Questions . . . Answers?

Okay, your turn.

I'm the one who writes every day (or nearly) and some people actually respond (thank you very much. You know who you are!) But today I'd like to ask a few more of you to help me out.

Before Christmas I said that I was hoping to get my website revamped by mid-February. I'm still hoping.

My webmistress and I have been batting around ideas, trying to come up with something that will do justice to the variety of things I write or have written. The current look is a little more "western" than most of my books have been in the past three or four years. But we developed it when I was still deep in the Code of the West books.

Of course now that I'm working on Flynn and Sara, I'm going back to characters from those books. But I've also been all over the map recently in other books -- the Caribbean, Montana, New York City, Santorini, Los Angeles, Fiji . . . And in a couple of weeks I'm off to Ireland.

So the website needs to reflect that breadth.

It also has to be a place where people can come and check out current titles and backlist. I want to make it helpful for people who discover my books for the first time and say, "What else has she written?" and "Am I interested in reading it?"

Those things are there now, but are they easy enough to get at? What else ought to be there?

If you've checked out my website anytime in the past, could you tell me what you think? If you haven't, and you'd like some input, could you check it out now and make comments?

I'd like to know what people who go there are hoping to find and how to make it easy for them to find it.

So tell me, do you get lost when you go there? Do you get too much information? Too little? What's missing? What would you like to see there that isn't there now? Would you arrange it differently? How?

If you particularly like any other writers' websites and visit them regularly, could you please let me know which sites and what you like about them?

The website is intended to be different from the blog. It's more static. It provides background. The blog -- crazy as it can be -- I want to continue to use for up-to-the-minute communication and connection with readers. It's here so we can connect in a more timely fashion.

But if you were redesigning my website, what would you do?

I'm tinkering with ideas while Theo and Martha have been busy re-connecting. I've spent the day prowling websites, noting down likes and dislikes, then trying to come up with a feel for what I want -- trying to describe "in three words or less" what it is that I do so my webmistress can come up with a concept that will reflect it.

Yikes. I am so not verbal when it comes to that stuff. I get totally tongue-tied.

I finally just managed today to come up with the single-sentence "what if" that is my focus for Flynn and Sara. In the end, of course, it was simple: What if you had a second chance with the person you'd once loved?

See? Simple. And pretty much universal.

And, to be honest, I stole it from Conversations With Other Women.

I bought a DVD of that film last week. It was directed by Hans Canosa, and starred Helena Bonham Carter and Aaron Eckhart, and it has dialogue and story and backstory and characters! All the things I love. It's really more like a two-person play than a film, though it couldn't be done as a play with quite the same effectiveness. Definitely worth watching.

I have -- so far -- watched it three times. And not only to watch Aaron Eckhart -- though I must admit to a certain, um, tendency to watch his half of the split screen more than I do Helena's.

But I digress.

The website. Right.

The thing is, I'm not analytical. I just write and let the stories develop on their own without conscious effort on my part. They do, through a slow process of accretion and some judicious head-banging on the wall on my part. And then, once I've got them, I go back and make sense out of them.

Unfortunately I can't help my webmistress put together a website the same way. She doesn't need a "rough draft." She needs words, concepts, ideas -- mental lumber, if you will.

And since this is not my forte, I'm hoping you might have ideas to share that will make it better and more useful.

Help. Please.