Read 'Til You Drop

I don’t often post resources (I’m trying to recall any instance and am failing at the moment, but I’m sure I have once or twice…), but here’s one that’s too good not to share. It’s a map of various census metrics broken down geographically.

An example: the breakdown of members of the United Church of Christ:

I think this would be really useful for researching the backgrounds of various areas beyond common stereotypes. I don’t often write stories set in the modern day world, but when I do I’ll be taking a look at this for ideas.

Comments? Link

For my first web design/css tutorial, I wanted to talk about a problem that I had, and how I solved it. This is pretty simple stuff, but it took me a while to grasp the idea, so I thought I’d share it with the half-dozen of you who do this sort of work.

Below is a screen capture of a footer of a blog I’m designing for a client. Typically, I like to include the navigation redundantly at the bottom of a page so that, rather than scrolling back to the header, a user can jump to wherever they want to go next. You’ll see this kind of basic redundant navigation in a lot of places.

The little line between links is called a pipe, and as a separator, it is pretty common. It’s just a simple little visual element to help delineate between the nav items. The trouble comes in when you want to use these in combination with dynamically generated code from WordPress.

The List Code

First off, navigations should pretty much always be a list in html. That’s what lists are for, and styling them is great and easy. And, coincidentally, WordPress returns a call for pages with list code. So the HTML for this list of links looks like this:

<ul>
<li><a href=“#” title=“Home”>Home</a></li>
<li><a href=“#” title=“Blog”>Blog</a></li>
<li><a href=“#” title=“Fiction”>Fiction</a></li>
<li><a href=“#” title=“Other Writing”>Other Writing</a></li>
<li><a href=“#” title=“About Rudi”>About Rudi</a></li
</ul>

I stripped out some classes that WordPress adds automatically, as I don’t need them here. All of the above is contained in a div with an id of #footer. So, note that nowhere in that code is the pipe iteself. That’s because I am adding the pipe with CSS. You can add characters with CSS, you ask? Yep!

The CSS

#footer ul {list-style-type:none; position:absolute;
            left:300px; top:27px; font-size:16px;}
#footer ul li {display:inline; color:#e3bd8e;}
#footer ul li:after {content:" |";}

So what’s going on here? First of all, I am using Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset above this, so all of that default padding and styling on a list has been stripped. This means the only styling that happens is the styling you want, and it creates a baseline between browsers. It really makes my job easier.

So we’re styling the list itself to have no bullets, and we’re positioning it absolutely within the container. You don’t have to do that, but I just found it easier for my needs in this particular footer. Next, I wanted the list all on one line, so I added display:inline. Finally, I’m using the pseudo class :after and the property content to insert a space and the pipe after each item on the list. Say my client wants these items separated instead by an asterisk? Easy enough to change across the entire site with that one line.

Pseudo classes aren’t something I often use, so the next thing I wanted to do tripped me up. The code above will add a pipe after each li tag, but I don’t want one on the last one. There’s no reason for it. How in the world do I do that? I know how to use the :last-child pseudo class, but it alone wouldn’t let me remove the pipe. Turns out, you can and should chain together pesudo classes

#footer ul li:last-child:after {content:" ";}

I probably could have set that to content:none as well, now that I think about it. But a plain space in my case works just fine.

So there you have it. The moral of the story? Chain pseudo classes together to get what you want. Any questions?

Related Links:

• CSS Pseudo Classes
• Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset Stylesheet
• Listamatic

Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there.

Here's my Pogo:

One of the books I picked up at Ad Astra was Dangerous Dames [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] by John Zakour & Lawrence Ganem. This is a two-in-one that combines the first two Zachary Nixon Johnson books, The Plutonium Blonde and The Doomsday Brunette.

I'll admit that the first few chapters worried me. I really wanted to enjoy these books, having heard good things about them. (Not to mention the fact that I've met one of the authors.) But the first few chapters felt like they were trying too hard to be funny, giving backstory and shooting off jokes without really starting the story.

Thankfully, those chapters were short, and the book picked up once things started happening.

The Zack Johnson books have been described as part parody, part homage to the old pulp detective novels. It's fifty years in the future. Zach Johnson is the last licensed P.I. on Earth. He's a bit of a celebrity, which means he gets some interesting cases. In book one, Zack and his partner HARV (supercomputer extraordinaire) must track down a homocidal plutonium-powered android superbabe. Book two sets Zach and HARV out to learn who murdered a genetically enhanced superbabe. (There's a theme* to these books...)

After those initial few chapters, the books were a lot of fun. Some jokes worked better than others -- I couldn't quite buy everyone swearing by "Gates" and "DOS" -- but then, that's going to be the case whenever you write humor. The story is good enough to draw you along, which means the humor is a bonus.

I thought the second story was stronger than the first, and I've been told the series continues to improve. The silliness sometimes threatens to cross the line, but it never felt over-the-top enough to throw me out of the story. Not even the attack toaster or the pixie/nymphs.

Will you like the books? That depends a lot on your taste and sense of humor. I wish I could find a sample chapter to link to. The silliness quotient is higher than in my goblin books, if that gives you a basis for comparison.

They're fun. Not terribly deep, but who am I to complain about that? If you're looking for a fun, light read, I'd give them a try.

---
*The "superbabe" theme could very easily have gone in a direction to make me throw these books away. Particularly the first book, wherein we have an android duplicate of a former exotic dancer. From a feminist perspective, there are aspects of the stories and characters that annoy me, but no more so than most books out there. The women are actually pretty well-developed characters. But while I enjoyed the stories, I will say it's a little tiresome to read about yet another male hero either fighting or saving a world of exclusively superbeautiful, supersexy women.

The following stock images have been approved at iStockPhoto. This was a pretty successful batch for me. I don’t have anything to go up now after that, but I will be correcting some of the rejections and resubmitting them.

Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there.

This is an honor roll for my wonderful sponsors for this coming Sunday's Walk&Roll:

Deb Gross
Alison Ford
Susan Marotta
Bev Long
Jerry & Teresa Kaneko
Andi Lyons
Barb Young & Bruce Worthel
Diane Whiddon-Brown

...and five people who prefer to remain anonymous.  You know who you are.  Thanks.

Yesterday I got a call from my editor. She had two minor pieces of news for me, and a weird question.

News the first: Bigwigs at Publishing House have almost-certainly decided upon a series title for my werecat books.
News the second: We now have cover art for Pride. And when I say "we," I mean the sales and marketing departments. And the art department, obviously. I haven't actually seen it yet, and though my editor has had a brief glimpse, she's still trying to wrangle up a PDF for me.

Given that:

There's a very large field in front of my house.

The grass and alfalfa is growing in that field.

No one pays me for the grass and alfalfa.

There's an airport a few miles away from my house.

Our house is under one landing path.

My house is high and has a good view of the field.

(You see where I'm going with this, don't you? It's inevitable, really.)

What sort of crop circle should I make?

Okay, back to business.

If you haven't been following this series of blog entries about how to build websites for writers, the earlier entries are here:

• Introduction
• Planning your Website - Do you need a website?
• Planning your Website - Who is your target audience?
• Planning your Website - What are your audience looking for?

Today I want to talk about the impression your website makes.

4. What impression do you want to give to visitors?

By this stage, you should have identified who your target audience are and what they are looking for when they come to your site. The next stage is to consider what impression you want to give them.

Received a rejection from Analog for my story "Incursion" yesterday.  Within 10 minutes I had it back out at Baen's Universe.

Of course, my second place finish in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest is actually a rejection with goodies, so it's targeted for Analog or Asimov's next.  I'm thinking Asimov's.

Funktisy and Schism Function, for all it's glory, rejected my story "Nymph", so it's probably a good time to send that one on to Analog.

Whoa.  I need to fire up my printer.

My printer asks silly things of me. Like just now, it wanted more paper.

Fickle machine.

Since I'm not going to be doing any Teaser Tuesdays for a while I thought I'd try something new around here. Every Tuesdays I will post one memory question and hope people will all chime in with their answers.

This week's memory challenge - your first car.

I turned 16 in 1974 but I didn't get my driver's license at 16 like so many other kids did. For one thing, I only lived a couple of blocks from the high school so walking was easy. For another thing I was a girl who dated guys who usually had cars. But the main reason I didn't get my license right away was because there was no car for me to drive. My mom worked for a car dealership and drove a company car which I wasn't allowed to drive. Eventually a friend of hers allowed me to borrow his car for the test and I got my license when I turned 17. Which meant, of course, I wanted a car. I was going to be a senior and I had visions of upping my coolness factor for at least my last year of high school.

I had a job at a local burger joint but would have to borrow the money for a car from my grandmother, which, according to her, gave her a vote in the car I bought.

My way cool aunt had a car for sale and boy did I want to buy it - a blue 1965 Mustang that looked something like this: 



I refused to admit that I was too short for the car and that I would be looking out through the section of the steering wheel instead of over the top of it. I sat in that car and imagined pulling into the parking lot at Mt. Diablo High School (after driving around a while "to be seen" of course) and suddenly being someone who mattered at school.

Alas my grandmother and my mother consorted to keep my coolness down in the freezer section and insisted, instead, that I buy this, a 1970 Dodge Dart Swinger.



Sigh. Granted, in later years when drag racing at the Fremont raceway was a part of our life, that car might have made me a little more popular. But as a fairly invisible senior in high school, it didn't help a bit. And when I married my first husband, the only thing insisted was that I sell that car ASAP.

So what was your first car and how did it come into your life?


 

Must stay calm....

Cut approximately 5500 words last night. Now I need to replace those with words more useful to the plot.

I also would like to end up 10-15K over the original total, but am not sure if I will be able to manage as much as that.

I really hope I won't have to take it with me to WisCon.

I finally figured out how to make the music work right, so that I had a bar at the bottom. Whew! It's in the Documents under Music, and then that's pretty much it. See, it was just a little too simple. I have a terrible feeling that there's lots of things I'm missing like this. I could really use a Vista Manuel. the Help files aren't as interesting to me, but I'll have to settle down and go through them as I don't have a Vista manuel. Good for trees, though, see, always an up-side.

I've also downloaded yWriter, based on 

cathellisen's review. She's going to try a different writing tool every day and tell us about them, so this could be great, if you're like me and like reading and thinking about things, but tend towards not trying them, Just In Case...*g* 

Anyway, so far, she's one for one with me. I haven't looked through it, yet, other than to give my novel a name, an author, and sign up for the updates, so we'll see how it goes later.

 

Yesterday, my three year old son, Riordan "Cool Hand" Kemp, ate three hardboiled eggs. This, of course, put me in the mind of one of the great movies of all time, Cool Hand Luke.

Luke: I can eat fifty eggs.
Dragline: Nobody can eat fifty eggs.
Society Red: You just said he could eat anything.
Dragline: Did you ever eat fifty eggs?
Luke: Nobody ever eat fifty eggs.
Prisoner: Hey, Babalugats. We got a bet here.
Dragline: My boy says he can eat fifty eggs, he can eat fifty eggs.
Loudmouth Steve: Yeah, but in how long?
Luke: A hour.
Society Red: Well, I believe I'll take part of that wager.

Ah, yes. Great stuff. Folks too young to know otherwise might think of Paul Newman primarily as the voice of Doc Hudson in Cars, or the guy on all the Newman's Own brand foodstuffs. If you're one of them, do yourself a favor and check out Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or The Sting, or Cool Hand Luke. You'll be glad you did.

And here is perhaps the most well known scene from Cool Hand Luke (and you thought it was just something from GnR's Civil War:

 Good Morning Infidels!

 

I had it in mind to assault you with more news of domestic and international natural disasters but it appears the human race has gone six hours straight without a calamity so I better post this quick.  I live in California - close enough to a fault line to be in a hurry today. If this is my last post due to “The Big One” do come to my funeral and explain to my children how amusing their mother was. I’ll also need a volunteer to take Chances the wonder Yorkie because my husband will hand him to the first imbecile he finds at my wake. I pray whoever it is has fire insurance.

 

Last night, I stayed up late reading Atlantic Monthly. For those unfamiliar with AM, it is a gorgeous, brainy publication with feature articles 9 pages long and not a single ad for lip gloss or maxi-pads. AM covers culture, history, science, politics and environmental issues. It is a good magazine to grab if you have 16 hours to kill as it is not easy reading.  I was having a good time with it until I started on the asteroid article. Apparently there are several thousand asteroids rotating away at this very moment, waiting their turn to hurl themselves to earth and blast us all to hell like 350 million ants.

 

That was the end of my dear Atlantic Monthly. If I am to be incinerated by a rude and murderous asteroid I’m going out doing something a little more fun, like reading Mark Twain. I’m on page 327 of Roughing It and ten pages away from reading every newspaper article that big genius ever wrote. Mark Twain makes me happy like Led Zeppelin makes me happy. I cannot explain it to you any plainer than that.

 

While I enjoy putting on my glasses and diving into the Atlantic Monthly, I see no point reading it alone. Why engage in the laborious process of it if nobody is going to see me reading the thing? I’ll save it for the next time I am in an airport and need to show off to some fellow travelers reading dippy romance novels with Fabio on the cover. Shove an Atlantic Monthly in a Gucci handbag and SWOOSH- I got status symbols up the ass.

 

Anyway, my beautiful Mark Twain wrote those two distracting books called Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, which was the dumbest thing he ever did. Those miserable books eclipsed all his other work (Innocents Abroad and Roughing It to name just two) which led to more crimes against literature when everyone on earth forgot he was a newspaper man in the early days. His best word wizardry came from his newspaper pieces as when he had no actual story for his column he did readers a favor and invented one. 

 

Behold – the best link on the internet and you are welcome:

http://www.twainquotes.com/callindex.html

 

Sam Clemens had to make a living I suppose and if tall tales of boyhood adventures paid his stage tickets east, and in the case of Roughing It – west – then I will have to get over it. I loathe Huck and Tom for hogging the limelight and turning up on required reading lists everywhere. Brat bastards!

 

I am at a spot in Roughing It where the divine Mr. T is telling me all about mining claims in 1863 in California and Nevada and how inconvenient gold rush fever really was to experience. Hopeful citizens would lay claims on dirt wherever they found it, including the road in the middle of town! There was also a tale about one Mr. Buck Fanshaw who was a louse and a miscreant politico who also held a high position in the fire department. It was said when Buck died, there was great lamentation throughout the town. But this was the Gold Rush, “flush times” and a lawless place. I’ll let Mark Twain explain the rest:

 

On the inquest it was shown that Buck Fanshaw, in the delirium of wasting typhoid fever, had taken himself through the body, cut his throat, and jumped out a four story window and broken his neck-and after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with intelligence unblinded by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death “by the visitation of God.” What could the world do without juries?

 

Once I finish this book, I will read The Innocents Abroad again until I find another author I like which will be never. When I go to the pearly gates, or somewhere considerably hotter, I expect to go with a Twain book. In the afterlife, I will look for Twain first, then Jimi Hendrix and then Hunter Thompson and Abigail Adams.  I imagine if I met the Mark Twain the angel, I would be fascinated, trembling with rabid fangirlyness …unable to slip away.

 

Unless Jimi was playing Hey Joe. Then I might have to say “Mr. Clemens, I’ll be right back.” 

 

Hello, I'm Wordkraphter, Rose, whatever. 

I'm a writer of such in that I've secretly been a writer since I was nine, but no one's pubished me yet. Except for a few letters and such.

I'm not trying to get published at the moment, but I hope to at some point.

I write mainly urban fantasy, or any sort of fantasy/scifi/horror. I also tend to write dramatic monologues, some short fiction and bad poetry. :P

I am currently trying to get my hands on The Chosen One by D L Mains, back in the days of reading Harry Potter fanfiction she wrote my favourite and now she's published. I'm also trying to get hold of a decent copy of King Lear which I want to read, or Midsummer Night's Dream whichever comes first. I guess that's a lot about what I want to read and no what I am reading. Currently I've just started Othello, but with my AS exams this week I'm not getting far.

Oh, my favourite Urban Fantasy author is probably someone quite typical like Cassandra Clare, Richelle Mead (Vampire Academy over Succubus Blues) or maybe Blood and Chocolate I'm not sure.

My favourite character is probably Buffy or Max from Dark Angel (yeah they're not books, but they're still urban fantasy, or sci fi in the case of Dark Angel).

I used to write Harry Potter fanfiction. Now I just read it.

Looking forward to reading and getting to know you.

-Rose

After 3 hours of homework and more stress and frustration than any 13 YO (okay, fine, any 13 YO's mother) should have to endure, I've decided if both of my kids make it through high school, I'm sending them to Grandma's for the weekend and *I'M* the one having a keggar. Mark your calendars. June, 2015.

My director at work complains about his almost two year old who takes her poopy diaper off and walks around showing people.

I'm telling you, I'll take that over algebra and science write-ups any day.

Colette Gale, Master: This was interesting; it's an erotic novel based on The Count of Monte Cristo, which mostly fits into the cracks of that novel as fanfiction fits into canon. But also like fanfiction, the novel comments on the novel's characters and time period. Most notably, the female characters are expanded and given more agency, partly through their roles in the life of Monte Cristo, and partly through giving them distinct erotic identities. The focus of the story is taken away from Monte Cristo and his complex revenge, leaving something new in its place.

It's a nifty concept. However, the length and complexity of the orginal Count of Monte Cristo is a hindrance to commentary, I felt; because some events in the original novel had to be compressed and explained to the reader, a great deal of plot impetus was lost. I felt more as if I was reading a collection of commentaries on The Count of Monte Cristo rather than a single novel. I'm not sure how this could have been avoided, or even if it should have been.

My favorite part of Gale's novel was the story of the Nubian slave Ali and the Greek Haydée, daughter of Ali Pasha and now also a slave. Minor characters in the original, Gale gives them their own story. Haydée acts on her erotic desires more than once, until she finally achieves what she wants. Notably, in the original novel Ali is mute, having had his tongue cut out; in Gale's version, his voice is literally returned to him; he explains he has kept silent for years as part of a debt of honor.

A very interesting read.

Another One Bites the Dust - Jennifer Rardin "Ever experience blackouts, and regain consciousness to find yourself holding a gun to your own head? This makes for fascinating reading..."

Have a lovely day! :-)

Tez Miller