The Credits

These should come first, because I certainly didn't do all of this by myself:

• First and foremost, The pd.com Network Overlord, Darien, who doubles as my CSS guru.
• Sosiqui not only hosted this site for about a year, but also has encouraged me from my first design tries to the present ones. (Try not to hold this against her.) To date, she has looked at about ten million eye-scorchingly horrid drafts and still magically retains her eyesight.
• Zullin, who unwittingly named the site and then let me know where I'd guessed wrong.
• My husband Robert, for being endlessly patient with my asking, "Does this look okay?" and his willingness to keep dinner waiting until I've gotten some problem fixed.
• Miss Sarah flyingcats, who continues to be an inspiration, a resource, and an awesome friend.
• My other friends -- all of them.

The Name

This site, from its early days on Tripod, was called Cynthia's Cupboard of Oddities, mainly because I had no better title and no real intention of making it anything more than it was -- a place to put things. As it grew, though, and I learned that people actually looked at it, I wanted to give it a slightly less belittling name, not to mention that "Cynthia's Cupboard of Oddities" is rather unwieldy.

I had to come up with something else. So I went to the section of my paper journal where I write down evocative phrases from speech and song, and I came across something a RinkChat friend, Zullin, had said: "I once knew a girl who spoke in italics." When he first said it, it made me imagine someone who spoke with such constant emphasis and elegance that every word required italics. Later I learned that he was referring to a ditzy sort of girl who stressed almost every bleeding word -- not quite what I was going for, but I still like the idea of that kind of eloquence, and on occasion fancy myself capable of it. I considered several other names for the site, but finally decided to use "speaking in italics" when it hit me that my own AIM font at the time, 10-point Lucida Sans, was, yes, italic.

And then I decided to get a domain name. I never had any doubt what I'd choose; "the surfacer" is my most common online alias. It's a shortening of a Sarah McLachlan-derived AIM name, and without going into copious detail about my life, that's about all there is to say about that.

The Layout

I had trouble coming up with a clever name for this one. What I ended up titling the drafts folder was "Bookworm." The librarian in me wanted to do this for a while, but executing the sketched concept absolutely gave me fits. I used Paint Shop Pro 7 and Notepad. The font on the title graphic is a stretched Civitype, and the font on the open book is Book Antiqua.

I also made a graphic in case anyone wants to link to me (ha):

The Cynthia

I'm 23, married, have a BA in English, and am currently unemployed by decree of the Canadian government. I can be contacted at cynthia@thesurfacer.com. Any other information I want you to have is on the site somewhere. Except where noted, all the writing and art on the site is mine, so I shouldn't find it anywhere else online, or I will be exceedingly upset. I do hope we understand each other.