But first: join me in celebrating Jodi Meadows’s kickass book deal over at her blog. If you know Jodi at all, you know she more than deserves this. I would spend all my savings to have that woman’s work ethic *g*

I actually had the pleasure of reading Erin Incarnate back in January, and I cannot wait until I have the actual thing in my grubby little hands.

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On to WIP Wednesday: it’s a little thin on the writing this week. I’m still plagued by, well, the plague. As a result, I’ve made my way through several seasons of TV shows, and am fervently trying to get my percentage of won games of FreeCell from 96% to 70%. (The actual number of won games is currently over 900. Excuse me while I faint.)

As you can probably imagine, yesterday I felt about ready to hit something out of frustration, so I decided to defy my germs and pick up some paper to see what I could do with it. Here’s my progress so far:

I’ve been wanting to do a self portrait with my new Hair of Awesome™ for ages now, and I’m mostly pleased with how this is turning out so far. I still need to figure out how to pull off the hair and freckles, among other things, but… it’s nice to get my hands dirty with charcoal again. I’ve missed it.

I’ve been taking pictures intermittently, so I might be able to do another post detailing my step-by-step progress when I’m done.

While I wouldn’t qualify myself as a senior Internet citizen, I’m fairly sure I count as middle-aged, if nothing else. I’ve been around since the mid-to-late nineties, and have been tinkering with my own websites for much of that time. I’ve never been particularly good, but I love playing with the code and putting on my problem-solving hat – and as anyone who’s ever hand-coded as much as a blog entry knows, problems abound when you’re doing code.

Yes, hand-coding. I started back in the olden days with Netscape Composer, soon switched to Notepad, and these days, I’ve made the tentative step to Taco HTML Edit. It’s like Notepad, but the text is now coloured. I can live with that kind of upgrade. While I got Adobe Dreamweaver a couple of years ago – courtesy of my job – it was too late for me. There’s no hope left. Dreamweaver does nothing but send me into a fit of OCD rage at all the messy, unnecessary code it forces on you, and let’s not even start on how it handles PHP or positioning. What’s the point of having a preview if it looks all off?

Anyway, all of this is an exceptionally long-winded way of telling you all that I’ve spent the last two days dehydrating at my computer because of how caught up I was in coding my brand-new, extra-shiny website.

It’s not as professional as it could be, but it’s passable, and it makes me happy. Good enough for now!

Hopefully, I’ll have a Dutch version up before Monday hits.

I also did a quick bit of art yesterday morning so I’d have something colourful to toy with. It’s me, looking supremely bored and extra freckled. Gotta love summer!

In entirely different news: the first episode of the third season of Sterren op het Doek aired today, with Gerard Joling as the celebrity. I really enjoyed watching, and am torn between excitement and abject terror in anticipation of my own episode, two weeks from now. It’s getting close now!