That's right, you can win a Kindle. It's easy. Just go here Monday through Friday (except for Thanksgiving and the day after)from TODAY (November 16)until December 14. Answer the scavenger hunt question for that author for that day, and you'll be entered. My day is December 1st, just so ya know.

Find new and interesting authors and you might just win yourself a Kindle. Win/win. How great is that?

I haven't been doing much of anything except writing. I'm about 10,000 words away from finishing the YA fantasy I'm working on, so that's good. We've also got free tickets to the Texas Renaissance Festival tomorrow and I'll be taking a break to go to that.

Some interesting links:

scottedelman posted this one: WWII Classic From Here to Eternity was originally considered too gay to be published. As the nation marks another Veterans Day with gays still barred from serving openly, Kaylie Jones, daughter of From Here to Eternity author James Jones, reveals that a major gay sex storyline was cut from her father’s famed novel. Plus, view the original manuscript.

Bookends, LLC: Who Does This? Not too long ago somebody thought it would be a good idea to send an angry diatribe of an email to roughly 400 publishing professionals.

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

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Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

Ecstatic Days Blog post by Lavie Tidhar: Excited About International SF

DearAuthor has a reader recommendation post for Multicultural Books


Troyce has another job interview today, so everybody think lucky thoughts.

Someone just sent me this link for the Anne Taintor page. The magnets give you the best overview. Some of my favorites:

"she was one cocktail away from proving his mother right"

"I believe we have an opportunity to make some extremely poor choices"

"it would, of course, have to look like an accident"

"the secret ingredient is resentment"

Hoping hurricane Ida doesn't cause much trouble.

We had a great weekend, and got to spend Saturday night and Sunday morning with a friend who came into town unexpectedly. She's going into surgery for cancer towards the end of this month, so if you have any positive vibes to spare, please send them her way.


Something fun:
Stormtroopers 365 A year in the life of tiny plastic stormtroopers.

My email is down, I don't know for how long. So that's a great start to the day.


eldritchhobbit's new book: The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America: From H.P. Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko Now an international, multi-ethnic, and cross-disciplinary group of scholars investigates the meaningful ways in which fantasy and Native America intersect, examining classics by American Indian authors such as Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko, as well as non-Native fantasists such as H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling.

Fun for the Whole Family: Traversing the Texas Book Festival "They fuck you up, your mum and dad," Philip Larkin once famously wrote, and, yes, I suppose mine did me, if not in particularly interesting ways. But what my parents indisputably did right was put books in my hands at an early age.

For marycrawford: Tantor Audio Readies Four Sherlock Holmes Titles

From WebUrbanist: Ten of the Most Chilling Haunted Castles in the World

Today I had jury duty in municipal court. ( again )

The empire strikes back

In recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal.

RSS feeds again

If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience.

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

c_s_i

If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here.

Enveloped in postcards

Last week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be giving ten random users paid account credits.

Photos of the week

If you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too!
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I’m always fascinated by the traditional idea that all vampires are rich. Presumably this is a function of two things:
One: they have a castle or two somewhere in Eastern Europe stuffed with valuable heirlooms and
Two: they all get rich because they live forever.

These are of course fallacies. Castles are expensive to run–which undoubtedly explains the mandatory tropes of cobwebs, skeletons and other signs of residential neglect. Housekeepers are expensive. Plus, it’s a good thing Vlad’s a corpse, because heating the old family pile costs a small fortune all on its own. Flogging the family silver on eBay is only going to net so much cash. Nope, he’s better off in a condo.
As far as amassing a fortune over time goes, that would depend on one’s business sense. Just because somebody’s Undead, that doesn’t mean she or he’s good with investments. I don’t care how long I linger on this planet, I’m never going to fully understand derivatives.

I figure the number of financial whiz kids in the supernatural community is about the same as in the human population. They exist, but they’re in the minority. Some will, with luck and experience, have a nest egg for those days when it rains angry villagers with pitchforks—but that wouldn’t cover the day to day necessities of black leather and styling gel. So, at least some of my characters work. Some even like the satisfaction of a job well done.
What occupations they have depends on their talents and skills. Mac, the hero of SCORCHED, was a cop before his luck ran out and after that he remains, more or less, a kind of cop. He’s the type of guy who identifies with his career. My werewolf is a computer science professor, my werecougar a journalist, and my witch had to go back to school because she couldn’t figure out the business side of ghostbusting. What they do is a big part of who they are and how they fit into society. When I say the werewolf is the first of his family to pursue an academic career, to escape the family construction business and strike out on his own, we learn a fair amount about who he is before we even get to the business of being furry. He’s an educator, a dreamer, and a solver of puzzles, and that all comes together in his classroom.
Who we are is a complex bundle of factors that includes the nine to five—be that a.m. or p.m. Because a lot of my stories revolve around how non-humans fit in a human world, the work world is a goldmine for humour and character quirks. It’s also a great source of conflict.
After all, who hasn’t had at least one co-worker who was a good candidate for a flesh-eating monster in disguise?

Originally published at The Daily Strange. Please leave any comments there.

Here's one not to fall for: Virtual Author's Assistant

It only cost $597.00, which I guess is much cheaper than the $10,000 or so that people pay to vanity presses. Apparently virtual writers need virtual assistants for their virtual careers.

(If I had an assistant, I would have them doing things like painting the kitchen, cleaning the gutters, and giving the cat his arthritis medicine.)

From arcaedia: How Not to Get an Agent


I caught an episode of Destination Truth about Mexico's Island of the Dolls. It was interesting, because I'd first seen it on an episode of Lonely Planet years ago, when Julián Santana Barrera was still alive and giving personal tours.

Anyway, back to work.

I keep meaning to get back here more often, and it keeps not happening. But I do have good news.

One: I am extremely pleased to announce that the talented Charles Saunders, creator of Imaro and Dossouye, will be dropping by to guest blog at the Black Gate web site from time to time, and he's just posted his first entry. Charles is one of the greatest living sword-and-sorcery writers we have, and I'm thrilled he's on board. Drop by the site and see his first post, then make sure you go find his fiction!

Two: John O'Neill has recently posted a preview of issue 14's cover, and is through laying out the fiction. We just have to wrap up the review sections. The finished issue should be available come Christmas time, and it will be extra bonus size, and not merely by a page or two.

Three: Now that I have a copy of the contract, I no longer feel like I'm jinxing anything by revealing that I have a two book hardback deal with Thomas Dunne, a St. Martin's imprint, for my Dabir and Asim historical fantasy/sword & sorcery novel(s). It's a good feeling. I had planned on keeping everyone abreast of the whole submitting process once I sent the thing off, but it didn't seem right talking about any of it until things were finalized. If anyone's curious about what it's like suddenly going from "outside" to "inside," I can post on that later.

Warm Regards, 

Howard Andrew Jones