Wicked Wenches

I’m in huff.

Actually, I’m pissed off as all blazes. And that’s putting it mildly.

When 2.5 came out, I was all gung ho and upgraded a blog to it.
Previously, every new release was a step forward, with many workflow improvements.

2.5 was a BAD move.

The admin area was a shambles. Many, MANY people hated it. Myself included.
It made no sense.

The widgets area (the bits like the RSS feeds, text, etc) went from drag and drop to…
Not drag and drop.

If I wanted to move a widget to another sidebar, I had to remove the widget from Bar 1, lost ALL the settings, had to switch to the other bar, re-add the widget, set up the widget again because it lost all the settings.
WTF? That’s an "Improvement"????

I found some blog posts by Matt Mullenberg (The wordpress honcho) who tried to pacify users on onblogging.com

Other things people have taken issue with, for example the new placement of the category and tag interface, were deliberate. Because of the feedback those assumptions are being reexamined for 2.6

He also said:

The changes we’re making in 2.6 will be as a result of the feedback given here and many other places.

So, I ask you, do you expect to see fixes / changes, considering those statements? I did.
Well.

I was wrong.

Nothing changed, the widgets are still the same as 2.5, the categories haven’t moved.

I’m looking at new blogging platforms at the moment, because of it, but Wenches won’t change until I’ve tried and tested and am happy with another one, and until I’ve used it a while.

Meanwhile… yeah. I’m pissed.

I have a tricky surname.
A rare one, but it freaks people out when they need to pronounce it, or, God forbid, spell it.

So I am looking for a pen name.

It’s difficult. Really difficult. So I thought I’ll blog about it.
(Hey, it’s Saturday afternoon and I’m bored!)

My first name is Silke (that’s Silk-eh, not Silky, but I don’t really mind being called Silky. If you spell me as Silka I’m going to throw bricks at you. K? I’m not a damned chocolate bar! (Milka)) and I don’t want religious overtones (no Angelo / St.Anything / SanWhatever / Demonico or anything of that nature.)
I don’t want initials. (If I do that, then I can just drop my first name altogether)
No surnames starting with S. (I do not want to end up with the monogram SS.)
I thought about a middle name, but do not want a middle initial.
It should flow naturally.
It shouldn’t feel contrived, but shouldn’t be too common either. (Thank you, but I don’t want to be Silke Jones.)
It should have rhythm.
I want it to be easily spellable.
I want it to be easily pronounced.

Yeah, I know. Picky, picky.

So far I keep looking at Silke DiMarco, Silke DiMatteo, Silke DiSabatino… things like that. (Yeah, I like the way the Di adds to the ryhthm and flow of the name.)
It’s driving me nuts!

Any suggestions will be most welcome!

A few years ago, a critique partner suggested I give the YA market a try. She said I had a youthful voice and it came through in my writing. Now since I loved writing the hot stuff as much as the sweet stuff, it took me a little bit to think about what she said. Then all of a sudden, I had this idea about a teenage sorceress written in diary format that I knew would work as a young adult tale. I wrote it, and found it was much fun for me to write as the grown up stuff .

Now as a teenager myself, I read a lot of Judy Blume. I loved the fact that she didn’t shy away from the taboo subjects, like teenage sexuality. In most of her teenage geared books, with the exception of Forever, sex was mentioned, but the main characters just didn’t do it. Her main characters were very real to me because of this. Because they went through all the same emotions I went through. Currently, I’m reading her Fudge and Peter books to my son now, which are geared towards younger kids, and I’m happy to see that the work still holds up. It’s as much fun for me to read now as it was when I was a kid.

I think I was about sixteen when I discovered the work of Christopher Pike. His teenage paranormal tales were fantastic and I still love reading them. The Remember Me series written from the POV of a teenage girl ghost are all fantastic reads. Maybe that’s why all of my young adult tales seem to lean more towards the paranormal, because reading his stuff inspired me to go that route.

My current project is actually inspired by my son, PJ. The little man asked me why I never write anything that he’d want to read. I told him about my uncompleted manuscript about a teenage boy vampire slayer, and he said that would only be fun to read on Halloween. Leave it to PJ to be so honest and blunt . Then I got to thinking about what PJ likes. He loves space, science, rockets and wants be a rocket scientist when he grows up. So, I came up with an idea for a Science Fiction Young Adult Romance with an alien princess heroine and a fourteen year old hero, who like PJ, wants to be a rocket scientist when he grows up, and I told the idea to my son. He loved it. We read the first chapter together after I completed it, and PJ loved it too. He even gave me some great suggestions.

I really think the key to writing a great young adult tale is to not overload with slang, but still keep the attitude young. And really a great young adult tale is something that people of all ages will enjoy. Just look at Pixar Studios and their movies. Yep, they are animated and generally geared towards kids, but hubby and I have seen all the Pixar movies at the theater and loved all of them, even the ones that came out before we had our son. That’s what I want to do with my writing. Write a fun tale set on Earth and worlds beyond that transcends the age boundaries. I hope I’ll get there, because if I do, I can get one or more of my tales published .

I like gadgets. Any gadget.

Therefore I tend to like software, too. So what do I use?

I use Word to write (2003, I can’t stand the 2007 version), or Open Office Writer. I like both and they are interchangable for me.

I use Onenote to organize things. Anything. Snippets, pictures, links, descriptions, plots… you name it, it’s in my file somewhere. Love the thing. OneNote is part of the MS Office Suite, but if you don’t want to use anything Microsoft, Evernote is a very good alternative. (www.evernote.com) it does almost the same thing as OneNote. I heartily recommend it.

I’ve tried out various writer’s tools, like Writer’s Blocks, Writer’s Cafe and a bunch of others I can’t recall the name of. None of them did anything for me — except distract me from writing. So for me it’s a big thumbs down for them. Others may like them, swear by them, but after trying it… no. Not for me. At all. Too fiddly, too distracting and therefore unproductive.

My reference stuff tends to be books, not software.

What do you use?