Web Design for Sara Ryan

Sara Ryan DotCom

In January, I got an email from Sara Ryan, asking if I would be interested in designing a website for her:

Hi Scott — I found your site while searching for Portland web developers who use WordPress, and I really like the look and feel, as well as your focus on CSS and web standards.

I’m contacting you to ask if you might be interested in redesigning and enhancing my web presence, which I’ve been hand-coding since 1995. (Yeah, I’m old-school.)

About me: I write books and comics scripts, and I have a day job as a librarian. My second novel, THE RULES FOR HEARTS, is coming out in April from Viking. My main site is, straightforwardly enough, sararyan.com. I’ve recently also bought empressoftheworld.com and therulesforhearts.com, (my book titles), and I’d like to set them up as subsites, and run everything with WordPress.

I checked out her websites and found that she has written several well-received mini-comics as well as aHellboy comic which I have a copy of. So a local author who also writes comics and hand-codes her own website is interested in a web-standards WordPress site and sought me out? Cool.

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Tattoo Dream

Last night I had a dream that I was sitting in bed reading comics when I found a full-page illustration that I really liked. At the time, I had the impression that it was aHellboy comic. I decided that I would tattoo the image onto my shoulder. As I started drawing the outlines, right there in bed, using a mirror, I figured the finished tattoo would be about the size of a normal comic book. About a quarter of the way through the tattoo, as I was filling in a large area of green ink, I realized I was really sleepy, and wouldn’t be able to finish the job, so I went to bed. When I woke up, I found out that Annie had brought in a tattoo artist to finish the job for me. The tattoo artist looked exactly like Adam Corrola’s friend Ray from his construction show. He waited patiently on the bed with Annie and Zoe as I tore the house apart looking for the comic.

After what seemed like hours of looking, I found it in my parents’ basement, which was in our basement. Suprisingly, the comic turned out to be aboutHalo, and was about half the size of a normal comic. I returned to the bedroom and took off my shirt to show the guy what I had done already, warning him not to laugh, since this was the first time I had used a tattoo gun. However, I was shocked to find that instead of a smallish scene involving Hellboy or the Master Chief, I had a gigantic scene spread across my chest, and all the way down my left arm. At the top, the field of green that I had been drawing turned out to be the Green Lantern, flying towards me like Superman, with a large battle scene below him of other Green Lanterns fighting various monsters. It wasn’t even the classic-looking Green Lantern, it was the more recent version with the horrible new uniform and the redone logo. I was laughing as I looked at it, but I felt like crying, because, “Oh my god, I tattooed Green Lantern on my chest.”