Collaborative blogging

I'm still new to blogging and am excited by every new feature I unearth. My latest finding is that Blogger allows multiple authors. This starts my mind churning...

What if you added on 50, even 100 authors (not sure if there is a limit), then gave them all a topic to write about and post about in one day. It would be like those "Day in the Life of..." books where photographers have been sent out on the same day to photograph what they've seen. If posted all on one day, all postings would have equal weight, accessible by the labels given them. They could appear hour-by-hour, one on top of one another, filed by time zone.

It also brings to mind the spontaneous writing group I used to belong to. We met every week and wrote about whatever topic came up, suggested by books or participants. It could be an electronic/universal spontaneous writing get-together.

I'm thinking this is where I should go with the Places I have lived blog I have tried to start.(So far, every writer I've invited to contribute is too busy to post something because of their busyness at the end of the academic year). Maybe it wouldn't be always limited to places we have lived--one project could be about our present neighborhoods, right now, whatever particular hour the writer sits down to write about it; another day/project could be memories of a place and time... It could be an annual event. (Maybe more frequent if not so many contributors for people to read through).

I wonder if there is a way that I can do this where I'm not out spending all the time I should be writing (and marketing my own writing) on rounding up writers, editing and promoting another project that isn't all mine. I'll need to find collaborators who can help steer it along.

Has anyone already done a blogging project like this? I'll look around and report back.

Electronic archiving or messages in a bottle?

I was inspired to start a blog last month when I read an article suggesting that writers could electronically archive their work by creating an extra email account just for that purpose. Once an article was completed/published, the writer is supposed to email a copy of it to the email address. That way, if the writer's house burns down or her computer is destroyed, a copy of the original work will live on and be ever-available.

What if I went one step further, I thought, and put my nonfiction writing on the Internet while it's still in-process or--more specific to my purposes--while it flounders around looking for a designated audience. Thus, this blog was born.

However, the seductive fallacy of posting something to a blog is that if feels like it's getting published already, right this minute, and, therefore, I'm done. I don't have to find (or try to write for) a target audience. I don't have to edit and combine and polish.

But, except for a lucky few, posting to a blog is not really like getting published; only luck or friendship of family ties brings readers to most blogs. All these blog postings--mine and thousands more--are like many trees falling in infinite forests with no one there to witness them.

On the page where you view someone's blog in Blogger (which is where this blog resides), there's a tab at the top that says "Next blog". Click on it and you get someone else's blog, randomly chosen. They may look different--different languages, templates, colors--but there's something the same about all of them. They all seem like messages in a bottle, thrown out to an Internet sea, describing thoughts and movements and routines and family events--with an urgency to find someone to bear witness, to acknowledge their existence.

I find clicking through the random blogs both hopeful--that people believe their lives and thoughts are important enough to share, but sad--that few, if any, are bearing witness. Maybe most blogs are only us writing "Kilroy was here" on an electronic wall.

How this blog is evolving

I've decide to divvy postings already made to this blog, as well as all my new postings, into three categories/blogs. I'm not sure how long I can keep three blogs going, but this is all  experimental/experiential for me, so I'll learn along the way. Blogging is still relatively new, so I'm not sure there are any exact rules about blogging or the number of blogs one is supposed to write anyway. And it's all free, so why not? (Will Blogger get sick of me at some point?)

• Postings about home or places I have lived is migrating to an experimental collaborative blog called "Places I Have Lived." I'll link to it in a sidebar when I actually have more than 2-3 postings there.


• Postings about blogging and writing will stay here and the blog will be continued to be called "Writing Home"--its focus will be on blogging/writing and, especially, finding a home for writing. I may invite participation from other writers about their experiences with getting published, writing blogs, etc. It depends on how much energy and time I have to read and solicit submissions from other people. 


• Everything else that has no exact market/focus/audience in mind, but is just whatever I feel like writing about,  will now go into a blog called The Electronic Closet (...of Beth Blevins' Overactive Mind). This is a blog that is closed to search engines, so it's just for whoever stumbles upon it or wants to seek it out. There is no intended audience with this one, so it will offer me more freedom to write about what I want and maybe write more about my personal life and the right-now. I will basically use it to store essays in-process and vents.

I'm doing this all wrong

I went to a blogging workshop at the Writers Center in Bethesda on Saturday and discovered that I have been doing this blog all wrong. For one thing, my paragraphs have been too long. I haven't used a lot of color or images. But, worst of all, I haven't had a strong focus for the blog--I can't describe it in five words or less.

Apparently, writing what's on my mind is not going to work as a blog.

So, I am going to rethink the format of this blog in the next few days. Probably what will happen is that I will keep it as an electronic closet for my thoughts (from which I can build larger essays) but shut it down to search engines and any outside links, and people will only be able to find it by invitation.

In addition, I may start a new blog focused on blogging/writing for blogs and writing for publication, which will be more publicly accessible.

I'm also toying with the idea of a collaborative blog on places people have lived, which will compile short pieces on places all over the country, and in other countries. I did something like this a long time ago with "a very small magazine"--we ran an issue on places people lived, with the nitty-gritty on cost of rent, food, etc. I may go for both the poetic and the everyday with the new blog. I would use some of the pieces I've already written for this blog on "places I have lived" to start it. Of course, once I start researching this, I'll probably find that someone else has already done it.

I'll be visiting other blogs and Internet spaces in the next few day and may post something on what I'm finding. Until then, I'm lost in cyberspace...

Dinnertime conversations in an eccentric household: James Joyce’s Ulysses as a Seinfeld episode

We are a silly family (see post on Urban legends and bad poetry). Some of our silliness takes place at dinnertime. My son often acts out colorful characters and zoned-out teenage conversations from his day, and sometimes the topics among the rest of us verge toward the absurd.

Take last night’s dinner conversation. After my son made a reference to “Khan!" from the Star Trek "Wrath of Khan" movie, I told him that he shouldn’t make a cultural reference to a movie he’d never seen. My husband said, “That’s ridiculous, people who have never read Ulysses make references to it all the time.” (He looked pointedly at me).

“Hey, what if we had the Seinfeld cast could act out highlights from James Joyce’s Ulysses?” I said, suddenly inspired. “You could have George be the guy in the book who talks about the shrinkage-inducing sea.” And then we were off—Elaine as Molly Bloom, Jerry as Leopold Bloom.

Some background: I’ve never managed to get all the way through Ulysses—its mostly male-centric world has always seemed alien and alienating to me: men getting drunk together, masturbating, peeing outside, etc. As a freshman in college, the first time I tried to read the book, I got stuck on the phrase in the first chapter of the book: “the scrotum-tightening sea.” It just stopped me right there. I was naïve and didn’t exactly know where a scrotum was and I had no idea how the sea could tighten it up.

Years later, when George on Seinfeld came in from a swim and said, “I’ve got shrinkage!” it was a Eureka moment for me. “Scrotum-tightening sea!” some part of my brain acknowledged. And, immediately, the dejected realization — "Is that all it was?"

Maybe someday I’ll actually read Ulysses and write this whole thing up as a lost screenplay. But here’s what we’ve got so far:

(Highlights)

Chapter 1

Stately, plump George Costanza came inside from the backyard where he had tried to take a swim. He peered into the kitchen and called out coarsely, “The water in that pool is cold and I’ve got shrinkage!” (Laughter; pause.) “It reminds me of my mother.”

Chapter 13

Jerry comes in and slaps some cash on the counter. “Let’s just say,” he confides to Kramer. “This afternoon, on the beach, I wasn’t the master of my domain.”

Chapter 18

Elaine explains her latest date. “I put my arms around him and his heart was beating like mad and then--Yada, yada, yada...”

[End]

I wish I knew where to put “Serenity now!” and “No soup for you!” (Bloom—I think it’s Bloom—talks a lot about soup in the chapter where he goes to a pub for lunch, but no one denies him food), and “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!”—and all the other Seinfeld expressions I was able to Google tonight, but I don’t know the book well enough to place them. If you, dear readers, have suggestions for more Seinfeld/Ulysses scenes, please send them on.

Giving away the milk for free

As I entered adolescence, my mother often repeated, “Why buy the cow if the milk is free?”-- an adage that was supposed to inspire me to keep a teenage boy from taking clumsy advantage of me.

(My mother had other cow-inspired adages, perhaps because we were country people, especially, “Everybody to their own taste said the old woman who kissed the cow,” which was quoted whenever neighbors showed strange taste in clothing, spouses, etc.)

Blogging feels a little like giving away the milk. I’m putting out for free here--I don’t see anyway of making money doing this. That wouldn’t be so bad in and of itself, since the slim possibility of being seen outweighs the even lesser possibility of being paid for this stuff, and I don’t know where else to place it anyway.

What bothers me is that paid publications seem to be filling more space with what are essentially blogging posts--letters and submissions on particular topics from anyone anywhere. In the Washington Post, instead of running a columnist on page 3 of their Metro section, they now fill the space with submissions from people recalling strangers’ good deeds or cute moments with children. (Every few days, they fill that space with excerpts from a Post online discussion board.)

I often read and enjoy these letters, since it’s like voices of the sane and sincere freed from the chaos of the Beltway. What bothers me is that none of the letter writers is paid.

The Post Magazine also runs a paid reader-submitted feature called “Editors Query,” asking readers to submit a response to questions they pose, like, “Tell us about a time you made a dining faux pas,” or “Tell us about a time you had to admit your parents were right.” They pay $50 for these gems. That’s a lot less than they paid a writer friend in the early 1990s ($250) to fill essentially the same space in that magazine.

Many of the Post’s feature writers have taken on the chatty, immediate style of blogging, especially in their Sunday Source section. If this is happening in what was traditionally a staid print publication, I shudder to think what will happen elsewhere. How much chattier can People or Us get?

Worse, the Post-owned local Gazette newsweekly has cut its staff columnists due to budget constraints. They seem to be filling the space with more pictures, more ads posing as features (such as stories about local houses for sale). I assume more reader-written submissions are just around the corner.

I like the idea of blogging as an act of democracy—no opinion suppressed, everyone having access to a forum. But blogging culture—the instant and the free--is seeping into traditional print culture and I think all writers and writing will eventually suffer for it.

Urban legends and bad poetry

A few summers ago, my son and I were each obsessed with starting an urban legend—we wanted the kind of infamy you can only get when people start forwarding something you have written so many times that you get it once and then again a few months later.

He taped two pie pans together, hung them from the clothesline, then drafted a story about the mysterious appearance of flying saucers over Maryland, which he put on his AOL space. No one seemed to forward it to anyone else, or at least we never got it back, so he mostly forgot about it.

Not wanting to write something that would terrorize gullible people and not wanting to lie outright, I had trouble writing the start of an urban legend. In the meantime, I decided that I could start one of those email questionnaires you’re supposed to bother all your friends with. It included such challenging (and now dated) questions as, “If you could date one of the men on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, who would it be?” A few friends politely (perhaps grudgingly) sent it back and that was the end of it.

Another summer came and suddenly the urge to be Internet legends overtook us. We heard about a contest ( Wergle Flomp ) to write the worst possible poem and submit it to one of the vanity poetry contests, like those perpetually found on poetry.com.

My son became “Joe Abstract” and I, ridiculously in hindsight, did not use a pseudonym. His poem consisted of the words that came out of a malfunctioning MSWord speech recognition program. (Poetry.com has now, helpfully, added ad-links within his poem, so that if you click to rate his poem, when the poem reappears on a new page, the word “garden” links to an ad for the Biltmore Flower Festival.)

Within days, mail began to arrive for Joe Abstract and for me, congratulating us on our excellent poems, certifying us both as semi-finalists in their International Open Poetry Contest, presenting us each with an “Editor’s Choice Award,” and inviting us each to read at a poetry conference that also featured Ruben Stoddard and Tony Orlando. Another year we were invited to read our poems and party with Florence Henderson.

All this for a poem about flatulence with the hopeful title, “Beautiful Poem.” (If you’d like to read the poem in its awful entirety, see: Beautiful Poem. Be sure to rate it while you’re there.)

Sadly, neither of us was nominated for a Wergle Flomp, the prize we most keenly wanted.

Blogging as confession booth

Blogging seems akin to those confessional booths in reality shows, where the participant steps aside from the everyday activities of the group and unloads her thoughts. Then she walks back into the scene as if nothing has happened—a strange and false dichotomy of private thoughts shared with potential millions.

Writing for a publication, then, would be more like a scripted TV show—a less narcissist effort made with greater scrutiny and quality control and, therefore, potentially, much more of an art form. And then I remember there are scripted shows like “The King of Queens” and almost any silly little trifle on the CW and the analogy doesn’t hold up so well…

I don’t know who I am writing this for. When I write in my journal I am addressing my future self, telling myself things to remember about the time I am describing, suggesting things I might want to think about or write about later, when I have more time. Part memoir, part raw material.

Maybe writing is like praying—we’re really still only talking to ourselves, but sometimes someone (a higher consciousness, a future self) hears us.

"Writing Home"--Not such a unique name, after all

I named this blog "Writing Home" thinking it was a clever play on words. I was very spontaneous and didn't take any extra time to Google the phrase first, afraid I'd get lost in cyberspace and not make it back to writing the actual blog last night. I googled it tonight--not only are there many books with "Writing Home" as a title, but someone else already has a blog called "Writing Home."

Is that allowed in the blogging universe or is using a title that's already in use considered rude? I also found that "writing home" as a phrase picks up a lot of junk, like "Writing Home Page," etc.


How much thought am I supposed to be putting into this blog anyway? It might take me a couple of weeks just to think of a title that hasn't been used before unless I start tagging numbers onto them like an overused email address (e.g., "Writing Home293").

Is blogging the new little magazine?

Blogging doesn't feel natural to me. I don't understand who might read this; if I don't publicize this and provide a link to it, how will people ever come across it? Who would take the time to go through a universe of anonymous blogs? So, maybe I am just writing this to myself, storing my thoughts in cyberspace rather than in a notebook--the benefit that it is a journal I can access from anywhere.  

I am assuming that blogging is what the zine scene used to be in the 1980s to mid-1990s. I used to publish a little magazine (a very small magazine) and was sort-of part of the underground zine scene in the 1980s to early 1990s.

It used to be a tedious process to publish and distribute a little magazine. Even when it was mostly my own writing, I would have to type everything up and lay it out (the first few issues were actually done on an electric typewriter; the middle issues were done on an old Mac Plus, with a screen the size of a trade paperback; and the later issues done on the comparably larger-sized Power Mac). Then a trip to the copy store and back home to collate and staple. Later on to the post office to mail it out to the people who were brave and kind enough to subscribe to it, as well as to other people who published their own zines, as a freebie exchange.

The good thing about publishing a zine was that I would get 3, 4, sometimes 10 zines in one week in my mailbox. People would read about my magazine in FactSheetFive and other paper directories of little magazines and send a sample copy of what they were doing and ask for the same. The process became a lot more tedious when I asked for contributions. Increasingly, all my spare time went into answering my mail--and most of that time was simply stuffing the sheets of paper back into the return envelopes, especially when it was supposed to be poetry or long fiction or other things I didn't ask for. But there were writers I really liked and liked publishing and with whom I sometimes collaborated via long-distance phone calls and letters.

How fantastic that I can type this up onto a computer screen and potentially send it off to hundreds of people at once, without involving paper, envelopes, mailing labels, stamps.  (Or, I can put it on the Web and have it just sit there, the same as if being inside my own computer.) But there is something a little lonely about this, a little isolated. In doing so, I don't see the people in the copy shop, the guy at the post office (most memorably, the one with the handlebar moustache in Chapel Hill), the people on the Metro as I take back my stack of copied sheets home in my lap, the people I would meet at small press fairs.  What is the present-day equivalent to getting sample zines in the mail? An email with links?