different names for the same thing

Just now, finally, in a sudden burst fuelled by some brilliant driving music, three months after I originally thought I'd be done, I have written the last bit of text for Strange Characters. When I started, I thought I'd just have to write a few connecting paragraphs. Turns out that what I wrote between January and now is as long as all the stuff I wrote on the trip. The whole thing is just over 60,000 words, though I'll probably have to cut some waffle out. I am totally boogieing at my desk right now.

What a grim, ugly day, with hardly any light. I'm fighting it with fairy lights, candles, and work.

Right now I'm filling in the ISBN application form - which is pretty scary, requiring all sorts of precise details I don't know yet - and mailing hatmandu to ask him lots of dull questions about booksellers' pricing practices. puritybrown has half the manuscript and is editing it. This is closer and closer to being a real thing. The rest of the time my head is in China. It's brighter there.

I haven't much faith in the book today. But I press on regardless. I was saying to metame on Sunday that this is one way travel writing is easier than novel writing. When I'm writing novels and start to panic, I lose faith in the whole plot. Maybe the main character should change gender? Maybe two characters should merge, like the opposite of amoebas? Maybe the ending sucks? If this book was fiction, by now I'd be thinking it was lame and cliched to send the characters to Japan and it would all be so much better if they went to, say, Kamchatka instead.

But no. I know what the next bit is, because I was there when it happened, and I write it, and then I write the bit after that.

Hasty life-update: On Friday accidentally went clubbing, that is, went to gig at the Zodiac which turned out to be a club that just happened to have an hour or so of live band. Rather good club too. Though at first, when I thought people were just doing the 'stand around and wait for the band' thing, was surprised by the random strangers attempting to hug me. Band were Goth As F*ck despite playing breaks and other dancey stuff, I mean, they were called Devil's Gun and their first track was called Raising The Beast and they had a waily girl singer for that 'touched by the hand of Ofra Haza' effect. They should totally play Whitby. Danced myself sober, wheeled my bike up Cowley Road with others who were walking home, ringing in the ears and pleasantly tired in the legs.

On Saturday there was a pub lunch at Iffley Lock where I fed ducks and geese and then there was a murder mystery on a boat in Africa (aka Jo's flat) with no actual murder in it but plenty of intrigue and treachery (undyingking, my compliments, wasn't it one of yours?). I was a journalist who was Not All She Seemed and my accent flopped comically from bad posh-English to bad mishmash-American all night. It still fascinates me how in games like these people can put on completely different selves. It's kind of liberating.

Other than that, I've mostly been sitting in the red room working a lot on the travel book. I don't even mean sitting for hours hitting Refresh on my friends page and trying to psych myself up to work, I mean really working, without having to force myself, up to ten hours a day, because I want to. Ten thousand more words in this last week, either written from scratch, from brief notes, or patched together from longhand journals. Editing, formatting, making breakout boxes with information in them, investigating that Amazon Affiliates thing, fiddling with the cover. Also putting together a website on which to pimp self, though this makes me a bit uncomfortable. (Here are my reviews! Here is everywhere I've been published, which isn't really very many places! Buy my book! Go on! Oh dear.) Spent today finding bits of PHP on code websites and bashing them till they do what my site needs them to do. Feeling burnt-out now and nursing glass of wine.

carbonunit sent me twenty quid by Paypal before Christmas when I was panicking about money. carbonunit is a lovely and generous person, and perhaps might like to know that his money has just covered most of the cost of my domain registration and webhosting for the coming year.

But I still haven't got a job. My CV is out there, I've had a couple of interviews recently with schools who say they'll phone me when they have work for me to do, I have lots of potential work in March and April, but no job-as-such yet. I worry that all this book stuff is just an especially interesting-looking bucket of sand for me to stick my ostrich head in. But I only worry for periods of about five minutes at a time and then I get an idea for something I can add to the text or the site and back goes my head in the bucket again. Yeah.

Whoops! I forgot the main point of this post!: I've been looking at author websites and general web-stuff for inspiration, but haven't found anything that's set my world on fire, and some of the really cool-looking blogs I used to read a few years ago have actually become much more boring. So. Plz recommend me a website that you saw recently and thought looked cool/interesting/unusual/"whoa-I've-never-seen-anything-like-that"/just nicely done? I won't poach their look wholesale. (I couldn't - my web design skills aren't up to it.) I'm just looking for ideas.