Monday, November 29, 2021

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.


40 comments:

  1. Well you have one "follower" already on your new site (that would be me).

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  2. I'll follow where ever your witty words land. Hope so, because I have no clue how to blog. Linda, still in Kansas

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  3. I would follow you to the ends of the earth. But not in a creepy way.

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  4. I LOVE your new site! Just read a lot of the articles, the "about" section, etc. Good on ya!

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  5. But..but I've been coming to this same blogsite for years! I'm not good with change! Alright, I'm full of it and congrats on your new blog which I haven't seen or bookmarked yet. I look forward to reading more of your wild notions and such there. 🙂👍💕

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    1. PS. Very nice site, Murr! I've taken the liberty of removing your blogspot feed from my own blog and replacing it with "Murr Brewster". It works!

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    2. YEARS? I thought you were a relatively recent addition to the fold. Like, two years? I guess that's years. Thanks.

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  6. I'll zip on over and take a look. I'll even bookmark it so I can still find you when this blog vaporises.

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    1. This blog site will not vaporize. It will mummify though.

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  7. I moved to Wordpress years ago and then, found it cleaner, simpler (in lay-out terms, not moralistcally!). But these days, when I have to MAKE TIME to blog, I am seriously pissed-off (for Americans, thqt means 'pissed.') with the constant tinkering.
    This may be WP's way of making me move to site that wants my pension.
    Anyway, I'll pop over to your new digs and see what's what. Good luck with the whole shebang!
    If you have trouble, trying shoving a weasel down someone's trousers!

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    1. Oh gosh. I guess I have some tinkering to look forward to? Trying not to think about that.

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  8. I commented there just to make sure I could, and I bookmarked it in my Favorites. I'm impressed; I myself have SO much trouble with change.

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  9. Well done. Easy to navigate, easy on the eyes (great colors), less cluttered looking and very accessible blog. I like it!

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  10. I can’t figure out how to sign up once I get to the site. My brain is not working the way it used to.

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    1. Well if mine was working properly, you wouldn't have seen this post until Wednesday! If you're already signed up here, it transfers to there. But it's a signup box just under Pootie's handsome mug!

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  11. Addicted. Must read essays, regardless of where they are stored. Better than meth…..I think.

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  12. Great new site Murr!!! You are sure to get a bite from a publisher now!

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    1. Oh if only it worked that way. Still, cain't hurt.

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  13. You are brave to change but also smart. Do they charge? I sometimes have to go behind the curtain on blogger and change the font size when it decides to shrink after I post a photo. My html skills are very rudimentary. Good luck!

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    1. This is incorporated into my own domain site and so yes, they charge. I think Wordpress charges even for a stand-alone blog, but I'm not sure! Hey, on blogger, BTW, when you type your post in, be sure to go up to where it says "paragraph" and check "normal" instead, and then maybe you won't have that problem.

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  14. I didn't see THIS post on the new site, however. The last one was Be The Leslie.

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    1. Right. It's scheduled for Wednesday, just as THIS one was SUPPOSED to be...

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  15. Love the new site! Fun to learn more of your background, and love the Murrch.

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  16. Hey guys? I totally did not mean THIS post to go up on a Monday. Figures my last entry here would be a mistake! Anyway glad you all went hunting around and everything except my brain works. This post WILL be up on the new site on Wednesday as God intended and then it's all back to the usual stuff and nonsense!

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    1. Tuesday. It's TUESDAY. Meanwhile, the new site is nice. It's going to take me some time to get properly used to it, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

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    2. Why did I not get the email until Tuesday??? WHAT'S HAPPENING???

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    3. Yeah, the email always comes a day late. I really don't know why. The old feedburner used to send notices at random times but always at least a half day late. Seems like this shouldn't happen, but...it does. So--you will get another notice for this very post on my new site on Thursday, even though I will have it in tomorrow.

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  17. Followers follow, but that print on Wordpress is arful hard for old ladies to see, let alone read. I did some ramblin' and read a couple of your articles from the Christian Science Monitor, the 1959 Christmas vs the 2014 one. It really is perspective isn't it? And the tuba story. Both *beautiful*. Those editors better smarten up!

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    1. Oh dear! I found it easier to see. Maybe you can embiggen it with a command+ or control+. If it's a serious problem for people, I'll see what I can do about the font.

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  18. hahahaha Awesome post. And good for you! I'm headin' on over there right now. Best of luck with the ....change....
    (I can't be the only one here who just gets tired when confronted with change)

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  19. Your new site looks great! Well done!

    But as for agents —--- your chances of getting one are still MUCH better than mine, as agents have no interest in poets (unless they are already famous). That takes the pee-in-the-Arctic metaphor into severe-prostate-trouble territory...

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  20. Hi, I've tried twice, but I keep getting a message that the captcha failed. How can that fail? I know you said that you will let crazy people follow, but maybe captcha disagrees?

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  21. I pretty much always just click on your Facebook posts to see the latest, and I imagine that method will still work. I had signed up for notifications at some point but they dried up long ago.

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