Listening to Music Without Understanding It

Here’s my third post in my series on Listening to Music Without Understanding It, contributing over on Sourcerer. In this one, I finally introduce the series and talk about where it’s coming from – and hopefully laying the groundwork for more to come! Hope you enjoy 🙂

CompGeeksDavid's avatarSourcerer

Having started writing these posts, I thought it was time to introduce them and to introduce myself as a contributor here on Sourcerer. My name is David, and my handle is CompGeekDavid – named for my main blog, Comparative Geeks. There, I write geeky things, and am one of two main contributors – the other being my wife, Holly.

I have a personal blog, as well, that some of you may know me from – DBCII. I am not nearly as consistent in writing there, but when I do, I write about Social Media experiments – similar, say, to some of the posts here on Sourcerer – and about writing and blogging – similar to what you see at The Writing Catalog. I had blogging on my radar because I want to write, and because, after college, working writing back into my life was not the…

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Six Word Saturday 1

[tweet https://twitter.com/dbc_ii/status/479420986207371264]

Here’s my first Six Word Saturday! I have started posting some #sixwordstory stories to my Twitter (@dbc_ii), to see what I like for Saturday when it rolls around!

In some ways, this one felt like cheating: by adding the Twitter hashtag, I was giving you a way to think about the six word story that might be considered to be breaking the rules of said story. It’s a seventh word. It’s a concept. A genre. #zombies.

However, this one was also interesting, in that it almost immediately got noticed and shared by a feed that’s just watching for stuff that is tagged #zombies. So I thought that was fun and worth sharing.

Want to see more #sixwordstory? Follow me on Twitter or check back next Saturday for more Six Word Saturday! Want to join in? I am not alone in using #sixwordstory; there’s a lot of different types of stories being told!

Introducing Features

I shared a post the other day that has really inspired me on figuring out my content here on DBCII. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the idea came from Gene’O, of The Writing Catalog, as he is someone who blogs similarly to how I do.

The idea presented, and one I see a lot in reading blogs, is features. Posts that you can just expect to see, daily, or weekly. As a creator, they help you know what content you’ll need to create, to keep your blog going. As a reader, they help you expect what you’ll see, let you know to come back for more later when you find something you like.

Gene’O lists a number of features on Sourcerer that they run, but I thought I would note a few of my other favorites. On Love Pirate’s Ship’s Log, there’s a quote of the day. I love them – generally a picture from a movie or TV episode, and then a few lines of quote. They just make me stop and smile as I skim through my WordPress reader. Another favorite is the Box Office Top 10 on We Minored in Film, which just fill me with joy each week as I read it.

I see other features, such as episode recaps and reviews of popular shows, or Wednesday New Comics (it’s nice that most all new comics come out on one day, for the purpose of blogging about it!). These are the sorts of features we might consider on Comparative Geeks, but at the same time, because others are doing it, we want to leave it to them. Because we do so little content, as it were – with just our 6 posts a week – features would eat up a lot of that.

Also, it would force us to keep up with shows or reading comics or whatever we chose – which is against what we’re doing with the blog. We are writing for the joy of it, for the thought and sharing, and forcing timelines like that on ourselves would not be great. The closest we get is our ongoing LitFlix – where we read the book/comics and then see the movie.

And we have other ongoing series, like Science Fiction Today, Character Studies, or Science Fiction and Religion, but we don’t follow a schedule on those… it’s more like we try to do at least one of those a month. We could try to make these a scheduled feature, but they’re more of just an ongoing series, and for a blog, those are good too.

So let me introduce the features I am planning on here! Read more of this post

Efficient Blogging: The Power of Features (The Sunday Re-Blog)

Doubling up today on Re-Blogs for reasons that will soon become apparent. This post has really inspired me, and I’ve been thinking about ways it applies. I think the answer is: it apples here on DBCII. Expect some features to come!

Sourcerer's avatarSourcerer

One thing six months of blogging has taught me is that, if your goal is to update a blog every day, you have to find ways to create posts that don’t take a lot of time. If you’re blogging to attract a readership (and not everyone is, but I am), you’re investing words and time in your blog and hoping for a return in reads and engagement. So when I talk about efficiency, I’m asking a question:

How can I produce a post that’s good — one people will actually like — and do it as quickly as possible?

Before I go any further, let me just say: I don’t believe it’s necessary to post every day to have a successful blog. It’s much more important to produce quality work, and to find ways of bringing it to the attention of goodwriter memepeople who are interested in whatever you’re blogging about…

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

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