in the middle of the journey of the life we share together
i became lost in the woods, and could not find the correct path
Dante, the Divine Comedy

I am not actually lost in the woods, though I know I promised to finish the redesign and relaunch of Literary Kicks by early September, and I’m running late. The project is going well, but I’ll need at least another full week before the new thing is ready to drop.

Here’s the real honest truth: I’m enjoying the break from blogging. I decided to allow myself to take my time with the technical redesign, because … well, I’ve been blathering on this infernal website for a whole long time. Sometimes I just want to be stop blogging for a couple of weeks.

You may find this hard to believe, but I sometimes just want to be silent. Silence is a good thing. The latter-day Beat poet Bob Kaufman once took a vow of silence for 10 years, whereas I’m pretty sure Litkicks will be back in the next two weeks.

Anyway, even though I am not actually undergoing a Dantean midlife crisis, I am lost in a different kind of forest: I’m upgrading Literary Kicks to a responsive HTML5 platform based on Drupal 7 and the Omega theme. This shit is hard as hell. I have been working on the content migration from Drupal 6 and the creation of a custom Omega sub-theme since late July, and if you saw a word cloud of my brain right now, here’s what you would see: “960 grid” “float” “alpha” “delta” “context” “entity” “term”, “node”, “region-sidebar-first”. Not much time for thinking grand thoughts about literature, I’m afraid.

However, I am very excited about the creative possibilities of HTML5 and Drupal 7, and I can’t wait to show you the new website I’m putting together. I like the way it’s coming along (though, admittedly, the technical challenge is more complex than I had expected). If anybody was worried I might be planning to shut the site down, or fade away into the night, as some sad bloggers do … nope. I’m coming back twice as hard.

(The picture on the top of the page is me and Caryn on a recent forest hike in Northern Virginia. We’ve also been exploring various Civil War sites during their sesquicentennial commemorations — does anyone remember that the battle of Antietam was 150 years ago this week? In this picture, the line bisecting my soaked head is a raindrop in motion — caught by the magic of Caryn’s phone.)