Hey, munchkins. Last…

Hey, munchkins. Last day of work before the holiday for anyone? Or are the big meanies making you work next week too?

I've mostly failed to work today. Whipped through the rest of Narnia, only forbearing to re-read Lion and Last Battle. I'd forgotten a lot, and it's all good -- and all film-able too. I'd love to see Digory and Polly in the Wood Between the Worlds, or the White Witch careening through 18th centry London, for example. The books are just chock full of gorgeous scenes, in fact -- and not a whole lot of repetition, so they'd be rather expensive to film. But that didn't stop Jackson, did it? What's a little money to the pursuit of epic beauty?

I did get some work done on the main page for the speculative lit. foundation, adding more content. We should decide on an actual design by early next week, and then, depending on the designer's availability, I'm hoping that we can get it implemented by January 1st. If we have to push it later due to the holidays we will -- it's not like a magazine, which really has a pressure to launch on time and then regularly as promised thereafter. This is a much more sprawling, organic sort of project. Hard deadlines are probably only going to be necessary for awards and grants -- areas like website development and outreach will be more likely to progress in fits and starts, as people have time. That's my best guess, anyway.

I've pretty much done all the content that's up so far, gathered from hither and yon (which reminds me that I think there might be some in comments to one of these entries that I forgot to add -- doh! got to remember to hunt that up). But a nice lass named Shannon Palma is taking on the Content Coordinator mantle, so I'm hoping that soon, I can just turn it over to her to keep updating. I wanted to be very involved up front, to make sure that we figured out a functional organization and got some of the key information in, or at least set up placeholders for it. I do love organizing things. But that part's mostly done now, and now it's more a matter of continuing to collect and fill in, which frankly, isn't so exciting, though I do think it's still satisfying in an accretive sort of way. Something like the growth of a pearl, perhaps, which just starts with a bit of irritating grit. :-) I'd like the Foundation website to be a pearl of beautiful content someday.

Other areas are proceeding apace -- the development people are researching various methods of fund-raising, though it's also become clear that the bulk of our support is likely to come from individual memberships. I'm not going to do a hard sell right now, but post-Christmas, you can expect to see me inviting you to join up. You have been warned. :-)

We're also planning on how to spend the money. Tentative plans right now include a likely short fiction award, with a substantial prize. We're nailing down the details now; you'll hear more once we know exactly what we're doing. :-) But I can tell you that at least for now, we're planning on modelling this on the Pushcarts in structure.

Mostly though, I've spent today waiting for Jed to come home from watching tRotK with his work colleagues, so we can discuss the movie. It started at 3:45, so he should be hitting some nice climactic bits right around now... :-)

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