Be Careful of What You Ask, WordPress

There has been a recent change to my WordPress experience: the introduction of survey questions. I hate being solicited for surveys. They’re next to the visit from the Latter Day Saints. If I wanted to do something for you, I’d seek you out. I had Intuit, the mega-corporation that delivers us QuickBooks, provide me with a survey so I could talk up the fourth customer service representative I had because she actually got what I needed done. I run an account on a review website because I write about restaurants I feel strongly about (good or bad). Point is: I will make the effort to give you feedback. Otherwise, I’m real busy and need to be left alone.

In the spirit of being impish, I’ve decided to answer any survey question with a very unique answer. It may not be exactly what corporate wants, but at least the employees will get a laugh out of it. I’ve only had two so far, but I swear I will not fail to answer every, single one of their questions!

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Q: How could we customize your WordPress site?

A: By giving me designer gnomes to do my bidding!

Q: How do you feel about our themes?

A: First, I look for my glasses, as I can’t see a thing without them. After I’ve effectively knocked and lost them off the nightstand, I proceed to determine that which is in front of me. When patting the snout and fluffy ears, I determine that it is a WordPress theme I’m holding. So, in a roundabout way, I would say “with my hands.”

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Maybe we all should show WordPress how imaginative we can be with their questions? After all, this is a place for create writing.

Forced Post

I slipped up earlier this week by not keeping consistent with my 48-hour rule on making a post. There are a couple of excuses for that. One, I had a conference in Xenia on Monday and was too exhausted to think afterward. The changes to the Higher Education Act (HEA), otherwise known as Title IV, can give me such a headache. It’s not that I don’t understand what they’re doing. Rather, it’s that I disagree completely with what they’re doing.

I also happened to pick up a three year-old game (Fallout: New Vegas) for $5. I game quite often, and know it can be a genuine addiction. The symptoms of video game withdrawal and other mentally addictive topics are quite similar. The best thing I could have ever done for myself was cancel my World of Warcraft subscription back in 2006. I would go through whole weekends without doing a thing.

I now would like you to notice I said “excuses” instead of “reasons.” Why? Because there are never any good excuses, only good reasons. Excuses are internal exceptions, reasons are for external situations. Therefore, I shall weave in a post during daytime hours. To quote Yoda, “Do or do not. There is no try.”

I haven’t written creatively for at least a week and a half. That’s terrible! While I do enjoy getting down on myself, that’s still a problem. I’m not a huge schedule-enjoying person, as the stress just makes me cranky. Therefore, making one will ultimately be abandoned. People like me just need to start headlong and do.

Contrary to what the above might suggest, I’m not adverse to planning. It just can’t deal with routine. For example, I have a loose plan in what order the house repairs will go, but there’s no time limit set to any of it. With this in mind, I was musing at lunch what planning techniques would be beneficial to me.

I’ve ended up deciding a timeline and a web chart might improve the ideas I have for my stories. I’ve got bits and pieces of them in my computer, but as a few screws and some planks do not a chair make neither does a few paragraphs and good intentions.

Splitting Attention and Image Reflections

I’m finally at the point in My City by the Bay where I’m going to be posting stuff that no one else has yet seen. I can see plenty of you rolling your eyes right now. You keep making faces like that young ladies and young gentlemen, and it’ll stay that way. You mark my words!

Regardless, for myself and the handful of others following along, I think that will be good news. I certainly haven’t finished, nor do I know how I’ll finish the story, but I’m sure it’ll tell me when I get there. I read an article about why writers love to write, and one reason was “…because we’re the puppet master.”

Now, I don’t know about the other writers but I do know about myself. What I’ve certainly noticed is that I often question the control I have over my own stories. Sometimes they form on the paper, and I feel like I have little say in it. I could never see myself as the “puppet master.”

I loosely consider myself a writer, and not by occupation. I don’t get paid to write; I get paid to do accounting. For established veterans in the literary world, this may seem laughable or galling. Quite frankly, there isn’t any comment they can make that an entire class of grade school kids haven’t mastered. Kids are much more cruel. Trust me.

With all this free wheelin’, gun shootin’ display of foolishness (as the logical, shrewd writer would want as much money out of their work as possible), I’m starting another long story. It may be long enough to make into a novella, as it’s a blank slate. It has political viewpoints, philosophical viewpoints, and I have to build characters from the ground up. I actually like creating characters.  As a child, I didn’t have a whole lot of friends. I ended up creating entire casts of characters in my head anyway.

Enough of Memory Lane. I’ve been ticketed flying down that road before.

This brings me to the point of the post. I’m fussing over splitting my attention between two stories or finishing one and starting another. Has anyone wrote multiple stories at once? Did they find it manageable? Were they disappointed in the outcome? I’d normally do this myself, but don’t want to waste the 3-6 months in trial and error, when I could simply get feedback from other writers right now.