimes all mixed up in one essay), so I have to admit that I just skimmed them. He does use more words unfamiliar to me (and also unfamiliar to my nook's dictionary) than Mr. Twain does.

I didn't get a lot of work done this week, chiefly because my Dad was in the hospital from December 22-30, and our entire family's routine was disrupted as a result. However, he is home now, we had Christmas last night, and although there'll be a few more medical things for me to coordinate, things will be more or less back to normal.

My public goals for 2013 will keep me very busy this year, which hopefully will keep me out of trouble. I plan to publish seven books of my own. January should see the short story collection Bits and Bites published. I have four short novels planned that will be ebook only, whose titles will be announced later. I expect to publish the suspense novel Just a Name sometime in May, and the fantasy Mind Touch in the fall. I'm working on an updated website for myself.

In addition, I am the newsletter editor for my church congregation, and I might be working on the website for my writing association.

 

~Marie

Resolution Update: November

My goals for this year began as:

• Graduate from college. (Accomplished)
• Write a new manuscript, something I haven't had time to do since I started college. (Accomplished)
• Take a vacation someplace out of Arizona. (Accomplished)
• Hug my daughter every day. (In Progress)
• Learn how to make book trailers and post them to YouTube. (Accomplished!)

As I continue through the year, my evolving list of goals reads:

• Hug my daughter every day. (Still in Progress, with modifications)
• Support my daughter as she takes her turn at college. (Accomplished)
• Finish editing The Siege of Kwennjurat and get it published. (Accomplished)
• Reformat all ebooks so they look better. (Accomplished)

The hugs were temporarily stopped during October, as we realized we were passing the flu back and forth. Now that we're recovered enough to consider ourselves no longer contagious, they have resumed.

Happily, The Siege of Kwennjurat was released on October 24th. Of course, if you read my blog, you already know this, because I've talked about nothing else all month. I've been working in this world for sixteen years, and was rather happy to be done with it at last. During most of that time, I have had a hand drawn and colored map of the Ten Kingdoms hanging above my desk. Even though the book was available for sale slightly before the 24th, I had decided to take the map down on the 24th, as a private celebration of the completion of my work in that world, and a symbol to myself that goals can be accomplished, even when they take a long time to materialize.

On the 22nd, I had a dream. Book ideas often come to me through dreams, and the vivid scenes that are the seed for the novel usually remains largely unchanged through the writing process. In this dream, I saw two people meeting in a shadowy place, and speaking in low tones. I recognized one of them immediately as a character from Kwennjurat. From their conversation, I soon realized that the other person had been mentioned in the books, but didn't have a large role. I had thought the second person was dead. They are not dead. I have left my map up. Research and plotting is already underway. There will, apparently, be a third book in the Kwennjurat Chronicles, even though most of the action in the third book will not be in the Ten Kingdoms. Hang on to your hats, this is going to be an interesting ride!

I have two trailers up on YouTube, and ideas are coming for other video projects including but not limited to book trailers. My video camera had other ideas. It apparently decided it didn't have any further interest in living, so further forays into video are temporarily delayed until I see enough books to replace the video camera -- or find the money someplace else.

I always have more than one book project under construction, and at any given time they're in different stages of being written, edited, and prepared for publication. Right now, I have a romantic novella that hopefully will be out around thanksgiving. It's a Christmas themed story, so if it misses its deadline it will have to wait a full year. Because of its length, I plan to release it in ebook only, and for at least the first several months, it will be in Amazon's lending program, which means Kindle only. The title is A Gigolo for Christmas. Yes, you heard right, A M Jenner is writing a book with the word "gigolo" in the title. You'll have to get the book and read it to see if my standards have actually slipped. I've also got a short story collection that hopefully will be out around the first of the year named Bits and Bites. By the end of next year, I hope to have the suspense novel Just a Name, and the fantasy Mind Touch published as well, so there's lots of good news and new books in the pipeline for my devoted fans -- all ten of you. (That's a joke - I hope I have more than ten fans.)

On the handcrafting front, I hauled out my daughter's knitting looms and started a shawl, but that project got derailed because of the dollhouse project I'm involved in. It began as an idea to make a miniature bookshop to use as a set for photo shoots for my website, but has evolved into simply a project to build a miniature bookshop dollhouse with a flat above the shop. Each of the floors has been constructed. My mom is planning on finishing and furnishing the flat, and I'm working on the bookshop. So far, I have built the stairs to go upstairs with, laid down hardwood flooring, painted, and polished it, painted the walls in the office at the back of the shop, and I'm working on creating the wainscoting for the front of the shop. I'm not going to post any pictures until it's finished, though. I'm making it on a budget in half-scale, which means I get to make the doors and windows and everything else completely by hand, because purchasing dollhouse things in half-scale is beyond my budget. Plus, it's fun to figure out how to create it and make it look good when my construction materials are mostly found items already in my craft supplies.

I only finished reading seven books this month, but my page total is 4367. 

~Marie

Winding Down...or Ramping Up?

Two weeks. Four more "Instructional Sessions" in each of my classes. And Finals. then I'm out for the "summer". I'm worn out and looking forward to the break.

As soon as I'm free of schoolwork, I'll return to my very neglected writing. Anne has been working over Deadly Gamble, and should pass it to me soon.

I will be diving into learning photoshop, with the idea of making our own cover this time instead of using a CreateSpace template. It's not that we don't love their templates, but if we use their template, they own the copyright on the cover, and I can't use the same cover for the ebook. If I make the cover, I can use the same one for the ebook, and I like that.

I'll also be learning better ways to format the ebooks so they look better internally.

I'll go over Deadly Gamble, and then it can be formatted for print and ebooks, and the cool cover put on it, and sent out into the wide world.

There will be website updates as well, something I've been neglecting. Does anyone know how hard it is to make a shopping cart for your website? I was going to take a class on that this fall, but they've decided not to teach it (now that I've completed the prerequisites!)

As soon as I've finished that, I'll be making new covers for Tanella's Flight, Fabric of the World, and Clues to Food, and uploading those for print; then I'll be reformatting the ebook versions and republishing with the new covers and better internal formatting.

If it's still not time for school to start, I'll get working on final edits for The Siege of Kwennjurat, which is the sequal to Tanella's Flight.

The fall semester will be challenging mentally, but not as challenging physically, because most of my classes are online, and those that are on campus are lined up in neat, compact blocks on Tuesday and Thursday, so I'll have a lot less travelling and wasted time than I have with the swiss-cheese schedule I have now.

~Marie

And Now...The News You've All Been Waiting For!

The first two months of this year have been extremely chaotic.

First, my father spent three weeks in the hospital. He fainted at church, and when he got to the hospital they discovered he was almost out of blood. It took time to discover where the bleeding was coming from, and by then it had pretty much stopped on its own. In the meantime he had other problems which were only discovered because he was already at the hospital, which ended up in his having two surgeries and narrowly escaping a third. He was finally discharged to a "long term care facility" where he stayed an additional two days before being sent home to his "normal" schedule which includes 3 dialysis treatments, six caregiver visits, and two nurse visits weekly. It's my responsibility to keep his medical life organized, and after a hospital stay of this duration, you have to reactivate all the people and transportation and appointments, in addition to the follow-up visits to your own doctors the hospital demands you attend.

I got the new, totally redesigned website up, and mostly running, but had many problems with the scripting, and had to get help to make things work the way they should. Thanks Maos!

In the middle of all this, the spring semester of school started. One teacher, who I had for two classes, was insisting that her classes were to watch her "carefully screened and thoughtfully chosen" R-rated movies which "have no sex, no violence, and no language" (then why do they have an "R"?). I don't watch movies with an "R" on them, for religious reasons. I ended up dropping from both of her classes and picking up two other classes, but in the mean time I had joined the other two classes after they started, and I got behind on my homework in the classes I kept while I was running around trying to get my schedule straightened out. I have been playing catch-up and frantically doing last-minute homework since then, and can't seem to be working ahead like I did most of last semester...and mid-terms are already upon me; I have major presentations and tests in all my classes next week that I really don't feel ready for.

I sat down to do the last of my year-end accounting and discovered I have no access to my eBooks and sales reports at Amazon. They have redesigned their stuff, and somehow I have ended up with two accounts tied to the same email address with two different passwords. They keep explaining to me that I must have clicked on "new account" instead of "I have an account" (possible but not likely), and given a different password (possibly but HIGHLY unlikely), and that they can reset my password if I ask them to.

What I can't understand is why they would allow two accounts to be attached to the same email address in the first place (this strikes me as bad computer programming). I have asked them, twice, if they will reset the password so I can get into my account, and all I get is the explanation that I have two accounts. I'm getting very upset, and although, this year, it really won't affect my taxes (I didn't get any money from Amazon) I still need my sales figures. Plus I won't be able to publish any more eBooks at Amazon if I can't get into my account.

Anne and I have been working on Deadly Gamble as often as we can, and it's taking shape for publication. We really appreciate all those who gave us such excellent input.

And finally, I realize that I haven't been posting any serial here. I have decided on the next book, but because of the craziness of my life at the moment, I'm only going to promise to post a chapter twice a week...I'll start with chapter one on Tuesday.

~Marie

Problem Solved!

First, I want to thank Okie Dog, one of my letterboxing friends, for discovering the problem and pointing it out to me.

When I go into my account at Createspace, I see a much different page than the people trying to find my books see, Which is why when Createspace recently made some changes, I was totally unaware that it is nearly impossible to search for a book, or an author, from their main page. This makes it very difficult for anyone who wants to purchase a book to find it if I only have given them a link to Createspace's main page.

Until I discover a better solution, I have changes the "buy my books here" link that's over in the right hand column. The link will now take you to my website, to the Book Shoppe page...where there are individual links to the print books at Createspace, the Kindle versions at Amazon, and the other ebook formats at Smashwords. No matter what format you prefer to read in, you can now "get there from here".

I do apologize for the frustration and difficulty in getting to the page to purchase the books. I am deeply grateful to Okie Dog for telling me about the problem. And even though it means an extra click, I have at least provided a work-around.

Anne

Spring is Sprung...

...and I've come down with spring fever. I've been doing spring cleaning in my home, tending my flourishing garden, (I have four small green strawberries, five or six small tomatoes, the radishes and lettuce are doing well, and there's pea pods on the vines!) and giving my website a major update. What's new? The school's format is different; you now must register in order to take the school. If you were already taking it, you'll have to pause in your studies and register, then you will have a much more open access to the lessons than before. Basically, the writing school is still free, but I want to know how many students I have and who they are. The colors are all different, with a bright new look for spring. A book review page has been added, now that I have some reviews to post on it. I'd really appreciate receiving some for the poor little picked on books that have none...so if you've read them, send me a review. Please? I'm now offering to present lectures or workshops to any group who would like to invite me...I also teach a full class on writing for interested groups. There's a new page on the site detailing what's taught and the applicable fees. I want to thank the "Atlas Quest Brain Trust" for help with this update. It seems no matter what I need to know, someone at Atlas Quest has the answer. In this case, AQ webmasters Green Tortuga and Wassamatta_u answered some questions I had on how to do some cool stuff to the site. Unfortunately the answer was, "you can't", but they saved me a lot of time trying to do it anyway. Also Eidolon donated a bunch of his time to me in helping to figure out what was wrong with some of the code I'd written. In that case, the answer was, "nothing". It still won't work on my hard drive, but it works fine online, so maybe the real answer is, "my computer doesn't like me very much". I invite you to take a little time to poke around my site. Enjoy yourself. Check out the great books for sale. Write a review or two. Then let me know how you like the changes, and what you might like to see different, or new, in the future. --Anne

New Website and other news

Whew! It's been a long month. I've been working frantically to finish my new website. I've been totally rewriting the coding to get rid of the frames, and a bunch of other things that will never be seen, but should make the page run better. (Yes, I know, I'm starting to sound like other programmers.) *shrug* Other than new colors, and a couple of new pages that will be unveiled soon, the biggest difference is I'm no longer at a free, .co.cc domain that no one seems to know where in the world it originates. One friend looked it up and said it was an island off Australia. My virus checking program said it was from South Korea, and I had to use an exception to see my own site. The trailing letters gave erroneous information, since my place was actually hosted in the US...it just had a strange domain, because it was free.

I now have sold enough books to afford a year's worth of paid hosting and a US domain name. My website is now found at www.am-jenner.com! I'm so excited! A new email address comes along with the new website, too. anne@am-jenner.com.

We've also spent the last two months reading the suggestions given by our proofreaders for Fabric of the World, and then ripping the book apart and totally rewriting it. I've gotta thank Doctor, Force of Five, Nitrocat, neknitter, bobguyman, Hornicorn, and Pat for all their work and suggestions. The book is a lot better, and there are a lot of changes that have been made since you read it. We expect Fabric of the World to be published very soon. We are currently waiting for the publisher's cover-maker to go back online, and the book should be ready for purchase within two weeks of that time.

As with Tanella's Flight, hand-made autographed bookplates featuring a handcarved stamp will be available.