Nothing highlights what remains to be done in a project like announcing that it's already finished.  It's as certain as the fact that washing one's car or leaving the convertible top down or forgetting the umbrella at home guarantees rain, or how bypassing the last gas station in the middle of nowhere ensures that you'll have to relieve yourself about ten minutes later.  It may not be convenient, but it is extremely predictable.

A few weeks ago, I said I was done redesigning this site and it was good to go.  (Ha!)  A few months ago, I said I was done polishing the query for Lumos Rising and it was ready to mail out.  (Ha ha!)

Wrong on both counts.

In the case of this site, I made a lot of changes earlier this month.  However, I've realized since making them that some of them either didn't work or didn't go far enough.  I liked the arrangement, but the fact|fiction split became less clear and less useful the more I looked at how I want content (and readers) to flow through this site.  There was a purpose to the split a year ago, but a clearer plan and some greatly improved web publishing options in iWeb '09 have made that purpose a thing of the past.  Stephen King's guidance to kill your darlings applies to web design as much as to writing fiction.

So I cut out a level.  The home page is still there, but things that used to require a click or two (or three, or four) to reach are no longer so buried.  News is right on top, as are the Social Networking links.  Home is gone, because how many "home" pages does one site need?  Everything is now accessible both from a single landing page — which one can always return to via the kennedybrandt.com banner — and from any other page within the site (with the exception of the blog archive, which I think will remain linked exclusively from within the blog itself).

Two years ago, Adam Holwerda pointed out that if you really want people to check out your work, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to do so.  Point taken — still.  Again.  Adam, don't ever say I don't listen to you.

The next retake/update concerns my querying process.  After synching up with Jose earlier this month and reading some materials that Ken Kao recommended, I now have a more concise, focused, and professional query letter.  It goes somewhat against my nature to say more with less, but it's almost always a good thing when I do.  My two-page synopsis has also been greatly improved, and I'm going to tackle the four-page version next.  I plan to have my Round 2 query packets out by the end of this month.

So that's that.  Enough with this site reworking anyway.  It's time to get back to the real action of writing and querying, since those are the only things I can do that stand a chance of getting me published.  I can worry about marketing it all later.

Thanks for reading.