The Worlds of James Vesping

I had planned to at least try and make monthly updates at a minimum to this, but a quick look on my calendar shows that I missed out on September and October entirely!

I’ve never been very good at tracking my progress, much less talking about it. I started a new novel in July and am only just now getting close to finished with it. Whether or not it will be any good remains to be seen, but regardless I’ll strive to complete it. It’s a complete departure from my preferred genre of fantasy and science fiction, instead shifting toward contemporary military fiction, so it has been a different challenge altogether.

When I worked for the US Department of Defense, I worked in the military equivalent of information technology, so I didn’t get much exposure to other parts of the military. There was some here and there, but as my job was basically communications, it wasn’t a daily occurrence. This means that my latest novel, which ties in with military aviation, has taken a decent chunk of research in order to barely scratch the surface of being authentic. I’ve known several pilots throughout the years, but lacking experience myself means a lot of guesswork. This has left me in doubt as to whether or not the novel can really make it.

Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way; in particular, I have two novels that I wrote in 2016 and 2017 respectively that I decided against publishing for a variety of reasons, but also because they were very different from my comfort zone. One doesn’t get any better by not challenging one’s self, so every now and again I try something new and different. It’s how I got started in this whole endeavor, after all!

With any luck, I’ll have my latest novel finished in a few more days and can relax for a week before returning. If it takes any longer, I think I might die from acronyms…

As a test of my image resizer, here is a cartoon from last month I did!

Know your target(s) before you pull the trigger!

Prior to switching to WordPress, I had my own PHP based website linked to a database. I made the change from a custom design to WordPress for a variety of reasons, some of which I’m now doubting, but I’m trying to stick with it. That doesn’t help much in regard to certain things like image resizing.

I might be living in the past, but resizing images to a smaller, more practical size is one of the key tenets I’ve tried to stick with when doing any kind of web work. In this day and age, I suppose it’s not as big a deal as it used to be, but it’s still one of those old habits that I don’t want to shake.

Perhaps I don’t know the right name for it, but I’m having a rough time finding a plugin that will resize images to a specified size and link to the original or enlarged version within the content. You would think that would be pretty straightforward, but no… Nothing out there! As a result I’m trying to take some old code I made for my custom website and shoehorn it into a WordPress plugin. We’ll see how it goes!

UPDATE: I ended up making my own plugin!