I haven’t done a Sunday Contentments in a while, I’ve been so busy writing this month. So I just wanted to put one out real quick. I started a new website this month with Mich, called “Very Scary.” It’s an online gallery of children’s art, all drawings about things that scare kids the most. We found these drawings at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear last month. DonorsChoose.org was handing them out to people to say thank you for all the donations raised by the rally. Unfortunately, they had no means to get all the leftover artwork home, so yours truly decided to take what was left back with me and do… something with it.
It turned out I had over 500 very scary drawings on my hands, and not nearly enough refridgerator space to display it all. So I talked to Mich and then I contacted DonorsChoose.org to let them know we wanted to put all the artwork online. After a month of communicating with them, DonorsChoose.org gave us the go-ahead. They were very nice and supportive about it, too. Then last week I started setting things up. The result is the website which we launched late Friday night. You can check it out here.
I had planned to do a simple WordPress blog, but ended up buying a URL so I could host the site myself. I’m just too picky about how my websites look and WordPress won’t let me customize the CSS without paying $15 for it. The URL was only $12 a year, so I said why not. Then Mich came over Friday evening and we spent many hours setting up the site template and uploading files and swearing at the computer (that was mostly me, Mich doesn’t swear that much). Around 1AM Friday night/Saturday morning, we finally had the site up and running.
And you know, in spite of all the hassle, it felt really, really good to get this done. If we hadn’t grabbed that artwork, DonorsChoose.org would have had to have recycled it, and I hated that idea. There’s some really fantastic artwork in the pile of pictures we got, some absolutely surprising and amazing stuff. I just can’t get over how creative these drawings are.
So there’s the super-secret-special project I’ve been working on this month, in between bouts of writing for PerNoFiMo and doing art commissions for LL-Publications. I’d say the new Very Scary site is probably my favorite project in a while, and I’m looking forward to working on it for a long time to come.
After all, I have over 500 images to post… 😉
There really was not much swearing that night. Or at least whatever swearing there was turned out really mild.
I swear a lot less when distracted by cats and knitting though. Still site up and working!