Addendum — Occasionally, after publishing a piece, I’ll have some additional thoughts I would like to go back and include. Since I don’t edit entries (aside from typos) after publication, these thoughts usually never see the light of day. Occasionally, though, if I really left something important out, or a wave a clarity hits me and changes my mind, or I just want to say more, I’ll write an addendum.*
*(Way back in the archives you may find post titles that include “Follow-Up.” That’s the same concept; I just hadn’t settled on “Addendum” yet, and, per my not editing past posts policy, I won’t change those at this point.)
Aliases — If you have not already perused the Dramatis Personae entry, and you have not otherwise read very far into the site, you may not yet realize I am ridiculously fond of giving people pointless and sometimes misleading pseudonyms. I do this, ostensibly, for the sake of their anonymity, but mostly because it amuses me, and if you can’t amuse yourself on your own website, it’s time to try something else.
Content — I caught myself almost just using this word to refer to my writing. That’s a bad habit lingering from a job I used to have. I loathe “content.” Also, “content creator.” I know, I know, they’re industry-specific terms and they have a broader application, yada yada yada. Fuck that. I’m a writer, goddammit.
Day Job — I have one, usually. I earn zero income from this site, and I don’t seriously ever expect to earn any. I do it for other reasons. Anyway, I work at A Place, which pays me A Salary, and that is all I have to say about that. If you need to hear some pointless legalese, well, sure: All thoughts expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of My Employer, whom I never mention anyway except in vague terms such as My Employer.
[expletive deleted] — In the wayback days, I used this phrase to humorously indicated the act of cursing. It was a holdover from my newspaper columnist days, where of course I could not use expletives. I eventually dropped this when it dawned on me that this is my own fucking site and I may curse whenever I goddamned please. Still, I keep myself mostly PG-13, which is, more or less, what you might expect to encounter from me in real life.
Footnotes — I like footnotes. There are some sites in the world that use ’em well, but they require more coding know-how than I am inclined to get into. Someday, maybe. It’s not that I can’t, but it messes with my writing flow. Thus, for the longest time I avoided using footnotes because I was afraid of them not looking right. Screw it. I like footnotes, so for now, I’ll use the method you will see elsewhere on this page — asterisks marking the note, with the note contained by parentheses in a separate paragraph following after the end of the paragraph in which the thing being referenced was used.*
*(Like this. Also, some sentence that one, eh?)
Labels — I am very fond of them, but only really for making cheeky jokes, which is why they damn near outnumber the blog posts themselves. Bear this in mind if you try using them to find other posts you might like. Who knows? Might be a fun journey.*
*(Fun most definitely not guaranteed.)
The Dusty Old Newspaper Stylebook — When I worked for newspapers, I had to abide by this creaky, out-dated, self-contradicting, pain-in-the-ass guide to how to put words on a page. Now I don’t. I did not, as did My Friend The Former Lifestyle Editor Who Retired And Turned Mystery Writer, throw my copy into a creek upon leaving the news biz, but some days I think I should’ve.
Wordless Wednesday — You might run across this label on a few posts, if you dig far enough back in the archives. (Thank you, for digging in the archives.) I think the posts are labeled just WW, though, because that really made them absolutely wordless. Shut up. I said wordless, not worthless. This was a thing I did for awhile, back when I was trying to keep myself on a schedule and post everyday. (I managed that for about 40 days. A literal 40 days, not a “God made it rain for 40 days” 40 days. Maybe 45. I’m too lazy to go look right now.) Anyway, that started, I think, as an old blog prompt and I picked it up mostly to amuse My Younger Sister, who is a professionally trained photographer. I may pick it up again, so if you see it — hooray! — you’ll know what it’s about. Except I don’t think I’ll keep to the rule about not writing anything else that day. I spent too long, recently, not writing, so these days I write whenever I damn well want to.
Footnote*
I had been looking, vaguely, for a place to put some notes about the site in general, and this seems a good spot. This is a work in progress, so please excuse any mess, and realize it may look differently this time tomorrow. For now it contains mostly my initial thoughts when I emerged from hibernation back in early November 2019 –a few things I thought of off the top of my head while putting it together. It is gradually growing as of autumn 2020, at which time I added some entries and alphabetized the lot.
* (Wait, this isn’t the method discussed in the Footnote entry above! What’s going on?!)**
**(As Emerson*** put it, ““A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds …” Note the ellipsis at the end of that quotation. That’s because it comes from the beginning of a longer spiel he wrote about being a great soul and being misunderstood. I think he’d been drinking, honestly.)
***(Ralph Waldo. Who else?)
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