Okay, so the site kinda ground to a halt for a while. The last three weeks I've gone from occasional artistic output, to absolutely nothing, to a few cryptic posts. Let me give you a quick run-down:

Three weeks ago I had a horrible, horrible weekend. My laptop suffered a strange library corruption that required a reinstall of windows. My Satellite radio broke, requiring a replacement. And finally, I got into a car accident in my new Kia Rio 5. As you can imagine, I was not happy about any of this. The rest of the week goes by and by Saturday, I have a pounding headache and can barely think or sleep. But Sunday, I'm nearly incapacitated, and by Monday I have a fever. Since I'm too busy at work to take a sick day, I worked from home until Friday. Then this week, I have an assignment from work for a client in Florida. This actually didn't turn out so badly, but it made recovery a bit difficult.

Now that I'm home and well enough to enjoy it, I'm beginning to get back my creative bearings. I've been slowly working on the Novella script and the new Akisa Web Theme. The scriptwriting isn't going as quickly as I wanted, mostly because it's a new medium and I'm being cautious. I'm hoping to have enough written to start posting some occasional episodes starting in January. I'm hoping to have the theme ready before then, so I'll have a theme to match the comics.

To the right is a mockup of the theme. I had to move some things around to make it position correctly, but I'm happy with the direction this is going. The design is simple, simpler even than the current CityLights2 theme. The key here was the center column. The fade out effect shown in the mockup gives the impression of someone reading a piece of paper by flashlight. This complements the night theme in the header nicely. The problem I see in the design is that the center column is going to be difficult to create graphics-wise. Each upper corner of the column needs an independent graphic that must be overlaid by text. This is not going to be a simple effect to achieve. I had some minimal success in doing that in Citylights2, but it's still clumsy. Hopefully some research will yield solutions.