Well, I wasted no time in trying out this Firefox add-on recommended by BJ Keltz. Very easy to install and set-up. Apparently, I can post entries to other blogs I might have, and Scribefire also provides a list of my entries and categories. I can tag, too, and have my post bookmarked for del.icio.us. So far, I am happy.
Scribefire September 21, 2008
To overshare or not to overshare! That is the blogger’s question. June 23, 2008
Today’s guest blogger on the Writer’s Resource Center is … moi! Check it out by clicking here. My topic is oversharing AKA TMI (too much information). In my guest post, I lay out some of my precepts for sharing or not sharing. However, as I note in a comment to my post, its the context of a blog that may drive the extent to a blogger shares or doesn’t share:
“The trigger for my post was the Emily Gould article that was printed in the Sunday New York Times some weeks ago (click here for the article). I still haven’t fully sorted out my feelings about the extent to which she overshared (and even the idea that she was paid to do so). Some of my favorite essay writers use personal disclosure as a way to draw in readers and also lay bare any biases they might have toward their subject. So part of me really doesn’t want to sanction oversharing in general. It all depends on the context.”
I think this is a topic that has a long life ahead of it. So how much of yourself do you share in your blog or on your website?
Elderbloggers June 18, 2008
Here’s a new term that I came across in a Wall Street Journal essay published in the June 14-15, 2008 edition: elderbloggers. In her essay, “Put It in Writing,” Ronni Bennett writes about the growing population of elderbloggers, the thousands of bloggers who are older than 50. At the time that Ms. Bennet started blogging in 2003, when she was about 62, an internet search for older bloggers might have netted only a dozen or so. Now, like the US elder population in general, their numbers have dramatically increased. According to Ms. Bennett, “Isolation and loneliness are well known to impair health and mental fitness. Blogging is a powerful antidote.” She discusses the general differences between elderbloggers and our young counterparts (no surprise that we tend, initially anyway, to be shyer about writing about ourselves), and she offers brief intros to some of the friends that she’s made through blogging, people whose paths she would never have crossed, had she not been blogging. You can read the full text of her essay by clicking here.
For more on elderblogging or for blogs by elderbloggers, try these links:
Time Goes By — What it’s really like to get older (this is Ms. Bennett’s blog)
Our Bodies Our Blogs: Elderbloggers Shift the Universe
Octogenarian (blog by Mort Reichek)
Learn How You Can Get Paid for Blogging June 13, 2008
Hana Kim, guest blogger at the Writer’s Resource Center, provides great advice for anyone interested in getting paid for blogging. Her advice can apply to writing in general since she touches getting used to rejection and calculating appropriate rates; however, her own experience in getting paid to blog is particularly noteworthy. Her take-home messsage: “Blog first; find the right gig later.” The best part of her story is that she is earning money blogging about things that really interest her, things that she was already blogging about for free. She describes it as her “dream job.” I want one of those! For Hana’s complete post, click here.
Guest bloggers at the Writer’s Resource Center June 2, 2008
John Hewitt of the Writer’s Resource Center is on hiatus for a few weeks and has engaged a great group of bloggers to fill in for him. One of that great group is . . . yours truly 
I am thrilled to be listed among some phenomenal bloggers. For a full list, click here. John has also challenged us to see who will generate the most comments, so please visit his blog every day and participate in our discussions about writing! (Of course, you should already be visiting his blog every day, but think of our challenge as giving you extra incentive.)
The month of guest bloggers is off to a great start with writer and editor Lillie Ammann’s post Get Rid of Ugly Wordiness: How to Cut Your Novel Down to Size. She provides five critical editing steps that apply to short stories as well as to novels.
The strangely insular world of blogging May 26, 2008
This Sunday, The New York Times published an article by Emily Gould, once-upon-a-time blog editor for Gawker Media. Emily is a woman in her late twenties who has had the great fortune to work in the field of publishing. After reading her article, however, I have had the great temptation to look down upon her as a naïve, narcissistic juvenile. (Disclosure: I am old enough to be her mother.) But for one thing.
A few days ago, I happened to catch “The Devil Wears Prada” on cable. In both Emily’s article and the movie, we get an opportunity to see how a young mind is manipulated into becoming her own worst enemy. In the movie, Andrea doesn’t even know what the magazine Runway is all about, although she has applied for a job there. She is eventually shocked and disillusioned by the cutthroat machinations of her boss. She does truly seem like a sacrificial virgin in contrast to Emily’s claim of the same when she started her career at Gawker.
But Emily was not “virginal.” She admits that her preferred mode of self-expression has deep roots, starting in her high school days when she and her friends circulated a notebook in which they shared “candid thoughts” about their teachers. When they got caught, she claimed First Amendment rights. Perhaps more telling is the comic book she created, presenting herself as a superhero (“SuperEmily”) who “battled thinly veiled versions” of the mean girls in her grade. And when it came to Gawker Media, unlike Andrea and Runway, she was an expert: “For a young blogger in New York in 2006, becoming an editor at Gawker was an achievement so lofty that I had never even imagined it could happen to me.”
Despite their obvious differences, my takeaway message from watching the movie and then reading Emily’s article was that both these women were very impressionable. They may be hard-working women who have survived the wilds of New York City, but they still are not savvy enough to navigate without leaving some wreckage in their path. But here their similarities end.
Andrea is blindsided in her transformation from a size 6 duckling to a size 4 princess. Becoming “one of them” was not her goal when she went to interview at Runway. In contrast, Emily saw her job at Gawker as “somehow inevitable. Maybe my whole life — all the trivia I’d collected, the knack for funny meanness I’d been honing since middle school — had been leading up to this moment.”
Unlike my generation, Emily grew up with perpetual access to immediate gratification. And she grew up with feeling that the world, limited only by bandwidth, could be her friend, or at least her audience. Yet, she does capture a universal drive toward blogging: “I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there’s a place where a record of their existence is kept . . ..”
Her comment reminds of my embrace of the phrase, “I am therefore I write.” Blogging is a way for me to record my existence, although I try to restrict to my posts to a general theme, that of writing. For Emily, the purpose of blogging is to expose every aspect of one’s life. The irony is that so many people who criticize her type of blogging feel compelled to leave comments on her blog. By their very act of commenting, they are legitimating Emily’s blog, whether they like it or not. By the time I grabbed the permalink for Emily’s article, comments about the article numbered in the thousands. Most comments suggested at least one of the following: that Emily should grow up; that Emily should get a real job; that the article was boring (usually expressed as “ZZZZZZZZ”); that The New York Times should not have given Emily so much space to write in. There is a bit of irony here: Is what drives a commentator to leave a badly written and/or insulting post any different from what drives Emily to blog?
(For a different perspective on her NYT article, check on the comments on Emily Magazine.)
When I come across a blog or post that I find offensive or boring, I don’t bother to comment. In much the same way that personalized rejection letters can give the writer some solace that at least her story was read, comments provide the blogger some satisfaction of being heard. Comments provide some form of legitimacy, although most often in their quantity.
So, I would suggest to those who are unhappy with the nature of Emily’s blogs: Just don’t comment on them. Let her comment count dwindle. Let her audience retract to only the closest of her friends. If what she is doing is so awful, then don’t encourage her. Like any other writer, Emily has more to gain from constructive criticism and encouragement than from the banality of “ZZZZZZZ.”
I AM therefore I write May 24, 2008
This is my new “slogan” for my blog. I know it’s not original, that you can find this phrase in use on thousands of websites (albeit with varied punctuation and case); but, I think the sentiment of the phrase captures why I write, or rather, why I cannot not write. I’ve gone through periods of not writing. I’ve had my dry spells, and, during those times, my sense of self would suffer. I’d feel lost and anxious. Lost because without writing I have no bearings. Anxious because words would still be welling up inside, waiting for an outlet.
My writing really dried up while I was a doctoral student in the social sciences (long story short: I bailed out of the program once all my miserable coursework was completed). Although I was considered a good writer by my professors, I hated the kind of writing I was expected to do. It was tedious, monotonous, one-dimensional. My school was neck-deep in quantitative studies, the kind of studies that attracted federal funding, the kind that reduced hundreds, even thousands of people into one data point. Any student who proposed a qualitative study, one that might involve in-depth interviews of a handful of subjects, would be encouraged to seek their degree elsewhere.
For a fiction writer, this was a lousy place to be, and because I had to struggle so hard to not tell stories in my papers, I eventually became depressed. I knew I had to drop out of the program when I found that I was no longer able to write, that every time I sat in front of my computer and tried again to work on my “specialization” paper, I’d break down and cry. I could never get past the first paragraph.
So I dropped out (unofficially, of course). My road to recovery involved one English course with a wonderfully encouraging professor, two years with a writing mentor, and now this blog. Now I find it difficult to not write whenever I’m on the computer. Now I feel more fully myself than I ever have in my life . . . because I am therefore I write.
What’s your story? What was the worst dry spell or writer’s block that you ever experienced? How did you recover?
Blogging is fun! May 22, 2008
My most favorite blogger, John Hewitt, has a delightful post about why he loves blogging more than freelancing. He gives five reasons: (1) he doesn’t have to send out query letters; (2) he can write about whatever he wants; (3) he doesn’t have to answer to an editor; (4) he can get published when he wants to be; and (5) he gets to connect with readers. Read his full post here or click on the RSS feed at the right-hand sidebar and keep up on his posts.
For me, the freedom of blogging is a double-edged sword: it does free me to write whatever I want, but it also takes time away from working on my stories and novel. I have a day job which definitely limits the amount of time I have to write. I often feel guilty (in fact, I feel guilty right now) when I spend time working on a post that no one may read or comment on, time that I could be spending on revising a short story, editing my novel, or brainstorming another story idea.
But I keep blogging because it is fun. Like John, I enjoy seeing my words published without having to go through gatekeepers. And it is still writing. No matter what, I am still writing.
How do you all feel about blogging, if you have your own blog? What drives you to blog? What keeps you blogging? How many of you have day jobs that leave you with precious little time to write? How do you persevere?
