It seems Facebook is going to require some $$ to see and be seen. I’m not going to pay to promote the Dead Mule on Facebook. What I am going to do is to blog again. Blog the updates. Blog the love. Blog the support. And hope our readers find it here and sometimes they might find it on Facebook.
That is the first item of business. Secondly, we are reading submissions and accepting stories and essays as quickly as possible. Helen has poetry lined up, but we are also taking submissions and we are all reading them. You can still submit Poetry, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Essays, Flash Essays by going to the Submission Page and clicking on the link to SUBMISHMASH. We look forward to reading your poems. To enjoying your stories. To reveling in your essays. You, the writer, are the most important part of the Mule. Your story is our story.
Right now the Mule is in a state of flux. A true HTML quagmire. When we updated the theme to the latest edition of Word Press, the formatting for apostrophes and quotation marks became messed up. There are fancy terms for that kind of thing. I could look them up. I would rather tell you what is going on.
So far, after reading through hundreds, maybe thousands, of lines of code, I cannot come up with a reason why this happened. We are using UTF-8 as we should. Our style sheet and header and footer settings seem to be the correct ones. The new posts on the Mule do not have problems. The idea of going through every post on the Mule to correct the mis-code and all the apparent problems — just not something I want to consider. There is no way that we, or any volunteers, are going to want to do that. No one has the time to go through 15 years of issues. I guess we just have to leave things as they are. We will continue to try to correct the Mule pages.
I will try to enter new poems and stories, new creative non-fiction/essays and maybe everyone can deal with the bad stuff for now. It seems to me the emphasis should be on publishing new writing and then working on fixing the old issues as we have time. If anyone out there is geekier than me or my support folks, if you know how to fix this, please let me know. The only fix for now is re-entering every single page or post on the Mule. Yup. I mean, Nope. As in Not Going to Happen. This is a horrible blow to you who are already on here. It sucks having your work look as if it is in, as one reader put it, Greek.
And we are sorry.
Look for new Mule fiction and essays, also poetry by mid-November. If we can’t fix the bad code, we can offer new works.
the Mule loves you all.
-Valerie MacEwan
Publisher and Editor
