Love these colors, and the sketchy look 

Comedy Central's video player is neat looking. It's all Flash.

Shhhh! Not a Word! 

I accidentally deleted Word from my computer at home, so I decided to see if I can get along without it. So far, no problem. I'm working from home today. Just (almost) finished a new Expression Engine template for a series of vendor articles, and I've been plopping in copy to see if the template works as I meant it to.

I usually get copy that's already been published in print as Word files, exported from Quark (because we make last-minute copyedits to the magazines in Quark). I save them down to plain text anyway before putting them in the CMS, so there's no fancy formatting I have to worry about, and opening them in Google Docs is working just fine, thank you very much. In fact, it's actually a little better, because the formatting for n-dashes seems to be preserved when copying from the browser.

Talk about the wrong song to have stuck in your head! 

"Kyle's mom's a bitch, she's the biggest bitch in the whole wide world... bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch, she's such a dirty bitch..."

I blame my kids. Otherwise I wouldn't even know South Park songs.

Funny thing happened 

When I started writing my story, I didn't have much investment in actually making it good. I'd never written fantasy and wanted to see if I could. I thought I'd toss something off to experiment with the product placement form, just to be crazy. I thought I'd throw in some internet personalities, just to do something different.

Then, in the last few days I started caring that the story was all over the place, and not as good as I can make it. I started liking Brian, and ideas keep intruding themselves at the oddest times about things he might say. I found myself dropping everything to run and make notes before the ideas went away. I started getting a clear picture where the story might go, and darned if I'm not now convinced it might actually shape into something.

So, you'll still see a lot of tossed-off crap posted as drafts, but don't be shocked if the archived bits change and start to look a little more like a real novel.