Writing has always been a "nice work if you can get it" type of thing for me. I'm at a place in my life where that's something I can explore.
I tried Patreon for a while, but it had two problems -- my kind of thing really didn't fit their model, and their recent adventures in changing their fee structure really didn't give me any confidence in them. I'm exploring a couple options right now. You'll see them soon. I'm also working on setting up a store for selling my books both here and including them on Amazon. There's a lot of infrastructure involved there, too. Anyone who tells you that self-publishing is easier than traditional publishing, you can laugh in their face for me. Luckily I have the skills and tools to do it, and I think it will be okay. It's just a metric butt-tonne of work. And speaking of, I need to get back at it. As a part of my periodic attempts to get my ducks arranged at least into a shape that can be expressed as a fractal, I'm exploring what this site can do besides display words and annoy me with it's ideas of how HTML is supposed to work (see tomorrow's possible entry "Responsive design, or Replusive design?"). As a programmer and technical writer, I sometimes find cause to have to speak code in something besides a code editor. This can be a challenge. I have built fancy styles in my word processor, but those do me no good here. While flopping around in the apps list for this service like a stranded fish looking for anything that seemed even remotely useful I found an add-on that's supposed to do that for me. There it is. You have a few settings to make it readable, and it's supposedly language specific (that's a regular expression using the XQuery setting, in case you were wondering). Without context it seems kind of silly, but in application it's pretty slick. I just cut and pasted that out of an Excel spreadsheet and it figured it all out instead of me changing colors and doing all sorts of formatting chants and dances.
So, Hello World! ;) A friend and I are trying the Habatica app together. If you've never heard of it, it's a tool that allows you to setup a list of tasks, and then the app makes it into a roleplaying game, where you gain XP and gold from doing the things you've set up for yourself, and lose HP for not doing them. And you can have your friends join too, so you can all work together on your to-do lists and bad-habit-breaking.
We'll see how it goes. I'm EXTREMELY interested in it right now, but we'll see how it goes over the long haul. Heck, this blog post came about because it's one of the things I'm going to be trying to get better about. ;) You can check it out yourself at http://www.habatica.com |
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