Works in Progress

So today I packed up most of the CDs in my office, all of my Pern books, misc. books, papers and magazines, a license plate, several very dusty vintage games and a few things in frames, and hauled them perhaps 25 feet into the den. It hardly made a dent in the work I have to do in this room. The den already has lots of boxes in it, and I don't know how I can possibly find space in the house for the masses of books, papers, LotR and Anya figures, photos, unsold eBay items, Quantum Leap scripts, autographed baseball bats and other precious junk cluttering my office. Somehow I have to do it, though. That's the price of getting new flooring in here instead of awful orange carpeting that was already ratty when we moved in twelve or thirteen years ago, not to mention the desk we bought last weekend, and the relief that will come with finally not working in an office so horribly messy and overcrowded that I'm too ashamed to even show you a "before" picture. In fact I didn't take one. Just imagine the messiest photos I've ever showed you, and triple the mess, and you'll have some clue of the depths of my self-caused degradation. But it will get better. It will. Really.

Meanwhile, I wrote several drafts of a query to an agent who blogs, and emailed them to a few writerly friends for comment. I also got a Google Calendar up and running today on the church web site, and posted a rather chatty note about it on the church blog. We'll see if anyone notices. And I'm considering the replacement of a rather old picture of St. Michael's on out Welcome page. Pop quiz: which of the following photos is most appropriate for a church's home page? It is this:

...or perhaps an interior view...

...or one with lots of people...and their dogs?

Should the first picture a visitor to the page sees show a solemn liturgical moment...


...or should we concentrate on showing the social aspects of church life?


That Episcopal web guru guy feels strongly that a church's "brochure site" should be about people, not buildings and stained glass. So tomorrow I'm going to try to photograph people in the context of the church building, perhaps going up the tree-lined walk toward our welcoming open doors.

But what I really want to do is put together a little Java slide show, like that AOL applet. Will that work on a non-AOL page? I don't have any Java authoring knowledge or appropriate software, not even something to make an animated GIF slideshow. Well, I'll figure out.

This is your cue to offer suggestions, folks. Meanwhile, good night!

Karen