I like t-shirts, and I’ve been wanting to do some book-related t-shirts for a while. But I’ve wanted to so something a little . . . off the beaten path, maybe?

Those of you who’ve read Chiaroscuro know a lot of the action takes place in the Gallagher family bakery, so the plan is to make some schwag with a Gallaghers’ Bakery logo: at the very least a barbecue apron, mostly because it both amuses me and feels very appropriate.

I’m still playing with designs, and a few of my ideas are below the cut. Click on the thumbnail to see the design in full. I plan to have the store open by the time Something Beautiful comes out on the 25th.

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Today is CSS Naked Day.

Web design, when I first started getting interested (back in the early 90s and get off my lawn, ya damn kids), was about tables and ornate graphics and slices; and web standards was something that only concerned the W3. (Which is not to say it wasn’t a lot of fun. It was, and it was really beautiful, too.) But it wasn’t practical by any stretch; and I’ve enjoyed the move away from what web design was to what it has become: sleek, clean, and simple, with an emphasis on usability.

But no matter how obsessed I get with making things pretty (and I do get a little wiggy about it sometimes) the basis of the web is information. The prettiest site is completely useless if you can’t find the content you’re looking for—and this is where CSS Naked Day comes in. A well-designed site will still be useful even without the pictures and colors.

So today, the site will be naked.

(This probably won’t be a regular thing, actually, but I had to call this post something.)

Because this has come up a time or two in conversation with readers, it feels like time to explain what chiaroscuro is and why I chose it as the title for my first novel. Bear with me: I was a humanities major in college and can ramble on about the things I love for quite some time.

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