Hey all —
As my post indicated yesterday, I had thought more about forking off the serialized fiction to another site to improve overall readability of my fiction content and the content stream here. Well, I did it.
It is still a work in progress, and not ready to be public-facing. But maybe today or early this week it will be ready.
In the meantime, however, I thought I would explain the philosophy surrounding my decision.
(more…)I’ve been doing lots of navel gazing when I haven’t been writing Vengeance, My Heart, which is why my activity has diminished somewhat on the site.
Some of it is getting around to coming up with a useful term and framework that I can hand people who ask me about my spiritual practice. I know, most folks are not clamoring for information here, so that isn’t the issue. But it does come up in conversations at times. And I’ve discovered that people prefer a tidy couple of words when it comes to answers of that sort rather than my rambling, ambling version of it (which is almost as much about what I am not as it is about what I am). Plus, it is time to settle down with it without sounding so darned intellectual about it.
(more…)I will admit it. I occasionally check out other platforms to deliver my writing on. You know, like that meme of the guy checking out another girl while holding his significant other’s hand and her being appalled… Yeah, I’m the guy, the sig other is WordPress and I am ogling the other services.
While there is a lot of positives to be said about WordPress, there is also 20+ years of baggage that comes with the platform. In trying to be everything to everyone it does have elements that are bloated for your average blogger. Some of that slow-down is self-inflicted when you add plugins (which have their own security risks), but there are plenty of parts under the hood that most of you never have seen, let alone used or needed.
(more…)This morning, I asked Claude to provide a general evaluation of the poetry on this site, mostly for shits and giggles. Sometimes I feel I am too close to my own poetry to critically evaluate what I write, so I felt it would be helpful to get the opinion from “someone” without a stake in providing me feedback — not cog greasing or a sense of friendly obligation to make me happy. [Note: Claude was not informed that I am the author of this site, so it has no reason to lean into saying nice things to me about my poetry.]
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A little bit of venting this Monday morning. If you are not into health-related posts or venting in general, you probably can skip this post.
About twenty years ago, I went to a general practitioner with an earnest complaint about some generalized pain I was experiencing that I couldn’t explain. It was sometimes in my joints, and sometimes muscular. Sometimes both. I asked what it might be, acknowledging that it might have some of the source being in arthritis. I also suggested that because my mother had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, that it might be a factor in my increasing frequency of inexplicable pain.
She laughed out loud at my suggestion. And I mean, nothing held back at all.
(more…)Some days you just want to do you. Hell, sometimes weeks go by where you just want to do you.
Or, at least, that’s how it works for me.
No explaining. No apologies. No regrets. No accommodations. Just doing.
What about you?
I’ll have to admit that I am mighty surprised by the lack of discoverable serialized fiction via WordPress Reader. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist, but either WordPress Reader doesn’t recognize the term, people don’t use “serialized fiction” (or variations of it) for tags or categories, or there are just not that many folks publishing such things that are connected to WordPress.
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As I delving back into the habit of writing prose versus my habit in recent years of writing almost exclusively poetry, I’m tossing around several ideas to bounce around my largely empty cranium.
Okay, it’s more like dumping a large bucket of superballs at this time.
Or, if I’m more upfront and honest about what I’m doing, throwing the whole bunch of superballs all at once as hard as I can and see what comes out of the bouncy mess.
(more…)For those who are interested, I discovered the problem with my scheduled tasks (but not the weird refusal of Google’s search engines to crawl the site for indexing).
I’m probably going to make a hash of the explanation. That said…
(more…)There are days where I ask myself if I’m going about everything all wrong when it comes to having a web presence for my writing.
The wonder spans from formatting to content to design to SEO to paid vs free vs subscriptions vs donations… So it goes.
Even something as simple as a domain name has implications. I just discovered that a published author uses “Ravensweald” as his fantasy series collection’s series name, the series published almost at the same time that I double, triple, quadruple checked to make sure there were no apparent conflicts for the site name before acquiring the domain. So it goes.
And, I should have known that updating a plugin should have been deferred — it broke it’s own cron jobs, so I see errors and I cannot revert because they removed the old version from the plugin repository. The errors are minor and non-critical, but irritating all the same. And I guess Google decided this winter to stop indexing the site for search and yet the console tells me everything’s just ducky. No errors. Just… not indexing. So it goes.
I’m tempted to wipe everything and reload the content with a fresh install of WordPress in case there are lingering ghosts in the machine. So it goes.
Are y’all contemplating any overhauls on your sites? What are some critical key things that you wish you had done differently? Or could do? Do you think you are underpaid for your content? Or do you think there must be a non-traditional approach to deriving/providing benefit to content.
So it goes.