I headed out of town for a few days, and while I had planned to keep blogging while I was away, I didn’t have a good internet connection on my laptop. This is starting to annoy me a bit…several times I’ve been hoping to write something, or work on a project, and my laptop is just struggling to do anything with the internet. I have a good tablet, I have a good phone, but I need to figure out a different option for online access where I need to be typing stuff. I was offline essentially for 5 days, so I figured I might as well drop the TIC series, it was just too hard to write.

And yet it wasn’t just about the writing. I was also struggling in the environment I was in, a basic holding pattern, to really feel like I was making conscious choices. All I could do was hold still. I thought about tricking myself into saying the TIC “drop” or break in the chain wasn’t my fault, but I could have still kept making choices even if I didn’t write about them right away. But I didn’t feel like I was. So it definitely has to be thought of as a clean break and takes me to series f.

Now that I’m back to the house, and at my desktop again, I’m a bit out of sorts as to what in my long list of things do I want to work on. One thing that is attracting my interest is that I have a series of blog posts that I have written but which are stuck in editing limbo because I haven’t quite figured out the right layout and format for them. I solved some recent layout issues for music, although not completely, and for book reviews, although again not completely. The structure is done, just some of the editing and population still needs work. Which is fine, no issues there. Just a question of time and discipline.

My TV reviews were a bit more problematic. Or at least they seemed to be. I have only compiled 12 of them on the website, 8 seasons of Castle and 4 seasons of Continuum. To do the reviews, there are a number of variables for consistency:

• Format of the page title;
• Layout of the actual review itself, including two images;
• Four or five headings to structure the review;
• A graphical representation of my overall rating of the season;
• Closing signature block;
• Two links to other reviews or the show on IMDB.com; and,
• A list of the episodes for that season.

I knew generally what I wanted to do, based on earlier wrestling matches with the seasons of Castle. But I was not completely thrilled with my review of Castle – Season 1 (PWTVR00001). There was something about the start of it that kept nagging at me, like I didn’t have something quite right for format or design.

But I just had a similar problem with my music reviews, and I realized for that one that it was more about flow and repetition. Could this be the same problem? It was. For some reason, I had started my review with some text that should be paragraph 2 and 3, and buried my lede for paragraph 1 farther down. A bit of editing, some rearranging, some deletions, and voila, it held together. Now that I could see what it SHOULD have said, I could figure out the rest of the headings and framework. I then replicated it 7 more times, moving 8 reviews out of “pending” and into “published”.

I had a different problem with Continuum. I had tried formatting it earlier to sort of / kind of match the Castle layouts, and for some strange reason, I was getting a really weird layout as a result. Sidebars went missing, featured images weren’t aligning properly, word wrap was doing things in weird places. All four posts / reviews were messed up. And while I would love to know what the problem was, it was easier to just copy the text to a notepad, thus stripping out stupid codes that were messing it up, pasting them into a whole new post with the proper TV review formats and structure, unfortunately redoing some links here and there, but in the end, fixing 4 more posts.

Thus completing 12 TV reviews that were pending and giving me another big strike-through on my to do list. If I want to move on to other reviews, I can. And I will in time. But for now? The previous 12 are fixed, published, and done.

Today I choose to figure out my TV reviews.

What choices are you making today?