Lynch Industries

Time is, time was, time is past… after ten years (zang!) at Livejournal, I’m moving my primary online journal here: Lynch Industries.

This is a necessary but melancholy thing. Necessary, because this is part of the online career equivalent of growing up. I have an expectant audience, a ‘brand’ (gods help me), and an established site I really ought to be using as the primary outlet for my announcements and natterings. Melancholy, because LJ for a very long time was an ideal fusion of a huge user base and extreme ease-of-use. Networked, nuanced conversations between dozens or hundreds of personalities you could recognize at a glance… ah, well. Livejournal has lost some steam and cachet in recent years, and the worry about total service outages from DDoS attacks doesn’t help.

I’m not leaving Livejournal. All of my posts here will be pretty much cross-posted there. I’ll still check my friends list frequently. But this will be my electronic babble flagship.

Lynch Industries. It was almost The Dork Lord, On His Dork Throne again. But time is, time was, time is past… and it’s a strange thing, realizing as an adult that I really ought to be designing and tending an online space with the next ten, twenty, thirty years in mind. When you’re a kid you can leap boldly online as SkullFuckMonkey38 or ReTARDIS or EyeDidYourMomTrebek; sooner or later you find yourself about to earn a PhD or starting a business or whatever, and the wisdom of something a little more contextually malleable as your online face sinks in.

It’s not like it doesn’t say “damn dirty threat-to-civilization long-haired head-banging fantasy and science fiction writer” right at the top of the page. At least there’s that.

This blog’s visual dress could be a little makeshift until I learn to grapple with CSS. Sadly, I know entirely fuck all about it, as you can see by the strange hovering search box that bisects my lovely little header illustration up top. I’m also unclear on how to add/adjust items within the gray menu box immediately below it.

Launching this blog is meant to be the kickstart to a refurbishment of my whole site. After a couple of badly depression and anxiety-mauled years, I’m more functional than I have been for some time. The anxiety, in particular, is still a drag on work, but I draw optimism from the fact that things in my head are nowhere near as bad as they were at their worst… and while they certainly plunge from time to time, they still don’t scrape that bottom I remember so vividly.

I ought to cover some questions that have piled up or recurred in recent weeks:

Q: What the hell is going on with The Republic of Thieves?

A: My current necessary edit to TRoT has been shot all to hell by that lovely anxiety I’ve mentioned. I haven’t talked much about it because I hate talking about it. I can be usefully open about my depression in a way I can’t about my anxiety attacks. Sorry. Suffice to say: They are the reason we can’t have nice things. I have a very good feeling at the moment, however, because I know something you do not. When I can say more, I will not be shy.

Q: What’s with the official TRoT release date switching all the time?

A: Because my publishers can’t yet reliably (my fault, not theirs) give retailers a true date, and retailers nonetheless want to keep the book as a forthcoming item in their catalogs, many weird things happen. Nobody is deliberately fucking with you. Least of all me or my publishers. It’s not personal. I have said, several times, not to take any date as valid until you see me posting it online myself. I have just said it again.

Q: Will you follow me on Twitter so I can send you a direct message?

A: No. If you want to send me a message, my personal e-mail address is no secret: scott@scottlynch.us. Why force yourself to send me something in 140 characters or less when you can just send whatever you like?

Q: Is there any news on the film adaptation of The Lies of Locke Lamora?

A: The Warner Bros. development option lapsed several years ago. Barring an amazing conjunction of large-scale miracles, there will be no further development of that project. Be sure to check the dates and the sources cited when you come across “OMG there’s gonna be a movie!” claims. If and when NEW information becomes available, I will not be shy about it. At all.

Q: Can you give us good news about anything?

A: Yes. Thanks to the pleading, wheedling, bribery, and death threats of the indomitable Lynne Thomas, Super-Archivist, there is now an honest-to-god Scott Lynch Papers at the Northern Illinois University SFWA Archive. The big announcement is here. I have kicked off the collection with full print manuscripts of TLoLL and RSURS. More of my manuscripts, notes, maps, and correspondence will eventually go to NIU, where they’ll be carefully preserved alongside the papers of 50+ other science fiction and fantasy writers.

35 thoughts on “Lynch Industries

  1. The header is utterly stunning and the name is nifty.

    Best of luck, Scott! Though we’re eager for the book, your health is the most important and we want to see how awesome TRoT can be, rather than getting a book now you’re not happy with.

    Anyone who wants to read something now can always work their way through Elizabeth Bear’s work, right?

  2. Regarding your header menu, well you might need to do it via WordPress’ interface somehow, I don’t know much about that…. but in case you’re editing the HTML directly, you can add menu items by adding elements inside the tag located in the tag. For instance, at the moment you have:

    Home

    So you could add, say, “Super cool page” right under the for your home page, and that would create a link in your menu called “Super cool page” that leads to http://scottlynch.us/cool/. Still as I said, this might actually be integrated in WordPress so my explanation is probably useless to you. :)

    As for your search box, where do you want it positioned? You can adjust its position by editing your style.css file (again, no clue how this works in relation to WordPress) and changing the values under where it says “#branding #searchform {“. The “right” attribute is the offset from the right margin, and the “top” attribute is the offset from the top of the page. I think it looks decent with “right: 1em; top: 2em;”, though it goes over the title a bit when the box expands when you click on it.

    Anyway, I hope this wasn’t too confusing and/or irrelevant.

    • Hello, Nick–

      No worries, that’s all relevant. I could easily bang up exactly what I want (and what you’ve described in HTML) off the top of my head; what I don’t seem to have is access to anything that lets me edit in HTML… just CSS stuff. I will however try the search form adjustment very soon.

      Thanks!

      SL

  3. Seeing your Babylon 5 tweets today reminded me how much I’ve missed talking with you, and reading this reminds me how often I’ve lamented that I haven’t made it past my own anxieties to finish longer works, either! Plus, those tweets made me laugh all damned day, and I had to thank you for that.

    Hugs, kiddo, and if you need WordPress help, I’m just an email away 😉

  4. While not pressing you for an actual release date as such, I’m thinking I should re-read TLoLL and RSURS before TRoT hits the shelves so it’s all fresh in the memory.

    Should I start soon? 😉

  5. I’d like to add this blog to my RSS reader, but I don’t see a link to an RSS feed anywhere. Perhaps I missed it somewhere? I’d really like to have this option.

  6. Just a Gentlemen Bastards fan here wishing you good luck with this site and TRoT! Also, I really like the name “Lynch Industries”.

  7. You could remove position: absolute; from the #branding #searchform brackets to get a search bar that sits on top of the navigation menu, or replace that whole bracket set with { display: none; } to turn it off entirely. (Or just locate the form tag somewhere in header.php and delete it.)

    The menu itself is managed under Appearance -> Menus. If you didn’t create one, it falls back on a list of all the top-level pages. More here.

    If you are looking to learn CSS in your copious spare time, the CSS No Crap Primer is a good place to start, followed by the HTML Dog tutorials.

    I will lose my WP author cred if I do not mention that the proper way to modify a WordPress theme is to create a child theme. That way you can still get the automatic updates to TwentyEleven (which might include security patches from time to time) without losing your changes.

    Welcome to WordPress. :)

  8. While I feverishly want to read RoT, I have so many damn books to read (Swords and Dark Magic and Range of Ghosts being two of them) that I’m okay with waiting until you have put out the product you want to put out.

    Until next time…

  9. Congrats on the new site. (They grow up so fast!) I’ve been suffering from both depression and anxiety too and like you, the anxiety is the worse of the two. It’s so good to see that you are getting better. Selfishly, I’ve missed you on the interwebs.

  10. In order to truly hack a WP theme (not dramatically but somewhat substantially), you’ll need to a little bit of CSS knowledge and a little of PHP knowledge (but only as it relates to WP tags).

    Things vary greatly from theme to them, but generally, in order to move the search bar, you find the block of code in the header.php file* with the –form id=”searchform”– in it and then move it above or below or between the blocks of code that are bringing in the other design and navigation elements. I’m a big fan of the trial and error method, but then again I have less people seeing what I’m doing as I do it.

    *I’m assuming that because you mention CSS, you’ve already go in to the Appearance > Editor > Edit Themes section and poked around a bit. If not, that’s where you go.

  11. Another fan here, wishing you good luck for everything and can’t wait for TRoT! I just finished re-reading TLoLL and RSURS, and also got three more friends to buy them and read them, so I now have a group of people I can talk to about it! I agree with the other people here, keep well and we know that the book will definitely be worth waiting for!

  12. Great to see the new site Scott, I’m looking forward to checking it daily. Now I just need to work out which site I check first, yours or Joe Abercrombie’s! 😀

  13. This maybe a pointless question, but is the sneaky (or maybe ill-positioned) search bar trying to play hide-and-seek in your lovely header needed? There is a visible and functional search bar about 1000px directly below it.
    But stupid question aside, props to you sir, for making your new blog and for tackling the WordPress beast. Last time I attempted a similar feat,I walked away from my computer blogless and the proud owner of a rampaging headache.

    • As far as I’m concerned, it’s completely unnecessary. My previous attempt to just delete it destroyed my entire header. I hope my next adjustment is a little more successful…

      • deleting this section of code should have gotten rid of just the sneaky search box:

        Search

        at least it worked when i tried it.

  14. excellent! I’ve been in need of a websource of artisan harsh language.

    and now I don’t have to send you that awkward “Why U no Post on LJ no more?” tweet, with one of those weird derp faces attached.

  15. I wish one day you’ll be as good enough to finish write RoT.

    Your frenchs fan wait for it and for you.

    Apologies if my sentences are wrong, I lack of practice writing et speaking.

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