Thursday, January 22, 2009

I Got Stumbled

About 2-3:00 yesterday afternoon, I checked the live stats for the site and mused to a friend how the Dark Conspiracy section had gotten 26 hits. I assumed most of them were from the Yahoo Group, which I recently joined (after several years of putting it off, because I was never settled enough that I knew I could be active and it would just be another Group on my list I rarely checked).

What sucks is how bad the navigational system is. I have been working on the department off and on for a while now and like any WIP, things change. The board is so vast that it becomes hard to keep-up with and I forget which pages I have added the changes to and which I haven't. Even worse, I already know there are pages coming to which I need to link but I haven't completely finished yet - many I haven't even finished preparing (researching, compiling rules and reference pages, etc.)! Those are the "dead links" across the section (often emboldened and colored, but not linked).

I pine for a studio - still, after all these years.

I am working from a very small "office" in the home. Actually, it's little more than my desk against the front wall (with a side table bearing my printer and the phonebooks, etc. I have been trying to work a giant corkboard into the budget for a year now; this would allow me to literally pin the pages to the wall and work them out visually (on index cards).

While there are programs and websites I can use to help me in this endeavor, there is only so much space on my desktop and my resources go only so far. I can't have 5-6 massive programs running at once without serious performance issues and it doesn't much matter because I can't see all those programs at once. Yes, a dual-monitor set-up would help and I've wanted one of those for years too, but though I have the monitors, I don't have the cord and I think it's about $50 - something else I don't have. Also, I lack anything to set them on.

I have the drafting table in the bedroom and am thinking of turning it into a full-fledged studio like I originally wanted to. The problem is that I've grown accustomed to working in the front room, but I'm pretty sure I can overcome that. Still, the bedroom has become a storage room which is now filled to the ceiling with... shit. Shit and boxes; shit in boxes; and boxes.

It's the age-old dilemma: I need to start a new, big project in order to make my big projects already in progress easier to complete. And it's going to mean time lost on the projects already underway. However, I need to be prepared for big rushes like this because this is the time I need to be able to strike.

I managed to rush out some of the drafts this go-round - just like I did the last time I got Stumbled - but I don't know if it will make a difference. Just like last time, by the time I realized what was going on and actually got the pages out, a lot of people had already been there and missed it. I can only hope more of them bookmarked us to check back later... and I can only work that much harder to get the department in shape before the next big wave...

Here's to hoping it comes!

© C Harris Lynn, 2008

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