Yes, Hashtags Are Helping.  Or: Why Shonda Rhimes Doesn’t Know What She’s Talking About (The Sunday Re-Blog)

06/15/2014 2 Comments

Fantastic look at how social media can be used, and how it should not be discounted by people just because they do not understand it.

Also, this is a great blogger whom I highly recommend, and I’m not just saying that because she took my comments and edited them into her original post. Yay writers!

Filed under Sunday Re-Blog, Thinking Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Sorry for my absence! Blogging, Contributing, and #SixWordStory

06/05/2014 2 Comments

Well, I can’t believe over a month has passed since the end of the A to Z Challenge! It’s been a busy one for me, with lots of blogging, but it probably doesn’t look like it here! I felt I needed to take a moment, after finding new readers and connections through A to Z, to talk about what I’ve been up to!

My main blog, that takes my most time and interaction, is Comparative Geeks. I post there three times a week, and after the A to Z Challenge over there, we had a lot of catching up to do on things. I think I’m approaching caught up to the present, or at least only a couple of weeks out from the movie I am highlighting this week – X-Men: Days of Future Past. So we’re almost stable again there.

I’ve been working on growing the related Tumblr for Comparative Geeks, with one post queued up for every day. That, along with the blog posts, means there should be TWO posts there most days! Granted, half of them are shares from other people’s stuff, but those are good too. I have shared a few of the more original memes or images I have put together, and those definitely are more successful, or at least the notifications track back to us! If you’re on Tumblr, give us a look and a follow!

I’ve also started contributing to a blog – I’ve shared a bit on that here. It’s a good feeling to have someone else accepting and sharing your work, to have new readers look at it, and also to work on integrating with the content and posts on that blog. Hopefully you like what I write there – trying not to just do my same sort of posts, but to mix it up. Much like my posts here end up quite different from my posts on Comparative Geeks! You can find my contributions and more over on Sourcerer!

My wife and I were also asked to contribute on another blog, but this is already filling up my weeks quite a bit. That’s four nights that I tend to be doing blogging, a fifth night where I am working a freelance job (the proceeds from which I use to pay for a lot of the games/movies/books/comics that we discuss on Comparative Geeks!), and that’s five days. I’m also working six days a week between two jobs, you add in serving on two non-profit boards, a little bit of church and volunteership, some social media, and I don’t have a lot of week left. I would like to do more contributing, but I think I need to add these sorts of things one-at-a-time.

The other impact, unfortunately, is that I really have not had/taken time to do much of any writing here, nor much of any fiction. And if I am going to fit more into my busy life, will it be blog posts here? Contributing to blogs elsewhere? Or writing fiction? I don’t know.

Well, we did a little bit of writing on Saturday, on Twitter with the hashtag SixWordStory: Read more of this post

Filed under Introverted Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Contributing to a Blog!

05/14/2014 Leave a comment

Hello faithful readers! Sorry I haven’t gotten much more going on here on DBCII, but I’ve been busy diving into a different writing foray: contributing to a multi-person blog!

Many of you may know Sourcerer, the multi-contributor blog edited by Gene’O of The Writing Catalog. I was seeing mentions of the desire for more contributors, and at the same time I was thinking of branching out and doing some more writing. The timing seemed good.

If I were to point out the best work on Sourcerer, it would be the posts that have been Feminist Friday, an ongoing conversation about the continued relevance of Feminism – and asking the far more challenging question, what can we as lowly bloggers do about it? You should check out the posts – this link will link to further posts from Feminist Friday!

My post will be going up this morning, so be watching for that! You can see I’ve already been lined up on Sourcerer.

Filed under Introverted Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

A to Z Recovery and Reflections

05/08/2014 16 Comments

Hello all! Thanks for stopping by my blog once more. Last week saw the end of the A to Z Challenge here on DBCII, and a great many other blogs, and it was a genuinely fun time. Just looking at my archives, that was by far the most posts in a month that this blog has seen. It adds a fantastic collection of reflections on writing to the blog, really beefing up the purpose of the blog. And, with completing the challenge on two blogs, it really got me writing!

survivor-atoz [2014]I did a reflection and looking-forward post on Comparative Geeks yesterday, and it was good to do so. For Comparative Geeks, it was a zero-sum change in the amount of content we did in the month: we regularly post Monday to Saturday, once a day, so the challenge’s rules matched perfectly. We went with a theme, so it got us blogging about characters for a whole month, which I think is good. Our character studies are regularly some of our most popular posts, so I think all of these are going to remain popular over time. At least, I hope so; I hope that the challenge-themed titles and such don’t detract from the posts. The one that got away from me was the one on Hermione and Harry – and the recent J.K. Rowling comments surrounding them. Which is a fun and relevant post here, too: does the author really get to challenge the meaning or content of their stories once written? Feel free to check it out and join in the conversation!

Anyway, I’ve been thinking and decompressing, and a four-day vacation helped. But it has me thinking about the state of the blog; the purpose of the blog, and my blogging; the future of my writing. Which is all supposed to happen, I think, doing something like this challenge. So below are some of my thoughts after working through the A to Z Challenge.

Read more of this post

Filed under Introverted Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Z – Zines

04/30/2014 8 Comments

ZRather than end the A to Z Challenge with a bang, I think I’m going to end it with a half-joke.

What the heck happened to Zines?

I mean, they seemed like a fad, I suppose, anyway, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised they’re gone. What were they, you ask? To merriam-webster.com!

Zine:

“a small magazine that is written by people who are not professional writers and that usually has stories about a particular subject”

e-Zine:

“an electronic magazine : a magazine that is on the Internet”

Oh… wait a minute… do they mean a blog?

Blog:

“a Web site on which someone writes about personal opinions, activities, and experiences”

So… kind of. Mostly. Maybe? There are probably a number of Blogs which might be more accurately Zines or e-Zines, maybe especially ones that have a specific subject, and which have multiple writers.

I didn’t end up going with my original plan for the letter M which was going to be Magazines… I felt like I was beating on them enough between Journalism and Newspapers. And because I knew eventually I would be writing about Zines… was it supposed to be the cool, hip, trendy, online word for a magazine? Was it supposed to catch on? Can you choose and control those sorts of things? Or do they just naturally happen – like the adoption of the word Blog instead.

I don’t know. But it seemed like a fun word to close out the A to Z Challenge with! Do you read any Zines? Or did you ever? Let me know in the comments below!

Filed under Intuitive Tagged with , , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →