Zen Master: Blog

Jack, Jack, Jack. I think you've missed the point. That is, if you are looking for wisdom and knowledge. If, on the other hand, you are simply looking for an argument, then I believe I'm supposed to start out by saying something that LZ would delete when someone pointed it out to him.

Um, intentions, reality, and perceptions are very often three different things. And, if there is more than one person involved, you can even add additional perceptions to the mess. I have no idea what LZ had originally intended for the blogs and the forums. It's quite possible that he never had any intended use; he simply set them up because the people who came to his website asked for them.

In my experience -which I recognize may be different from yours- the _blogs_ tend to be bombastic wastes of space, mostly "Hey, everyone, look! I posted another chapter." And, as a matter of results, the blog entry announcing chapter 12 shows up on the home-page stream AFTER the actual chapter 12 entry shows up, making it of absolutely no value to anyone. Of course, as you pointed out many of the blog entries do say something useful.

On the other hand, what I've seen of the forums is more of a question and answer session. There are a lot of rants, but mostly it's been people asking questions. And people giving answers. Not always even on the same subject much less actually helpful, mind you, but answers.

With that in mind, I'd suggest that you have it exactly backwards: The forums are for the thoughtful while the blogs are more for those who just want to talk and they have no interest in any answers.

The truth (as I see it) turns out to be orthogonal to intention. It has been my experience that my blogs are generally answered by readers with a few writers tossed in, while my forum comments are generally answered by other authors, with an occasional reader who got lost. So, these days I use the blog to talk to my readers while I use the forums to ask questions of the other authors. Read whatever you want into the sorts of answers I get.

-ZM

...and I will start posting Part Two next Monday, April 29. Again, the story is complete and all chapters will be queued to post automatically at 8AM (US Eastern Time) every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until all chapters have been posted.
Unfortunately, I won't be available most of the time to listen to people who notice mistakes. Please send me an email and I will read them when I can.

-ZM

I am about to go off-line for a few weeks. I do this fairly often, but this is the first time I've done it in the middle of posting one of my longer stories. I have set up all of the remaining chapters of "Part One" to be automatically posted every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8AM (Eastern Time), or as soon after that as the site's moderators get to it. The last chapter, #35, should go up on April 24th.
If I'm back online by then, "Part Two" will go up on the same schedule. If not, it will go up as soon as I get back to civilization. It is complete and returned from the proofreaders, but I keep messing with it.

-ZM

(If something goes wrong with a post while I am away from my desk, please contact Nuke Danger 3rd Eye who knows how to reach me. It will still probably have to wait until I return to civilization to fix it, but at least I'll know there's a problem and can be thinking about it.)

It's common to use the asterisk '*' to mean multiplication. If you need to square a number, maybe '50', you say '50*50'.

If there's more, you keep doing that, maybe to multiply what you got by Pi, you would add '*3.14' to your formula to get the area in square units of some circle.

This doesn't work, here on SOL. If you want something in bold you surround it by those same asterisks again....

So, instead of my formula looking like '50 times 50 times Pi' what got shown on the screen was '50503.14' which makes no sense to anyone unless you know what happened. I have re-posted Chapter 16 using 'x' instead of '*'.

Oh, and I fixed a minor continuity error I saw. I think I'm paying my proofreaders too much.

-ZM

This website has recently added an internal email system. It works great for conversations. Feedback to the authors from a story get sent as new emails. Authors can reply, and those get sent back as emails to whoever sent the original comment.
I keep getting emails from 'CoullPert' with issues he (she?) has found in my latest story "Jason's Tale". Many are valid and I fix them in my original 'master' copy. Others I explain in my replies. However, the website's email system shows that CoullPert has not yet read any of my replies. What's the point of replying if he isn't going to read them?

-ZM