Of This and Other Worlds

So I was making up business cards for the SCBWI conference I'm attending next weekend, and somehow I ended up putting a URL for Knife on the card, in spite of the fact that I didn't actually have a page set up for it yet.

But now I do. And besides the Prologue it also includes a link to Chapter One, for anyone who might be interested.

I'm still around, really... just having a remarkably busy week. I keep meaning to sit down with the printed manuscript of Knife and read through it scribbling notes on every chapter for the rewrite, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm thinking about it all the time, though, and occasionally jumping out of bed at 11:30 p.m. to jot down ideas that I'm afraid of forgetting otherwise. I've had at least one thought of this sort that made me very happy, as it resolved an issue that has bugged me about the story ever since I first wrote it in 1993.

Funny, though. I thought that taking a fannish hiatus would give me more time to work on other things, but it really hasn't -- not much, anyway. I used to grab a few minutes to read forums and such whenever the baby wasn't actually screaming the house down, snacking on guinea pig poo (don't ask) or otherwise obviously needy of my complete attention, but I became guiltily convinced that those bits and pieces of browsing time were adding up to hours over the course of the day. Which was, no doubt, the case, and it's not a bad thing that I'm now using that time in different ways: but the problem is, I can't edit my novel, or study the Bible, or spend quality time with friends and family, in random five-minute installments. So anything meaningful I want to do still has to be crammed into the times when Paul is napping, or after all the kids are in bed at night.

Mind you, I've discovered one unexpected gold mine of productivity: seems that five or ten minutes here and there is not a bad way to work on web pages. And lizbee was so kind as to provide me with a subdomain after I lost access to my previous web host. So for the first time since *cough*, I've completely redesigned my personal web site with new content and a catalogue of all my online fics (or at least the ones I'm prepared to admit to writing, anyway). I even bit the bullet and polished up my Mary Russell page. Now I just have to figure out what to tackle next...

'Cause I liked the Fourth Doctor and I thought his scarves were cool and all that, but you know, somewhere there's got to be a limit.

Bonus points if you can get through the page without clawing out your eyeballs (what was the guy thinking when he chose that background?).

And on a pretty much unrelated note, Steve Burns (former host of Blue's Clues) is my new musical hero. I'd buy his album, if he had one yet. Get on it, Steve!