Day: August 17, 2006

CSS evil strikes

The nastiest thing about WordPress and Cascading Style Sheets is their relative impenetrability to anyone other than a dedicated web monkey/producer. If you don’t work in this stuff for a living, then all you can hope for is a stable template, easy management and no bugs like the one that hit me this morning which is putting everything into italics. My patience wears thin. Sure, I can go into the admin console, hit “presentation” and do to myself what I did last winter when I took the entire blog down for a week and had to spend cash to get the coders at my ISP to un-befukticate me.

[Update: Ryan from the c-c-c-comments delivered the solution.]

Piano tuning

I started a book two days ago. Just dove in and started writing. Most of the research is finished, heavens knows I’ve done enough procrastination, and at the urging of Jim Forbes I just opened a doc and started banging away.

In the old days the poets would begin by invoking the creative muses. Milton kicked off Paradise Lost with the usual call for help:

"Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of OREB, or of SINAI, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of CHAOS: Or if SION Hill
Delight thee more, and SILOA'S Brook that flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song"

John Barth, in the short novel, The Floating Opera, has his narrator, Todd Andrews, limber up his writing skills in a chapter entitled, “Tuning My Piano”.

Coleridge ate some opium. Hemingway pounded a bottle of rum. Me, I limber up with some good reading to get the old narrative voice locked in, put aside any mental overhangs and clutter, and then dive in at a steady forced march of 1,000 words a day with no re-reading or drafting. I am fully outlined, and I know enough not to stop to find a fact — marking holes with the old “TK” mark that means: “to come.”

So, a major project is underway. It feels good.

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