The Price
The words streamed through the open doors in her mind like water through a sluice, more words with more speed than she could ever write down. But she wrote in phosphor, on slips of napkin, in the margins of books, and on the back of her hand when there was no place else to write. Sometimes the ink on her hand would fade and blur, the words washed away before she could transfer them to a more permanent place. Even so there were always more words to write. So she wrote. This was her purpose, her calling, her reason. She was the road, the arroyo, the channel for the words, the scribe and the medium and the marionette.
But it was not just the words that waterfalled through the doors in her mind. The creatures also came through the doors, quietly, furtively, from the corners, in the shadows. She was focussed on the words and determined in her purpose; she didn’t notice their arrival. She didn’t notice when they began chewing on the edges of her consciousness, burned and scratched and tore at the walls and windows of her brain. Were they creatures, or beasts, demons or insects? She didn’t know what form they took, but she thought of them as creatures, later, once she understood they were there, once she realized the damage they had done. For years they had followed the words through the doors. For years they had laughed and danced on the wreckage of her thoughts. The price of the words were the creatures. The price of the creatures was her sanity.
The white and yellow pills chased and burned the creatures from her brain and closed the doors so no more would come through. The bleeding edges of her mind scabbed and healed, the damage repaired and rebuilt. Her family and the doctors were pleased; she was pronounced cured and sent back into the world to live what they all called a normal life.
Except that the doors were closed. The waterfall was dry. The words were gone. She could still assemble phrases, sentences, paragraphs, but the words felt cold, dry, as if she were collecting shells and stones from a beach. Shells and stones were not a calling, a reason, a purpose; shells and stones were potsherds, skeletons, shadows. Dead things.
This was the price of the cure. The price of the cure was the words.
The price was too high. Against everyone’s wishes she stopped taking the white and yellow pills. The doors opened. The words came back. And with them, the creatures.
She understands them, sees them, recognizes them, this time. She feels them tear at her again; she bleeds words uncontrollably onto the page. She know it is only time before the creatures win, before the river of words washes her away entirely. But until then she writes, and she writes, and she writes, because that is her purpose, and it is all that she does.
She writes; and over and over, day after day, she pays the price.
I really envy web designers who seem to fling out an entirely new design for their home sites every few months, designs that are spectacularly beautiful, original, and creative, and that employ all the latest standards and software. And they do it all while retaining day jobs.
I hate these people.
I used to be able to do rapid design iteration, back when my entire web site had six pages and there were only four HTML tags to choose from (H1, P, A, and BLINK). These days: haha hah. If I get a site redesign out every four years or so I consider it a job well done.
My problem is not intent. I have ideas. I love playing around with software and design and technology. In the last three years — since the last iteration of this site — I’ve worked on a dozen or more revisions that never got done. On the contrary my issue is focus and follow-through. To get things done I need to cease playing, put butt in chair, and apply a consistent set of ideas to the entire site.
I managed to finish the site this time because I established the redesign as an actual project, with goals and a prioritized to-do list and a deadline (which. er. I didn’t make. still.) I had three major goals for this redesign:
- New and better CSS. The last time I did my site I didn’t understand a whole lot about CSS, and it showed. The styling was crude and buggy. I had worked around the simpler bugs over the years but there was a lot I didn’t think I could fix without a tear-down. It was time. I also wanted to spend a lot more time learning and understanding CSS in general, especially cross-browser issues. The current design still has some problems and inefficiencies but it’s a lot better. I have a lot I want to say here so I’ll put it into another post.
- Integrate my entire site into a content management system. My blog has always run under Movable Type. The core “www” part of my site — essays and fiction, primarily — was a whole pile of raw HTML files. This had turned out to be kind of unmaintainable. I wanted to put the entire site into a database-backed content management system, split it into modules, and structure it so that the next time did a redesign I could just write some CSS and hit “publish.” I looked into a couple packages for doing this including Wordpress and Drupal but decided that I didn’t want to redesign the entire site AND learn CSS AND learn a new CMS at the same time so I stuck with Movable Type for the entire site. In retrospect: even with the pain it would probably have been a better idea to migrate to something else. I also have a Movable Type complaints post coming up.
- Upgrade the Movable Type software, redo all the templates, fix untold bugs, take advantage of features I had previously ignored (categories), and add new features (tags, new feeds, dynamic publishing). You’ll notice that there aren’t actually any categories or tags on the site right now. That’s because after three months of working on the site I got worried that I was working on the Windows Vista of web design — bloated, buggy, late — so I started dropping features off my todo list. Goal: ship it. I’ll add categories and tags in a dot release. (sooner than another four years, I hope).
Along the way of course there was going to be a new visual design. There were actually three new visual designs along the way because I can’t leave well enough alone (sigh). I did play around a lot with gradients and animated icons and more colorful backgrounds and schemes — more modern web 2.0 kinds of things. For a long time the site had a black background so the blue headings looked kind of neon. I even had ajaxy javascript-based menus that opened and closed once. But I’m not a very good visual designer and there was a little voice in my head telling me “but you’re a writer. its all about the content.” So I kept stripping things out. This design is kind of plain but its readable.
Now that I’m done with the design I can get back to writing. Yay.
Well that wasn’t too awful. There were some crufty template configuration issues that required editing in about 60 individual web forms by hand (arrrggghhhh) but that was the only big surprise in migrating things over from my development site. I’m feeling kind of pleased (it’ll obviously all collapse after I go to bed.)
Obsessively detailed design and upgrade notes to come.
Today I will go to Pilates, and then I will have lunch with a friend, and then I will come home and roll out a ginormous site-wide upgrade of the entire lauralemay.com domain including design, software, and structure.
This is a blue moon event. Things will probably break. Brace yourselves.
This story I wrote a coupla years back — about a tech support call from a car — seems to have come true. Jan Chipchase spent twenty minutes in his car in hot weather last week with the windows rolled up waiting for a “security reset.”
Freaky.
(I got it from Radar O’Reilly.)