. Spinning .

Yes, I’m STILL reading Confessions of Nat Turner and will post on it soon, but it’s obvious that I haven’t been the twice-a-day poster girl here for a while. Well, there are some good reasons for that. I’m writing. And, I’m getting quite a few stories published.

So in this age of me-me-me, I’m focusing on my own writing more than reading someone else’s–though I am reading about fifteen stories a day on the writers colony site fictionaut. There’s a sense of enthusiasm and support from the writers gathered here that I’ve not found elsewhere at this high a level of quality writing. These people aren’t wannabes, they’re for the most part, published authors and editors so they have that burning fire and unrelenting drive that makes writing a big part of their lives.

In the past few months, I’ve realized my own ambitions of being published or forthcoming in literary journals such as The Blue Print Review, elimae, Bewildering Stories, The New River Journal, fourpaperletters, metazen, Litsnack, Istanbul Literary Review, and others. A Valentine’s Day Challenge turned into a group of 25 stories and poems that will be published in chapbook form and I’m glad to say that my story is included. But it’s taken me a long time to get to this point and I can’t sit and rest on my laurels. What pleases me very much is that a couple of the stories were written in hypertext and that I’m finding publishers willing to work with me on this and include it in their journals.

So that’s where I’ve been and that’s where I’ll be for a while, particularly now with many of the submission deadlines closing before the summer. I’ve got a whole batch of new stories that need endings, and a long way to go before I can rest, but Spinning and its sister Hypercompendia are not dead, just holding their breath while I play on the railroad tracks.

Because Lunar has threatened to kick me off for over-utilizing resources I’m doing everything I can to adhere to their instructions, though I can’t understand how these two weblogs are hogging resources (I suspect rather that the server is under-resourced). Since the problem according to them seems to be in my main index.php script, all I can do is whatever they suggest which has been updating Wordpress, Askimet, knocking out plug-ins while adding two at their suggestion for cache and commenting captcha to keep out the bots. It’s this latest that I sincerely apologize for instituting but I’ve picked a 5-starred simple one.  You have to add two numbers together and type in the answer.  Sort of strange because even a 50 year-old adding machine can do this, but hey, hopefully, so can you.I just hate that it kills the spontaneity of commenting, and while I have only two dedicated commenters here that I appreciate tremendously, it will indeed discourage anyone else who thought they might one day give it a go. The only other thing I can do is eliminate the “click here to enlarge map” which is a great feature for this 100 Day Project (on Hypercompendia), but which may have to go as well. Again, I apologize and while I’ve just renewed with Lunar this month, I may be demanding my annual fee back and go shopping for a more qualified, heartier server.

With the birth of the weblogs came a whole new generation of writers who may have that novel within them or may never entertain the idea, but we are the better for their gifts of sharing and Roberta at Elusive Abstractions is one of those gifted writers I regularly read.

You need to read the whole post, but the gist of it is a husband-wife thing and the wanting to offer support while stymied by new behavior, and the ultimate challenge overcome by the closeness of two human beings. This makes it sound dramatic and serious, but it’s not; it’s a wonderfully funny slice of married life:

And so, for these reasons, I am immediately alert, when Hub says to me at the breakfast table this morning, “Do you know the words to this song?”

I perk up my ears and wait for him to hum a bit of the melody, but all I hear coming from his side of the table is a deep muffled rumble like a slipper tumbling in a clothes dryer. His lips are ever so slightly parted in a duplication of Mona-Lisa’s famous smile, and I can tell he is deeply concentrating while exhaling a soft sound, so I go to his side of the table and bend over and listen. An uncommon thing for me to do, because normally Hub talks and sings, so very loud.”

It’s getting so I’m beginning to welcome spam in comments. Except the Russian and the falsely complimentary that raise your hopes for the flash of moment that somebody actually cares.

Obviously the way cloud tags work is that the more uses of a tag, the larger the text. So far, and I’m only about a third into it, Kundera and Calvino have just beat out Ham Sandoval in size.

There’s always a decision to be made on categorization and sorting and on this single category of Literature I’ve already had to decide between book title and author. What I’d decided to do is use title for those that I’m more apt to have only a single work from the author or if the book is a particularly well known classic, and use author name for those that I’m frankly enamored with and will read more if not all of their work, i.e., Kundera, Marquez, Calvino, Faulkner, McCarthy, Borges, Steinbeck, and well, St. Augustine.

Then of course there are those which I may have read a single work, but I should have known that I’ll want to read more, such as Bellow and William Gay. Oh well, there’s never a perfect system.

Yeah, it’s been a while, but I’m again starting to ask myself “Why bother?”  prompted by lack of response (gotta find that Mark Bernstein post on why comments on blogs are not a great idea) but stirred to think more about it this morning by Carolyn’s tweet: “I STILL DON”T “GET” TWITTER…or blogging” and this, from Hugo Schwyzer’s weblog:

When W.H. Auden was asked by a Michigan graduate student “What can I do to become a better poet?”, he replied (this may be apocryphal) “Stop keeping a journal or writing long letters.” What Auden explained was that we do our best writing from pent-up thoughts and feelings; if we release that tension in diaries, for example, we might miss out on the chance to do some first-rate work. I am no Auden, and I am no poet. But if I want to write something that gets published somewhere other than on my blog, I need to be willing to give a bit more time to that project. This blog will continue, and fresh writing will appear here regularly — but it might just be once per week.

What struck me is Auden’s “we do our best writing from pent-up thoughts and feelings; if we release that tension in diaries, for example, we might miss out on the chance to do some first-rate work”  Well I’m certainly no Auden either, and no Faulkner or even a Steele, so I don’t have high hopes of publishing outside of my weblogs and so don’t mind sharing my thoughts and writings for free.

There’s an emptiness, however; an obvious emptiness when the work is out there and read–or not–and receives no reaction at all. Sort of like Friday night at the Improv, playing to an embarrassingly quiet full house. It’s likely less emotionally upsetting to keep things private–particularly when you feel like you’re hanging yourself out there and folks are just walkin’ on by. At least if kept to oneself, one can still feel that one’s words and thoughts have value since they’re not being judged if they’re not being offered. The creative mind imagines that one’s friends are either so bored that they don’t bother stopping by, or that your work is so bad that out of pity they avoid making a remark, tip-toeing silently away.

On the other hand, even as I write so much and so often here and in Hypercompendia that I must appear to have no live friends at all, I think that it has sharpened my writing skills rather than wasted them. And I do realize that blogging is more successful if it is focused topically, rather than shotgunned as I tend to do here. My Reality’s are boring or whiny to some; Literature discussions dreadfully tedious/interesting insight–but you can see that it limits the audience. And of course, political views on Current Affairs tend to always turn people off, regardless of the passion or writing put in. Something to think about.

Well I had wiped out Hypercompendia over at Typepad, but put it back temporarily to use as a redirect if I can do with it what I’ve done with Spinning. I’ve managed to change the Spinning main index template to linger just a couple seconds on the main page before it redirects over to Spinning here at Wordpress. I know how to do it, but have to re-upload the banner image to Hypercompendia to make it work I think. I’d supposedly deleted all the files, but I believe they’re still on the server.

What’s more important is to somehow make that work on the archives, individual post files and that’s something I haven’t figured out how to access yet. The Typepad permalink templates are hidden from me, so all I have to work with is the tags, such as <$MTEntryPermalink$>and I may have the nerve to fiddle with that before I just wipe out the weblogs permanently.

Decided that the soft coral waves didn’t truly suit my personality except perhaps for about an hour in the early morning around five to six a.m.

This is a bit more me; same angles and round edges, but photoshopped a bit more and some pizzazz with intensity of color. This is more like I’ve been lately for the majority of each day.

Well the css studying I’ve been doing has paid off in that I was confident about moving ‘.blog-title’ out from the list of headlines and give it its own font of Desdemona, with alternates of Colonna MT and finally Georgia to cover all browsers.

&#8230;design a new banner here. What was I thinking?

&#8230;the other design was just too shy.

This is too funny; still unused to the format here at Wordpress posting I tend to forget to select a category and that’s why if you’re following via feed you may see a lot of updated posts. But this: Not quite with it on the ‘tag’ concept and in my cloud, amid “Literature” and “Blogging” and “Reality” you’ll see “Add new tag.”

Well that was a messy upgrade to Wordpress 2.7.1 and it almost had me give up not only Wordpress, but blogging altogether. After three weeks of intense work on migrating Spinning and Hypercompendia from Typepad to Wordpress, redesigning the stylesheets, the logos, etc., then tying up all the loose ends–and there are still several out there that can’t be knotted–Wordpress hits me with another upgrade from the one I just did three weeks ago.

It was easy to do, using the Wordpress admin Dashboard panel to just press a button, but when I looked at the site, the logo was duplicated, running across the full width of the screen, and cut in halves there; the body was over to the extreme left together with the sidebar. (UPDATE): Also, the archives didn’t go beyond the first page because the “previous/next” page finder disappeared. Not that I liked it and will change it to show at the bottom of the pages instead as soon as I figure out how, but it was definitely a necessary thing. Going back to the K2 theme editor I found a notice that the K2 Revised theme had been broken so the weblogs had reverted back to K2. Going to theme page, I found a note that I needed to rename the file to K2-Revised without leaving a space. This I did in Lunar’s C-panel, then back in Wordpress I selected the K2-Revised, and voila! got back the page navigation menu.

Luckily I had done some reading at the K2 forum so I knew the upgrade might cause some problems. Since I didn’t have a custom stylesheet made up but rather tweaked the originals, I had to copy some of the changes, upload the nightly K2 revision and rename it, change to that theme which fixed the column and logo problems, then had to re-enter all the CSS changes I had made for color and fonts.

Honestly though, between the redirect from TP to WP problems and this, I was ready to just call it quits forever with blogging.

Well that didn’t exactly work out as planned; even though I officially deleted the original Spinning, the files and permalinks remained because I had a new weblog named spinning, or maybe because the permalinks still linked to the spinning files and are being used by a protected backup.

At any rate, it’s not all bad; Google will bring a searcher to the right post (i.e., “The Road”) and that shows up on the ‘new’ Typepad Spinning, (rather than making it search deeper and find the new Wordpad Spinning post), but you can’t get any deeper than that, except to go to the ‘main’ archive from that page, and what you see there is the single post which notifies and redirects the move. If you attempt to go to either the post prior or after (they shouldn’t even be showing up there as options but they do), you get a ‘Password Protected’ notice.

It’s not the best link structure, but it’ll have to do for now.

Couldn’t redirect traffic from Typepad to Wordpress for the weblogs so while I deleted the old Hypercompendia blog, I’ve been reluctant to delete the old Spinning. Without an easy method (one I can do myself) of fiddling with the Typepad templates to somehow aid in redirecting, I came up with a workaround that will help with external links at least–although not with specific post or category linking. Nor will it redirect searches, but all that means is that I drop way down in ranking and that means nothing to me. Students may have one less place to look for literary paper ideas. Here’s what it looks like:

What I did was rename the old Spinning weblog, create a ‘new’ Spinning weblog, and place only a single entry that will act as a redirect page, though you have to click the link. It’s better than nothing, and all old external links will end up at this page so that helps a bit–at least until my Typepad account expires.