I’m not sure if anyone besides my brother visits this site on a regular basis, but if so then I’m sorry about being AWOL lately. I’ve been meaning to post about my absence for a while, but things have been stressful and hectic for all kinds of reasons. I honestly don’t think anything I wrote at the moment would be worth reading anyway, but this site was never really about that, so I suppose that’s beside the point.

To break it down, I am writing a PhD thesis. It was supposed to be submitted by now, and that isn’t the case. Until it is submitted I really need, no matter how much it is killing my soul, to be in technical-writing-mode. When it is all finished and done then I’ll be trying to get back in the groove here. Unfortunately the PhD is far from being the most stressful situation I’m in, so if I’m being honest I can’t see the post-a-day thing starting up again straight away, but we’ll see.

All that said, I’m trying not to let the writing stuff slide completely. I have found a couple of self-publishing avenues for the novel recently, one in particular that seems quite promising. I don’t know what’s happening with the editing situation there still, but I’ve been working on sorting out other neccessary things like a cover and a version of the world map that is suitable for printing. The overhead is so small on this priniting method that when it all comes together I’ll be getting a few copies no matter what. When this plan gets closer to fruition I’ll hopefully be able to take pre-orders and make sure that anyone who wants a copy gets one.

As yet I’m still unsure how the free CC-licensed online part of this will all play out, but it will still definitely be happening. Perhaps a serialised version after the people who pre-order get their nice shiny hefty meatspace copies.

More news as events unfold.

Apologies to any IE users who visited the site before today. I had completely forgotten to test the compatibility of the site with your browser, and nobody had told me how horrible it looked. I’m going to pretend that it was due to a combination of being distracted by my PhD and wishfully thinking that nobody uses IE anymore. Anyway, whatever the reason for my lapse so far it should look okay now. I couldn’t get it perfect, but almost. If you use Opera or Safari or Lynx or something else and there are problems, let me know and I’ll do what I can.

Oh, and if you dropped by to check out the Random Saying Generator and clicked through to the main site, welcome! Hopefully a few of you at least will find something of interest here.

Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that Tuesday marked the momentous occasion of the first story actually completed on the new site. I can’t promise this will become a common occurrence, but at least now there’s a precedent.

The stuff that gets posted on the story blog is, for the most part, posted without editing of any kind. When I finish whatever I’m writing, I submit it. If there are glaring mistakes I will go back and fix them, but beyond that nothing is changed once I hit post. This is actually a conscious decision, because the primary aim of this outlet is to get me writing again. I know what I’m like, and the lack of editing, the jumping back and forth between stories and one-off snippets, and the lack of any “quality control” (which is to say that if I write something for the page it gets posted whether I think it’s good or not) are all specifically to stop me from getting stuck on anything.

That said, the eventual goal of all this is to start producing full, edited, quality-controlled stories again. There are at least three novels waiting around in the wings to be written, including the sequel to Nadir. (To be honest it’s more like seven, but three are out ahead right now.) To that end, if and when I finish stories here I will re-post them in their full, stitched-together glory in a separate section somewhere. I’ll do my best to get that sorted in the next few days, and while I’m at it I’ll try to fix the “old stuff” section. When I stitch the stories together, I’m going to let myself edit and polish them. Realistically the degree of polish each story gets will probably depend on how attached I am to it, but I can live with that.

Oh, and speaking of quality control, the Jenny and Mug theme song has been stuck in my head for four solid days now. Yes, there is more to it than I posted the other day. No, I probably won’t record it for you guys. I did consider it, wondering if perhaps that might get it out of my head, but on reflection I think that’s unlikely.

This morning I threw together a quick site that, in mashing up well known sayings, really succeeds in mashing up my geekery with my love of non-sequitur. Thanks go to Tony for the inspiration. Sorry the html itself is a bit of a quick hack, once I got it not-ugly I figured it did well enough for the purpose.

Adding options to the generator is a very simple matter, so if there’s any sayings you think are conspicuous in their absence (which admittedly would be quite hard for you to verify given the random element) let me know and if I’ve got a second and I think they fit the bill I’ll add them.

Enjoy the Random Saying Generator