Thursday 28 September 2006

Excerpts, baby, excerpts!

Not one but two!

Gothic Blue

Suite Seventeen

no more foofing

Since I finished the first draft of Suite Seventeen last week, I've been mainly foofing about and achieving very little. I haven't done a scrap of writing, although I have done a bit of web design, so I suppose I shouldn't be too hard on myself - because at least that's something creative. And I have expanded my horizons a bit on the computer. I've set up a MySpace, I've uploaded more photos to Flickr and learnt how to do things there, and I've even posted a new message on my sadly neglected Amazon Connect profile. I've also installed Zone Alarm, for a bit of extra computer security and I've been experimenting with del.icio.us for saving my favourites. At heart, all these things are displacement activities, but sort of useful ones too, so I don't feel too disgusted with myself for spending time on them.

I've also set this blog up here. For a long time, I've been not feeling too keen on Bravejournal... for several reasons. The limitations of the sidebar, the limitations of layout and look, the infuriating advertising in the posting area which frankly gets on my wick and tends to muck with my browser. Now, as I had a pro account there, I simply don't think there should be any ads at all, but there are, and I've had enough of them... I have toyed with setting up Wordpress on my own webspace, but even with broadband, the login process takes a ludicrously long time. Something to do with the way the program talks to my ISP... Life's too short to spend that time just twiddling my thumbs waiting. Which brings me back to Blogger, the blogging platform I began my very first blogging efforts on... I'd always been put off by the necessity to get in and footle with the template to add links and stuff to the sidebar, but now I've discovered beta Blogger, those shortcomings are no more. Admittedly it is beta, and a tiny bit cranky here and there, but generally, I'm well pleased with it so far. And I think most of the crankiness is due to my 'puter needing a tad more memory. But that's something I'm planning to correct in the v. near future with a little trip to PC World for a bit of RAM therapy.

Anyway, all this is just more foofing, innit?

Today, I will be mainly:

  • uploading a fab new cover image for a web client
  • taking an initial look at proofs for my story Public Domain, which arrived yesterday
  • uploading an extract of Gothic Blue to my PortiaDaCosta.com web site
  • maybe even setting up another blog, for posting extracts to... [got this idea from above mentioned client

I hope to do a few other bits and bobs too...