Neon Winter (2.0?) has launched. Sort of.

The main site (www.neonwinter.com) has a layout (a ‘flavour’, if you will), but no new content as yet. By ‘no new content’, I mean that most of the ‘old’ content is back (and yes, by now I am partly just enjoying seeing how many parentheses and ‘quotes’ I can put in this paragraph) and as exactly the same as ever.

Some of the prose is embarrassingly æsoteric, some embarrasssingly angsty, some embarrassingly awkward, some embarrassingly awesome. There are two main reasons it’s here, though. The first is that it’s true, and that’s important. To go back to the garden metaphor of my first blog post, this stuff is in the soil. It is organic matter, composted and fertile and it lives in some form in everything written since then. It has earned its place here, though I imagine it will be moved away from the light once new things start to sprout. As for why it is currently on the surface, I’m coding the site to be modular and adaptable: I want to be able to update by just dumping a text file on the server, not recoding every page like I used to have to do back in the day. That interface is to an extent already up and running, but to get a decent idea of how it works and fine-tune it properly the site needs content. This content will do as good as any other.

And, frankly, I’ll be as proud of Slithy Toves and the Francésca story in sixty years as I was the day I wrote them.

There is no comment system set up on the main site, though I think I will try to get that sorted in time, but if anyone cares enough to have opinions I want to hear them. I’m talking mostly in terms of the site, not the content, but of course any constructive comments are always welcome. The chances of me effecting a rewrite on any finished piece currently on the site are slim to nil, but I can and will take comments on board for the future. As for the site, what do you think of the layout and the style? Any suggestions for features or changes? I have plenty of ideas myself, of course, as it is far from finished, but running a site and using it are not the same thing and there’s little point running a site that’s unusable. Leave all comments here, for now, or send me an email over at zane@neonwinter.com.

As for new content, there is some around. A few stories written in the intervening time between websites, and more than a few unfinished pieces. I’ll start to gather the finished stuff together and trickle it onto the site, and if anything new gets written/finished it will make its way here as well.

* * * * *In other news, yes, I am editing the novel. Getting in the mood for that when taking a break from editing my PhD is difficult, but I’m trying to push it and I think my new two-pass editing technique is helping that. I’d suggest I’m just under halfway through the first pass, and that is the quicker pass. When I finish my second pass it could use an edit from someone who isn’t me. Since I can’t really pay anyone for that at this ‘give it away for free’ stage, I’m looking at a couple of options there (one of which is “fuck it”). Not sure which way it will end up going but I’ll keep you updated.

One thing I was considering was the possibility of starting to release some ‘special features’. There are myths, character profiles, a sort of annotated atlas and various other bits and pieces that might interest readers. I’m less convinced they will interest people who aren’t yet readers, but reacquainting myself with the world probably can’t hurt – it exists in a lot more detail than will ever make it into the novels.