The footer was innocent. The template was guilty.

I am, by all reasonable measures, an amateur website builder.

All I wanted to do was put a few books into the world. A small website, a few pages, a quiet little library where the writing could live.

Originally I built the site using one of those tidy website builders where everything behaves itself and the templates do most of the thinking for you. It was all very polished, and also rather expensive.

Eventually I decided I would rather save the money and have my own opinion about how things were arranged.

Which is how I found myself moving everything into WordPress.

I can read instructions. This is not a flat-pack. In fact, I am an outstanding flat-pack builder. I own two drills, which is a fairly serious level of commitment for a girl assembling furniture on the kitchen floor.

How hard can it be?

That, as it turns out, is a dangerous question to ask when WordPress is involved.

At first everything seemed simple enough. Add a page, place the words, adjust the spacing. Nothing unusual.

Then things became curious.

A heading appeared that I had not written. A title repeated itself. Something refused to disappear no matter how many times I deleted it.

Naturally I assumed the page was misbehaving, so I fixed the page.

Which changed absolutely nothing.

After a while you begin to realise something else is at work. The footer looks perfectly sensible. The page appears entirely innocent.

And then, quietly, the truth reveals itself.

The template.

Sitting behind everything, rearranging the furniture while pretending to be helpful.

At this point one briefly considers whether the spooks are at it again. Given my reputation for being a little “woo-woo” by ordinary human standards, this does seem like a plausible explanation.

Unfortunately, the supernatural is innocent in this case.

It is just WordPress.

At that point laughter becomes the only reasonable response, because the truth is quite simple.

I am not a web developer. I am someone who wanted to write a few books.

Creation rarely travels in straight lines. Sometimes it arrives as words, sometimes as ideas, and occasionally it arrives disguised as a long afternoon wrestling with WordPress.

Fortunately, I also happen to be interested in artificial intelligence, which meant I had a very patient assistant helping me search the house for the missing template.

The books are now exactly where they belong.

The website, however, is still finding its shape.

Which, when one thinks about it, was rather the point of leaving the tidy templates behind in the first place.

— Saint Parousia