And my words like silent raindrops fell, and echoed in the wells of silence

[pameladean]

I haven't been posting much because, after a brief moment just after LJ struggled to its feet again in the wake of the latest DDOS attack, when everything seemed to work, LJ is again failing to play nicely with Opera. I can type in entries till I'm blue, but neither the Preview button nor the Post button works. If I click on the link in an emailed comment notification, I can type merrily away in the comment box thus provided, but the Post and Preview buttons do not work. If I attempt to comment directly on a journal, sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I can comment on a journal, and if I go back to answer a response, suddenly I can't comment any more. Some journals seem permanently barred (karenkay, I would pester you a lot more if I could). LJ Support heroically worked on the problem during the DDOS attack, but told me they had been unable to reproduce my difficulty with several different versions of Opera.

I'm using Firefox to post this.

I don't know why I don't just switch to Firefox, aside from a less than healthy hatred of unfamiliar things in my working environment. I think some deep part of my brain, faced with the fact that a particular website does not work with Opera, decides "Forget that website!" rather than "Forget Opera!"

Oh, and I can't post to or comment on Google+, either. Well, I could, but only if I didn't put spaces between words. This would give my comments an interesting flavor of very old classical manuscript, but seems unproductive in the long run. In any case, I'm unimpressed with Google's handling of its insane insistence on real names.

However, I do have some good news. I heard back from sdn, my fabulous editor. She does not hate the book! It needs more cutting and tightening, as I knew when I sent it off, and hence has been moved from Fall of 2012 to Spring of 2013. This is not, I understand, good news to people who are still actually waiting for the book rather than having found authors who write regularly and don't end up expanding and shrinking their novels as if they were variable stars, but it's good news for me. The book would have needed to be in copy-edit by November if it were to be published in the fall of next year, and now it doesn't have to be in that enviable state until March. Breathing room to make revisions -- with any luck at all, the last revisions this unfortunate composition will need to suffer -- will be useful.

I should make posts about this summer's hiking and about books I've read, but we'll see.

I am reading you all, and I rejoice at your triumphs and am saddened by your sorrows and laugh at your jokes.

Pamela

Comments

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I like the image of your book as a variable star.

[kate_nepveu]

Me too.

I wish I could help with your Opera problems. I love Opera and would be massively distressed if I couldn't use it for LJ.

[pameladean]

Aw, thanks, you guys. It came to me during the dark, dark days after I was told that I had to squeeze the 375,000-word two-volume novel back down past its original 250,000 words all the way to 100,000. And while this sounds grandiose, doing that felt a lot like tinkering with an already unstable star. Perhaps I have read the Young Wizards books too many times.

Kate, I guess I love Opera too, in that way one can sometimes love something too utterly taken for granted. Your earlier suggestions to me paralleled LJ Support's later suggestions, and then they had some more, but except briefly, nothing worked.

P.

[kate_nepveu]

I am occasionally forced to use other browsers and I feel like papersky about her word processor--muscle memory! Having everything set up exactly the way I want! When it started needing admin access to install updates at work I went and found a version that's meant to run on a USB drive, i.e., no install, because I am just not as efficient on other browsers.

(Was using a portable version one of their suggestions? I would think that would be a non-destructive way to tell if there was some quirk in your existing install that was affecting things. OTOH, the support page says "There are issues with Javascript not loading correctly on several LiveJournal pages, such as commenting forms and the update journal page. " , which sounds very much like it could be related to your problem.)

[kate_nepveu]

http://lj-releases.livejournal.com/70119.html -- commenting if Opera Turbo is on now fixed--was this maybe it? I hope so, anyway (I had weird things happen with LJ/DW when Opera turned Turbo on, so I turned it off ages ago).

[pameladean]

Oh, interesting! I do have to use Opera Turbo sometimes, because we have a lamentably slow connection, and if our little independent ISP does not do something about it, at some point we may have to go to a large evil corporation instead.

The present situation is that I can now preview and post entries in Opera, but there are some friends' journals that I cannot ever comment in. I am making a list, though I don't know if it will show me much.

P.

[arkuat]

I like the image of Going North (if that's what it's going to be called) as a variable star too, but it's an unsettling sort of variable star that suddenly has to settle down to some constant length or another after publication, so that all the critics (boo!) and fans (yay!) can agree that they're discussing the same book.

[carbonel]

Does David or Raphael use Opera?

I would be interested in hearing what would happen if you gave your logon info to one of them and zie tried posting to your LJ. That would test just how computer-specific the problem is.

Or have you been through all of that already with LJ support?

[pameladean]

They both do, and no, LJ Support and I didn't get that far, since I thought the problem was fixed. I'll see what D and R think.

P.

[(Anonymous) (from livejournal.com)]

I've never been able to duplicate any of Pamela's Livejournal issues on my computer, but hadn't actually tried it while logged in as her until just now. Not only did it still work, it worked when I went and tried it on her computer again, and then it continued to work when she tried it. Who knows if this will actually last.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

pubdate--yay!!!!

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Yay! 2013, as opposed to "sometime eventually." (Thus I prove I am not your usual reader, or something.)

I can't comment on G+, either, but that's because (due to computer limitations), I can't use the new editions of Firefox et al. Gr.

[pameladean]

Best kind of reader, however.

It's very strange being unable to comment. I kept forgetting, for a while, that I couldn't, typing stuff and being unable to post it, and having to let it go, like birds on the wind or something. Then for a bit it felt very liberating, but now it's annoying again.

I suspect I may be dealing with a computer limitation too, but I don't know what the heck it is.

P.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I haven't used Opera to post to LJ, but I've found a similar problem with Hotwire, the discount travel reservation site. Some of their pulldown menus refuse to pull down under Opera, so you can't enter data or change the default data if any. Others work OK.

[pameladean]

I do have problems with other websites, including Hotwire and FatFreeVeganKitchen, but I don't use them daily and don't actually have to use them at all. Vermont Country Store used to not work with Opera either, but now it does.

p.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Heh. I just dropped a line from "Mrs. Robinson" in a comment in my own journal.

I am so happy about the book. Hurray!

I am finding Javascript-heavy sites more and more and more annoying. I frequently have to go from Chrome to Firefox to IE to shop at some stores. A friend just posted that google.com, the search engine itself, no longer supports her browser. (!!!!!)

[pameladean]

I saw that! I still love all those albums.

Book happiness is fine happiness.

Eeeek. I guess I'd have to try something else if google.com did not support Opera any more. Not Bing, lord knows.

P.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

As I recall, the problem was that her browser was "obsolete", although it was the latest browser her computer could actually run.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

That's what happens to me with G+ (my work computer is a G4 iBook, so it can't update the OS), but I have yet to run into it with Google-the-search-engine, thankfully.

[arkuat]

Since I switched from firefox to chrome as my default browser, I switched from google to duckduckgo.com as my default search engine. It works as well for almost all purposes, and I can always go to google.com whenever I want to; it's just not the default anymore.

[arkuat]

It works as well for almost all purposes, and it works better for some, is what I ought to have typed.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

The revised publication date sounds like good news for you, and I can wait. Yay!

[pameladean]

At least it's only six more months.

P.

[cowfan.livejournal.com]

Yay! Looking forward to the book coming out. And people may get a taste of it at Conjecture 2 (http://www.mnstf.org/conjecture/) at your Friday night reading, right?

[pameladean]

Very likely, though I need to find a passage I have not already read at Minicon. People have actually gotten several tastes of it over the years. The question is whether to do a bit that will be in the published book or one that got cut, as a special treat.

P.

[thinkum]

Fred's and my little niece Sonia, adopted from India as a special needs child, has a particular gift for wrapping our heartstrings around her tiny fingers. She has this funny expression that combines frustration and happiness and impatience and eagerness and resignation all at once, when she's ready for something exciting and her mother tells her, "Not yet!". Her small hands make the sign for 'Wait' and she gives a little sigh -- even while she's smiling in anticipation and her eyes are all lit up.

I look a lot like Sonia at the moment. ;-)

[pameladean]

Awwwww!

I'll try not to do anything to make them move the publication date again.

P.

[thinkum]

I have no doubts that it will be well worth the wait.

Last night was little niece's birthday party. She kept throwing her hands in the air and saying "YAY!" -- and the knowledge that your book is, in fact, on the way, makes me look like that image of Sonia, too. ;-)

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

rather than having found authors who write regularly and don't end up expanding and shrinking their novels as if they were variable stars,

I don't think "rather than" is quite the right expression, because it's probably quite unusual to be monogamous with authors. Except perhaps for the partners of authors. But I digress.

I would, of course, buy books by other authors too even if you were to produce a new one every Christmas. And I am looking forward to your new one.

[phantom_wolfboy]

Commenting with Opera. Not having any problems so far.

[sdn.livejournal.com]

You have done a stunning job with this book. We're getting there ...

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

I rather like the idea of your Google+ account resembling a very old classical manuscript, unproductive or no.

And I'm very much looking forward to the book, even if the wait has got longer...

love

Catherine

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on the new date!