Auld Lang Syne

Sharon Wildwind

The weather is appreciably gloomy this morning: sleet, frozen rain, and a promise of snow and wind until noon. I’m rather glad. It fits my mood. If it were bright sunshine and blue sky, it would be even harder to say good-bye.

When I started here with the Daughters, I was working on book number three in my first mystery series. That series finished out at five books.

As I leave the Daughters, here’s what I have on the go:

• Carrying the Blood - a stand-alone mystery set in a Calgary folk music club needs one more read through before it’s ready to go looking for a publisher.
• Willful Missing - my first complete play will be entered in a contest March 1
• Whiskeyjack - I’ve started work on the first book in my new series, set in a nursing station in northern Alberta. One of the main characters is from the Isle of Sky, and Burns Night is only 11 days away, so here’s a little bit of Scottish flavor to go out on.

Some ad is likely to pop up in the middle of this. I'd turn it off if I knew how, but I don't, so just click the little X to make it go away.



And here’s my deep, dark secret — I’m writing a little fan fic set in the Harry Potter universe. At my age? As someone in my critique group said, “Why the heck not?”

I know if I hit a rough spot in any of this I can call on any of you, and you'd be glad to help. That's what friends are for.

The same back to you. If I can be of any help as you write, please get in touch with me.

web: www. wildwindauthor.com
blog: sharoncreate@wildwindauthor.com
Twitter: @sharww
Google+: Google.com/+Wildwindauthor

Final quote:

© Photo Lance Keimig/Isle of Skye

Lance is a wonderful photographer who specializes in night photography. Check out Night Photography here.

Mobile Me

Sharon Wildwind

It must be summer because I’ve been to computer camp. I even got a T-shirt.

Here are some things I learned at camp about web sites and mobile devices.

60% of computer users in North America use a mobile device as their preferred source of Internet information. The days of designing web sites for the desktop computer are way behind us. Unfortunately, many of us designed our web site way back when desktop computers were the norm. Have you ever seen your web site on a laptop, tablet, or mobile phone?

There are programs on-line that allow you to do this, but you can also do a quick mobile check just by resizing your screen.

Go to your home page.

In the lower right side of your screen should be a resize tab.

Move that tab up and to the left until the screen is about the size of a laptop screen. Here’s what mine looks like. 

What my site looks like on a laptop.

It’s not that bad. My name is still there, most my photo, and that I’m a writer, etc. However, I’ve lost my contact information, which is at the lower left corner of the full screen.

Keep decreasing the screen size until it's about the size of an iPad or other tablet. Essential information is still there, but my photo is starting to disappear.

What my web site looks like on a tablet.

Finally, go all the way to mobile phone screen size. Here’s mine.

What my site looks like on a mobile phone.

Design Rule #1: Design for a mobile screen first.

Remember that mobile is used on the go. What is the first thing your user looks for on the mobile device? Design your mobile for that essential, information.

Two people are having coffee. One says, “Have you read [Insert your name here]?” The other woman says, “No,” and pulls out her mobile to look for you. What information does she need on her mobile screen?

Your name. How to reach you by Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn.

I’m not doing too badly, but the only contact information visible is my Google+ link. So I went into my web program and reorganized two items. I moved my Twitter information up on the screen, and I added sub-menus under the Books and Art headings. The mobile user can now click on one of those little white triangles and get a list of my books and the art pieces I’m currently showing.

My web site revised for a mobile phone.

 Fortunately my program allows me to make these changes very easily. If you have a similar program, think about rearranging the information on your home screen so that the essential information is in the upper left corner of your screen.

If someone helps you with your web site, ask them to check how your home screen looks in a mobile phone format and rearrange information so that essential contact information is in the upper left corner of the screen.

Down the road, when you’re ready for a site redesign, think about or have our computer guy or gal think about designing your screen in columns.

• Essential (mobile) information should be in the far left top corner.
• Most desired information is one column over: this will show up on tablets.
• Desired information one colum over from that: this shows up on laptops.
• Finally, your nice to have on the far right. Chances are this last column will show up only on full-screen desk computers or very large laptops.

Here are a couple of other tweaks you or your computer person might consider.

This first one comes with a warning: it’s the most techie two paragraphs in the blog.

Dump meta keywords and descriptions entirely. They are no longer used and if meta information hasn’t been changed in a long time, hackers think this is a vulnerable site they can take over.

Remove generator tag entirely. An unchanging generator tag alerts hackers to blogs that haven’t been posted to in a while.

I’ve managed to locate my meta keywords and delete them, but generator tags are a foreign country. Someone else is going to help me with that.

You can use customer descriptions as key words: for example if you would like to sell your book to book clubs, add mystery and book club to your key words. Don’t bother with a phrase such as mysteries for book clubs because for is not a good key word.

When posting photos, name your photos well because photo names become key search words. Suppose I’d taken a research trip to Ireland (Don’t I wish) and I’m posting photos of that trip.

• Worst photo name I could use would be not to change what comes out of the camera, such as IMG0568
• Slightly Better photo name Donegal Trip. At least Donegal would become a key search word. Trip is too generic to be a good key word.
• Great photo name Sharon Wildwind-Donegal-Ireland, because all three are good key words.

In naming photos, use hyphens rather than underscores because the Google Search Engine reads these marks in different ways. If I’d named my imaginary photo Sharon_Wildwind_Donegal_Ireland the underscores may do strange things in Google.

If you’re not sure what size to use for a photo try resizing it to 585 pixels x 585 pixels if it’s a square photo and 585 pixels on the long side and 366 pixels on the short side if a rectangle. That’s an average base size that is likely to work on a lot of devices, including mobile phones.

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Quote for the week

What is the best social media for us to be on? The one where everyone else is. This means we have to move as the crowd moves. This doesn’t mean that we abandon other programs, but we change our emphasis of where we spend the most time, energy, and financial resources.

~Chris Garrett, author and smart computer guy, 2013 May 25

Patterns and Self-Protection

Sharon Wildwind

Crystallography is the study of how atoms are arranged in solid materials. Scientists identified seventeen possible two-dimensional arrangement patterns, eleven of them in lines and six in circles. Ruth B. McDowell, an American quilter realized these patterns were the same ones quilters used, but most quilters had limited themselves to only a few of their possible choices.

This past week I worked through a couple of her books, drawing a lot of patterns and coloring them in muted colors. As long as the patterns were pretty unidirectional I was okay, but when elements had to be reversed or placed upside down, I had a terrible time. I know I’m a little dyslexic with numbers, but patterns? I’m the pattern-recognition queen, so I was at a loss as to what was going on.

Here’s Pattern #1 (P1). Because it’s only one placement repeated over and over, I didn’t have a problem with it, though where most people would draw the first design from the instructions, I would be equally likely to draw the second.

The scientist's version on the left; my left-handed version on the right.

Pattern #2 (P2) was a little harder, but after several false starts, I managed.

Ditto to the previous drawings.

Pattern #4 (P4) was a complete disaster. (For those of you who like consistency and order, P3 is a circular pattern and I’m no where ready to tackle the circle ones yet.) 

You’re probably already ahead of me on where the problem lay. I’m left handed!

Ms. McDowell starts with a sample block pattern with a hand imposed over it. Tell most people to imagine a  hand over a pattern and they’ll visualize the first figure in the line. I tend to visualize the second one. Because I can do simultaneous translation of right-handed instructions into left-hand, I was also tending to mentally reverse the pattern, so it looked like the third figure in the line.

1) What most people see in their mind. 2) What I see. 3) A reversed left-handed pattern.

What I was supposed to draw on top.
What I kept drawing on the bottom.

When those patterns included elements that had to be flipped or reversed, my brain couldn't keep up with the changes. It took me a full day to work out the difference between the right-hand orientation for P4 (top) and the left-hand orientation (bottom) my brain kept handing me.

No doubt the scientists who came up with the seventeen patterns would tell me that the world isn’t put together with left-handed arrangements of atoms. Maybe their’s isn’t. Mine is. If you’re a mystery writer, so is yours.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever voluntarily, not because it was for work or school

• Fired a handgun just to see what it feels like?
• Done a ride-along with police officers or other first responders?
• Toured a new building and been more interested in places to hide bodies than in the nifty pro-ecology features?
• Read an autopsy report?
• Taken a field trip to the medical examiners office or a forensics lab?

Ordinary—I’ll refraining from saying normal—people don’t seek out these things as a matter of course. Because as mystery writers we have a far greater familiarity with what human beings do to one another, we have a greater need to pay attention to healthy, life-affirming activities. Art is one of my anodynes. It finally dawned on me that my need for pattern and low-key colors in the past few days is my reaction to what’s been happening out there in the world.

The point is we have to be as diligent in protecting ourselves as we do in researching our books.

Physical activity and sports are good ideas. So are meditation, dance, music, and good friends. I’ve learned some things recently about singing bowls and walking labyrinths, and I’m interested in trying both, though maybe not at the same time.

One further comment about pattern-recognition queens. I hope you saw the first episode of The Bletchley Circle on PBS last night. Four women who worked as code breakers at Bletchley Park during World War II reunite in 1952 London to track down a serial killer. There are two more episodes, one on April 28 and the last on May 5. Well done, well worth watching.

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Quote for the week

Let’s be careful out there.

~ Sergeant Phil Esterhaus, Hill Street Precinct, played by the late Michael Conrad (1925 - 1983)