So I’ve been doing some work and research (more like Vince has been doing the research and I’ve been sitting here reaping some rewards of his research) and I’ve come to the decision that the book will pause here.

Pause, not end.

The reason being is the website needs to be fixed. I get 80-100 spam comments over a two day period and never any real comments. So the first thing to go is the comment script entirely. Hell while I’m at it I’m going to remove word press/comic press all together.

Now I know the opinions of flash vary and more than once I’ve disliked completely flash designed websites but that’s when you’re dealing with a more dynamic page. This page is more static. Other than the book updates nothing really gets changed on here - this and that do but nothing you notice.

So I think it’s time for a “cooler” website. Something a little more entertaining to look at and something a little more geared towards the purpose of this book. I’m going to be working on that for the next little while and while I do I don’t have time to write. So rather than kill my buffer for it. I’m going to pause the novel here.

You’ll have to be left to wonder what’s going to happen to Kyle next. Check back later for updates as to when we’ll be back live. I’ll be making the site vanish sooner or later, and you’ll be left to see nothing but the FIU logo and a launch date.

Think of it this way - Kevin got a hold of the website, it’s in his hands now and we’ll have to hope for the best. You never know with boy geniuses.

So I made up the posts for all of this week a couple weeks ago and thought, “there, don’t need to worry about it now.” Only I forgot that I needed to upload them. When I checked the site this morning I noticed that it wasn’t uploaded.

Thankfully my laptop is on and running so I was able to pull the posts off of the network and load them onto the site. The next couple of weeks are all ready to go, hopefully I can format the rest of the posts this week or next week before I run out of preformatted posts.

Anyway, I don’t want to work today so it’s going to be a long day at the office, my roommate is reading and I’m debating bringing my laptop with me to work so I could write on the bus but because we don’t sit at the back where there’s more room in front of you anymore, I can’t write on the bus, I could read if I had a printout, but she has my printout… damn.

Ah well she’ll read I’ll stare off into space. Till later toodles!

So I’ve been working steadily on making things work around here, and haven’t had much time to write on the main page or even update the other pages. It’s been a busy few weeks and coming up soon is my birthday. August is always so hectic!

I wanted to try and find someway to make “correcting” parts of the story easier on me. My grammar and spelling can be horrendous at times, and sometimes the spellcheck will grab the wrong word automatically and since I post most of this stuff fresh I read it about the same time you’re reading it so I don’t always catch things until it’s too late. Though I have taken some time to read ahead and hopefully the mistakes will be less frequent. Sadly it’s hard for me to keep ahead of everything here, and elsewhere.

With that said I’ll be spending today doing some prep for pages in the future as the automatic updates only go to August 18th at the moment and I’d like to get the rest of them up.

Hopefully everyone has been enjoying the story. I get the occasional feedback from it and I look forward to recieving more in the future. It always makes me smile when something comes in. In any event, thank you everyone for reading, and here’s to many more updates!

I’ll catch you guys later! I’m on my way to working hard!

-Sheyna
I can immortalize you in fiction, doesn’t mean that your eternal life will be a good one.

So I was sitting here at work debating if I want to eat my sandwhich, cheese or strawberries while surfing the internet, (It’s lunch time), and I came to some realization… I forgot to do something last night.  Gosh forbid I could remember WHAT I forgot to do, but sure enough as I continue to surf and suddenly think about checking my own website I remember what it was. I didn’t upload the update.

Forgiveness is greatly appreciated. When I get home tonight I will be uploading the beginning of Chapter Two Alexia. (Yes Chapter two for those who read the comic was entittled down the Rabbit Hole, however, for the sake of the novel I decided to combine 1 and 2 from the comic into just 1.)

Check back around 6pm and you should find Chapter two uploaded for all to see and enjoy.

The reason I don’t upload them all in one chunk is sometimes I like having the ability to put up some sort of witty or just plain silly news post. I fail to often seen the advantage in just uploading them all and writing the news here in my blog whenever the occasion occurs, but seeing as I’ll be in California over the next two weeks (Not really there for two weeks just the one week I am there spans over two weeks) I figured I’ll do one big chunk upload and make all the news posts say see below.

Wednesday I am heading out to Los Angeles, California to attend Anime Expo, the largest Anime convention in North America (I think that’s what they say). I’ll be there with some friends and I’ll be meeting new people when down there too. My only hope is that my flight isn’t cancelled or even worse that I don’t end up stuck in Detroit or Minneapolis on my way to LA. (Forgive my spelling of American Cities.)

All in all it should be good fun. Tomorrow I’m off work so I’ll be packing and getting ready to go and also celebrating Canada’s birthday. YAY CANADA!

I plan on staying at either my brother’s or my parents for the night, don’t know which but my brother is driving me to the airport so it’s more likely I’ll be at his place rather than theirs. The flight takes off at 6am and I need to be at the airport by 4:30am. It’s hard to find people who get up that early, fortunately my brother Mike does!

I return on July 8th at 11:40 pm, so I took the 9th off in order to sleep in. My roommate is picking me up, thankfully. Now the only trick will be getting my car back from my brother’s or parent’s place when I get home.

Anyway it goes, it should be a fun trip, though I’ll sadly be missing my weekly RP date and will have to catch up another week… well not really catch up considering I run the game… o.o;

Well since I’ve managed to kill at least 10min of my lunch time in which I’m absolutely bored out of my mind I suppose I could do something productive for the last half an hour and just write or read. Not that that is any more productive than this.

In short, story will be up this evening and there shouldn’t be any more hiccups till after I get back from California. (Though I had better get writing I only have enough written to get us to September!!)

-Sheyna

 (Oh and I decided to eat the strawberries)

The story board for today will be a slight bit late. It’s on my laptop and I passed out before publishing it last night. I’d post it now but I have to get ready and go to work.

Sorry

Sheyna

So I’ve gone to my parents for the weekend, in order to work on my newest little side project. My mother whom is not well is an extremely good cook and one of the things my brothers and I always do is call her to know how to make this or how to make that.

How easy would it be, to just have a book of all these recipes that we’ve grown to love all our childhood so the only call we’d be making is “Mom, I made this today!”

The book which will contain some of the family recipes and some of the family favorites is called “Just Like Mom Would…” and it contains a set of recipes my family has loved all our years and traditions we’ve become accustomed to, like our enormous Christmas socks.

I’ve been working hard on that today; trying to pull measurements out of a woman who cooks by a pinch of this and a dash of that is near impossible. While my ‘cook to taste’ taste buds haven’t quite gotten there, eventually I hope that with this addition to my growing collection of cook books I can do it Just Like Mom Would.

With any luck I’ll be able to show you guys a bit of what I mean in the near future. The book which I’m going to use lulu.com to publish is something I hope to have done before Christmas along with Volume One of Secret Service Wars, of which I also plan to publish through Lulu.com.

Self publishing though, while great for freedom is a hassle for the risks it forces you to take. An Editor/publisher could help you with potential infringement issues and ensure that you’re covered in the event that someone is “angry” or disappointed with the idea of the story, they’d be able to tell you what risk you’d be taking and well if they’re willing to take the risk with you then it usually works.

I’m consistantly concerned that the mere idea of this story, involving real historical names and organizations, may cause an upset with people of Russian birth or society. I’m not so much concerened with other nationalities though they may be portrayed in a weaker light I can’t see it as much of an issue. I could be wrong though.

My knowledge of Russian Culture and society however is as limiting as my internet resources allows it to be, and in the years it’s taken me to write this book it’s changed quite a bit from my initial research. However, I truly believe that the majority of people will take this as the fictional story it is and feel no need to create an issue.

In any event if anyone reading knows of any potential issue by my use of the Romanov name I’d greatly appreciate the advance warning.

Before this novel is published I do plan to have companions of mine go over it in an annalytical view, something that is bound to change the story from what you read today. So do be light on my grammar and the occasional typo that spellcheck fails to catch. These things will be corrected over time, after all you’re reading this hot off the press and at times I’m not as on the ball as I should have been with my typos! (No excuse for the grammar, I just plain well suck at that.)

The title of this news post likely may draw some ‘huh’ like expressions seeing as I’ve yet to even mention the Brr factor. Well simply put my parents seem to enjoy living in subzero temperatures as the air conditioning is on when it’s barely needed.

It’s cold inside, and I wish I had a sweater! Though really it’s only likely like this for me because I’m getting use to sleeping in heat!

Heh update is on my laptop and I slept in. So it’ll be up around five-thirty / six when I get home from work tonight. ^_^

Love me?

So I set up this story (The one you see today on Thursday June 5, 2008) to go up at 12:01am and for some bloody reason it didn’t post! I don’t get this thing it never posts for me! Even though it’s suppose to.

I suppose in the end it’s my fault because I should have checked at least once in the day to see if there had been a post or if it had gone through. Honestly until Vincent had posted a comment on the previous story board I wasn’t even aware that it wasn’t up.
So thank you Vincent for the comment!

Anyway, lots been going on the good news is there’s at least four chapters written for this novel, and I know I’ll likely finish a couple more soon.

When I do I’ll likely change the update schedule to update more frequently after all until we get to Chapter three really the content for you guys isn’t much new other than the new ‘character’ added in and the changed direction. It’s pretty much the same.

Ah well, hopefully everyone is enjoying it. And here ends my first “blog” post… not much blogging much more story talk. lol.

-Sheyna