Dixon's Forum

Well, heck, I missed another week.    Sorry to all who missed me.

I get kind o’ discouraged, having zero comments after all this effort.    This is a high-maintenance website, as a matter of style, with each blog post having its own introductory home page.    Part of that was because core WordPress is easier for me to understand but I needed Elementor to put the stationery    image behind the text, and partly because I wanted to invite comments for the Weekly Activities blog posts, but not invite them for the introductions.    I haven’t yet learned enough HTML to do that stuff on my own.

Plus, it can jump directly from one post of a given category to the next or previous post of the same category, which the canned automatic navigation features can’t handle.    Like if you’d like to continue straight to Segment Three of “That’s my Way” from Segment Two, but the chronologically next post is “Unentitled” Installment Three.

There’s a special navigation menu after each category post, where the “Next %post%” button skips over all the other categories to the next post of the same category.    Each week, after preparing the Weekly Activity and formatting it to the Web screen, I have to put the proper links in each button.

There are buttons for the previous, current, and next introductory home pages, for the previous and next actual posts, a button for the index of the posts in the post’s category, and a button for the index of all my posts of all categories.    

I keep track of which button points where for each post in a table on a sheet of grid paper, yet to be computerized.

So it takes a lot of time each week, more than I had imagined, and sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it, if anybody’s even seeing it, as I have no comments yet even after all this effort.    Plus I have to keep up my day job.

It’s part my fault; I haven’t pinged the Googlebots yet.  But from what little I understand, I figure they must have found dixonsforum.com by now anyway, and today the proof arrived, in the form of Dixon’s Forum’s very first unsolicited email!

Actually, it arrived tomorrow, since I’m also late for this week — though this is backdated  Sunday from Tuesday, the first email arrived Monday, the second Tuesday.    So I’m looking at two emails from the future.

They’re from people offering  first page ranking in Google and other search engines.    One of them said the site has a good design and looks great.    I bet they say that to all the newbies.

All I want, though, is a few conversations about the ideas in the stories, poetry, artworks and entertainments I present.

Early on, I thought a tip jar was a good idea, to help pay for hosting services and other websiting expenses, but that whole endeavor imploded in a comedy of errors that rendered me unwelcome in the Stripe payment gateway, WordPress’s favorite, for being suspicious.    I may someday find an usable alternative, but I still have to keep up my day job.

Well, I told you all of that to tell you this:    I didn’t feel like doing anything labor-intensive for this week’s Activity.    No photos to take and upload, no poems to format for screen, just a simple short story with plain old paragraphs.

That’s what “Hyperdreams” is, simple short story, plain old paragraphs.    But it was written to explain the method of time travel for a book I  haven’t gotten around to writing yet.

Basically, long story short, a kid grows up hating his horrible father, mostly for how he treats his mother.    The dad is a literature professor who loathes his job, is bitter, mean, and horrible.

The kid loves science.    In college, he helps a physics professor with a time travel project.

Basically, in a nutshell, the kid comes home from class one day to find his mother has fallen victim to suicide at the hands of his father, so he kills his father and flees to the time machine, vowing to go back and kill him again, before he ever met his mother and made her life a living hell, even knowing it’s only a one-way trip.

Basically, in a nutshell, he goes back, kills his father and assumes his identity as a literature professor, tantalized by the science departments so near and yet so far away.    He marries his father’s girl, they have a baby, which it dawns with mounting horror is himself as a child.    Trapped in a job he detests, unable to answer his true calling, knowing the kid will grow up to kill him, he grows bitter, mean, and horrible, becoming his father, who was always the older version of himself, and drove his wife to suicide.

Basically, in a nutshell, the first half of the book is about having a horrible father, the last half is about being one.

The time travel part is only a thin sliver out of the middle, and has nothing to do with the story other than the time travel theory itself.    “Hyperdreams” is just a practice piece to try and make the theory sound plausible, as good science fiction must.

So, to answer the problem of the kid contributing to his own gene mix, the mother had an affair and the literature professor wasn’t his biodad like they thought; the physics and math of the time travel are what “Hyperdreams” is all about.

Click here    to see the second Gallimauf:   “Hyperdreams”, and here       for its home page. 

Next Week:   I really want to do exhibit One of the Essential Art mentioned in the September 22 introductory home page for the stupidest thing I’ve ever written, and hope to find time enough to present it well.    I still have to keep up my day job.