Busy, y'say..?

Absolutely run off my feet at the moment; mostly with work-related projects, which is absolutely great.

In brief:

Jo and I were guests of Pete and Nicky Crowther (of PS Publishing fame) last weekend, at their absolutely wonderful home on the East Yorkshire coast. Their house is one of our very favourite places on the entire planet: partly because it contains a veritable cornucopia of sf stuff - books, toys, DVDs, memorabilia; decades worth, and it would take a decade to read / watch / play with it all - but mostly because it's home to Pete and Nicky, who are two of our very favourite people (an opinion widely shared in genre fiction circles, I know) and spending time with them is always an absolute joy. We ate, we drank, we laughed. A lot. Of all three. And we watched Hollywoodland, which was... interesting. Dark, and definitely... interesting.

We also thrashed out a last few remaining issues on the PS website re-build, which means I'll now be able to crack on with that project as soon as possible. Got another few jobs to finish as well, all of which are tantalisingly close to completion, as well as a few new ones in the pipeline. Plus, I'm off down to London on Thursday to have lunch with a few of the fine folks from Gollancz Books and meet with a certain Mssr. Lynch, a word-smith whose acquaintance I'm absolutely dying to make. Will tell you all about it later next week, all being well.

Then on Friday afternoon Jo and I are heading down to Derby for Saturday's Alt.Fiction event, which I'm also thoroughly looking forward to. It'll be a great chance for us to catch up with a whole load of fantastic people that we haven't seen since last year's Fantasycon (or perhaps last month's Eastercon, or even last weekend...) and hopefully we'll get a chance to talk to everyone I've been saying "catch you at Alt.Fiction!" to for the past few weeks. Packed panel programme allowing.

So, yes, incredibly hectic schedule just now, absolutely loads going on. And I'm afraid that it does all rather mean that I might not be posting properly until after the weekend. I'll do my best to prep a couple of bookish entries sooner rather than later. Six hours of quite, quite wonderful reading time on the train to and from London on Thursday should help no end with that. Luxury!

April 24, 2007 | Filed Under Miscellania | 3 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..?