Rayne's Newsletter

Update about rescue pup Leni. Spring heralds in my garden. Website Question

Hi folks,

Recently I’ve posted some ‘Notes’ (that is, short posts) here. Did you see them, or did they vanish in the aether? I wonder if I should use ‘Notes’ or if I should focus on ‘Articles’ (i.e. longer posts with multiple texts and pictures).

This is Leni - One Day After Spaying

When I adopted the rescue puppy Leni a few months ago, I promised her rescuer that I would get her spayed. Here in Bulgaria, there are many stray dogs, and their lives are incredibly hard. By neutering our dogs, we can keep the number of canines down, instead of adding to the population of starving strays.

For females, neutering requires abdominal surgery. Well, Leni recovered so quicky, it’s unbelievable. An hour after the operation, she woke and immediately wanted to walk around and explore the vet clinic. When my friend brought her home to me, she was delighted, greeted me with enthusiasm and asked for cuddles. Even when the anaesthetic wore off, she barely slowed down. She just moved a bit more carefully for a while.

A day later, she was eating heartily, play-wrestling with the other dog Ginger, and racing around the garden with her feline friend McCoy.

The First Fruit Trees are Blooming

My cornus mas trees have flowers, and the first bees of the year visit them eagerly to gather pollen and nectar.

Cornus mas trees are also called cornelian cherry or fruiting dogwood, although they have nothing to do with either cherries or dogs.

They’re ecologically valuable plants, providing food for bees in the spring and food for humans in late summer. They also improve the soil. A small tree, they are happy to grow in the shade of taller trees, as long as the soil has enough nutrients and they still get plenty of sun. They’re thorny, and thus offer shelter to certain birds, and serve natural safety barriers on boundaries.

I have a food-forest style orchard, where everything grows as nature intended, in a merry mishmash of plants, and without harmful chemicals.

Website Question

What platform do you use for your author website? I’m rethinking mine.

Many years ago, I decided to pay for Wix Premium for my website. At the time, I thought that having a well-designed website was important, that free hosting platforms and template designs were inferior. So I paid Wix for the hosting, paid designers for the design.

I realise now that this was a waste of money. Frankly, the kind of people who visit my website go there for the content, not for the design. And book readers don’t care whether an author’s website is individually designed or uses templates.

It was also a waste of time, requiring much work to create new pages or even to keep existing pages updated.

So now I think of migrating my website to a fre, easy-to use platform (maybe Google Sites) to save myself time and money. If you have experience with a free hosting platform, I’d love to hear about your experiences. Do you have any advice, any warnings?

(If you want to take a look at my website as it is now, with articles about writing, and funny bits about my cats, here it is: raynehall.com. )

When Life Gets Tough

Here’s a book which can help you cope with life’s challenges and at the same time strengthen your author voice and produce great writing.

Crisis Writing: Use Your Experience to Fuel Your Fiction

Are you in the grip of an overwhelming personal problem, or caught up in the currents of a worldwide disaster? If you struggle to survive and keep going day after day, if you find it difficult to summon the energy and the will to write, then this book can help.

I'll guide you to write more and write better than ever, by turning harrowing events into potent stories. Harness the power of your emotions, mould your experiences into fiction. You can even put the evil people who harmed you into service as villains. Your observations become the fuel that turns your tales into beacons.

Ebook only. mybook.to/cris

Greetings from Bulgaria

Rayne

(PS: I always love hearing from you. I don’t always respond, simply because life gets in the way. But I read and cherish every communication from you.)