This is to those who value or otherwise have reason to pore over my blog entries, because I know they’re not written as blog entries often are. Some readers may have wondered, why when these entries seem to be sophisticated or well enough done in some respects, are there sudden glaring errors? (Which may or may not be fixed in a timely fashion.)
Let me explain my working method, which is both cruder than you might think and yet a good “regimen” for inciting me to do good work.
Complex editorial preparation is done
I do not roll out of bed, go on the computer, and puke out the copy directly into Blogger. Except for the very first entry in this series (which I did blindly groping, writing live in the Blogger window for receiving copy, to see how the system worked), I draft my entries in Word files first. This could go through stages of editing, usually both on paper and done directly on the computer. Then, the Word file is available to me at a public location where I can get good Internet hookups (my home computer hookup does not me allow to do much at all with Blogger). There are steps here I’m purposely not explaining fully—involving a Flash drive and other means of conveying a Word file to a place I can access it at a public Internet hookup (heck, I’ve got to maintain some trade secrets). Then, after additional editing on the Word file at the public location, I copy and paste the Word copy into the Blogger window, and may edit a bit more there. Then the file is published. (Sometimes there is an intermediary step where I “save” a draft [which is copied from a Word file] onto Blogger, and fix it up and publish it later.)
This all may seem cumbersome, but through much of my life, my editorial and writing work has been done under relatively cumbersome technical circumstances. But as I’ve long found, going back to my first assembling a novel in 1984-85: despite the clumsiness and patience-trying of the process, it does allow you to think twice as you have additional hurdles to get over, from the point of a first blog idea to actually publishing it. These several steps mean taking care so you just don’t spill brain puke onto a Blogger page. By the same token, the cumbersome aspects of the process, and occasional interfering factors at the public locations in which I put material on Blogger, sometimes facilitate errors’ getting in.
Formatting oddities—due to Word versus Blogger language; simplicity sought
One of the odd things that sometimes happen is how Blogger’s Internet language (whatever it is) interacts not-too-well with certain things I do with Word material (either a whole entry or a small part brought in later as a “patch”). I don’t fully understand the causes for problems here, but my take on it helps you understand why weird things happen like my apparent inability to put spaces (or the right-sized spaces) between paragraphs in one or blog entries, or sections of a blog entry getting accidentally reordered. With my old Web site, which was in Linux, I encountered different problems in terms of formatting an entry based on what browser I used (either Explorer, which I liked better, or Firefox, which I liked less); I think importing “patches” was not a problem. Apparently Linux interacts differently with Explorer versus Firefox, so I had different problems related to that.
With Blogger, there doesn’t seem to be a problem with the type of browser I use; but apparently the best way for me to minimize problems arising from my editing Word copy is to place the whole entry in at once from the original Word doc, and then do minor edits within the Blogger entry. If you put in a Word-doc-derived entry first, then put in patches (of large amounts of words) later, you run into weird formatting problems. (It seems you can adjust your entry for what it does with HTML versus other formats, but I don’t know much about Internet languages, and try to deal along this parameter as little as possible.) The solution (which I rarely have cause to use) when I run into formatting problems that seem resistant to fixes is to start a whole new entry, and put copy into it in the simplest way possible. This helps you understand some of the weird problems I can run into with my entries. Word I know well; Internet programming I don’t know well at all, and I try to get as little versed in it as possible.
Proofreading is aimed for, but I try not to be fanatical; and my limiting comments
Often, when I publish a blog entry, I print it out, and basically aim to proofread it later, but don’t always do this right away. Hence, some corrections turn up days after the post was first published. I try not to be too fanatical about getting everything perfect; after all, this is a blog, not a scientific or big-time trade-publication affair; we are operating in weekend clothes here, so to speak (even during the work week).
I also try not to allow others’ comments to my blog entries. This is mainly to avoid such mischief as occurred with my commenting on the Writer Beware blog on September 5, 2006 (so long ago, yes, but there is still a certain antipathy toward me out there related to the SFWA et al. legal mess of 2007-10—you might know which mess I mean).
Readership stats become more worthy of heeding
Some of my blog entries are more popular than others, as I see from the pieced-out “page views” reported on my Blogger dashboard. I keep this in mind as I plan or prepare future entries.
