I’ve been trying for months to grasp css and php but it just won’t stick. However this past week I was able to do a fairly complex image map within two hours. I’m very pleased with myself and my clarity of thinking this is a good amount of progress. However, there are still a few things that I can’t do without a builder of some sort, such as slide shows. One of these days I’ll get it; but I’m going to practice with stylesheets and things a bit more; then see if I can actually make a wordpress theme from scratch and then we’ll move on to something else.

All I can say to anyone who has Mesothelioma is I’m very sorry for your bad turn in health and please go and speak to a professional.

If you have fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, those I can at least offer some personal experiences about, but not that sort of cancer.

I’m very interested to track down their books and see what sort of things they write, but as of now I’m working my way through “World War Z” so it’ll be a while before I take on any other books. I can’t keep up with reading more than one at a time any more.

Back on twitter I remember a few years back I was all “twitter is not worth the fuss” but that’s because I was mis-using it. I was updating random things and not looking for connections, or marketing or anything like that. Now I understand more what you should and shouldn’t share, though I’m sure I do still write some inane things at times. I’ve linked it to my facebook account so that I can remember to update both; and I’m more apt to do so on a semi-regular basis. I don’t tweet when I’m out of the house unless something insanely funny happens; mostly because I’m a paranoid sort who doesn’t like the idea of someone realizing I’m out of the house and doing something untoward.

#amwriting is very fun though, there’s a lot of mutual encouragement and commiseration from people I’ve found through it, and we’ll joke back and forth about characters doing certain things, share very small snippets or funny lines, and muse on word usage and definitions. It’s very geeky in a lot of respects; but then using twitter itself is kinda geeky.

I suppose it’s a bit like dieting, you can have the best fat burners and you can cut down on foods and exercise. It doesn’t matter which order you do those in entirely, I mean, I imagine you have to take the fat burners with food or perhaps they’ll make you sick, but it doesn’t matter when in the day you exercise so long as you do it regularly. From what my doctor tells me it doesn’t matter when in the day you eat, or if you eat standing up or sitting down, so long as you do so slowly and allow your body to catch up with how full you are, and so long as you eat meals per day, and in fact it’s best to eat small meals throughout the day. He tells me you have to retrain yourself as to what’s a meal. A meal doesn’t have to be meat and two veg with dessert. A meal can be a bagel with cream cheese and a piece of fruit, or yoghurt with honey and cereal, or a scrambled egg with a slice of bacon. It’s about retraining.

Retraining is also good when it comes to my writing. I can write whenever during the day so long as I have the time and pace myself and don’t try to force the writing when it’s not coming, but if I’m being able to write something that I know from planning happens in the middle of the story and I’m only in 15% right now it doesn’t matter. I should go ahead and write that while it’s in my mind, rather than waiting and forcing it and making it suck and then getting disheartened.

I will randomly have musings from time to time about buying a domain that’s linked in with a story I’m writing, but then I think that I should just get one that fits with my name as an author, but then I start debating about pen names and if the pen name that I think of now will be the one that I elect to use, or am allowed to use if I’m ever fortunate enough to get published. When I first started writing at the age of fifteen I decided I would be Tabitha Lesley; because my step-father had nicknamed me Tabby-Cat on the CB radio, and Lesley was my erstwhile middle name.

Since then I’ve toyed with others particularly those honoring the clan back in Scotland so using Watson or Buchanan as my surname. I don’t know, however, if those would be valid, allowed or if by the time I actually see a work to fruition if I would want to use the name in question and keep it for myself forever.

My husband and I had similar issues coming up with a name for our son that we liked. I found a piece of paper we’d been using when planning the baby announcements, and it had at least fourteen names on it from each of us.

Which is fitting with me really, you see I burn through screen names quite often. I’ve been Ami-chan, Heather Miriel, Miriel, AmitheCat, Lulinari, Lulinari Imonai, Rowan Dawn, Echo, Catriona and I think that’s about all of them, not counting the various others I *currently* use, so I fear that as soon as I find a name I like long enough TO actually get something published with it I will then despise it and fell horrible about being stuck with it.

Decisions, decisions.

It’s hard to have scheduled activities when you have an active toddler and a chronic health condition; but I figure that if I work things out properly I should be able to come up with a kind of floating schedule so that I can move things around as I need to, allot a couple of hours per day for free writing, a couple of hours per day for blogging and work-related activities, a few hours for chores and playing, and teaching the munchkin; that sort of thing, and it can be flipped around and things can be switched out and rotated depending on what’s going on at the house or with my health.

I was talking to an associate who said that he might be able to fix the desktop, and spoke about the possibility of connecting it to a Samsung HDTV, but the monitor itself and all the peripherals work fine, it’s just the desktop which is dead. I have some prospects which are very heartening, that I will write more about when I’m not sneaking time on Kore’s computer, but if my various blogs are rather quiet right now, that is why; but it’s giving me a nice break from the hussle of the internet and really helping me kick the Facebook app addiction, so that’s a good thing to come out of this. I think.

Also I have 19 hand-written pages of the story I’ve been working on and more knocking their way around my brain, so that’s good too. I’ll have a ton to write up once I have a functioning keyboard again.

He also thought I should be writing books for children instead of the stories that I normally write. That I would be a great children’s book author. I don’t know why he thought that considering most of the stories that he ever heard me read sections of involved war-torn alien landscapes, people being taken prisoner and their families dying (though that would be appropriate for Disney); but that’s not appropriate for children. He kept saying I could take the things I write and tone them down, make them educational and all these other things which would have meant diminishing my creativity.

As I get older I’m not saying that I couldn’t write children’s books, it’s just not something I’m interested in. My husband has often joked that I should make a book series called “Helpful Declan” about our son and all his attempts to assist me with household tasks that end in comedy, and maybe that would be something, but I have a lot of other crazy stories that have to get out of me first.

I’ve had some ideas percolating but I’ve just been jotting down notes here and there to come back to after the holidays, or in a little bit of downtime. I’ve almost got most of the presents made. I just need to take some snap shots of the munchkin for this year’s Yule photo and get them printed, and then write up the explanations of the semi-precious stones I used in the jewelry and get that printed too.

So, despite my writing being slow I’m crazy-busy.

I’m still fixing the widgets and things, but I’d rather get all the sites back up that I can and then get the widgets sorted than play around with that right now, the feed subscription is back up and that’s the main thing as far as I’m concerned.

What happened is that on Friday a person in Sheffield initiated a scam of PayPal and to do so had hacked into one of my other domains using my password which they had somehow phished. My host is incredibly wonderful and incredibly on the ball (seriously you guys should ALL host with drak.net and tell them I sent you!) and had everything locked down within a few minutes, but that’s still meant that they had to lock all my sites down in case the person had been messing around in all of them and also that once they got me fixed I decided to take everything down and put it back up in pieces anyway because I’m paranoid like that and thought it would be a good time to weed out anything that was up on the server that probably shouldn’t have been because it was old, stale, and not being used (like my old Joomla installation).

Anyway I hope that I can regain my readership and breathe new life into everything like a Phoenix rising from the ashes of this disaster.

Thanks to those of you who’re sticking with me!