It’s so tempting to drink and blog at times. Some of my best (at least I think so at the time) ideas come to me when I’m less than my regular sober self. But like with anything we humans do after a couple of ounces of alcohol, our bravado goes up as our inhibitions go down.
One of my most memorable (to me, then again I was drunk for all of my drunk posts–there aren’t many) less-than-with-it posts was this one. The lyricist/singer in the picture is known for his liberal drinking habits, though I’m not sure this particular photo wasn’t staged. But I think that tiny post pretty much says it all. Some of the best things that have been written are by well-known drunks.
So what’s the difference between, say, Hunter S. Thompson or F. Scott Fitzgerald and your average blogger? The time it takes to publish.
I need to remember that next time my finger hovers, swaying over the mouse as the cursor rests on that lovely blue button.
So now that I sound like a total alcoholic (which I’m not), I ask all the casual drinkers out there the question: should a pepper post before it’s pickled? Or is a peck of pickled posting perfectly proper?
There are times when I just can’t stand hearing people say “but.” I do it myself sometimes and I hate it when I do it too. I suppose that’s why I hate it – they say the things we dislike in other people are the things we dislike about ourselves – that’s one time it fits to a tee.
“I want to go on vacation, but…” This is the one I hear most often that bothers me. Is there really any good time to go on vacation? There will always be something more important to do than taking time for ourselves. There will never be enough money to go. There will never be enough time. So do it! Stop saying “but”! Either that or stop saying you want to go!
Wow, there was a rant I wasn’t expecting.
A bit of this time I’m taking to write this post should be used to mention that the participation today, and in the last couple of weeks has been awesome! My promise to read and comment on each and every SoCS post is taking longer and longer to do, so I apologize if it’s next Friday by the time I get to your post, but I will get there. I hope there will not be a time when I can’t read everything, but at the same time I hope this prompt will spread further and wider so that many bloggers will have the opportunity to participate and, most of all, connect.
So, thank you!! To all who read the SoCS posts linked in the Friday prompt, to all of those who are part of this wonderful WordPress network, and most of all, to all of you who join me in Stream of Consciousness Saturday!
Hello, and welcome once again to the Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday! It’s been a while since I presented a choice for the prompt between one thing and another – today I thought I’d expand on that and give a few.
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “bat, bet, bit, bot, but.” Focus on one, use them all, or simply include one of these words in your post. It’s up to you!
After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!
To make your post more visible, use the SoCS badge! Just paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!
Badge by: Doobster @ Mindful Digressions
Here are the rules:
1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.
2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.
3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” or “Begin with the word ‘The’.”
4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours. Your link will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.
5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.
6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!
I don’t know if it’s the subconscious prodding of being part of Team Pepper, or if it’s the weather, but I had a craving yesterday for chili con carne. So while I was at the grocery store, I bought all the ingredients which are now simmering on my stove top, their mingled aromas wafting into my nostrils and teasing my growling tummy.
I don’t like cooking, as a rule, except when I’m making something that I can see coming together in stages. To me, making a pot of chili, or spaghetti sauce, or dish I call “slop” (which is basically all the veggies you’d put in spaghetti except without the tomato sauce but including chopped tomatoes, and chicken and rice with a dash or two of curry) is more like building a dinner than cooking it. To me it looks like life.
You start with the basic ingredient and it’s like a newly formed child. Add in the next, which may be language, and a sprinkling of different spices (which we all know are actually experiences) and before you know it, it’s turned into something entirely different, and yet the same.
And then you eat it! Which incidentally is where it stops being like a person… unless you’re into that… but we won’t go there, will we…?
Where was I? Oh yes, peppers. My chili is going to be hot and spicy. Just like Nano Poblano… and the people involved. Who I won’t eat.
I’m trying something new today. I’m participating in my dear friend Colleen’s prompt over at Silver Threading. Her rules in “Writer’s Quote Wednesday” state that the quote can be by a famous writer or by ourselves, since we’re all writers after all. So I’ve taken the liberty of writing my own statement, as I see it. I have to say it’s a little weird quoting myself. I hope it doesn’t seem too presumptuous.
Why do I set such high goals for myself? Okay yes, it feels great when I achieve them, and usually I do because I don’t like giving up on a challenge I set for myself. But the downside is that I end up getting stressed when I have too many things to do.
The latest goal of course is NaBloPoMo – write a post every day during the month of November. Together with Nano Poblano which gives me the extra challenge to make my posts spicy, I’m thinking by the end of the month my posts will be unreadable garbles of swear words. That should be fun!
Yet there’s something extra I’m contemplating to drive myself crazy reach for, and that is to extend my Scenes from the Second Seat on the Right series to 365. An entire year. I’m working on getting ahead of myself to cover the period in December when I won’t be around. They’re already scheduled a day or two in advance, so what’s two weeks? Nuthin’! My eventual goal with the series is to turn it into a calendar. I’m not sure exactly how that would work as an e-pub, but I’m sure I can figure something out. The idea came up a while ago, and I spoke to another blogger about possibly animating it, but that sorta fizzled out into nothing. So far. I should re-visit the idea and see if there’s any interest, though the 365th episode is still 300 away from being completed.
Any thoughts? Anyone who’s reading it think it might be a good idea? Click here for a link to one of the scenes that stands alone (meaning it has no back-story nor any follow-up so far) if you’ve never read one. You may just be amused.
First off, what the hell is going on with WordPress today? I woke up and this blog’s “best ever” day has gone up by nine views, and my fiction blog’s has gone down by four. Has this happened to anyone else or are they just screwing with me?
Second, I really am going to finish replying to all my comments soon. Tomorrow, if all goes well. But when does it ever? Can anyone answer me this question?
Third, I need another glass of wine.
Fourth, … oh yeah! Another WTF WordPress. I scheduled my 63rd Scenes from the Second Seat on the Right post for 11am this morning but it went live at 10. Did WordPress not get the memo that the time changed last night? Was it only Canada that changed? I’m confuddled.
Fifth, what do I do with all these Hallowe’en candies?
Sixth, if anyone can answer the above questions to my satisfaction and (as always) with humour, you get a point. Extra points if you send me a bottle of wine.
It’s true. I’ve been slacking off on my blog. Two days this past week I failed to post. My excuse? Life. What kind of excuse is that? A terrible one, if you ask me.
So I’ve decided to join in to not one, but two events to keep me on track for the rest of the month. I won’t be able to participate in Every Damned Day December this year, so I’m gonna make up for it ahead of time.
So what, you might ask, are these events? Let me show you.
The first is NaBloPoMo (or National Blog Posting Month I assume, since NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. …shouldn’t that be INTERnational by now?). The sign-up form can be found here if you’re interested in joining me: http://www.blogher.com/joining-nablopomo-november-add-your-blog-2014-blogroll-now Here’s the official logo:
It’s Friday!! What with Hallowe’en and the chaos that comes with it, I totally forgot about your Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt! Thanks so much for the reminder, John! So what to do…? Oh, I know!
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “memory.” That’s it! Have fun!
After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!
To make your post more visible, use the SoCS badge! Just paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!
Badge by: Doobster @ Mindful Digressions
Here are the rules:
1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.
2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.
3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” or “Begin with the word ‘The’.”
4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours. Your link will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.
5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.
6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!
Okay, so you have a WordPress site of your own and your site has followers. When you started out, you got your first few notifications that someone had hitched their wagon to your blog and you thought, “Great! I have someone reading what I write!” But then as time went by, you realized that maybe they weren’t reading after all.
Fast forward to where you are now. You have tens if not thousands of followers. How many of those numbers do you figure actually visit your blog?
What brought this up in the first place was the municipal elections we had yesterday across the province of Ontario. Voter turnout at most elections is far below the numbers of of eligible voters. The difference between running for election and blogging is the people running for election are putting out money to advertise themselves. At least we bloggers don’t need to go to that length to have our sites viewed. But I digress.
From what I’ve gathered over the last twenty-one months of blogging, it seems that any of us are, at any given time, being visited by 10%-20% of our followers. The 20% is if you’re either very lucky or if all of your followers are friends and family.
I have just over 2,100 blog followers at the moment. I would estimate that over the course of my blogging career, I’ve had between 10-15% of my numbers actually reading my site on a daily basis. Which means that people have come and gone, and some have come back again, but on an average day I have around that many regular followers, not including those who show up once and I never see again. My regular followers don’t visit every day, but I know they’re out there by our interactions. On my fiction blog it’s even less – I have over 600 followers and would guess there only around 20 or 30 people who regularly read. That’s only about 3-5%
I’m far more frustrated with my 3-5%, obviously, than with my 10-15%, but as I said, at least it doesn’t cost me anything but the time I put into writing.
If you had to guess just going by feel and judging by the number of followers you chat with in a day, how many of your followers are reading you?
lindaghill.com 