#Fail
Nanowrimo is over, and I am reporting my results. As the email title suggests, I failed. I failed big time, and I got to about 10,000 words of my new book. As I wrote last month, the goal was to write 50,000 words, which means I got about 20% of the way through it.
I also failed by not sending this newsletter out on Friday as I was supposed to. :) You’ll have to forgive me, though, I had the flu.
Back to Nanowrimo. Why did I fail? Well, the answer is a little bittersweet.
My website also failed. I mean, it succeeded. But it failed, too.
Approximately a week into November, my website crashed. I figured out (after many hours of research) that I needed to restart the web server.
And the next day, my website crashed again. So I restarted it again.
The following week, the website kept going down, so I went into diagnostic mode and tried to fix the issue. After much research, I came upon the solution, buried in the recesses of Google’s search engine.
My website had so much traffic, the RAM couldn’t keep up.
In other words, the Google fairy godmother liked my website so much, it kept crashing.
I ended up fixing my server. (The boring details are that I went with a static website and CDN.) But, unfortunately, November’s Nanowrimo went out the window.
The lesson that I learned in all of this: websites are a pain in the ass.*
* On a side note, Substack’s website is also a pain in the ass. It keeps giving me errors, mostly because the site is getting so big that the servers cannot keep up.
The Promos
Broken Days by Emma Sebastian is on the Kindle rn.
From the Amazon web page:
She is a survivor and there is a serial killer preying on young women in Minneapolis, but whoever’s following her doesn’t appear to be a homicidal madman. In fact, it’s a different stalker every time.
A Short Book Review of Suicide Run by Michael Connelly
4.5 out of 5 stars
This book is a set of three short stories in the Harry Bosch universe. The first short story is the name of the book, “Suicide Run,” featuring Bosch and Edgar on the night shift. The duo team pulls up an apparent suicide. The second is “Cielo Azul,” about finding an unnamed woman. And the third is “One-Dollar Jackpot,” about the murder of a professional poker player.
I really liked this book because they were short bits into Harry Bosch’s life without the long, drawn-out mega drama of him almost being killed. I realize that Bosch is a LAPD homicide detective, but his constantly getting almost killed stretches the imagination.
I’ve always thought that that was the fatal (hahaha! get it!) flaw in any book series. Lisa Scottoline, for example, has a law firm in which every single person in that law firm almost dies. A lot. And they are lawyers. Again, I realize it’s Philadelphia … but …
These short stories were well written, with a few minor grammar flaws. My biggest problem was that they were all over the place timewise. Bosch is a long book series, and it has a television show to match. Edgar appears in one of the stories, but he has a different partner in two others.
The issue is that now I know some details about Bosch that are spoilers for upcoming books. I also had no idea when they were.
Suicide Run isn’t as long as a Harry Bosch novel, but it doesn’t have the price tag of a Harry Bosch novel, either.
Happenings
I’m totally into Harry Bosch short stories at the moment. Amazon Prime (via Freevee) released Season 2 of Bosch: Legacy, and I am watching and reviewing it for my website. If you’re wondering why I’m writing Harry Bosch reviews when Harry Bosch is not an attorney, it’s because of his current partner in crime, Honey, who is an attorney.
So over the next two weeks, I won’t have any more recipes … yes, I know, terrible timing as it is Christmas. If it makes everyone feel better, I have my classic Christmas sugar cookies with vanilla icing, Gingerbread man cookies, and gingersnap cookies with a marshmallow dollop.
As part of my #NanowrimoFail, I moved all of my newsletter posts (and newsletter) back onto Substack. I’m not the happiest with their (lack of) SEO tools, or that they don’t have good mailing list opt-ins for my website, but they are also free. Even if their site keeps being a pain in the ass.