As you have probably noticed, updating the blog was more complicated than we thought. It is now here, hopefully for good this time.
Meanwhile, I just want to say Merry Christmas to all the readers out there, the ones who read this blog, the ones who read my books, the ones who read other people’s books.
Having intelligent, articulate readers is one of the biggest blessings a writer can have. It is extremely satisfying to finally get a scene down and know that it is right, but it is even more satisfying when a reader says something that tells you they really understood what you were doing with that subtle bit of character development, or that they got the point you were making underneath all the complicated plot twists.
It’s not so much the appreciation (though I don’t know any writer who is tired of hearing people say “I love your book”) as it is the comprehension. It’s why “Your book made me think” is up there with “Your book kept me up til 3 a.m.” and “Your characters are so real” and “Your book made me laugh/cry” on the list of the top things writers want to have said about their work. (Yes, those are examples from a panel; the question was “What was the best complement you ever got about your work?” And as usual, I was the outlier – the best complement I ever got was when my mother put down Snow White and Rose Red and said to me, in a tone indicative of rather more than mild astonishment, “Pat, this book is well written.”)
So Merry Christmas, and thank you all.
And merry Christmas to you, too! We discovered your books when the first two Enchanted Forest Chronicles fell into my hand in a second-hand book store some years ago; my daughter was around twelve or so. I’ve been recommending them to people as girl-empowering reads ever since. They make us laugh, they make us think, and they encourage us – thank you!
The site looks great, and it looks like I can comment this time 🙂 Yay!
Merry Christmas to you, too! Congratulations on the new site, it looks very sleek and classy.
Merry 2nd day of Christmas! (We still have ten more. 0:)
Happy ongoing holidays, and congrats on the sleek new site!
Looks like commenting & RSS feed are both working fine. Is there a way to access the tag list, or plans to put the tag cloud (hopefully with all the tags) back up? That’s a feature I use a lot, and it’s great to be able to click on, say, “middles”, and have all the reminders of why the book’s not a lost cause just because I’ve hit 30K in one place. 😉
Addendum: Hey, is that threaded commenting I see? Let’s try it and find out!
Oooh, very shiny!
And I see the tag cloud is back, yay! Still not with *all* the tags (it looks like anything with 7 or fewer entries doesn’t show in the cloud, so “middles” and “endings” are not to be had, for example), but it’s a start!
Nice new website look!
Did the comments from this post on the old blog not get transported over here with it? I ask because this is a different set of comments than the ones I saw yesterday on the old site…
Anyway, Merry Christmas! I’ve started reading my new copy of The Seven Towers.
We transfered the whole web site, but there was a lag between when we backed up everything to move it and when the new site went live, so any comments that came in during that time got lost in the ether. Given the difficulties we had, I’m just grateful that that is all we seem to have lost. But do, please, let me know of any bugs that you find.
I’ve just finished re-reading the copy of The Seven Towers I got for Christmas (the paperback reprint from Firebird), and I was utterly delighted by your note in the back about how Amberglas originated as a cross between the Dowager Duchess of Denver and Chrestomanci! I’ve loved Chrestomanci for years, and I just recently fell in love with the Lord Peter Wimsey books as well. It’s no wonder Amberglas is one of my favorite characters.
Love the clean, fresh look of the new site! Beautiful! (And the possibility for threaded comments! Yay!)
Oh, lovely new site! (Thank you for not having the bubbles anymore — I have some occasional vision issues, and the bubbles weren’t helping. *wry*)
Good luck with stuff for the New Year, too!