Been going over some aspects of the site and trying to prune anything that hasn't been updated in 8 months or more. I'm finding a terrifying amount. In the course of doing so, I began rereading TAB, and I've already found a couple more proofing errors. This is especially bad given that before I posted chapter 3, I thought I'd done quite a job on the first couple chapters' errors.

Also, I am finding continuity errors and stuff- really amateur crap. Maybe it's because I've read it a hundred times now, but the story overall is seeming pretty crappy to me. There are some funny one liners here and there, and some concepts I still like in their zanyness, but it doesn't have the feel of something I'm jazzed about anymore. That's discouraging, given that I'm trying to invest some energy in Chapter 4.

Ah well. Everyone who's weighed in on writing ennui who's got a writing portfolio I admire pretty much says you have to write a bunch of crap to get to the good stuff.

I was just assuming these entries were crap and that TAB was fairly good. We'll see. Maybe it's just exceedingly-late-night self doubt, and a couple days from now I'll re-read about how a year before and then a year and a half later Brad did something, which is a continuity error somehow placing the events of the first well-described night in the story 6 months after when they're supposed to have taken place. I guess it's good that I don't have any confusing timeline constructs in the later chapters. (After the funeral that occurred like half a chapter ago, but a day after what you just read, anyone?) Sarcastic as that is, even those are at least comprehensible, just convoluted, unlike chapter 1, which is just plain wrong and contradictory.

Also, I failed so badly at what I was trying to do with the actual text in the prologue that it reads like some awful fanfic or the dreaded Eye of Argon.

Paper cup one: Age worn hoof prints smothered by the sifting sands of time shone dully against the dust splattered crust of earth.

Paper cup two:
He threw the cup to the rotting wood floor. His pained face looked to the anthropologist for an anchor to reality.

Which one is new Hackneyed Soda, with 2 times the ridiculin?

Of course, mine was trying to be overly wordy (without using dialog) to fit the overly complicated metaphor I was setting up, but I don't think anyone got that. So I just look like a jackass.

Again, this all may just be self doubt. Maybe you're all geniuses and got what I was going for. See, the playwright is described with, uses, and supports dialog, the anthropologist eschews and denounces it.

See, because I don't use dialog much in the story.

But I use regular language as if the story was being told to you by a friend.

It makes sense, I promise.

Anyway, after hitting a despair threshold there, I moved on to messing around with Photoshop while zoning to music. It was my original intent to re-do the graphics for the security login console for all my web-admin stuff - the root of theempire.homeftp.net's web nexus. (See, there's a reason all my web services are called Imperial Something...) I'm still going to do that, but tonight I ended up making something else.

Behold: the new logo for Sol Enterprises, LTD. I've given it it's own album over at imperial surveilance. It utilizes the LOH Brainbomb, one of my favorites among all the things I've ever designed, and for once, people who don't already know what it is may be able to see the damned fuse and figure it out.

Even if not, it appears, even in my very down-on-me-creatively mood, that I'm making real progress in photoshop voodoo magickery.

That's something, though it comes on a night when my most involved work to date feels like a crummy world full of plot holes and spelling errors.

[i am the greetest]