ore procrastination is afoot! I’ve added a progress-meter. It’s deceptive. It gives you the impression that between now and February 11th, I have written 7,000 words. This, of course, is an illusion. It must be, because I’ve apparently written 7,000 words, and yet I still have the same darned scenes left to write.

How did that happen?

hat I should be doing is Actual Work. Either for work or on my book. But what I spent far too long on instead is designing business cards for nationals.

Now, I have a very specific reason for going to Nationals this year, even though I’m in an extremely odd position (even if I wanted to, I couldn’t accept an offer of publication until midway through 2008–don’t ask, I can’t explain). I want to learn about agents and maybe editors. I want to talk to them. I want to see who I like and who I click with and, well, who I don’t. So that when I can query agents, I have a good idea who to go for.

And so I want a business card that’s clean, uncluttered, and memorable. So I spent some time dithering around all the many, many sites that offer business cards at astonishingly low prices.

I hated them all fervently.

I finally found a place that used ink rather than toner, gave reasonable paper choices (look, I’m picky), let me pay extra for bleeds (graphics and text near the edge of the card) and allowed me near infinite control over exact placement of elements: you can rotate and move the elements by minute fractions. Yay, control.

I’ve hit on a basic design. Now it’s just a question of color choice. For that, I open the matter up to you, dear readers. The burgundy design is definitely more romantic. But I also like turquoise, and the gold (that is supposed to be gold) is very cool.

Which has your vote?

EDIT: Adding, by popular demand:

ne of the more frightening things on the internet is WikiHow.

Now, Wikipedia actually has a pretty good thing going. It reports facts, for the most part, and tries to provide references for them. It’s not bad–or at least, it’s not tremendously worse than other sources that you might pay money for. Of course, there’s always the Wikipedia Brown counterpoint, but oh well.

WikiHow, on the other hand, is frightening. Imagine people giving you advice. By committee. That’s WikiHow. Take, for instance, the advice on How to Stay Popular if you think you’re losing popularity.

I bet you never realized that if you’re losing popularity, you need to “[b]e extra friendly with the second in command, which will bring the queen bee down and even the whole clique out.” Way to go. I particularly like how the “Steps” require you to first take out the queen bee, and then, after you’ve smilingly ascended to the top of the heap, realize that “[f]riends don’t claw their way to the top over the ruined egos of others.”
Every so often, someone tells me that women and men are totally different because women aren’t competitive. This always baffles me. I mean, there are differences between women and men, but they don’t think women are competitive? Didn’t these people go to middle school?

o, Eve has tagged me. Bah. I’ve decided to make this fun by lying about one item in each category. I like lying; it’s probably why I enjoy writing fiction. You figure out which one. Except for one category, where three of the things are lies and one of the things is the truth. You figure that one out, too.
Four paying jobs I’ve had:

• Computer technician.
• Telemarketer.
• Hair stylist.
• Food-service worker.

Four favorite foods:

• Raw fish.
• Raw beef.
• Raw tomatoes.
• Chocolate.

Four movies I could watch over and over again:

• Titanic.
• Pride and Prejudice.
• Howl’s Moving Castle.
• Princess Bride.

Four TV shows I enjoy watching:

• Saturday Night Live.
• Sex and the City.
• Trading Spaces.
• The Iron Chef.

Four Places I’ve traveled to:

• Hong Kong.
• Canada.
• Costa Rica.
• Germany.

Four websites I go to almost daily (this one’s hard, because I can’t actually list some of the websites I go to without hinting at my super-secret identity):

• The Kingdom of Loathing.
• Google.
• Slashdot.
• Squawkradio.com

Supposedly, I am supposed to tag people. I refuse. That would require work.

pparently, people are having trouble commenting. Can you comment? Of course, if you can’t, I’ll never know. But still.

I’m trying to figure out if it’s a problem with the math module or something else. Try it, please.