I sent a mail to a soon-to-be-published writer, Tamara Siler Jones, [found through Neil Gaiman’s blog]. The letter pointed out a mild blooper on her site [since corrected] and asked a couple of question arising from my quick read of the sample chapter of her book Ghosts in the Snow. She replied, quickly and politely—I was very touched—telling me that these were not mistakes but her intention, that there had been debate and hesitations, but there were no mistakes. This is fine. These are her words, and she has obviously enough spent years on them; she should know what she wants to do with them. I appreciated the possibility of being able to just fire off a mail, ask a sincere question, and get a reply like that. Thanks.

And, this morning, as I was doing the washing up after the very nice curried noodles that Ludivine had made for us last night—her brother and Akio came over after they had all gone swimming—and trying to freshen the house up in order to survive the day, I was thinking over this, while composing the entry about the heatwave in my head.

I have read blogs that are beautifully crafted. I can imagine—not only because I’m like that, but also because I have met people like that—some of these bloggers and writers just dashing off a quick piece, and hitting the ‘publish’ button without doubt, hesitation, nor a spellcheck. And I hate those horribly talented people, most sincerely.

I sweat over each comma. And that’s not just because it’s so hot…

I determined that if I wanted to ‘write’—that is, let this be more than just a hobby—then I should do just that. Everyday. 1000 words on the current novel, or die. And the blog. Use this to practise different pieces, styles, to throw out ideas. The sandpit.

So there are two types of writing here; well, three in fact, but I’ll come to that…

So there are two types of writing here: there are the diary pieces [“Today it was hot, I only wrote 418 words. Life is rough.”]; then there are the set pieces where I try to say something, with a point of view, a bit of effort, a start-a-middle-and-an-end, perhaps a chuckle along the way. Now these may end up looking like the journal entries but being just a bit more laborious in tone… I don’t know. In fact, the set pieces are divided into two categories: the quick ones, that I dash off, generally touching on a film, an event, a happening. And then those that I write, rewrite, correct, chop and change, read out loud, and generally chew over until I find them acceptable, and I can copy them out of BBEdit and into Pivot.

But there is one thing that should be clear. This is about ‘Writing’; it is not about ‘Truth’. I’m not worried about leaving an accurate trace of my home life, my writing life, my—ahem—working life, or whatever. I am concerned about working on the rhythm and the flow, the words and the style. If, when I am writing this, I feel I need to twist the events in order to better make a point, to milk a joke, or just because I prefer it like that, then… I will. With no hesitation.

Nevermind the mess. Yes, just brush those off onto the floor, and sit yourself down. How you doing?

And so here’s the news. I have just finished incorporating the photo galleries. At the moment it is basically test material up there, but I hope to get an Amsterdam gallery up to accompany this old piece over in the stuff section. My next plans concern adding some more old material to this section; I’d like to integrate the poems and other stuff—currently over at Writing—as well as dig out some short stories that are cluttering up my hard drive, and make them available as downloads in .pdf format.

Please note: the photo section and stuff are not added to the front page—unlike all the other sections. This is because stuff will probably contain old material for a while and I like the home page to be up to date; and because photos can take up quite a bit of bandwidth, even though I do severely compress the pictures, and I don’t want to inflict that on slow modems. [Remember that I haven’t put in preloading for the galleries, scrub the mouse cursor over the previews, but wait for the images to load; it can take time depending on your connection.] And, for obvious reasons, neither photos not stuff appear in the RSS/ATOM feeds.

Today will probably be a clearing up day on the real plane—my desk has got very untidying during these last few days of coding. And I will be reading over Pirates to try and get a good grip on it. I started to severely lose confidence these last few days as I read some really good books and extracts, and wondered if my work was good enough.

I have now spent about four days, completely revising the design of this little blog. I’m still getting used to it; ‘it’ being both the design and the tool—Pivot—that I use to do all of this. We will see how things go…

Warning: these pages have been verified on my usual browsers, Safari as well as Firefox and, even though I say it myself, they show up pretty nice in both. I have just remembered that I also have a version of Camino on my drive, but as this and Firefox both use the same rendering engine, what passes in one, should also work in the other…
Please note: I have checked the pages in neither IE Mac [and even less, IE PC], nor have I seen fit to take it for a ride in such as iCab, Opera, Konqueror or even Omniweb. If you do see problems in your favourite browser, please let me know, but be warned, if the problem is in your browser, I don’t intend to break my code for non-standards compliance—Thanks, and Move Forward^TM.

So why change?

Good question, my poor tired hands and wrists also ask. There is the issue of standards compliance, but there are, in fact, two major answers:

• the old version was flawed, the navigation didn’t always work, the code was not optimised, the search and archives haphazard, as I had just hacked into the default themes available for Pivot, without necessary understanding. [To that extent, redoing everything for Kim’s pages was a great help.]
• and I wanted to get more of the newsprint or old-printed feeling to the place.

This version also sees the final arrival of the little power factory drawing up in the top right-hand corner. It has been hanging around for years. Sometime I might take the time to explain where it comes from.

There is also a new section called Paris. I will be reclassifying some old material on this, but my objective is to try and write around 1000-2000 words every two weeks or so on things that have been happening here in order to give those you are not—or no longer—here, the feel for the old place.

There are other changes in the pipeline; I would like to add a photogallery section, as well as bring some older material online. But for the moment, I need to sleep.