Trippin’ through the blogosphere…

Did I mention my personal PC died a few weeks back? Did I mention I do my writing exclusively in the cloud? Google Docs & DropBox are my friends. Whew. My older docs were backed up on an external drive but I hadn’t moved my most recent photos so I was  thrilled the IT folks at work were able to rescue everything. One other thing I’m missing are all those important things I bookmarked on my web browser. My last backup of those in Firefox was almost a year old. Always a good thing to export & save your bookmarks. Then you can import them on your new computer. Or, set up syncing with cloud services – I didn’t realize Firefox offered that until I started writing this post. (I really should read those “what’s new” posts when the browser gets updated!) And Safari bookmarks can be synced using Dropbox. I’m new to the MAC world but still hanging out on Firefox for the moment. What’s your favorite browser?

AROUND THE BLOGOSPHERE
On to some highlights from my reading list for the last week:

Tales of the Fiction House – a new blog that you MUST follow. Raji Singh is going to take you on the most wonderful adventures. Trust me. I’ve had the honor & pleasure of being in a critique group with Raji for 3 years. His novel will be released soon, and his blog will be a great companion to the novel.

What’s the Purpose of Your Scene
K.M. Weiland offers some great advice on developing conflict and strengthening context.

Sarah Woodbury talks about inspiration for her historical fiction and gets interviewed by Melissa Smith about her writing. I love time travel fic, and Sarah’s book Daughter of Time, which sent her main character back to medieval Wales, was a great read.

Five Mistakes Killing Self-Published Authors
Ouch. Words of advice from Kristen Lamb.

How to Write Sex Scenes
I am a huge fan of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. She writes historical fiction romance (and sex) the way I aspire to write it. Watch for my novella Battle Scars next year (unless it turns out to be a novel and takes me longer to write).  πŸ™‚

Adios for now. Have a great weekend.

  1. Jaime Avatar

    Awww! So sorry to hear about your PC! πŸ™ Some places (thinkgeek, for example,) sell these kits that allow you to take the hard drive out of a dead computer and use it as an external drive. Then, if you use a version of linux (puppy linux, for example,) you should be able to access the data on the dead computer’s hard drive and copy it over to a new one. I don’t know if that helps, but it might be worth a shot. πŸ˜€ HUGS! <3

    1. Char Avatar

      The IT folks got all the data from the old ‘puter, so I’m good for now. Technology – love it when it works! πŸ™‚

  2. Marie Loughin Avatar

    Firefox became unstable for me and was crashing all the time. Dunno why. So I switched to Chrome. I use some sort of Google bookmarks (I forget what it’s called, but will look it up if you’re interested, (It’s probably called Google Bookmarks.)) I can synch the bookmarks on all my computers, theoretically.

    1. Char Avatar

      Wow – I have just the opposite problem. Chrome freezes up on me – at least on the old PC. I use it (and practically every other browser known to man I think) on 2 of my work computers and haven’t had a problem. I keep thinking that if I’m logged in using Chrome, it should show me the same bookmarks no matter what computer I’m using.

      1. Jaime Avatar

        From what I’ve read, Chrome has a memory leak. The longer you use it, the more memory it takes to run it. It’s probably not a huge deal on a computer with a lot of memory, but for older ones (or ones like mine that only have 1GB of RAM,) it can really make a difference. Have you tried Opera? It’s pretty speedy.

        (Sorry. Tech support moment there. LMAO! ;))

        1. Char Avatar

          I definitely believe it takes a lot of memory to run Chrome. I’ve cleaned out the cache, cookies, etc, using a product called CCleaner and it removes 100s of 1000s MB of stored ‘stuff’, which really has to slow down the browser. I used to clean my PC cache 2-3 times a week because of that. I decided to skip using Chrome on the MAC completely. I’ll give Opera a test run one of these days. πŸ™‚


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