Cockygate Update

Cockygate is over!

Recently a notice was posted at Cocky Authors, the website for those who were affected by Faleena Hopkins attempting to trademark the word cocky in a romance title, along with a specific font.

The good news is that the trademarks have been surrendered and the lawsuit has been withdrawn.

This is a HUGE win not just for the Indie romance author but also for every author. One of my fears was that this suit, if given any credibility, would lead the way for people attempting to trademark titles, phrases, words, fonts, designs – something that small time publishers and independent authors couldn’t easily do, but what large publishing houses could do.

It also could have led to ‘squatting’, much as domain squatting happened; that practice was eventually prohibited, but if it started happening to romance authors, especially authors who didn’t have the funds to fight a big house squatting on a book title, who would really have cared?

Kudos to all those involved who decided to fight this and bore the stress of it; the rest of us also got a win out of it!

Computers

I love computers. I enjoy playing games and I used to be a software tester, learning new software and then trying to break it, and although technology can be frustrating (and I feel it has made us as a society a bit less polite), the power at our fingertips now is immense. I recall the old days of writing papers for school – sometimes struggling to find the books I needed for a report because someone else had them or they had been mis-shelved, (for example), or struggling to find the information I was looking for to satisfy some random curiosity.

Now the full breadth of the web is at our fingertips. If I can’t find what I want with my first search result, I have pages to browse through – journals, newspapers, videos. I love that; it is incredibly useful to me as a writer, and allows me to look at places I’ve never been to, examine a period in history far in the past, all with incredible ease. I love learning, and far too often I get lost doing research; I spent hours searching for information about the Picts for “Blood and Frost” for example.

So when my computer – my job, my entertainment – started to act up, I limped along as well as I could, not wanting to deal with the expense and stress of changing over to a new machine. The issue finally reached critical mass, and with a bit of a heavy heart I acceded to my SO’s desire to buy me some new gear, and together we brought out an old case and built a new machine, although I feel bad at the cost of it all.

But I love building computers. It’s exciting (and a little scary) to seat a processor, but so satisfying!  When it boots for the first time I get a real thrill; clearly I am a geeky girl.

But all this means I am reinstalling all my old programmes and transferring about five year’s worth of data to another machine. Sorting it (needed or not?), and then copying it over is a bit tedious and I’m doing it in safe mode, because of some disk errors I can’t seem to fix. So regrettably, my work on the Void Chronicles has slowed significantly since mid-last week, and I haven’t hit the 60,000 word mark, as I had hoped to last Friday.

My new machine is nice, however, and the RAM (memory) has LEDs on it! I’m a sucker for cool lights and colours.

I’ve copied a fair bit of my data over, (books, research, personal stuff) and am slowly plodding through the installation of programs and setup. My biggest complaint is Firefox; I have literally thousands of bookmarks, and it’s a pain to get that data over (and a bit complicated to explain why).

But I’m making progress, and will be working on “The Void Wept” tomorrow. I am so excited to get it out to everyone, to see what you think! I think you’ll like the lore in it, as well as understanding how Julianna got to Galea. 😉

All the best,

Holly

 

The Void Chronicles – Lucas or Tristan?

If you’ve read the ‘The Void Chronicles’, I’m curious who you prefer – Lucas or Tristan – and why. Please leave a comment and explain. =)

Do you think Julianna is a better match for Tristan or  maybe Lucas? Was she too hard on Tristan when it came to what happened with Reena? Can you relate at all to Julianna having feelings for both men?

Would love to hear your thoughts!

Remember, comments are moderated, so they won’t show up until after I approve them (I do this to cut down on spam).