Changing Up The Site

mobile interface designThe last upgrade of the web site was a good one, despite the fact it started when the site crashed without a backup. (I know. I need to figure out a solution for that. Manual is not going to work.) But a lot’s changed recently, and I need to upgrade again to stay with it.

For starters…

  • (Jim) Winter is coming... Back.Winter has returned. As in Jim Winter. Clayborn Press is going to rerelease the oft-talked-about, but seldom-seen, Nick Kepler PI series, along with Road Rules and a handful of short stories I wrote a while back. Barring a sale to New York on Holland Bay, there may even be a new Kepler novel next year showing what happened to Nick after he left Cleveland for New Orleans. (Gypsy’s Kiss, set in 2005, takes place in spring of that year. We all know what happened later in New Orleans.) So the site will have to be a bit less… spacey.
  • On that note, the blog will undergo some changes. The five-day-a-week schedule is a treadmill. I plan to write everything on Wednesday nights so I have my weekends, but that’s not really generating traffic or interest. But with crime being added to scifi, I can do more subjects. It’s been a while since I blogged about music, and I have some definite opinions about the death of Tom Petty, Fleetwood Mac, and why the hell modern country music sounds like 80s pop. What I won’t be blogging about is politics. Sure, it’s a shit show, but angry diatribes basically are angry diatribes, boring and stupid. Did those long ago, and my stress levels only went up.
  • Separate pages for the Compact Universe and crime. Let’s face it. Even though everything will be under the TS Hottle name, it’s two different audiences. Crime aficionados don’t want starships in their noir, and science fiction fans couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Rolling Stones and Elmore Leonard. (Well, both may like these things, but not together.) To that end…
  • I’m going to write a new book plugin. I use Totally Booked to manage bookstore links so you have a one-stop shop for my work. The problem is the plugin has been abandoned, and their making affiliate link money off of it. The store icons are missing, and it does not allow for custom links (like your local bookstore or that online site that wasn’t there when the plugin was last updated.) I need to learn to write plugins anyway.
  • A Compact Universe wiki – There are a lot of things I could handle better about this series. Who are the players? What’s the setting? What is the suggested reading order? All that would be helpful to readers.
  • Mailing list contact form – GDPR is a reality, but the need for giveaways to build lists has not gone away. It’s a lot easier to send out an email with a compliant form on the site so I’m not glomming random email addresses. (Although, mailing list services, you could give us bulk invite tools to make this easier. Hint! Hint!)