As various people have been reading and corresponding about A Sane Woman and U-town, I’ve been referring quite often to The Ten Pillars of Modern Literature, a series of small essays about the novels, stories and plays which have especially influenced what I’m doing.

The only problem is that the essays are not all in one place. The first five were scattered throughout the chapter Curse the Darkness in U-town (one of them in two parts), and the others were in the Jan Sleet’s Dream chapter of the current novel.

I decided they should be collected together, but I didn’t want to copy them and have them in two places. But then it occurred to me that this could be done in PHP. So, I wrote a PHP script, the most complex I’ve done so far, which pulls the text from those different locations, depending on which one you select.

In a couple of cases, it also combines two entries into one (since there were two about Dave Sim and two about William Burroughs), so there are now eight, which means I can do two more without getting into “Hitchhiker’s Guide Trilogy” territory, though I’m sure I’ll end up there eventually. As I indicated in an earlier entry, I already know I need to add The Alexandria Quartet.

Also, I found a JavaScript script which allows you to put a random quote on your web page. I liked the idea, but I don’t like JavaScript, so I re-did it in PHP as well.

So, at the end of the list of the ten (currently eight) pillars, there will appear a random link to another part of the story.

And here it is.