Never underestimate the commercial value of mental illness.
You have probably realized by now that the link on the iTouch image from The Forbidden Apple post is broken. I did that. On purpose.
I don’t care if you take the images from this site, but take the time to save them to your own box and upload it to your server yerowndamnself.
You’re costing me bandwidth, with no return on my investment.
Fucking looters.
To be honest, I have been given two of these puppies and I haven’t been gracious enough to acknowledge them publicly. I apologize.
So, the first one is from Rae Lori from way back in February. Aarrggghhh. So embarrassed. Especially since I like her writing voice. Very calm and sweet (what I’ve read of her).
This is the Premio Dardas Award, which…
…acknowledges the values that every Blogger displays in their effort to transmit cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values with each message they write. Awards like this have been created with the intention of promoting community among Bloggers. It’s a way to show appreciation and gratitude for work that adds value to the Web.
These are the rules:
1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person that has granted the award and his or her blog link.
2) Pass the award to 15 other blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.
3) Remember to contact each of them to let them know they have been chosen for this award.
Well, screw the rules (as usual). I’m just going to list a few of the blogs I read on a semi-regular basis, in no particular order.
Eugene Woodbury’s Ooburoshiki Blog
Deborah Riley-Magnus, Writeaholic
If you’re in this list and you see yourself, considered yourself to have been tagged and you are now it. Otherwise, thank you for some awesome stuff you give me to think about on a regular basis.
Blogs are, by their very nature, niche. One person, or a group of like-minded people, write stuff that generally espouses one point of view. Dissenting opinions are usually always welcome, but even those with opposing opinions like those blogs for whatever reason and become regulars.
Then we have the people who stumble across a blog whose agenda doesn’t coincide with their own, and they do a hit’n’run. I did this once (that I remember) and I was very embarrassed with myself. I had no reason to haul off on that guy. I went back and apologized, but the damage was done and I can’t take that back.
So here’s a study:
One message board where I lurk is an active, established community of self-publishers, and a certain couple of traditionally published authors swoop in from time to time to berate them how deluded they are. Um, okay. Thanks? If you don’t like what those people are doing/saying, don’t go there.
On a blog where I lurk, a post hit a hot button of mine, but I almost never post there and I didn’t want to do like I’ve done before and swoop in to tell them all to shove it, because, well…I’m not an active participant otherwise. Why would I do that? All I have to do is not go there.
It’s taken me nearly 40 years to learn that keeping my mouth shut gets me in a lot less trouble than opening it.
But sometimes…it’s a fight to keep from saying something.
I lost this round. *sigh*
Okay, my last theme was annoying me to death. Could barely stand to look at it. I’m working on the sidebar now because, you know, i R a righter and I gotz me sum bookz to sell. Need to make it easy for you to get there to buy them.
Anyway, this is much cleaner and easier on my eyeballs. I hope to get back to blogging semi-regularly, too.
I never cottoned to the last template, especially the date thing.
I’ll leave this one up for a few days and see if it grows on me.
June 18, 2009, 8:07 p.m. CDT
I’m trying to finalize the blog theme I’m customizing, which means lots of changes in the way things look. Unfortunately, two things have happened:
1. The new theme has only one sidebar and I’m rearranging stuff.
2. WordPress asked me to upgrade to 2.8 and now my stupid widget function isn’t working. I only found out about this when Dude said, “Where’s the latest comments list?”
I’m hoping to get the thing up and running some time tonight, but don’t quote me on that.
UPDATE on 6/19/09 at 11:11 pm CDT:
1. For some reason, the “date” function on this template doesn’t work. That’ll be a dealbreaker if I can’t get it to work.
2. The “Stories” tab above doesn’t point to anything yet.
3. The blogroll is hand-coded in the other template, so I need to get that in here properly.4. I have a few other widgets I’d like to try out.
I’m tired of this template and besides, it’s getting a little too cluttered for my taste. So…for the next little while, I’m going to be working on changing it out. If you come here and see strangity, it’s cuz I’m messin’ with it.
It’s been almost a year since I started blogging and honestly I didn’t think I could keep it up this long. Oh, wait. I haven’t. I kind of dropped off the face of the planet in early March. I ran out of things to say about the same time I started becoming a slave to my stats, falling in like with Twitter, and having had some projects to work on.
The break has been nice, quite honestly, but I do have a backlog of things to say now and after I got a tweet from a concerned tweeter inquiring as to my rightness with the world, I eased my way back to twittering too. (I do love Twitter. Facebook…not so much. Actually, not at all.)
I’m going to pick up where I left off over at PubRen and start being more of a contributor over at that juggernaut April set up, Publetariat.
Yeah, I know I have more non-Mormon readers than Mormon readers. How do I know this, you ask? I have the Sight. (Plus the not illogical assumption that I offend most Mormons.) Anyway, that post title just gave every single one of my Mormon readers a giggle. Mostly because I used it.
This blog: Why Mormon Girls Stay Single is probably a lot funnier now that I’m married, but I had to tell you about it, which is actually the whole purpose of the post. I found it via the current, ah, kerfuffle (don’t hit me, Jessica) over what is and is not a real bloggernacle blog, but my blog is not any one of those.
Thank heavens.
Not really. I’ll take Ludwig over Wolfgang any day. But I have not bitched in at least 1/2 hour; thus, I am overdue.
One thing that totally gives me an emotional wedgie is this: When you reply to a blog post that asks an open-ended question, and you put a lot of time and care and thought into your reply, and you’re not acknowledged by the original poster, not told that you’re brilliant, not told that you’re a fucking idiot. What I mean is, NO ONE who comments is acknowledged and the blog doesn’t have enough traffic (read: any personality) to generate its own activity.
Hit’n’run poster who was doing her time on a group blog. I’m on several like that. They have one thing in common: They’re LDS. They’re about writing. PLONK
I don’t think I’ve done this (I try to be conscientious about commenting), but if I have, feel free to shove it back in my face.
And while I’m bitching, might as well throw this out, too:
Takes me about 3 days through the blogosphere these days to get tired of the latest catch phrases and buzzwords. And I’ve used some of them in the last 6 months. Well, no more.
drinking the Kool-Aid (thank you, O’Reilly, like, 3 years ago)
honing your craft (and plain ol’ “craft” by itself by now, no matter what it’s in reference to)
made of awesome
made of win
meme
OMGWTFBBQ and any variant thereof
FTW (for the win)
trope
srsly
And also? My blog is just way too cluttered for my taste. I’m going to have to figure out something workable before my ADD gets violent.
What are you latest internet pet peeves?
For fun and a free e-copy of The Proviso, be the first to peg the reference in this post’s title.
NOTE: This is the second in a series of several posts David Nygren of The Urban Elitist and I will be cross-blogging concerning the issue of authors (whether traditionally published, e-published, or self-published) actually getting paid for their work.
Today is David’s turn and believe me when I tell you he is far more thoughtful than I, pantser that I am.
I’m over at SmashWords blog today, hanging out with SmashWords founder Mark Coker. C’mon over, pull up a chair and we’ll make a drinking game out of the occurrence of the words “indie,” “traditional,” and “NY.”
Oh, wait. I don’t drink. Mountain Dew, please!
I like music as well as the next hair-band relic, but blast me with tunes the minute I click on your blog (or anytime thereafter), and I will leave as soon as I can find the exit button. I promise.
I had a real character of a supervisor once. The minute I clapped eyes on her, I felt real pity deep in my soul.
She was 106 if she was a day. She had a sparse bottle-blonde bouffant. Her skin was paper thin (friable in MD speak), though her face was amazingly free of wrinkles. She had a permanent snarl on her pink-painted lips that let me know she’d had a stroke and/or that side of her face got stretched too tight. She was sitting behind a desk loaded with yellow and brittle papers that had been there since the Nixon administration, one hand on her hip and the other elbow propped on the desktop, a cigarette between two long, gnarly fingers.
She glared at me.
Well, I was late.
My first day.
As a temp.
(A hammer, really.)
But my first thought was, “Oh, that poor woman, having to work at her age. I bet she’s eating cat food.”
My second thought was, “I didn’t know they made leathers in lavender.”
She had a voice like I would imagine the sound a cat would make if it were shaved and then dragged over the business side of a cheese grater. She smoked like a chimney.
Right. Next. To. Me.
She snarled and growled and snapped at me. Once I dug into the work and figured out what had to be done, I calmly explained myself to her and it only took about 2 sentences for her to understand I knew what the hell I was doing.
We were best pals after that.
Anyhoo, over the next year, she taught me a lot about life. Well, no, not life. About money. About how to make money. Because, contrary to my first assumption, she was not eating cat food. She was richer than God. Older than Him, too, but that’s neither here nor there. She worked full time to pay her taxes because she didn’t want to dig into her principal.
And lavender leathers can’t come cheap.
She had a repertoire of cutting asides she tossed off throughout the months and I wrote them down because I never laughed so much as I did with her. She was a mean, sneaky, conniving, clever bitch and I loved her for it. In my head, I called her The Dragon Lady.
One day a customer came into our store complaining about other merchants in a loud, obnoxious tone of voice, and generally being an asshole. Finally (because she couldn’t help herself), she said, “Well, shit. If one person calls you an ass, you can bet they’re having a bad day. If three people do it, buy a saddle.”
Yesterday I was wandering around blogland and witnessed a train wreck of a blog wherein the embattled blogger was told this, only in a much nicer way (albeit not as, ah, colorfully).
And I thought, “Damn, I wish Dragon Lady was online so I could see what she’d do with that.” Except, well, Dragon Lady can’t type very well.
It’s her long, manicured claws nails, you know.
Painted lavender.
To match her leathers.
So around the bloggernacle I go about twice a week. I don’t spend too much time there because everybody discusses the same things over and over and over again and it’s wearying. The feminists fondle the patriarchy of the church like a worry doll; the academes throw around their $100 words and concepts that I don’t understand (click away! click away!); the more-righteous-than-Mojo bewail the crumbling standards in the church and how wicked the world is; the artistes ask, “Where are our Miltons and Shakespeares?”
Yawn and no big.
But then there are the people with way too much time on their hands who come up with nifty ideas that they want Someone Else to (help) implement Right Now and then wail and moan that these ideas haven’t come to fruition and what is wrong with You All?
Endlessly.
This isn’t an LDS blog phenomenon, so don’t think I’m picking on my own again. I see it in every sector of the web I visit, in the smaller niche communities where, apparently, because we’re “all in this together,” we’re all supposed to roll with the Next Great Idea because of some artificial construct of solidarity.
And every time I see the same permabloggers on every blog they contribute to express their desire for the same thing they expressed elsewhere, with the same plaintive whiny tone, I just want to say, “Do it your owndamnself.”
I see all sorts of ideas and requests for programs and calls to change, but the work product is pretty much 50,000 words of “Why won’t you support Meeeeeeeeeeeeee and my Great Ideeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee????” spread across about 14 blogs, mired in clarifications and addenda and backpeddling.
Oh, and speaking of backpeddling. When I began the process of actually implementing a (better, I thought) version of one of these ideas and shared it with one of the terminal whiners, the response was: “Yeah, good luck with that” with the internet equivalent of a sneer and no offer of help—for an idea that was GREAT! until it A) morphed out of this person’s comfort zone and B) started to require thought and action and money.
This happened to a friend of mine, too, in an interwebz community I inhabit, but she doesn’t. However, she’s good at looking at ideas and finding ways to monetize them. So she contacted the person with the Great Idea and the minute it involved A) work and B) money, the person promptly ignored her.
Eh, fuck ’em and the ideas they rode in on.
I’m not taking any of it seriously anymore until I see some evidence that it’s more than simply masturbating to Idea PrØn.
I’ve had a lot on my mind lately that I haven’t been able to untangle, much less unpack on an issue-by-issue basis. What are they?
1. The election
2. Prop 8 in California
3. “Black October” in publishing
4. Independent publishing
5. Agents and editors (the “Gatekeepers”)
6. Mormon writers/Mormon literature
But a couple of posts on Nathan Bransford’s blog yesterday sorted at least one issue out for me, which is my firm belief that whether or not independent publishing becomes as accepted independent filmmaking and independent music making, it was the right choice for me. And I’m going to come back to that Espresso Book Machine thing because it’s tres important.
Which leads me to a post Mike Cane made recently about self-pubbing and an author’s inability to do it all, yet tries because he wants to save money. He’s right overall, but I learned long ago that creative types in one discipline are drawn to other disciplines and have the ability to do those well, too. What they are, though…that I can’t say. So that’s going to be my jumping off point for today’s Jack Handey.
In romance [well, in other genres also? I don’t know], sometimes authors strike such a chord with readers that the characters the author created seem to belong to the readers (aka fans). When an author does something bad to one of her characters, much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues. Well, you know, you write romance, you know that there needs to be a happily ever after (HEA) or at least a happily for now (HFN) ending. (We will parse the romance “formula” later.)
Well, I can see why there’d be some legitimate reason for distress here. The author created these worlds and people and they belong to her, true, but the public pays to read about them. Do they have an expectation to get the story they want/expect/hope for or not? Hell, I don’t know. I’m going to write my Imaginary Friends the way my Imaginary Friends tell me to. [Uhm, I’m independent. I can do that.] But I have to expect that some people are going to cry foul if I just completely make one of them [insert horribleness here].
But now over at one of my must-stops for blog cruising, Dear Author, apparently the blog has ceased belonging to the person who built it, maintains it, and pays for it–which is a far different matter from creating books that you then persuade the public to buy who then eats them up and feeds your bank account.
I’m watching this train wreck of a thread and wondering: Why, if people don’t like a thread, a blog, don’t they simply stop reading? This isn’t Usenet, people (darn it). It’s Jane’s blog. She can post what she wants to and expect reasonably that people will remember that fact–without having to confront people who feel betrayed that what she said in her own house didn’t exactly fulfill their reading expectations that day. The sense of entitlement running through the thread is kind of…interesting.
Yo, all you gotta do is not go there. Or not read. Or sumpin. When did Jane’s blog become yours?
I’ve been on the hunt for a blog feed I like. I’ve used various Firefox plugins and only tried Google reader as a last resort.
While I don’t exactly love it, it’s the best thing I’ve tried so far. Problem is, I don’t get inspired to comment very often because I read, move along. I have too many blogs of interest: romance, LDS, Kansas City, politics, diet/nutrition, traditional and independent publishing, other artsy fartsy craftsy type things (you don’t want to know how many of those I follow), and healthcare industry-related things.
I know I read a blog post/thread a while back commenting on lack of comments all over; someone suggested that this situation was part of the problem. I didn’t understand it then (most of the readers I’ve tried listed how many comments a post had and it would prompt me to check them), but I do now.