"Currently in its infancy, if not its embryohood". That's what I've just written on my website about this weblog. My website is also in its embryohood, although it's pretty well developed now. It long ago passed the arms / legs / head stage, and for a while has been sucking its thumb and kicking me when I'm not looking. Occasionally it appears to go into REM sleep, although nobody has ever hazarded a convincing guess as to what it might be dreaming about.

When it emerges, my website will be a venue for advertising the books I've written (all one of them, although I've also contributed to anthologies), showing off my doctoral thesis (not that I'm going to let anyone actually read it, oh no) and, in the long run, wittering occasionally about Reading, Writing, Art, Politics, Religion and my Life.

Most of that part of it will be going on here. Which is where we came in.

This is all new to me. I had a website when I was at university in the mid-nineties, but that was very basic text-only stuff (with a couple of photos held together by code I'd painstakingly scissored out of someone else's page). I mainly used it as a place to put my comic poems. My new website, on the other hand is a great deal better designed. I've learned how to use colours, and columns, and all kinds of exciting things.

I've also spent the last couple of weeks (and please don't mention this to my employers) translating a lot of old material into HTML. Old comedy sketches, old short stories, old... well, a couple of comic poems actually, but a lot of this stuff has never seen web publication before. I hope I can put up at least one piece of worthwhile academic criticism too, to show that I Am Serious And So Is My Website.

In the course of this, my brain has caved in. I'm supposed to be doing the rewriting and polishing on my first novel, Of the City of the Saved..., published by Mad Norwegian Press in March. Instead I've been madly assembling HTML code in an effort to publicise the book I haven't even finished yet. It's all excruciatingly postmodern.