Countdown

Deborah Beale kept a diary of events around the Beale-Williams household during the two weeks leading up to the Shadowmarch launch. We thought you might enjoy reading it.

5.16.01

There's pressure. How long till we launch? My mind refuses to count the days.

Josh Milligan, producer, calls with Matt Dusek, site architect, and Karawynn Long, our new designer. She stepped in at blessedly short notice when Aaron Castro, our first designer, left 3 weeks or so before launch for personal reasons. It was a blow. Expensive too.

Josh drives the phone conference wonderfully, focussing all of us. Towards the end of things a German journalist arrives, Thomas Borchert, from Stern magazine, but Tad is not home yet. Thomas is very nice: full of stories about the Silicon Valley people he will interview whilst in the Bay Area (we live in the mountains above the Valley). Tad finally overcomes the bad traffic and arrives, and so does the photographer Bill McLeod. (Me and Tad are thrilled about the Stern profile. It's like getting Time or Newsweek in the U.S.)

The session is long. As ever, Tad does whatever is needed. He's great to work with — I speak from personal experience — good-humored and genuinely interested in everyone he meets, even if he's getting by on only three hours' sleep, which frequently happens when he’s touring.

Whilst Bill photographs Tad in the living room, I tell that Tom that we would always know when Bill Clinton was staying at Steve Jobs' estate, somewhere in the area, because there would be police and secret-service types everywhere. And clattering helicopters. All very entertaining to us small fry.

Our son Connor fights with Bill's daughter Ella. The two kids are four and five, and it's a good ole power battle involving slammed screen doors and a struggle for possession of an oddly calm kitten. While it’s going on I jam in a number of emails and phone calls — contacting the journalists Stan Nicholls and Roz Kaveney to ask if they have interviews with Tad we can post on the Shadowmarch site. Unforgiveably, I wake Roz up — it's 1 a.m. London time.

People leave at 7 p.m. We're exhausted, the kids are hungry and irritable. Connor sings dinosaur songs all the way to the restaurant. We go to Buck's (our local world-famous diner — and it is pretty famous too, it's a V.C. hangout, whenever there's a piece on venture capital on CNN, there they all are, having breakfast at Buck's) and eat steak. The woman at the next table is a teacher and a widow. She's marking papers and talking to us. The night is dark and warm and bullfrogs in the creeks are out in force.

Tad and I still haven't talked about the day's Shadowmarch work.

5.17.01

So Mr Matt Dusek still hasn't answered my question about medieval crop rotation.

I'm teasing him. It's part of what is possibly our first Shadowmarch in-joke. Josh Milligan always calls him a "farmer", because Matt left California for Chicago (the deepest Midwest to us Californians, and never mind that it's a world-class city), and his friends find that unforgiveable! Incomprehensible! Matt probably thinks so too, during the winters.

Anyway, Matt protested during one of the Shadowmarch sessions that he couldn't possibly be a farmer, he reads philosophy and poetry and The New Yorker. (The Welsh poet and farmer R S Thomas would probably bite him for that.) So I asked him if he knew about the economic revolution that occurred owing to crop rotation — this being history, and thus the pursuit of an intellectual, and all that. I suppose he knows better than to touch that one.

Matt Rhodes' rough sketches for the character designs arrive. Tad opens the FedEx on the spot. Illustrators and their work fascinate him. It's another of Tad's career-paths-not-taken: he was a technical illustrator and cartoonist for a while. Tad had many career-paths-not-taken in the arts. It was a tremendous creative apprenticeship. But sometimes he grows wistful. It's another subset of ambition: sometimes you hunger for what might have been.

Matt's roughs are exceptional. We think he is very talented. To be drawing like that, with such speed and fluidity, and only eighteen years old ...

Afternoon. We've just finished a phone conference with a corporation who shall remain unnamed, plus our agent Matt Bialer. These corporate people seem very interested in doing a deal with us, which could take one of several different forms ranging from portaling (a weird 21st century verb: "to be a portal") us to e-publishing us. We're very interested in their marketing, and their handling the e-commerce (which is fraught with difficulties for us, and boring. Poor Matt Dusek seems set to throw himself into his combine harvester.) But they want us to delay the launch.

We baulk. In all of Tad's recent tour publicity we said June 1st for launch. Plus the date was anounced in Tad's newest book, Otherland 4: Sea Of Silver Light.

Tad's instant solution: let's put the site up anyway and publish episodes for free until we’re got everything settled.

Sounds do-able, and smart, but it has its problems for a little family business. As in, it’s a potentially long delay in earning any money.

Tad's on the phone right now, chewing this over with Josh and Matt D.

5.18.01

Forest light coming into your home is simply beautiful. Our roof died during the first storms of the rainy season, and since we had to replace it, we put in skylights too. But the world since then has tilted as it circles the sun, with the result that that light, increasingly hot and summer-like, pours onto Tad's desk and computer in the afternoon. Which is when he writes (also in the small hours of the night). I saw him sitting there, squinting, throwing up his arm to shield the screen. Whilst Tad was away on tour for Sea Of Silver Light, I called our friend Ian, a builder and craftsman, and he helped me order skylight shades. I wanted to surprise Tad, but in the end they weren't delivered in time. In fact, as of this writing, they’re still not up. Now Tad is back from tour and cannot work. So Ian comes round again and throws a sheet over the skylight until the work can be done properly. The sheet is covered with dinosaur designs, especially to amuse our dinosaur-mad son. And Tad is no longer squinting.

5.19.01

Today Tad signs at one of our local bookshops — Kepler's in Menlo Park. We love Kepler's. First of all, it's a dream of a bookshop. Secondly, the people there have always done a wonderful job of promoting Tad's readings and signings. When we were last there, there were so many people that there was no space left for me — I had to squeeze in at the back, unable to see Tad, only hear him. However, this time when I arrive after Tad, I see a few empty seats. I'm puzzled. Then I realise that it's Saturday afternoon. Mental note to self: in future ask Tad's publicists only for evening dates at this store. Otherwise we lose Silicon Valley office traffic, stopping off after work.

It's still a good-sized event. Tad reads a scene from the new novel, The War Of The Flowers. I call it the "Shite And Onions" scene, and it's one of my favorites. Afterwards, the people who have come to see Tad ask some smart questions. It is blessing, nothing less, that people want to meet you and tell you how much they enjoy your work. I often think how police see the very worst of human nature, but writers see the best. People come with little gifts, with gratitude, and sometimes they tell you that you have changed their lives. They want to give you the best of themselves. Tad never takes this for granted.

Later that evening — back to normal life. I cook dinner, which is a mistake. I hardly ever do this since it means Tad has to look after two small children whilst I cook, and as beloved as they are, they eat your brain alive. And afterwards, by the time we’ve had five exciting hours of this and they’re in bed, Tad's mind will be hammered flat so he can't work.

We cut our losses and jam a bath in, too — they are a pair of stinky little monkeys. The bath goes like this:

NO, DEVON.
KEEP THE WATER IN THE BATH, DEVON.
DEVON! DON'T DO THAT TO YOUR BROTHER!
PLEASE TAKE THAT OUT OF HER MOUTH, CONNOR —
NO, DEVON. KEEP THE WATER —

Etc, etc. Our son, no slouch himself in the alpha department, bears his sister's vandal behavior with good grace. Then we mop up the worst of it and get 'em in PJs and watch 'em dance for half an hour to Elmo (Connor moves like Pinocchio, Devon is a Sumo Monkey), and then it's bed. Which itself is another brain-bending process. But before that I watch Tad watch the little birdies, and the smile on his face is his Buddha smile.

5.21.01

I've been musing about e-publishing. A Silicon Valley friend of mine, some months ago, interviewed for a job at an e-publishing firm. He asked for my opinion (in another life I was a book publisher.) I thought this particular company had got things wrong. They mistook format for content, and I didn't think they knew their market. Also they didn't quite understand the acquisition of content, and what in fact lies behind the very idea of "content" — bloody good writing. People who are not editors or writers often seem to think that words just happen by some invisible alchemy. The opposite is true, of course. Writing, or at least writing well, is exceptionally work-intensive.

My friend asked me if I thought the old-fashioned book publishers would translate their business to the new medium.

Doubtful, I said. They're too hidebound by tradition.

But I added: There's nevertheless a big space out there, waiting to be filled by a successful e-publisher. It will happen, I'm sure.

The thing is, you can't overlook what traditional publishers know and have: a huge body of knowledge about the creation and marketing of texts; the rights to almost everything worth reading; and the crucial creative partnerships with big-ticket authors. (Creative partnerships between editors and writers used to exist for most authors, but corporatisation has weakened that greatly, certainly in fiction publishing.)

When I was a publisher, every few years something came along that set people squawking about how books were going the way of the dinosaurs. In the early-mid eighties it was the boom in the video market. That gave way to CD-Roms, and after that came the Internet. I didn't believe any of this meant the end for book-publishing, and I don't believe it now, either. Books will be around forever.

Doesn't mean to say new markets aren't opening up, however.

And the big e-publisher of the future — if e-publishing doesn't turn solely into a subsidiary-rights operation, whereby rights to publish e-books are bought from traditional publishers, and that's all there is to it — will have to know how to publish to world-class standards, and be protean in their understanding of the new medium.

I wonder which way it will go.

5.22.01

I have no nanny. She's on jury duty. I am paying for my political principles. She had never registered to vote before, and I persuaded her to do so, for last year's presidential "election". Now they have nabbed her for jury duty in the crucial weeks before we launch the site.

We are coping. Friends helping out with childcare. But today's a bad day: everything's getting away from me.

We're waiting to hear from that corporation about portaling, e-commerce, etc. They emailed yesterday with more questions. Now it seems they're putting together an offer. Our launch date is still an issue. But Tad really does not want to delay. He worries that if we postpone we will not be keeping a promise. Or that maybe people, denied the chance to see the site and what we are doing, will think we have gone "corporate".

I finish negotiating the designer Karawynn Long's contract. She's been asking some smart questions during the phone conferences, and I like anyone who causes me to think.

The house is full of shrieking laughter. My kids are playing with my friend's kids. When I hear my kids being happy like that, I know I've done a few things right in this world.

Oops. Spoke too soon. Now it's screaming.

5.23.01

Land management is part of life here in the Santa Cruz mountains. I would call it a rural life, except it isn't, quite. I'm not sure what it is. We aren't city — we aren't suburbs. But neither are we cut off from restaurants and child facilities. The thing is, we live with the realities of a landscape so marvellously alive that like a wild animal it must be treated with the greatest respect, lest it slaughter you.

Our neighbor is at the door, her mascara running in the heat. She says the guys doing work on our road will patch the big ditch outside our shared driveway for $250. It's a bargain. That ditch has caused untold damage to our cars. Rain off the big hill behind us chewed up the surface there. The long-term is we need a decent drainage system. Tad goes outside with the neighbors and checks things out. I call the landscape-clearance guy I've been meaning to call in a while. I'm reminded that landslide area up behind the house needs work, and all this is interconnected.

In the winter storms (which aren't what a Brit like myself would call cold, not by a long stretch of the imagination), Tad and I have to go outside and clear out the inadequate drainage (ochre mud and bits of redwood trees and stones from that landslide) so that water can flow to the creek. Our son comes out too and runs and shrieks in the rain. I get to feel like I'm in a Robert Frost poem. Wrong coast, of course, being California not New England. Nor do I experience mortality in quite such an in-your-face fashion as the genius Mr Frost. Still, it's a piece of my American experience that, howsoever it near breaks my back, I love.

Today after the road is patched Tad goes off to play basketball. It's the nearest thing to a religion in my agnostic husband's life. One big reason we came back from living in London was Tad could not find a decent game. It does all the things exercise does for anyone, and then some, for Tad.

I am (momentarily) on top of my Shadowmarch work, so I decide to climb up our hill and attack the poison oak. This is my exercise-relaxation. When I do things like this, Tad is very amused – he calls me Kali, Goddess of Death. I say I'm only being practical.

Poison oak is vicious stuff. I'm poisoning the poison oak. If I don't tackle it I can see it growing down into our garden, and the thought of one of my little birdies stumbling into a patch ... I attack with a squirt gun and extreme prejudice. There's a big stand of the stuff by the gate that leads onto the top of our hill. Beyond the gate, under the trees, small dotty stuff here and there. I am wary — if I fall I could roll into some. I remember what one small contact did to the side of Tad's body, last summer. This is hot and dirty work and my hair irritates my face. I round one of the redwoods and suddenly there's a goddamn mini-rainforest of the stuff. I feel like Donald Sutherland in that last scene of the remake of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. But he didn't have my squirt gun. I spray and spray until my hand blisters.

I am a small Brit confronted with the giant wonders of California. Even the poison oak makes me happy, as long of course as I can kill it.

5.24.01

"What does Mommy do?"
"Fun things and plays with me. Sometimes she gets grumpy."
[Connor quoted in his "Class of 2001" preschool yearbook]

Some of Karawynn's first designs comes through. They are lovely but we fret about some aspects of the design. We need more mortality and masculinity. Matt, Josh, Tad and I phone-conference about this and more besides. Tad and I on our separate phones bounce around our office as we talk, like balls in a pinball machine.

That's the good part of the day. The rest turns very bad.

I have a slow-leak tire. It stops me picking Connor up from his preschool and I have to take time I do not have to go get it fixed. Whereupon in the garage I discover all four tires are in a bad way and this is a considerable expense, replacing 'em all. Everything's a considerable expense when you're coughing up for a web site.

Before I leave the house our nanny calls in from the San Jose courts to say she has been picked (by the prosecution, unsurprisingly) as juror for a child-molestation case. It could be long.

I am inside a wooden press and the screws are getting pretty tight.

All this means I miss the birthday party of one of our son's friends. Tad goes with Connor but Devon and I don't make it. Connor is mad at me because the present for his friend is with me. Oh, and when I get home from the garage there's a rejection letter for one of our children's manuscripts.

(We have co-written a number of manuscripts for illustrated children's fiction. It's proving tough to break into this field. Perversely, however, this rejection letter rather cheers me. It's an honest letter and I like that. I get impatient with publisher bullshit.)

I make dinner for Devon then have to deal with what is the beginning of a migraine aura. Just as I am groping, through neon zig-zags, for medication (and I'm about five minutes away from ANYTHING! GIMMEANYTHING!), the phone rings. It's Josh the producer and he tells me the corporation has made us an offer we can definitely refuse. And we have done so.

By the time Tad and Connor come home, I am the bitch of bitches.

5.26.01

Our nanny has agreed to work a weekend day here and there whilst the jury duty drags on. So she collects the little birdies and takes 'em out to play. Josh Milligan drives down from the city so we can, with Matt Dusek on speakerphone, have a formal Shadowmarch meeting.

Since Matt is in Chicago, there is time dislocation, and we end up waiting for a little while to talk with him. We pass time by distributing baby praying mantids around the garden. We're trying to help them reach the best food sources. They hatched but three hours ago, whilst I watched, from an egg case that looks like a tiny alien backpack. They come out as miniature adults. I ordered the egg cases, three of them, from a catalog — natural bug control, it said, because they eat all the nasties in thegarden. We're all fascinated by praying mantids. Tad put an economy-sized mantis in Otherland 2: River Of Blue Fire, of course: and one time, when Connor was a toddler, he and I came home from a birthday party to find, in front of our garage, a mantis as big as my spread hand. She stayed around the house for several days, appearing on the windows and swivelling her triangular head to watch us.

Good ole dining room, I think, as we go in there and begin our meeting. (This, in spite of it being very hot in there, and our desk fan not up to the job.) How many Shadowmarch meetings have we had here? I can't remember. We make jokes about the stress, about how we blew up one designer and have almost blown up another. A book of Diane Arbus photographs is on the table. One is entitled, "Patriotic Young Man With A Flag, N.Y.C. 1967." He looks like a psycho farmer who wandered onto the set of the film Taxi Driver. When Matt joins us on speakerphone we tell him we've found the perfect photograph for his credits.

We discuss every page, what's needed now, make decisions and lists. Detail, detail, detail. The nanny and the children come back, the nanny goes home, I leave the meeting before it's over. Never enough time.

5.27.01

The corporation we have been talking to wants to talk some more. However, Tad, myself, Josh and Matt have decided that for the moment we will leave such talk to Tad's agent, Mr "Wonderful" Matt Bialer. We have to focus on getting the site up, and on our business model as it evolves.

The whole business has however shone new light on some fundamental questions. We designed the aforesaid business model so that we have a large measure of freedom in developing the site and the business. How much of that freedom are we prepared to give up — and at what price? Doesn't a little family business need some big allies? Will we start small and grow bit by bit, or will it benefit us most to be marketed with a bang? And would that actually work, anyway? Can we do everything by ourselves? Will the utopian promise of the web hold for small creators like ourselves?

There are no obvious answers, which is what makes this all so intriguing — and frustrating.

Tad and I lie on our bed and chew all this over. (The little birdies have mercifully gone to sleep for the night without, at least on Connor's part, the usual armed resistance.) We play with Jupiter, the new kitten, and gradually the conversation shifts to other topics.

Tad: I take no blame for this one.
Me: Don't give me that.
Tad: I was on tour. This cat has nothing to do with me.
Me: It was you who said our other cat is lonely. [Note: A beloved cat of ours died recently.] It was you who said, "I'd like an Oriental Shorthair."
Tad: I did not.
Me: Yes, you did.
Tad: You went and got another inbred purebred and it has nothing to do with me.
Me: He is not inbred.
Tad: Just look at him! If you had found an ordinary, sane cat from a big healthy mixed genepool —
Me: Ordinary cat?! Don't you remember [followed by the names of several prior "ordinary" cats in the Williams-Beale household]? Fine examples of cat sanity they were. Not.
Tad: Ordinary cats don't die young.
Me: Ordinary cats don't bloody well die, even when you want them to. Let me remind you of the flatulence, the diabetes, the arthritis, the cat breath from hell, the scabby skin —
Tad: Well, I take no blame for this one.
Etc., etc.

Anybody who knows Tad's work knows two things:

(1) It all began with a cat book.
(2) He makes endless fun of his cats at signing sessions.

He loves and adores 'em, really truly.

5.29.01

The new kitten wakes me by biting me on the bum. Outside, there is much beeping of trucks backing up. Turns out PG&E, working on new water pipes out there, have closed off the road. We were not warned of this. I wonder if they have told anyone.

Several dozen baby praying mantids emerge from the second eggcase in the garden, and our son watches, thrilled, with Tad and our assistant Marcia, who has for the moment dropped her normal work to become our emergency childcare. Then Tad goes into the dining room and spends much of the day working on his map of the Shadowmarch lands. Later in the day I find him baking it in the oven for the right ancient-and-distressed FX. He painted tea on it, too. He fidgets in the kitchen during the baking, peering into the oven in a way that makes me think of a midwife about her work. I laugh but he doesn't notice.

When a friend arrives to help with the children, she tells me she had to insist a little before the workmen would allow her in. Later when she leaves, it becomes clear that two people have not in fact made it — one being a delivery man with a rather important delivery, the other being someone I persuaded out here to talk to us about clearance work needed on our land, which is the first step in stabilising the landslide up there.

(The landslide is facing away from us, thankfully. We would not have bought the house had anything else been the case. But it's still a liability, and it's prudent to get stuff like this fixed.)

It's an anxious day. I fret about the Shadowmarch marketing. We have various tools and strategies, but it's all moving so slowly. Or maybe it's just different to what I've known before. Tad and Josh are pretty mellow about this, but I can't see the shape of things and so I chew on the problem like Farmer Matt on his corn-cob pipe.

5.30.01

I don't suppose praying mantids, even grown ones, can deal with black widows. In the garden I discover a big one, the red on her belly flashing me once. She's squatting on a big fluffy egg case when I pull aside a climbing rose. It's exactly where Josh and Tad were putting their hands last Saturday, retrieving and relocating the baby mantids.

Normally I kill nothing (save poison oak, of course), but now I go into the mud-room cupboards in search of bug poison. There isn't any. I go to the kitchen and find a near-empty bottle of Zinfandel. I go back to the garden, pull back the climbing rose, think of my children, and swing. The cork comes out and there's wine all over my arm and my feet, but I did it, the poisonous widow and her egg case are history.

The remains of the legs are visible. My stomach turning, I clean the mess off the fence.

My dear friend Charon calls from Scotland. She's a veteran producer of websites. She says nobody gets their website up on time, nobody. I tell her, Well, we're going to do it. We really will. She and I laugh at this, me a touch hollowly.

Because of the childcare situation, Tad is obliged to combine his role and mine in an effort to save time. I resent this. It's nobody's fault, and it's necessary — we are deep in crisis management — but I have lost an opportunity to learn website production under pressure. The bitch bad temper returns.

I spend what working time I have preparing for a meeting with Wells Fargo Bank. We're interested in their e-commerce solution. I make a folder of information so that everything they need to know about us will be at their fingertips, then we drive to our local branch and meet with a Territory Sales Manager who has come up from San Jose. It's a good meeting. The Territory Sales Manager, who is nice and asks smart questions, grows a bit embarrassed about how banks take proportionately more from small businesses. I don't really like this — who would in our position? – but I don't have a problem with it, it's one of the things I file under "The Way Of The World." A bigger business has the leverage to secure better deals. Basic stuff, no point getting lathered about it.

We have half an hour to spare, so we go to the bar in Buck's for a drink. My Cosmopolitan is cold and jewel-colored and delicious. Tad has Campari and soda. Actually escaping childcare and work long enough to have a drink at a bar — the very act itself makes us giddy. Behind me a woman jokes about the pink zipper in my pale blue dress. Outside the bar it's a lovely summer evening.

We decide that whether we go with Wells Fargo, and they with us, or not, we at least have some useful e-commerce figures for comparison with anybody else we're dealing with. We begin to scheme. We discuss independent marketing, how we could inevitably get more from marketing Tad if we had someone focussed solely on that job. We discuss lateral marketing ideas and our marketing disappointments in other areas of our business life.

What is so fascinating about this whole venture is being involved in something that lives beyond you. It's like being inside a thrilling story. Josh Milligan and Matt Dusek feel that too, I'm sure. They are working so hard, so very hard now, as the clock ticks. But they give me every impression that they are loving this — that they are proud of this. Bless 'em, we'd be nowhere without them.

5.31.01

"When is your birthday?"
"A lot of days."
"What does Daddy do?"
"Fun things. He plays 'Hot Potato' with me."
[From Connor's Yearbook]

Cleanliness is not a priority. For the house, I mean (although I suspect that today not one of the Shadowmarch people gets to shower.) I work my way to the office, skidding on toys and piles of clothes discarded by stinky little monkeys.

Piecemeal I'm getting out the press release. It takes hours. It's sweaty work. I start thinking about the publicity and marketing departments I have worked with. I admire all over again the skills of some people I have known. I am quite aware that there is a sort of inner-circle knowledge to things like this. The world works on contacts, and you know who to approach, and who not, and your every action in the power circles of the media carries its own code. My mailings must look like the work of an outsider. This amuses me. But the bottom line always is, what's effective? What can I do that is effective?

I add little notes to people I once knew in the science-fiction world. It's good to have the opportunity to say hello again, how are you?

The children are happy. In between phone calls and emails we drop the tension and play with them. They keep us sane. No, they make us insane.

It's all blurring together.

Email after email. They come to me randomly, like voices from other rooms. Everyone’s nervous we’ll get the site up then find we’ve forgotten something. So many decisions are being identified and swiftly dealt with. Important decisions, things that will shape Shadowmarch forever. It's a bit like watching a disciplined crew taking out a big gorgeous space ship. And they've all had such little sleep...

6.1.01

Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 21:19:16 –0700
From: karawynn
Subject: another bbs naming question

this one is mostly for tad, or anyone who's read more of shadowmarch than i. :}

we need replacement names for the categories of bbs member, preferably ones that refer to shadowmarch.

the categories are: junior member, member, moderator, administrator.

(for example, on my bbs i use scarce, pervasive, ubiquitous, and omnipotent. other sites use 'fan' and 'hardcore fan' instead of junior member and member. but i think we could be more imaginative than that. :> )


Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2001 09:44:46 –0700
From: Tad
Subject: message board member categories

One thing that might work for the message board gradations -- it would certainly be unusual -- would be to use a religious hierarchy from the story. We can't use "Trigonarch" as one of them, because he's sort of like the Pope -- there's only one -- but I think we could use (from lowest to highest):

Pilgrim
Deacon
Mantis
Hierarch

Beyond that, I haven't thought of any other hierarchies yet that wouldn't sound too much like Dungeons and Dragons, but I'm still considering it ...


Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 22:00:19 –0700
From: karawynn
Subject: another bbs naming question

:> i like. want me to set it up?


Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2001 12:00:36 –0700
To: Matt
From: Deb

Matt

Just to let you know that I checked in with the site 11 a.m. pacific time (it's now 12) and there was still erratic text display, full-size type dropping suddenly into little type. I can tell you specifically where if you wish.


Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 21:02:55 –0700
To: Matt, Josh, karawynn, Deb
From: Tad

I'm told the site is up, and I'm just on my way to go check it out now, but I wanted to say thank you and well done to everyone. I know you've all put in a tremendous amount of work, especially in the last 48 hours. Get some sleep. You're all brilliant.

Tad

6.2.01

Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 00:57:33 –0700
To: Matt
From: Tad

Hey, I thought of something: Where's the index?
Just making your life a living hell, like always,

-- T-boy