Making websites is like having babies: The pregnancy seems to dramatic and absorbing and you think of the birth as the culmination of it all. And then once your baby’s here, the pregnancy becomes distant history, unimportant in the face of the real live growing changing being in front of you.

And so where the process of designing and building Ho Springs seemed interesting and dynamic before, now I’m more absorbed in the day-to-day writing and this stuff seems like so much back story that I want to rush through.

I’ll just say that Katie talked me out of my beloved flaming logo with a new concept I loved just as much: Vintage Tourist Map.  We both had a lot of fun looking at vintage tourist maps and guides online, like the one here.

But in the end, it just didn’t work.  I was worried about it looking too kitschy and retro, Katie couldn’t find a style that she loved, and ultimately we abandoned an excellent idea for what you see on the site now.

I only really stopped being sad about letting go of the Vintage Tourist Map concept when the brilliant Eli James of the site Novelr directed me to the equally brilliant online novel All’s Fair in Love & War, Texas, created by Amber Simmons.  Amber is a visual artist and a writer who lives in Austin, and she uses the map motif to much better effect than we would have on Ho Springs.   I really admire her site and, vampires aside, she’s doing the closest thing I’ve seen to what I’m doing.