I may have wanted to stick a bunch of cool nouns in the subject heading… you have a point there. My website has been a bit fragmented of late, so here’s what I’ve been up to the past few months.

PlayWrite – a funky not for profite I do a whole swag of work for. I’ve been working closely with them to develop a new website. PlayWrite has a lot of complex needs and responsibilities and it’s been quite the journey. I’ve been their communications gal since late last year and my role will be changing soon (my visa type is changing, doh, so I must change with it), but I’ll stay involved, even if it’s as a volunteer. See, new shiny website! The PlayWrite website was built by Blue Mouse Monkey Design (working with Acts of Good) on the ExpressionEngine Content Management System. I’m still learning the back end, but it looks pretty robust. They have been super helpful teaching me the back end so we can manage the site ourselves (it’s a bit more complex than wordpress, but my heavens, the functionality is much bigger too).

I’ve also been working with Blue Mouse Monkey Design on another website. For that crew I’ve been writing copy and making some major structural changes to how information is presented and accessed. The client’s been super nice to work with, we’re not done yet, but I’ve really enjoyed the challenges. The work has drawn on my depth of knowledge around good practice in the community sector and the needs of their constituents and has been fun. Most of the work on that one is done and I’ll let you know when that piece goes live. I really love discrete projects, go in work hard, get the job done right. There’s not much in life that’s actually like that, so it’s important to treasure.

In the past couple of months I’ve also written several work for hire educational comics, fact checking for a number of other comics and trained up a few people around the work I do. It’s a small paragraph, but it’s been a lot of my time, both the doing and the creative recharge afterwards. It can be interesting work, but is also the most draining work I do.

Clarion Write-a-thon, ’tis finished. I’m not sure if we met our $10,000 target. I feel a bit bad for not promoting it more, my energy needed to be focused on comics for most of the duration. If you want to help us sneak over the finishing line you can still contribute on the website. The write-a-thon did help me keep the novel nagging away at my mind and while most of the creative words I put down during the write-a-thon were work for hire I did have a major breakthrough on my novel as well. I’m very pleased I did it and next year I’m going to do something extra special.

So that’s stuff that’s happening, hope you’re all having a grand time. I should get back to the educational comics work!