Finally moving

This is announcing I will not be updating this blog anymore. All new posts will now show up at

http://sherricornelius.com

and if you’d like to subscribe to the new feed, click

http://sherricornelius.com/feed

Thanks for all your support, friends!

It’s the 4th, yo

Didn’t get everything on my list done yesterday, but I had my reasons so I still feel I was productive.

We did some small fireworks last night, and I have to tell you, I hate ‘em. I don’t mind going to a show where it’s somebody else’s responsibility, where they have controls on hand, where I don’t have to worry about all the things that could go wrong. Of course Maggie Rose burned her finger, and of course the yard is now littered with trash, and of course it’s too dry to have fire, but do any of those things matter? Do I get a say? Nope. It’s the 4th. We have to have fireworks. Every year it’s the same effing thing. It used to be my favorite holiday. Holidays are stupid. Let’s stop having them.

This evening one of my brothers may stop by and my mom and step-dad are coming. We’re having hot dogs and the rest of the fireworks. My favorite gatherings involve very little planning. Somehow I got the idea that planning every aspect was the only way to do it, but as I get older and more defiant I’m surprised to find Miss Control Freak actually does better when things just happen as they will. Except when it comes to safety.

Happy Independence Day, friends. I hope you don’t get bernt.

NaBloPoMo and stuff

Funny that I declared on July 1st I would be writing a post every day, only to find out that this is NaBloPoMo! What is up with that? I hadn’t heard it mentioned even once that I remember. I’m taking it as a sign that a post a day will be good for me.

I have narrowed it down to two templates on the new blog. One is colorful and bold (the one on the blog right now…Unfortunately I can’t get the image, so go there to see it) and the other is simple and light and elegant (the one pictured here, only with double sidebars and a daisy header).

I like the layout of the simple one, but the bold one fits my personality better. And since I am not in code mode, I really don’t want to mess with massive changes to one or the other.

I’ve been unusually busy lately, what with writing this 20-pg synopsis, editing for Eternal Press, fixing my mom’s computers, and now changing up the blog. Trying to stay off the social media, letting Twitter and email be my connections. Facebook is the devil, with its quizzes and flair and games and such, so I’ve limited that to once a day. Hopefully it’ll be only another week or so until I knock out these projects and can breathe a bit easier.

Your mind’s default character

Today’s post will probably be a rambler. I’ve been out of bed for exactly 17 minutes, and my brain is still firing with the energy of the dream I just had. It was all about trying to get someplace, but losing my keys, almost missing the bus, etc.

And there were a lot of black guys in it. I don’t know about you, but my default dream character is white, I guess because I am, or maybe because I don’t interact with African Americans on a daily basis. I deal with more Indians, but still not enough to impact my dreams. (I have no social life, what do you want?) So once I woke, that aspect stuck out at me. It didn’t in the dream.

In my stories I don’t really have a default character. They speak to me, and their voices tell me who they are. The details of a character always comes through dialogue.

So I have a twofold question for you: What is your default dream character (presumably out of your control); and do you work different races into your stories, or just let them come as they will?

Theme Merry-Go-Round

This post applies mostly to my new website with the old URL, sherricornelius.com. The new site seems to be working fine, but since I’ll be changing things every day, I want to double-post just in case I screw something up, and also to make sure all subscribers of both sites stay in the loop. Also, if I start posting different things on different sites, I’ll get confused, and that won’t do anybody any good.

Yes, it’s Theme Merry-Go-Round time again here at Sherri Blossoms. Well, only on the new site, which is probably where most everybody will read from here on out. I spent a long time working on that simple flower theme, which I liked a lot, but I couldn’t get it just right. Then I realized I need more color. So I started looking for pictures of colorful flowers and found some beauties, but it just wasn’t working.

The next one I tried was called Dark Wood and I thought it was near-perfect. Elegant with whimsical touches, natural, tiny flowers next to each post title to fit my theme…but in the end it wasn’t customizable enough (for a code idiot like me) so I took it down. I might try it again later, though, if I don’t find anything else I like. The one I’m using now, called Arclite, is cute. I love the colors, and eventually can change the header to my own image. I’ve already brought along the CSS changes from the old blog to make the rollover links pink. For some reason I just love that.

Problems with this template: No nested comments; if I use the optional 2nd sidebar it squishes the main content too much; lots of people use it.

I could probably make a new header with my old flower, but I’m actually getting tired of the whole flower thing. I guess it’s a memorable title, Sherri Blossoms, with its play on “cherry blossoms,” but then I always have to have a flower, and flowers get boring if you look at them too much. I don’t know. Changing my blog is gut-wrenching. There are simply too many ways to go with it. Plus I love playing with it, so it eats up a LOT of my time.

The reason behind all this change is because I’m changing from the free WordPress hosting to GoDaddy’s paid hosting. They have a plan especially for WordPress users, where they do all the hard work of installing the WP open-source software on your site and changing your domain servers and such, and now I’m using an interface near-identical to the one I’m used to on the old WP blog. It even has the same options for themes and widgets, so changing the look is easier than a traditional website. I can’t recommend it enough. (And no, I won’t be in any GoDaddy commercials. One bimbo is all they need.)

One benefit I hadn’t considered with getting paid hosting is that the page seems to load faster than on the free one, so that’s good.

I feel like an expert now, on domain names and hosting and WordPress and stuff, so if you need any help with it, let me know. I don’t know much, but what I do know I know very well, as I’ve been over it a thousand times.

Thank you for all your input, folks. And thanks for following me around during my time of wandering. Now I have a lot to do today, so I won’t be around as much as usual. Don’t feel like I’m ignoring you. Have a great day.

Introducing my daily spew

When I don’t blog/spew regularly I get nervous. Nothing I say on here is earth-shattering, but it appears I need to say it. I want to start posting every morning, even if it’s just what I ate for dinner the night before. You can ignore those posts, but at least I still get my daily spew. I think posts are more effective when they are short and to the point, but when I don’t post about my life for a while, things get backed up and then you get long, rambling posts which make your eyes cross and glaze over as you drool on the arm of your chair, or a numbered list. Like this one.

1. Still working on my domain problem. They make it confusing on purpose, so that only the strongest come out on the other side. It’s like hazing in a sorority. In fact, on my last pass through GoDaddy Support, I’m pretty sure somebody poked me with a stick and called me Thunder Thighs.
2. We brought home a gerbil. One child is allergic to cats, and one mom is allergic to cleaning up after a dog, so we’re trying a gerbil now. Her name is Marmalade, she’s black with a white goatee, and she chews everything. She’s getting used to me holding her, mostly because I always have sunflower seeds, but she still doesn’t like it much. I like her because her mess is contained to a 10-gallon area. We need to get a companion for her. I think she’s lonely.
3. Next on my to-be-read list is All the Windwracked Stars, by Elizabeth Bear. I have high hopes. After my previous reading experience turned out to be a major disappointment–so boring I skimmed large chunks, something I never do–I really need a decent one to cleanse my palate.
4. Went to the Science Museum of Oklahoma Friday. It used to be called the Omniplex, and that’s what I will call it till my dying day, because it’s a cool name. We had a good time, besides the IMAX movie being the lamest freakin’ movie in the whole world. It would have been lame on the small screen, but in an IMAX theater you want to be wowed, you want to feel like you’re zooming, you don’t want a sappy, idiotic story about flies on Apollo 11, where all they do is float weightless. There was about 12 seconds of zooming, total.

Darcsfalcon’s question: meeting a historical figure

I love being free from deciding what to write about, so I’m going to continue with the “A”s to your “Q”s. I’ve been quite restless lately, and I think it’s partly because I haven’t been expressing myself enough through writing. You writers know sometimes it doesn’t matter what you write, as long as you write something. Sometimes blabbing is the best.

On that note, I shall now blab about what Darcsfalcon asked last week, and that is,

…if you could meet any historical figure, who would it be?

And of course that is the hardest question of all, because there are too many possibilities to narrow it down to only one. I’m going to take liberties with her phrasing and assume “meet” means that I will understand what it’s like to be that person. In that case it would be some unknown person in a civilization like ancient Sumer, or Hitler, or a slave in the years leading up to the Civil War. Maybe one of the Underground Railroad people or the folks who risked everything to hide Jews during the Holocaust, whose courage, vision, and love for their fellow human beings astound me.

However, that’s not what Falcon asked, she asked who I would like to meet, and that implies sitting down and talking with them. In that case I think I’d choose Eleanor Roosevelt, because she had so much wisdom to pass along about being a strong woman.

How about you?

Drive-by linkage

You guys have to check out this hilarious post by Holly the Waitress called The Sand Artist. It’s the perfect meld of imagery and words. Since my readership is down to about five, Holly might not even notice a bump in her pageviews thanks to my link, but if I can pass laughter on to just one of my readers, it’ll be worth it. Check it out.

Blog changes

Come on in. Sorry about the mess. Looks like I’m forced to make some changes to the blog after all. I had subscribed to a year of domain mapping and CSS here on WordPress ($25 for both, if I remember correctly) and it worked very well for me. I was able to tweak the colors of the template to match my header, and my readers didn’t see the “.wordpress” in my URL. Very smooth and glitch-free. Then I let the subscriptions lapse, and it has been a couple of weeks of total confusion, trying to figure out who hosted what, which settings to change, and what to change them to. I’m finally back in control but unfortunately can’t do a simple redirect from my domain, so the only access to this blog is through the wordpress URL.

Why not just pay the $25 per year to WP if it’s that important, you might be wondering. Well, because. I’ve never liked the limitations that we WordPressers have to deal with on a free blog, and yet the 25 bucks didn’t give me total control, either. It was a good compromise for a while, but I want more control over what I can and can not do on my own blog. That either means going back to Blogger, or paying a monthly fee for hosting. If I go to Blogger I lose all my previous posts, basically starting from scratch. That hurts. But I don’t have a reason to spend time and money on my own website, so… I don’t know what I’ll do. I guess I’ll just keep limping along with the blog the way it is now and hope everybody keeps reading till I get something concrete. So if you’re not getting my RSS feed anymore, just subscribe to  http://sherricornelius.wordpress.com/feed/ . You can keep the old feed active, if you want. It won’t hurt anything, and then when I do find a permanent home for my domain name, you’ll already be set up for it.

I’ll answer another reader question in my next post. Thanks, guys, just for being you.

Vince’s question: rise or fall?

Vincenzo came up with a philosophical question for me that ties in nicely with the book I’m reading right now, In the Courts of the Sun, about the going back in time and the Maya and 2012, remember? A rise and fall to rival the Roman Empire. (The review pretty much mirrors how I feel about it, in case you were wondering.)

Vince asked,

If you could choose to live in the ascent or descent of a civilization, which would you choose and why?

How about a plateau? I think that’s where the U.S. is right now. But if I have to choose ascent or descent, then it’s an easy choice: ascent. You’d likely have new technologies, conquest, discovery. You’d probably have plenty of resources to spread around. I like the fresh, the open, the adventurous.The feeling that anything’s possible.

It’s true that rapid advance can be reckless. And when a civilization ascends it’s on the backs of people, so that’s a downer. But there’s oppression in any culture, is there not? Always a pecking order, and somebody’s got to be on the bottom. And people tend to be more brutal when they have a lot to lose. An individual might not know they’re in the ascent or descent of anything, so you almost have to look at the broad overview. An individual might not feel that sense of adventure in a rising civilization, nor the chaos of a falling one, because they have nothing to compare it to. Yeah, a lot can happen in a person’s lifetime, but I’m assuming major changes taking place over hundreds of years.

I’ve really oversimplified here. What else should I consider? Discuss!