Done
It may have taken far longer than anticipated (as usual), but as of thirty seconds ago the second draft is now done. There’s a certain satisfaction in tapping out the final words of the final scene, something the first draft never quite had since I was dissatisfied with that first ending as always a placeholder.
Still to do? What do you know? I’ve already made a list. There’s about three whole back stories that need to be filled in and I want to rearrange the entire first third of the novel (the gear changes between the three sections are a little rough at the moment so the job now is to disguise them).
Oh, and this is what finishing a draft after midnight on a weekday looks like:
Well, here it is.
Hello. I’ve redesigned the web site. Why did I do this? I don’t rightly know, except that it always used to bother me that the journal and the shop were always completely new sites under the one umbrella. When I started blogging, I realised I could set the whole site up around a blog and unify the design. More on that later.
All the old features are still here. Hemmingway of course still opines and harangues in equal measures, so feel free to chat to him.
The Emporium is still the best place to buy short stories as digital downloads, but the shop has also expanded to offer copies of books and journals featuring my short fiction. These are extremely limited in stock and out of print everywhere, so this is pretty much the only place you can find these treasures.
I guess this design can be summed up in one word: DARK.
I tried a whole bunch of design experiments before arriving at this (one was an attempt to make the site look like a grandmother’s wall of bad artwork), but this was the first design I came across that didn’t really look like a blog (which was my priority – that two-column/three-column crap was not for me). Design-wise, there are still a few little tweaks to work and I haven’t yet tested in every conceivable browser and connection speed, but I felt it was close enough to go public. Any comments or whatever, feel free to leave a comment after this post. I guarantee I’ll read it.
Read MoreWebsite redesign
Here’s a perfect way to avoid working on your manuscript. Do a complete redesign of your web site.
In fact this redesign has been on the cards for ages, probably six months or so since I discovered I could run the whole site from a WordPress blog with various plugins and addons.
It’s coming along nicely too, with very few of the headaches and frustrations that plague a standard site design. I am concerned though that the page loads are too slow despite my best efforts to keep everything lean and mean. The worst part is I haven’t the faintest idea how to fix that.
Anyway all this is kind of suffocating the very last gasps of draft two. It’s almost there, but I’m still disappointed with great wads of it. Should get on with it, really.
Hi ho.
Read MoreNotes for part three, part four
Notes for part three, part four
Apologies to Stanley Donwood and Dr Tchock for the doodles at the bottom.
Read MoreThe Books
