BLOGGERATION: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

When I blog, I preview the blog to see what Blogger fucked around with. Sections of the text appear tiny. This is usually a paragraph problem. I select the entire paragraph of tiny text and change the size around a few times, hoping that uniformity strikes like a snake at the irritation of awkward formatting.
   It takes time for the venom to have an effect. Usually, it’s quicker to take a sledgehammer to the cracked saucer, rather than embark upon a long and laborious repair.
   In that case, I select the entire blog post and change the size around a few times, hoping that uniformity strikes like a strikey thing. A nuclear strikey thing. Everything in the blast is covered for all eternity plus a few years.

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Yes, there is work backstage, offstage, and in the cluttered parking area behind the theatre. Once in a good while, or bad while, Blogger is updated with a lick of paint that came from a cat’s tongue. This is an unpleasant business.
   For a trial period, Blogger allows users to revert to the classic style. The trial period expires and the classic style is sent to the grindy-grindy machine come midnight. Does it matter if the handy button for doing that thing is now top-left instead of bottom-right?
   Yes, it fucking matters for the first few scrabbling grabs at digital thin air on the user non-interface. We’ve made it more user-friendly! How’d you manage that? Kill off all the regular users so the raw recruits don’t know any different?
   Change on Blogger leads to bloggeration. Wrath-of-God-type-stuff. Dogs and cats, living together. The most annoying change I faced on this shaky platform was the change I am facing now.
   It’s the paragraph problem.
   I type the blog up in a file…aaaaaand copy the text over to Blogger. Simple. Too easy. Blogger changed the width of the stage, the height of the audience, and the no cream in the coffee.
   But I wanted my coffee without cream, and this new lack of cream isn’t the same as the old lack of cream. Can we go back to the complete lack of cream that wasn’t there before? That non-tasted so much better.
   Now, as in…right now…I drop the text into the Blogger box and…
   The paragraphs are standing on the corner of Fucked-Up and Normal. They separate. Oil text and water text.
   Blergh.
   I didn’t have to take a guided tour of the internet, but…I took a guided tour of the internet to find out what the fucketty-fudge was going on. Just fix it. The internet just fixed it. I mean the internet just barely fixed it.
   Why are all the paragraphs separated by space, the final frontier?
   Paragraph by bleeding paragraph, I have to go in…I don’t have to go in… (I really must go in) and I cut the gap between paragraphs. Then I pump up the typographical tyres with a borrowed slice of keyboard wizardry and I am falling asleep typing this.
   The point is…using Blogger was always irritating. Over time, Blogger endeared itself to me by turning all user-friendly and that is a lie I tell myself as the realisation dawns that I have to fix this bloody blog post before it goes out to a semi-suspecting public.
   I learned the fix, and that’s as far as things went. Merge the paragraphs. Cut the paragraphs apart again. Like an angry baker throwing lumps of dough back into one huge boulder, I wonder how it came to this.
   How did it come to this?
   I might as well ask why there’s a pet snake called Reggie aboard the plane. Wait, is that where the idea for the Samuel L. Jackson movie comes from?

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Anyway, I use the fix. There might be a better fix than the fix I use now. But the fix I use now is a fix that works. Merge. Cut. Merge. Cut. Paragraph by ill-fitting paragraph. Of course, I tried to make it easier on myself…
   I set up a file with wholly separate paragraphs and dropped that into Blogger. Separate paragraphs. Little rafts of text, making their way down the not-so-rapid rapids of Formatting Falls. Blogger detected my cunning ruse, and I still had to merge the paragraphs before cutting them apart with my bare teeth and a rusty saw I found by the side of the road.
   In short…
   (Notes futility of making a point about the formatting problem by creating a one-line paragraph that will still be adjusted later, regardless of size.)
   Every fucking time I blog, I have to adjust the entire blog. No more dropping the text off at Blogger, running a preview, and kicking the blog over the grass and out into the world.
   No.
   I could hunt for another fix.
   Or I could change platforms.
   I think I had a WordPress account for five minutes, back in the Jurassic.
   Perhaps I shall mimic Defoe, and write without let or hindrance – abandoning the many benefits the paragraph brings to the scribbler. Robinson Crusoe isn’t paragraph-free. It just feels that way.
   The challenge is not a difficult one for the blog writer. Though something tells me, call this a wild and impulsive view, yes, something tells me the reader may not feel the ease of the reading challenge wrapped up in a one-paragraph blog.
   Usually these blogs run to 1,500 words or so. The challenge in writing is to avoid hitting the return key. You may think of that as the enter key. Bless your heart if you’ve never experienced the fun of using a manual typewriter. Big fun. All the fun.
   No fun.
   Should I inflict a one-paragraph blog on the readers? Yes, if it is also a one-line paragraph. But wait a bit. How long are my paragraphs anyway? Not long. Back in the Jurassic, I’d rarely go over six lines for a paragraph. On average, I’d write three lines.
   When I saw how my stories looked when transferred to Kindle, I knew the days of the six-line paragraph were dead. A six-line paragraph on the Kindle non-page took up the whole screen.
   I cannot inflict that on the readers. Once, just once, I wrote of a character who babbled for a whole page of text. One paragraph. The paragraph of doom – a doom that rolled over the readers and squished them flatter than pancakes.
   So I decided to blog about this paragraph problem. And I am not looking for answers. I have the fix. The fix is in. And it is annoying. But I no longer care. Perhaps I never cared. As soon as I found the fix, I fixed the problem. Inconvenient to me as the fix is, it is still a fix. There may be a better fix out there.
   I suspect the better fix will come along when Blogger is once again “improved” for the delighted user. Normally, blogging is painless. One paragraph is a different size when the text hits the preview. It is a basic formatting problem. I nuke the paragraph free of its formatting then resize. Job done.
   But here I am, down on the factory floor, conducting paragraph maintenance every time I drop a wad of text into the blogging machine. Could I sidestep the issue by typing raw text straight into the word-sausage maker?
   No.
   If I type directly into blogger, I must still use the fix. The fix is annoying. Instead of hitting the return/enter key, I must hit that key and the shift key at the same time. Yes, this is the fix. It is, to use a technical term, fucking annoying.
   Eat. Drink. Be merry. Wine. Women. Song. (Not wine, though. Wine is decaying grape juice on a long slow journey into becoming vinegar. And people who can’t sing shouldn’t. Other than that, you’re golden.)

Screenshot from the movie Sideways appears under the copyright doctrine of Fair Dealing.

I consider the office and the bookcases and the space for more bookcases and the shelves in those bookcases and the books on those shelves and the words written by good and bad authors in those books.

   Great books by absolute shits and shit books by otherwise great people.
   And I consider the coffee it takes to write those books. Right now I am considering the mints I popped like pills to get me through this meta-textual morass that is a blog post about the annoying change to my blogging routine.
   Imposed on me…
   The change to blogging, not the mints. No one imposes mints upon me. I receive mints graciously, in a room built for the very purpose. Why, yes, it smells of mint. However did you know that?
   See also Would you like to buy the Brooklyn Bridge? It’s a steal at that price. Ah, but before we even get into that bit of nonsense, I must away and slash through the thorny wilderness of formatting to carry this blog from my computer to the internet.
   Also, the chance of being sent to Sing Sing for attempting to sell the Brooklyn Bridge was always rather high. As high as the bridge itself.