Shifting Gears - The Author as Geek

Shifting Gears

As a creative artist that seems to have a dual nature (something to do with being a Gemini or on the cusp of Cancer if you're into the whole astrological thing, man), it's often hard for me to shift gears from one activity to another, but I've been learning to do so through the use of arbitrary borders in my day called "hours" or "days". Every Friday (or thereabouts) morning I have been meeting with a fellow artistic type (musician by night) who also shares geeky interests and we have been creating new PHP scripts for my Pan Historia community in my everlasting quest to keep the site fun, usable, and competitive with modern web technology. Sad to say we're probably light years behind, but I find that's ok because a lot of my users are not the super elite web savvy but people like myself that just wanna have fun. It's often just a challenge to get people to click all the handy links.

Anyway the point of this little discourse is that today I start a new, fairly large, project. I'm creating a doppelganger of Pan, or perhaps rather a trimmed sleek brand new version with stripped down functions, for a client. I have done this once before when I created the panerotica.us version of the community, but this is going to be more interesting as I'm customizing a bit. Not so much under the hood but definitely with the fins, hood, and trunk. Whole new paint job. This is being done for the folks at BardicWeb - a very different role-play community from Pan Historia, but one that has much the same origin as our site, birthing from the ashes of the old Ancient Sites community (their direct descendent being AncientWorlds now). I'm sure there are a few other small groups out there that are splinters of that original dot.com causality, but I tend to have a narrow focus, staying with Pan Historia because it's mine, I like it, and if I were to spread myself too thin nothing would get done!

Each of these sites has its own unique flavor and I'm sure proponents of each adore theirs best, and for similar reasons that I love Pan best, but I do think it's going to be fun and fruitful working with the BardicWeb people and helping them to realize their dream of a more smoothly functioning interface where they can act out their creativity. I'm truly flattered that they looked around and decided that the Pan Historia model would be one, with customization, that could work for them. It shows I'm doing something right you see.

Now the problem with this project and the subject of this blog (yes, I ramble), is that I often find it difficult when the middle of construction to shift back to the creative writer and participate adequately in my collaborative fiction projects at Pan. I hope that I have learned to correctly prioritize and schedule tasks so that I can easily shift gears from one part of the day to the other and don't allow one activity languish for the sake of the other.

Oh - and tomorrow my friend and I are creating bulletins for Pan.