I’m starting to settle into a decent working routine up here in the chilly yet hospitable Northlands. In something of a lifestyle shift, I start work at about 8am and finish around 6pm, and I actually have weekends, just like normal people. Well, sometimes… book reviews and such are being shunted into leisure time, for example, but they’re more like a leisure pursuit anyway, so that’s all good.

But this post is all about the results of the work… in this case, some fresh new website designs for some of my clients. Launched last week (after some merry japes with domain name servers), here’s the jade-and-marble art deco confection ordered by James Lovegrove:

And here’s Chris Beckett‘s new site, too; this one was actually finished back at the end of October before the house-moving chaos began, and it appears I was remiss in not announcing its launch here at the time. So, better late than never:

Both sites are full of free fiction to read, by the way, and both are new to using WordPress (and fully-interactive blogging in general), so why not pop on over there and say hello in the comments? Writers like to know people are reading them, after all…

It’s been open to the public for a couple of days now, so I can safely announce that the new website for Zeno Literary Agency (the project formerly known as The Big Project) is live and unleashed upon the intertubes.

Zeno Agency represents a big old swathe of genre (and non-genre) writers of note, so it’ll be a good place to keep an ear to the ground as regards the publishing circuit. Go take a look.

Design-wise, it’s pretty stark and minimal; the real heavy lifting was getting the client biography pages to work the way we wanted them, complete with alphabetical divisions, little thumbnails in the listings and so on. There were times at which this project was intensely frustrating, but I learned a great deal about what you can do with custom queries in WordPress in the process. Every day’s a school day.

Aesthetic and ergonomic feedback is not just welcome but positively encouraged.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce the launch of a completed project, namely the new website of fantasy author Alex Bell.

Alex seems very pleased with it, and so am I – it’s definitely the ‘prettiest’ site I’ve built yet (for values of ‘pretty’ where x = ‘kinda moody in a feminine mode’), which was partly due to having the fabulous Kustaa Saksi artwork to work from for the colour scheme.

Go take a look; all feedback is appreciated!

Well, I’ve just sent off the invoice, and all but a last few lingering (and, frankly, very perplexing) aesthetic bugs have been squelched, so I think it’s time to announce formally that Tim Lebbon’s new website is open for business.

It’s been quite the learning curve, for an assortment of reasons that – seeing as very few of you give a crap about the internal workings of WordPress – I shan’t bother going on about here. But learning is good, and Tim’s is the first site I’ve built from scratch rather than hacking about example themes, so I was expecting to hit a few snags. Maybe not quite so many, though…

But any way – take a look, let me know what you think. I should take this opportunity to thank Tim for his patience with me, too – he’s a super gent, and no mistake. Buy one of his books.

Well, what do you know – the gradual renovation of the BSFA website has seen it sprout a discussion forum at the back-end (so to speak).

There are even members-only regions, which makes it feel all nice and exclusive! This hopefully spells the end of me missing out on all the decent debates just because I don’t have an LJ account …

Thanks to some advice from people who actually know much more about cameras than which end to point at people (cheers, Katie and Stu) I managed to get some halfway decent shots of Oceansize at their gig last night:

I think the ranging light must have caught his attention! More Oceansize portraiture here, if you’re interested. A fine gig by an excellent band, who I commend to anyone who likes guitar music with brains.

Writing about music

Writing work has been comparatively thin on the ground this week, thanks to the postal strike capturing large numbers of promo CDs deep in the system.  Some finally turned up this morning, but unless some more arrive tomorrow, there are going to be some deadlines which I cannot meet without completely making it all up …

[That muted roar you've been hearing all week is nothing to do with the rugby World Cup - it's the sound of music industry PR companies and magazine editors across the country howling in impotent rage.]

However, I finished and sent in my review of last week’s Electric Eel Shock album launch party (which was a lot of fun, and well worth the epic journey (and even more epic hangover)). Should be live sometime soon, I’m hoping.

Just because there’s been no work to do for other people doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy, though. I’ve almost got the base code for my reviewing website ready to roll out to the public, although it’s still as ugly as sin.

And, as mentioned earlier, I had to migrate this very blog to a different host – so I’ve been doing an awful lot of webby techy stuff this week, and am quite proud at having not made any spectacular screw-ups … at least, none that I’ve noticed yet.

Writing about other stuff, and editing

Pretty much nothing, writing-wise; see above. Last weekend saw me knocking out the latest reviews selection list for my Interzone team – I’m getting faster at doing it, but there’s still plenty of scope for error and confusion. Give me five years, and I’ll have it nailed flawlessly!

The other editorial high-point was Futurismic getting a mention in PC Magazine’s 100 favourite blogs, as also mentioned earlier this week.

Books and magazines seen

The Orbit folks sent me yet another book about a vampire detective (seriously, is this not the most tired genre idea ever?) and a chunky Manga/anime housebrick about a family looking after an autistic child:

With The Light Vol. 1 by Keiko Tobe (Yen Press)

Unusually serious subject matter for manga comics, in my experience. Maybe I’ve just read all the wrong ones, but I’m sure that while reading it I’ll be subconsciously expecting the sudden appearance of pneumatic breasts and people doing very personal things with cephalopods. Ahem.

Coda

Well, unless my postal backlog materialises tomorrow morning, I’m going to have a weekend relatively free of music writing commitments – which should leave me ample time to sort out the T3A web reviews offer list, write up my interview with the Oceansize boys, do some final touches to my music reviews site, and install Ubuntu Linux on my laptop as an experiment …

Rock and roll, huh? I bet you wish you were going to have that much fun. But trust me – this level of enviable awesomeness isn’t suitable for everyone. Only the somewhat unhinged and socially maladjusted need apply!

So, it’s time for The Friday Curry, and then I’d better do the Friday Free Fiction round-up for Futurismic before considering a jaunt to the pub for a few beers and a chin-wag. Here’s hoping you all have a good weekend too. Hasta luego!

Well, I hope you’ve all had a nice long holiday weekend – even if the weather was as rotten as it was here in Velcro City. I hardly noticed, though – I’ve been busy.

One of the many things I’ve been doing over the weekend is playing around behind the scenes at T3A Space, the new-look blog-style website for TTA Press (publisher of short genre fiction magazines Interzone, Crimewave and Black Static). T3A is where updates and story acceptances for the TTA stable are posted, and over the coming months it’s going to grow into a content-rich site with lots of good stuff to read.

Andy (TTA’s head honcho) already had things looking sexy with an eye-catching theme (luckily – as, having seen VCTB, no one in their right mind would set me loose on the aesthetics of a website), but yours truly has been hacking about with the ergonomics and functionality. Upgrades include a working spam-free comments system, and lots of other behind-the-curtain search-engine friendly stuff. There’s still work to be done, but things are looking good so far.

I’ve also set the RSS feed for the site to run through Feedburner, which is a very easy operation but well worth the time invested. But if you click through, you’ll see the subscription counter sat at a lowly first-day count of zilch, zero, nada.

So, here’s the challenge – I’d like you all to subscribe to the T3A RSS feed, which I’ve made extra easy by linking to it there. You don’t even have to click more than once! Let’s see if we can’t get that counter to show something a little more impressive than zero by tomorrow, eh?