All together now: "Dis place (aaah-ah!) is comin' like a ghost town…"

Hello? Anybody here..? Bit quiet around here lately, I know, but I'm afraid it's a situation that's quite likely to continue for a little while yet...

The thing is, I had a cunning plan, way back when. I was going to finish the new, full content version of Richard Morgan's website (almost done, hopefully it'll be live by the end of the week) and then spend most of September working on a few side-projects of my own, catching up with long overdue blog content, running a few admin tasks that have been on the to-do list for a good while, that sort of thing.

But the Morgan site has been taking a little longer than I planned, if only for all the usual miscellaneous reasons (note to any other would-be or relatively new-start freelancers: when estimating the length of time a job will take, always double it, then add a bit...) And then I got a full schedule data update through from Pete at PS Publishing late last week, which means that I can now crack on with finishing the long-awaited new e-commerce version of the PS website, which is what I've been doing - along with a few other update jobs - pretty much solidly since then.

Having said that, I did manage to get a basic blog setup started for my own work-related info / promo / portfolio site, which is now live at www.darrenturpin.co.uk, although it definitely needs some more work, particularly round about the Portfolio and with regard to contact details etc.

But yes, anyhow, the PS job should take up most of September, which means that my other plans will have to return to the back-burner for a while. October is booked pretty much solid already, and I'm hoping that I'll get chatting about websites to a few folks at Fantasycon the weekend after next, so hopefully I'll end up busy through November. Which means I might have to wait until December to get everything sorted out properly. C'est la vie, and I'm certainly not complaining about being busy.

Although having said that, if I can sneak some schedule space in the meantime, then what I'm hoping to do is: finish DT.co.uk and expand the range of content I'm posting there (marketing, productivity, GTD, freelance working, that sort of thing), then re-template The Genre Files (it's looking a little dark and dingy in here, compared to a few of the cleaner templates I've seen online recently) and re-focus the content on books, bookishness, publishing and related topics, whilst moving out the more general, chatty and / or personal stuff into a new blog. Possibly at darrenturpin.me.uk, possibly at lessordinary.me.uk ("aiming to live a life less ordinary..." yes? no? good? okay? crap?) which I registered a while back on whim and haven't done anything with yet. And of course, I'll be keeping things ticking over on UKSFBN and I will try to pick up the pace again here, pending the re-design...

Phew. Wish me luck!

September 11, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | 6 Comments

Work in Progress: bit of spare capacity, if you're interested…

One of my major clients (a public / private sector organisation based here in Manchester) has had to make budget cuts this year, so they've cut my contracted hours from 15 to 7.5 per week.

Planner image by 'nosheep', via sxc.hu This is, of course, entirely fair enough and it does come with the bonus of freeing up some of my scheduled work time to focus in on some other projects that I've been meaning to get my teeth into for a while.

And if there's anyone out there who has a website that needs building, or a genre-fiction related project that they'd be interested in getting my input on, please do feel free to get in touch.

In the meantime, here's a quick run-down of what I've got in the pipeline, just to give you an idea of the sort of projects I'm currently involved in and particularly interested in working on:

Adam Roberts and I are currently re-designing his old website at www.adamroberts.com. The new one will be chock-ful of Wordpressy goodness and will allow Adam to tinker to his heart's content (he's a great web-tinkerer, is our Adam... ;)
I'm also building a blog-based website for John Berlyne's family business, the North Star Delicatessen. It's a great deli based in South Manchester, that serves great coffee (I can definitely vouch for that), and John really gets the whole blogging thing, so it should be a very lively and interesting site to visit, whether you live in his cathcment area or not, and especially if you're a bit of an amateur gourmand, like I am.
I'm about to re-launch myself back into the major overhaul of the PS Publishing website that I started earlier in the year. It's been strategically sidelined for a while recently - largely due to the huge amount of work that Pete Crowther has been putting into his trip to the World Horror Convention in Canada, where he was one of the Guests of Honour - but will shortly be back on track with a vengeance. The new site will be great - full e-commerce facility, a regularly-updated blog, tonnes of info about the books and their authors. Looking forward to getting stuck back into that later on this week.
Later in the year I'll be working on full-scale websites for both Joe Abercrombie and Jane Johnson, whose holding pages / micro-sites went live in the last couple of weeks.
I'll be running a six-monthly site update for Les Edwards (and his alter-ego Edward Miller ready for July 1st, so there'll be a stack of new artwork for you to feast your eyes on.
I'll also be building new sites for three new clients, all of whom I'm very pleased about and looking forward to working with immensely... and whose names I'll reveal once the work itself is under way (not that I'm superstitious, but...)
And finally, I'm planning on launching at least one, maybe two new blogs. One will be for me to talk about my freelance work and provide links to interesting articles about website content management, online copyrwriting etc. elsewhere. The other I'm not saying too much about at the moment, but it will be a very focused, topical blog that I hope will prove both useful and interesting to a wide range of folks. Mysterious, much..?