I’ve been clawing my way up the learning curve of WordPress.   Here are a few things I’ve learned that might help you.

<rant
The WordPress forums are populated with people who are often wrong, never in doubt, and ready at a moment’s notice to misinterpret or dismiss a question.   Whew, I feel better.

I’ve never posted a question, but I can’t count the number of times that I’ve found that someone asked about exactly the same problem I was encountering, only to get “You are posting in the wrong forum”, or RTFM.  But, what else do you expect on the net, where people who otherwise live oppressed lives of quiet desperation get to seem important.
/rant>

OK, I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush.  There are some smart, helpful people out there.   The problem is that you have to go through a lot of dross to find a nugget.

An illuminating exchange is here, where one relative newbie thought that the Worpress Codex (the supposed canons of the codes) was wrong on a small but sometimes important point.   How many angels can dance on the ?>

One technical thing I’ve learned is that despite all indications in the admin interface, and lots of advice to that effect on the forums, your blog post page will not use a custom template, no matter how many times you try to convince it to.  It will always traverse the standard page template hierarchy.   Actually, it probably does use the custome template, but it just doesn’t look like it is using it.  Confused.  Me to, over many hours until I ran across this classic blow-off on a WP forum.  When you follow the bug posting you actually get a useful answer.

I’ll add information later, particularly about how I was able to display posts on two separate pages.   That is, I will once I am sure I understand the subtlety that finally made it work.