Bottled Sky

My LiveJournal has been “smoochified.” I normally don’t do mushy, but I came across this old drawing of mine and felt the urge to use it in a layout:

I added the style sheet to the LJ themes page in case anyone else wants it. I had a few drops of creative juice left over after finishing the layout, so I made a bunch of icons as well.

In other news, my mom is now a blogger. I guess everyone and his mother really does have a blog these days She chose Mrs. B for her screen name and refers to my dad as Mr. B and me as Miss B in her entries. I love it, haha!

To my knowledge, my dad has yet to join the blog-wagon. He does visit this site regularly, though. (Hi, Dad!) Sometimes we’d be eating dinner and he’d say, “By the way, in your links page you missed an ‘I’ in ‘visiting.’” Who needs Spell Check when you have a perfectionist father going over your website?

I began writing when I was five years old, typing short stories on my mom’s office computer. I wrote about rude rabbits and pigs with wigs and fancied myself the next Enid Blyton, whose books I used to collect. I later discovered poetry and penned many a bad rhyme. And then came the “junior journalist” phase, where I joined essay writing contests and became a staffer for the school paper. Growing up, I was so often told that I had potential for writing by both biased (my mom) and unbiased (teachers — they didn’t like me because I was a lazy underachiever) authority figures that I thought it must be true.

Here’s the truth, though. Even now that I have successfully earned a Journalism degree, I still can’t decide whether I like writing or not. While there are times when I feel the urge to just write, I usually struggle so much with it that I wonder if I’m even having fun. It’s rare for me to come up with a piece of writing that I’m satisfied with, and even when I do I still cringe every time I see someone reading what I wrote.

It’s drastically different from what I experience with my other hobbies. Even when it takes me days to complete a layout or finish a drawing, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m enjoying what I’m doing. And I’m always proud of the end product and eager to show it to anyone who’s interested, whether I’m completely happy with it or not.

However, this is also true: for all of my creative pursuits, I always appreciate a good critique. I don’t mean good as in positive, but as in detailed and specific. I’ve attended writing workshops where they figuratively ripped my assignments apart, but I’ve found those sessions very helpful and even enjoyable. Not all reviews I’ve received were useful, though, particularly those that came from people who 1) didn’t really know what they were talking about and 2) didn’t take into account what I was trying to do with my piece and simply made suggestions based on his own vision. For me a useful critique is one that points out issues I might have missed and helps steer the piece closer to where I want it to go.

Kimmie’s recent review of Skylight was definitely useful. I requested her to critique this site after reading her well-written article on website reviews. Her suggestions helped me address many issues that had been bothering me before. The features section is now more organized and the index page less cluttered thanks to her. Next step: a more flexible CMS. I seriously need to move on from Blogger. Any suggestions?

In other news, I recently made two kid-inspired layouts, one for my candy-loving friend Kathy, the other for my LJ. What can I say? I have a lot of free time these days, being a bum and all I’m just resting a little before I go into full-on work mode after the holidays.

I decided to participate in this season’s CSS Reboot and came up with “Bloom,” Skylight’s 17th version. I was browsing through an old issue of Time Magazine, when I saw a picture of the King’s Forest room at Hotel Fox and became instantly inspired. (Even the name of the hotel itself was enough to tickle my fancy. Hotel Fox? How cute is that?!) I have never been attracted to the color orange in the past, but that particular hue really caught my eye. Skylight’s previous layouts had a lot of blues, greens and grays in them — I wanted to use a color that I haven’t used before. I was also going for a slightly more grown-up look, something feminine but not frilly. Of course as dictated by tradition, the design still had to feature a cartoon version of me, hehe. Aren’t all personal websites at least partly narcissistic, anyway?

Let me know what you think or if you have problems viewing the new layout. I double-checked everything, but it’s possible that I missed a kink or two.