It’s release day for Kane

I can’t quite wrap my brain around it, but Kane now available for purchase at Amazon.

If you’ve read Brick’s story, Kane will be a familiar character to you. But even if you haven’t, you should be able to enjoy this book as a standalone.

Thank you so much to everyone who has been part of the journey in making this book a reality. Joanna, you are always there for me, my friend. Also, Elle, Ronelle, Shelly, Caitlin, Allison, and so many others who gave me feedback as early readers.

And, of course, my editor Christina Kaye and the incomparable Lydia Harbaugh at Limitless. You guys are the best.

Readers, I hope you enjoy Kane and Amanda’s second shot at Happily Ever After.

On formatting a website

I know I said I would spend the next few posts talking about my favorite types of heroes, and I promise I’ll get there, but first I need to take a little side-journey into my experience building and formatting this website. It’s consumed my last few days and it’s been a real learning experience.

Running a website isn’t foreign for me. I’ve had my review blog for a long time. That started on Blogspot way back in the day, then migrated to WordPress, and eventually moved to a self-hosted WordPress when I bought my own domain. But the biggest difference there was that I won my web design in a Twitter contest. I did virtually nothing to contribute to its appearance beyond a conversation with the designer about the kind of look I wanted.

Fast forward a million years to the launch of this site.

I bought the domain and spent hours working with the GoDaddy people talking through hosting options and working out logistics. For about 15 hours, this site mirrored my other one… until Gregg at GoDaddy explained what I did wrong and helped me start over.

If you’ve never launched a website on your own, it feels kind of overwhelming, especially figuring out what to do with the blank slate in front of you. I spent an entire day scrolling through stock photos for the right models… and don’t even get me started on the same one guy that shows up a thousand times when you have the term “beard” in your search bar. (I’ll never search “beard” on Shutterstock again.) Next came picking a blog theme. (I ended up choosing “Enigma.”) And then I needed an entire additional day just to figure out how to move the slidebar off the center of the guys’ faces. (Big props to the folks on the WordPress forum for providing the CSS code.)

Bottom line: I have no future in web design. But it is exciting to watch it all take shape.

PS — Did you know that .com domains for common names like mine cost in the ballpark of $5K? That’s insane. And why I have a .net.

I’m glad you were able to find me anyway.