The falcon cannot hear the falconer

So, instead of doing my Patreon posts today – or at least two out of three of them, I did get one done this morning although technically it was due yesterday – now I’m sitting at an odd angle at my rolltop desk with a very, very fat cat on my lap, who is making it really hard to type. Wait… if I can juuuuuuust reach my phone, maybe I can get a picture….

… by the way, I still haven’t been able to find a fix to not being able to turn off my laptop track pad, hence the index card taped over it that only vaguely works at stopping the palm of my hand from accidentally selecting and deleting paragraphs of work. Which really, really makes me want to use my laptop. Hahahahah. Sob.

But my desktop computer, the one that has all the photographs I need to write a Patreon post, decided to update before I could stop it. It’s been about three hours now and honestly I walked away from it about an hour ago because I was getting frustrated, just waiting. An hour ago it was at 27%. I don’t know what it’s at now and I’m not going to go look – I left it running and shut the studio up for the night and if it’s not done tomorrow morning I’ll just unplug it and take the consequences.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”
— W. B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)

Lately, I’ve been really frustrated with my lack of blogging. It’s not that I don’t want to – but blogging on the laptop runs the risk of deleting paragraphs accidentally with the palm of my hand, and the Internet hates my desktop computer and photos either never load, or take half an hour to load and who has that kind of time?!

I’ve also been in a self-induced fuss of “blog on Snarkland vs blog on HaldeCraft online shop vs Patreon blog IS THERE GONNA BE A SMACKDOWN TUNE IN TONIGHT AT TEN”.

Snarkland: I love you, blog. You have been my friend and confidant for… seventeen years. When did I start this blog? 2002? 2003? It was soon after my dad died. And blogging was so new that I had to write each post as a new html file and upload it via ftp. I KNOW. Now I just flirt with WordPress and make googly eyes at it and it pretty much does everything I want.

HaldeCraft shop blog: I feel like I need to have you. But I strongly dislike the Shopify blog interface (seriously, why couldn’t they just do a WP plugin or something) to the point where I’ve just started writing posts here in WP for Snarkland and copy/pasting them. I’m not even 100% sure anyone ever even reads the work blog – I get comments over there about once every two years. I mean, comments that aren’t spam.

Patreon: I also love you, my new little child, but boy howdy your interface is juvenile. And your keyboard lag is atrocious. It’s not just me – I’ve been Googling and a lot of people are having trouble with this. Each keystroke takes approximately 1.5 seconds to register. I don’t know how fast I type, but I took a typing class when I was 15 and I’ve not needed to look at the keyboard since I was about 19, and I just turned 50. So I know I type more than 45 letters per minute (yes, I said LETTERS, not WORDS), which is about the time it takes Patreon to register a sentence. So for about half of my posts, I’ve been, as with the Shopify one, copying and pasting from here. Or copying and pasting from Scrivener, for my fiction. When I have to type directly into Patreon, I’ve been typing my sentence and then checking in on my farming game on my phone for two minutes while the sentence takes a while to show up. Also, it’s hard to have a multi-type post on Patreon. You have to choose before you start writing — text, pictures, video, whatever. And while you can add text to a picture post and you can add pictures to a text post, you can’t add video to anything unless you’ve tagged it as a video post. So if you start typing a picture post and then remember you have a great video….? Copy, paste into notepad, delete that post, and start another new post marked as video. So, that’s not frustrating.

So I’ve been on the fence. I feel required to have a work blog and that it should be readable on my work site. I want to have this blog. And of course, my fiction over on Patreon, but a few other blog-style posts as well.

There is a plug-in for WordPress for Patreon, but – BUT! – here’s how it works: you write your post here on WordPress, tag it as a Patreon post, and it shows up. Here. On WordPress. Not on Patreon. So if you want to cross-post? If you want it to show up on both? You have to copy and paste. Otherwise it won’t show up on Patreon. So, what do I do? Do all my Patreon stuff here, instead of over on Patreon, but tag it all Patreon? I’M SO CONFUSED. WHAT’S THE BEST AND EASIEST ANSWER, HERE?!?!?!

I keep doing all this in three places and it keeps making me crazy because I feel like I’m always behind in *something*… lately I am, too.

So my maybe brilliant (???) idea is to maybe start composing all of my blog posts in Scrivener, the same program I use for writing fiction. Of course, am I doing that right now? HAHAHAH no of course not.

But it would solve a couple of problems for me –
#1. I would only be writing in one location (albeit copying and pasting to three).
#2. I would be doing it locally, on my laptop, which means that I wouldn’t be using precious Internet resources to do it (Internet is another thing this week that’s making me insane).
#3. Oops. Maybe there isn’t a three? I thought there was another plus but I can’t remember it right now.

On the down side, Scrivener is on my laptop, with the Track Pad of Doom. Although taping the index card has helped. I mean, it doesn’t block touching, really… but it does give me a visual and I’m learning to type with my wrists in the air over it (the trackpad is red, same as the laptop, so I often forget that it’s there).

Maybe that’s the answer? I guess we’ll see over the coming weeks. Although I’m heading into the busy season, hahahaha, because other times of the year I’m JUST SO DREADFULLY BORED, but… well, we’ll see if this is the elegant solution I’m hoping for.

“Things just happen in the right way, at the right time. At least when you let them, when you work with circumstances instead of saying, ‘This isn’t supposed to be happening this way,’ and trying harder to make it happen some other way.”
― Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

PS. Did you know the Instagram widget off to the left was broken? I sure didn’t. I hope I’ve fixed it, but if it’s just text, or is blank, let me know please? Thank you!