Swan Tower

website addition: statement on AI

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:44:50 GMT

Since it's good to have my feelings on the matter stated clearly in a more prominent place than scattered across various blog posts, I've added a statement on AI to my website.

Next task: updating the copyright page in all my BVC ebooks to state that I do not grant permission for them to be used in training AI models, and any such use is prohibited.

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Caveat clicker

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 22:24:44 GMT

Apparently several of my old blog posts just appeared on people’s Dreamdwidth friendslists. All of them reference gambling, and had spam links inserted into them that were NOT there before. From this I conclude that my account was hacked somehow.

I’ve changed my password and edited those links out of the posts. But if you’ve seen things posted from me today that aren’t “On Cruising,” “Wheel of Time side post: On Women,” and “A Memory of Light Liveblog Part 2,” please let me know, so I can go clean them up. And if you’re getting comments suddenly on old posts of yours, check to see if they’ve been interfered with, too.

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Swan Tower’s privacy policy

Mon, 11 Jun 2018 18:48:40 GMT

I put this up last month, but since I was busy traveling, I didn’t have a chance to mention it publicly until now.

Swan Tower now has a privacy policy page. It’s modifed from WordPress’ boilerplate suggestions, so it’s a little clunky, but the short form it this: I gather almost no data about visitors to my site, use only data which is necessary for the purpose (e.g. email address if you sign up for the mailing list, IP address etc for comments), and will delete your data if you ask. It may take me a little while to do the latter, depending on the scale of the request and whether I’m on a trip or something at the time, but I will do my best to respect any such wishes as promptly as I can.

On a less site-specific note, it’s been interesting to watch the privacy updates roll out across the web. Turns out to be a fantastic way to find out what I’m subscribed to that I had utterly forgotten about — which has led to a lot of unsubscribes, as you might imagine. And I have taken great pleasure in telling certain sites that no, they may not do XYZ with my data. So on the whole, I’m glad that GDPR has pushed the web in general and U.S. companies in particular toward being more careful with such things, even if there was a mild panic as everyone realized the deadline for compliance was coming up fast.

Mirrored from Swan Tower.

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New Worlds: Plate Tectonics

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 20:03:48 GMT

(Forgot to cross-post this last week. Does anybody know of a replacement for the Livejournal Crossposter WP plugin? That one stopped working for Dreamwidth a while ago, which is why I'm having to do all of this by hand.)

This week (or rather, last week now) on New Worlds: plate tectonics! And also mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, and other things that go along with the fact that our world is a big ball of rock plates floating on a sea of molten lava. Comment over there!

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the end of an era

Thu, 04 May 2017 23:41:28 GMT

Since Livejournal changed their terms of service and the mass exodus began, I haven’t had a single comment on the LJ versions of these posts. Accordingly, I am going to cancel and remove that blog. If you’re still reading via LJ, I suggest you transfer to one of these options:

* the WordPress original (you can subscribe via the widget in the sidebar or checking a tickybox when commenting on a post, or add it to an RSS reader like Feedly)
* the Dreamwidth mirror

I’ll be shutting down the LJ in a few days, so make your changes now!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Two weeks to the release of WITHIN THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 18:17:24 GMT

Are you impatient? I know I am. <g>

In preparation for the book’s release, I’ve spiffed up its page on my site. The opening chapter excerpt is now posted there (if you didn’t read it already on Tor.com), and there’s a page that will collect all the blog posts I make about the book, etc. And, for something entirely fresh, I’ve also posted the soundtrack — though that comes with the usual warning that, while I have done my best to minimize spoilers in the track titles, they do still provide some clues, however tiney, about the novel’s plot. For them as likes that kind of thing, go and see what you can divine? For them as prefers to come at the book entirely unspoiled, you may want to hold off on looking at that page, just in case.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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The Future of (me on) Livejournal

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 07:42:23 GMT

If you’re intending to bail from LJ due to the changes in the terms of service but want to go on reading my blog, your options are:

1) my website
2) its DW mirror

When it comes to commenting, my personal preference is for the original home, i.e. my website. That’s the place I control, and the home of my blog in the eyes of anyone who googles my name; it would honestly be nice to have more of the discussion happening over there. I recommend Feedly as a service for all your blog-following needs, mine or anyone else’s; all you have to do is click “add content” and paste in a URL to follow a WP blog, DW, LJ, whatever you like. (There are more bells and whistles, but that’s the core of it.) On the other hand, I know many of you like the LJ/DW style interface and would prefer to stick with that, so rest assured, I’ll continue to read and respond to comments on the mirrored posts.

. . . I’ll even fix my damn theme so the text around the comment box is readable instead of accidentally being white-on-white. Like I’ve meant to do for, um, years.

I am not at present intending to drop the cross-posting to LJ, but it sounds like many of you will be shifting to DW or elsewhere, so the comment threads are likely to get a lot quieter. For my own part, I suspect I’m going to be reading everything through Feedly from now on, regardless of where it’s hosted.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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a note for those who read this blog via LiveJournal

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 18:31:28 GMT

I’ve been seeing concerns about the future of LiveJournal now that its servers are apparently in Russia (and therefore subject to Russian, rather than U.S., law concerning privacy etc). I don’t intend to pre-emptively abandon the LJ iteration of this blog, which is where it began and where the majority of the comments are, but in case I either change my mind or LJ itself goes poof without warning, you may want to bookmark one of these links:

WordPress (now the source for all mirrored versions, and integrated with the rest of my website; can be followed via WP or Feedly/some other RSS reader)

DreamWidth (mirrored from WP)

Goodreads (I can’t remember whether this feeds from LJ or from WP; I may need to change settings around)

If you read this blog on LJ and that stops being an option, you will still be able to find me at one of those sites — and I hope you will! I think the only risk I really face on the LJ front, aside from possible incompetence that causes too many unresolved bugs, is that mine is a paid account and therefore there’s a credit card number involved. So I’ll stick it out until the bitter end, most likely.

Edited to add this from mme_hardy on DW:

Your readers should know about another catch:

LJ no longer allows access to its https site when browsing/posting, which means that any information you send to that site is readable by every other site that cares to eavesdrop. This means that anything you post under friendslock is still being read by any site that chooses to spy on Livejournal communications; you can safely assume that at least one Russian-government entity is.

I just double-checked, and the payment page *is* protected by https, so that at least should be secure.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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New photos!

Sun, 22 May 2016 21:23:19 GMT

At long last, I’ve finished going through my photos from our European trip last year. There are new galleries up: Adriatic Coast, Barcelona, La Sagrada Familia, Montserrat, Florence, and Venice, plus my pictures from Rome separated out, and additions to the Italy and Other galleries.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Hunt bugs, win a book!

Wed, 11 May 2016 18:36:55 GMT

Ladies! Gentlemen! Polite and helpful people of all types!

I need your assistance. Specifically, I need you to hunt bugs and errors on my shiny new website. I will bait you into doing this by offering your pick from my collection of author copies, and I’ll run it sort of like a raffle: for every bug or error you notify me of, you get one “ticket” to win a book. Send in seventeen corrections, get seventeen chances to win. If at least ten different people submit corrections, I’ll pick two winners; if at least twenty people, three winners; and so on. (It doesn’t matter whether you report an error somebody else already sent in; if it was there when you looked at the site, that’s good enough for me. Otherwise I have to do a lot of really annoying bookkeeping.)

Here’s the kinds of corrections I’m looking for:

1) Text errors. Misspellings, grammatical errors, wrong punctuation, etc. I proofread carefully, but there are a lot of pages on my site; odds are quite good that I’ve screwed up here and there.

2) Broken links. I scrubbed out a lot of dead links when I ported stuff over, but I probably missed some. Also, we’ve set up redirects for the old URLs, so when you click on a website-internal link in the middle of text, it should go to the correct new location — but if it doesn’t, I need to know about it.

3) Bad code. This could be anything from images displaying in the wrong place (like over text) to me forgetting to close a tag to munged escape character sequences. If the site displays badly on any particular platform, also let me know that, and I’ll pass it along to my site designer.

You can send these to me by email, via my contact form or in the comments. Please include a link to the page in question, and enough context for me to know where the error is — don’t just say “missing comma” or “broken link,” let me know where in the page that is. It will also help me if you separate the errors in your reply, just so I give you enough raffle tickets!

You have until the end of the month to send in your feedback; I’ll pick winners once I’m home again in early June. Thank you all in advance for your help!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Welcome to Swan Tower 3.0!

Wed, 11 May 2016 09:50:18 GMT

If you’ve visited my website in the last twenty-four hours, you may have noticed . . . a few changes.

For the last month or so I’ve been deeply in the throes of a major, major redesign. As in, the entire thing now runs on WordPress — because I finally got convinced that it’s way more powerful and effective than I thought, provided you get somebody to tailor it to your needs (rather than just running with an off-the-shelf install). This beauty is the work of Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios, who has done a number of author sites; I recommend him wholeheartedly. It’s thanks to him that I not only have the usual stuff of blogs and pages and so forth, but a lovely setup that allows me to easily manage all kinds of material for books — buy buttons for different formats, auto-generated links to the rest of the series, cover galleries, “DVD extra”-type pages, and so forth. And photos! A whole gallery setup for photos!

Seriously, this thing is amazing. You guys get to see the pretty front end; me, I’m over here marveling at the dashboard, at how much easier maintenance is going to be in this iteration. So please, go admire it. Say nice things about Jeremiah’s work. There’s a lot to explore. 🙂

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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The final count(down)

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 20:29:46 GMT

Actual number of html pages on my site: 351.

Assuming I didn’t miss any.

The good news is, I intend to remove some of the cruft, and doing that will reduce the number to 267. That’s more than 20% less! . . . but it’s still a lot. Doing the transfer is going to take bloody forever. I am sorely tempted to pay somebody to do it for me (this is a service my site designer offers), except that I know this is also my big chance to tidy everything up: change the organization, fix broken code, add information I left out before, remove stuff that’s out of date. So I plan on doing it myself, though I reserve the right to change my mind partway through.

I can do ten pages a day, right? At which point this will only take me . . . a month.

Yeah.

So yes, there is a new site on the way. Just don’t expect to see it any time soon.

(And for the record, the closest guesser was weareadevilcow on Twitter, with 341.)

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Like those carnival games

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 00:34:33 GMT

I’m preparing to do a major overhaul of my site, and part of that process includes taking an inventory of the current site.

Which is rather large.

So let’s play a game! You guess how many pages there are on the site — individual .html files, not counting images and offsite links. Whoever comes closest to the real number will get a prize: their pick of my current inventory of author copies. (In the event of a tie, I’ll flip a coin or roll a die or whatever.)

Get yer guesses in!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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For the edification of the reader

Thu, 14 Apr 2016 07:01:50 GMT

The recent brouhahah over Stephen Fry saying asinine things about trigger warnings has given me an idea.

I’m going to add something to my website. I don’t know yet how I’ll arrange it in terms of code and presentation, but I’m going to provide content warnings for my fiction. Because I’ve had parents email me asking whether my book would be suitable for their kid (my inevitable answer: depends on the kid, and I don’t know yours, but the book contains XYZ), and readers asking whether my book contains a particular type of thing because they just don’t feel able to deal with that right now. So why not make that information publicly available? Yes, spoilers — but nobody will force you to read the content warnings. They’re there for the people who want them, and everybody else can go their merry way, exactly as they’re doing right now.

It will take me a while to write all this up (because I want to include my short fiction, not just my novels), and like I said, I need to figure out where I’ll put it on my site and how to code it (if you’re there to check the warnings for Work A, you won’t necessarily see all the warnings for Works B-Z). But apart from the labor involved, I see no reason not to provide this information. Also, I figure it would be good to ask: what kinds of things do you think it would help to see warnings for? I’m thinking major common ones, rather than trying to pin down every little thing — triggers can be very idiosyncratic. I’m also thinking of the kinds of things parents worry about, which aren’t so much triggering as inappropriate for kids at certain ages. So far I have:

Violence
- Non-graphic violence
- Graphic violence
- Sexual violence
- Murder
- Major character death
Profanity
- Mild profanity (i.e. “damn,” “hell,” etc)
- Strong profanity (i.e. “fuck”)
Mild sexual content (i.e. reference to sex, but no direct depiction)
Drug use (not including tobacco, but including alcoholism)
Mental illness (PTSD, depression, etc)
Psychological abuse
Harm to children
Harm to animals

I’m not including things that haven’t actually shown up in my fiction, e.g. graphic sexual content [edit: also domestic abuse, torture, parental death], and obviously people’s boundaries for things like “non-graphic violence” vs. “graphic violence” differ. But if you can think of anything major I’ve left out, do let me know. (I’m also probably going to include special notes where necessary, e.g. “In Ashes Lie covers a period of plague in London, and gets quite grim and detailed about that event.” Because I don’t generally think I need to warn for illness, but I feel that’s one of the most horrific things I’ve ever written, and people might want to know it’s coming.)

Basically, I can go on providing this on a one-at-a-time basis — which requires people to do things like ask me “is there sexual violence in this book?,” thus possibly disclosing their own history in a way they would rather not do — or I can just put the info out there. I think the latter is the better way to go.

EDIT: good lord, self, have you written anything that doesn’t have non-graphic violence? (Answer: yes. But not at any length above novelette.)

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Technical note

Wed, 28 May 2014 18:20:08 GMT

Just a heads-up to say that I am aware of the difficulties with the WP installation of this journal, and am working on fixing them. If you want to comment on or link to any of my posts, then for the time being the Livejournal mirror is the way to go.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

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Okay, so, that's going well.

Wed, 21 May 2014 18:10:32 GMT

(One thing that isn't going well: my WP installation. I don't know if I'll be able to get it back up before this evening, but for now it's kaput, which means among other things that today's picture post is broken. If you click on the missing image or the link, though, you should be able to see the full-size version on Flickr. In the meanwhile, this is only posting to DW and LJ.)

I'm not sure I have adequate words to express how pleased I am at the progress Chains and Memory has made in its first day. We're coming up on exactly 24 hours since I launched the project, and in that time, it has achieved over 75% of its funding. I think the technical term for that is freaking awesome, yo. Chickens, unhatched, yadda yadda, and we're not actually there yet -- but I think we can agree that's it a rather good start, can't we? </understatement>

It's a good thing that I'm going to Wiscon this year. Tomorrow I will be on planes for many hours, and then I will be surrounded by friends and colleagues and new people to meet, and all together that means I will not be able to haunt my email like a cat at a mousehole for the next few days. (I said on Twitter that I take 2d6 points of SAN loss from Kickstarter emailing me every time somebody backs the project. But hey, if you're going to lose sanity, this is a good way to do it!) If you're going to be at Wiscon yourself, a) do come by and say hello!, and b) my plan is to read from Lies and Prophecy at 2:30 on Saturday.

I promise not to check my email under the table while the rest of my friends read. :-P

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Wordpress site temporarily down

Fri, 31 Jan 2014 18:55:10 GMT

Today's picture didn't post because my Wordpress site is down. I'm in the process of trying to fix it.

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Swan Tower

website addition: statement on AI

Caveat clicker

Swan Tower’s privacy policy

New Worlds: Plate Tectonics

the end of an era

Two weeks to the release of WITHIN THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS

The Future of (me on) Livejournal

a note for those who read this blog via LiveJournal

New photos!

Hunt bugs, win a book!

Welcome to Swan Tower 3.0!

The final count(down)

Like those carnival games

For the edification of the reader

Technical note

Okay, so, *that's* going well.

Wordpress site temporarily down

Okay, so, that's going well.