When I was in the 7th Grade my English Teacher gave me a paper bag filled with back issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Great magazine. Lots of great stories. And lots of crap stories as well. Those below par stories that helped to fill the magazine out inspired me to become a writer. For the next few years I would bang out bad short fiction and send it off to the three or four Science Fiction/Mystery magazines that published monthly digests. Then something happened, I got a handwritten rejection letter saying they were looking forward to my next story.…
Category: blogging
From Typewriter to Technorati: My Journey as an Old-School Blogger in a Modern World
I used to write these long rambling letters to everyone I knew. Pages and pages of random thoughts and poems and photos and whatnot. I banged them out on an old typewriter and I still refer to the ‘Enter’ key as the ‘Return’ key. I was blogging before there were blogs. A pretty lesbian I liked to write to told me I should write a blog. So I did. It was a more personal blog than the ones I write now. Filled with intimate details, rants about the unfairness of it all, and the usual mundane daily business of a…
Blogging, Writing, and Ginger
I wrote my first short story when I was in Middle School. It wasn’t very good, but I did have fun writing it. It was a bit of SciFi fluff about some colony meeting a bad end. It was followed by dozens of similar stories set in a wide variety of futures, exploring a number cliched topics that had already been written about my Wells and Verne. My writing style was minimalist at best. At about the same time I was writing letters to my friends, girlfriends, and any random stranger foolish enough to give me an address. These letters…
Elephant Girl
“We’ve got two lives — one we’re given and the other one we make.” ― Mary Chapin Carpenter Jane Devin doesn’t agree with Mary Chapin Carpenter, she has a more deterministic view of the universe. Jane sees her life as a river flowing beyond her control, going places she doesn’t want to go, and forcing her to be something she doesn’t want to be. All memoirs like to find one note and continue to strike it over and over again. Memoirs by chefs and restaurant critics tell how food rules their lives. Memoirs of artists talk about art, musicians talk about music,…
That Was The Year That Was
This was the year that my blog got hacked and I got a bit discouraged about the whole thing. I went from around 3,500 visitors in February to a low of about 10 visitors in April. I have since leveled out at about 1,500 visitors a month. I have found myself less interested in a number of things, and am blogging a bit less as a result. Most of my random visitors are looking for pictures. My most popular Google image search terms are related to Burger King, Mountain Dew Throwback, and House on Vicodin. My most popular posts are one about Team Name…
Blogs I Wanna Be When I Grow Up
Last year I had a bit of luck and got a few hits on a couple of Popular Posts, well, for me anyway. These posts kept my daily visitors at around 1,000 and often over a 1,000 a day. I know, you scoff at my measly 1,000 hits a day. Muhahah! I get that before breakfast! You say with justifiable contempt. Or maybe you’re one of those bloggers whose hits all come from you checking your stats every hour. I was there in the beginning as well. But now that I have a couple of years under my belt and…
Big Plans for November
Among the normal stuff of my life-working, traveling, trying to make ends meet, and attempting to get my Voice Over Career a bit of a start-I have a few other projects I am working on in November. In fairly typical manic depressive fashion-though I am feeling much better now-I have decided to have a go at a number of online events which I have never done before. Ok, I have written 30 posts in 30 days, but I have never been a member of NaBloPoMo while doing so. I have this mad idea to try and get If You Write…
Blogging and Free Stuff
Seth Godin talks about freebies for bloggers in his book Meatball Sundae. He says that an office chair manufacturer send him an email saying they would like to send him a chair and ask that he review it-and give them a link to their website. He says its a six hundred dollar chair, but that doing a paid review for an office chair would not fit in with his overall business plans. It isn’t scalable and it would just drive his regular readers away. He goes on to say that the people making the chairs should look for blogs that…
A Week Without Blogging
Ok, maybe not quite a week, but pretty close to it. And I have been writing, just not blogging. My work moves me around and there are times when-shockingly-I don’t have the internet close at hand. Yes it is possible to use a dial up connection, but just thinking of that slow death was enough to make me just step back and think about my life as a blogger. I had hopes of becoming a professional blogger and making a living from my random thoughts and silly observations. But I have not quite figured out how to do that yet.…
Follow This Blog with Blogger Followers
Blogger has always been my blog platform of choice, though the serious bloggers all say to get your own domain if you want to hit the big time. Maybe one of these days, but not just yet. The good people at Blogger keep rolling out new widgets and doodads and I stop by from time to time to take a look at them. Followers allows you to keep tabs on blogs you like and lets others keep tabs on what is going on at your blog. Clicking on the Icon does not take you directly to the blogger’s blog, but…