Goodbye, 2013!

It was a pretty good year, but I have high hopes for 2014.  The Google Doodle for today shows 2013 partying in a 70's style disco while a 4 waits in the wings, ready to make it 2014, That's about the way I feel, except I never liked disco that much.

Happy New Year to all!

It's almost Christmas!

I won't be blogging in the next several days, so I want to wish everyone Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice, have a wonderful Kwanzaa! Whatever holidays you celebrate, I hope they're wonderful!  In the case of Hanukkah, that would be a past tense wish. :)

Finally, a draft at least!

The cover for Saronna's Gift has been plagued by problems. This is my first cover that used an actual model, and the photographer had technical difficulties that required a reshoot.

Anyway, it's only a draft, because the colors aren't right and the typography is missing, but here is (more of less) what the cover of Saronna's Gift will look like.

Kindle finally has web-based collections!

Something interesting has happened. The Kindle currently lets you create "collections" (i.e., you can label your books and see all the books with a given label) but the set of collections you create is specific to that single device. Ergo, if own a Kindle and create collections on it, and then you buy a new Kindle, you have to import all the books you want to appear in collections onto the new Kindle and then import the collections from the first Kindle. This will label all the books currently on that Kindle. But if, after you import the collections, you later send one of your older books to your newer Kindle, it will not arrive with the collection label it had on the first Kindle.  This was tedious!

However, Amazon has announced that you store collections in your Cloud Reader, too, and the Cloud collections can be imported to any Kindle.

The Cloud reader is really just a browser-based app that lets you read all your Kindle books from a PC, but since all your Kindle books (or possibly all your Kindle books from a specific date; I am not certain) go into your cloud reader, it should mean you can label the books once then import them to how every many Kindles you have.

I am very hopeful this will be as handy as it sounds! I had not yet created any collections on my Paperwhite so now I think I will create them in the Cloud and see how this works.

Addendum: Sigh. Not nearly as useful as I had hoped. You still have to create the collection on the Kindle Paperwhite, which means all the books you want to label have to be downloaded to the Paperwhite first.   If you have just bought a Kindle Paperwhite, this is a great feature. If you're on your 5th Kindle, like me, not so much.