Edward Richmond:

I returned Monday night from a trip to the beaches at Destin, FL.  Faced with the opportunity to go cheaply for a weekend in the sun, I made a very healthy decision to head east along the Gulf Coast.  I dined at a restaurant called the Back Porch my first night there, and since I was on vacation I decided to do something I would not normally do–I ate some raw oysters.

I think the last time I did that, I was about five.  The end of my fondness for raw oysters dates back to an incident in which I discovered my gag reflex when an oyster hit the back of my throat the wrong way, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn’t really have any trouble with my oysters this time.  Despite my initial trepidation, they went down very smoothly.  I was especially pleased because the oysters served to me were large without being grainy.  The Back Porch also serves a decent plate of grilled amberjack.  My parents used to rave about how good it was (when they were about my age, they used to go to Destin frequently, and ate at the Back Porch whenever possible).  It’s not as good as they promised, but by no means did I feel as if the food wasn’t good.  I’d eat there again.

As might be expected, I’ve got a little sunburn, although not as bad as it would have been if I had not used sunscreen.  I suspect some of it washed off of me when I went for swims in the Gulf.  An hour or two in salt water is not kind to sunscreen.  It didn’t help my skin much, either.  I’m starting to peel, even in places where I’m not actually burned.  It was absolutely worthwhile, though–last time I took a trip to the beach, I was too small to swim very well against the waves and currents.  It was very different as an adult.

The whole experience was good enough that I didn’t really want to come home at the end of it.  That’s the mark of a successful vacation, if anything is.  Time for me to start planning so that I can do it again another time.

I have published another review at www.eatlikeanative.com, this time for one of my favorite local restaurants, the Mariner’s Inn. Give it a look. I plan to hit another restaurant sometime this week.

Business is starting to pick up. I have been getting more visitors on the site, and some repeat business is in the works from other clients than the folks over at Eat Like a Native.com. I also have got a couple of prospects for new business, which is encouraging. After putting so much work into setting up Emendator.net, it really is gratifying to think that it will be a success. I think I may finally be on the way to establishing a couple of long-term business relationships that will allow freelancing to be more than a hobby that sometimes turns a profit. That would be fantastic, because I really do enjoy my freelance work.  I would rather keep this business as a part-time concern, and find a full-time job to make a living from.  But it’s nice to think that with some patience and guts, I could someday make a living at this . . . if I wanted to.

Speaking of hobbies, my friends at the Dungeons and Dragons Archive are cooking up some new surprises for their readers. I am providing a modest bit of help with publicity as they gear up to award prizes to readers who submit the winning entries for a monthly competition. This month is sort of a pilot for the contest, designed to determine whether people will participate at a level sufficient to justify advertisement sales to underwrite the cost of the prizes. If anybody out there is a gamer with an interest in 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons, check them out. Details on the contest will be released soon.

So, I’ve been following the press’s reaction to the recent debate between Clinton and Obama.

It’s discouraging, because it’s more of the same thing that I’ve been hearing since the two of them became the major candidates for the Democratic ticket–basically, nobody in the press seems to be interested in asking either one of them a meaningful question about the real issues in this race. We’re in the middle of an economic slump, our military is tied up with a fiasco in Iraq, Social Security is still in trouble, the dollar is getting weaker by the day when matched against other major currencies like the Euro, China is becoming active in international politics, our bridges, highways, and other infrastructure are crumbling . . . these are all massive issues. Since a good-sized chunk of them are directly related to the current administration’s policies, it would be of great use to the voting public to hear what the Democratic candidates have to say. I’m really just parroting what established journalists, like Slate’s Alex Joseph, have already said. The sad part? Despite the withering chorus of, “Oh, come ON, ANOTHER question about Obama’s crazy pastor?!?” which currently rips the heavens asunder . . . we can pretty much expect the major news networks to dish up more of what we’ve already heard from them.

This reluctance on the part of our revered Fourth Estate to actually perform the functions associated with journalism is deeply upsetting, when you think about it. Republican government simply does not work properly unless a constituency is able and willing to keep itself informed about the issues at hand, and to gain clear statements from politicians regarding their views on those issues. It’s already clear that we can’t trust most politicians to tell the truth about anything when the stakes are high–Hillary Clinton has fibbed about landing under sniper fire, for example, and there are similar examples for Obama and McCain. It’s all shameful; I can actually forgive politicians for making promises they they later turn out to be unable to keep, or that they have to reassess in light of later developments. That’s how politics go, and anyone who expects more is naive. But saying things that are factually untrue, and that they know are factually untrue? That’s not reasonable. It’s exactly why the Bush administration is so unpopular, and as I observe the 2008 candidates’ mendacity, I find myself thinking that none of them is fit for presidential office.

Having established that we know we can’t trust our candidates to tell us the truth about what they’ve done, I will give the press a little credit. Our news reporters, as a whole, are doing a pretty decent job of nailing them for fibbing about their policy records. But they’re doing it at the expense of other facets of their very important job. Representative democracy is threatened by their failure to follow these basic journalistic principles:

1) Discuss the facts, and just the facts

2) Keep your personal opinions out of your reporting

3) Don’t take sides

As long as news media continue to approach matters from a partisan slant, or to favor one candidate over the others, or even just to focus on juicy gossip about the candidates at the expense of their real job of accurately disseminating information about the candidates’ political plans, the voting public–which includes me, and most people who’re reading this–can’t hope to make a sound decision about who’s going to be the next President of the United States. And that’s really frightening.

Today I was published by www.eatlikeanative.com, a Lafayette-based food webzine.  The piece is a short article on the Strawberry Festival held in Ponchatoula, LA, which is just a few miles from where I live.

I’m going to be continuing my relationship with eatlikeanative.com as a “stringer.”  That’s a freelance writer who has an ongoing relationship with a client, but does not work on retainer.  It’s especially common as a way for regular contributors to do business with a small publication.  I’m pleased because it’s good exposure–I keep the byline for each article, there are plenty of readers on the site, and the work is actually a lot of fun.

Here’s a link to the article: Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival 2008.  I’m looking forward to working on the next piece, which I think will be a review of a local restaurant.   I get considerable latitude as to what I write about, so long as it’s topically appropriate to the webzine.

I recently completed a freelance gig for some new clients, whom I’ve added to my blogroll in the sidebar. Viking Lodge Music, LLC of Canton, GA is a young label founded in 2007. They deal primarily with country musicians in the southeastern United States, and hired me to complete some promotional materials for one of their prominent singer/songwriters, Ms. Amanda Lynn. Her debut single, “Buck Wild” has performed very nicely on the Billboard Airplay charts, and I penned a press release to help keep her in the public eye in the wake of its success. I also wrote a brief professional biography on her, which has been posted as web content on her official site. Follow the links to both her site and the Viking Lodge’s home page for the free samples which now are de rigueur in the music business.

I was extremely pleased by my experience with these lovely people. Everyone to whom I spoke in connection with this project was very kind (or more properly, in Southern country-speak, they were “as sweet as could be”) . Particularly pleasant about my dealings with Viking Lodge was that they were very clear about what they wanted, and prompt in issuing the few clarifications I needed. As a result, I’ll certainly be glad to do business with them again.

This underscores a few issues that I suspect are overlooked in freelancing. Most freelancers do not do it full-time, and don’t rely on their income from freelance work to sustain them. It’s often a hobby/supplemental income combination. Employers often feel as if they are dealing from a position of strength when they hire a freelancer (and this is one reason why many freelance gigs advertised online come with ridiculous expectations–that a professional will work for literally 50 cents per 100 words, for example). Viking Lodge has not treated me this way; to the contrary they have been solicitous of my happiness with our arrangements, and readily gave me permission to use the work I completed on their behalf for clips. This is what freelancing is supposed to be–a business relationship. Celebrity treatment is not necessary, and no sane freelancer expects to be the client’s buddy. But should employers be cordial and reasonable with a freelancer? Yes!

And by those standards, Viking Lodge Music is good people.

A new addition has been made to the main site; I have incorporated a contact page with details about my rates, and a sample page so that prospective employers can see the kind of work that I’m capable of doing and judge my competence in web design and related matters.

The “Devil’s Details” mock-up I discussed in my last post is finished, and can be reached through the sample page. It evolved a bit, however; in order to show that I can script HTML and CSS appropriately to organize large amounts of content, I needed to find some content that 1) required organization and 2) was not lorem ipsum. Plain old filler text wouldn’t do–I needed real content. The end result was pretty nice. I’ve got what I guess might be considered a journeyman understanding of the “float” property in CSS, and so this mock-up uses a floating navigation panel to let the reader browse freely within the content, which I have reprinted from The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. I learned to use anchors with the “name” property in HTML so that I can make a link jump to a specific part of the target page, and included that in the design as well. There’s also a more standard navigation bar at the top of each page to allow navigation within the main site. Finally, I put together a .jpg image in Photoshop to serve as the header for the whole thing. It doesn’t look half bad if I say so myself . . . although I still need more practice.

In accord with my earlier plans, this mock-up also includes liberal use of some simple mouse-over effects to make it prettier and more interesting.  More work is needed; I think my next move will be to figure out how to use images as backgrounds, and see if I can incorporate such effects into a mouse-over.  I suspect that I can, but more practice in Photoshop is really going to be necessary before I can make it look good.

All in all, site development is looking good.

I have taught myself to make rollover effects through CSS. I’m still finishing off a mock-up that will later be placed online for display, called The Devil’s Details. I have the basics covered already, but am finding it difficult at times to make my layout come together smoothly in all browsers. Internet Explorer 7 typically does not display my markups the way I would like the first time through, so I am spending a lot of time finding workarounds so that my work always looks pretty much the same regardless of browser.

The site is up and running. For now, the material posted there is relatively rough, but it’s there and my online presence is now established. I’ll be refining the material steadily now that I have the site alive.

Big projects in the near future:

• Learn how to use CSS to make buttons and drop-down menus that appear when you hover the mouse over them
• Expand the website to include reviews and samples of my work
• Update the ‘blog’s theme and color scheme to match better with the main site.

Projects in the long-term:

• Learn PHP scripting to help make the site more interactive and easier to update.
• Amass freelance industry contacts and link to their sites.

Work proceeds on my preparation of the main page for this site. I’m surprised and gratified at how quickly I’m picking up HTML and CSS. The page template is now laid out, for the most part. My activities are now going to bend towards tidying up the scripting that I used–a great deal of my work currently uses HTML descriptors that have been deprecated in XHTML. I am going to revamp the page so that those deprecated features are reflected in the .css file, which I hope will have the side effect of making my HTML cleaner. Once I bring the site into order, I’ll have to see about validating my XHTML and CSS. I wouldn’t bother if this were just a personal site, but the majority of what’s going up in this site will be content relevant to my freelancing, so I want it to be as conspicuously professional as I can make it.

Updates will follow.

I used to be an academic, and a specialist in medieval English literature, to boot. So part of my training was intended to at least familiarize me with the methods used by sub-specialists to determine the date and provenance of manuscript documents. It’s one of the fundamentals of medievalist study because the entire archive of literary and historical documents before the advent of the printing press is composed of manuscripta. The problem with manuscripta is that, like the name says, they’re handwritten. That’s something that I think most readers in the present day are culturally ill-equipped to understand–after all the art of letter-writing is dying out, and use of a typewriter is now quaintly old-fashioned. Interests in calligraphy or even in the development of attractive, speedy penmanship are the dusty relics of a bygone age.

In the present day we assume that books come from the bookstore. Even literati tend to think of books as originating from a word processor. But once upon a time, they came from handwritten notebooks, and once upon a further-ago time they weren’t even printed; a published book was just one that had been professionally copied out by hand. Since there were fashions regarding what constituted proper scribal practice, it is increasingly difficult to determine what a given author meant to appear on the page the further back you go in time.

Slate’s Megan Marshall highlights a number of relatively recent examples in her recent article, “The Impossible Art of Deciphering Manuscripts.” Most notably, Marshall takes the recent upswing of interest in the great Robert Frost to point out that he is among the 20th century’s hardest-to-edit poets because of his atrocious handwriting. This is the starting point for a discussion of the difficulties which face documentary editors as they attempt to transcribe one or more manuscripts in varying states of readability into an accurate, reliable and readable edition. It’s hard work–I cut my teeth on documentary edition by working up a few pages of the A-Text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in modern English translation here). I didn’t even translate it; all I did was try to produce a transcript that was as accurate as possible, and as readable as possible, and then add a small glossary. Chasing down the sources necessary to perform a critical edition of every version of a really old text is a herculean task requiring dozens of scholars and years of work.

This is not glamorous stuff. It sounds kind of interesting when you’re considering it in abstract, but in practice documentary editing is dull, dull, dull unless you’re obsessed with the topic covered in the text. I will admit now that I found it very interesting work indeed. Nevertheless, I am tickled to see a major media outlet provide coverage of manuscript studies. Then again, I’m usually impressed with Slate. Good stuff.