This week’s serial installment of The Complete Writer — chapter 17 — is online at Plain & Simple Press. In today’s suspense-filled story, we navigate the perils of libel, defamation, and slander as we cling to the tight-rope of fact-checking.
Hand-over-hand across the Gorge of Electronic Peril…
This week, too, Ella finally gets it on with Lohkeh and a twit whines about his coworker injecting himself with insulin.
Friday is always Hell Central in the serialization department. For some reason, WordPress hates…just HATES…that writing book. Every. Single. TIME I go to post a chapter of The Complete Writer, some effing snafu keeps me sitting there for-freaking-ever wrestling and banging and whacking with the damned computer.
Honest to God I do not know why this happens, but it has happened every goddamned Friday since Week 1. Every time I try to post a chapter in the accruing “book,” WordPress just doesn’t wanna do it. And every time it has some new, unique, unheard-of, clever way to not wanna do it. No two snafus have been exactly the same.
Often it will have something to do with building an internal link from the table of contents to the chapter of the week.
Understand: there’s nothing very difficult about an internal link. Let’s say you want your reader to be able to click on the title to chapter 10 and be taken down the page to lovely chapter 10. Let’s say, for simple lunacy’s sake, that we have titled said passage in the magnum opus “Chapter 10.”
So you type the passage’s title, in the “text” mode, embraced and resting within a wee bit of code:
<h2 id=”chap10″><span style=”color: #0000ff;”>Chapter 10</span></h2>
This should cause your chapter title to look approximately like this:
Chapter 10
Dramatic, eh?
Well, “id=chap10” tells WordPress that the squib “chapt10” can be linked to. So back at your table of contents, you highlight Chapter 10, go ⌘k (or, if you prefer, point and click on the link icon), and enter…
#chap10
This link will then take the inquiring reader to the coded copy that reads Chapter 10.
How hard is this?
Extremely, if you believe WordPress’s antic of the day.
Among many evasive tactics, when you hit “update” on the page to publish the new data, it deletes the code around the chapter title. So the link in the TofC goes dead.
After 90 minutes of fucking with this, I finally gave up and sent it off to Grayson (guru par excellence) to figure out. No doubt he’ll have an explanation for why it can’t be done. Possibly I’ve maxed the number of internal links you can put in a single WP page? Who knows…
WhatEVER…I damn near lost my mind trying to make WP perform this very simple trick. It has done it before (true: unhappily) in the TCW page. It does it without arguing in the pages for Ella’s Story and If You’d Asked. But it just ain’t a-gonna do it today.
So I’ve gotten virtually nothing else done today.
Well. That’s not entirely true. Inventory:
• Walked dogs 1 mile
• Watered desert willow tree in front that Luis says is suffering from drought (a trick, what with the stupid springy hose I bought, which has to be secured to a tree limb so it doesn’t rewind itself back to the damn faucet)
• Pulled out dead flowers in front courtyard; planted new flowers
• Fertilized the paloverde tree and three citrus
• Presently pouring the state’s entire allotment of Colorado River water to those, to soak fertilizer in
• Cooked a package of pork; ground that with precooked chicken and veggies and mixed up a week’s worth of dog food
• Watered potted plants in back
• Swam in pool; ascertained that (thank god) it doesn’t need to be cleaned today, or at least not this minute
• Inspected workman activity down the street
• Soaked toes in tea tree oil
• Posted two links to articles in The Economist for homeowners at NextDoor, re: ongoing discussion of homeless drug addicts
• And miscellaneous stuff
And do I feel like working now? Hell, no!
