This is a test

UPDATED 7/17/21: The follow.it experiment was a bust. Their new-post emails looked spammy and gross. I deleted the account and posted an update here.

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I know, I know, I disappeared again! After dormancy, uh…more dormancy. At least here on the blog, and on social too, for the most part. I spent May and June feverishly busy on other projects, and when I wasn’t working I stayed offline as much as possible. I completely overhauled my studio, deep-cleaned the main floor of the house, reorganized the garage, fiddled with a picture-book manuscript, studied all ten Brave Writer Dart books for the upcoming academic year (I’m writing the whole batch of Darts), survived the heat dome, and read or reread all the novels of Emily St. John Mandel. That’s right: my pandemic lockdown began and ended* with Station Eleven.

*Oregon lifted all COVID-19 restrictions last week, but our home life hasn’t changed much yet. The spiking numbers of the Delta variant have me feeling cautious still, so I won’t be ditching my mask quite yet, not in indoor public spaces. I did get to spend a delicious evening with a circle of fully vaccinated chorale friends, singing around a firepit, and I’m hoping for an encore soon.

It’s a bit surreal to be all caught up on chores in the real world, and way behind on things in my digital spaces. But the former couldn’t have happened if I’d kept up with the latter. My sidebar booklist is months out of date. My whole site needs a spring cleaning. I didn’t even announce the Nerviest Girl audiobook and paperback launch here! Yikes! That is extremely bad authoring. More on that soon?

One of my looming digital chores was to deal with the demise of Feedburner’s email subscription service. If you’ve been accustomed to receiving an email whenever I publish a new post here, it may look different now. This particular post is meant to test the new delivery vehicle (Follow.it). If you received a notification email, would you mind letting me know in a comment? And if you should have received that email and didn’t (and you happen to drop by and notice this post), please let me know that too. The transfer was supposed to be seamless, but the subscriber number changed, so there was a puckered seam somewhere.

To my vexation, the new service seems to have added little ‘follow’ icons on mobile, hovering over the text in a seriously annoying way. I’ve checked all the settings and I most definitely have NO ICONS selected. Yet there they are on my phone, irritating as mosquitoes! If you’re a mobile reader, I apologize and I hope to disappear the icons very soon.

All right, this post is like a phone call to a friend you haven’t talked to in way too long. Too much to catch up on! I’ll hang up now and hope to chat again in a day or two. I hope you’re well. I’ve missed you!