I'm not talking about Obama and Romney.
In "Poem Collection" I had been presenting my work centered on the page. A few readers stated that they had difficulty reading the centered versions and asked for Left-justified. A few other I asked liked them centered. Some others were ambivalent.
Personally, I think centered is more aesthetically pleasing, but more than than that, I like what readers like. So, let me know.
AW
What had been "Poem Trilogy" has been renamed to "Poem Collection". (There are now five works, so trilogy didn't seem to work very well.)
The organization has been changed from a single page of separate poems in a sequence to each chapter containing a single poem. The text formatting has also been upgraded to make them easier to read.
I added two works last night, too: "Christmas Poem" and "Secret Morning".
I had some indispensible help in making this look and be more reader-friendly. You know who you are -- Thank You!
Some habits are hard to give up, so I posted a new story today. It's been over two years since my last new piece went online. It's a short story entitled "Rendezvous on Cape May".
I thought I would pass this on to any authors concerned about the unauthorized use of their work.
I happened to discover a large volume of my copyrighted work on a site called "Ask Jolene". The link is below. I believe the site originates in The Netherlands.
http://stories.askjolene.com/?l=grid&qr=&t=dark
All of the stories there were used without my knowledge or permission. All my work is copyrighted.
If unauthorized use of your work is a concern to you you might wish to check out the link. At the same time, it is doubtful that anything meaningful can be done,since it would mean lawyers, etc. and divulging our true identities. I doubt if any of is going to do that.
At the very least, I hope no one would voluntarily publish on that site, or create a membership on it.
AW
Math riddle of the day:
A story receives a vote and the story's Actual Score Average increases from 9.23 to 9.24. There can be no doubt the vote was a 10.
At the same time the story's Q-score (the ones readers see) goes from 7.80 to 7.21 -- a decrease of .59.
Question: How can a single vote of 10 decrease the score of a story, especially by such an outrageous amount?
Answer: The story in question is from 2006. Recently there was a cleanout of old, inactive, incomplete stories. Most of them had low scores so the bottom fell out of the curve for stories written in those years. (This is the answer I got from Lazeez when I asked about it.)
This isn't an isolated example. I've had other of my older stories affected much worse. I used this as an illustration because it is obvious proof how the system has turned something that should be a positive into a negative. So if anyone has any older works on the site, prepare to see them take a tumble one by one.
This is as about as discouraging as anything could be. What's worse is that most readers don't realize that the scores they see attached to a story are statistically derived. They believe the scores are the raw averages of the votes received.
When a reader ponders a vote he/she might think, "I want to vote a 9 or 10, but why should I when everyone else voted 7." The fact is that to earn a q-score of 7 a story has to receive actual votes of 9 and 10.
This is yet one more illustration of why scores are a poor indicator of an author's writing quality. I no longer accept voting as a valid measure. If a reader wishes to let me know what they think of my work it is far better to send me an e-mail or use the feedback form at the end of the stories.
Readers who use scores as a criteria for selecting stories to read are short-changing themselves. they should also be aware of the artificial depression of scores written in earlier years.
I used to enjoy keeping track of my scores, but no more. The disillusionment is complete.
AW