Day: May 26, 2010

THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT. Ahem.

This has to start with a little story.

Once upon a time, in my first critique group, the Friday Night Mudslingers, we had a saying. We were saying it all the time: “Jennifer Armintrout does not write romance.” And it’s true. The most common complaint I get from readers is, “I thought this was going to be a romance. They had it in the wrong section.” I try to write romance, in fact I aspire to some day write category romances because I like them more than any other type of book. But when I try to write romance, I end up killing everybody. You can’t have people skinned alive in a Harlequin Presents. I know. I looked it up.

Eventually, when I finally figured how to write a romance without murders in it, I was already locked into this Jennifer Armintrout gig. Now, Jennifer Armintrout couldn’t write romance, even if she wanted to and had gotten good at it. People would not like that, and companies wouldn’t pay for it.

So, I figured that if I can’t write romances, I figure I’ll leave that up to someone else. A someone else who happens to be me. Under the name Abigail Barnette, I will be writing ebooks, the first of which will be available from Samhain Publishing in September of this year. You’ll be able to find more info about that at Abigail’s site. I will still be writing as Jennifer Armintrout and being my normal self. As normal as I can be.

So, that’s the big announcement.

The thing I hate most about having a new computer, (which, as is implied by the phrase “new computer” be nothing but awesome) is forgetting that simple tasks you might once have done with a bit of shareware that you downloaded on your old machine is now impossible to accomplish because you do not have it anymore. In the worst case scenario, you have no way of getting that program again. In the best case scenario, who the hell am I kidding? I still have to download the same program, install it (on a Mac this is a hellish ordeal of clicking and dragging that is so simple as to be insulting, yet somehow not simple enough on a machine that practically runs itself for you) and try to get my bearings with whatever little changes the developers have made in the last three years since I bought a new computer.

There’s no point or underlying meaning to take away from this post. I’m just mad that I have to wait for Gimp to download again.