Website Updates

I’m sure you all know this feeling–just when you get your life semi-organized, something comes along–a family visit, a vacation, a writing project–that takes all your focus. For a while, you concentrate most of your energy on that thing, just pushing the tidal edge of the rest of life back far enough so only your toes get wet.

If you’re lucky.

Then, when the relatives leave, or you get unpacked from vacation, or you send the project off, you look up, and your shoes are soaking wet. Because the rest of life, all the little things that you’ve been saying, “Later” to are now saying, “Now!”

While The Writing & Critique Group Survival Guide is off with my editor, I decided it was time to get my website cleaned up and add a few things. In front of you, you see the result. Over the weekend, I:

• Updated the text for most of my pages (behind those tabs you probably never look at!).
• Added a picture of the book, which you can click through to see the listing on Amazon.
• Put up a link for my Twitter updates, which is working only sporadically.*
• Found a different utility to let people subscribe to my blog feed.**
• Took off the Categories list of previous blog posts, to make room for where I…
• Added some more links to blogs that I think you might find useful. Or fun.***

*I’ve read up on this intermittent updating thing, and it seems to be either a Twitter or a WordPress problem. This may be a bit frustrating, but at least I know it’s not me! I’ll watch it for a while and see how often it’s NOT there. If you see it totally disappear one day, you’ll understand. And if you’re on Twitter, you can always follow me at http://twitter.com/Becky_Levine . The updates also go over to my Facebook page, so you can friend me there if you’re on FB–I’m the “Becky Levine” in Silicon Valley. (Has anyone else noticed that it sounds more intimidating to follow someone than to friend them?!)

**About the blog feed. I’ve been trying to feed some of the blogs I read over to my Yahoo reader, and some work & some don’t. I don’t know if this is a problem with the feed, or with my settings. (I can only handle SO much technical stuff at once!) Anyway, I picked one of the feed apps that seemed to work more often than not and set it up here. If anybody feels like being a guinea pig (maybe without the whistling!) and seeing if they can use the link to feed my blog over to their reader, I’d love to hear the results! 🙂

***I noticed, while I was updating my blogroll, that it is highly weighted toward children’s and YA authors. Could that possibly be because I write in those genres and, even more, I read in those genres? Whatever the cause, I would love to add some links to authors, agents, and editors who blog about other genres, including just general writing stuff. If you read any writing posts regularly and want to recommend then, please stick a link in the comments. I make no promises, except to put them on my own list of blogs and read them for a while to see what I think!

The one thing I did not get to this weekend was to send out a newsletter. I try to do this quarterly, so I don’t inundate people, and I know I have newsletter readers who don’t check in here. So I am planning a Spring issue, and if anyone wants to receive it who isn’t yet on my mailing list, make sure to click over on the right, or on the Newsletter tab, to subscribe.