Looking For A Nice Squishy Spot To Land

Author's pose

So, yeah. My blog is a creaky little old lady, and sometimes she farts a little when she gets out of a chair, but she's still got most of her marbles, and God knows she's regular. She's had a data dump twice a week since December 2008 and hasn't missed once.

But someone should maybe be keeping an eye on her. And it probably shouldn't be me. I shouldn't be in charge of anybody. I don't pay attention. I'm the one who waits until the old lady is hobbling to discover she has an ingrown toenail, and then I look online for the cure and read:

    

    Simply <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8?>

    <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" media="screen" href="/~d/styles/atom10full.xsl"?>

    and wallah

Sorry, Grandma, you're just going to have to wait until it grows out.

Besides, I don't want just a blog. I want a real Author's Page like a real author. It is true most of my stuff started out between two ears and never made it between two covers. But I don't think this should disqualify me as a genuine Author. My God. You should see who got called President a few years back. You wouldn't believe it.

If I had an Author's Page, then if someone tripped across one of my essays somewhere and wanted to look me up, they'd have a nice squishy spot to land, all literary pudding and goodness. There would be a tab for my blog, nicely displayed against a friendly white background. There would be a tab for all my essays appearing elsewhere. There would be an About Me tab. An About Pootie tab. A Murrch tab (books, T-shirts).

People do trip over my stuff sometimes, and I know this because once someone took the trouble to figure out my email address and sent me a letter saying how much she liked my Christian Science Monitor essay. I was surprised and delighted, because I was not aware I had an essay in The Christian Science Monitor. I went to the liberry to look up the current issue and I will be goddamned if I wasn't right in there.

"Hi," I wrote to the editor, "I noticed you published my essay, and I was just wondering, were you planning to let me know?"

 

Or, you know, pay me?

I got an immediate and embarrassed response from the editor who swore this had never happened before. He said he loved my essay, and I should feel free to send him more. Shoot, I said. I can do this all day long. Give me a column.

He said No. They didn't want to feature any one writer too often. I sent him another. He took it. He's taken over fifty since then. He has rejected only three of my efforts, and those were because I might have trampled on Christian Science sensibilities. (That's something you can do without even knowing it.) It's been a swell ride.

Well, various outlets on the internet make it super easy to design an author page. As with everything else, you can create and launch such a thing without knowing the first thing about how it works. It's even free. I should do it. I've been saying that for years.

I've also planned to clean my house, but I don't. Grow up, Brewster, I say to myself. You can do it, but you won't. And so, slowly, I am beginning to employ a whole new-to-me method of contending with these issues. I am throwing money at them. Which means I should probably hire someone to build me an author page.

Someone who knows how to transplop my blog without losing my archives. Someone who speaks in code. Someone who won't push a button and make everything disappear. Someone who, clearly, is not me.

Ten years ago I wrote a bunch of copy for a web designer. It was supposed to be an exchange, but at the time I didn't know what I wanted in an Author's Page. And now it feels too late. I hate writing emails when I know the recipient is going to look at them and say Oh, Bother. Ten years ago, she'd think. My rates have gone up since then.

 

Mine haven't. I'm still free.

And so my little blog keeps hobbling along, threatening traffic with her walker and scowling at the internet. I just need someone who can get this old lady all the way across the street without a bladder leak.

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.