First, we're happy to announce that the team has identified and fixed the issue with the YouTube conduit; you can now find and add videos from YouTube to your library and posts. As always, thanks for your patience!
The other news we have today is about a new addition to the Six Apart family: TypePad Micro, a new free level of TypePad that is streamlined for microblogging. We see a new form of blogging emerging that lives between the quick status updates of Twitter and Facebook and the long-form posts of "classic" blogging; TypePad Micro is designed to meet that need. You can read more about TypePad Micro in Chris Alden's post on the Everything TypePad blog.
A lot of the new capabilities we've added to TypePad this year were actually inspired by some of the best things about Vox: favoriting, member profiles, a dashboard to follow other bloggers, and easy ways to post content from other social media sites. But the things that make Vox different from TypePad are still there: Vox has always been -- and still is -- the best place for "friends and family" blogging, where you're in control over who sees what. TypePad, on the other hand, is built for the blogger who wants, no, craves, attention.
Do you have a passion or interest you want to share with people beyond your Vox neighborhood? If so, we'd love it if you tried out TypePad Micro. Maybe you've always wanted to start that obsessive blog that's just about waffle restaurants. Or want a place to share videos of your favorite band (Jonas Brothers, anyone? Anyone? ...). TypePad Micro's great for those topic-specific blogs. Take it for a spin and let us know what you think.
On the Vox front, our designers are working on some cool new themes (coming soon!). We'd also love to hear your thoughts about where we should take Vox in the coming year. What are the key things you'd like to see for Vox? If you've had a chance to use TypePad this year, what are the features there that we should bring over to Vox? And, if you're thinking big thoughts, how could we connect the Vox and TypePad communities in order to bring together bloggers and their shared passions? Your feedback is really important to us, so please leave a comment here, or shoot me a message.
And again, thanks for your patience as we found and fixed the YouTube bug!
~ daisy
As many of you have noticed, the YouTube Conduit is not working. I am so sorry about this; I know how frustrating it is.
The team is looking into how to get this fixed and I will update you as soon as I hear something. In the meantime, not all is lost... There is a work-around for posting videos.
When you're in the Compose Screen, just click on "embed." Ignore the fact that it says "Widget" before everything because you can definitely use this to embed videos as well. You'll just need to input the embed code from the video, enter a title (if you want) and hit OK.
It might not show up perfectly in your compose screen, but when you hit "Save," your video should appear just the way you wanted it to.
Hopefully this will allow you to keep posting videos while we figure out what's happening on our end.
As always, thanks for your patience.
Go forth and fill your libraries with media.
Seriously, thanks to everyone for being so amazing and patient. You are the reason I love Vox.
I was just told that the Amazon Conduit will be fixed by tomorrow. I will post here as soon as I get word that it's back up and running.
I know this has been frustrating and I am sorry there wasn't more I could do to make it less so. I really appreciate your patience though.
Cheers,
Bad news. As many of you have probably noticed, the Amazon Conduit was not fixed in the last week's release. Unfortunately, there was an undetected bug that is preventing the conduit from working.
We are working on this bug fix and hope to have the Conduit back up and running this week.
I will keep you posted.
Thank you for being so patient.
Blog Action Day is every October 15th, when blogger are asked to post something about a single issue to show our strength and conviction as an online community. It's a great way to feel connected to the greater good, and the participation of so many bloggers to support the world's leading non-profit organizations is something you can do to help, right now. By blogging today, you're supporting some of the world's leading non-profits and sharing your voice for change.
This year's topic is climate change, and we'd love to read your thoughts on the topic. If you participate, leave us a link to your post in the comments, so we know to check out your post!
Go to www.blogactionday.org to learn more, get a badge for your blog showing your participation, and see some ideas for your post on climate change.
Can't wait to read your posts!
~ daisy
The Amazon Conduit will be working again on October 15, 2009. Thank you to everyone for your patience.
Have a great weekend,
daisy, Team Vox
I finally figured out, late last week, that I was just coming up with excuses not to write.
I hate it when writers do that. Some people don't enjoy writing, and there, I can see some reason to make excuses. But people who love writing, then make excuses not to write?
I don't believe there's anything difficult about writing. The notion that you have to know exactly what you're going to say before you sit down to write is inherently silly; if you knew what you were going to say, it wouldn't be writing - it would be transcribing. Writing is about exploring ideas and creating something that doesn't exist until you type or scribble or encrypt it into existence.
But you always have something to say.
Somehow, I managed to talk myself into wasting time. Now, not everything I did before I started in on Prophesied was time-wasting. Some idea of how things develop and who all is going to be there is good. But once there's an outline and cast of characters in existence, the only reason not to write is because you're afraid what comes out won't be up to your own personal standards.
Here's a hint, though: It never is. What you're going to write is going to be first-draft, and it's going to require revision. There will be things about it that are good, and things about it that suck. However, until you write it, you can't do anything about the things that suck, and you don't have the good things to look at and go, "Hey, that's pretty good." So you have all of the anxiety, but none of the reward.
Even after all these years of writing every day, I still manage to get myself into places where I put off starting new projects. I do the same with research that's part of my job. I'll find excuse after excuse to not start a new research project, and every time I put something off, it only increases the anxiety that goes along with doing it.
Writing is about the last thing that should be like that, if it's what you love. The fear that you'll produce something crappy shouldn't be an impediment to doing the work; I'm sure I've quoted JBB before, but I'll do it again: "No great writer has ever been a wimp." You take risks. Those risks start with admitting to yourself that you think you have something worth saying, and then sitting down and trying to put it into words. The risks continue as we put our work out there to be critiqued. Some people are going to brutalize you. That's a fact of life. There will be people who absolutely hate whatever it is you do. No good reason why - you just aren't their kind of writer/composer/painter/pediatrician/pet groomer/bricklayer/boom mic operator/etc. They will hate your guts. They will call you unpleasant names. They will tell you that you don't know what you're doing. They will insult your lineage, tell you not to quit your dayjob, and so forth.
These people suck. I won't say that you should ignore them, because if you ignore any part of your audience (even the jackass part) you give up the opportunity to learn why they despise you and grow from their critiques, but anyone who uses the word "suck" as part of a critique has a somewhat limited amount they can teach you.
I've wandered a little bit afield. I'm finishing up the first chapter in Prophesied. I like where it's starting; there's a decent hook, I think, it brings Mack back in a recognizable form, but it gives him something different that he's working on. I want to finish establishing that he's still acting under the assumption that he's smarter than everyone around him (because if he weren't operating under that assumption, he wouldn't be Mack...), give him something scary to send him rolling forward (but not too scary, because I don't want to fall into the trap of writing a horror story, which I'm no good at), and then transition into the next chapter and introduce the second PoV character. Well, re-introduce her, since she was in the first book.
Here's an excuse not to do that immediately, though: I don't know how old she is. She was 14 last time I wrote her. That was two books ago. Mack can't go beyond age 39 (or rather, he won't admit to it), so I have to figure out if I actually stated how old he was in either of the first two books. I also need to figure out how old one of the new characters is, based on the established timeline in the previous stories. Freaking continuity. See, this is why I need a book deal and a large fan base and someone who obsessively follows my stories, so they can put all this stuff together for me. It'd be so much easier than doing it myself!
But those are all excuses. I can find whether Mack's age has ever been mentioned in 10 minutes or less, probably by searching on the word "thirty" and seeing what comes up in the earlier manuscripts. I've only got a thousand or so pages of text from the other books, total (the first is probably 1.5x longer), so going through and continuity-checking isn't hard. It's not as easy as just sitting down and writing, but it also doesn't get in the way of sitting down and writing.
There can't be excuses. Writing is a joyous activity that has no down-side. The fact that I manage to make excuses to not do it just astounds me.
In my last Team Vox post, I let you know that we're aware that the Amazon conduit is broken and that we're working to fix it. Many of you want to know when it's going to be fixed and I'm so sorry I haven't gotten back to you about that sooner.
Unfortunately, I don't have an exact date to give you, but rest assured, the Amazon conduit will be fixed in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, I'm about to finish my latest book and I could use a few suggestions as to what to read next, so... if you don't mind, let me know in the comments what's on your nightstand and/or what book you think I absolutely must read next.
Thanks! :)
It's time that I ought to be writing, but I'm not quite ready. Well, I may not end up "ready" to write tonight, because I'm fairly exhausted. Hope it's not swine flu.
I doubt it, though. See, I got home from work and started testing some software. I can't talk about what kind of software it is, because it's a product that's in closed beta testing and I do in fact take NDAs seriously, but testing is really tiring for me. Especially when it involves doing the same thing over and over to gather data that the company that built the program hasn't been willing or able to provide.
I think I put four hours into testing. I have no idea why. That's four hours when I didn't do much other than sit and stare at the screen, clicking buttons and pressing keys to see if, somehow, when I did the same thing over and over enough, a different result would occur.
Sounds like insanity, right?
I agree.
So I'm not at all in the right "head-space" to be writing, and since I'm still without my own laptop (I'm using Christy's for the time being, until we get mine back; 2-4 weeks means between now, and 2 weeks from now, but I really hope it's not a full month to repair, since that would stink) I don't have quite the ease of access to all my data that I need to get my thoughts organized before I start writing Prophesied.
I've got (and I may have said this) a full, functional outline of basically what happens. All scenes are subject to change, but the arcs for the two leads make sense to me. I need to figure out how a few other characters fit in, who a couple of characters are, and who's coming back from previous stories - I need to finish re-populating his world, since it's been 4-5 years since his last adventure, if not the last time I wrote about him.
The thing with Mack stories is that I really feel a need to be organized, because I know the kind of chaos that the character himself generates. I may go out and grab some more note cards, or I may not. Thankfully, a lot of existing characters already have cards, and lest I sound like I'm patting myself on the back, that was a great idea. (That I stole. From some book on screenwriting, and an image in my head of what Robert Jordan's workspace must have looked like.) Being able to pull out an index card that has a brief description of the character, key phrases, sample speech patterns - it makes it easier to go back to the character if it's been a while, or to differentiate him/her from other characters and prevent populating the world with a bunch of people who all have the same purpose and mannerisms. (See? I do actually read a few books about writing. I'm not as bad as I used to be at avoiding anything anybody else had to say on the topic...) So I figure, I'll do up some index cards, integrate them with the characters I'll be bringing back, maybe do up cards for scenes but maybe not, since doing that would make them more difficult to manage - although I do need to get a couple of characters placed appropriately. I hate it when characters just kind of float around my stories and I don't know exactly when or where they're going to show up.
I lie. I actually love that. I just have to remember to let them arrive whenever they feel like it. :)
