What This Is & What It May Be

  1. A Place To collect my thoughts
  2. Self therapy
  3. A Blog in the fediverse at @[email protected] via RSS feed at the URL https://paper.wf/how2b/ in your inbox, just ask me at [email protected]
  4. The rough draft of something more I feel deep ambivalence over ambition. I may come to accept, understand, or overcome my uncertainty as a result of writing here.
  5. Out of order Per Number 1, I am using this space to collect certain thoughts. Per Number 4, what I'm collecting them for is 😬 uncertain. Getting started is difficult. Continuing is ever more difficult. I have never compiled a long form personal writing project before, though I have been posting personal thoughts online for thirty-something years. There's a saying that The Internet Is Forever. It isn't always, but it can be. Thanks to the Internet Archive I can find some of what I put online in the 90s more easily than I could locate paper notebooks. That's on me. If I wanted to keep organized physical records I could. I like to use the internet for that. More than anything else (again, see Number 1) this URL is storage that I will (hopefully) always be able to access. (That reminds me, Robbie: ask the Wayback Machine to crawl my new blogs!)
  6. Out Of Order I got distracted in Number 5 and wanted to start fresh. Truth is I don't like lists. I chose to make this page a list as an illusion of order, to make it easier on me than putting care into “real” sentences and paragraphs. A list can be...
  7. In Any Order This platform (WriteFreely) describes the display format I've chosen as “Novel: No dates shown. Oldest posts first.” That would be accurate IF I was uploading pre-written material. I intend to use this space to [Number 1] collect, compile, compose and edit. Not really sure how that will make your reading experience or RSS feeds. I have no expectations of building an audience here (though of course I welcome all). I am trying to assemble [Number 4] a rough draft of something more.
  8. Further Thoughts On This Site's Order I know that I will write out of order. I can copy & paste the contents of entire posts to rearrange as I go. That will result in incorrectly titled URLs, though. (See the slight discrepancy between title and URL here, for example: https://dotart.blog/humanissome/painting-enquiries |. I changed the title after the URL was already set. [1]) Another option is to make every title a number, then the contents do not matter. Of course I've already botched the start if that's what I want to do, but sooner is better than later if I want to make a course correction. The last possibility is to add links at top and bottom for previous and next chapter organization. This has appeal, except for the visual flow. And I think somehow the extra work of making links somehow will make it harder for me to organize than physically moving blocks of writing. Hmm. 🤔
  9. Order, Order! I think that I will think... it over while I take a break, eating and such. At the moment I am strongly leaning towards deleting and re-uploading the current (two!) posts to remove anything but numbers from the URL. Ugh but that makes URLs less good and it still doesn't work. My display options are:
    • Blog: Dated, Most Recent First
    • Novel: Undated, Oldest Posts First
    • Notebook: Undated, Newest Posts First
  10. Order From Disorder The victor in the organizational debate for now seems to be titling each entry by number, and rearranging the contents later as I wish.

At that, this list is over. And as with every other entry here, I may re-edit it in the future. Cheers for reading!

When I have Notes they will appear below a horizontal line. Direct comments in my voice appear in italics. Lines & italics may be used in other ways as well. Whoever said the writings of a madman [3] would make sense?
1. After all this time I still do not feel confident about how to punctuate URLs that end a sentence. I do not like adding a period attached to an URL. [2] In the above instance I'm experimenting with “ |.” I wanted to like it but I think a space only (“ .”) is less distracting. 2. I didn't think I ever wrote or said “an URL,” but I just found it in 2 sentences in a row! I reworded the first sentence then left the second example in so that I could add this note talking about my confusion. 3. At some point I would like to explore self deprecating comments about sanity and fitting in; when I think they're healthy & when I think they're not; & whether this or similar terminology is offensive.
※ — below this symbol I keep scraps removed, not yet committed to, etc. This is not an editing platform. Why am I using this space again 🙃 ? Well, it's because I love the Fediverse and because the simplicity of this site is conducive to writing. Right. So... I could make an Outline or Table of Contents of sorts, and create all sorts of blank numbered entries... Then every time I write I'll be thinking, “Should this new entry go in slot 2 or 17?!” Cumbersome. And ugly. I could not care about the words in the URLs. (But I do. I can see them.) I could write EVERYTHING in Part I in that massive blog post, just adding to it over and over; ditto for Part II. That doesn't seem very nimble & conducive to creating to me... I could make everything a pinned post; not sure what that accomplishes. Drafts can also be shared; but again not sure what would be good about that... Weirdly I'm thinking that the dummy placeholder entries may be the best option. I can give myself some sense of structure before I even begin, some limit to how many chapters I intend to write — many but not too many.