Pen-Elayne on the Web

Too Much Like Work

It's been a lovely weekend for the most part, the Upstairs Neighbors From Hell having mysteriously vanished sometime Thursday. As I write they've just returned (good timing, we woke from our afternoon nap about a half hour ago), but we had four days of almost total quiet. As Robin just noted, we tend to forget how noisy they actually are with their heavy footsteps, moving of objects, banging, dropping shoes, niece running about, etc. until they again make their presence known. In any case, because I haven't been desperate to escape the noise, I've gone a bit lazier than usual these past few days. We had all these grandiose plans to do housework, which have gone by the wayside because we haven't wanted to shuffle about and do stuff as a way of "combatting" their noise. So I've done mostly fun things. Except for the WDC.

The WDC is the "Women Doing Comics" page I started a few years back with Friends of Lulu then-president Jackie Estrada, and which I still maintain on the FoL website. FoL, for those not active on the comic book scene, is a national non-profit organization working to get more women and girls involved in making and reading and selling the stuff. So that there's, you know, more diversity and interesting stories and the industry does better all around. Anyway, the WDC is one of 3, soon to be 4, pages I maintain on the site. I also helped with their link page, which I can't remember when I last updated and I wish someone else would do. Then there's the "Industrial Strength Women" (ISW) list because some women were upset that I wasn't listing the non-creators - i.e., the people not involved in actually putting together a story - who also work in comics, like journalists and production folks and webmistresses and secretaries at the comic publishers (in other words, I had the feeling, they wanted to see their names on the list) so I said what the heck, let's create another catch-all for them. And the last, still in the process of creation, is called "Women in Comics 'Herstory'" (WCH) because yet more women, those who aren't currently doing comics but used to, asked why they weren't on the WDC, despite the fact that the word "currently" is fairly prominent in that list's introduction (and besides, it's a good idea not to forget Those Who Came Before).

In any case, between the near-impossibility of trying to be all things to all women, my work until this month as president of the group's New York chapter including updating the pages on the chapter site, and the fact that the national site underwent a massive style change last spring and I couldn't handle new input the way I used to (using Netscape Gold 3), I haven't updated any of the pages since like April, and haven't really gotten the proto-WCH to a decent debut point yet because I still need to go through my old Comic Book Index from '96 and pull every single tiny-type female name from there. In other words, it's Too Much Like Work.

Be that as it may, I decided to tackle the WDC today via GoLive!, which is what I've been using to create (i.e., reformat) and upload my old comics reviews onto our website - and there was just so much garbage on the page that I spent all day just re-italicizing credits, eliminating drop-boxes and resizing tables. And all the non-direct links have disappeared. (FoL, being a non-profit, decided awhile back that any direct, embedded link that led to a page containing ads was not acceptable, and a lot of these women - particularly those doing webcomics at Keenspot - couldn't afford space on a non-advertising site. But I wanted to tell folks where to find their work anyway, so I typed out their URLs, shrunk the size and stuck 'em underneath their names. Where they sat happily until the website updated.) So it's been like an uphill battle just getting the page into the shape where I can do something with it, and whenever a task becomes that much drudgery I seek to avoid it as long as possible. I feel bad for those women who've written to be added to the list or asked that their credits be updated in the last six months, but as nobody else is going to do these pages, they'll just wait until I'm ready to tackle them again. Everything Lulu-related almost always seems to do this to me - taking a lot more organizational skill and time to maintain than I'm comfortable with, requiring all sorts of redos after others have done something to complicate matters, and leading me to waste twice the energy fixing things and bitching about having to fix things, leaving me pretty well exhausted and grumpy - so it's not surprising I'm looking to curtail my activities with the group, online and otherwise. At this point, with all the external interference about which I can't do anything anyway and all the tension that causes, all in all I'd much sooner do something that actually energizes me, like writing for this blog and updating our website.