I had forgotten how much time you can sink into a website. Even though I’m using WordPress, which makes building and modifying a website pretty damn easy for anyone with a modicum of technical aptitude (computer aptitude, not “rebuilding a small block V8” aptitude), there are still tons of things you can tweak and change, plugins and widgets you can load to enhance content, media files to upload and share, and that’s not even considering time spent writing another blog article like this one. And inevitably some change breaks something and I suddenly spend three hours trying to fix it, the time passing by like water over a cliff. It’s just gone… poof… magic.
Of course, the real upshot is I get to procrastinate from writing.
To be fair I just finished draft two of Mercy, which was far superior to draft one. It’s off to my readers now, as motley a crew of scurvy pirates as did ever exist (OK, most of them are as geeky cool as I am, so perhaps that’s a bit extreme… let’s call them “salty sailors”, or maybe “carefree cruise ship customers”). It’ll be a while before I start getting their comments back. So I’ve got some time to kill, and about ten or fifteen short stories growing moldy in the back corners of my computer, along with the novel (novella, long short story) “Summer” baking slowly.
It’s more fun at this point to invest time in changing the site around, playing with the template I’ve chosen (it’s called “Modest” by a company called “Elegant Themes”, and I don’t recommend it since it costs bucks and there’s plenty of free ones as good or nearly so), trying to get things to look nice. I luckily have a good collection of generic media images to choose from to at least make the site look not so bland, left overs from my last foray into writing when I bought a metric crap ton of stock image files from one of those stock image sites. I’ve also loaded a local server on my system and have a copy of the site there so I can make changes off line and tweak things that aren’t working without impacting the site.
But I really do need to get back to the writing. It irks me every day I don’t get at least a few hundred words, maybe a couple of new ideas, down onto a page. Changing the website is fun, something I enjoy doing and that pulls me back to my IT roots, but writing… that’s where the real joy is.
Turn and face the strange… (I mean seriously, what the hell DO those lyrics mean, it’s like a bunch of random thoughts all strung together… great song, though… )