MRFortenberry Pen

I had promised one week for next update and today makes two weeks. But, that’s an improvement over previous gaps.

Those two weeks have been rather hectic personally so other than exercise, which I refuse to miss, some things remained undone.

The latest status on Scrivener/DropBox/iPad/iMac has not really changed. I am able to populate the dropbox directory(ies) with files but it’s still a mystery how one would just put the whole project there and finish on iPad, go to iMac, and resume from the last update on the iPad which should have synced to the iMac. I will get back to this around and about other events.

On a personal note, we went to a wine tasting with another couple and there are shared interests to explore. As the weather warms, which seems far away from now, I look forward to the possibilities.

Writing has taken a back seat recently also and that will change this week. I need to continue my current path and prepare something for the upcoming North Fork Pen meeting at the Mattituck Laurel library.

On an entertainment note, if you have not checked out ‘Magpie Murders’, it should go to the top of your list. I am also enjoying ‘Shetland’ on Britbox. As to reading, I am currently at various places in three books, actually four as i think of it. I need to finish one or more of those this week as I have some ‘Want to read’ books on my list.

I reached out to Dropbox answering the suggestions made and explaining why they were insufficient. I then outlined the issue concisely as a number of bullet points. Dropbox support basically said they do not support what I am trying to do. I offered my time in collaboration with support to create a step by step procedure others could follow. I was told support is not available for that and further I should reach out to the application I am using; i.e. Scrivener. Scrivener says go to Dropbox and Dropbox says go to Scrivener. I once worked in technical support and I understand the perspective but what would be so bad about creating a useful tool others could use in their adoption efforts for these platforms?

I have been pursuing my own research in parallel and while there are many how-to texts and videos, I prefer text usually, they are either for things that are not what I need or for those who have not read the help and done any research.

This is not to say I have not made progress. I have managed to set up directories in Dropbox and attempted to point my iMac to those directories as well as iPad to the cloud and both to the url for Dropbox. Each side says all is ok but there is no synchronization. My last work was all on iPad. Today I will recheck everything on iMac and hope for the best. I will update if this is resolved.

I am continuing to experiment with Scrivener’s compile function with my existing passages. I will also work on the next passage today or tomorrow.

Let me end by wishing everyone a happy holiday season as it is once again upon us.

I found this was not published though I wrote it on 10/24. I’ll publish it now and just specific it was the second post.

Wow! I just spent a half hour or more just trying to login to WordPress. It has to be the slowest application, perhaps because it is browser based. I thought I had lost all my account details and previous post. Given the choice of new post or new page, I am guessing a new page would be a page for the website versus my journal or blog or posts. Although I have designed and written software for 35 years, though recently retired, I am not very familiar with blogs though I have worked on web pages. Still, I am not familiar with WordPress and the dozen or so emails I have received suggest ways and offer help for designing a site. Initially, I just want to comment on the process of my writing endeavors.

I first thought and my plan has been to write a historical novel, prompted by love of Zane Grey’s ‘Riders of the Purple Sage’ and James Clavell’s ‘Shogun’ among others. However, as I stared at empty pages and accumulated notes on my first idea, I experienced what I would term writer’s block when it came to character profiles and story though I know the historic event and its detail.

This led to thinking what I had been writing as desire and time permitted over previous years and that was recollections of events I used to practice writing. I called those vignettes or snippets ‘Memorable Moments’.

I keep telling myself; more consistency, less delay, but even though I have been retired more than four months, I still run out of time trying to accomplish all I want. Let’s catch up first:

I attended the next monthly meeting of North Fork Pen! Congratulations to Susan Maclelland on the publication of her book of poems: ‘Follow the Little Footprints’. We had decided a prompt exercise would be fun and we tried that out this past meeting. Basically, a prompt was selected and we each had about 10 minutes to go wherever we decided and then share our result with the group. It was fun for all and I managed a short two paragraphs when I had expected writer’s block. I have to remember, write as a stream of consciousness and stop making corrections as I go. I also bought a book called ‘642 Things to Write About’ (Guided Journal, Creative Writing, Writing Prompt Journal). When faced with the blank page, I will try that method again.

Once again trying to start WordPress, I struggled, then realized there is a wordpress.org and a wordpress.com. Org knows nothing about me but com does so I’ll have to remember that for next time. The next hurdle will be getting from this draft to published post which does not seem intuitive when I created ‘Post Initialization’.

I did spend several hours, perhaps more, trying to sync Dropbox with Scrivener so I can work on my iPad (using today) and iMac while the output stays synced. I had tremendous problems and have not solved them all. The help and tutorials just say do x, y, z and all should work, but that is not my experience. First and foremost, somehow Scrivener’s backup mode turned on and overflowed my 2G space resulting in a need to free trial 1T so I could find out what was up. The fourth chat agent guessed it was the backup gone crazy and he was right on. That is now turned off but no example I found takes one step by step through how and where the directory structure begins and ends and what has to be shared, i.e. root or each folder, etc. Suffice to say that so far I am still not synced successfully and have to manually update iMac or iPad depending where my last updates were made. Once I figure out the whole thing, step by step, I’ll create a post with the steps that worked for me.

Onward and upward, the holidays are here and tomorrow is Turkey day. Happy Thanksgiving to all and I’ll be writing again next week at the least.

Later!