sore butt from sitting too long and writing(1100 Afterwar: 670 on Mickey story)

The Mickey story is for my own amusement, because my favorite amateur gay romance writers are not updating their series lately. Also it's a chance to look at a few other aspects of the world of Esperanza Highway.
I have this sort of free-floating feeling of not doing what I'm supposed to. I know it's because there are things I ought to do that I'm not doing. I need lists. That will be my next move. Lists of all the things I should get done. Meanwhile, I'm creeping closer and closer to the denouement of Afterwar. The next bit will be very dramatic. Well, by my standards anyway.


I was reading all about Sorbian language and Lusatia because Brian Scott at rasfc said my name is derived from a Sorbian word for "stony brook." Sorbian is an obscure Slavic language -- indigenous to the part of Germany between Poland and Czechoslovakia, and possibly what my folks were before they were Germans.

There's a Lusation independence movement which has apparently resurged since the unification -- under communism, the use of the language spread, because it was taught in schools, and it was used for signs and other official purposes bilingually with German.

Oh, also, I made another gallery for the Bella and Chain graphics. So far I'm made three repeating patterns based on pysanky, and the sketch of the index page. I'm not sure how I intend to use the pysanky patterns. They have something to do with Harry Smith, a protrait of whom I've nicked as well. Look, I change my galleries all the time, so I think it's stupid to put up a link that will be bad soon. Just go to my user info, find the pictures link, and when you get there, notice that under "every picture tells" there's a gallery called "stuff for bella and chain." Then you can see my pysanky-inspired designs, the sketch of what I want the index page to look like, and a picture of Harry Smith, who is not a character in the novel, although there is a character named Harry Smith.

Maybe the least disruptive way to use them would be to fill a column on one side of the page. I could do a different one for each chapter.

grr. something's missing

SO I thought the way to learn how to make a web page is the old fashioned way -- like any art student does -- copying the source and playing with it until I understood what was going on. And I found a nice simple three-column layout and I copied the source into my old Dreamweaver Ultradev 4 and all of the formatting disappeared. It's still in the source, but it sdoesn't show at all in the browser (what's worse is that I can't even get IE to open it. Mozilla opens it, Dreamweaver opens it, but it's unformatted.

Clearly I'm missing something. There's some little signal or other that should be obvious but it isn't to me, that tells the browser "hey, there's some formatting connected with this!"

On other fronts. still no word on any of the things that are out there. I should dash off another story so I'll have something else to put in the mail and never hear from anybody ever again about. It'll be a month at least before Afterwar is ready to send out into oblivion.

On still other fronts, for the second time in a week I was able to gather enough strawberries and blueberries that between them they could garnish a bowl of cottage cheese for the nice fellow. The grapes and apples, however, have a ways to go.