Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch

Suzy Vitello and I are distantly “related” in the literary world by virtue of our involvement in separate writing groups that sprang from the ur-group, Tom Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writing. While we’ve never sat at the same writing table, we’ve chatted at parties now and again, and we’ve worked together in our other lives — in the world of communications, branding, and websites. Suzy is an editor and copywriter, and I’m a web designer, and we have delightfully collaborated on many projects together over the years.

And she edited the text on my Parts Per Million website!

And I got to redesign her new author website!

And she interviewed me on her blog! Check out Writers and branding: an interview with Julia Stoops for our discussion on the importance of author websites, the effect of DIY technologies, and the impact of art, teaching, and creative writing on my branding and web design practice.

The Blue Mouse Monkey team: John Redder, Shelise Gieseke, Jimmy Thomas, Julia Stoops

2011 has seen some bittersweet personnel changes at Blue Mouse Monkey. In July Jimmy Thomas, developer extraordinaire and my office-mate for 3 1/2 years, moved to Japan, where he’s persuing a new life teaching English. To live in Japan was a long standing ambition of Jimmy’s, and I wish him well. But I miss his generous good nature and most excellent CSS skilz. We made some wonderful websites together.

And this December saw the departure of John Redder. For the past year John has provided incredible insight and support with process analysis and improvements, and project management. I’m still amazed that we “hooked” John at all — he brought to my little company experience and expertise from a higher plane, and I feel so lucky. Blue Mouse Monkey is a better company for John’s efforts, and we are sad to see him return to the bigger pastures from whence he came.

But all is not lost! We have some excellent new freelance developers in our stable, and in-house, our studio manager Shelise Gieseke is expanding her role and ably stepping into John’s role as project manager. With new, streamlined systems in place, we’re even better positioned to take on larger and more complex projects. I feel really ready for 2012.

After a hectic spring and summer at Blue Mouse Monkey, projects are wrapping up and my workload is decreasing. And I’m loving it. All of a sudden I have time for family and friends. I have time to just poke around the web, or stroll around outside. And time to get working on my second novel.

Okay, there I said it. Yes, I am working on a second novel. The first one, which took me 10+ years to write, is in the process of being queried to agents. Many readers tell me it’s an important story that needs to get out there, and I do hope it finds its way in the wider world. Learn more about Parts Per Million here. This second novel won’t take me 10 years. This time I’m starting with plot and moving towards crafting sentences, instead of the other way around. And its going to be more of a literary thriller. Parts Per Million has some thrillerish aspects of uncovering secrets and facing dangerous repercussions, but I wouldn’t call it a bumper-to-bumper thriller.

The new novel is going to be about a rogue biohacker. I’ve started research (which means amassing folders of related articles Thank you New Scientist) and am sketching out plot. I’m also working on making my rogue protagonist sympathetic. You’re going to be on her side, even while she wreaks havoc, because, well… I don’t want to give it all away!

And as the summer closes there’s time for pickling cucumbers and steaming home-grown edamame, and drawing on rocks with a 15 lb yellow-orange crayon. We were at Crescent Beach last weekend, and at the patch of basalt scree at the far end of the beach I discovered a rock, a piece of sandstone perhaps, that had oxidized (or something – I have no idea what I’m talking about, really) and was coated in a 1/2 inch layer of soft, crayony bright yellow…stuff.

Basalt, which Oregon is full of due to the massive basalt floods of 17–14 million years ago, is dark gray. Rather a somber stone, and not particularly inviting. But when columnar basalt breaks off it does so with smooth, slightly curved planes. Nice to draw on. I had fun brightening up the jumble of gray at the end of the beach.

And now that the anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis has passed, I’m ready to put that difficult year behind me. When my GP broke the news to me last July, she said, “This will dominate your life for a year.” And she was right. And now I’m better, stronger, healthier, and so happy to find a soft yellow rock to draw with.

A depiction of John Nelson, the protagonist of Parts Per Million. The painting is titled 'Waiting for a Sign'. Mixed media on paper, mounted on panel.

There’s this other thing I’ve been doing these past few years; some people know about it, many don’t. When my writing friend Laura Stanfill posted her interview of me on her blog yesterday, it felt like a coming out of sorts. After all, what business does a visual artist and web designer have writing a novel? Well, the project started as a compulsion ten years ago, a story that took hold of me and wouldn’t let me go until I wrote it down in a rush. Then I went back and revised it. Again. And again. And again. I lost track of the number of drafts. Now Parts Per Million is a complete novel. Pared down, tight, thoroughly critiqued by many, and ready to go out into the world. The next step is finding an agent to represent the MS.

Laura’s a wonderful writer with a couple of novels under her belt already. I learned much for her when we sat together at Stevan and Joanna’s Pinewood Table critique group. I’m so grateful for her generosity in including me in her interview series!

Read Laura’s interview here: Novelist Julia Stoops on Anti-War Activism and Using Research to Build a Realistic Fictional World

It’s up and walking around: the new Blue Mouse Monkey website. All done up extra-nice in HTML5 and all that good stuff. It’s a bit dodgy on IE 6 and other hold-outs, but really, I cannot keep caring about obsolete browsers.

Bye-bye to the old Flash site, which was beautiful, but invisible to iPods and iPads, difficult for search engines, and a total pain to keep updated. However, it’s too lovely to banish completely, and can still be accessed via a link at the bottom of the new home page.

I was able to tweak and re-use a couple of the animations from the old site, on the contact page and the ‘404 page not found‘ page. I do love Flash. It was fun to use, great to make entire sites from if you were aiming for something artistic and didn’t care about SEO. I hate to see it get downgraded like it has been, but one must move with the times. And move we have. Thanks to Jimmy Thomas for doing the fabulous CSS build.

Makara Beach, outside of Wellington, NZ

…when you’re busy, then you go on vacation. We were in Hawaii and New Zealand for a couple of weeks, visiting relatives. It was lovely. We really should get back there more often. What was also lovely was that Blue Moue Monkey carried on in my absence. Now that we have a project manager (John Redder) and a studio manager (Sheliese Gieseke), stuff gets done even when I’m not there! I am so thrilled to have them both on board. And of course Jimmy Thomas, who strictly speaking isn’t part of Blue Mouse Monkey, but he does so much work for us he may as well be. Jimmy built the new Blue Mouse Monkey website while I was away. We’re putting the finishing touches on it and hope to launch it this week!

Lots of machines that go beep

The Blue Mouse Monkey blog has been quiet of late, due to two things. 1. We’ve been busy wrapping up several projects back-to back, and 2. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in July. Luckily it was caught at stage 1, and there’s a very high chance of long-term survival. I had surgery (lumpectomy and sentinal node biopsy) in August, and will start radiation this month.

Dealing with breast cancer has been hard, of course. Lots of medical appointments accompanied by a steep learning curve of information acquisition, and getting acquainted with the machines that go beep, roar, and squeeze. And until the post-operative pathology report came back we didn’t know whether the cancer had metastasized, so we lived with that fear for several weeks. But the hardest thing has been figuring out how to fit being a “patient” into my creative-small-business-owner life. There are no paid vacation days or sick days for the small business owner. Time off means time not working on client projects or building my business or expanding my knowledge and skills. And while Jimmy and Shelise did a great job of carrying the load the week I was off for surgery, any more time than that would not have been good for Blue Mouse Monkey (or probably for them).

It’s given me a push towards something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, and that’s hire an experienced website/interactive project manager. Someone who can keep all the balls in the air while I’m away. And now that big projects are wrapping up, it’s the perfect time to stary looking.

I’m proud to say that despite the upheaval, we’re still popping out all of this current batch of websites on time. The next few posts will showcase our recent work.

By Randall Munroe of xkcd.com

One of the things I try to get clients to understand is: Your website is not for you. It’s for your audiences.