C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 200

BREAK OUT THE CHAMPAGNE!

Closed Circle Lives!

After vowing never to darken the door of one of our software security providers again, and reinstalling every single product code 62 times—we have a counter—we are live! If you meet the "Come Back Again" sign, hit the 'refresh' button on your browser and reality should reveal itself.

Browse! Enjoy!

We did it!

We have run the fix, and now are testing. Some small glitches…

…but definite improvement. We're still hoping.

Ha!! We are going to make a fix, which shouldn't take long.

We have our fix. We're going to run it. Give us maybe half an hour.

We push the buttons, one after the other—and it glitches on the file downloads…

We're working on it.

We are so sorry, guys. We have 5 hours sleep between us and the darn security download software has taken exception to something. Everything checks out…step by step. But the download process is stuck somewhere.

We are all 3 working on it…

Drumroll…has started…

We are not going to make it by any decent hour tonight, and we don't want to open Closed Circle for the west coast, Hawaii and Australia while the east coast and Europe is asleep. Tomorrow at 12 noon Sunday in Spokane will be 3pm in New York, 8pm in London, and 7am Monday in Sydney, late but not impossible in the Eastern Med and Middle East…I think. This seems to be the best time for us ALL to enjoy the opening as a global  event—how's that for ambition? And no, I don't expect our readers in ...

Lynn Abbey's in: she's gotten the splint off…

…her hand, and is starting to work, having put together her new computer today (try screwing in tiny computer screws with a hand in rehab). Knowing we are so close to launch, she has edited and put three short stories into the pot.

So all 3 of the Three Musketeers will have works in the store for launch, (hurrah for us!) and Lynn will be working up other things—we may fling the doors of Closed Circle open tomorrow night. Don't hold us to that, but we are this close!

An eerie electronic silence

…from about 8am until about 3pm, local. Not one e-mail, Comment, tweet, or other contact from the outside.  I began figuring maybe I had screwed my incoming mail. But spam was arriving, though less than the usual 20 an hour.

Paranoia set in. I began to think maybe my recent troubles with that pseudo reg-cleaner had screwed my account. I started trying System Restore. This never ends well—but at least it doesn't end badly. The simple truth is I have had System Restore as an option since...

Here's what we hope, re schedule on the Closed Circle opening…

Jane's hit every snag I have, plus some: every time I've hit a technical glitch, as in Norton, as in various things of that ilk, she's had to abandon her books and rush to the rescue. She's done all the technicals of CC, and most of the covers, and all the panic details—not to mention me losing my entire genealogy file this evening (I found it, tucked in e-books, go figure)—but the upshot is, we're still putting finishing touches on the books—she found a major misspelling in one of my...

A day with the US Copyright office. Gasp.

I started before 11 am; it is now 3:01 pm local, and I just now got through registering the copyright on 4 books. I have to give the .gov site kudos for unflappability: it didn't lose info if you had to backtrack in the maze, and it developed an autofill button from your login, which made things really much easier as far as rote re-typing.

What they didn't say was you shouldn't USE the add new buttons to pile all your books into one basket. That took a call to a live human being in Washington ...

Progress on the e-book launch

We have spent the day trying to untangle the tentacles of MS Word from 4 relatively small files I thought I would run a fast conversion on. Wrong. Use Word Perfect. It produces actual HTML that we can convert. It does not scatter 3 lines of code into a document to produce a 1/m dash. Sheesh! What a dirty critter that is!

On the other hand, we are THIS close. I am finalizing Faery Moon, page by page. I've got to contact the copyright office. I've got to do some proofing. We don't have a...