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

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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.

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I – Internet

04/10/2014 Leave a comment

II think I would like to make the claim that few things have changed the craft of writing as much as the Internet has.

I mean, there are some things. The printing press. The invention of the novel. But really, even something like computers just let us write in a different way: but it was still just writing. Spell check is nice, but in the end, that’s what the editing process was for: now that process is just a background process.

But the Internet lets anyone publish. It lets you talk about obscure things, and be able to point people to information about those obscure things. From another angle, it lets you write about obscure things and be found by people wanting to read those things.

It gets everybody writing. The Internet lets your audience talk back to you, in unprecedented ways and to unprecedented extents. There’s more comments coming back in than can be read for anything that gets big or viral. There’s no way to read this much fan mail!

The Internet also helps break down major language barriers, with translation services. It opens up the world so much.

Unfortunately, what all of this means in a lot of ways is that it has also become infinitely harder to find the good stuff. I’m a librarian. We see this problem coming. At some point, we will have generations who have to deal with the fact that anything they search for is going to come back with millions of hits. How do we find what’s good? The point of this post is not to answer this. The point is to say that now, all of a sudden, everyone can write, and so very many of us are writing, and the world has gotten smaller, and yet also bigger, and more full of things.

It’s a brave new world out there. Write on!

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#Blog Series Pitch: Social Media Sorcery – The Sunday Re-Blog

03/16/2014 Leave a comment

Great idea for some posts from a blogger who is trying many things with Social Media right now. Also a lot of conversation in the comments, so definitely check that out as well – and pitch in with your experiences and thoughts!

Gene'O's avatarMy Former Blog

I have to create a social media document for my own use, and since I’m seeing interest in that aspect of my blogging, I thought I would pitch it as a series. Here’s a basic outline. Each Roman Numeral represents a post.

I can go one of two ways. I can add it to my list, write it as I need it, and run it as an occasional series for one of our blogs. Or, I can write the whole thing as a single piece, then break it into posts, illustrate them, and shop them as a guest series. I have to write a rough draft-quality version of it sometime soon, anyway, because I need it to analyze what I am doing and improve my game.

I. A short narrative that explains how we started. It will include links to the things we wrote about social media along the way…

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A to Z Challenge – My Post Topics

03/05/2014 10 Comments

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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