To Blog or Not?

Someone I met online insisted I must blog to put myself out there where I might find a buyer for my books. From other bloggers I have gathered that one is expected to keep at it, week in and week out. I'm amazed at the number who keep to a strict schedule, producing weekly or monthly, or whatever. I've also read that if a blogger wants readers, s/he must offer something a reader wants or needs. "Aye, there's the rub."

In my opinion, many bloggers offer tips and hints and glimpses at inside tracks to help their readers sell or learn something. From day one, I've known I don't have that kind of thing to offer. All I can put out there in the blogosphere is what I can put out there in articles or novels or stories or poetry:  what I hope might touch a sympathetic vibration in another human being. I might as well be trying to sell an essay to yet another uninterested agent or market. Makes a person wonder if it's worth the time invested.

So herewith a list of tiny successes thus far in 2012:

Two poems in www.lowestoftchronicle.com; one in Lucidity Poetry Journal; one in Red Poppy Poetry Review; one for an anthology to be published by the Poetry Institute of Canada; one for an anthology to be published by Inner Child Press; and a dozen or so reviews and essays for www.seniorwomen.com. An essay has been published in an anthology called Heartscapes by Spruce Mountain Press. I'll spare us all the number of rejections or simple non-responses.

What I'd really like to know is whether this blog has helped. If a reader responds, it's encouraging. If no one does, it's discouraging. But the latter is the result of 90% of what most of us send out, isn't it?

A Thought While Listening

Maybe I’ve come to love chamber music so much because of the constant evidence it gives of human ability to respond to another. Every nuance of every note depends on communicating, on agreed-upon emphases: volume, timbre, tempo, interpretation—and, I believe, some instinct that allows for perfect consonance. It’s like an emblem of the possibility of understanding at the deepest level. 

How terrible to be deaf, and not to experience this!

Emphasis on the Wrong SyLAble

Foreword: to those who asked about the Irving book, it's A Widow for One Year. I left out the title because I thought what I was saying really applies to the other books of his I've read as well.

What I'm thinking today arises from two recent public brouhahas (love that word): the Olympic uniform debacle, and the ongoing campaign rhetoric. Never having been a political animal anyway, I'm ill suited to understanding and/or discussing campaign practices. However, I can't help thinking that if something could just be got through the heads of campaign managers and their candidates', namely: that transparency, honest answers even to harassing questions,

and a change from the culture of he who can afford the most obscene waste of money wins is not the way to win the hearts and minds of those with something more useful than lint between the ears!

When will lawmakers begin behaving the way their oaths of office demand of them, and stop seeing who can outspend the other? It's shocking. The emphasis on insulting and "spinning" every bit of publicity-rich information (regardless of its accuracy) is utterly misplaced.

Then the Ralph Lauren flap: economy is a word with more than one meaning. For some it's a narrow concept involving an attempt to make the most of the money you have. If it was significantly (sic.) cheaper to manufacture some components in China or elsewhere, so be it. The point is that the designer shouldn't be using Olympic athletes as private posters for his company, and the important part of the Olympics is supposed to be international SPORT. Of course, the view of the games as purely chauvinistic competition is pretty well ingrained, but we should really be thinking of the fact that in the original games, even in the midst of armed conflict, the Greeks put aside the war for the duration of the games (in which they competed nude--perhaps so as not to reveal their native states)? The athletes were competing as athletes, not as members of Sparta or Rhodes, or Athens, or what have you.

It's discouraging to find so much of humanity engaged in what looks like deliberate or totally wrongheaded perspectives on really important issues with future consequences.

So much for my rant of the day.

Reading for Fun

Most of the time I read for entertainment. That's been the case ever since I got out of college. It took about ten years for me to realize that a) I didn't have to finish something I hated, and b) that I dared to read without an analytical eye.


However, often I see something that attracts my attention. I just finished a novel chapter which is really a fairly long scene that combines melodrama, satire, burlesque, and sadness (John Irving) that stopped my suspension of disbelief for a moment. Here's a teenager, a four-year-old, and a mature woman in a confrontation full of emotional undercurrents and epiphanies-in-the-making.

As is expected by anyone who has ever been to a workshop, the physical description of the place where the action takes place is supplied right away. Here, though, just before the close of the chapter, Irving inserts the information that you thought you'd had at the beginning of the chapter:  the minute details of the setting with all their implications.

I guess if one tries to write for entertainment, whether fiction or not, one becomes accustomed to accepted methods. This inversion provided a new technique for giving emphasis that slyly inserted a whole truckload of specific, important exposition.

Is there a message here in whether or not it's okay to read just for fun?

Foreign Language?

This is probably not a new notion to anybody trying to learn to write what someone else might want to read (as opposed to those who claim to write for themselves), but I keep finding myself in a manner of speaking (i.e. writing) in what seems to be the wrong language. Sometimes an idea or a compulsion comes along that drips out on the page more or less in the way I intended, and sometimes it even is a small success. Then there are the days when a mental picture develops of a bloated balloon on top of my neck that's threatening to burst. Something needs to get out there, and no matter whether I try to avoid it, quash it, or rise to the challenge, the format and words won't adjust.

Here we are, facing the barrage of political campaigns; here I am with a list of both praise and complaints that need emphasis here where I live...and I can't seem to think in prose. Don't laugh. This isn't poetry, I know. I'm not sure it's prose...disjointed as it seems. The point is, something like an imp behind my screen seems to be demanding I write poems. See that? An imp, indeed! And I won't expose any more poems on this site after the deafening silence the first time I tried it. Besides, if anyone did like one, they wouldn't take it because it would already have been "published." Wasn't there a time when a blog didn't count?

Is there a writer out there with a trick for disciplining that "inner voice?" I don't include freelance journalists or advertising copywriters because I do understand how to take a paid commission and trample it into shape somehow. I'm talking about the "creative" writers. Yes, I do dislike the implied condescension in that term, but I think it makes the distinction clear.

An Encouraging Word

Breathes there a writer so blithe s/he doesn't crave a reader's word that shows said reader liked, understood, agreed with something s/he's committed to paper or the Net? I offer this post only as encouragement. It just shows that sometimes that treasured word can drop from an unexpected place. I've been cherishing this for a while now. It's offered to remind us all that there should be hope to go along with the work. This was part of the final post by a professor of creative writing whose blogs I'd been reading and commenting on from the time I first found him.

...You're a better writer than you think you are, and you're going to be better yet...

It doesn't get any better than that.

Maybe the lesson is to remember to respond to what you're reading; you never know who or how it might be appreciated, or what you might be lucky enough to learn.

What's in a Name?

If anyone out there has missed Mark Twain's masterpiece Eve's Diary, it's not too late. The fun of names and naming is a big part of Eve's (aka Samuel Clemens's) observations on how mankind learned to live in this world.

I looked up from my lunch table reading and saw a big yellow butterfly with black designs on its wings enjoying one of the Asiatic lilies just outside the window. For some reason, I noticed the thought that came immediately: "Tiger Swallowtail." This in turn made me think about the human compulsion to name and to know the name of just about everything.

We most likely begin this in early childhood as we're learning to talk. Names of people and things are the first words we learn. I guess there are some people who grow out of that preoccupation and become content to find out only what's necessary for their work or hobbies. Somehow I slipped into what a few have hinted is some kind of obsession. Thinking about it,  I realize that I'm frustrated if I can't find out the name of a shrub I don't recognize, or a new weed. We spent a year in England, and I think it was less than a week before I bought a field guide to birds of Europe. There's real pleasure in knowing that the mushrooms and ferns I learned as a child I can recognize in England or Italy or France or Germany, where I've been, but I could note them anywhere above the equator. That's half the world of two categories I don't have to research!

If my father ever used a generic term for something he referred to, (gismo, thingamajig) I never heard him do it. His mind was as organized as his workshop, with everything in its place and properly labeled. Even before I married an engineer I'd been taught the difference between a socket wrench and an adjustable wrench, I knew the difference between an Allen wrench,  plain screwdriver and a Phillips head. Daddy wouldn't let me apply for a driver's license until I could recognize and name all the exposed parts of an internal combustion engine (c. 1950. Needless to say, I'd be lost today.) Dog breeds, horse breeds, cattle, birds--denizens of our woods of all sorts, tools, sailboat rigging, musical terminology, a good deal of biology and geology, and you name it--I'd had to learn their names before I was out of school. And now I'm stuck with it. "If you know the botanical name, it will be easy to find what you want in a nursery," Daddy said. Well, I confess, I try to use common names now, but when it comes to local names, I fall back on the genus if I know it. The trouble is nowadays, I'm lucky to remember either one. Still, I did remember the name of that beautiful common butterfly (whose genus and species I never had to learn).

If it's a beautiful bird song, why should I care which chorister is singing it? I keep wondering if it's just early conditioning, or if I'm somewhat like Adam in Twain's story, who seems to feel a sense of power when he decides to bestow a name, or if there's some acquisitive gene involved. I admit to a love of precision in use of the language, but do you really need to point out the difference between a pine tree and a juniper?