Website design

 I'm working on the banner for my updated website.

Not that I'm going to actually do the banner thing myself, you understand.  This is just me trying to communicate a 'feeling' to the website designer.

Since there are all kinds of visually skilled folks out there . . .  can you give me some opinions?  What's the direction to go with this?  What's the working idea?

Oh . . . these are photos I mostly don't have rights to, so I'm just using thumbnails and I'm going to pull the banner designs after a bit. 

The person who gives me the most help with this, (it's one of those subjective thingums,) gets a Black Hawk ARC, as soon as I actually get some.






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Let me go add another one here:

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Going down to add a modification of the design above.  This one is meant to sorta break outta the box.  Don't know how technically feasible it is.

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Looking at making the concept punchier . . .  I've added red to it.
It is not just straightforward and easy to add add red to a dress, so It's all a little clumsy.

I think this is a bit too much red.  Maybe a gentler pink on the dress.
Or . . . there's blue.  Let me try blue.

Blog Philosophy and that kinda thing

I'm bringing this up from the comment trail, because it's a sizable piece of writing and, after all, why not?


This is about the use of a blog, for a writer:

I hate to say this, but I don't think you attract readers by posting a blog. 

Once you HAVE readers you can remind them about your new books.  You can make the reading more fun. You can lay down content that doesn't fit into the books but you're still in love with. 

You can do the whole self-expression thing about how you feel, which is liberating and useful to other writers who are going through the same trials and a great relief to your family who don't have to listen to you whinge and I suspect everybody reading the blog skips this part anyhow.

But I don't see a blog as a way to garner new readers. 
I may be alone in this.
And I am not what you might call a promotion maven.
So you should not necessarily listen to me.

All that said,
I love blogging.

What it is . . .
We depend upon the immense generosity of the internet.  Our research on-line depends on information posted by thousands of people who work without any expectation of return.
When we blog, it's payback.

If you're going to blog anyway, my advice would be to pick a theme you're passionate about and make your blog a creature of your love.

It's nice if you're interested in some topic vaguely related to the kind of books you write.  You could get synchronicity.  It might be that folks who come to read your postings on pirates or the labor movement in 1930 will pick up your 1760 pirate book or your labor-leader love story.

If your bliss is knitting or raising koi, I think you gotta blog about that for its own sake.



Life is too short to spend your time promoting.
Write about something important.
If you make your blog an advertisement for your books, nobody's going to come anyway.

The Wine Glass Over the Water

The Wine Glass over the Water

God bless the King
I mean our faith’s defender.
God bless — no harm in blessing — the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who is King —
God bless us all — That’s quite another thing.
          John Byrom

Joanna, here, talking about an interesting sort of drinking glass our hero and heroine might have encountered in their travels through Georgian or Regency England.
The Jacobite Drinking Glass.
These are wine glasses that form a body of distinctive Eighteenth Century artwork.

We have these through a confluence of lucky chances.

First off, by 1700, English glassmaking was particularly advanced. 
A century before, the champion glassmakers were Venetian. The best glass in England was made by imported Italian glass artists, working by Italian methods.

This changed when the English developed flint glass.  'Flint glass' contains a high proportion of lead oxide, an ingredient that makes for tough, workable, clear-as-water product.  Excellent stuff, in short.  And it was an English specialty.


Continues here, at Word Wenches