"You're so helpless- like a baby hyena." Does that mean when I grow up I get to gnaw your leg off?

This week has been a lot about puttering around making self-watering planters to go on the porch, planting the latest batch of native woodsy things my mother brought me from her yard, and painting trim (after a couple days of sunning the trim boards which grauwulf cleverly weighed down to keep them from warping... right at the edge of the porch where they got rained on & started to mildew.) I've also found myself sitting on the porch with my eyes half-closed contemplating the sunshine and high 70s weather; in another couple months I'm liable to sit around with my eyes drooping closed because it's too hot to think, but thus far it's pretty lovely.

The story I'm working on at the moment seems to be coming out of my head in segments of under 100 words, which is a bit frustrating, as I find I would like to know what's going to happen in it.

Meanwhile someone (possibly marthawells?) linked to this article on having an online presence as a writer. While this is something I'd more or less had on the list to get around to sometime (possibly with far more exciting digital format mouse novels than I currently have the technical knowledge to create), I'm slightly disturbed that at least one editor apparently finds it offensive to discover that an aspiring author doesn't have an online presence. Really? I've been poking around (more on this in a minute), and could name you several authors who haven't got websites of their own, though admittedly by the time I know of them, they have things that turn up in google.

So, having got off on a bit the wrong foot from feeling ordered around, I went off to re-examine various existing author websites, and the thing that stands out about them is that they're all very wordpressy. Even the interesting ones, with neat background graphics or whatnot, are very much header over info box with sidebar and/or menubar tabs. Very functional, easy to navigate, but very much exactly like about half the internet. (the other half being graphics intensive and/or ad infested) And my little contraryartistic heart starts whining that this is terribly boring, and surely there must be some better way to express information that nobody else has thought of yet. Unfortunately, I haven't thought of it yet, either.

(Does anyone else have favorite author pages, or anything else pages for that matter, that look a bit more interesting without falling into chaos?)

In the mean time, I put up a token effort here, which doesn't turn up on google (yet) either, and is probably about as much help as nothing, particularly since I am an idiot, and managed to let my one publication thus far lapse from the internet, so I'm going to have to reformat it and put it back up myself. (er... they said "let us know if you want us to keep your story up past the 1 year mark" and I said "oh, I should do something about that... when I'm done making all these Christmas presents" and forgot all about it. This is why I now have a writing-specific e-mail account.)

Mainly I just needed to whine about this while my back brain works out half-considered images; could I just work out what exactly I want such a thing to look like, I could hand it off to the resident web expert. (quick quick, before he gets accepted to grad school...) But if anyone has any helpful thoughts or suggestions (on interesting web design, on what *you* want to see from an author website, etc) I'd love to hear them.

"You're so helpless- like a baby hyena." Does that mean when I grow up I get to gnaw your leg off?

This week has been a lot about puttering around making self-watering planters to go on the porch, planting the latest batch of native woodsy things my mother brought me from her yard, and painting trim (after a couple days of sunning the trim boards which grauwulf cleverly weighed down to keep them from warping... right at the edge of the porch where they got rained on & started to mildew.) I've also found myself sitting on the porch with my eyes half-closed contemplating the sunshine and high 70s weather; in another couple months I'm liable to sit around with my eyes drooping closed because it's too hot to think, but thus far it's pretty lovely.

The story I'm working on at the moment seems to be coming out of my head in segments of under 100 words, which is a bit frustrating, as I find I would like to know what's going to happen in it.

Meanwhile someone (possibly marthawells?) linked to this article on having an online presence as a writer. While this is something I'd more or less had on the list to get around to sometime (possibly with far more exciting digital format mouse novels than I currently have the technical knowledge to create), I'm slightly disturbed that at least one editor apparently finds it offensive to discover that an aspiring author doesn't have an online presence. Really? I've been poking around (more on this in a minute), and could name you several authors who haven't got websites of their own, though admittedly by the time I know of them, they have things that turn up in google.

So, having got off on a bit the wrong foot from feeling ordered around, I went off to re-examine various existing author websites, and the thing that stands out about them is that they're all very wordpressy. Even the interesting ones, with neat background graphics or whatnot, are very much header over info box with sidebar and/or menubar tabs. Very functional, easy to navigate, but very much exactly like about half the internet. (the other half being graphics intensive and/or ad infested) And my little contraryartistic heart starts whining that this is terribly boring, and surely there must be some better way to express information that nobody else has thought of yet. Unfortunately, I haven't thought of it yet, either.

(Does anyone else have favorite author pages, or anything else pages for that matter, that look a bit more interesting without falling into chaos?)

In the mean time, I put up a token effort here, which doesn't turn up on google (yet) either, and is probably about as much help as nothing, particularly since I am an idiot, and managed to let my one publication thus far lapse from the internet, so I'm going to have to reformat it and put it back up myself. (er... they said "let us know if you want us to keep your story up past the 1 year mark" and I said "oh, I should do something about that... when I'm done making all these Christmas presents" and forgot all about it. This is why I now have a writing-specific e-mail account.)

Mainly I just needed to whine about this while my back brain works out half-considered images; could I just work out what exactly I want such a thing to look like, I could hand it off to the resident web expert. (quick quick, before he gets accepted to grad school...) But if anyone has any helpful thoughts or suggestions (on interesting web design, on what *you* want to see from an author website, etc) I'd love to hear them.

Experimentally cross-posty from dreamwidth. Comments encouraged in either location.

#6: excessive villain-cam

So, I'm reading this book... well, books to be more precise. Which is to say that on jazzfish's recommendation, I ordered up Stephen Brust's Agyar from the library system next door, and got a little more than half way through on the strength of good writing and momentum, and haven't quite had the heart to pick it back up again. I think at this point there's only one character I like enough to care what happens to her (well, and I like the ghost, but it doesn't seem likely that anything is going to happen to him, being fairly statically dead and all) and possibly I ought to be going back to jazzfish and asking what I ought to start with from Brust given that I prefer not to read about characters I would hate in real life.

I keep having this discussion with grauwulf, too; he goes on about how fantastic the Iron Man movies are, and I pointed out that we know someone who acts a bit like Tony whatsisface, and he (grauwulf) can't stand him. I find the real person, not being exaggerated to the point of stereotype, much less appalling. The idea that it would be fun to watch someone, even purely fictional, behaving in exactly the same way that drives one up a wall in real life, completely baffles me. (I only got through the first half-hour of Ghostbusters with someone else sitting there making me watch it, too.)

The other book I'm in the middle of is Daniel Abraham's The Dragon Path, which is the beginning of some giant epic fantasy series, and it's reminding me why I don't commit to these sorts of things very often. I'm reading it because someone described it as being about accounting in a way that's actually interesting (which is true), and it also has sub-themes about truth, and how to deal with having a superpower you're not morally comfortable with. The world is full of legacies of a time when dragons ruled, and sculpted humans into various less-human forms. Unfortunately, of the four rotating POV characters, one I actively dislike (though his wife is fantastic), and another has been put into situations he's increasingly unsuited for since the book began and has made some appallingly poor decisions. The sort of thing that haunt one in the night, having just read about them. But I need to keep reading about these two or lose track of what the rest of the world is doing in relation to the characters I'm interested in. Also, the "dragon's path" of the title refers to large-scale war, so the whole thing is leading up to some manner of the world breaking down into chaos, which I also find disappointing.

(Can anyone think of a sweeping epic fantasy that doesn't involve some sort of either "great battle between good and evil" or global warfare? Inquiring minds would like to read...)

When this gets too irritating, I can always go back to the urban gardening books, which are all newfangled and newly published, and I am very sorry they were not around a decade ago when I was nursing a horde of sickly potted plants through apartment living. Now, they represent mosquito-free gardening options. Then, they would likely have improved the lives of many plants, and possibly the health of heuchera's and my diets. (But! My purple-podded peas arrived on monday, and I took a chance and put three of them in the ground already. It's been a slow spring; maybe they'll get as far as producing something before the heat kills them off.)

#6: excessive villain-cam

So, I'm reading this book... well, books to be more precise. Which is to say that on jazzfish's recommendation, I ordered up Stephen Brust's Agyar from the library system next door, and got a little more than half way through on the strength of good writing and momentum, and haven't quite had the heart to pick it back up again. I think at this point there's only one character I like enough to care what happens to her (well, and I like the ghost, but it doesn't seem likely that anything is going to happen to him, being fairly statically dead and all) and possibly I ought to be going back to jazzfish and asking what I ought to start with from Brust given that I prefer not to read about characters I would hate in real life.

I keep having this discussion with grauwulf, too; he goes on about how fantastic the Iron Man movies are, and I pointed out that we know someone who acts a bit like Tony whatsisface, and he (grauwulf) can't stand him. I find the real person, not being exaggerated to the point of stereotype, much less appalling. The idea that it would be fun to watch someone, even purely fictional, behaving in exactly the same way that drives one up a wall in real life, completely baffles me. (I only got through the first half-hour of Ghostbusters with someone else sitting there making me watch it, too.)

The other book I'm in the middle of is Daniel Abraham's The Dragon Path, which is the beginning of some giant epic fantasy series, and it's reminding me why I don't commit to these sorts of things very often. I'm reading it because someone described it as being about accounting in a way that's actually interesting (which is true), and it also has sub-themes about truth, and how to deal with having a superpower you're not morally comfortable with. The world is full of legacies of a time when dragons ruled, and sculpted humans into various less-human forms. Unfortunately, of the four rotating POV characters, one I actively dislike (though his wife is fantastic), and another has been put into situations he's increasingly unsuited for since the book began and has made some appallingly poor decisions. The sort of thing that haunt one in the night, having just read about them. But I need to keep reading about these two or lose track of what the rest of the world is doing in relation to the characters I'm interested in. Also, the "dragon's path" of the title refers to large-scale war, so the whole thing is leading up to some manner of the world breaking down into chaos, which I also find disappointing.

(Can anyone think of a sweeping epic fantasy that doesn't involve some sort of either "great battle between good and evil" or global warfare? Inquiring minds would like to read...)

When this gets too irritating, I can always go back to the urban gardening books, which are all newfangled and newly published, and I am very sorry they were not around a decade ago when I was nursing a horde of sickly potted plants through apartment living. Now, they represent mosquito-free gardening options. Then, they would likely have improved the lives of many plants, and possibly the health of heuchera's and my diets. (But! My purple-podded peas arrived on monday, and I took a chance and put three of them in the ground already. It's been a slow spring; maybe they'll get as far as producing something before the heat kills them off.)

Experimentally cross-posty from dreamwidth. Comments encouraged in either location.