Myr

Well. Here I am. I've finished off my two weeks at my last job. Saying goodbye to the great people I worked with was hard. I did that on Friday. I finished packing and moving Saturday. (and did 13,600 steps before taking off the Fitbit...). Sunday was Easter with the family and now I'm looking at the giant pile of boxes and furniture and trying to figure out how all that stuff fit in my old place and will fit here at home. I've known this was coming for awhile, of course. I built my mancave last year. It will serve as my entertainment and fun room. One of my computers is in here so that I can enjoy writing and what not. I'll do some site work in here as well. My main computer is set up in the Family room, which was the other renovation we did in the last 3 years. We converted a covered porch into the family room. It's all windows. Perfect place to work most of the day until the sun swings around and then you have to close some of the blinds or get blinded by the sun (on those rare occasions the snow stops and the gray clears). I'm in the mancave at the moment taking a break from moving things. I'm hoping by the end of the week, that things settle down and I can start work on my new normal. The new job starts next Monday. I figure by May, I'll get my routine all settled again and instead of so many trips on weekends, they'll be more open to doing site stuff and getting into a regular writing routine. I'll be on at weird times this week as I pop on and off between sorting and organizing my disaster.

So, this week for my Monday movie mania, I thought I'd stick with a Christopher Nolan movie and recommend the Prestige. This movie was great. It has a few good twists. I think I might pick up a copy in Blu-ray as I have on DVD.

There will be. I'm glad you liked it.

@CassieQ http://blog.karenwoodward.org/2012/10/orson-scott-card-mice-quotient-how-to.html

With the move, I figured I'd keep this really simple this week. Harry Potter. If you haven't read it yet... what's wrong with you?

This week's Anthology flashback brings back to Spring 2010 - I'd Never Do That! Now in Alphabetical Order: For Authors! We'd also like to remind all authors that we have 4 Anthology themes for 2018 and a Novella Contest: Contests 2018 Summer Novella Anthology - Due April 15th, 2018 Anthologies 2018 Spring Anthology: Now or Never - Due May 15th 2018 Spring Anthology: Encounters - Due May 15th 2018 Fall Anthology: Fight Back - Due Nov 15th 2018 Fall Anthology: Good Intentions - Due Nov 15th Don't forget to read and review!

We are currently testing a bug fix update to Stories, 2.2.4, that also contains a minor, but important feature. Site rules at the source when posting new Stories and new chapters and when editing them. This is just a sample of the test code in process: One of the issues we have at Gay Authors is that we have a lot of rules and standards that authors are expected to follow, but they are not always easy to get to. This update will place rule boxes right at the point of use so that authors will no longer have to search for the rules for a specific area. This will help us keep to the site's visual standard and help authors stay within the rules. The ones listed above are samples and we'll be putting them in place when we update the site. On a different note, my move will finally be wrapped up on Saturday and I'll have a week to settle in before work starts up again. This will let me spend some time writing and working on the site again instead of bouncing around like a madman.

I liked both of those. Red Storm Rising is actually something I'll be reading soon. It is hard to choose a favorite, though I really liked The Bear and the Dragon. I'll post a review on them as I get to them in my rereading frenzy. lol

This is an interesting movie. It is probably the only movie I know that you have to pay full attention in and stay engaged with because it is such a mind job. Literally. The special effects are cool. The concepts are crazy and the acting is interested. I quite enjoy the movie. If you haven't watched it, check it out. I added the top. You'll know what it is for after you watch the movie.

I have been a fan of Tom Clancy's books since about 1991 or so when I first read Hunt for the Red October. The books tend to be almost the only books I read outside of Fantasy and Sci-Fi. I'm a bit behind on the latest books that have the co-authors (since Tom Clancy is no longer with us) started up. I have spent many, many enjoyable hours reading his books. Patriot Games is the first of the Jack Ryan books. (Hunt for the Red October is 2nd, I think it is). He has 3 intertwined series. John Clark, Jack Ryan and Jack Ryan Jr. I'll post more in the future.

In no particular order: For Authors! We'd also like to remind all authors that we have 4 Anthology themes for 2018 and a Novella Contest: Contests 2018 Summer Novella Anthology - Due April 15th, 2018 Anthologies 2018 Spring Anthology: Now or Never - Due May 15th 2018 Spring Anthology: Encounters - Due May 15th 2018 Fall Anthology: Fight Back - Due Nov 15th 2018 Fall Anthology: Good Intentions - Due Nov 15th

I picked this pair of beauties up back in October. What a great buy! I was eating microwavable soup for lunch at work. Soup allowed me to easily control lunch. These mugs work great for a can of Progresso soup. They paid for themselves very quickly since the canned soup is much cheaper than the microwavable soup. Oh, they come in so many colors too. I went for the white since they were cheap.

This week's blog is going to be a little light. I'm extremely busy with my move. I will be relaxing this time in two weeks, I hope! Now, I think everyone has bumped into some weird spacing issues or weird formatting issues when reading stories on the site. This is especially true of older stories that were brought in from the days when we hosted stories as webpages. @A.J. has been working hard to clean up visually, by having the system fix the code on the fly. We are working on a way for you to report a formatting issue or hit a button saying the formatting was just fine. This will be coming. In the meantime, keep an eye on the Announcement forum as we ask for volunteers to test the display filter. It is our goal to prevent poorly formatted stories from going into the system in the future and clean up all the stories posted in the past as well. With almost 35,000 chapters posted on the site, this will take time, of course. If you come across any severely broken story chapters, please read this topic and follow instructions: We are all busy right now dealing with real life, so it might take a bit of time to get to them. However, having sample stories of bad formats will also help us know what to filter and fix for. Thanks for your help!

This movie is interesting. The actors are cute in it. It does wander right into controversial teritory of course. It's definitely worth seeing for the character development and tough topics it hits on.

Oddly enough, I have the hardcover trilogy version shown in the post and I have paperback versions as well.

Great advice @Comicality!

Me too.

I'm sure the first thing that pops in your head is... why are there 5 different books here for a Trilogy? Depends on how you look at things. The hardcover (listed first) contains the 3 books listed next. (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, and The Last Enchantment) The trilogy follows the life of Myrddin Emrys or Merlin if you prefer. I love books 1 and 2 and found book 3 of the trilogy dry and boring. This does boil down to my interest as in books 1 and 2, Merlin is young to middle age. He's an old codger in the 3rd book. Book 4 follows Modred, King Arthur's bastard son by incest with his half-sister (per this version of the tale). This book is also quite interesting as Mordred is not a bad guy in this tale and the conflict with his father the King is not intentional. The reason I like the books... The Crystal Cave is the coming of age of Merlin. The Hollow Hills is the coming of age of Arthur. And The Wicked Day is the coming of age of Mordred. Mary Stewart does a great job of coming of age. The Last Enchantment is about the end of Merlin's days and that's not nearly as interesting to me, at least.

Another week has arrived and it's time for another Anthology flashback. As always, we thank all these authors once again for participating. If it is not too much trouble, would you be willing to write a review for these authors? Even if some of them are no longer around, I'm sure other readers will appreciate the effort. The authors that are still with us surely will. For Authors! We'd also like to remind all authors that we have 4 Anthology themes for 2018 and a Novella Contest: Contests 2018 Summer Novella Anthology - Due April 15th, 2018 Anthologies 2018 Spring Anthology: Now or Never - Due May 15th 2018 Spring Anthology: Encounters - Due May 15th 2018 Fall Anthology: Fight Back - Due Nov 15th 2018 Fall Anthology: Good Intentions - Due Nov 15th

Get your very own laminator and lamination sheets cheap. And why not? The price is right. I picked this up for a little project. I won't use it all that often, but the price was cheap enough that it's worth it. Check it out!

The sound works for me. It bloops a lot.

You can find "Notification Settings" under your name in the upper right menu. https://www.gayauthors.org/notifications/options/ The first batch of settings is about how things work: "Send me news and information" - Everyone should keep this checked so that we can email you. "Automatically follow conent" - This allows you to automatically follow things so you get alerts to things that you involve yourself in. "Method to use for content I follow Automatically" - Select how you wish to follow stuff. Notification preferences - This allows you set how much alerting you get. On the right side is the Browser Notification which allows Gay Authors to alert you even if you aren't on the site. They can be pretty intrusive. If you wish to change them, it is at the browser level. If you want to change your browser notification, here is a how to video: The rest of the notification page allows you to set what you get as inline notifications or emails: Hope this helps!

In last week's promotion of Latter Days, I mentioned the trivia that Joseph Gordon-Levitt auditioned for the lead gay role in the movie. Well, he got it in this movie. There are actually a couple of sex scenes in this one and you get to see stuff. lol. It is funny that for a long time if you typed "is Joseph Gordon-Levitt gay?" in google, it popped up to Gay Authors and a topic I made years ago... Anyway, the movie itself is a bit odd. It was definitely interesting. Different. And worth watching, even without the eye candy incentives. Check it out!

@Page Scrawler I saw you mentioned you didn't know how to do spoilers... Read this blog.

It is clear that as we move forward we are getting closer and closer to the day where we hit the Star Trek level of Computer voices in our lives. How do you think things are going? I'm in a cross-functional world at the moment. I use Cortana on the PC to a limited degree. Cortana is also on Xbox One, but they've crippled her pretty severely. I see them dropping her altogether as a failure, to be honest. Google gets used more and more on the phone and Alexa rules my house. Alexa is the one I'm using most, as it ties into my Wink home automation, My Nest and my Phillips Hue gadgets. One of the developing areas is voice search and I've done some preliminary research into how that is going to affect us here on Gay Authors as well. There are big changes coming in how search engines work and it'll have an effect on us as well. They really need to settle on a standard soon so that we can start doing whatever it is we need to do. Right now, there are competing standards and methods. I suspect that it's going to be a lot more semantic markup in website coding. (Semantic search is how Google knows explicitly that something is a review or a navigation menu or that a person is an author or an editor.) Are any of you using voice controls for things yet?