OK. I’m new to blogging. This post is here just to take care of some housekeeping stuff, so feel free to comment if there’s some advice you can offer or an image you can share.

I had some images I wanted to incorporate here (besides Nick’s photos) but for some reason, they’re not working.  I have a logo that incorporates the initials A.B. into a castle with a little Nessie.  It looks good as a tiny thumbnail, and I uploaded it as a “Gravatar”, which I understand is a “Globally Recognized Avatar.”  When I first did it, it showed up when I commented on other blogs, but now it doesn’t.  It’s still here…  wherever “here” is, I have to browse around the controls to find anything since I’m not familiar with them yet.  But it’s no longer being used to represent me.  Sometimes I get the generic pretty quilt square from WordPress, sometimes I get the header photo.

When I clicked “Use as featured” on one of my photos, it took the place of the header, which is NOT what I intended!

Years ago, I had another version of this logo that read like a comic strip.  A little stick-figure wearing a kilt took a “pile” of all the individual black “blocks”, and built the logo.  I’d love to try that in flash!

I also had my hubby take several headshots of me.  They’re far from professional, and I’m not wearing makeup (I rarely do) but they turned out pretty good.  I’m using them on my profiles for facebook and twitter.

So I can insert photos into a blog post…  that works just fine.

However, when I’m looking at the “Widgets” menu, adding an image does not give me the option to upload something from my computer.  I suppose I’ll have to go look at some tutorials and figure it out.

I’ve read many warnings about randomly snatching images from the internet and putting them on my blog.  The $25 it cost to get the domain name etc. up and running was considered “An investment in my writing career”.  I can’t afford to pay $10 or more every time I see something I like, and I’m not going to snag images from Flickr or some other site just because it’s easy!  But I would like to find some images I can use legitimately for little or no cost.

Here’s a list of what comes to mind…  I might add more later.

1. Skytower is the capitol of Kingdom Come.  It is one huge city, incorporating a space elevator system that reaches into orbit.  It is on an island on the equator, connected to the mainland by a bridge.  The bottom of Skytower consiste of six supports, each the size of a small city.  They eventually come together, and continue up into the atmosphere.  By the time the air gets thin, Skytower narrows to a diameter just large enough to handle the traffic and shipping for the space elevator.  From there on up to the small orbital station is the space elevator, consisting of various sized compartments on multiple cables.
2. Hands.  It would be crowded to show a picture of an eight way marriage (common on Kingdom Come) but an image of four female hands and four male hands would be a good representation.
3. There are several space stations in orbit.  Although I never say that “artificial gravity” doesn’t exist, I did describe one (It’s called Sheridan County) as being long and cylindrical (Like Babylon 5) so that residents and tourists can experience different levels of pull, including freefall.
4. On this space station (Sheridan County) one of the nicer resort hotels has a luxurious swimming pool with a round window in the bottom.  This window is in the outer hull of the station, so guests can float or swim while looking out into space or the planet below.  (Of course, the view constantly changes; the station is rotating.)
5. OK, this isn’t really a spoiler alert, but the second novel, The Scar, begins with the crash of a huge Starliner.  The crew manages to keep it from simply falling, and it touches down in the flat plains of Drakeshead, creating a long, devastating scar on the planet’s surface before finally coming to a stop in the mountains.  An image of this scar on the landscape, with or without the actual ship’s wreckage, would be good to see.

Hmmm…  that’s all that comes to mind immediately.  I also have in mind certain actors who would make good representations of my characters, but I’ll have to figure out which, if any, photos might be legitimately used here on my blog.