This has been a good news / bad news sort of week.
Since I’m the sort of person that prefers to get the bad news first, I’ll share some of the challenges of the week. First, I received an email from my “brother from another mother” letting me know that the email subscription button I had on the site here wasn’t working. I’ve spent a little time with it (admittedly not too much), but the fact of the matter is that it’s not a quick and easy fix, and looks like repairing it will require some expertise that I don’t currently have. That means dedicating time to reading up on the widget – time that I don’t have just now. So for now, my solution has been to remove the email subscription button and replace it with an RSS feed button. I’ve tested it, and it seems to work fine. So, while I would prefer to offer the email subscription option, it’s going to have to wait for a while until I have the time to read up on one and determine what I’ve done wrong.
I also have to admit at this point that I’m not entirely happy with the way the site conversion process has gone. There seem to be quite a few little things that are giving me a little trouble, and I think a lot of it is related either to the fact that I am using a theme designed for use in the WordPress.com hosting environment, or to the fact that I updated the version of WordPress that I’m using here. Don’t get me wrong, I love the look of the theme (Motion 1.1.6 by Volcanic Web Design Company), but several of the options that I used at WordPress.com no longer seem to work – little things like being able to replace the “Just another WordPress site” tag line in the header, or being able to remove the category bar just beneath the header. To paraphrase a certain “superior intellect”, it tasks me!
As a result, I will likely begin playing with various other themes soon, in an attempt to find one that not only gives the site a look and feel with which I am comfortable, but also one that I can customize and maintain easily.
On the good news front - the second edit of Half Past Midnight is now complete. The little meter in the sidebar is now at 100%, so I am going to take a moment to celebrate.
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Okay, that’s long enough. 
Now its time to get with the next round of editing. The previous edit was the easy one. It was time-consuming, but not terribly difficult. It was just a matter of going through the edited manuscript that Lynn sent back to me, going over the changes she made in it, and either accepting or rejecting those changes. In probably ninety-five percent of those instances, I heartily agreed with her. There were a few where I felt that the changes were simply stylistic choices, but for the most part they were things that I screwed up – and she fixed. Thanks again, Lynn.
So now I begin the more difficult, but hopefully shorter, third editing pass. In this pass, I have to fill in some characterizations and correct a few plot flaws that she pointed out. These are things that will actually require some more writing and/or rewriting, which will be considerably more difficult than simply determining whether or not to accept Lynn’s suggested changes. On the other hand, there aren’t nearly as many of them either. Hopefully, another week will see me through with this phase of editing. At that point, I’ll be able to submit my revised manuscript back to Lynn for another edit by her, and we’ll see where it goes from there.