It has been a while since my last, and first post here. A little update is in order on what is currently in the works. So, straight into it!
Site design updates
The theme I have used here since launch has been more of a place holder and the more I looked at it the less happy I was. I did not imagine I would keep it long anyway, so I have spent a little time checking out other themes after it became clear I could not tweak this one very much. I could also not settle on an overall theme for the site, though as a good friend of mine said, it is a difficult thing work out. I think I may have settled on a theme now, and need to research what the paid version will let me do before I commit fully. The biggest issue I have had with the current theme has been text layout. As a best practice, the font for a website should always be clean and of a good size with good spacing to avoid eye strain. However I felt like the old initial theme had the text set too big, with a narrow area assigned for the main content making each s paragraph seem to flood the available space. When writing short blogs such as this, that may be fine. However, publishing longer stories was different and the previews of some current works always looked wrong to me.
The new theme I have my eyes on should clear this up a little, giving a little more space over to the main content column with a slightly smaller font, and reducing the size allocated for the sidebar which seemed to take up too much of the screen on the old theme. There may still be some work to do, such as the colour pallet for the site and header images, but it will get there in time. And once the site looks better I will likely feel happier actually putting content here as it will be presented better. I should push out the new theme soon, after I work out a couple of issues and decide if I wish to adopt the paid theme.
Apocalypse World
Since I started this site, there has been a menu with a single page on it called ‘Apocalypse World’. So far nothing else exist here save for the introductory page explaining what it is all about.
This series is going to be the first set of works I plan to put here. The first story is about half done, maybe a little more like 60% completed. Not counting proofreading and editing, of course. I had plans to get it out this last week, though I ran into the dreaded wall. The first two to three pages came easily, as I started the story mid-action. I had all the inspiration, motivation and time to work out how I wanted to write the story. After that the slow follow up began and the writing slowed in tandem. Not to mention I spent around half an hour trying to write just two lines describing a specific scene. Overall, as it stands right now, the wording does not match the mental image I have. However the foundation is finally there, and now needs working on. I am sure I will get it in editing.
This has also made me think about how I divide the content up for release. Do I write in smaller batches to avoid the wall hitting me hard mid-flow? Will this create more regular content? There is also the question of presentation. If you follow the link above to the introduction page for Apocalypse World, you will see the stories, initially at least, have derived from a roleplay game setting and sessions I ran with some friends. Originally I had intended each journal entry to be for each game session, for ease of following. Usually each roleplay game session has a defined starting point and ending point, and when I ran the game I always indented for a session to cover a defined portion of time and their own series of events. The game system itself allows easily for this time/story management compared to other tabletop games. However, in mirror image to my intentions here to stick to such a system of storytelling, that did not happen in the game for one reason or another. So maybe I can let myself off and just put out what feels right as a self-contained story.
Either way, the slow down after the action has been written, if a little rough compared to the first couple of pages, and I am now up to a more satisfying part with some weirdness. I am looking forward to my next writing session where I get to figure out how to portray some of the tabletop game’s more unusual player abilities.
EVE Works
One of the things I have been more occupied by has been putting my EVE Online character stories on the EVE Works site. Some time ago I completed the first chapter of my main character story, however there is still plenty to do such as the short chronicle entries I wrote alongside them. There are also two more chapters to publish, the first part of which I pushed live a couple of weeks back. Not to mention a load of other shorts, side character stories I began and never finished as well as continuing the saga where I left off.
The remaining two chapters, along with the chronicles for them are already written, and I have committed myself to doing minimal editing on them to preserve the old style. The writing is not too great, however I felt it was a good thing to leave them alone as much as possible. Even then there was much to do. Pasting them from Word documents has brought along some odd formatting errors such as punctuation issues. For whatever reason, pasting from a word document uses a style of inverted comma and apostrophe that is not recognised by WordPress and my browser. Maybe I am being a little OCD but I wanted to edit these out. Also, having pasted these stories to forum boards in the past there is some forum tagging code in the text here and there that I need to weed out and replace with the correct formatting in WordPress’ own system.
I will continue to chip away at these posts and get them out at a steady rate. Be sure to follow the RSS feeds for those as well as here for the releases of the Apocalypse World story.
I like the size of the font you have going now. :) But the theme you choose for your website is pretty personal, and in many ways it should be a reflection both of your personality as well as the personality of the content you post. I’m sure you’ll find something you like!
I know you’ve been trying hard to get back into your writing. The sooner you start posting (and advertising your posts), the better! I think once you get going it will help feed into your motivation. It’s not a bad thing to feel like an audience is waiting. Just never apologize for not posting (you don’t owe anyone anything). As for how much to post, trust your instincts. Think of how short some of my posts are on Solitary Pilot, while some of my content on Incyanity is a lot longer. If you know already that a given story will naturally fall into chapters, I’d post a whole chapter at a time. But if you’re still exploring how to divvy up the content for a story, then post whatever you have whenever you have it in whatever chunks feel good for you, so long as your readers will be able to follow along.
As for Word versus WordPress: WordPress is very cool in that it has a fairly intelligent HTML editor built into it, and this editor is usually pretty good about interpreting and converting rich formatting when you paste from another source. Word is very uncool in that when you copy text from it, you also get a bunch of crap garbage meta formatting with the text that often make HTML editors have brain aneurysms. (It was even worse when I was still on Joomla.)
If you don’t use too much simple rich formatting like bold, italics, and underlining, then you might solve your straight/curly apostrophe and quote issue (I’m not sure why it’s an issue for you) by first pasting into the “text” tab of the editor (rather than the “visual” tab). The “text” tab will strip all of Word’s garbage meta formatting except paragraph returns. Then when you swap back to the “visual” tab, you can CTRL+A to select all the text and use a button like the left alignment to automatically apply the proper HTML paragraph tags. After that, use the Find feature in Word to search for the rich text formatting you’re now missing (bold, italics, underline) so you can reapply it. Then reapply any section headers. Should be okay then. Your Word document open on one half of your screen and the browser open on the other side should help make this easy.
Last but not least! A few plugin suggestions:
Copyright Footer RSS: Get this. It will help “protect” your content from being scraped off your RSS feed to other websites by bots, as the scrapers will pick up the footer text too. If you include links to your Twitter account and any other social media pages you have you’ll get extra exposure. Some schools of thought think this will help your search engine ranking too. You can see the text I’m using by looking at a recent post of mine for Incyanity in your feed reader.
Google XML Sitemaps: Once you have more content posted, consider using this plugin in conjunction with Google’s webmaster tools to help improve/maintain your search rankings.
Ultimate Tag Cloud Widget: WordPress, for some silly reason, has a 40 tag display limit on its built-in tag widget. If you run into this limit, this widget will let you display all of your tags and it will give you an insane amount of control over how they look.