A to Z Challenge – My Post Topics

A to Z Challenge 2014

One of the many things you can do to interact with and grow community on a blog is to participate in blogging events or challenges. Some that come to mind are Feminist Friday, NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), and, coming up next month, the A to Z Blogging Challenge.

The idea is to post 26 days in the month – all but the Sundays in April – on a theme, and with something starting with each letter of the alphabet. By the end, I feel like you’ll have some great content, or at least some content. The idea is for the posts to be short, not to drive you mad with trying to keep up with something. The idea is also then that you read several other blogs and what they’re doing. This is where you grow community: engaging in something others will be looking at, and going and looking at their blogs yourself. Find out more by going to http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/

So my theme for the month is going to be writing. Looking at the topics I chose, I think that this could be more narrowly said as maybe the business and world of writing, with some highlights on some of the current trends – or dying aspects – of the industry. I guess I do touch on a few more specific points, and for all of this, it will be coming more from my head and my opinions and speculation.

We plan on also doing the challenge on Comparative Geeks, and we’re working on figuring out what topic would be best, given you have two of us who will be alternating writing about things! And also that we want the posts to fit within our blog and be a good contribution to it. This challenge fit our posting schedule over there perfectly. However, there is the fact that there are a few posts that we have scheduled for 2014 that will still have to go up… so we’ll be generating more than our normal amount of content in April!

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One Year Anniversary of Comparative Geeks – The Sunday (Tuesday) Reblog

I posted this yesterday over on Comparative Geeks. Today would be the to-the-day anniversary for us starting our weekly schedule of posting. I ask below for more ideas for posts, for input from my community – and I would happily accept input here as well! Let me know what you would like to read from my blog!

Last year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Holly and I started a blog. We had been toying with a few different ideas, thinking of what niches we saw and conversations lacking. And we thought a lot about how we talked about things, and what we wanted to say. And Comparative Geeks was born from that – the thought that we would talk about Geeky things, and not alone or by themselves, but in comparison to each other, or to other aspects of life.

I’d like to think that we’ve accomplished that, and written a blog at least a little different from what else is out there. For instance, we’re not a news blog – there are other blogs out there doing a much better job of giving you day-of updates on what’s going on in the world of geek. We tend to speculate a bit more instead. Nor are we a review site – there are other blogs out there doing episode-by-episode show reviews, issue-by-issue comic reviews, and more detailed sorts of movie reviews.

Instead, we’ve taken our comparative approach – things like our LitFlix, which compare the book or comic to the movie based on this source material. Or like our Science Fiction and Religion posts, which consider a topic often touched in science fiction but which is treated in interesting ways whenever it shows up. And we have now, for a year, successfully kept up with our publishing plan – six posts a week, three each. Granted, not always on the days we plan on, but we got you some content!

And that leads to what has been great about this blog: you. The readers. While we had enough to say that we likely would and could have kept going on our own, you make it all the more worth it. While we may not reply to comments in a timely fashion, know that each one makes us happy. When you take the time to read our posts, thoughtfully consider them, and add to the conversation? That’s where this is worth it.

So that’s what I wanted to do for a one-year anniversary post: ask for input from you, the readers, on what you would like us to write about in the days, weeks, and months to come. Help us make another great year for Comparative Geeks!

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New Year’s Malaise

The New Year is supposed to be full of cheer, new possibilities, a new lot in life. I think that’s why, when it doesn’t feel that way for you, it’s even worse – not just that you don’t feel optimistic, but that you don’t feel optimistic, AND you know you’re supposed to.

I’m in a funk, and I feel like talking it out through writing. Writing is my outlet, my dream job, something I take pride in when working other jobs. I haven’t written a lot over here in a while, most of my efforts centered on Comparative Geeks and some fiction world-building. However, I would like to get more over here – and write more fiction – and overall just write more. Three posts a week on Comparative Geeks was just the beginning!

So if you feel like, read on and move through my malaise with me, and join me at the end where I try to find hope and an outlet.

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Internship: Done! Now what?

Hello dear readers!

I have completed my Internship in Library Science, and am pretty proud of the final product. I built the base of a virtual collection of materials about the Treadwell Mines here in the Juneau area, and it now looks pretty excellent. You’re welcome to check it out and give me feedback in the comments below!

http://treadwellsociety.com/home/

Meanwhile, that means I am trying to get back to the rest of everything in my life, because I am now done with my Master’s in Library and Information Science! So I have some things I want to talk about, things I want to explore, so let me lay out some of what’s on my mind! Read more of this post