oh, well

So much for the Christmas tree. The first time I turned my back on the cats for more than five minutes, half a dozen ornaments were on the floor and one of them was broken (one of the dozen bells that my parents bought for their first tree almost seventy years ago, which I thought I'd put up out of reach).

So I took the full-sized tree back down and will put the little tree up on the armoire. Again.

If I had a way to keep the cats out of the room with the tree, I would, but I don't.

Sigh. Maybe next year.

it's a start, but not much more than that

Since attempting to choose a WordPress theme brought me to a screeching halt every time I tried to do it, causing me to get absolutely nowhere with my website in the last two weeks, and since choosing a theme is the first thing you have to do to set up a WordPress website, I finally gave in and just defaulted with the 2013 theme (the one that comes with the installation).

At least this way I can get started. I'm told I can change my theme later, which I probably will do as soon as someone takes me by the hand and says, "this is a really good theme -- it's easy to use, will do what you want it to, and looks like it ought to belong to someone who writes historical fiction." Because 2013 looks really generic, even with my header photo. My handcoded pages look better at this point. Honestly.

I have a single static page so far, after an afternoon's work (most of which was spent trying to get the header the right size and shape with the type on it in the right place and color, most of which I ended up doing with InDesign rather than WordPress's tools, because I couldn't get WP's tools to do what I wanted -- I'm sure they would if used properly, but I couldn't figure out how to use them properly). At least the page has my header photo and text now, so that's got to be something. And the page has text, and an image of Cross-Country's book cover, and even a few links.

I'm going to keep my old websites (http://mmjustus.com and http://carbonriverpress.com) as the 'live' versions until I've got all the new pages created and all of the widgets and plugins (gods help me) that I need installed. That is, once I figure out what it is I need [sigh].

This is going to take some time, I suspect. I hope it's worth it in the long run.