Instagramatic

This post mostly serves as a buffer between my last post in July, about my friend Joan Preiss, and what was was written as my next post more than a month later (on Aug. 24) about my crappy summer—because as E-girl just pointed out, it looked like I was talking about Joan on the same page as my complaints about our sewage spill, which seemed disrespectful. So, this post was written on the 24th also, but pre-dated Aug. 23rd. 

I haven't had time to write this summer, but I did find moments to take photos on my phone, whenever I was waiting somewhere or en-route to somewhere else. The photo at the top was taken when I was waiting for my friend, Orit, to show up at our CSA (community-supported agriculture) pickup. These were the vegetables I had just taken out of the box to divide between us. I took the pic and loaded it up on Instagram in the few moments before she got there. And then I rushed back home to get something else done. But there's that moment, recorded.

Perhaps technology is offering people more opportunities for quick moments of expression. But it's such a time-suck otherwise, especially with the allure of social media and video gaming, that it seems a two-edged sword (I tried to think of a less cliche way of saying this, but am rushed to finish this post in the few minutes I have free...).

I took this photo at the top of the ferris wheel at the county fair last weekend—altered and loaded on Instagram before our car swung back to the bottom.

I'm not sure who is looking at all the pictures loaded onto Instagram and Facebook—both could be infinite cyber-galleries. Is it art if no one really looks at it? Does it matter? For me, Instagram has just become a visual diary of where I've been, sometimes. I don't load up a picture every day because much of what I've done recently is too mundane.

I took this picture of a lake I had tried to paint in a watercolor moments before. The photo looks so much better than the painting, which grew muddy as I added too much color (the secret with watercolor is in what you don't do). But trying to paint the yellow parts of the green leaves and grass, where the sun was shining, made me see everything more vividly as I took the picture. What fun to take the time to play for an afternoon, with a child's watercolor set, sitting in the shade at a park with E-girl and my friend, Mary.

Perhaps photography is like watercolors, in that part of the art is knowing what to leave out or show. The last photo I'll load up here, above, was taken at a diner during one of the first weeks of summer. Is it art if everyone who walks into the diner sees the same scene—and could take the same picture with their phones? I don't know. It's one of those questions I'd like to ponder for awhile, perhaps for the rest of my life...

#LikingTwitter

Despite my earlier disdain for Twitter, I have begun to tweet a few times a week. It has helped ease my withdrawal from Facebook. And, unlike other social networking sites, it's surprisingly easy to do from my non-smart cell phone. But the real reason I like Twitter is: subject headings.

(Once upon a time, my dream job was to be a subject cataloger at the Library of Congress. It was a vision of putting the universe in order, one subject heading at a time. Alas, it was dashed when I actually took a cataloging class. Cataloging is a precise art, particularly the assignment of call numbers. The Dewey Decimal system drove me up the wall with its long strings of numbers. One number off in a class assignment meant that it was all worth zero points, even with perfect subject headings.)

But I still like labeling things. Hence, my new-found (and probably temporary) love of Twitter. The hashtags (#) mark the searchable phrase—the creative part is in coming up with new phrases. I've been thrilled to discover that I'm the first to type in: #5wordTVreviews (based on an earlier blog post). I'm planning to also start #literarymaps, to mark any new ones I find. The possibilities of new, searchable phrases appear to be endless—though, the downside is that no one will know to look for them if they're not already well-used (and that most Twitter users are not looking for insights from the middle-aged anyway).

So, for whatever it is worth,  I add my voice to the narcissistic hum, in as few characters as possible.

Four days into my Facebook fast

I vowed on my Facebook page (where else?) four days ago that I was taking a break from Facebook. But I have found it difficult to entirely avoid it because: people use to to email me; I get invites to local events sometimes; and not wishing a friend "happy birthday" seems rude when their birth date is noted there.

Then there is the difficulty of communicating to/with live broadcasts.  The Kojo Nnamdi radio show did an interesting story on the survival of newspapers yesterday (Rebuilding the Newspaper Pay Wall) and I wanted to share my thoughts with the guests about the Washington Post. I emailed the show, but realized it wouldn't be read immediately, so  I surrendered and went to its Facebook page to post a comment.

Still, I haven't written a status update since that vow I made Sunday. But I'm itchy to answer Facebook's "What's on your mind?" as soon as I think of something wry or descriptive. It's become a habit or even an addiction, describing my life by the moment, in the moment. Equally addictive, the need to know what other people are doing and observing on any given day. But I've mostly let the "News" stream/ticker go by unread, accumulating.

So what am I doing with the extra time I have now? I'd like to boast that I am writing more (I am), but I might as well also confess that I've begun to tweet.

"I want real people!"

When my son was a toddler, he didn't want to sleep in his own room. While the family bed concept might work for some people, I needed my sleep and found that hard to achieve with three bodies in a double bed, especially with a child as intellectually energetic as he was. He could easily stay up to midnight with only a one-hour mid-day nap at preschool. So we would tell him, "Go to bed, you've got Mr. Bear and all your stuffed animals with you."

"I want real people!" he would shout back.

(Eventually, we fashioned a solution for him. Whenever he was lonely, he could come and get into the sleeping bag we left for him beside our bed. With just a rug beneath it, it proved less comfortable than his own bed and he would return to it after an hour or so. Soon, he stopped coming to it all.)

The other day, in the midst of writing all day by myself, I took a break and opened up my Facebook page. It was the day that Facebook launched its new everyone-everywhere-has-something-to-say format. I couldn't pick out anything interesting or important from the chaotic stream, so I closed it quickly. But I still had a need to communicate and let someone know I was alive.

"I want real people!" I said to the empty house.

I know that such quiet is necessary to write (and to do my other, editing work), but my days have a lot of quiet to them. For me, too often, Facebook and a full Inbox have become substitutes for real encounters. And by opening them as much as I, often necessarily, do, I am keeping myself from the potential for such encounters.

The new Facebook format that I loathe has given me an excuse to wean myself from electronic forums. Unfortunately, at least right now, there is nothing to fill the void I thought I was filling with them.

More literary maps (paper and computer-based)

Illustration of the voyage of the Pequod, from Moby Dick, one of a series of 12 literary maps produced as a calendar by the Harris-Seybold Co. in the 1950s. From American Treasures of the Library of Congress.

Often in the past, I've needed visuals as an aid in fully understanding a story. When I took a class on Dante's Inferno in college, I kept finding myself lost in the circles of hell until I drew them all out on a long scroll of paper. I glanced at it under my desk during class. In the years since, I've yearned for a laminated, fold-up Streetwise-like map to accompany books I was reading—not just for Dante's Inferno, but also for Huckleberry Finn's Mississippi, etc.

Of course, fantasy novels often have accompanying maps on the inside pages.  (The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps has a great round-up of maps for Imaginary Places, including both books and movies).

After I wrote my post on creating a geographic map for Alice Munro, I googled around for examples of other Internet-based "literary maps." Here's what I found:

• Google Lit Trips - developed "as part of the Google Certified Teachers program," it offers free downloadable files "that mark the journeys of characters from famous literature." One problem I have with it is that you have to download a separate file for each book and you have to use the Google Earth application to run it.  Another problem is that, compared to a map put up on Google Maps, the files are relatively static. They're files versus something more akin to a fluid web page.

• Wikimapia - According to Wikipedia, this is a "privately owned, online map and satellite imaging resource that combines Google Maps with a wiki system, allowing users to add information, in the form of a note, to any location on Earth." There are some literary places marked, but they're noted individually. For example, search for "F. Scott Fitzgerald" and you'll get a map that marks his grave site.

• The Atlas of Fiction - This site uses Google Maps to mark real locations mentioned in selected, singular fictional works. For example, the map for Jane Austen's Persuasion marks "The Cobb, Lyme" where "Anne meets the Harvilles and Captain Benwick; Louisa's accident." Also offers a World View, where major sites in fictional works are offered as a group.

• Finally, the New York Times produced a Literary Map of Manhattan in 2005, with quotes from the books noted at selected locations.


I'm sure there's more out there, but this is all I've had time to find this afternoon. Happy mapping!

A different kind of literary map: the USA Literary Map features a "total of 226 geographically connected authors." (Click on the link to see a larger image of it).

The Geography of Alice Munro (Literary mapping with Google Maps)

One of my goals this summer was to read Alice Munro's Selected Stories in sequential order, to get a better feel for her evolution as a writer.  Unfortunately, being an American, all the stories seemed to me to take place in that amorphous area called Canada—I imagined prairie-like towns with long winters and too-brief summers. Then I realized one day that perhaps I should look at an atlas to get a sense of how far her characters were traveling on trains, when they moved, etc.

Of course I was stunned at how far it is between Wingham, Ontario, town of her birth, and Vancouver, BC, where she moved with her first husband—a distance of some 2,500 miles*—and how different the terrain is between the two places. Also surprising—how close to the U.S. border many of these towns are. The book, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, was an excellent source for charting the real places in Munro's life, as well as cluing me in that Wingham is probably the town she fictionalized in many of her stories.

I wanted to dig a little deeper, to see what the streets, lakes, and mountains might have looked like to her characters, so I looked around to see if anyone else had created a visual representation of these places. Since I didn't find it, I created a quick Google Map marking some of the major sites in her life and fiction:

The Geography of Alice Munro 

(Please realize that this is a work in progress).

You can click on most places and zoom in until you can get a street with all the businesses marked on it. If you're able to put the little golden man on the spot, he can show you geographic features, buildings, even people walking on the street. For example, if you click on Munro's Books, you can put the little Google man there on the street to find charming, European-style buildings, with mountains in the distance.

If there are other, literary, publicly available Google Maps available, I'd like to find them and will eventually list them here. I imagine, like everything else Internet, I am not the first to try do this. Soon, I imagine, nonfiction authors might create a public Google Map to use alongside a modern history or biography.

* I know this because I used the Google Map "Get directions" feature.

The continuing joy of paper

Hurricane Irene passed through this weekend, hurling branches against our house all night into early morning. Acorns rolled madly across the roof and deck. In the morning, the yard was a chaos of oak leaves. And we were without power.

No power means no Internet for us since it comes via FIOS (fiber optic lines). But, out on our driveway to greet us the next morning was our Sunday Washington Post. God knows what conditions our newspaper delivery man had driven through--we later found out that there were two big oaks down across our road. We sat down to cold, milkless cereal and read the Post in the dim quiet of our house.

What a miracle that throughout the storm, the Post's writers and production staff had continued to labor and were able to get it out to the suburbs in a few hours. Without that paper on the table in front of me, I would have had no local news, save for what we could catch on my portable radio, between endless ads.

The next day, I tried to make calls on my cell phone to see what was open. But I had thrown away the phone book when it had arrived a few weeks ago, thinking I could look everything up on the Internet. Fortunately, I had written the number for the county library reference line on my paper Rolodex and called it for the number of the public library (wanting to check on whether it had power or not)--where I sit now, on a borrowed terminal, writing this post.

Last night I read an Alice Munro short story ("Dulse") by lantern light. If I'd had it on a Kindle only, it might not be accessible anymore, the power given out.

I could live this way for awhile, I think--we have books and flashlights and (cold) water (I have taken one-half of a cold shower so far, the hot giving out before the end). There is a sense of contentment and calm, save for the sound of the dripping freezer, letting go of its frigid interior and all the good food therein.

The electronic rewriting of history, email by email, page by page

Earlier this summer I visited my hometown of Moravian Falls, N.C., and discovered it has become a point of pilgrimage—some newcomer ministers are proclaiming its falls is a portal to heaven.

The obvious image here is of people eager to slide down the falls to their deaths, but what they are saying is that you can talk to angels if you hang around there.

Yes, the falls where teenagers once swam in the muddy lake it fed, the falls where my great-grandfather ran a grain mill, is now suddenly an angelic chat room. The idea is being promoted via  web sites and YouTube videos as well as some local pulpits.

OK, whatever, maybe this will bring some much-needed tourist dollars to the area. But the same fellow who told me the falls is a heavenly portal also told me that there is a prayer rock in the nearby Brushy Mountains where the Moravians who founded the town prayed 24-hours-a-day for 100 years.

I'd never heard this before even though some part of my family has lived in the area since at least the late 1800s. I'd always heard that the Moravians were there only a few years before giving up and moving to what is now Winston-Salem. So, when I got home, I googled "Moravians and prayer rock" and found new web pages mentioning this as fact—a history quickly being rewritten. Only when I went into Google Books and looked at pages in an actual history book (the only one I could access online) did I see references to the Moravians' short stay in the town.

The book was the authoritative source—well researched, edited, verified. But I had to dig to find it and if I wanted more on the topic, I would have had to make a trip to a North Carolina history collection. When it comes to research these days, how many people would make the trip, or any kind of effort to consult a book? Most would just go to Wikipedia, or use whatever first pops up in a Google search.

There is a danger that whatever is most accessible will become the truth, repeated and repeated until it becomes a fact, or even part of the historic record. Crazy email rumors can be checked on snopes.com (although, obviously, a lot of people don't bother to verify them, given the multiple layers of email addresses in some of the emails I've received lately). Put something on a web page and it seems even more valid or authoritative, perhaps because it is more static, more "there."

My son told me a while ago that it's a game among quiz bowlers to go into Wikipedia and create false citations, sometimes even false histories, to see if anyone notices. So far, almost no one has.

(The photo above is of a painting, done by my great aunt Maxie Pardue many years ago, of the Moravian falls, where her family lived when she was young. Any appearance of angelic halo or aura is caused by my camera's flash.)

Web directories and resources for creative writing: Yahoo directory

I was excited recently to discover that Yahoo still maintains a Web subject directory (which, ironically, I found via a Google search); even more excited to see that one of its subject categories is Literature > Creative Writing.

[For those of you who don't know Yahoo's history, before Yahoo had devolved into a celebrity news port, its focus was on indexing the Internet—this was before the Internet got so crowded. I heard a Yahoo rep speak at librarian conference in the mid-90s about their subject indexing.]

But I'm not sure that I can trust this directory as being either comprehensive or unbiased. When I looked at the Yahoo sub-listing for Literature > Creative Writing/Blogs, I was puzzled that they list only 25 blogs, and wondered why they'd listed Neil Gaiman's blog first—which meant the list isn't alphabetical, but it didn't say if it was listed by popularity ranking either.

Of course I wanted to help them plump up the list, so I clicked on the top link that says "Suggest a Site"—this links to a page that says:

There are two ways you can submit a site to the Yahoo! Directory.

Standard
Free!
No time guarantee

or

Yahoo! Directory Submit
7- Day Guarantee (If you choose Yahoo! Directory Submit we guarantee that your site will be considered by our editors within 7 business days.)
US$299.00 non-refundable, recurring annual fee

So, writer beware. I'm sharing the link to this listing, but not necessarily endorsing it.

Farewell "real sex"—hello "bleak and depressing"

In a post last February, "On getting free HBO for a month," I described the HBO program "Real Sex" and made the startling conclusion that the people featured on the show don't seem to be well-read intellectuals.

Despite my lack of graphic detail about the show's goings-on, that post became one of my most popular for awhile. I know this because Sitemeter (that little green box at the bottom of the page) lets me see the search terms people have used to get to my blog. And there were a lot of "real sex," "HBO real sex," and "dirty real sex" searches for awhile. The searches were from all over the world (Sitemeter lets you see the countries from which the searches originate), though most were from the United States.

Sitemeter also lets you know how long the reader stays on the page. Not surprisingly, those who were looking for "real sex" but found my blog instead stayed for average of "0 seconds."

I've decided to take off the "Free HBO" essays and polish them for publication elsewhere, but I don't worry that people won't still accidentally find my blog. Recently there's been a rash of searches using terms like "bleak depressing music," which has led readers to my post, What is the most depressing song ever? Fortunately, these readers tend to linger a little longer than those looking for "Real Sex."

The most surprising statistic in this is that every search originating from a European country recently (5 out of the last 100, the maximum Sitemeter tracks) were for "depressing music" or some variant. I hope that once the winter is over and the cold and the fog lifts, such yearnings will go away, even if it means less traffic to my blog.

Postscript: I just realized, by merely mentioning "HBO's Real Sex," I'm going to garner renewed traffic to this blog from people who didn't really want to get here. If you're one of those and you've read this far... oh, wait, you already left 20 seconds ago.

Back in the old days...

So, I became a reporter for a daily newspaper in North Carolina in the mid-1980s, before there were cell phones, digital cameras, high-speed modems or the Internet. Lacking such technology wouldn't have been so bad if I had been in the Winston-Salem Journal's main office—reporters there had computer monitors on their desks hooked into a mainframe computer. They could send stories with a push of a button.

But I was in a bureau office in the northwest corner of the state, 90 minutes from the main office. I was given a portable Radio Shack computer to type my stories on. It wasn't a laptop exactly since it only held three medium-sized stories at a time and its screen held only a few rows of type, yet the field reporters were wowed by its portability; it was the best thing we could use at the time.

I could slowly send a story from my bureau office via a modem, but out in the field, if I needed to get a story in before I could get back to the office, I would have to pull up to a pay phone, dial the paper's toll-free number, then attach a cup to the phone receiver to transmit the story from the laptop. The story would make long chirping noises as it went over the wire, like a fax machine on valium.

I was lucky. I saw reporters for other newspapers still calling in their stories, slowly reading them out for the intern on the other end to transcribe.

If none of the paper's photographers was available, I took pictures on my cheap, automatic 35mm camera, popping out the film when I was done. If there was no rush, I mailed it back to the Winston-Salem office. But if the story was going to run the next day, I'd drive over to the bus station in Boone (actually, it was just a local motel) and put my film on the bus; someone in Winston would pick it up.

I would check in with the main office at least once a day. But without a cell phone, I wasn't immediately available to anyone. While I was in Asheville one August day to write a feature on a New Age-y organization there, a plane packed full of cocaine landed near Boone, and became one of the largest drug busts in that part of the state. My editor frantically tried to reach me, but I was out of earshot, not knowing why everyone was so upset when I called in late that afternoon. I think they went with a wire story that day, supplemented by one of our reporters in a nearby bureau. It should have been my story. Still, my story on the New Age-y people got me my only above-the-fold front page, in that Sunday's paper.

Things are faster, easier, more accessible now, yet I'm not sure they're better or that stories are better written. My old bureau office, which covered two counties (with others, occasionally, as needed), has closed, folded into another bureau to become the Northwest Bureau office. I think that reporter must cover at least four counties now. Spread thin, is how I'd describe it. I'm not sure how you'd get to know all the people in local government or be in so many places at once. Maybe the reporter makes his rounds electronically, reading local blogs for gossip, chatting up people on Facebook, emailing interview questions. It's the only way I can imagine that he or she can be in 10 places at once—unlike when I used to walk around Boone, even in the deep snow, to visit the sheriff, the mayor's office, the Registrar, hoping to catch wind of something, to hear something I wasn't supposed to hear.

(The picture at the top of this post is one of the pictures I took with my cheap camera, which ran in the paper; it was for my favorite story I ever got to write for the WSJ.)

Pandora's box of songs: music to write by

Lucky is the person who can write a short story while listening to the Rolling Stones or a Bach fugue. Or who, like my spouse, can write at the computer while listening to rock music and watching TV sports from the corner of his eye.

I've never been able to listen to music and also do anything that involves a computer or a pen. Apparently my brain doesn't multi-task that way. I write best in a quiet house.

Yet sometimes the quiet gets to me. I think of all the songs that I'll never hear because the part of my brain that writes or types is too demanding of my full attention. So, I've been searching for music that would provide a pleasant sonic background my brain won't rebel against.

It was easy to eliminate disco/techno, folk songs, and any music with lyrics. But even slow, sweeping orchestral music was too demanding.

Finally, through trial and error, I've discovered that I can write to piano music. As long as the piano is the main instrument, and there are not a lot of other sounds alongside it, my brain doesn't get distracted. I don't know if this is true for other writers, or just me. Perhaps only the sound of the clarinet will do for someone else, the french horn for another.

Maybe it's because the motion of fingers traveling across a computer keyboard and a piano keyboard are kind-of the same?

I have created a "Piano Music" station on Pandora Radio. When Pandora asked for a "seed" artist or song, I typed "Keith Jarrett" and "Glenn Gould." It has since persuaded me to add Bill Evans and other jazz pianists, as well as Chopin and Erik Satie, and it is still trying to steer me toward Philip Glass. Miraculously, I've mostly heard piano music on this station, having only to occasionally say no to the rare symphony. (I moved Beethoven to his own station, since it hurt to give him a thumbs down).

If you'd like to hear my station, (I think this will work) you can go to: http://www.pandora.com/?ext_lsfi=sf135142619270723600&ref=nf . If this doesn't work, you can create your own station, with similar parameters. Happy listening!

The electronic water cooler

I was so busy with (paid) editing work last week that I worked through Saturday and Sunday, into the evening. Yet, I still found the time to go on Facebook everyday.

In an earlier post, I described how I use Facebook as my online journal. But it was much more for me last week—it provided the same kind of chitchat I would have been able to engage in occasionally if I was working at a cubicle in an office. It was an electronic water cooler, then.

I posted: What does it say about me that of the 10 films just nominated for Best Picture, the only one I've seen is "Up"? And a friend of mine, who also works from home, posted a while later: It says that you're focused on your children! Either that or you're just too damn busy for the movies!

Of course, she and I could have just emailed one another and have been done with it, but another friend commented also and we all got engaged in a tiny discussion about parenting and movies. Neither of them knows the other, so this wouldn't have happened in just an email back-and-forth. It was more like having a conversation with a colleague that someone else at work casually joins in on.

Another post on another day, On to the second season of The Wire (and the next book in the Wrinkle in Time quartet)... led to a discussion of Madeline L'Engle's spiritual beliefs between two FB friends of mine.

Five to eight minutes a day, tops, I'm on-then-off Facebook. I suppose I could use those five to eight minutes for something more productive, but I can't keep working without some kind of human contact every so often; (yes, I realize the irony of describing human contact via a computer, as I type this).

It sometimes feels like I'm sending up a little flare out to the world when I post something there—maybe we all are. It certainly felt that way during the recent snowstorm in D.C., when FB friends trapped in their houses without electricity put up posts via their cell phones to let everyone know how they were faring.

Each post a flare, announcing: I am here, in this moment, in this world.

The new poetry.com for blogs?

I got this strange email today:

This is Shiela from hp-ink-cartridges.org.
We stumbled on your blog while searching for Hp Ink Cartridges related information. We operate the largest hp cartridges website featuring more than 30,000+ blogs. Our site averages 200,000+ uniques visitors per month. As a kind note We have featured your blog at http://hp-ink-cartridges.org/blog_awards/index.php?id=811 We would be grateful if you could add the following details to your blogs main page.
Looking forward for your confirmation.

I don't remember ever mentioning HP Ink Cartridges on this blog—could they know that I have an HP printer? More likely, they are writing this message to any blog they can find on the Web and the gullible blogger, like me, checks out the site. I had a momentary hope that maybe HP had created a blog awards web site and I had been chosen for it, but a quick look at their ".org" site revealed it to be a commercial enterprise selling ink jet cartridges. Perhaps such gullible optimism accounts for their 200,000+ unique visitors a month.

My blog wasn't actually listed on their site although there were plenty of other blogs there already, from the "DIY Poetry Publishing" blog to the "Drugstore Divas" blog: "Life is expensive; toothpaste shouldnt be." I'm supposing Writing Home won't be among them unless I create a link to the HP ink jet.org web site, but that's not going to happen. Here's hoping this post does not give them any additional traffic!

The necessity of self-promotion

The Washington Post Style section ran an article yesterday about author Kelly Corrigan who, despite having two books in print, had to cobble together a web site, a trailer, a book tour and other forms of self-promotion, paid entirely out of her own pocket. Apparently, she is not alone.

The article, On Web, A Most Novel Approach, says this is now a common occurrence among not-yet-well-known writers:

Book publishers actively market and promote authors, of course, particularly the big names, but for thousands of writers it's a figure-it-out-yourself world of creating book trailers, Web sites and blogs, social networking and crashing on friends' couches during a tour you arrange.

Strangely, the WP article fails to hyperlink to Corrigan's web site in its online version of the story. It's here: Kelly Corrigan.

After viewing her self-made trailer, I'm a little shocked that it helped further her career. In the first few seconds there is a shot of her dad in bed, with the voice-over saying, "He calls his bed a fart sack..." OK, I'm probably not going to read this book if that is an example of its scintillating prose. But it must have been effective. The Post article says it has been viewed more than 100,000 times, and that it helped lead to her getting a booking on a network morning show.

I've always made a distinction between writers who blog and writers who publish books. There's a little bit of class distinction there, in my mind, despite my being mostly a self-published, Internet-based writer these days. I always figured that a writer in print had MADE it, that they would be taken care of by agents and publishers once in print. This article was disillusioning. Now I see the difference between a blogger like me and a blogger/web site creator like Corrigan is that, while we're both providing our words for free, her web site and blog promote something tangible, which can be purchased, and which can provide her with an income. Her blog is an ongoing advertisement; my blog is what I'm writing right now.

Why I blog

After I published my Popularity post (in which I lamented that stupid videos on YouTube can claim a million viewers in a matter of days while this blog had only had 1,200 hits in a year), a Facebook friend wrote me, saying: "Charles Bukowski wrote an entire poem about how you should only write because you HAVE to - I think that is probably a good enough reason, whether or not anyone else reads or likes it." [I think the poem he referenced is So You Want to Be a Writer.] Perhaps my FB friend was trying to console me, but I found his message a little depressing since Bukowski's poem about writing for the pleasure of writing had obviously been published and was enough-known for someone to reference it.

I knew from the outset that a blog about creativity and writing was not going to garner as many hits as blogs about vacuous celebrities (e.g., TMZ, Perez Hilton, et al). And, to be truthful, I’ve never wanted it to be that popular—if I knew that thousands would read each posting it would probably leave me tongue-tied, frightened of a voracious public appetite.

But since I received his message a few weeks ago, I've been thinking about why I write this blog when I could be doing something else with my time. I've come to realize that the blog serves several purposes for me:

• It’s an electronic journal, of sorts, much like my Facebook status lines.


• If it didn’t exist, I might not write at all, for days at a time. There is an artificial deadline hovering over me each week; if I haven’t published a new post by Friday I start feeling an antsy obligation to put up something new.


• It’s easier for me to justify making time for a blog post than it is for more personal kinds of writing. I would never tell someone that I am going to go and write something in my journal—it’s private and, for some people perhaps, the act of journal writing (rather than mowing one’s lawn or cleaning one’s house, when both obviously need to be done) verges on narcissism or a waste of time. But tell that same person you’re writing for a blog and it seems more concrete, justifiable, with an edge of glamour even. And it’s something I can talk about since it’s public: my blog has a URL (which I sometimes put on my business cards); my journal doesn't.


• It has given me a compilation of essays (or essay embryos) that I otherwise wouldn’t have. There are 80 posts on this blog right now that would not be here if I'd never created the blog. Having to write something every week often gives me a chance to start riffing on whatever is on my mind at a particular time, capturing thoughts that might have evaporated or evolved differently if I hadn’t put them down when I did.


• And, it often gives me a respite from my otherwise overly to-do-listed weeks. I found this entry in my journal today, written late summer, which is what prompted me to write this post today:

"How simple it is for me, then, to sit down for an hour a week and write a blog post, then to take a few moments to look for a photo I might use for it, convert it to sepia, and load it up on Blogger. It is a moment of solace and peace. I wish I could have it for more than an hour a week."

(Photograph by Beth Blevins)

In defense of paper

At a PTA meeting I went to a couple of nights ago, some parents argued that, for ecological reasons, the PTA newsletter should no longer be printed and mailed. They argued that parents should read the newsletter online and not expect a paper copy, which costs the PTA thousands of dollars each year in printing and mailing costs. The counter-argument was that not all parents have computers and/or Internet access. So an ad hoc committee was formed that will look into providing computers to parents who don’t have them in the home. (Although, now that I think about it, I’m not sure that the energy required to manufacture, ship and run a computer is all that much ecologically better, in the long run, than printing and mailing a bi-monthly newsletter).

I receive the PTA newsletter by email because it arrives a week earlier that way, but I don’t want to receive all my news—or all the words I read—this way. The primary reason is that it hurts my neck to read at the computer for long stretches of time. And online text glows, which never feels natural to me. Stare at it too long and I start getting eyestrain and an ache in my forehead. I never had a headache in my life—or neck problems—until I started to use a computer in the late 1980s.

If everything goes online, I’m afraid readers of the future will be awkward head-jutting, Advil-popping creatures tethered to the computer screen (since that will be their only access to any kind of writing and all measures of entertainment), unable to move away since their physical misery will keep them from wanting to get up.

Of course, there are portable devices that lack the glow of a computer screen, and which you can read as you eat breakfast, but as I said in a previous post, unless the Kindle becomes so cheap I can buy it at the Dollar Store, where I buy my sunglasses, I’m not likely to own one. Leaving the paper Style section of the Washington Post behind on your Metro seat is no big deal; reading it on a Kindle and leaving the Kindle on your Metro seat is nearly tragic, given its current cost.

But beyond cost and discomfort, I would miss paper because books and magazines are more inviting to me than hyperlinks. Sure there are splashy web pages, but looking at a publication online, I miss the typical Table of Contents, being able to physically thumb through a magazine, letting things catch my eye. More than anything, I'd miss layouts—I rarely see an online layout that compares to a great two-page spread.

And, since I have chosen what comes into my home, the books and magazines I own or borrow from the library usually have more authority than whatever pops up in a Google answer. One of the best books I own is The Indoor Kitchen Garden, which I bought 20 years ago—$14.95 seemed so extravagant at the time. I used it to start an herb garden in my high-rise, no balcony apartment in D.C. and still use it to figure out what plants can go on my deck in containers. Plant by plant, it tells me how big the pot must be to provide for the roots, what the soil pH should be, etc. I’ve tried to find similar information on the Internet but when I type in “basil,” I’m given hundreds of pages, most not specific to container gardening, many written with god-knows what expertise. I can try to sift through and navigate the many possibilities on the Internet, or simply go to my bookshelf, pull down my well-worn book, and have my answer in a just a minute.

Postscript: I wrote this on my laptop a couple of days ago and uploaded it today, finally realizing the irony of complaining about reading on the Internet via a blog post that I now hope people will read on... the Internet.

Facebook as fodder for fiction

[This is the second in what may be an ongoing series on Facebook for writers].

"It's complicated."

When someone's relationship status on Facebook changes from "In a relationship"(or, perhaps more tragically, "Married"), there is a short story there, both obvious and hidden. I'm surprised that friends bare themselves so nakedly in this way, even more surprised when strangers do.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has gone through Facebook looking for the open-to-the-universe pages of people I barely know or don't know at all. The excuse I have at-ready is that I am a writer—I am plumbing the depths and superficialities of modern life and romance, as well as seeing:

• what people do in their spare time;
• what they believe in or don't believe in, who they voted for;
• what books or concerts they consider the most important;
• what old TV shows people are watching on DVD.

And to display some of my own honesty, of course, I'm also seeing what old boyfriends and classmates have done with themselves and/or what they look like now.

But the thought occurred to me the other day: Facebook is a fabulous tool for fiction writers because there are a million names there with pictures attached to them, and sometimes there are life summaries, freely available to all.

For instance, if you were writing a short story set in Oklahoma City and you wanted to name your main character "Chris Palmer," you can search for Chris Palmer of Oklahoma City (as I did just now), and there he is. I suppose you could still name your character "Chris Palmer" but you might want to switch cities, or you might at least make him look different than the young man with a crewcut I happened to find in FB just now.

Or, what if you want to include in your story a 30ish woman with black hair and blue eyes. By hyperlinking through friends' or random Facebook pages, you should be able to find someone who looks like what you imagine who is telling the world her taste in music, movies, etc. She could enter your short story, with some of her real-life personality intact (but don't use her real name), or mixed in with aspects of other people, perhaps also randomly chosen.

But—and there is almost always a but on the Internet—FB is both a potential idea-generating wonderland, and a labyrinth of links, updates and invitations. On one's Home page, especially when you have more than 100 friends or your friends frequently update, a cacophony of voices rises daily, which a writer might drown in. Writing is lonely work and it's seductive to have so many "friends" trying to talk to you, making themselves available to read what you write without fear of rejection, or having to wait months for a response. And, like other web sites, accessing FB on the same computer you use to write means that it is sometimes hard to pull away, to make the transition from absorbing text to producing it.

So, I offer a cautious endorsement of FB as a tool for writers. Like wine, it can be beneficial in small doses, but detrimental if you drink too much.

CREATIVE EXERCISES:

1. Choose a day at random; write down, or cut and paste, the descriptions in the status lines of all of your friends. Rearrange and use to compose a poem, or make each status line the start of a paragraph in a short-short story.

2. Random FB short story: Take 3 friends. Hyperlink 3 times away from their FB pages (click on the third friend on their FB page; then click on their third friend; then click on their third friend). Use the first and/or last names of the people you find as characters in a short story. Use real life personalities or descriptions of their appearance (but mix up so the first person's description matches the second person's name, etc., and no real person's name is linked with a real person's looks or hobbies).

3. Write a short story titled "It's Complicated." Base it on any non-friend's FB page you find with that in the status line, or just make up something. Write it in the form of reverse chronological FB status lines.

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P.S. If there are writers already producing FB-based work that has gotten the attention of serious publications, please let me know by writing me at: thebethblevinsATgmailDOTcom. I might mention/examine it in a future post.

Facebook: Time-wasting guilty pleasure, or writer’s oasis?

Do you ever sneak onto Facebook, guilty that the tiny amount of time you linger there might have been better spent composing haikus or writing postcards?

I’m here to tell you that such guilt is unnecessary if you can view Facebook as a potential writer’s resource. Not only can you use FB without guilt, you can even feel justified in using it on a regular basis.

I’m not saying that you should go on and spend hours each day taking every FB quiz or playing every FB game that comes along. (Although, occasionally, you'll need to know such valuable information as your Gilligan's Island character.)

There are several uses I’ve found for Facebook. The first, and the most compelling for me is:

Facebook as an electronic diary

A few weeks ago, I was feeling glum that I hadn’t written a journal entry in months, not even in the pocket-size calendar I’d bought to record the occasional minutiae of daily life. (I always miss this stuff when I don’t write it down, months down the road. I find it comforting, in retrospect, to see what I was doing or thinking on a given day. Such info is also handy for writers who want to write about a real and particular day in the past.)

Then I realized I’ve been keeping an ongoing, electronic journal on FB through postings on the status line (aka the “What’s on your mind?” box). Of course, some of the time, I’ve attempted to be clever, but, more often, I’ve written down what I’m doing, much as I would in a regular journal, although, of course, more succinctly. Status lines, when taken as a cumulative whole, can reflect natural and cyclical patterns, from hot, humid days to snowed-in January afternoons.

And keeping a FB-based electronic journal doesn't require a lot of time. Most days, I go in, do my two minutes in FB to update my status and to see who/what else pops up on my Home page, and then I go off.

Here are some recent entries/comments. I’m posting them here mostly to show that none of these is especially profound. If I tried to be profound, I’d never post anything:

likes this cool, cloud-covered, humid morning.
August 14 at 9:08am

watched as a long black snake slowly slithered down the window ledge this morning.
July 30 at 4:44pm

lingering by the window, waiting for the sudden red buds on her hibiscus to bloom at any moment.
July 23 at 10:04am

is re-reading the Collected Stories of John Cheever, looking for a happy ending.
July 14 at 12:44pm

is going to D-Day beaches today
June 28

saw the sun for five minutes this morning. Oh well, at least I'm saving money on sunscreen.
May 6 at 11:24am

is watching the clouds roll by (the weather is changing here every five minutes)
April 3 at 2:04pm

spent the afternoon cleaning dead growth out of the herb garden in 70 degree weather—just 4 days after sledding in the backyard
March 7 at 7:35pm

Helpful hint:

If you decide to do this, you might want to download/keep your status lines every 2-3 months. In attempting to go back five months, I had to scroll down through screen after screen, and click on "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page. As the updates got older, FB became less cooperative, often not uploading the older posts the first one or two times I clicked on it.

OPTIONAL EXERCISES:

1. Gather up all your status lines from the last six months. Copy into a word processing program. Put in page breaks between months. Add other things to each page, whether from a paper calendar, an email or a paper journal, trying to arrange by date. Print and put in a notebook marked "Journal."

2. Gather up your status lines from 2-3 computer screens. Copy them into a word processing program. Add only a sentence between each and try to compose the opening page of a short story, or a poem.

NEXT POST: Facebook profile pages as fodder for fiction

Popularity

“Had-i-lay, did-i-lay, had-i-lay, pood-i-lay.”

These words don’t seem significant, yet nearly five million people have tuned in on youtube to see a young man utter this gibberish.

This is not the kind of video I normally seek out and I wouldn’t have known about it unless the young man in it, Brandon Hardesty, was featured on a recent cover of the Washington Post Magazine.

The same week the article came out about the popularity of Hardesty’s “Strange Faces and Noises I Can Make” video, my blog counter registered 1,200 hits. That’s 1,200 hits in 13 months; 1,200 hits for 66 posts, sometimes made with thought and great care, vs. millions of hits for one video made in a matter of minutes.

I have never assumed I can win over the eyeballs that watch videos of cute cats or naked sportscasters or goofy teenagers. The difference, of course, is between readers and audience. Reading requires thought, perhaps even a delayed gratification. Watching a video just requires a couple of minutes of your time. And it’s hard to imagine an essay going viral.

In other words, I am trying to console myself with the idea that I am seeking quality of readership vs. quantity. But it’s not entirely true. I still expected that more people would have read my blog by now—it’s been around for almost 15 months.

Yet, truth be told, I’ve done little to promote it, other than having it listed on a couple of web sites for writers’ organizations. I’d rather spend my small amount of free time each week writing it rather than advertising it. And I don’t know how to advertise it anyway, or how to help people find it other than sometimes posting links to it on my Facebook status line.

It goes to a deeper problem I’ve always faced as a writer—do I write for myself, or for an audience? I feel a deep satisfaction when I’m able to complete a story or essay/blog post; it feels like an accomplishment in and of itself. But there’s always another feeling there alongside it, a tiny discontent that can only be appeased if I know that the thing I have created has been seen.

So, I am looking for validation, no matter how happy the process of writing itself makes me. Not fame, but a recognition, a visibility. Without that validation, there’s always a little bit of melancholy, perhaps even a small amount of bitterness, in everything I write.

I don’t think my lack of popularity in high school can be blamed for this, though perhaps it feeds into it a tiny bit, like so many other slights in the whole history of my life, all these things feeding into what it is that makes me a writer. Without that urge for validity, maybe most writers wouldn’t write in the first place. Without that urge, I would write, but the things that I write would be entirely tucked in my drawers and never seen, not even here.