It’s almost the end of January, and I’m already setting myself deadlines. My calendar is already pockmarked with various page numbers, chapters, quizzes to be completed — and this is just for the next few weeks. On top of that, I’m going to make myself sit down and have a finished, draft copy of my novel ready by June 30th. Right now, I’m sitting at about 83,000 words (thanks to my 50,633 from this year’s NaNoWriMo.)

This seems outrageous, mostly to me, because usually this is where I stop a draft and start over completely. I’ve done it twice before, and I’m terrified that I’m going to pause halfway through, reach back to the beginning, and make my protagonists leprechauns or something, and then the rest of the story wouldn’t work because they weren’t small, mystical, or Irish. This honestly haunts my every waking thought.

Where I stand right now, I’m about ¹/₃rd through the novel. All of the exposition is done, most of the characters have been introduced, everything is screwed up, and a lot of other things are in motion, namely death and destruction and probably some evil babies or something. I’m not quite caught up there. Now, 50,000 words in a month is remarkably doable if you sacrifice a bit of sleep and tranquilize your control-freak inner editor, who says that “squirm” is a much better word than “wiggle,” and that you really don’t know anything about botany, except for what you looked up on Wikipedia to make sure you weren’t putting tropical plants in a tundra setting. (Did you know there’s such a thing as an “Air Potato?”).

But goodness, I need to write at least 100,000 words in five months without slacking off. The word count doesn’t scare me as much as the idea that I will have to constantly motivate myself over half a year to get this done. Considering that formatting alone will take me a month and a crate of Kleenexes and maybe some Lasik, And editing — oh boy, editing. Editing will probably take me the rest of my life. I really don’t have any time to waste. Other than the time I’m taking to write about this. If only novel writing was this easy.

I have learned one thing. If you let the story just race out of you, the plot usually comes together on its own — roughly, but it’s still viable. I’ve gotten away with preparing one-line outlines, or none at all, and my chapters seem to have seamed themselves together. Additionally, because I’ve been working with these characters for so long, I’ve stopped trying to reinvent the characters themselves. They’re set in stone. They won’t change, even if I tried to. But I can change their roles. I leave blanks in my plot for certain roles to be filled, and when I’m close enough to the scene, the right name fits into place. That way, everything that needs to happen is taken care of, and hopefully by the right character.

Editing this beast is going to be hilarious. I’ll post snippets along the way. Here’s one for the road:

Additionally

I took a crack at illustrations, and I threw some up (more or less) on some of my pages. I’m not sure what aesthetic I want to convey. I always have the hardest time illustrating things for myself, because I could do almost anything and get away with it, almost being the key word. I tried a little grunge, a little bathroom stall, a little whimsy. I wanted them to be somewhat rough, so wherever I’ve colored outside of the lines, it’s not my fault — I mastered neat coloring very early on (except with paints) — I did it on purpose.

Let me know how you like them!

There was a moment last week when I thought that I could honestly switch to WordPress and have no problem with it, but every time I design with it, I feel like I’m cobbling something together instead of using the defined framework. It’s a little hard to tell, because sometimes you find regular PHP beside template tags. Granted, it works, and that should be all that matters. But I do love that Movable Type defines most of the things you will ever need for your site in advance. It just helps cement my choice of CMS a little more thoroughly.

There are a few things I would change, and a few of these I have definitely brought up before.

1. Features

   This one is a little nitpicky, since I have no complaints about the bulk of Movable Type’s built-in features, but did you know that Movable Type hasn’t had proper article pagination until Version 4.3 (please correct me if I’m wrong)? I’m talking a simple previous/next entries link at the bottom of the page. I racked my brain trying to find a solution to work on my poor little 4.1 installation, but all of my best efforts failed. I tried about four plugins, and none of them managed to do anything either. Which brings me to my next point:

2. Plugins

   I don’t know what happened to the developer community for Movable Type, but there’s not too many of them left. Just for comparison’s sake, WordPress has 7,965 available plugins. Movable Type has a mere 910. I’ll leave the guffawing and math to you guys. In the mean time, I might start writing my own, although this seems like a bad idea all over. Now, quantity usually doesn’t matter, and there are quite a few quality plugins on the community site, but maybe only one working version, or perhaps two, of the same sort of script. What ends up happening is that you don’t have alternatives to turn to if nothing works out. And when you really want help, the place you turn to first is the community forum:

3. Support

   I can rant and rave about this at length. Fewer users means fewer knowledgeable users, which means fewer people who have answers rather than more questions. It really keeps coming down to the size of the community. You can have all the functionality in the world built into your CMS, but if no one’s constantly surging ahead and syncing it with the latest technologies, it won’t matter at all. There’s not a great deal of dignity in being just behind the baseline.

4. External Help

   A lot of the really great sites for Movable Type help that I mentioned in one of my previous posts, like Movable Tweak, Learning Movable Type, and Movalog have either stopped updating or just don’t work. It’s always a good sign if the company that makes the product has the best support site for it, but it’s slightly more tragic when it’s the only one around. I mean, where do you go to when there’s nothing else?

Solutions

I encourage developers, programmers, and curious minds to try sparking some new life into MovableType.org. It’s a wonderful platform, and while most people aren’t comfortable with Perl/CGI — that’s it, isn’t it? PHP is more accessible? — it doesn’t look too bad. Hell, if I say I’m going to try it, it can’t be that bad.

I think a lot of you guys will get the impression that I’m just punishing myself by using MT, by wearing myself out until I just shiver and hallucinate about WordPress all day, but it’s just because I really like this system, and I hate to see it wear away. Six Apart is doing their part by creating a brand new version which, aside from the admin panel woes, and the catering towards a community site rather than a personal blog — hence the word “site” throughout. Now I think it’s my turn to chip in.

Or perhaps, this is as good as it gets.

I am happy to announce that my new design is up and running fairly well. This morning, I made a dynamic menu/title (the former, thanks to this article, the latter a result of some very basic programming — but I’m not here to brag). I’ve been working on this for about a month, maybe a little longer, and the final result is a great deal more polished than my original mockup — but it’s not that different either.

My process

Most of the mockups I’ve ever made in Photoshop are unfinished in some critcal way. Maybe the color aren’t quite right — that always takes a lot of tweaking once you have to see them all over the screen — or maybe that logo isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe it’s not your logo at all, it’s a logo that was swapped for yours at birth, and now it’s a hunchback with tentacles, and you don’t know where you’ve gone wrong as a parent, but it’s happened, and now those angst-ridden teenage years are coming on fast and—

That was not the metaphor I had in mind. Moving on…

Mockups and markup

A lot of people have probably already read Meagan Fisher’s article on mockups vs. markup, and if you haven’t, do it right now. Photoshop mockups are extremely inflexible. While I think it’s important to play around in Photoshop just to get your bearings, know that 90% of the work you will be doing will be with markup. Every now and then after I exported the images for my design, I’d return to Photoshop to grab a color (although Colourlovers helped out a lot), or refine an icon, but that was it. When you know what you want to do, Photoshop is pretty much useless.

So as soon as I got out of the whirlwind of possibility that is Photoshop with a decent design, I churned out Version One, which will never be seen by human eyes; then, Version Two, which is similar, but better; Version Three was nearly there. I broke away from the vertical menu to tabs, which I hadn’t done in a while. At any rate, it seemed to suit the theme, and left the sidebar open for content — delicious, delicious content.

Trial and error

I initially tried to get pointed tabs at the top of the page, but the varying widths of my tabs made that a bit more trouble than it was worth. I compensated by…using -moz-border-radius around the place. Because those things totally go hand in hand.

I hadn’t tried rgba before this design, and I wasn’t sure if it was worth it. Within seconds of applying it on the navigation (I thought it would be unwieldy and superfluous everywhere else), I changed my mind. It is extremely easy to use, and very pretty if you use it right.

I also tried out Cufón and @font-face for the first time. I stuck with @font-face, because it was the easiest to manipulate. I could change weights and fonts without having to upload a new Javascript file every time. But I have to say, Cufón is very neat. If you’re using sIFR, Cufón is infinitely easier to use. I mean, for chrissakes, there’s a generator. And it renders very smooth. @font-face renders a bit choppily (this might be caused by other things as well), but unlike with Cufón, I won’t have to worry about selecting text or :hover (this is apparently supported, but I couldn’t get it to work).

Then, I thought about upgrading from Movable Type 4.1 to Movable Type 5, which was released a couple days ago. After a few minutes of playing with my installation, I decided not to. The interface is gray and boring, the navigation is a bit confusing. I’m not sure why they got rid of MT 4’s UI, because it seems infinitely better.

So that’s a wrap! I have a few more things to clean up about this design, but I’m pretty happy with it. Let me know what you think! :)