Like the sledding owl pictured above, I have had quite a ride recently!
Project Zeitgeist has been around since 2013, but this past July its database was hacked and utilized for someone else's forum. As PZ's sole producer, I did all I could to remedy this problem, but in the end the database had to go. I dumped all of its information into a .sql file that is 3 GB huge, and a kind friend from FaceBook helped me figure out how to extract the information from it so that I can rebuild much of my important lost work from the past few years. Of course, I have plenty of other projects simmering away on my proverbial stove, so there is no shortage of content to be published from here on out... but there are stories, poems, articles and journal entries in that database which exist nowhere else. Such is life, but very soon I'll begin restoring those old entries, “Before Zero”, to the new blog. Which doesn't look all that new, by the way... it looks almost exactly the same as it did before. It's underneath the hood where things look different. The new blog has no database, and the only CMS (content managment system) I'm using now is myself. This is unorthodox for a blog, but I am confident in my organizational skills and my simple programming abilities. In the future I'll be more careful when putting my trust into technologies that are beyond what I'm used to dealing with (ahem, Drupal). In all probability, I will one day have to utilize a database again. But for now, I'm going to stick with what I know - HTML and CSS, with a little bit of SSI just to spice things up. Instead of spending so much time trying to figure out how Drupal and database hackers work, I'll be spending more time actually creating stuff. Hell yeah!
SO here's what I'm up to nowadays. In addition to designing t-shirts and paying bills working full-time in a department store, I am also in the process of writing a story - a saga, actually. It's all about invaders from Mars and what happens when enemies fall in love. The setting is Earth - Ancient Earth, that is. The story takes place in a human-inhabited Pangea. It's both a love story and a war drama, exploring many subjects such as good versus evil, polyamory, political intrigue, and the personalities of deities.
But this is only one of many stories locked inside my head, aching to get out...there are thousands more. The most important one is my own story, which I want to share in an autobiography written here. I've lived a peculiar kind of life, one that has shaped me in ways I wasn't prepared for, so this autobiography is incredibly important to me. Once I finish writing this story I want to leave that chunk of my life in the past forever, and not ever be influenced negatively by it again. Telling my own story is a bucket-list item, so to speak. But it would be impossible to tell my own story without speaking of the countless stories I've created throughout my lifetime, as well as the ones that I've lost throughout my lifetime. Some of those are painful memories. But, I have learned much, and I have much to learn if anyone besides myself is to glean something useful from the experiences I've been through. I have a beautiful mind, and I think that some people might really enjoy taking a peek into my universe.
Since Project Zeitgeist is now, more or less, a clean slate, I'll re-birth this blog by posting some stories and articles I have already written & still have copies of, beginning with episodes of the saga I am writing. There will, of course, be brand-new content coming soon. Go ahead and read the Newcomer's Page as well as the About Section for more information about this blog. I hope it is enjoyed!
Sincerely, Anastasia Valentine ♥