The simple truth: I'm swamped

I got an email today asking me if and when I was going to fix the Yowlers series so it was at least readable.  The answer is "Yes, I will, but..."

Ever since the great layoffs of 2008, I've been in one of two states: either fully employed with a wife and two teenage daughters to look after,  in which case I was overloaded with absolutely no bandwidth in which to write, or unemployed with that same family, in which case I was a neurotic wreck sending out a gazillion resumes in the hopes of getting a bite, and no will to write.

Yesterday I got laid off.  So now I've switched from overloaded to neurotic.

But in a good way, because I already have two job offers.  I've figured out The Secret To Finding Work As A Developer, so that's taken care of.  Both offers, by the way, come with a bonus: commuting by train.  The last few jobs involved commuting by car, in which there was no way to write, but writing on a train is old-hat to me: most of the Aimee and Blood Beth series were written on buses or trains.  I went to an interview yesterday that took the train: in two 35-minutes rides I wrote 2200 words of hot, angsty, mel-on-mel human/squirrelmorph porn.

The other problem is simple: Narrator 3.0 is old and a headache to use, and fixing it is a serious problem, and every time I think about fixing it I also think about how the Journal Entries and other series ought to be responsive and mobile-friendly, and I look at my to-do list and realize that there's a gazillion projects to take care of that have a higher priority, especially if I want to maintain That Thing That Makes It Possible To Find Work.  Right now the top priorities in my project list are revamping my wife's website for modern typography and a better color selection, future-proofing my skillset, deploying another Thing to my professional portfolio, and revamping that portfolio so that live Things (like Fridgemagnets and Priorities) are the very first thing someone reads on the sidebar.

I have ambitions for Narrator 4, ambitions that, sadly, I haven't had the time or bandwidth to realize.  And equally sadly, low on that priority list is fixing the IE-8 oriented CSS that's completely fucking up the Yowlers pages.  I will get to it.  I am writing more.  I just can't promise when you'll see those changes.

Earlier: Playing Tag: The Work In Progress

Later: Will no one rid me of this troublesome story?