Christ, I've had this blog for a little over five years. And yet I've still only posted in fits and starts. This blog is turning into one giant pool of guilt hanging around my neck like... Wow, that was a pretty fuckin' mixed metaphor right there. Maybe I should stop with that while I'm ahead.

Stuff happens, and life goes on.

REVIEW-O-TRON 5000: Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson (Updated)

[See new version here: http://jakejesson.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/review-o-tron-5000-gardens-of-the-moon-by-steven-erikson/  - okay, it's really just the old version but with commentary.]

Everything I Have Ever Written Is Terrible

Such are the thoughts that streak through your head when you managed to write half a book in a month and then hit a brick wall of a poorly-conceived-yet-integral plot thread and have to spend three motherfucking weeks trying to work it out it. Which resurrects your personal favorite bugaboo of "what if everything else in this book is just as terrible as this part was?" Oh hello there, Obsessive-Compulsive Editing Syndrome! I thought I'd locked you up in the dark corners of my subconscious two months ago.

 And then you spend the week after that struggling with insomnia and trying to get your lost momentum back, and decide to write a blog post to break the writer's block and you can't even think of a topic goddammit. Although I guess that part isn't true anymore, at least!

I'm twenty-six, and I am probably going to die before this book is done. No, bad Jake! I'll finish it by the end of next month.  Yeah, that's the ticket.

NaNoWriMo

So, the reason I haven't posted much recently: I've been writing up a storm. Not that I've ever posted here regularly, mind you. That's just the current reason for my lack of posts.

I'm unreliably employed at the moment, y'see, and so I took the opportunity to try NaNoWriMo. I didn't mention it here because I didn't want to jinx it.

And I succeeded. 50,000 words in 1 month. Plus several hundred beforehand, too. Meaning I'm now at the halfway point of the novel I've been working on for years.

One more month. One more month of powering through another 50,000 words, and I should be done with the entire novel.

...And then, I'll start in on the editing. Or I'll let it sit for a while, maybe work on another project. I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it. For now: I'm halfway done with this damn thing! Woo!

T-Shirts.

I was pretty surprised when I saw this T-shirt. I probably shouldn't have been. But I've been following this book series since 2004 and even THEN I was a latecomer, and I can't get used to it being this majorly popular TV show... Not that I don't love it, just sayin'.

"Damn It Feels Good to be a Lannister T-shirt" (If you don't get the reference, what are you doing here? Go watch and/or read "Game of Thrones" already.)

Fringe

I've recently started watching this show. I expected it to mildly entertaining. It turned out to be much better than mildly entertaining.

For one, the character of Walter Bishop, played by John Noble (known best for playing Denethor in Lord of the Rings), is one of the best characters I've seen on television or film, thanks to a deft combination of excellent writing, direction, and acting.

For another, the show's mytharc actually reveals shit on a regular basis. Stuff happens on this show, and I'm not even all the way through season 1 yet. (Reviews seem to indicate that things only get better.)

So of course I end up reading this article last night. If you are too lazy to click that, the summary is: Fringe is in danger of cancellation. Again. Apparently it's been in danger of cancellation each season due to low ratings, despite superb writing. Maybe it's a false alarm, but still - I'm getting a little tired of excellent shows being cancelled early because they don't get an immediate audience. Especially shows that obviously play better on DVD than they do on television. (See: Angel, Firefly, Rome, Deadwood, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and the list goes on. Counterpoint: The Wire, and... uh, The Wire.)

Hopefully Fringe doesn't get the bite that so many others have had. It's gotten as far as season four at least...

New Blog Title #4

...because it occurred to me that "Fairies, Sex and Spacemen" was a bit NSFW if it's up their in big bold letters.

So now it's the subtitle. Yeah, that'll do it.

And now I've titled the blog "Then Again", which is perfectly appropriate considering how often I rethink everything. Including the blog title. Which I may well change again, if I decide I don't like it. WHO CAN SAY.

The SCP Foundation

Since about March, I have found myself involved in an online community again. It's a little website called the SCP Foundation". It's a primarily horror website, inspired by creepypasta and evolved into something new and different and entertaining. Maybe you've heard of it. If you haven't, maybe you should check it out. Go ahead. I'll wait.



While I'm at it, I'll mention my most popular contribution to the site so far: SCP-1000: Bigfoot. (I'm so proud.)

Jane C. Hines

Here, on the blog of Jim C. Hines, you can find a truly excellent post about the difference being a man or woman makes, even when it shouldn't: Jane C. Hines

The sad thing is, I know a whole ton of people (mostly men) who would claim that this disparity simply does not exist, with many words and plenty of rancor.

Another Update

I'm not sure if I should be proud that I really do post in this blog regularly, or ashamed that no matter what I've tried, so far I've failed to post regularly. Seeing how old John Scalzi's blog is, and the fact that he's post almost every day, has reminded me that I need to post more often.

I'm between jobs at the moment, so I should really work out a system now, rather than waiting until I get full-time employment again. Sure, only a few people are reading this blog now, but once I get this current novel published, I might even go up to a few dozen, and what happens then? I'll be totally fucked, that's what will happen. (Or maybe nothing. You never know).

Maybe I should try posting every day (that I have Net access). Even if it's only one line. Why not, I suppose? It'll be good practice. I guess. Maybe. Maybe it'll just be a distraction from all the other shit that I need to be doing.


Now, let's see how long I can keep that up.

Another Reason to Like George R. R. Martin

George R. R. Martin is having a good year. First, Game of Thrones is now airing as a(n apparently fantastic - I haven't been able to see it yet) HBO show. Second, he finally finished Dance With Dragons after six long years.

Now a clueless reviewer labels GoT as male fantasy, and Martin takes issue with this.

A choice quote:

if I am writing "boy fiction," who are all those boys with breasts who keep turning up by the hundreds at my signings and readings?

In the light of certain sf/f authors identifying their stories as male-oriented - like George Lucas - it's great to see a major male fantasy author standing up for female fans and saying, fuck you, this isn't just for boys. Martin was already my favorite epic fantasy author - this only raises my esteem of him.

Read the whole thing here: "Boy Fiction?"

Gender Gym

I've realized that so long as I'm working on a novel, I will never keep this bloody blog updated unless I write about what I'm writing about while I'm writing it. (That sentence got a little convoluted.)

I write for two consecutive hours every day; I also work full time. And then I have a happy, complicated love life that needs time devoted to it. I don't really have extra time to think up blog posts. But if I write about what I'm doing in my novel, well, then it sorta counts as brainstorming, doesn't it?

(First off, in these posts I'm going to call my novel Aether. That's not necessarily going to be the final title, but I need to pick something for now.)

What have I done recently?

I just changed my magic system. Again. This time, it's because several people whose opinions I trust have pointed out that my magic system is getting fairly unique. So I shouldn't just call everything 'magic'. Still, I think the word 'magic' is pretty descriptive, and if I call it the One Power or the Force or Mindcraft or something I'm going to feel a little pretentious, which isn't exactly what I want from this book. I'm still thinking about what changes to make.

I also gender-flipped a character several times. This is a character who I've gender-flipped before, but she keeps returning to her original female gender. Currently I think I've settled on making her a biological male who identifies as female. I think that's where she might stay. Though already I'm thinking about the possibilities of her as a biological female who identifies as male. Or someone who changes his/her gender every few years (magical character, so I can do that).

Usually I go the other direction on this gender flipping. When I first had the idea for this novel (farther back than I care to admit), most of the characters were male. Of course they were. Most sci-fi/fantasy works are populated almost entirely by straight white men. Because of this, I feel very conscious about the number of female, queer, and minority characters in what I write. There's little reason why a fantasy novel shouldn't pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors. So many of my characters started off as straight white males, and ended up queer, nonwhite, and/or female.

So why am I debating changing her gender to male? Well: I actually have too few male characters in charge of the Secret Magical Community. (She's one of them.) The male characters are mostly in the "Assimilationist" faction of the community, which means they're embracing American Christian attitudes, for better or for worse. That includes anti-queer attitudes, negative sexual beliefs, belief in a male-female Stay In The Kitchen hierarchy, plus other generally unpleasant but common things. While this doesn't make them the Bad Guys, it certainly doesn't put them on the side of our protagonists.

This is a problem, because with this setup, it can look like I (as the author) am trying to say:

A) Female leaders are incompetent, and female-led communities are doomed to failure, because in the story - well, let's just say a lot of Bad Things happen. Worse, the POV character that interacts with the community the most is male, which could make him seem like a Necessary Male Hero (here to save these womenfolk from themselves!).

B) Males are generally bad, sexist/homophobic people. More of a stretch, since I have male POV characters as well as female, and also I am male; however, 'male' is usually associated with 'straight', and the male POV characters as well as myself are pansexual.

C) Both. Females are incompetent leaders, and males are bad people. This may not initially make sense, but how many traditional conservative women have you heard say "all men are pigs"?

So the solution is easy: Make at least a couple of the community leaders male. Most of the community leader characters, however, need to be female for either some story reason or because I'm attached to the idea. The character in question has no reason to be either gender, though.

So why not make her male and be done with it? Possibly because she started out female, and I keep thinking of her like that. But more importantly, changing her to male doesn't actually make her any cooler (I have to admit that changing lots of my males to females did make their character concept cooler). In fact, I worry that she loses some 'cool' factor as a male. This isn't particularly logical, of course - it's solely based on personal preference. 'Cool' is a hard thing to quantify, so I may be thinking about this for a little while longer.

The Magicians

I just finished The Magicians by Lev Grossman, the first book in some time that I've managed to finish in two days.

It's good. It's very good. I found the magic depiction fascinating and original, and certain scene setups and plot twists are extremely creative (the entrance exams, the foxes, the south pole, the beast/watcherwoman twist) It's also very flawed, and has those flaws which really stuck themselves in my face.

FYI I'm going to spoil some of the events of this book like hell from here on out, so better run if you don't like that.

In no particular order, here's the flaws (or semi-maybe-flaws?) and why they bothered me.

1) I'm not sure if this is really a flaw or a feature or both, but at times the author slips so far into the Harry Potter pastiche (first half of the book) and the Narnia pastiche (second half of the book) that he practically seems to be trying to rewrite those books but really hastily and not as well, though with some excellent ideas of his own and a shiny new adult tone. (By the way, what was up with the Gulliver's Travels bit with the centaurs near the end? Sheesh. No, I'm not talking about Lilliput, but rather the horse people.)

2) The narrator is:

a) a moron (not necessarily a bad thing)
b) really depressing to read about at times because he is CONSTANTLY depressed and only rarely happy. Some really great moments in the story are undercut by his detachment & complete lack of caring.
c) extremely distant and alienated from everything, including the frakking reader. Good luck trying to get emotionally attached to this mopey fucker.

3) The characters have depth, but not enough. They're sorta broad types; they seemed realistic enough but I only ever cared about them or their fates in brief moments.

4) This may just be me, but for a book as straightforward and explicit as this, what's up with the sex scenes? They're super overdescribed yet barely explain what's going on. This is perfectly excusable (and probably the right choice) for the first sex scene (with the foxes), but did the book really have to tiptoe around that aspect and not everything else?

5) All the characters feel disposable, but the female characters seem especially disposable. Of the major female characters (and hell, minor female characters who aren't teachers), Julia gets screwed over early in the book only to be thrown in later as a Replacement Goldfish for Our Hero's Love Interest Slot, Amanda gets eaten (first book death IIRC), Janet is treated as a 'slut' and therefore disliked, and Alice is alternately fascinating then boring when the author doesn't know what to do with her - ultimately a pretty banal and annoying he-cheats-she-cheats storyline gives the author an excuse to keep her quiet for a while until she dramatically incinerates herself (but she might be back in the next book anyway, says the author). Finally, 11th hour badass Fen is the only casualty besides Alice of the Climactic Battle (both female).

On the other hand, the guys get pretty screwed too, and while the females seem disposable... so do the males! It's still a bit disproportionate, though.

5a) Speaking of which, the stupid cheating storyline. This is at least partly a personal peeve; as a polyamorous person my immediate reaction is (oversimplified) "why can't you just all have sex and be fine with it?" And then, I'm bothered by that old trope that tells us that people lose their worth when they break relationship rules, so long as it's sex. (Breaking other relationship rules just makes you a jerk. But sexually cheat, in a story, and your worth as a human being skyrockets downwards.) But even beyond that, couldn't it have been slightly more complex and less mundane of a story choice than it was?

6) The magic. This is both a huge benefit and a flaw of the book. What we get is overall pretty fascinating. But the author seriously skims over the basic details in places while casting others. What does it feel like to cast a spell? We only rarely know. We just get a vague description of mechanics and a cool description of the effect.

7) The narrative pace. Dear God, could the author have skimmed any more? This with a character that's hard to get attached to in the first place. We get oceans of time skimmed over. Additionally, the structure jumps around like mad, and it's a bit jarring - did we really need to get "surprise, Fillory is real!" like 2/3 through the book?

8) Confusing cliffhanger endings that leave the reader confused. Yes, this happened several times. And not to nitpick, but I wish some of the dialogue tags had better clarity, at certain points I'm unsure who's talking (and they all sound the same anyway).

9) Narnia Fillory. Grossman's Hogwarts stand-in feels like it has real stakes, and the Wood (City, in this case) Between the Worlds drew my attention like a magnet. But the stakes of most things that happened in Fillory felt ... nonexistent. The best part is a conversation with a drunk bear, and that's only a side note.

...And I believe that closes out my first impressions.

All in all, a great book, if very flawed. I want to read the sequel, certainly.

Show Me This:

Here is what I would absolutely love to see or read: A fantasy (or contemporary sci-fi) television show or book series with strong, realistic character focus, creative/surprising plot and action elements, female characters as good as male characters (and not just as interesting; they should be just as badass and plot-important as any of the male characters; if one character has to be Most Important, I'd prefer a female, just because you see that less often), a cast of characters who aren't all straight and/or white, multiple actively bisexual characters, and strong polyamory, queer, and sex-positive themes.

For the record, what I'm working on fits this description either perfectly or partially. (Specifically, the book fits all of it; the script I'm doing a little less so, but hey, I'm co-writing it.)

This is one reason I'm looking forward to the Game of Thrones TV show (and why I love the books); the book series fits all of the above except that the poly/queer themes are only minor (and thus sadly may not make it to the show), most of the characters are at least nominally white, and there's only one major actively bisexual character. But everything else fits - and this is all in SPITE of the extremely male-dominant anti-feminist pseudo-medieval setting. I don't favor epic fantasy, but I make an exception here.

(That might be misleading. I love the idea of epic fantasy, but since I want character focus and not setting focus, I usually end up disappointed by the genre. This includes The Lord of the Rings books; in the movies, you at least had the actors to convincingly emote. You don't get that in the books - not enough, anyway.)

If you know of a book or book series that fits all these criteria, point me the fuck to it. I don't think it exists. (I *know* there's no TV series that does.)

Which is, of course, why I have to write them.

Copyrighting Ideas

A note on Repo Men vs Repo! The Genetic Opera:

Dear rabid fans of Repo! who are pissed off about Repo Men Stealing Repo!'s Idea:

That "stolen" idea was not original.

(Here's a recap for those who have no idea what I'm talking about.)

One of the writers of Repo! gives us a "history lesson" on his blog, demonstrating that Repo! was kicking around in some form or another all the way back to 1999. The implication is, of course, that since the idea for Repo Men was first made public in 2001, OMG THEY STOLE OUR IDEA!

Except... just a cursory Google search turns up the 1997 award-winning play "Harvest", whose central plot bears suspicious resemblances to the idea behind Repo!. And further, while I can't quote examples offhand, this whole organ-buying idea pops up a lot in cyberpunk. 1997 is before 1999. OMG plagiarism!

(There's also the mention on that blog post that the similarities became too much for the Repo! author to "bare" reading more when he found out that in both stories, the company the repo men works for turns on them when they go rogue. The funny thing is, I've only seen parts of Repo!, and I guessed on my own that this would happen once I knew the Repo Man himself was a character. It's that bloody obvious of a plot twist. Protagonist works for evil corporation and goes rogue, then they hunt him down. Gee, I've never seen that plot before!)

This is not to knock Repo! itself; as I mentioned earlier, I've only seen parts, but I can't dislike anything that has Anthony Stewart Head singing in it. The point is, all ideas have been done before, and this could just be bad timing.

I can see where the outrage is coming from, given the concept similarity and the oddly identical marketing campaigns, but still. At least wait until the actual film comes out, why don't ya?

And a final point: Shit like this happens all the time, just not usually to cult films - because most cult films have silly central ideas. No one's going to make anything that could be accused as a rip-off of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, because you can't do much else with that idea. Repo!, though, uses a pretty iconic idea with a clear real-world metaphor. A claim of coming up with something at the same time as someone else, though, isn't necessarily bullshit. Take the word of a script reader for it:

Like one time, I swear, I covered three different screenplays -- submitted from different parts of the country -- all of which had key scenes set at a southwestern rattlesnake farm. Why, you could go years without reading a good rattlesnake farm scene, and here I had three in one week. Needless to say, after that I became more sympathetic to claims of 'parallel development.'

And it's true. That's why, if you're writing a book or a script, you can never hope to coast along with a crap story and a great original idea. After all, won't they forgive the crap story for the original idea that they can't get anywhere else. No. Because that idea? Probably not as original as you think. So you better have a great execution, because that's what will make it or break it.

What triggered this post was an article on Tor about the subject here, a well-written article that nearly had me nodding in agreement by the end:

Let this be a warning to creative people everywhere: guard your creations well, but at the same time steel yourselves for the possibility of a Repo befalling you. You can copyright your stories, you can copyright your art, but you cannot copyright the beautiful ideas that give them their uniqueness and life. It is frightening and it is upsetting, but it is inescapable.

But wait. Would it really be such a great idea to copyright ideas? That would eliminate entire genres; the Tolkien estate could sue almost every epic fantasy writer ever into oblivion, and that's actually one of the better scenarios, since at least we'd still have Lord of the Rings. Very often, the first work in a genre is not that great. Plus, you'd simply have powerful corporations hire writers, however crappy, to come up with as many story ideas as possible and publish them as crappy short stories, claiming copyright based on that and suing the pants off of anyone else who comes up with a similar idea independently and makes something good with that. Now that's frightening and upsetting.

Morning Pages

A few months ago, a dear friend/romantic partner of mine introduced me to the concept of "morning pages". Taken from the pages of the rather popular book The Artist's Way, the idea of morning pages is that you write three pages of whatever comes to mind, first thing in the morning, every day. You're not writing anything good, sensible, or even true; you're getting all the bits and pieces out of your head and onto paper.

When I first heard about this, I balked. Get up early? Voluntarily? Just to write? God save us all!

But then I did it. And it turned out very well. So well, in fact, that I haven't skipped a day since I started doing this months ago. I confess I've yet to read much more of The Artist's Way, but these Morning Pages have been immeasurably helpful to my writing. Many times - including the past two mornings - I've solved big problems in stories I've been working on, problems that would have ordinarily plagued me for months before resolution. So, suffice to say I'm a believer.

For the record, I write 3 pages or more, double-spaced, in a Word document. This is despite recommendations that these pages be written by hand. I have yet to find a reason why, though, besides a theory that writing the pages more slowly by hand makes you think about what you're saying more. However, for me, it's easier to take off my (powerful) internal censors when I type them out.

Rambling on Fantasy

Because I am lazy, here's a blog post I wrote a while ago - October 2007, in fact - yet never finished:

--------------------------

'Burying reader under a dumpload of facts' (I think I stole that quote from someone, not sure who anymore) is the bane of sf/fantasy. One of the banes, anyway. It's a bit difficult to have an outsider's perspective when you're making up the world in your own head.

Then again, that doesn't take cliche into account. The Lord of the Rings Rip-Off No. [Insert Arbitrarily Large Number Here] may well count as being written with an 'outsider's perspective'. In fact, the parts of the regurgitated fantasy world the author invented themselves stick out because those are the only parts the author bothers to explain. Unfortunately, this can be extended to plot and character motivations just as much as setting...

And there's always things like vampires, where authors sometimes even start out by explaining which cliches are true, which are untrue, and which the narrator (read: author) thinks are utterly ridiculous (read: unkewl). (Vulnerability to garlic? Not in MY vampires!)

Annoying though this is, it does speak to a central problem of sf/fantasy, which, come to think of it, is merely an exaggerated version of the Setting Problem all stories have - how do you get all this info across to your reader without annoying them? Which is bad, which is good? Purely, I suppose, good info would be info relevant to the character, and bad info would be info relevant only to the author. But what about info irrelevant to the character, but relevant to the reader?

I guess that's why the Newbie Initiate character is so popular. Too bad they're usually boring as shit.

No Sex Scenes Yet

Wait. Not NO sex scenes, just only one. Yes, I've only completely written one sex scene, so far, like, ever. And it was a horrible awkward thing - as in the sex, not the scene (I hope).

What's holding me back? Oh, heteronormative puritan sensibilities whispering in the back of my subconscious that I've struggled all my life to overcome. And sheer terror. The usual.

Ironic, then, that my blog title is currently "Fairies, Sex, and Spacemen." I'm good on the fairies and spacemen. The sex? We'll see.

A Question of Content

(read: what the fuck am I supposed to talk about here)

I've spent the past few days trying to puzzle out a nagging question: I've had this blog since 2007, and in all that time I never figured out what to do with it.

My original idea was that I'd use the blog to bitch about my own writing, yet I've done that very little, possibly because bitching about one's own writing is only sometimes funny, and annoying in large doses.

The most fun I've had blogging in the past few years wasn't even done here, but rather on my mostly-otherwise-abandoned Livejournal, snarking about D&D monsters. Since these were also my most popular posts (my 'most' I mean 'only'), it follows that perhaps I would do well to snark some more.

I considered reading through - and snarking about - the Twilight book series, but Cleolinda Jones has done this already, and more hilariously than I could hope to live up to. Not only that, but since she wrote those many other people have jumped on that bandwagon. So, that's kinda "out".

Which brings me to a curious problem I have.

I haven't read enough.

In an earlier post, I typed up my creative influences; the fantasy/sci-fi works, anyway. The list is noticeably devoid of many - most - popular works in the field.

To sum up this problem:

• I'm working on a contemporary/urban fantasy novel, yet in that genre the majority I've read was by Neil Gaiman. No Laurell K. Hamilton. No Jim Butcher.
• I'm working on an epic fantasy novel, yet the majority I've read was by George R. R. Martin. No Robert Jordan. No Terry Brooks.
• I'm working on the script for a science fiction television show pilot (in spaaaaaaaaace), yet I've mostly just seen Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars (not even a TV series). No Babylon 5. No Farscape.

Why have I not read these books (or watched these shows)? Oh, various reasons. Maybe I always planned to but never followed through. Or maybe I just didn't get around to them. Some of them I've been actively discouraged from reading - they may be popular, I'm told, but they're crap. (Like Twilight, or so I'm told.)

Yet, if I'm going to be a respectable aspiring speculative fiction writer, aren't I kind of obligated to read these? Eh? A bitter pill, perhaps...

But on the other hand, if I can read them and tear them apart (or praise them) on this blog, then maaaaaayyyyybe Robert Jordan's twenty-billion-word super-mega-opus starts to look a little better. And after all, I did promise "snark" in my new blog subtitle. (And then my snarky D&D posts may look a little less out of place, and I can bring them over here, in from the cold of LiveJournal. Or I can leave them there forever, like a gleefully bad parent. Either way.)

So, first on my list: Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time."

On the New Blog Title (For Now)

"Fairies, Sex, and Spacemen."

Third blog title I've used so far. The first was the evocative "Goldfish and Needles" - I liked that one, but neither goldfish nor needles have appeared on this blog, nor are likely to appear in the future. The second was the humdrum but utilitarian "Jake Jesson's Blog".

I think I like this one.

I almost titled it "The Mystical Vagina of Time" after the title of a (sadly, fictional) book series referred to in this post by Jay Lake on the larval stages of the common American speculative fiction writer:

After re-reading volumes I through XVII of A Game of Throne-Captains of the Mystical Vagina of Time, the writer will exclaim, “I could do better than this! A monkey could do better than this!” Many amazing careers have been launched from this moment. It should be honored, much like any moment of conception, possibly by bunking out for a wet wipe and a smoke afterward.

As I am one of these aforementioned larval American speculative fiction writers, it seemed somehow appropriate - if a little obscure.

Then a friend suggested "Fairies and Spacemen", in reference to my current works-in-progress and my plans for this blog, in reference to the poem / song Daisies, Cats, and Spacemen. I wanted a third word; I put "Sex" in there as a joke, and thought "Hang on - that could work."

Possible downside: I may now be contractually obliged to mention "sex" in every post. Hm...

Speaking of which, next post: Blog content!