Murrmurrs 2.0

I don’t want to scare anyone unduly.

I’m fine with scaring people duly. The autocrats are demolishing human rights here and abroad. The wealthy are ever wealthier and more powerful. The Gulf Stream is petering out, with dire consequences for the climate and all life dependent on it. Children are inspired to vandalize through TikTok, and people’s hair is falling out in clumps. White ladies’, too.

So this isn’t that bad. The deal is, this blog is changing. At least the drapes and wallpaper, which smells like rose water and lilac, the sort of thing one suspects is masking an underlying old-lady hygiene issue. If we keep going at this site any longer, I’ll have to set out a dish of hard candies in the margin. I’ve been afraid for quite a while that if I keep my antique template and stick with Blogger for my host some horrible thing will happen. Like the whole thing will disintegrate from natural senescence and blow away like powder.

On the other hand, I’ve had reason to worry that if I do try to migrate my blog to something more up-to-date, there will be an explosion so serious that my words, every precious one of them for thirteen years running, will disappear altogether. Do you even know how many words I’ve jammed into this site? Hundreds. Maybe dozens. It would be awful.

On top of that, I have been solemnly advised that I need an Author Site. It’s sort of a fake-it-till-you-make-it thing, maybe, but also I am told that literary agents will invariably seek out your Genuine Author site if they’re even remotely interested in you, and there’d better by gosh be something there, so now there is.

It’s a simple site. I didn’t want anyone to click on it and have to wait for a bunch of artful creative visual content to unroll before them. It’s a Just The Facts Ma’am site. And my blog has moved in there. So, this here post is on there as well as here, if you want to check out how it looks—clean and simple, like me in the latter respect. The next post will be exclusively on the new site, and if you’ve been so kind as to sign up for updates, weirdly emailed to you a day late—don’t ask me about that—they should direct you to the new site. If not, or if it doesn’t work, you can bookmark my new home, and I hope you do. At least one cool thing is ALL my archives are easily accessible from the new site, so if you want to read the very first one, you can! In fact you can order a box of Who Gives A Crap toilet paper and sit down and read the whole damn oeuvre in chronological order, if you’re a little backed up.

I’m sticking with this new platform, but I don’t know how everything works yet, so I want to hear from you if you have trouble commenting (do you get the irony, there?) so we can straighten it out. Wordpress, my new platform, is a little more precious than Blogger, my old. Wordpress’s default is to put a velvet rope around my blog and let in only the worthy or credentialed, and my default is to take y’all on no matter what, even if you’re nuts. So let me know if there’s trouble and we’ll see what we can do.

That’s the deal. I have been trying to attract the attention of literary agents and publishers for any of my six novels and one non-fiction work for a while now, and it feels like throwing spaghetti on the ceiling to see if something sticks. But although some pieces stick for a minute and then fall off the ceiling, mostly my pasta evaporates into thin air like a stream of urine in the Arctic. So I now have an Author’s Site. Is it like the Field of Dreams? If you build it, they will come? I do not have a corn field out there, just a field of standing spaghetti strands, but let’s just see. If nothing else, maybe Kevin Costner will show up. “Bull Durham”-era Kevin Costner, as long as I’m dreaming, not present-day.

Murrtle Forges On

Back when I was working downtown, I got to recognize this one old lady who always crossed the street at 6th and Clay. She'd get a jump on it, if you could call inching headlong a "jump," poking her walker out just past the parked cars before her Walk light came on, to take some of the distance out. Then it was full speed ahead, a gritty, determined, thoroughly terrifying clank-and-shuffle in front of three lanes of temporarily halted cars, and anyone could calculate that she wasn't going to make it to the sidewalk before the light went green again. Not even, really, close. We didn't know who would be barreling down that last lane hoping to turn left and catch the next light before it turned. She bore down on those last few yards with a scowl that could stall out an Oldsmobile, and that alone gave her enough edge to live to see another day's trudge. It was the stuff of nightmares.

Let's call her Murrtle, because if she's no longer with us, she probably came back as my blog.

Something must be done about my blog because there are only so many days left it's going to be able to get all the way across the street without being creamed by the march of progress. Anyone can sense there's a problem just because, well, look at it: it's written on parchment and the wallpaper is clearly from an old-lady dress. It's a cranky old template from the early days of Google blogging and I have to dust the screen with pounce and set my signet to the seal before I can post anything.

It's old.

And when stuff gets old, it quits working as well. Things give out. I mentioned recently that Feedburner, the doodad in charge of my blog subscriptions, was about to quit visiting the Home because it can tell I don't remember it anymore; and shoot, it's old enough to retire, itself. The same year Feedburner came into being, a ton of babies were born who have now graduated from high school, bought up the company, and dropped enough on their houses to send a thousand people each to a homeless camp.

It's old.

I don't need a lot out of my blog. I used to think I could keep or gain an audience by keeping the quality of my (cough) content up. I don't want it to depend on some gizmo somewhere that I use but don't understand.

But I am terrified of starting a new blog site. What if all my archives disappear? And why do I care? I don't know. I spent over fifty years of my life thinking of mysef as a writer, but not actually writing. Since I retired, I've been spraying words all over the place. I've scattered essays in legitimate publications that people have heard of. Right here at Murrmurrs, I've written over 1300 posts averaging about 600 words each. Even if you take out "flang" and "poop," that's a lot of words. I'm about to finish my sixth novel. I've got three other books written that aren't novels. I. Am. Not. Blocked.

At the same time, I have no plans for the afterlife. I don't expect any of the atoms I've been using to recognize each other after I'm done with them, and even if I merely live on in memory, it won't be for long. In fact, I don't think any of our kind will be around for too much longer. I'm finding it easy to give away my possessions. I'm not hanging onto things. So I don't know why I care that the words I've hammered together live on.

But I do.

Something Old, Something New

I don't like to mess with something that's working for me. If looking like a scruffy pound pup moves people to bring me inside and feed me, I'm not going to change just for the sake of dignity. If I've racked up 57 years of continuous air breathing, I don't want to take up scuba diving. Even more adamantly, I will not change anything related to my computer if I've figured out a way to make it work. I may have done the equivalent of taking a document, walking it into a room, getting out the step-stool, hauling the box off the top shelf, grabbing a sticky label and applying it to the document, running around the yard three times and plopping it in the tool shed, but that's where I'll find it again. Don't start telling me I can hit two buttons and shoot it into a safe deposit box a foot away. I don't want to know.

Visual Park Bench #1

So what does my nice host site Blogger do but start making all kinds of template choices available to me? I hate choice. Choice is why we never get out of the grocery store. Choice is why it's almost certain that the latest whiz-bang electronic device we bought was the wrong one. Choice is the enemy of happiness.

Until recently, when I wanted to post a new piece on Murrmurrs, I went to the front door of the site like everyone else and used my key and went straight to the study and cranked one out. Now, thanks to Blogger, I can still get to the study, but not without going through a giant foyer with pretty pictures down the sides. "You can have one of these!" the butler says. "Any one you want! Any color you want!" I'd smack the butler and push on to the study. Finally, one day, I stopped to glance at the pictures.

There are about five new templates with lots of opportunity to re-jigger. Things get bigger, wider, pinker, brighter, right in front of your eyes. I like my old template. And I really hate messing with something that already works. Last time I tried to take a screwdriver to my template, my whole site blew up. You probably heard it from there. Why would I change?

Because it's fatter, and I've put a lot of mental capital in the notion that fatter is better.

Visual Park Bench #2

When I picked out this template, there were about a dozen choices. Mine jumped out at me. It was conservative, stately, a little rumpled, didn't put on airs. It had a name that I do not recall, but it might as well be called "Old Fart With Writerly Aspirations." If you do a casual cruise on the blogosphere and loop into a groove with a lot of author types, you'll see this template a lot. We're drawn to its old-parchment body. Spinster-lady wallpaper drapes down its sides. The blinds are always drawn, and the air is redolent of old books, African violets, medicine, and a little pee. No one with this template is planning to wow anyone with graphics. We are serious wordsmiths, and we don't want anything distracting people from our literary pearls.

Most do not even hang up pictures on their writerly sites. I do, because I worry that if I creep past 600 words a post, my audience will panic and click off. The photographs are little visual park benches. Folks can rest up and then find the stamina to push on to my last, perfect word. I think it's working for me. So why would I change?

Visual Park Bench #3

It's the damn wallpaper. I like it, but I have to squeeze every last thing in a narrow curtain down the center of the page. If a bigger photograph crowds my paragraphs, the words dangle down the edge like they're Chinese. My sidebar is smashed thinner than a passenger on the window seat. It looks like I don't even care about my blogroll. We don't want to put too much pressure on those Poop Posts.

So I've been tinkering with the new templates. I've tried to jigger most of the color and flash out of them. I haven't succeeded in getting them dull enough yet; we may be stuck with the wallpaper and parchment. If anyone has an opinion, hang it off the hem here, but try not to blow anything up.