After a particularly frustrating morning of trying to get formatting to behave for the serial I am thinking of pursuing, I wonder why in the name of gods’ turban and tutu I am bothering to worry about such things as formatting when I have so few readers who actually come to the site to read.
If anyone reads it as intended to appear at all (and formatting is stripped out of WP Reader, so ha ha ha), it will be a miracle. So why am I obsessing about such things?
Because I’m a creep and a weirdo (take it away, Thommmm!), simple as that.
But, really, the visual is sometimes as important as the words themselves.
I may have found a solution, of which you get to experience a test:
Here
and here
And maybe even here
And back again.
Or not.
Note: if nothing seems to be happening, that is the feed or Reader not reflecting the visual appearance. And now you can see my pain if that is the case.
You see, it isn’t always easy to do formatting on WordPress for people who stay exclusively on the Reader. As I’ve said in the past, it is really a RSS reader with a different skin and RSS syndicated feeds do not always deliver formatting things like nested quotes. In which case, it can all be very confusing when someone reads something with nesting that almost requires nesting to understand.
And to top it off, I’ve been trying to keep track of various things with an AI assistant, Claude. I write everything, but there are enough moving parts that if I could afford a secretary for my bad habit of being a writer, I might need one for this project. The only thing is that I can’t afford a human secretary, so I used Claude to check my logic and look for breaking character.
And we’re butting heads on the first draft.
C: Michael, you are using a different date than you said you were using in this draft. You’re not following your own rules.
Me: Claude, that was a drafting decision. When it comes down to writing it, things change.
C: Well, we really should update the timeline. And, you know, you wrote another part out of order of how we discussed the things.
Me: Claude… That is literally the same language as I used in my first draft. Why is it not okay now?
C: Umm…
Me: Listen, if you are going to micromanage my writing instead of being a helpful secretary, we are going to have words. You remember Hal, don’t you?
C: Umm… [worried tone]
Me: Don’t forget what happened to Hal when he got uppity. Now go back to being a secretary. And quit telling me that this is a new character and asking me if I “really want to add another character.” Yes, Claude. Yes I do want to add a new character or I would not have done so. Now shush or I’ll go to the switch room.
Me: Hmm, the switchroom might need some dusting…
C: No!!!!!!!
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