NVDT Random – Housekeeping and a Thank You

This blog was a mess. Of opinion, “tips”, silliness, and craft. Here’s a sad truth. A number of the craft pieces end up with more edits on here than the Word or other scratchpads where they originated. Even stuff pulled out of Scrivener is fresher here than there.

It has been in the back of my mind for a year to assemble a handful of shorts from the better of these blog posts. Trying to search them on WP is frustrating at best. Particularly if I know the title or a content trigger word and WP offers up forty posts. Thirty-nine of which are not relevant, nor do they contain the triggers or the title.

The other day I did some research on converting blogs to PDF/Word and found BlogBooker. This is not a pitch, nor am I a compensated spokesperson or an actor portraying a user. I tried several of the options out there on the “free tial” and for me BlogBooker worked the best. The caveat is if you want your whole blog you will need to pay. I found the princely sum of $18 for 6 months and a few passes and 30 minutes of processing time reasonable to save me at least one cut and paste step of 380+ documents. In under a minute, I had this entire blog down to five Word Docx files, one per year. Complete with graphics and comments.

I have been going through the files, copying out singles of the short stories by title and active character. Okay, in all honesty I went through and blew out all the comments so I could tell what was content and what was me blowing. I want to thank everyone (except that asshole Australian Nicholas whatever) for your comments. Good, constructive, critical – All of them. I had forgotten what I learned about Deanna and Jackson from you, what characters and their antic/conversations resonated and what was a reach even when I was experimenting. And how what crap I think my “poetry” is, it was the biggest hit.

I’m through two years of shorts and poetry. I haven’t pulled any of the goofy stuff or the Writerly Concerns/thoughts. I was on the verge of recycling myself, or reposting and what a waste of time. The point of this was to create a canvas with artificial deadlines to put product up and look at it. A virtual dress rehearsal. Hence the reason there’s a finer point on most of what was up here than anywhere else. Like playing live or putting a demo together or creative for $. I don’t see or hear the clams unless the volume’s up.

I used the word “was” in reference to content here. After I ran BlogBooker I dumped 99% of my content. Not because of any paranoia, but to keep me from hitting on something and tweaking it in one too many places. I’ll have one main folder with subs for shorts by character and the “poetry”. I will make various assemblies of content and port them to epub or Word or whatever format required and ask anyone interested to go through and say yay or nay to content selections. I have so much junk I could do several variations, with mini novellas in the middle. Deanna collection, Jackson collection, conversations with Lamar… Or print them for fish wrapping.

Coming up on this site will be more originals, ’cause I can’t quit, and I had a lot of fun with SepScene and the bad detective pulp and creating. But there will be a lot less nonsense.

Truth? I belonged to this blog hop. Nobody wanted to discuss craft, they wanted cover reveals for crap.* I mentioned that more than once and they invited me to go away. I still get notices from a few of them and, by and large, they are still writing long tomes once a week about nothing but how grand their shit is when they could be fixing their work or helping each other. When I saw all that, and all the time I’d spent participating and writing long tomes about why don’t y’all give a shit I was sick.

Thanks! Back to your regularly scheduled blogs.

*Stevie Turner is exempt from this description. Just sayin’.