If it’s your thing, I’ve launched an author newsletter. Join for announcements about new releases, sneak previews of upcoming titles (including Haven Divided), special offers, and giveaways. 📚

This song has been stuck in my head all week. This Old Guitar by John Denver 🎵

🔖 A Guide to Micro.blog For People Who Have A Love/Hate Relationship With Twitter, by Jean MacDonald

Episode 305 of 99% Invisible tells the story of the Laff Box, the contraption which was used to generate laugh tracks for TV for decades. It’s a preview of a new podcast called Decoder Ring.

I’m in the modern minority, in that I actually like sitcoms with laugh tracks, but I don’t understand why it has to be an either/or stance. Some people hate laugh tracks; some staunchly support them. I think there is room for both formats on television. Part of what makes I Love Lucy, Three’s Company or Friends so great is that they were all performed before studio audiences, some of the laughs being “sweetened” not withstanding. Those three shows are among my all-time favorite sitcoms, in no small part because the actors are playing to the audience. But I also love The Wonder Years, an early example of a show without a laugh track.

The history of the Laff Box is interesting and entertaining as presented by Decoder Ring. I only wish that it hadn’t been so biased against its use. I don’t think we need to start overlaying a laugh track on The Office or Modern Family, but I don’t think shows should be shying away from it either just because it isn’t in vogue.

I just finished reading Borderline, the first book in the Arcadia Project series, by Mishell Baker.

This book has been on my radar for a while. I’m pretty sure that the first time I heard about it was on Upgrade #174, recommended by Jason Snell. It kept popping up here and there since, and I finally picked up the audiobook.

I outline all of the above for an important reason; I enjoyed this book tremendously, but I think my enjoyment was somewhat lessened by the book being overhyped. It was a very good story, and I’m thoroughly looking forward to reading the rest of the Arcadia Project series, but I went in with the wrong mindset. I spent the first half of the book feeling mildly disappointed. I did eventually reset my expectations, and doing so made a huge difference to my enjoyment. By the end, I was hungry for more of the universe Mishell Baker introduces and the characters that inhabit it.

If you’re a fan of fantasy in general, and/or urban fantasy in particular, I definitely recommend this unique take on the genre.

Ah … yes … there it is! The whooshing sound as the manuscript for Haven Divided zooms away on the wings of an email to my editor, whom I highly recommend to any other authors out there. 🐉📚✍️😌

The first book in my Dragon’s Brood Cycle series, Haven Lost, is now available to read for free on Kindle Unlimited for the first time, if that’s your thing. The Kindle edition is now only $0.99 to purchase, too. 📚

“This is the year of the hungry man, whose place is in the past, / Hand in hand with ignorance and legitimate excuses.” —George Michael, Praying for Time 🎵

Started reading Borderline, the first book in the Arcadia Project by Mishell Baker. I’ve heard good things from several sources about this series. Only a few chapters in, but I’m enjoying it so far. 📚

My revisions to Haven Divided are complete! Next up: off to my editor. 🙌🕺📚

Elton John’s Made In England has got to be one of his most underrated albums. It’s so great—timeless. 🎵

🔖 As an avid audiobook fan and someone who enjoys the nostalgia of vinyl, this is so cool. Plus, the book in question is one of my all-time favorites. So fun! 📚 – Audiobook 42 years overdue returned to Johnson County Library

🔖 Tesla was a fascinating fellow. – Nikola Tesla predicted the smartphone in 1926

Revisions to Haven Divided are now 92% complete. I always find that applying polish to the last quarter of a piece takes the longest, but it is also the most satisfying. 📚

🔖 All I ask is for it to be a good film. – Nee Brothers to direct Masters of the Universe

🔖 This is extremely cool. FicDown is a Markdown based syntax for writing interactive fiction stories.

This is a quick guide for using Micro.blog as a visually impaired user in its current state. The service has some accessibility issues which the official What’s Next page lists as upcoming improvements. The web, macOS app, and iOS apps all have various accessibility shortfalls to greater or lesser degrees, with the web UI being the least problematic.

Nevertheless, I’ve found myself falling in love with this new service, and I wanted to provided a quick guide of the tools I’m using to workaround the current accessibility problems. None of these are particularly earth shattering, but I hope they’ll help prospective visually impaired users get up and running more quickly.

As a macOS/iOS user, the solutions below focus on those OSs, but you can probably easily adapt these strategies to your platforms of choice.

Reading Your Timeline

The Micro.blog web interface works reasonably well for reading your timelines, but it is a bit clunky compared to using a native app. Still, for now, this is the primary method I use for reading my timeline.

There is an alternative that I’ve tried and which you may find works better for you. Using an RSS reader, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your timeline and/or mentions as described in this help article. I’m using FeedWrangler as my RSS manager. It can be nice to have a quick look at your timeline this way, but the inability to quickly reply or view conversations is a definite drawback. If links were available in the feed text to perform those tasks, this method might be more useful.

Posting

Update: Less than 24 hours after publishing this blog, things have changed. See below for an even better posting method.

You can post using the Micro.blog web interface, although it behaves a bit strangely on both macOS and iOS. This is the method I use when replying to other users on the system.

For a better posting experience, I’ve been using MarsEdit for macOS, which is every bit as awesome and accessible as it has ever been, and Drafts for iOS, in conjunction with its Micro.blog action and the official Micro.blog iOS app. Essentially, you can compose a post in Drafts, send it to the Micro.blog official client, and just hit the Post button to post. Although the Micro.blog iOS app does have a lot of accessibility issues, you can get signed in using VoiceOver.

Update

Just a few hours after publishing the above, Drafts 5 was released. That version of the app has a new Drafts 5 action for Micro.blog which allows you to post without need of the Micro.blog iOS app. This is much better for now, but it does require upgrading to use Drafts 5. I have left the earlier method intact in this post for existing Drafts 4 users.

Conclusion

As I continue working with Micro.blog, I expect to update this post with other solutions. The flexibility and openness of the platform is what initially sold me on it; I used my Micro.blog’s JSONFeed to show only relevant posts on my official site, while my blog shows all my posts, just as one very simple example. I also wrote a script which archives both HTML and MarkDown versions of all the posts on my own web server.

Ultimately, though, it is the awesome community that keeps me coming back.

Despite the fact that I tend to do my best writing in the evening hours, I’ve belatedly come to the realization that I do my best revising in the mornings and afternoons. That seems counterintuitive to me. 📚

I’ve been slowly … very slowly … working my way through The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in Esperanto after finally figuring out how to transcribe into Esperanto Braille on macOS. Mi Esperanto estas rusta. 📚

75% finished with the revisions to Haven Divided. Right on track to get the manuscript to my editor by the end of the month. 😃📚

In anticipation of the release of Haven Divided, the Kindle edition of Haven Lost is now just $0.99 on Amazon.com! The price has been similarly lowered in Kindle stores around the world, so if you’ve been thinking of picking it up, now would be a great time! Of course, it’s also available on Audible!

The second volume of The Dragon’s Brood Cycle is written! Haven Divided will be shipped off to my editor by the end of the month. It’s been a long time in coming, but I am so proud of the manuscript, and I can’t wait for readers to rejoin Emily on her adventures. Expect more news on this title, including a projected release date, very soon!

🔖 Stumbled across this fascinating blog post while researching Braille translation for Esperanto. – Esperanto for the Blind | Imp of the Diverse

I’ve always been an avid reader. My taste runs more toward fantasy and science-fiction, but I have read a bit of most genres throughout my life. In having read fairly widely, I have, like most readers, found which genres I gravitate toward–and which I shy away from–and it becomes easy to fall into the trap of seldom revisiting genres where I’ve been unlucky.

Last spring, I discovered an author whose genre is one of those I tend to avoid. Rhys Bowen is billed as a mystery author, and I typically don’t care for mysteries, apart from occasional forays back into the world of the classic Sherlock Holmes stories. I especially do not enjoy modern mystery novels unless they have, for example, a supernatural bent to them (e.g. Sookie Stackhouse).

I previously wrote about my love of the Bloody Jack series, the audio book versions of which are narrated by the incredible Katherine Kellgren. It was her narration talents that nudged me into checking out, a bit dubiously, Her Royal Spyness by Bowen, the first title in a historical mystery series of the same name.

Her Royal Spyness is a lighthearted series of mysteries focusing on a fictional heir to the throne of England in the 1930s who, much to her embarrassment at times, keeps falling over corpses. The books are light, fun reads with a wealth of fascinating historical details and often feature real historical figures.

After finishing the dozen titles in that series, I turned to Bowen’s Molly Murphy Mysteries series. These feature an Irish peasant girl who, in 1901, flees from the authorities in Ireland and ends up in New York City. There, she discovers she has a talent for solving mysteries and attempts to run her own detective agency, a profession very much frowned on for women at the time. The Molly Murphy books are a bit more serious than Her Royal Spyness, but no less engaging and fun for that. I absolutely adore them.

I rarely read historical fiction, and even more rarely mysteries, but I highly recommend both of these series, and Rhys Bowen in general, if you are looking for something light, fun, and full of wit and heart.