I'd earlier blogged about the California Divorce Ban Initiative that's being qualified for the 2010 state ballot.  This turns out to be a satire on the absurdness of the initiative process.  (Then again, maybe not.)  The group behind the 2010 California Marriage Protection Act had put out a video.

Your reaction to this may be laughter, cheering or crying.  I find this funny from the perspective of an anarchist throwing a Motolov cocktail or two into the California political process.  I'm deeply intrigued by how this would play out and will vote to accept the consequences of a ban going into effect.  California is still America's future according to a recent cover story by Time Magazine.  Think about that but not too hard.  Your head might explode.

Comment (0)

The redesign of my business website was released on Black Friday.  The content that used to be on that website was moved to my author website for a shorter domain name, leaving an empty, neglected shell. Which was fine since I had no traffic for that website to care about.  For this website and the author website, the business website was a link in the copyright notice.  But the redesign had a significant impact for this website, which has always been an unholy mess since I started working with HTML in 1997.

First, a portfolio showcase for my brilliant game designing talent that went nowhere when I worked in the video game industry.  Second, an extended programming project when I took programming classes at San Jose City College from 2002 to 2007.  Third, a personal blog when I switched to the Joomla! 1.5 CMS in January 2008.  I have only one-third of the content from my legacy website converted over.  (A task that I hope to finish one of these days.)  When I developed my Show Twitpic module for Joomla, download and forum components were added.  If that wasn't bad enough, I've done some things wrong in setting up and maintaining Joomla for the long haul.

Nice mess, eh?

With my business website having no significant content, I did a clean installation of Joomla and selected the Demi template from PraiseJoomla to rebuild from the ground up.  Although none of my websites has a webcomic, the information on Webcomics was quite useful.  Especially the articles on tweaking an existing webcomic website for presenting a clean user interface.

The first half of this redesign was creating a generic business website presentation with graphic buttons and RSS feeds for the other websites, an about page, and a contact page.  The second half was removing the download and forum components for my Show Twitpic module from this website to add significant content to my business website.

The Show Twitpic module is still the only one available on the Joomla! Extension Directory to display pictures from Twipic.  My approach to software design is to develop something that everyone is not doing to create something unique.  While everyone is programming to display pictures from Flickr (which is easy to do), I made one for Twitpic (which is harder to do).  When I finished adding some significant new features in next month's update, I'm planning to branch out by creating a similar modules for Twitgoo and yFrog (which are both harder to do than Twitpic).  I'm also considering doing a component version to display pictures on a page rather than a box.

The biggest advantage of the redesign is figuring out the demographics for the blog and software.  I had known for a long time that I had a significant international audience for this website.   I couldn't tell for what exactly from the server log breakdowns presented in the website back end.

As a writer, a few of my recent acceptances had came from Canada and Great Britain.  Some American writers find more success internationally than they do at home.  If I have a significant number of international readers for my blog, I need to be more aggressive in submitting my works internationally.

As a programmer, I had to fixed bugs related to the presence of international characters in the Twitpic RSS feed.  If I have a significant number of international users for my software, I will need to figure out the localization issues that I been putting off since I have no clue if a foreign language is being presented correctly or not if they're using a non-Latin alphabet.

I also created a separate Twitter account for the business website (cdrassoc) to separate traffic from the shared blog/writer websites (cdreimer).  HootSuite allows me to figure out the demographics from the URLs in my Twitter postings that drive traffic to my websites.

This website is long overdue for a redesign.  Something I'll be thinking about very hard next month before I do anything.  Unlike my author and business websites, I got significant content to take into consideration.  I also need to finish converting the legacy content as well.  If I decide to go ahead with the redesign, New Year's weekend is probably when I'll shut the website down, tear everything down and put it back together like Frankenstein's monster.

Assuming, of course, I don't put it off for another year.

Comment (1)

This week I got a post card in the mail for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize Series that will be accepting contest submissions for a collection of short stories (150+ pages) and poetry (50+ pages) between January 15, 2010 and March 15, 2010.  The entry fee is $25.  The grand prize is $3,000 and publication through the University of Nebraska Press.  I'm planning to enter my short story collection.  This is a strong motivator to polish off all my short stories from the last four years that are languishing in the slush piles.

If you search the Internet for how to put together a short story collection, you won't find much information.  Most articles start off with the caveat that publishers won't accept a short story collection unless you're a well established author, and even then somewhat reluctantly.  Surprisingly, The Wall Street Journal reported that short story collections are breaking out this year and e-readers might make short stories a viable form again.   I found this article and the arrival of postcard to be most encouraging for my own short story collection.

Since I had four short-short stories accepted for an anthology that I wrote after looking at the submission requirements two months ago, I started looking at the submission requirements of various anthologies and publications to match up with short story ideas that I thought up or recycling the ones that I started but never finished, and letting the deadlines determine my writing priorities for the next three months.

My first non-fiction essay, "The Cabbage Patch Fight," about how my mother got a Cabbage Patch doll for my baby niece by punching out two other mothers in a Toy R Us brawl in the early 1980's, was accepted for publication in a special Christmas issue of Soft Whispers Magazine.  I originally threw this story idea out on the Editor Unleashed Forums since I didn't think I had the time to write anything new when I got my hands full with revising my first novel and a short story with a submission due date at the end of the month.  The editor wanted the story and I found the time to write.  This became my fifth accepted story in the last two months and I have seven stories appearing in the next six months.

I'm going to be busy during the holidays.  I'm wrapping up and putting aside my first novel after cutting 30,000 words from the 125,000-word rough draft and splitting the novel in two volumes.  I got four short stories I'm writing to submit to different anthologies.  I write on average eight short stories a year but I'm on track to write 13 or 14 short stories this year.  I'm revising my 20,000-word vampire novella for submission to an ebook publisher.  The New Year will begin with me polishing off the 27+ short stories in my collection to submit to Prairie Schooner by March 2010, and working on the next draft of volume one of my first novel.

Maybe I should find time to look for a job since I been unemployed for the last nine months.  Rejection slips and contributor copies don't pay the bills.  Which is why I put a PayPal donation button my author website (scroll down to bottom right).  If you got some spare change, please help out a busy writer trying to get ahead financially.  The grand prize is still a long ways off.

Comment (0)

Noticed in the Los Angeles Times that California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has authorized a divorce ban initiative to gather signatures to qualify for the 2010 ballot.  California is often regarded as the social laboratory for the rest of the country: movie star governors, the anti-tax revolt, a dysfunctional state government with a budget process teetering on bankruptcy,  pro- and anti-[insert hot button social issue here], and whatever else that can qualify for the ballot.   If California got something going, the rest of country will get it too like a bad case of swine flu.

Marriage used to be considered a serious commitment that wasn't to be taken lightly since dissolving the marriage happened under three common scenarios: legally invalid (i.e., underage without parental consent), adultery, or death of a spouse.  If you made a bad decision when you got married, you had to live with the consequences of your actions.  Short of murder, faking your own death, or joining the French Foreign Legion, you were so out of luck.

Then the divorce laws were liberalized to include "no fault" or "irreconcilable differences," and the divorce rate shoot up so that nearly half of all marriages ended up in divorce.  What used to be a shameful secret in society is now widely accepted. Celebrities getting married and divorced—sometimes in less than a day—is routine coverage for the paparazzi crowd.  The Republicans nominees had more divorces than the Democrats nominees in the 2008 presidential campaign.  With prenuptial agreements, you can even plan for a divorce if that should ever happen.

Now there is an initiative in California to change it back to the way it used to be.  Maybe this will be the initiative to force a change in the initative process.  Or maybe the status quo won't change at all.

What's even more interesting that no one else in the media had picked up on the story.  Probably because the initiative is in the signature gathering stage, and not all initiatives qualify for the ballot.   No sense for the media to focus on an initiative that might go nowhere.  But I'm fascinated by all the questions if the divorce ban is enacted into law and survives a constitutional court challenge.

Will people rush to get a divorce before the amendment was enacted the same way people declared bankruptcy before the new bankruptcy law in 2005 went into effect?

Will the legal profession try to challenge the constitutional amendment to protect their divorce and child support practices?

Will social and religious conservatives find themselves dancing around the issue because divorce rates are higher among the "family values" crowd?

Will the divorce ban apply to gay marriages (once all the legal challenges are cleared)?

Will the homicide rate among spouses increase dramatically?

Will Las Vegas become the key destination to get married and divorced?

Will people leave California to move to a state with liberal divorce laws?

Will the other states enact their own divorce bans?

Will this be the beginning of the end of an uncivil society?

Personally, I might put my signature down and even vote for this initiative.  Not because I have a strong position against divorce, either legally or morally.   But, like an anarchist holding Molotov cocktail at a store front, I want to see the impact of this initiative on society.  California can't get any more screwed up than it is now—or can it?

FTC Disclosure: My parents were married for 47 years until breast cancer took my mother in 2004, although I might have benefited if their attempt for a divorce in the late 1970's had actually succeeded.  I have no financial connections with the backers of this ballot initiative, and, beyond a possible signature and a vote, have no intention of actively supporting them otherwise.

Comment (1)

This week I received two contributor copies for my short story, "The World's Greatest Coffee," that appears in The MacGuffin (Fall 2009 / 25th Anniversary Issue).  This is my second published short story but the first one I have seen in print.   (My first published short story, "The Uninvited Spook," appeared in The Storyteller that paid a 1/4-cent per word and no contributor copy.)  I mailed one copy to my Dad since the idea of me being a writer has always been an intangible concept to him and my family.

When we got together for my birthday in August, and my brother asked what I do to keep myself occupied since being laid off in February, my Dad said "ceramics" before I could say anything.  Ceramics is something my family could immediately grasp, and, at the time, I was working on a big pot.  When I mentioned that I had finished writing the rough draft of a 700-page novel a few months earlier, the room was silent since they couldn't grasp what I said.

Writing to them is intangible until it appears in print in the local bookstores, on the New York Times best seller list, and lavished with praise by the Oprah Book Club on TV.  Even when I gave my Dad a copy of my short story collection in a binder, he was more interested in keeping the binder and tossing out the pages.  Maybe the new issue of The MacGuffin with my story (pages 68-70) and bio (pages 158-159) will convince him that I'm serious about being a writer.

Then again, maybe not.

This week has also been good for revising the 125,000-word rough draft of my first novel, a coming of age ghost story.  I started frequenting the Editors Unleashed forum, posted a question, and a suggestion was made that I split my novel into two volumes.  The ideal length for a first time novel should be about 80,000 to 100,000 words.  Anything longer or shorter may be a difficult sell.  From revising about 1/3 of my novel over the last month, it became obvious that keeping the manuscript under 100,000 words was going to be a difficult task even after I cut out 35,000 words.   I still got three notebooks of ideas that never made it into the rough draft.

After careful consideration and a late night of revising the novel structure on paper, I decided to split my novel into two 80,000-word volumes.  That fixes a big problem in the rough draft where the halfway point happens at the two-third mark, something that would be painful to fix if the word count was less than 100,000 words.  The first volume is strong and complete.  The second volume is weak and underdeveloped.  The overall structure is now clearer since I have room to run with the story.

Would selling a duology (two books) be any easier than selling a single, longer book?

I'm not sure, and, to a certain extent, I really don't care while revising my work.  Something I'll worry about next year when I start shopping the first volume and polishing the second volume.  However, since my novel will fit into the Urban Fantasy market niche, a duology shouldn't be a problem.  Ultimately, I think an agent and/or an editor will have to decide how many volumes my novel should be.

Comment (0)