The Labor of Website Updates
I think I've mentioned it before: I have this website. Even though my ambition for it has always been to regularly add new material to it, the reality is that I don't do it very often. A big reason for that is that it does take a chunk of time to build a webpage. I'm not the best at it, and half the time I'm not entirely sure I know what I'm doing when it comes to coding.
So, I updated my front page, adding a fairly current photo of myself. Alas... that coding stuff got away from me, so some of the text runs off to the right side. I'm going to have to do something about that. Eventually.
I added a new paper to the site: "For Love of Sophia." It was written for and presented at Mythcon 34, which was held in Nashville. The theme of the conference that year was the Wise Woman in literature, and it gave me an opportunity to take some of the things I had worked on in The Scribbler's Guide to the Land of Myth, and apply them to literary studies. I admit, I got a kick out of that.
As a side note on that, I have to admit to a certain genuine enjoyment of doing literary scholarship just for the fun of it. It lets me step beyond my mere passive reception and enjoyment of a work of fiction and elaborate on aspects of the work that have resonated for me. I have a strong analytic turn of mind (happily, in my case, balanced by a strong synthetic side as well -- putting things back together in new configurations), and it is a pleasure to give it free rein in ways that do not require negative criticism. It's also refected in my interest in process (how a work came about, was constructed, or was influenced), which travels with my love of the product (the work itself, be it a book or a piece of artwork or music).
Anyway, I've also added a couple of new reviews, long overdue: a short review of James A. Owen's Imaginarium Geographica, and Jincy Willett's The Writing Class. The links directly to the reviews are in this update notice.
(And, oh great! Another coding error -- the Amazon link for Indigo King got added in the wrong place -- I'm going to have to fix that! Yuck. Tomorrow, probably.)
Every so often, I reconsider my policy of the permanent reviews on the website. I mean, I have a couple of blogs that I can do reviews on, this one and the one on my MySpace (which I use mostly for comics reviews -- it too needs some updating). But for some reason, I feel that blog posts are more ephemeral, I'm not sure why. They aren't really, the way there is redundency all over the internet. Perhaps it is that the review is hosted on someone else's "property", whereas when it is on my own website, it's planted in my own yard. But there's also this feeling I have that if I take the time to add a review to the website, it's a permanent statement on my part -- it's not just a passing reaction to the immediate experience. If I add it to the website, "I REALLY mean it!"
Anyway... that's been the activity I was engaged in this morning. Obviously, I'm going to have to do some more tweaking tonight or tomorrow to correct those little glitches on the new additions.
In the meantime -- HEY! plan ahead for Christmas! Check out my original Christmas card designs and BUY SOME -- please forgive the crappy black and white scans of the artwork, by the way. The cards are actually in color, and look much much better. (Yeah, I am going to have to get on the stick and master my new scanner. *sigh* work work work).