Unadorned, But Updated

Over the weekend, I worked on a secret project and I fixed my website. The former was a total geek-out for me, and I can't in good conscience discuss what it was. The best I can do: it involved copy editing and an artist I admire a lot, and is probably not remotely as supercool to anyone else as it is to me. My website, of course, took much less time than I thought it would, and once it was fixed, it was fixed. So, voila. Check it out. I'll have to change it again pretty soon here, because the issue of Theaker's QF with my crazy robot story in it is evidently going to come out within a couple of weeks. But that change will be quick and easy and I will accomplish it fearlessly. 

Back in 2008, my website had all kinds of other shit on it. It had loads of writing samples; it had a detailed table that set forth my submissions and rejections, which I updated so that my [nonexistent] readers could track my progress; it had pages of writer's backstory about the projects I was working on or had completed. None of this seems like a good idea anymore. The samples - okay, but the links on the site to my published fiction show stuff that's finished and editor-approved, which is even better than stuff no one has said yes to. If I had books for sale, samples would be a good idea, but I don't. The progress table - something tells me that magazine editors won't think too highly of me publishing that information. The backstory - well, I'm permanently interested in writer's backstory, particularly my own (preen), but I doubt that anyone else is, particularly since I am the opposite of prominent. 

So I don't really know what to put on the site other than what I have: two little pages, the index and the one that sets out all the published work of mine that you can find on the internet. I am not a fan of rambling bios; when asked by publications, I stick with "Katharine Coldiron's work has appeared in x, y, and z. She lives in California and blogs at <a>The Fictator</a>." Clean and neat. Although I always want to know more about the writers I like, long bios virtually never give me the information I want and are almost always dull or self-aggrandizing or both. 

Anyone have any thoughts about how to juice up the site? Anything you'd like to see there? The only ideas I have involve lists, like lists of movies or books I enjoy, lists of places I've lived, lists of people I've dated, etc. Even with more biographical detail than just a blank list, that stuff is not interesting and I know it. 

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My UCLA class starts Wednesday. I am excited and extremely anxious that I'll fuck it up somehow. We've been assigned stories to read, which is a pleasant surprise, as prior workshopping classes I've taken would have benefited from outside work. I finished my instructor's book, Middle Men, over the weekend, and really enjoyed it. I'd read two of the stories before in litmags but liked them just as much a second time. Los Angeles is one of the stars of the book, so I rolled around in that like a horse in the grass. 

My classes at CSUN are simultaneously more effort than I expected and exactly how I thought they'd be. In my lit class, we've moved on from short stories to poetry, and thence, for me, into the black void of know-nothing. In my syntax class, I'm passionately engaged on a conceptual level and fumbling around like an idiot on the level of concrete answers to homework problems. 

My life has gotten a little overstuffed in recent weeks, and I'm trying to keep up. I expect to write an essay this week about this picture 

and I really want to get started on a complex short story I've mentioned in half the posts I've put up recently. I doubt I'd accomplish any more if I was juggling three balls instead of four (with school), but when I'm looking at the clock and looking at my to-do list, it doesn't feel that way. 

And tomorrow begins my 384th month on this planet. After spending all damn weekend at my computer, I feel every minute of that in my neck muscles.