Have you ever created a parallel universe?
‘Tisn’t easy.
If a writer is famous, said writer will have things like interviews. You would click on Famous Writer’s website, and there would be links to such interviews. Obviously, I can’t actually link to The New York Times or some parallel universe equivalent. And a blog doesn’t allow you to dramatically alter a blog page to look like a newspaper…and while I can create a newspaper type document on my laptop, I can’t post it in a blog post because the fonts, columns, pictures, etc. won’t simply copy into the post.
I also have an idea for the characters of the novels to contribute…but for similar formatting reasons can’t pull that off either.
Free blogs don’t really have that much flexibility (freedom for imagination), do they? Hence the free.
I’m not even sure a regular paid-for website could do what I want. Certainly not on my budget–my budget being $0. This project isn’t going to make me any money after all, so taking money from our there-is-no-money-for-random-projects budget isn’t going to happen.
If you’ve any thoughts or suggestions, please tell me.
My parallel universe might not be as vast as I’d like. Not at the moment anyway.
P.S. And to make the parallel universe interesting, it has to have a story. Reading about the daily routine of a famous writer isn’t much more interesting than listening to the daily routine of an unknown writer. So…something else has to happen over there.
All the same, my parallel universe is here.
Marta Pelrine-Bacon 
Hm…well my website is quite cheap, $5 a month, and buying the domain is, like, 15 for 2 years. And a lot of times they have sales on different suffixes, like .info or .biz, and you can get them for two bucks. It’s not zero, but it’s pretty close. Of course, if you use your hosting with wordpress pre-installed like I do, you’ll be stuck in the same way you are now, and if you get a clean slate hosting then you’ll have to build a website yourself.
I’m fairly sure Blogger can do some of the customizations you’re talking about–it’s at least more flexible than WP.
Another thing you might consider is mocking up the document you want and then uploading it as a photo.
Sounds like you could get a book out of this in the future…in this universe. 🙂
I had a Blogger blog a long time ago (in Internet years) and I don’t know how much it has changed. Then it only a few templates and a few ways to change them. I don’t know any code or html or whatever it is called, so I can’t build anything myself anyway. There might be more I can do with WP–I just don’t know enough to figure it out.
I may do the photo. We’ll see.
As for a book in this universe…I’m trying not to think about it.
Ha, sorry I brought it up! Hey, I thought of something else. If you had another WP address just for news articles and stuff, they do make themes to mimic newsy-type sites. That might make things more complicated than you want, but WP urls are free…
Anyway, good luck with it.
I like Sherri’s idea about finding a newsy-type WP theme.
(Personally, I much, much prefer WordPress to Blogger. I’ve got only the one WP blog, but also administer and sometimes write for a bunch of Blogger ones; they drive me crazy. Otoh, as you say, maybe it’s because of my comfort level with HTML and such… It feels a little like the arguments 20+ years ago about WordPerfect (coincidentally another “WP”) vs. Word.)
One thing I thought of when I first read this: the parallel universe doesn’t have to match up with this one down to the level of hyperlink technology. Maybe there, the ability to create a hyperlink is proprietary, owned by a big search-and-index company, so blogs can’t hyperlink directly without (a) paying an exorbitant fee for the technology or (b) just saying, like, “Go to Massive Search-and-Index Company’s site and look for information on this upcoming concert.”
Or maybe hyperlinks created in one universe don’t work in the other. (I can show you how to do something very simple which looks and acts like a hyperlink but does exactly nothing.)
Or whatever. Point being, when the constraints of interfacing the universe get in your way, just invent some reason why it honestly can’t be done. Hey, BOTH worlds are yours. 🙂
Yes, leaving comments on a Blogger drives me crazy. But! But I think I’ve just gone the wordpress route…
This whole universe thing is a work in progress.
You know, if I believed in creationism–which I don’t–I’d wonder if God feels this way about our known universe. “It’s a work in progress, people!”