Brief Emergence From Radio Silence

Apologies for the lack of posting, folks. Dealing with some personal stuff I’m not at liberty to discuss right now. Hopefully, I’ll be back to normal (for relative values of “normal”) soon.

I’ll be up to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow for the day to participate at Readings@Seskan’s and get together with some friends. I’m bringing copies of both Red Dot Irreal and A Field Guide to Surreal Botany for sale and signing at the event, so if you’re in the Bangsar area of Kuala Lumpur around 3:30 pm, do please stop in and say hi.

On March 1, I’ll be doing a tripartite reading at BooksActually in Singapore with Wena Poon and Stephanie Ye. More on this when I know it.

I just this morning accepted two mentees for the Ceriph Mentorship Programme. I’ll be meeting with them once a month to work on their prose writing, discuss publishing, and so forth.

But coolest of all, I was recently approved for Professional Membership in PEN. I’ve been an associate member of PEN for some years now, and have been proud to belong to an organization that does so much for freedom of expression and human rights around the world. I’m honored to now be counted, thanks to the publication of Red Dot Irreal, as a full-fledged member.

New Digs

If all has gone according to plan, you’re now seeing this WordPress site rather than my old site at JasonLundberg.net. More and more over the years, I’ve come to see WordPress as my favorite blogging platform, and after trying Blogger, Tumblr, and my long-running blog LundBlog: Beautiful Letters at LiveJournal, I’ve decided to make the move to WordPress for my official presence on the Internets.

Another reason is that WordPress allows the flexibility of hosting Pages as well, a fact that worked well for me in setting up the blog/sites for Zoran Zivkovic and Hwa Chong Institution’s Kong Chian Library. I really like that everything can be found in one place, with a uniform look. And the fact that WordPress has so many nice-looking themes from which to choose doesn’t hurt.

I’ve also been inspired by the blog/site run by my good friend Theodora Goss, which is also a WordPress site. It’s very professional and uncluttered, which definitely appeals to me. I’m also inspired by the regularity and prolificity of her blogging on all sorts of topics, and hope to increase my own blogging in 2012.

The last reason is that there has been a consistent and pervasive coding disagreement between my old site (which Janet programmed in PHP) and the LiveJournal feed which occupied my home page, so much so that it was crashing the entire website. Janet was forced to remove the feed, leaving the front page largely blank, and has been unable to reconcile the problem, despite her mad programming skillz.

I love the old site; Janet created it for me as a birthday present, and put a lot of thought into both the design of the front-end and the functionality of the back-end, which made it really easy for me to change things or add pages without going into the PHP code. She spent a lot of time putting it together, and then tweaking things in the interim so that everything flowed smoothly. I can’t thank her enough for her keen designer’s eye, and incredible attention to coding detail. If you need a website designed, I unequivocally recommend her (and not just because she’s my wife); you need only contact her for a quote.

If you would like to subscribe to this blog via email, or input the blog’s RSS feed into your preferred reader, the links can be found in the sidebar to the right. My thanks for following me over to my new home here at WordPress.