The Jig is Done …

Meaning the rejigging is done for now. I’ve renamed all the necessary files and re-uploaded them.

Bosley’s Builders are good to go for their next adventure … though progress in that direction is hung up in one of those situations that you apply that old nursery rhyme to. You know the one I mean … “for want of a nail a kingdom was lost”?

The image is of half the shallows. It just need a bunch of smooth little light blue tiles to cover the sandy looking studs to give you the idea that the low lying islands are getting flooded. As always with Lego, you need to use your imagination. One of the reasons I like it so much.

I’m waiting for those little parts to come by post. … little 1×2 tiles in light blue so I can enable Boz to visit with Robbie Rafter as steers his raft by, and for Bosley to get the news … the Post office promised to deliver on Friday but the parcel is not here yet, and it’s now Monday. Hundreds of possibilities why they didn’t make it so, okay, I am (im)patiently waiting.

Bosley’s Builders, 2

Lunch at the site, pizza again …

OMG, do you see what I see? Just noticed the smiley faces on the studs of the base plate … they’re not Lego, of course. But we knew that, right? It’s the Hardware Store Build and that base-plate is on notice.

This installment is now live here, on Story-ing Bricks … couldn’t change a few things, like the file name, and there being no author name, as if the installment appeared out of the ether … these items are part of the set-in-concrete nature of MSWord. Hopefully those will be fixed from now on.

Didn’t change the upside down order of posts. They should be easier to find with the blog-post re-titling. That’s a WordPress thing.

So I’m wondering whether if I organize a ‘cloud’ that’ll help with find-ability. Can but try, as the saying goes.

Rejigging Pages …

Having a bit of trouble rejigging the Page above called Brick Stories … if you click on that you’ll come to a page that says … Oops, can’t find it. I put it back in draft mode to figure out what happened to Bosley’s Builders, parts 1 and 2.

There’s a new page called Story-ing Bricks … which is where I will re-post the whole of Bosley’s Builders, beginning at the beginning, with today just the first installment.

I can’t believe the trouble I’m still having due to getting rid of Microsoft Word, the word processor that seems to think it owns the whole word processing world, and that was at least six months ago.

At the moment Bosley’s Builders seems to start at parts 3 or 4, depending on who is trying to access part 1. I thought to fix that and at the same time invert the order … you know start with Part 1 and go on from there, instead of starting with the latest and working back.

There has to be a better way to set that up.

But, not so fast, says Word. You need to pay us first if you want to shift this Word document from A to B. It turned out that Parts 1 and 2 were still in Word. There is a labor-intensive way to circumvent that, so that’s what I’m doing, one installment at the time.

Read Bosley’s Builders, Part 1, if you haven’t or haven’t for a while here on my new page Story-ing Bricks

If you are wondering why on earth “Story-ing Bricks?“

I googled the various possibilities and came up with this as a not yet hugely populated title. Can you imagine there is even a Lego store called Brick Island? And it is in Brisbane? (Brick Island was my first choice.)

Mongrel, 1

This is it! I’ve just let Draft 2 Digital (the publisher I’ve been with for about six years) know I’ll be serializing it here on my blog. Mind you, it’s not nearly Monday yet in the northern western hemisphere, so I am jumping the starter gun a bit.

And in addition, I said I’d write a post with Ushen’s letter. That’s not happening. It isn’t hard to read her story between the lines, and the details will keep till we meet her again as a grown up woman down the track.

Giving the manuscript another edit while turning it from a print format into an online reading format, I’m laughing about the bits that are already dated. I’ll be interested to hear about you tripping over them.

Rita de Heer, Mongrel, 1 Download

Earth Fall, 21

Connecting A to B

Connecting Earth Fall to Meld is not happening. The amount of time between them is out of wack. I think now that the events in Earth Fall took place before anything in Mongrel happened.

Lol, does it seem like I’m talking as though these events are coming into being without a writer’s input? Put like that? Yes, it does. A broad band of muscular storying is growing between Earth Fall and events in Mongrel and it’s not like I planned anything much.

Mongrel was to be part one of a trilogy that in my mind I’ve already scaled back to a twosome. Time will tell. Mongrel resides in the long long tail of indie published novels marketed by Draft to Digital.com.

I had a quick read of Mongrel’s Chapter 26 the other day and thought I wouldn’t mind running my eagle editing eye over it once more. And maybe turn it into an audio file by reading it chapter by chapter into some software and publishing that chapter by chapter.

Which will necessitate taking it off Amazon if I don’t want to get a shirty email, saying I’ve been cancelled, as the biggie doesn’t allow any part of a production it’s selling to exist outside the virtual covers of the item being sold.

Making some friends over on Substack, I got a bunch of links on how to find my voice. Thank you, Aurelian Ashmore. So yeah, I’m looking into it.

Earth Fall, 5

This image is a cut from an original photo by whom I don’t know from somewhere in the gloaming beside the virtual ocean where we go surfing when we open our laptops, switch on our desktops or scroll up our mobile phones. Cell phones to you, too.

It might even be a cut from an image from iStock where I purchased maybe thirty useful shots a few years back. I don’t remember. The fire is the important thing, though. As in, Claire builds a fire.

5. After the Night Download

Browser Shenanigans …

My online world broke this morning, like this tile broke … and was rethought in the way that I’m having to rethink my desktop …

I was glad to hit on a familiar page at last with this one … my WordPress dashboard. Thankfully, it was the same as it’s always been. I heaved a sigh of relief when I arrived.

It was then 2.30 PM and I’d struggled since I sat down after breakfast and chores to get back to my familiar scenario. My troubles began when suddenly my online bank was unavailable and the helpline operator and I thought at first that I’d been hacked.

But no, my then-browser updated overnight and apparently threw up a firewall that kept me out of my bank as well as several other places. Well I thought, away with that browser. I de-defaulted it and all my problems began.

Who knew there’d be 500+/- settings, and that there’d be a whole different architecture to accustom myself to, and that there’d be a bunch of new rules? One good thing about the new old browser is that everything is easy to find. I learned more about browsers in a couple of hours than I’d learned the whole year with the de-defaulted one.

I hope all the new stuff sticks in my head, as do I hope that all the stuff I have open on the desktop stays on there when I close the laptop. That I don’t have to find it all from scratch again next time I open the lid.

And although I enthusiastically welcome the password app, I also wrote down a bunch of them. You never know when you might be shut out, and at what level.

I managed to retrieve the situation without the help of an AI assistants, I’m glad to say. What FB AI assistants are doing beggars belief.