I’m going to keep this update really brief.

First off, I’ve begun working on Chapter VII for The Pale Man. This should be the concluding chapter for that series (collection?) of short stories.

Second, I…really haven’t made much progress on anything, including the aforementioned finale for The Pale Man. I’ve had a few things going on, mostly in my personal life, that have made it difficult to keep up. These matters are gradually resolving, however, and I’ve had a little more time to dedicate to working on anything.

Third, you’ll have noticed that the Gallery page/section is looking a bit different. Yes, that’s deliberate. I’ve said before that the organization of this website is simply atrocious. I was able to get a little more done this week on some improvements. The changes (thus far) include the following:

• The wall of text on the Gallery front page has been replaced by a simple “under construction” notice. I am working on the underlying pages and templates that I need for the Gallery to function (and look) the way I want it to. Once I have all of that connected the way I want, I’ll be able to bring the Gallery back online. Which means that I’ll also be able to start adding to it.
• I’ve removed the sticky top-bar (or whatever you want to call it) in the Blog. It really was distracting and didn’t look quite right. This has been replaced by a much better navigational tool: a drop-down menu. Now, when you hover over the “BLOG” button in the navigation bar of the website header, you’ll get the directions to the various sections of the blog. Less clutter, better navigation. We’ll see how this goes, but I’ll likely be using the same method for navigating sections and subsections of the Gallery as well.

These are overall changes that I, personally, think will improve navigability of this website…just make it easier to get around. Some of this also requires going back to the drawing board, however, and settling out exactly how everything here needs to connect together. This should get a lot easier now that I’ve figured out how editing the navigation bar works. That, I think, is already a huge opinion.

There are still a lot of improvements to make on the website. Among other things, it introduces an author’s website, then…well…where is everything? It’s all sort of hard to find. For example, the link to the page for The Aos Si’s Gift is kind of tucked away in a corner. There’s no mention of it across the navigation bar in the header, or even published work in general for that matter. This isn’t helping and needs to be resolved in some way.

That being said, a lot of the changes I want to make to this website are purely aesthetic, not functional. I’m reluctant to make these aesthetic changes, however, until I have the functional layout complete. So, getting there.

Either way, a lot of lessons learned, especially as someone who had no website and little to no social media footprint prior to late-2024. So, let me just give anyone following along a piece of advice:

Get your website set up and start making your presence known on social media before you go through with anything. You don’t have to make a big deal of it. You don’t have to go around advertising how many words you wrote today or what a super-big deal this best-thing-ever is going to be. Pro-tip: the only people who will care are going to be other writers…readers just want to know that this isn’t another ripoff. Either way, just get it done. Just get the website up and operational with all of the functionality you’re after. Establish some degree of social media presence. Then you won’t be spending about 90% of your time playing catch-up.