I woke up this morning with an idea . . .

And now I understand the structure of Bella and Chain. I also understand how to write the next ten pages or so of Afterwar.
I've been spending my time mostly reading about css and html. An awful lot of the css people keep complaining that all the browsers but one are "broken" because they won't render the fanciest pages the way the designers intend them to. Excuse me? All the browsers but one? And it's especially astonishing, because the differences they're complaining about are completely inessential for getting across the content of the web page, one, and two, do not especially enhance the reader's enjoyment of the page. The effects are, actually, cute little tricks, about which I cannot care enough to throw away all the major browsers.
On the other hand, there's some exciting stuff happening with css. One of my favorite -- well, threads, even though the articles were on different sites, because they were in threadlike conversations all across the web instead of contained in one group, board or blog -- is about low-vision accessibility. There's a movement to compose pages in at least two versions and to have a chooser button at the top of the intro page. My only objection to this is that one could make the pages legible in the first place, but the response to that is that different conditions require different adjustments to make the pages legible.
There's this place called zen garden which is a collection of pages all designed with the same html and different css and graphics. It's meant to showcase "the beauty of css" and to provide models for people to play with. Most of the versions are ridiculous, honestly -- way too much color, pointless images, unreadable text. But I did learn a lot crawling around with them.
You might think this is all superfluous for me, since Bella and Chain is going to be almost a straight-ahead narrative. But I've wanted it to look special and to be interesting in structure -- and so I have to think about layout, graphics, structure: otherwise anything I do will run the risk of being ridiculous.

So last night I made a mockup of the graphic look I want for the index page. It's really cool, not graphic intense, but containing graphics (a bicycle chain running down the left to divide the links from the text, a bicycle wheel and a silly but appropriate font in the header, for which I now know enough to include an alt tag, but I don't know if you can specify large letters for alt tags or if you are stuck with the teeny letters in a little box) And this morning I figured out how to use the blogs I've made. Permalinks from the index page! All I have to do is figure out how to do permalinks. It's going to be easy, once I've done that . . . and that means that the blogs can be read like blogs, but the story can also be read as a straightforward narrative. Just what I wanted.

In other news, it's tomato sandwich season, and I have used up all the bread in the house celebrating it.

Glen's online

My friend Glen Fitch has inaugurated his blog with a scary poem about the end of the world as we know it -- and also about ekectric blankets. You can find it here.

something about worldview and prediction

I'm reading Frederick Pohl's Dark Star Rising. So far it's a hoot. Though it does the same thing that CHina Mountain Zhang does -- assumes too much will stay the same in terms of social structure -- so we have a Chinese occupation of a devasted US, and their running criticism-self-criticism meetings like it was 1960. Which is a thing about worldview. Pohl definitely doesn't like communism, and he's kind of suspicious about the Chinese culture in general. But this, also like China Mountain Zhang, doesn't have a racist feel to it. Unlike a lot of other works with the "China takes over" trope.
Before I learned how to use my killfiles correctly, I used to keep finding dogawful attacks on things I'd say in usenet posts. The fact that I had a worldview that was distinct would just irritate the hell out of some people. There was an underlying accusation, frequently made in so many words, that my worldview made me a murder, or at the very least complicit with murder. Aspersions were cast on my ability to enjoy reading whose ideological foundation was quite different from mine. I insisted that it wasn't true, that when I objected to ideology my heart was pure. "Everybody has a point of view," I said. If the book was good, I could read it, as long as the worldview wasn't all the way over to the too nasty to contemplate.

I think Pohl proves me right. I don't know directly about its political worldview, but I'm pretty sure it's way different from mine. And not just accounting for twenty years of history since this book was written. Internal evidence points to him being an old-fashioned default moderately conservative guy. And I like his book immensely so far, though there might be deal-breakers farther in. I don't think it's because Pohl attempts to keep his own beliefs hidden and I don't think it's because he doesn't really, concretely comeright out and say "I think you guys are blowing it if you support socialism and socialist realism and that." I think, continuing the way he's started, here, he could have written a more blatant boo, politically, and still haven't gotten censured by people who care.

No, the reason, I think, is that Frederick Pohl has written a book of good will and good faith and good storytelling.

There's more but I'm literally falling asleep at the keyboard so goodnight, those of you who are not in daylight.