Callidus

Greetings once more.

There’s some maxim about announcing your plans if you’d like to hear the universe laugh in reply. Despite my optimism that I’d be back in the swing of things way back in May, life had other ideas. However, the good news is that nothing has really changed except the time table.

While work and freelancing and life have been keeping me very busy, I’ve been determinedly working in the small gaps between those things and, at last, I’m close to having something to show for it. I’m putting the finishing touches on my new site theme, which has been in the works for almost a year at this point.

That may not sound all that sexy but the new theme hosts a number of features I’ve wanted to add for a long time and manages to provide a great viewing experience on mobile screens and desktops alike. It will make it faster and easier to access content, keep track of my progress on upcoming projects, and provides a foundation to build entirely new kinds of erotic mind control content and experiences.

At this point, I’ve nailed down all the major design and feature changes. What remains is to add a few minor bells and whistles; optimize the theme for maximum performance; and to test the design on a lot of browsers across a lot of platforms to make sure its a consistent user experiences.

So when is this going to happen? Well, I’ve had enough of the universe laughing as of late so I’m just going to say “as soon as its done.” The good news is that I’ve made tremendous progress this week. The other good news is that I think the best way to celebrate the new theme is to release a whole bunch of new manip content to go along with it!

So stay tuned, fun stuff is on the way.

Greetings all! Well the week has been productive enough though its still going to be a little while before you fine folks will be able to enjoy all the things I have brewing.

I’ve been able to do a little writing on the epic, lengthy, and squick-i-licious animation I’ve mentioned previously. Its one of those frustrating situations where I know, more or less, what I want to do with the writing, I just haven’t had the time to really sit down and work on it at length.

Speaking of length, I’ve received a few very nice notes on the lengthy story attached to Treatment Program. I’m glad people enjoy seeing that kind of material from me as I certainly enjoy creating it. It wasn’t that long ago that I would’ve scoffed at creating ‘short fiction.’ It just seemed such a lofty goal in comparison to the humble endeavors of my caption work. But, as time has worn on, I seem to write a bit more and a bit more with every new piece. And, I must say I enjoy letting my imagination run free.

The changes I’ve made to my website theme have been especially helpful in breaking out of the confines my caption work has traditionally been in. In the past, the caption text needed to appear as part of the image; arranged beside or below the action. That worked fine for the most part but as I transitioned to creating animations, that method became problematic. Bigger dimensions mean bigger files and longer page load times. Uncoupling the text from the image solved that problem while also giving me the freedom to write as much as I like.

Between you and I, its also been wonderful to go back and be able to fix misspellings by simply tweaking a page on my site. 😉

Speaking of tweaking my site, I’ve been doing a bit of work behind the scenes lately. One project was to write a plugin that would drastically cut down on the amount of time required to create a new manip page. So I brushed up on my php skills a bit and spent several days last week banging out the necessary code. The final product is mostly invisible to the viewer, but it makes things -much- easier to manage on my side.

In the course of doing that, I needed to make some adjustments to my site’s theme, which turned out to be easier said than done. The theme I’m currently using was selected as a time saving measure. When I began using it, Google had mandated that, in order to maintain their search rankings, all sites needed to be mobile-ready. I didn’t have time to update my custom theme so I selected an off-the-shelf theme I could live with and saved my site’s search rank.

But now, I’m thinking its time to move on. The theme’s author intended it to look a certain way and hasn’t made it easy to change some things I’d like to change. Rather than fighting with a theme that was only ever meant to be a stop-gap, I’ve decided to start working on a new, modern custom theme of my own.

In order to speed that process along, I’ve started exploring the world of responsive frameworks and SASS, an extension language of traditional CSS. I’ve settled on Foundation as the framework for my new theme and have already completed a rudimentary prototype.

Its been a fun learning experience getting to know these tools and, sometime later this year, I’ll be rolling out an updated website that looks more like I always wanted it to while also looking and performing great on mobile devices.

I also recorded a very fun interview earlier this evening that will be showing up soon on The Black Room podcast. I promise I’ll tell you all about that next time!

I’ve been hard at work on smut recently. I’ve got a series of commission pieces I’m working on, I’m pondering on and collecting material for a long-gestating collaboration with thrall, and I’ve got new animations in the pipe. The first of which, will be unveiled on Friday, June 3rd.

Now, this is not the squicky follow-up to Worm that I teased on the podcast. I’m still writing on that. I have a clear path of where I want to take the story. But, I reached the first major scene and I want to get it right so bad, I stopped writing it entirely. I get that way sometimes. Especially when I feel like the whole, or best version of the, idea hasn’t shaken loose yet. Which is now.

While I wait on that, I’ve put fingers to keys and written about 1500 words on the manip for this weekend. The animation has been finished for months now. But, I didn’t have a surge of inspiration for the story back then and so on the shelf it has sat.

I’ve already done a first pass at editing, which took the word count down to about 900. It was feeling a bit indulgent but, more so, I want to save some of those ideas for another manip-in-progress where I think they’ll fit in better. So, I’ve got a bit of polishing to do, which I’ll get to today or tomorrow.

Bring your imagination, leave your pants, and I’ll see you on Friday!

P.S. If you haven’t already, check out Tabico’s new blog: Tabico Secret Files. This post was directly inspired by her recent updates and I hope to follow her example by making blogging here a habit instead of an occasional threat.