The Progress of the Progress Bar

If you're reading this post on my site (and not in an RSS aggregator) you'll notice a rather busy sidebar off to the right. A sidebar, not to be confused with a side bar where lawyers whine to the judge, or a side car where motorcycle passengers whine to the driver, is an HTML jungle where over-ambitious web page designers load up all the junk that in real life would be stacked to the ceiling in a closet, waiting for some unsuspecting soul to open the door at peril to his or her dear life.

Blog authors often load their sidebars with links to friends, relatives, favorite blogs and other sites, plus calendars, personal info, pictures of their pampered pet, and logos of all the supposedly "free" goodies that they're using on their blog to slow down delivery of their little posts, now made fatter with all the sidebar frou-frou like bling on a banger. (Try saying that five times fast!)

At any rate, if you dare wade into my sidebar pool and scroll down past the personal puffery, the links and the dates and the other miscellanea, you'll notice the new progress bar that measures my lack of progress in writing my novel. As I write this post, I've reached 211 pages out of a minimum goal of 300. Five of those pages I added just this last weekend in a burst of writing frenzy triggered by ideas whispered in my ear by a couple of the novel's characters. Make your characters quirky enough, and they transform into muses who insist on writing the story themselves.

I'm plenty quirky in my own right, so I'm trying to manage the herd and see if I can get us all to the same end of the book.


Blog Tag: Chatter