I really thought this would be a painless process, but between needing to figure out what features to add via community plugins, how to replicate my original blog as closely as possible, and trying to get my domain transferred, it was actually a constant source of stress and a giant pain in my ass for over a week. A week and a half, really. Turns out that getting domains transferred away from WordPress .com sucks because they’ll drag their feet about it, their listed support email doesn’t actually exist, their instructions are wrong, and their actual domain service website seems like a scam since it lacks anything even approaching the level of polish I’m used to seeing on the rest of the WordPress website. It was harrowing, but it is done now. Everything is cleaned up and put where it should be, or will be as soon as I find out that it is out of place. Turns out that it’s kind of hard to do that when you’re doing to be swapping domains around again after you’ve built your website. Especially when you’re writing the “everything is good now, welcome in!” post when the domain transfer has yet to actually go through and you’re still worried you might need to take down and put up your blog again for some reason when it finally does go through. This crap sucks. Thankfully, it’s all done by the time you’re reading this, so at least Present/Editing Me has that going for them, even if Past Me is struggling to feel cool about it.
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The Only Constant In Life Is Change
This post is going up a little late and largely unedited because I ran into a few hiccups during my blog transfer process. Well, technically it is the Domain transfer that ran into issues, but I spent six hours on Saturday doing the whole blog transfer thing and there were plenty of hiccups in that process, so I’m comfortable generalizing. The thing is, since I own the domain broken-words.com, I want to continue using it at my new host, but that means transferring the domain between difference domain services. It’s a thing you can do, but the domain service that WordPress .com uses is incredible obtuse and difficult to use since there’s two places you can edit settings but each place only lets you edit certain settings. Which means that the transfer I attempted to do before leaving Wisconsin for Thanksgiving failed since the step-by-step guide I was following actually skipped a bunch of important steps. Turns out that the dirtbaggery of WordPress .com extends to trying to leave their service (who woulda thought?). So, while I have already gotten my blog set up at the new place, it’ll be undergoing some maintenance over the next few days, when the domain transfer finally goes through. I don’t want keep posting to a site that I’m going to have to potentially do a lot of work on, so I’m going to take a few more days off from posting (this next week), build up my buffer again (it shrank further because last week’s cleaning and then travel left me no spoons or even time for writing), and spend a little time making sure my new website is set up the way I want it to be.
Continue readingMy Website And I Are Both Travelling This Holiday Week
Well, I’m finally on the verge of getting four whole blog posts ahead [well, I was close… this week’s cleaning has crashed into my exhaustion, so I’ve done little beyond making my apartment nice and clean so far]. I’ve managed to slowly build up a three-post buffer (this post is maintaining that, not building on it, but I’ve got a topic and everything picked out for the next one and enough time to get it done today [this was incorrect]), but I’ve got a bit of a mix-up coming what with US Thanksgiving and visiting with my sister and our sibling. Which means this is the last post for this week since I’ll be taking tomorrow and Friday off to spend time with my family and not lose the buffer I’ve been painstakingly building these last few weeks. It’s been a real busy week, as I’m writing this, so I haven’t been able to make much progress on the goals I’ve set out for myself in last week’s post. I have spent some time doing research for where to host my blog and I expect that, by the time you’re reading this, I’ll have most of that set up or at least figured out. I’ve only got a couple more weeks until my current plan on WordPress .com expires and I’m sticking by my decision to not given them any more of my money, even if my mind has been wavering. It’s not easy to go to self-hosting and I’m already so tired, so burned out, and so low on energy to do anything at all, so making the process of blogging any more difficult or complicated than it already is might just leave me unable to keep up with it’s demands. I mean, right now, I’m barely able to balance work and blogging on top of getting some amount of necessary rest in my evenings, so more steps aren’t going to make it any easier…
Continue readingTaking A Short Break
Today is a holiday in the US and I have the day off. It’s also a couple days after my birthday. I’m taking today and tomorrow off of all work to continue resting up for what will be another two long months of overtime and effort at work, but that doesn’t really mean a whole lot if I’m still pressuring myself to do stuff. In short, I’m taking the blog posts that would have gone up today and moving them to other days so I can keep my buffer and not need to actually write more blog posts to maintain it on my days off. So I’ll catch you all again on Wednesday the 4th with an update about The Magical Millennium! Talk to you all then.
Today’s Focus Is On Infrared Isolation!
I’ve put a lot of work into what is currently thirty chapters of an entire novel and while I haven’t had the time or energy to work on it since I chose to stop updating with new chapters every Saturday (or as close to every Saturday as I could get) due to WordPress dot com deciding to sell the work of its users to a company making plagiarism machines, I’m still proud of the work I’ve done. Maybe someday, when I’m more confident in my ability to protect my work as a citizen of the United States of America, I’ll go back to posting it, but until something gets done at the federal level about all these junky, shitty, and downright artless plagiarism machines, I’m disinclined to provide them with new material to scrape off the internet. But, it’s too late for these thirty chapters and I’ll continue working on the novel someday. At which point I will at least post them behind a wall of some kind (to keep out the bots) so people can continue reading and I can feel like I’ve finished something for once in my life. Someday.
Today’s Focus Is On The Voice Of The Author!
It has been a while since I’ve posted any new poetry, but I got in the habit of recording myself reading it after talking to my friend (and editor) about how different it feels to read a poem and to hear the author speak it. After all, the author can lend a cadence and tone to the poem that the words alone might not. Formatting is fun and you can usually suggest a lot of that stuff with the right formatting, but it is ultimately up to the reader to determine if they’ll follow the conventions of the author’s home accent and primary language or if they’ll tread off the beaten path and hear the line breaks or commas in their own unique way. Since I had a bunch of recording equipment and a little bit of experience doing rough sound editing (both from my theater facilities job in college and from recording an online D&D campaign I ran for a couple years so I wouldn’t have to take notes by hand), I decided I might as well record myself reading my poetry. Plus, reading it aloud and hearing it read back to me was a great way to find lines that weren’t working. Anyway, I hope you at least mildly enjoy the sound of my voice and some decent poetry along with it.
Today’s Focus Is On Podcasts!
I haven’t written about many podcasts (something I’m sure to rectify in the future, given that I was positive I’d written about more than four of them), but I’m incredibly fond of the ones I HAVE written about, enough so that you should go read about them right now! There’s not a lot there and it won’t take you long, but that’s okay! That’ll leave you more time to listen to two of my favorite podcasts, A More Civilized Age and Friends At The Table! There’s plenty of both for you to listen to, so you better get started!
Today’s Focus Is On Grief!
I’ll be completely honest: it feels weird to put an exclamation point at the end of that title, but I think some of my best blog writing and poetry has been about grief in the myriad shapes and forms I’ve experienced it over the last five or so years. It is a very relatable emotion since everyone loses someone eventually and while I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest I’ve tread new ground in my reflections on grief, I would suggest that this expansive emotional experience is the one I’ve developed the most healthy relationship with. While I’m recommending pretty much everything under the tag if you’re up for some writing about the various forms of grief and how we process it, often through the lens of my experiences, I’d recommend one post in particular: Grief And Personal Revisionist History. I wrote this post on the day of the previous monarch of England passed away (and, coincidentally, exactly one year to the day before I’d be attending my grandmother’s funeral) and is probably the best thing I’ve written about grief in general and how an unhealthy relationship to it and loss can warp our views of the people who have passed.
The past decade has been full of grief for a lot of people, as we’ve seen drastic changes in our country–often to the detriment of people who are already treated as less-than–as we’ve lost (and continue to lose) millions of people to a pandemic that capitalist society has deemed the acceptable price of continuing to do business, as I’ve lost the one person that made putting up with my biological family worth the effort, as I’ve grappled with my decision to separate myself from all but two members of my biological family, and as we’ve all struggled to grapple with the trauma of the last four years specifically. There’s so much to process, so much to grieve… It’s no wonder that this tag includes some of my most-read posts. If you wind up reading, I hope it brings you some solace, comfort, or food for thought.
Today’s Focus Is Creative Non-Fiction!
To start off the time that I’ll be fully away from home (rather than just preparing to leave it), I thought I’d recommend my Creative Non-Fiction category. This link also include a a sub-category I call “descriptive,” which are just bits of writing focused on describing something rather than telling a story. The descriptive bits often include stories, but not always. Sometimes I just had an experience I wanted to share or a moment I wanted to capture and the main vehicle for me doing that is via the written word. There’s plenty of 2018 and 2017 stuff that I did not look at very closely because it pains me to spend too much time contemplating my old writing, so I can’t say how good any of that is. The rest is decent, though, so I hope you enjoy yourself!
Recommending My Own Writing While I’m Away On Vacation
Today is the first day of my much anticipated vacation! I’m busy running errands, packing up my car, and getting ready to go on this trip, so I don’t have a proper blog post today (those will resume in a little over a week, on July 1st). What I do have is a bit of information about what you’ll see over the next week!
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