Today was one of those days that frightens me down to the tips of my toes. Ever since I came back from SXSW Ivan and I have been working like mad to get the new CMS site up and running, and now a v1.0 version is up at comparativemediastudies.org. I’m heading down to campus tomorrow morning to triple-check that the bloody thing works the way I think it does on other browsers, lacking a PC here in the apartment. The website is part of a pitch for a $14 million dollar funding proposal, where if it goes through we might – might! – have enough cash to hire more profs and start that Ph.D program that we’ve all been nattering on about all year. Woo!
However, after one last heavy round of edits this morning, I turned my back on that project and returned to the other projects in the queue. Tomorrow’s going to be bad news – I have to meet with the literature department and discuss how to get their site up off the tarmac before too much longer, a problem because I’ve been backburnering their project pretty much all year and it’s starting to rise up and bite me in the ass. This isn’t surprising because I don’t have any classes in the literature department, versus my heavy involvement with C3 and CMS, but I’m still going to face the music tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll face the music and dance, but we’ll see what happens. I dashed out a comp for a client who’s been more than patient lately, and I’m waiting to hear back from him on that, I turned down another client who poked me to see if I could help with another project (yay newfound “Just Say No” skills!) and plowed through a whole ton of emails.
The trouble came next, when I tried to start work on a project for my Interactive and Non-Linear Narrative class.
I’m here to get back to my storytelling roots. My classmates are growing annoyed with how much I gripe about working on websites when that’s what I’m here to stop doing. Yet when I’m torched from coding and all this other stress, when i sit down to start work on a narrative project sometimes I choke. And that’s what happened today. It’s a terrifying feeling. I was sitting at my keyboard, flipping through magazines, doing research, and nothing I came up with worked. The two pages of text I dashed off as an intro to a story fell flat, the idea I had for a text message-generated narrative proved too complex and expensive, and a few tentative other experiments all proved dead ends. It was seriously humbling.
Now I’m going to crash and get up early tomorrow to try and shake this problem. Wish me luck. I can’t afford another day like today.