Tag: blogging

all part of the process (writing about my writing)

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a writer. As a voracious reader, and avid lover of books, it seemed obvious to me that I would one day write a novel. I can’t really say at what point this dream faded, but I would be surprised if I ever got down to writing a novel. I don’t have a driving need to do so. I might some day explore writing shorter works, such as a children’s picture book. (I do love picture books.) Or perhaps something even shorter, like a greeting card. (I don’t much like greeting cards.) What I have discovered is that I do enjoy putting together words, and this blog is the place where I most like to put them together.

My friend Sarah, who currently posts at Splitting Infinitives, is a phenomenal writer, and I don’t say that lightly. I was therefore enormously flattered that she asked me to participate in a meme to explore the writing process.¹ Sarah’s way of putting words together gives me great pleasure, and the content of her writing regularly makes me think. I very much enjoyed reading her reflections on her own writing process.

In any case, she passed along these 4 questions, and I have put a bit of time into answering them.

1) What are you working on?
2) How does your work differ from others’ work in the same genre?
3) Why do you write what you do?
4) How does your writing process work?

What I am working on is a lot of academic writing. My goal is to finish my degree requirements, as well as submit papers to journals and conferences. The big thing, of course, is the dissertation, though I am not officially working on that yet. I have a few more loose ends to tie up, after which I will assemble previously constructed chunks of my research and stitch them together with a few yet-to-be completed chunks of research, then infuse this mass with my sweat, tears and lifeblood. Finally, I will run large currents of electricity through the resulting body of work in hopes that it will take on life. (And that it won’t get driven out of town by villagers bearing torches and pitchforks.)

As for the personal writing, I wouldn’t say that I am actually working on anything. Actually, that’s sort of the point. It is not work. What writing I do is for the pleasure of it.

I don’t really know what my genre is. Much as I love to categorize things, I hate to feel categorized myself. At least not into a single category. This blog in particular is a means for me to express the various aspects of my life and personality, and allows me to present myself as more than just “mother,” or “grad student,” or “feminist.” I am all of these thing and more. I explore many topics, and many forms. Perhaps my genre is “eclectic personal blogging.”

I sometimes wonder if my mind works differently than other people’s. I am constantly collecting things: facts, images, words, themes, ideas. At some point, something will trigger an idea, and my mind races to fit all the related bits with it, and display (or sometimes build) a pattern.

For example, I take a lot of photos of things in my environment. Sometimes it’s pretty leaves and flowers, but also cracks in the sidewalk and water drops on the windshield, or frozen puddles. Hydrants I pass on the street…rusty dumpsters…brick walls. Shadows, reflections, signs, clouds. Sometimes I will take a picture and it will remind me of a picture I took once before, even years previously, and I will group the photos together. Sometimes I will then seek out additional images to fill out the pattern. (I have this strange but compelling compulsion to collect things in group of at least 3. More is fine, but 2 somehow seems like only the suggestion of a pattern’s beginning.)

I don’t always feel the need to share patterns when I find and build them. Sometimes I file things away for future use. My iPhoto library contains a hive of folders with related sets. I have also been adding tags and metadata to the photos for years so that if I want to, for example, find photos that I like that prominently feature shadows or gates (or shadows of gates), I can find them. The keywords are not infinite, but somehow express my personal lexicon of imagery.

Sometimes I am similarly compelled to make a list. For a long time, I would post my Themed Things Thursday lists with great regularity. The chosen themes would sometimes relate to a nearby holiday or date, or just be inspired by a pattern I’d noticed. (Separate and distinctive things I have known or observed with some sort of feature in common: blue people or stories with peaches or fight scenes in subways.) Once my mind has caught the beginnings of a pattern, it will nag at me until I have sifted through my memories and my knowledge for things on the theme. Often, I will just jot down the skeleton of the list and be done with it. I currently have saved (in the drafts of my Mail application, to be specific) 48 partial ThThTh lists, in varying stages of completion. If I feel compelled to see the list through to a post, then things take longer. I will do some web searches, mostly to find iconic images, and I might poke around Wikipedia to flesh out a theme. Mostly, though, I don’t post those lists any more. They take a lot of time for formatting and fact checking and finding and sourcing images, and the returns on this time investment are not significantly greater than the satisfaction I get just from jotting down the list.

The process for other creative posts is sometimes similar, whether it’s for another list-form post, or one in more of an essay form, or even the occasional poem. I like to play with words and idioms, and come up with expressions that are relating to specific words. (Case in point: pants.) Sometimes I will share a set of pictures that work together to tell a story.

Along with these collections of related words or images, I will write things as the mood strikes. I write posts that help me see humor when my life otherwise seems overwhelming. (My last American Hovel Magazine post was written when I was feeling crushed by the chaos in my life and depressed by the lack of progress in my degree. I wanted to just sit in the fetal position. Writing about the mess in a way that made me laugh helped me keep going.) Other times I write stories because I want to preserve memories (of my travels, my childhood, my children). Sometimes I just want to work through my thoughts on current events.

Above all, I love to run with themes. I find my blogging the most satisfying when the themes are ongoing or recurring. It allows me to feel like I am creating something of complex and interweaving patterns: a bizarre tapestry of puns and photos and lists and pants. For this reason, my blog may be confusing to those who happen upon it. They will see a given post, and think that it somehow represents “what I write about.” But it will often be just a single thread that forms part of a bigger picture, tangled though it may be. (In case it is not clear, I also like to play with metaphors.)

I do all of my actual writing on my laptop, as well as the photo editing and sorting, while sitting in the dent I have worn in my couch cushions. The creative process, though, happens all the time. My eyes and ears are always alert for new patterns. My thoughts wander to things I want to write about while I am going about other mundane business. I might be stuck in traffic and coming up with cooking metaphors, or cooking dinner and coming up with a list of driving metaphors. I might be doing laundry and mentally making a list of shark movies. (Or doing laundry and making a list of laundry songs.)

Many posts never make it into writing, others have never proceeded past the draft stage. I try to edit well, but I am a slow editor, and sometimes I sacrifice editing in order to post. I aim to keep my posts short in words, and try to rarely exceed 500 words if I want other people to read my words.² Sometimes I will post longer things, but I accept that these are mostly written for me. It’s gravy if someone else takes the time to read what I’ve written.³

Next week, Stacie is going to take up the baton to explore her writing process. Stacie is an amazing writer, and like Sarah, has a way of putting together words that makes me want to savor them. Her writing at her blog If you want kin, you must plant kin, too, always gets me thinking. (It’s funny to realize that I actually somewhat group Stacie and Sarah together as writers whose stories, some fiction and some short memoir, have reminded me of Rumer Godden, one of my all-time favorite authors.) Stacie has been branching out into writing and drawing comics as memoir form. She has shared a few episodes of Adventures in Racism on her blog, and they are sharply witty and thought-provoking. This summer, she will further develop this project at a workshop on graphic novels. (Please check out her Indiegogo campaign to help get her out to the workshop, which is across the country from her.)

I’m afraid I have to break the rules of this meme, which asks for us to find 2 people to pass the meme onto. I am only offering up one writer for next week. (I also had trouble limiting my bio of her to one sentence. I suppose I could have done so, with an egregiously long sentence…) If anyone reading this would like to explore and share their own creative processes for blogging (or other writing), please do! I will gladly link to you and sing your praises. (Though I may not actually sing.)

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¹ Secretly, I think it is because I scored points for always gushing over how much I love her writing.
² The 500-word limit is based on the maximum length of abstracts for many academic conferences. This seems to be one of the ways that being an academic seeps through my writing. Footnotes are another
³ This post is one of those excessivley long ones. I apologize for the length of this post, as I did not hvae time to make it shorter.

daily bloggin’, no foolin’

I have decided to post every day this month, and I am totally not making an April Fool’s Day joke. I considered writing some sort of funny post for today, but I didn’t. I did, however, enjoy playing a few jokes on the kids, who were very excited about the whole thing. This is the breakfast that I had ready for them when they came downstairs:

A wholesome bowl of wooden blocks, with a side of crunchy raw new potatoes, and a glass of fresh-squeezed rainbow loom bands.

This is going to be a busy month for work/school, getting ready for a couple of conferences coming up in May. I have also decided to try a month-long home organization project called The Subtraction Project. The decision to blog daily this month is because I just really want to. I still have a lot of stories I want to get out of my system, and pictures I just want to put out there. (You can expect to see some photos of ice from my extensive collection. And seeing as it looks like the spring weather has arrived, there will probably be flowers.)

silver fish, gold fish (a pair of almost completely unrelated photos)

I present to you one giant silver fish, and one smaller gold fish.¹

At the Boston Common on New Year’s Eve, while wandering around looking at ice sculptures, we came across this big silver-colored fish car. It was possibly related to the First Night events going on there, but in a way that was not clear to me. What was clear to me was that I needed to take a picture of it.

When I went to China in 2012, my hotel in Shanghai had rather unusual furniture. Most of the larger pieces (the armoire, dressers, settee, and even the beds) were adorned with fairly large and extremely shiny gold fish. I only wish I had better photos to show off their extreme shininess.

For another still grainy view of one of the gold fish (possibly even the same one, you can click here. I have even been inspired to upload a short video taken while walking through this very…special…room³. Sadly, the movie is also quite grainy, but you can still make out the shiny fishy shapes on the beds and other places.

So, tell me about you: If you were going to build a giant fish onto a car, what color fish would it be? And what sort of car? (A Toyota with a trout? A Mini with minnow?) And if you were going to design furniture featuring large shiny gold animals, which animals would you choose? These are the important questions that I pose to you.

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¹ This post is in response to Ally Bean‘s prompt to of “gold or silver [photos of?]”. Naturally, I could not choose either just silver or just gold. Much like I couldn’t settle on either just a haiku or an acrostic.²
² If you, regular reader or hapless passerby, would like to also suggest a prompt or ask a question to elicit a post from me, feel free to do so in my post of last week. I would be tickled if you did.
³ If you feel the need to stay in such a room, it was a suite in the Salvo Hotel in Shanghai. I cannot guarantee that all of their suites are equally well-appointed with fish.

haiku acrostic, acrostic haiku

Here are two short poems:
1.

Hallmarks of these lines comprise
Allusion, evocation and expression
Impressions of nature and sensation
Kept short in sound, long in symbol
Using a constrained scheme

2.

planted rows of words
reveal another pattern
sprouting in the fore

A couple of days ago, I solicited suggestions and requests for things to post to help blow me out of my blogging doldrums, and said that I would respond to them in the order received. Sally was first in line and gave a lovely list of suggestions.¹ First on her list was a request for either a haiku or an acrostic. As you may well be aware, it is often hard for me to choose one or the other when “both” seems an equally valid choice. So I decided to do one of each form, but made each one be about the other type.

Craving more? I seem to have a shocking shortage of haiku in my archives, but I was terribly tickled that Ally Bean recently composed a haiku for/about me². You should go read it.

I did once make another acrostic, which was also rather meta. I’ve played around with other poetry forms, too, usually in response to a Monday Mission³. You can find a tanka, and another tanka in the form of a tanga, as
well as a villanelle (about pants). To see other less structured instantiations of my bad poetry, check out my tag “bad poetry.” I find such exercises fun, given my general love of playing with words.

—

¹ Up next, I will probably hit the first item off the next commenter’s list, and then run through the commenters a second time for their next items on their lists. If you have not already done so, I’d love a comment from you on my last post to suggest another post theme. The more the merrier!
² It was as a prize for getting an answer right in one of her posts.
³ Monday Missions are a now-dormant group blogging activity that I enjoyed.

in no particular order

I have been struggling to decide what to post. It’s not that I have any shortage of things to post. Just the opposite. I have too many photos I want to share, too many stories. But when I find time when I could conceivably put together a post, I spin. I come up with reasons to not post each particular thing, at least right at that particular time. There are two many photos of this set. I have too much to say about that story, and not enough time to write it. These photos are now months out of date. (Who wants to see Christmas photos now? Or Halloween ones, for that matter?) I’m saving those photos for a theme I have in mind. (But I never get around to running with that theme.) I sometimes wish I had some method for deciding what to post when. That’s probably why I have participated in the Friday Foto Finder thingy, and used to love things like the Monday Missions¹ and other group blogging activities. For that matter, this is why I kept up the Themed Things Thursday for so long. Such bits of structure make it feel a bit like there is a reason for my rhyme. (Or a rhyme to my reason?)

I know that it doesn’t have to be that way. This is my personal space, and I can post whatever, whenever. Lately, though, it feels like my posts are more like “never” than “whenever.”

So, would you (whoever you are) like to help out? Leave a question or a request or a suggestion or even just a word in the comments, and I will post something in response. In the order of comments received.²

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¹ This is a now-defunct blogging activity whereby a host would select a format or style (like a real estate ad, a course description, or campaign coverage) for participants to use for a post. I just looked back through my archive with the Monday Mission tag, and these were some of my funniest posts, if I do say so myself. And I do say so myself. I seriously crack myself up!

² I don’t, however, promise that what I will post will necessarily make any sense to anyone who is not me.

Thanks a million. Almost.

Before I got my beloved Mini¹, I used to drive a Toyota Corolla. We bought it used, but only slightly used. It had only about 35,000 miles on it, and was only a couple of years old. It was a great car. Almost totally unremarkable, with its 4 doors and gray-blue paint, you’d see cars just like it every day. It was barebones: no bells or whistles (it did have a horn), nondescript upholstery, casette player, manual roll-up windows. But that car got really amazing mileage. Typically 36 miles to the gallon. It was very reliable, not counting a couple of incidents with dud alternators. I loved that car.

I remember the day it rolled over to 100,000 miles. Well, I remember noting at some point that it was going to do so that day, and then later that day noticing that it had. I missed the actual moment of rollover. Probably because I was driving.

Would you believe that this blog is getting quite close to rolling over on the odometer? At some point soon, almost certainly this month, it will break a million pageviews. Quite remarkable for a little not-quite-six-year-old blog with a fairly small number of regular readers.

I’m hoping to catch the roll-over, and I wondered if anyone out there wanted to play a game with me to guess what day. As of right now, at 9:46 p.m. on Monday, September 3rd, the pageviews are at 994,985. (You can check what they are yourself, as I have the pageviews in my sidebar. Just scroll down a bit to see the section called “blog stats.” Unless you are reading this on a mobile version, in which case, I don’t know if you can see it.)

To help you estimate how quickly the roll-over will come, here are some details about my pageviews:

  • I tend to get between 200 and 400 pageviews a day (mind you, these are WordPress pageviews, not unique visitors. So if someone clicks on a few pages, it counts as a few pageviews)
  • An average weekday gets typically somewhere over 300, and weekends tend to be lower

Here are some screenshots of my blog stats from a few days ago. (I noticed that my pageviews were at 993,333, and I liked that number)

Pageviews by day:

Pageviews by week:

Pageviews by month:

(As you can see, things have slowed down in the last couple of years. This is probably partly due to people reading blogs less, but also because Google doesn’t seem to like me as much anymore. Maybe because I stopped sending it flowers?)

I did a lazy calculation, and estimating that I’ll continue to get around 300 pageviews a day, the remaining 5000 or pageviews should take a bit over 16 days. So that would put us around September 20th. I’m going to guess noon on September 20th for the rollover.

So, does anyone else want to play? Guess the day (and a time, too, if you like) that my blog will hit 1,000,000 pageviews. Whoever gets closest will win a choice of one of the following:

  • An original crayon doodle in the style of my blog header created by me
  • An original haiku created by me
  • An original dust bunny created by my extraordinarily subpar housekeeping skills
  • A walk-in appearance in my next novel. (I’ve never written a novel. But I might some day, and you’d totally get to be in it.)
  • A walk-in appearance in my dissertation, should I ever actually write one. (Expect delayed gratification. Very delayed.²)
  • A post here on the topic of your choosing
  • A surprise, chosen by me³

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¹ Did I ever mention that I had a Mini Cooper? Before I had a baby, I called it my baby.
² Very, very delayed.
³ Really I have no idea what this would be, so I would get to be surprised, too.⁴
⁴ It will almost definitely not be one million dollars. But I was really tempted to write that in as a prize, because I hear it in my head now, as spoken by Dr. Evil in Austin Powers.

mmmm: on the blogroll

mmmmWhen I come across a blog that is new to me, one of the first things I do is look for a blogroll. It gives me some insight into the person behind the blog: tastes, humor, worldview and whatnot. It’s fun to see if I recognize any blogs on the list, and to see if we share common interests. It reminds me a bit of my tendency to go right to the references section of an article I’m reading when I’m in research mode.

Why I have a blogroll

I see the blogroll as a courtesy feature of a blog. Potential visitors can get insight into who I am by way of who I know. It’s a courtesy to the bloggers on the list, as I am potentially sending them traffic, whether directly through people who like to explore blogrolls, or by adding to their rankings for search engines or Technorati. Foremost, my blogroll acknowledges that I read and enjoy those blogs (and/or that those people read and enjoy my blog). Like a references section in a journal article, it lists the bloggers whose voices have influenced and inspired my own writing.

Who is on my blogroll?

If I list a blog in my blogroll, it means that I regularly read that blog. I may miss a post here and there when my life gets hectic, or may skim over a long post on a topic that is alien to me (such as about a TV show I don’t watch). But if a blog is up there, that means I am a loyal reader.

I admit that there are blogs in my feed reader that I have not put on my blogroll. Usually it’s because I haven’t established a rapport with those bloggers. Sometimes I’ve just forgotten to add a blog.

Some of the blogs there are fairly dormant. This applies especially to a few of my near and dear real life friends who started blogs, but didn’t keep them going for long. (But they should have!)

I’m considering paring down the list, and removing blogs that have not been updated in, say, 6 months. (So post something if this applies to you!)

Removing blogs from the blogroll

It makes me sad to remove blogs from my blogroll, and I’ve done so only a few times. Mostly this has been when a blogger has deleted the blog or made it private. In at least one case I took a blog down after faithfully reading a blog and leaving comments for an extended time, and never getting back any sign of a visit back from that blogger. Another time I noticed that my own blog was removed from a blogroll, so I responded by removing that blog from my own.

Adding to the blogroll

I usually will add to my blogroll if I find my blog on a blogroll, and/or if I get regular comments from the blog author. I used to be fairly stubborn about not adding blogs without these happenings. Now I’m quicker to add if I find a blog I like (and if I happen to be in the mood to add links).

I’ve been rather hesitant to add big, high profile blogs to my blogroll, but I have started to do that more. There are now several big blogs in my sidebar whose authors don’t read my blog, though they have at some point been courteous enough to come by for a visit and leave a comment (or otherwise acknowledge my existence).

to blogroll or not to blogroll

I’m not quite sure why some people don’t have them. (Well, laziness I understand, if that’s the reason.) Some prefer instead to share favorites from their feeds, some prefer to link to blogs in posts. I think these ways of expressing appreciation for other bloggers are great, but for me don’t supplant the blogroll.

It seems that some people find blogrolls quaint and outdated. Well, call me quaint and outdated. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

Still others prefer to keep their reading lists to themselves.

Where I stick it

My blogroll has gotten a bit unwieldy, but I still like having it on my front page. In fact, I like having a theme that keeps the sidebar showing for all pages. Some people think a gigantic blogroll clutters the page, and detracts. But I like giving it the extra exposure. Call me cluttered. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

Blogrolling by numbers
And to demonstrate my compulsive tendencies, I actually counted up the blogs currently on my blogroll, and tallied up how many had blogrolls. I made a spreadsheet. Call me a dork. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

    blogs on my blogroll: 78
    blogs on my blogroll with blogrolls: 58
    blogs on my blogroll with blogrolls with my blog: 47

Blogroll me, baby!
In case you haven’t guessed it, I like being listed on blogrolls. It feels like support and validation. Also that acknowledgment of existence, which I seem so partial to.

So, what are your thought on blogrolls?

This was the first post of the metablogging series I threatened to write as part of my self-declared Merry Merry Month of Metablogging.

mmmm…blogging

I am declaring May to be the Merry Merry Month of Metablogging.

Over the past few months, I’ve seen a change coming over the blogosphere. Bloggers are dropping out, frittering away. (Or perhaps just twittering away.) For many, the excitement over blogging has died down.
mmmm
But I still really love blogging. For a couch potato with many interests like me, it’s the ultimate hobby. It’s been more than a hobby, though. It’s been a way of making connections with people, continuing conversations and expanding my horizons.

I know some people find blogging to be the most boring topic for blogging that there is. I’m not one of them. I’ve been quite fascinated by just about all topics bloggy. I like the blogging about the blogging. (I also like to use the word blogging.)

Whereas I know I really need to buckle down and get cracking with my work, I really want to get this out of my system. There have been loads of posts that I’ve wanted to write, but haven’t had the time. (Or when I find the time, I lack the focus and energy.) But the metablogging topics have continued to weigh on my mind.

For instance, I’ve wanted to share my take on, and my experiences with, these aspects of blogging:

  • blogroll and linking
  • commenting and discussion
  • identity and image
  • design and themes
  • categories and tags
  • traffic and readership
  • memes and group projects
  • popularity and rankings
  • personal disclosure

Here are some of the questions I’ve also been thinking about:

  • Why did you get started in blogging?
  • What do you get out of blogging, and what do you want to get out of it?
  • What advice would you give to a new blogger?
  • What will be the future of pants posts?

Anyhow, my plan is to cover each of these topics (as many as I can get to) in a series of posts this month.

I’d really love it if other people would like to join in the conversation. If you have posts on blogging that you’d like to share (whether new or from your archives), let me know, and I’ll link them up.

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In other news, the April Just Posts are coming up. If you’ve read or written posts on a topic pertaining to social justice, please send your nominations to me or Holly. Want to learn more? Check out the Just Posts info page.