When choosing a career in life, the career of “professional writer” was actually on the table for me. I don’t mean in a “I wanna be a veterinarian fireman who specializes in saving kittens and figure skaters” kind of way, either.
I honestly wanted to be a writer. The truth is that I love writing fiction and non-fiction alike, on nearly any topic at any time.
That’s why blogs are are really great. While I could always write something, gaining any sort of modest readership was near impossible before the blog. Even if I were to write something and go to the painstaking trouble of making a webpage for it, I’d still have issues with getting people to read it.
The blog (along with RSS) allows me to write about whatever I want and feel moderately comfortable that someone is reading it.
The one thing I feel that the blog doesn’t lend itself too, however, is particularly long works of fiction. I have literally dozens of short stories (and not-so-short stories) on a CD just longing to be read by some bored soul.
So I’ve decided to begin a project of porting said stories to a web format. It’s a daunting task that is going to take skills that I have heretofore not developed in web technologies.
My first endeavor was to set up a style sheet and design some divs so that I had a good template to start with that could serve the purposes I need and still fit with the design of my site (which honestly is just this blog).
Web technology sucks. It’s so fickle and it behaves so differently depending on the browser. I literally spent hours just trying to get some divs lined up the way I wanted them to be lined up so that I had a site resembling my blog that wasn’t quite my blog.
But — as my wife says — the hard part is done. Now I just have to come up with an easy (or impossibly difficult) way of getting my dozens of word documents into a format that can be read by php and displayed on a web page in paginated, readable goodness.
With no meaningful experience in PHP, this should be annoying enough to possibly scare me away from the project entirely. Though it is true that I program in C for a living, it’s not my idea of a good time in my off hours (well, it’s not really my idea of a good time at any hour).
So, with any luck my stories will start trickling onto the web for all to read. Some suck, some are good, and some are high school english assignments. All of them, however, are part of my body of work — a part of it which I too often ignore.
The css IS the hard part, IMHO. All that’s left is to learn PHP, learn regexes, put all the files in a directory or db (I vote for dir), write a PHP page to traverse that dir/db and create a link for each story, then write a PHP page that takes a story and turns into appropriately marked-up HTML with any necessary paging. While that may sound like a lot – and may even end up taking more time than the css – it is infinitely less frustrating than trying to get all the stupid divs to do what you want. I promise. :-)
Not that you need any emotional support from a man you’ve never met, but…
YOU GO BOY!
All the work transfering it over will be worth it. I only wish I’d written half of what I said I was going to through the years. I can’t offer any tech-support but I am looking forward to reading!
Never ignore your muse. Never strangle her with technology. I like movies; I love the theater; I live for literature. CG should never replace the mind’s eye.