jonathanwthomas.net

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I doubt anyone cares but I want to track my progress somewhere and maybe build an audience along the way.

I haven’t worked on my novel in nearly a year, for various reasons I won’t bore anyone with. It’s time to get back on the horse, get this thing written and find an agent.

Nothing will happen unless I actually sit down and do it.

So, I’ve taken the advice from my friend Chad and have decided to just start the book all over, from scratch - though I may use elements of what came before.

I’ve spent the last week re-conceptualizing the book, hammering out new outlines, writing various snippets of text to use later and altering mechanical things like voice and tense.

I’m almost done with this phase and will sit down and start writing significant amounts of text soon.

The goal is to finish the book by the time my wife and I go to England in March. I want to have a finished book for my wife to read on the airplane.

Watch me succeed or fail, if you wish. I hope you at least get entertained or learn a thing or two about writing.

This is my third novel, for those that care. I’ve been through this all before…

I’m going to Atlanta later this week to go to DragonCon. I’m going to be gone for 5 days. So today, was spent working on my projects so they won’t need any maintenance while I’m gone.

First up was finally putting together and finishing my long blog article about the Beverly Shores World’s Fair Century of Progress Homes.

I also set up a gallery on this site of the most arty pictures. Check ‘em out.

I also set up a series of Sunset pictures to auto-post for the next week or so on Jon’s NWI Photoblog. I went through my collection and found the best sunset pictures. I hope you all like them.

I stumbled across a very slick theme that I though would work perfectly for my Transatlantic Travel blog, so I switch it out and while I was at it, I updated and added some content. I think the RSS feed of flight deals to London is pretty sweet.

I also wrote a really long entry for Austerity Blog on How to Make Money Selling Your Stuff in an Emergency. I hope some people find it useful in selling their stuff. I’ve made a ton of money selling online, and it’s saved us financially many times.

I’ve decided to retool my personal website and make it more of a portal to all my current interests and projects.

I’ve ditched iWeb and gone for something a little more robust; Wordpress combined with the Gallery 2 plugin to display my pictures. I’ve never done some of this stuff before but I’m getting a hang of it. I already like how things are turning out.

iWeb was great when I was just starting out in building websites. But I quickly realized that it was cumbersome and didn’t do exactly what I wanted it to do. After seeing the light and learning about Content Management Systems, I figured it was time to put my new found knowledge to work.

I considered using Drupal for this site and I’ve successfully used it in the past. But Drupal takes too much work to customize and getting it to do what I want can be a challenge. I’m short on time these days, so Wordpress it is.

I’m also looking forward to having a more general interest blog where I can spout off on whatever I want. Most of my other blogs are focused on one or two topics and I prefer to keep them that way. I may write about other things that interest me, like sci-fi or even politics. We’ll see.

Enjoy!