How to use this Page

I have added a page for commissions to my site. Please check it out and contact me if you are in need of an illustrator for an upcoming project.

Right now I am working on a badge for a special summer blog project for writers. I will post more later when I have more time.

A quick site note: I've neglected to update the Fiction page on the blog here for some time, so I just did so. It now contains not just links to stories originally published online, but information about all the fiction I can remember publishing over the last 10 years or so.

A couple old links were dead, and I found two stories completely available via Google Books ("The Lake" and "In Exile"), which made me very happy, because those are two of my personal favorites (which is to hint that reader reaction to them has been decidedly ... mixed...), and I had thought they were inaccessible and obscure. But no! (Well, their content may be inaccessible and obscure — or, as some have maintained, pretentious, arrogant, presumptuous, artsyfartsy, and — or maybe that was somebody describing my cats...) You can even still buy the whole zine or book in which they appeared, which you should, indeed, do, because you are a supporter of small presses! (Though you should really buy that issue of Lady Churchill's from the publisher's own ebook site, which offers it in many formats, all DRM-free. In fact, you should probably buy all of their ebooks. High quality, handmade. Artisanal, we might say.)

Meanwhile, the Selections page here remains out of date and a bit of a mess, but that's a much bigger project for a later time...

Just an addendum to my previous post, in which I lamented the breaking of Google Reader's share function, which enabled the "Fresh Links" widget over on the sidebar—

I have created a near fix, as you'll see if you look over on the side. I'm using the RSS feed from my Delicious account for this, since it was sitting dormant. (Thus some of those links are very much not fresh right now!)


There are some limitations to this system. What made Google Reader's share function so useful for this was that it required one quick at the bottom of whatever post you wanted to read. That was it. It took one second and poof!, a link automatically appeared. The new system is not so fast, because whether I do it from Reader or from NetNewsWire, it requires at least an extra click and, since I use Delicious's tagging system, the categorization of the shared link.

What this means is that the items in the Fresh Links section are things I really want to share — enough to take the time to plug them into Delicious — not just things I found momentarily interesting. That removes some of the improvisatory feeling of the Fresh Links section, but it also means the general quality of the links will be, in my eyes at least, higher.

I've kept the Diigo links widget there on the sidebar, even though it and Delicious have similar purposes. If I were starting from scratch, in fact, I'd use Diigo because it has more options for display and functionality. But I use Diigo for research and for my classes, so the links you'll find there have a different purpose and tend to be much more exclusively related to the things I teach and research. I certainly could create Diigo tags that would separate things differently, but for whatever weird psychological reason, I find it helpful to compartmentalize.

That's all probably more information than anybody needs...

It's long been time for this site to get a facelift.  Well, now it has one.  I've not only changed some of the formatting and colors (yes, I'm fond of purples; it's my site, it will have lots of purple!), but also taken advantage of Blogger's new Pages feature, familiar to anybody who's used Wordpress.  The pages are listed up there beneath the site header.

The About and Fiction pages are self-explanatory, but the Selections page probably needs a few words of introduction.

For a couple years now, I've wanted to put together a collection of the nonfiction I've written over the last seven years or so (since a piece of mine about George Saunders appeared in English Journal in May 2003), but I've struggled to come up with a book-length manuscript that is more than just a collection of miscellanea.  I could easily put together a collection just of my writings on science fiction, or film, or general book reviews, or extended essays on writers such as J.M. Coetzee ... but what most excites me is the idea of mixing all of those together and finding some of the connections, echoes, and reverberations.

Thus, the Selections page, which I'm giving the title I've always had for the nonfiction manuscript: Other Choices. One way to read this blog is chronologically. Another way is thematically. Another way is randomly. Each will produce a somewhat different experience, especially if the reader only encounters a few of the hundreds of thousands of words that have been posted here. If I believe in anything it is the power of a reader's creative choice, a reader's freedom and agency, and I try to exercise that in my readings of other people's texts, so I hope to encourage it in the readers of my own. What is invisible, what is unsaid may be as important as what is visible and enunciated. Choices, by definition, imply other choices.

The Selections page is not complete, and will probably never been finished, because I'm not sure what "finished" would be. I'm going to keep playing with what is there, creating various groups of my writings, editing the ones that are there. I hope eventually to put some of the posts together as a single page to encourage folks to read a few at once and find connections that way (and also to give myself some ability to edit and clarify the texts), but for now they're just links to the original posts.

I expect to continue fiddling not only with the Selections page, but also the colors and fonts for the whole site over the next few weeks as I try it out on different computers to see how it all looks. Please don't be alarmed...

I am working on a new update of my site, WordPress and Headway theme so please be patient if it seems a little buggy. I should have it back to normal by the end of the week! Thanks for your patience

Hi Everyone,


I've just updated my site with some fresh work inspired in part by music. Also my work will be in the next issue of Digital Artist Magazine cool!


Bite Me With A Bullet, inspired by Blues the US and the 1950s.


http://www.mousetricks.co.uk/index.html

The new Rod Hunt Illustration website has been launched!

Bigger, brighter, more colourful! You can check it out here
www.rodhunt.com



Rod Hunt is a London based Illustrator who has built a reputation for retro tinged illustrations & detailed character filled landscapes. With UK & international clients spanning publishing, design, advertising & new media, he's created works for everything from book covers to advertising campaigns, theme park maps & even the odd large scale installation too!

Many of you are probably members of Linkedin. It's a place where you can leave your resume online. You can make connections with people you have worked with in the past or even at your present job. You can get recommendations or write them for others. You can also link to people you haven't worked with, like friends, relatives or an online aquaitence. There is no more need for a resume. You can just direct people to your Linkedin page. It's pretty cool. If anyone out there is a part of it, you can connect to me here

Another sketch in my office. I think up stupid stuff to say in the first person to amuse myself. I have been so busy in my office lately that it has really cut into my drawing time. Yun and I are in the midst of moving so that has killed my drawing time on the weekends also. Somehow I still am able to put up three drawings a week here. Let me tell you it is not easy but I will keep on trying.