Blog relocating to Blogger

I've spent most of the month pondering my various blogging options, and I've settled, at least for the moment, on Blogger.

Blogger has a lot of advantages: it's highly customisable (and doesn't charge for access to the CSS), allows for scheduled posting so I can post blogs several days in advance and have them automatically go live when I want them to, and it's readily accessible to anyone with a Google account or an OpenID. Even if it should happen that you don't have either of those, you can post a comment and it will show up screened for me to approve of.

On OpenID: If you have an account with certain websites, you already have an OpenID. These sites include Google, LiveJournal, Yahoo, Blogger, MySpace, and Flickr. Check out this site for a complete list and instructions on how to log in with your OpenID.

I've played with some Blogger templates and I'm undecided as to whether I'll use/modify an existing template (like Clips or Paper Wall) or just hack up the Minima template I'm using (and have already modified in a few ways). There are a lot of beautiful templates out there, but I'm more inclined to stick to the clean and simple. Such pages will load faster and not be too visually distracting. I'm looking for a certain look and feel as well as elements that suggest writing and/or art. I also have ideas for some customisations to the current template.

Another advantage to Blogger is its access to advertising options. I have no plans to splash Flash or animated adverts across this blog, but I would like to get set up with Google AdSense or to become an Amazon affiliate. Being that this is a writing blog and I make frequent reference to books on writing, it makes sense for me to become an Amazon affiliate. Then I can display books and get potential ad revenue if someone makes a purchase. On VOX the only people who get paid if someone buys a book through a link on my blog are VOX.

I can also get wider exposure with Blogger, I think. My blog is automatically indexed on Google, and the community doesn't seem bogged down with spam like VOX. I think a lot of blogs have left VOX and just not mentioned it. The VOX Literature Liberation Front used to be somewhat active, but don't read too far through it now or you'll hit a huge swath of NSFW images as part of a Russian advert for dating sites. That no one has removed this post tells me the community isn't being maintained any longer.

So for the moment, Drops of Blood on My Forehead's home is at Blogger. RSS feeds are available for both posts and comments, so even if you don't remember to come round and have a look, you can have blog updates dropped in your e-mail box.

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Fiction! And jeans. Stretch jeans. Yuck.

Thursday I finally sat down and spent half an hour or so writing fiction. I had a spark of an idea while writing my Morning Pages, and after breakfast I followed it up on the computer. The result was about 1000 words of a science-fiction story about a time-travelling woman accidentally stranded in 2010.

The inspiration for this story was an experience I had last week whilst attempting to shop for new jeans. For years I've been buying jeans from Fashion Bug, who have sold straight-leg, normal, plain-old jean jeans. That era has ended, however, as now they seem to have moved to this silly 'Right Fit' brand of all stretch jeans, all the time.

I do not wear stretch jeans. I will never wear stretch jeans. The very idea of lying down on my bed to get into my pants is repulsive to me. I don't even wear pants with elastic waistbands. I've been spoiled all these years by having the ability to walk into the store, go, "I'll take one of these, one of those, and a black pair, just because," buying them, and walking out. It got to the point where I didn't even really have to try them on any longer, but I usually did, just to be certain.

Now I'll be hitting Goodwill stores and shopping in mens' sections of department stores for my jeans, because, let's face it: clothing manufacturers are insane. "This is what real women want!" Well, I guess I'm a three-toed sloth from the jungle, then, 'cos no way.

Ahem. Anyhow. I guess that rant still needed to get out of my system. The story doesn't focus on jeans, at least not yet. I wonder if I can make it hinge on wearing or not wearing a particular kind of blue jeans. Hm.

Here's a taste:

"Now, how do I find my way around?" She turned idly through the guidebook's pages, frowning. In her own time, she could easily have found the information by verbally querying the net or tapping her request into her wearable, but this book thing was dangerously antique. She remembered that when documents were still regularly printed out onto paper, they usually contained a list of their contents… "Table of Contents!" she said, elated with her recollection of the term. A postman walking by gave her a glance as he passed, and she realised how loud she'd been, gave him what she hoped was a disarming smile.

The table of contents revealed a map section, and though this was nothing like the scalable, draggable, zoomable maps of her own time, it served the purpose well enough, once she restrained the urge to touch its surface to navigate it. Grumbling about backwards backwaters, Samantha looked to a open-walled shelter a ways down the sidewalk. "Bus stop," she read from the map. She had to cross-reference it, which took another couple of minutes. "'Conveyance common in cities.' Huh. 'Requires a pass or physical currency.' Nuts." She dug in her shoulder bag and found a smaller pouch within. The black and pink paisleys decorating its surface were repulsive, but the pouch contained some printed paper slips and round bits of metal with faces and words stamped on them. "Physical currency," Samantha said to herself. "I have no idea how much this is." The guide had a description of the coins, but she saw a long, dirty wheeled vehicle approach the shelter, grinding and hissing to a stop. Near its front, a pair of doors folded open. "No time," she muttered, clutching her belongings to her and racing for the stop.

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Video Thursday: Inspiring Authors

This week's video is a bit of inspiration from published authors about writing. They give some very useful and entertaining advice.

Inspiring Authors

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Snowy Observations and Wishing for Spring

Moleskine notebooks

Last Friday I had a doctor’s appointment to check in over lab results. While I waited in the exam room for the doctor to see me, I looked out the back window. The snow that had just fallen two days earlier was bright and largely unbroken – beautiful. I wrote this in my handy-dandy Moleskine notebook:

The exam room is snow-bright – the vast sheet of white behind the building
reflects ths sunlight mercilessly. Twin lines of tracks, evidence someone blazed their way through the thigh-deep snow, criss-cross the field, reaching out toward a loading dock in one direction and the road in the other. Nearby a gazebo sits shrouded beneath a white crown. The
tracks pass it by.

The snow-sheet, painfully brilliant to behold even with eyes squinted partly shut for protection, is beautiful, broad
and unbroken except for the criss-crossing paths. Its surface is lightly decorated with crinkles from wind-blown snow drifting across its surface. The shadows of overhead power lines, barely visible above, stroke across the sheet.

A man in a Day-Glo yellow jacket and hood comes out to scrape ice from the loading dock’s driveway. Against
the backdrop of the snow-sheet he looks tiny, insignificant.

daffodils

I never seem to get tired of writing about snow. I should use stuff like this in the story idea I had last month. I sure have written enough of it lately. Thankfully our forecast seems largely free of snow for the next week or so. I’ve enjoyed this winter stuff, I suppose, but I’m ready for spring. A friend online mentioned being eager for warm weather, the scent of freshly-mown grass, and birdsong. I second that.

I can’t wait until I can go out for a walk with only a light jacket, or hop on my bike and ride up to the bird sanctuary again.

Good with the bad

I can't seem to get going today. My mind keeps wandering in vague circles of procrastination, edging around looking for something else to do other than write in here. Hung up on the details of phone conversations actually completed this morning, as opposed to the frustration of yesterday, of being unable to reach the invisible parties on the other end of the line, I'm pleased to have made the connection, but clouded as to how best to use the information so gleaned.

Yeah, I just listened to the poetry reading on Writer's Almanac. That's kind of a mess of a thing up there, but I'm going to leave it. Good with the bad.

I almost wrote a State of the Blog post today, as I'm still weighing my options for the future home of this blog. If you have time, please look at Drops of Blood on My Forehead on WordPress and Blogger and give me any opinions you may have of them. I'm compiling some data on my experiences in composing entries in each and their look once they're finished, but it's not much. So far VOX is the clear winner, with WordPress a near second. So I'm working with Blogger today, planning this week to play with the CSS, as it's most customisable here (and free to do so!), and I do have some experience in working with it. I just haven't been much in a CSS mood lately.

I tend to stick to one kind of work at a time – if I'm writing, I tend not to want to configure Linux (still have no wireless internet on it) or tweak HTML or CSS. Instead I want to draw or play with conlangs or work on role-playing game ideas. So I've mostly been composing in VOX, as I know exactly how to get the results I want there, and they export nicely to WordPress.

One thing I do need on this blog if I'm to move it is a header image. I could grab a picture off the internet and tweak it up in Gimp or Paint Shop, but I think it's far wiser to create my own. I'd love a picture of a finely-crafted fountain pen, perhaps a mug or a typewriter, some typed sheets of paper. I don't own a finely crafted fountain pen, but I do have the other things. I could take some photos and tinker this week.

So I'm flailing a bit so far this week. Kindly bear with me. This too shall pass. I will get back to my fiction writing. You may well see bits of it in here in weeks to come. I'll be rearranging my schedule to get me to sit down with my fiction-writing Muse and focus less on non-fiction things, though, you know, I have at least three articles for Associated Content I need to start/write/finish. Sigh. Somehow there's never enough time in the day. It's time to make some. More on that later.

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Good with the bad

I can’t seem to get going today. My mind keeps wandering in vague circles of procrastination, edging around looking for something else to do other than write in here. Hung up on the details of phone conversations actually completed this morning, as opposed to the frustration of yesterday, of being unable to reach the invisible parties on the other end of the line, I’m pleased to have made the connection, but clouded as to how best to use the information so gleaned.

Yeah, I just listened to the poetry reading on Writer’s Almanac. That’s kind of a mess of a thing up there, but I’m going to leave it. Good with the bad. I almost wrote a State of the Blog post today, as I’m still weighing my options for the future home of this blog. If you have time, please look at Drops of Blood on My Forehead on WordPress and Blogger and give me any opinions you may have of them. I’m compiling some data on my experiences in composing entries in each and their look once they’re finished, but it’s not much. So far VOX is the clear winner, with WordPress a near second. So I’m working with Blogger today, planning this week to play with the CSS, as it’s most customisable here (and free to do so!), and I do have some experience in working with it. I just haven’t been much in a CSS mood lately.

I tend to stick to one kind of work at a time – if I’m writing, I tend not to want to configure Linux (still have no wireless internet on it) or tweak HTML or CSS. Instead I want to draw or play with conlangs or work on role-playing game ideas. So I’ve mostly been composing in VOX, as I know exactly how to get the results I want there, and they export nicely to WordPress.

One thing I do need on this blog if I’m to move it is a header image. I could grab a picture off the internet and tweak it up in Gimp or Paint Shop, but I think it’s far wiser to create my own. I’d love a picture of a finely-crafted fountain pen, perhaps a mug or a typewriter, some typed sheets of paper. I don’t own a finely crafted fountain pen, but I do have the other things. I could take some photos and tinker this week.

So I’m flailing a bit so far this week. Kindly bear with me. This too shall pass. I will get back to my fiction writing. You may well see bits of it in here in weeks to come. I’ll be rearranging my schedule to get me to sit down with my fiction-writing Muse and focus less on non-fiction things, though, you know, I have at least three articles for Associated Content I need to start/write/finish. Sigh. Somehow there’s never enough time in the day. It’s time to make some. More on that later.

Pressure and Deadlines: The Fire Beneath Your Butt

Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers

“Writers are attuned to deadlines. Most, as students, wrote their
term papers the night before they were due. We are energized by
impending doom, motivated by a sense that now the work really must be
completed; someone is waiting for it.” — Susan Shaugnessy, Walking On
Alligators

No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days

“A
deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most ass-kicking form. …
Because in the artistic realms, deadlines do much more than just get
projects finished. They serve as creative midwives, as enthusiastic
shepherds adept at plucking the timid inspirations that lurk in the
wings of our imaginations and flinging them bodily into the bright
light of day.” — Chris Baty, No Plot? No Problem!

Raise your hand if you’ve ever written a term paper on the bus on
the way to school because you’d put it off for two weeks. Yeah, that’s
what I thought. Anyone who’s done any writing for a class, whether it
be a term paper or a short story, knows how it feels to wake up with
the cold realisation that it’s due. Today. And it’s not finished yet.
It may not even be started. “Crap,” we may think, “and I was going to
really try to do a fantastic job on this thing this time. Oh well.
Let’s get it banged out so at least I don’t get an incomplete for not
turning it in.”

My school life was full of such thoughts. As a long-time hard-core
procrastinator, I frequently stuck my fingers in my metaphorical ears
and sang, “La la la, I’m not listening!” when I had a project to do.
It’s the most difficult for me to get started. Once I get the work
begun I find I build up a sense of momentum and it’s easier to carry
on. But when the realisation dawns that this five-page paper I’ve
conveniently shuffled to the back of my mind for two weeks is due in
three hours, some of which need to be spent doing things like eating
and riding or walking to school, panic sets in. And panic is never, in
my experience, conducive to writing something as pedestrian as a term
paper.

It can be useful for fiction writing, though. National Novel Writing
Month is a perfect example. Your plan is to write about 1600 words each
day. Not a big task. If you start to slip, though, if you miss a day of
writing, or put up a low word count for the day, the task gets bigger.
Now you need even more words to catch up. At the end I’m usually behind
at least somewhat, and that ‘Oh My God I have to HURRY or I’ll fail!’
feeling sets in.

And I write. I write like the house is on fire and sometimes it’s
contrived and stupid, with wooden dialogue and idiotic plot leaps. But
sometimes it’s good. Sometimes my characters surprise me, for good or
for ill. When a secondary character suddenly runs off to war
unexpectedly, it can be great for the word count, but potentially bad
for the plot, which spirals off in an unintended and perhaps useless
direction. More often than not, though, I find that those side-tracks
can lead to more character development and even a subplot all their own.

There’s a feeling of triumph, of accomplishment when a thing is
done. When I’ve finished up in here, particularly after beating Blogger
with a stick on the days I’m composing my initial post in it, I feel
like I’ve made a checkmark in a worthwhile box. “Well,” I think,
“that’s finished. Maybe now I should feed the cat. She’s been trying to
paw my door down for half an hour.”

I write here in this blog six days out of seven. Even bloggers get a
chance to rest, right? I sit down and write nearly every day because I
know someone is reading it. And even if those people aren’t waiting
with bated breath for the next post to appear, it means something to me
that they’re waiting. They’re anticipating. And it gives me the
motivation to deliver. Even on days when my mind is being crazy and
coming up with all kinds of weirdnesses, it’s part of the process and
it’s my dim hope that someone’s entertained by it. My audience forms my
deadline, the expectation that I’ll produce this blog (nearly) every
day, and gives me the motivation to write.

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Pressure and Deadlines: The Fire Beneath Your Butt

“Writers are attuned to deadlines. Most, as students, wrote their term papers the night before they were due. We are energized by impending doom, motivated by a sense that now the work really must be completed; someone is waiting for it.” — Susan Shaugnessy, Walking On Alligators

“A deadline is, simply put, optimism in its most ass-kicking form. … Because in the artistic realms, deadlines do much more than just get projects finished. They serve as creative midwives, as enthusiastic shepherds adept at plucking the timid inspirations that lurk in the wings of our imaginations and flinging them bodily into the bright light of day.” — Chris Baty, No Plot? No Problem!

Raise your hand if you’ve ever written a term paper on the bus on the way to school because you’d put it off for two weeks. Yeah, that’s what I thought. Anyone who’s done any writing for a class, whether it be a term paper or a short story, knows how it feels to wake up with the cold realisation that it’s due. Today. And it’s not finished yet. It may not even be started. “Crap,” we may think, “and I was going to really try to do a fantastic job on this thing this time. Oh well. Let’s get it banged out so at least I don’t get an incomplete for not turning it in.”

My school life was full of such thoughts. As a long-time hard-core procrastinator, I frequently stuck my fingers in my metaphorical ears and sang, “La la la, I’m not listening!” when I had a project to do. It’s the most difficult for me to get started. Once I get the work begun I find I build up a sense of momentum and it’s easier to carry on. But when the realisation dawns that this five-page paper I’ve conveniently shuffled to the back of my mind for two weeks is due in three hours, some of which need to be spent doing things like eating and riding or walking to school, panic sets in. And panic is never, in my experience, conducive to writing something as pedestrian as a term paper.

It can be useful for fiction writing, though. National Novel Writing Month is a perfect example. Your plan is to write about 1600 words each day. Not a big task. If you start to slip, though, if you miss a day of writing, or put up a low word count for the day, the task gets bigger. Now you need even more words to catch up. At the end I’m usually behind at least somewhat, and that ‘Oh My God I have to HURRY or I’ll fail!’ feeling sets in.

And I write. I write like the house is on fire and sometimes it’s contrived and stupid, with wooden dialogue and idiotic plot leaps. But sometimes it’s good. Sometimes my characters surprise me, for good or for ill. When a secondary character suddenly runs off to war unexpectedly, it can be great for the word count, but potentially bad for the plot, which spirals off in an unintended and perhaps useless direction. More often than not, though, I find that those side-tracks can lead to more character development and even a subplot all their own.

There’s a feeling of triumph, of accomplishment when a thing is done. When I’ve finished up in here, particularly after beating Blogger with a stick on the days I’m composing my initial post in it, I feel like I’ve made a checkmark in a worthwhile box. “Well,” I think, “that’s finished. Maybe now I should feed the cat. She’s been trying to paw my door down for half an hour.”

I write here in this blog six days out of seven. Even bloggers get a chance to rest, right? I sit down and write nearly every day because I know someone is reading it. And even if those people aren’t waiting with bated breath for the next post to appear, it means something to me that they’re waiting. They’re anticipating. And it gives me the motivation to deliver. Even on days when my mind is being crazy and coming up with all kinds of weirdnesses, it’s part of the process and it’s my dim hope that someone’s entertained by it. My audience forms my deadline, the expectation that I’ll produce this blog (nearly) every day, and gives me the motivation to write.

Pursuing your Secret Dreams

Deluxe Grahams

Greetings, my little ones! I’m glad to see you all here today. Let me hand out your graham cracker snacks to keep your busy little hands occupied whilst I get things going.

I spent a couple hours last night learning a new Jonathan Coulton song on the guitar, so I’m a bit more random and abstract than perhaps is normal for me in this blog. But then … yesterday was pretty out there, too, wasn’t it

Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow

It seems when I let my inner artist/inner goofball out to play, what follows is a period of lightheartedness and sometimes weirdness. Spending two hours listening to and playing a song about an evil genius who makes half-pony half-monkey monsters for his love, whom he keeps captive in his secret lair, may be partly to blame for that.

Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

Songwriting is something I’ve never considered myself good at. I love to play guitar and sing, and I frequently find myself making up snippets of songs for no good reason. The Artist’s Way invites the reader to list some alternate lives, lives you think might be fun to try out. Whether your secret dream is or was to become a cowboy, an opera singer, or a comic book artist, Julia Cameron asks you to pursue a tiny piece of those dreams, just to get a taste. Maybe you can’t move to Texas and become an actual cowboy, but can you take a horseback riding lesson? Perhaps it’s not possible for you to be a drummer in a famous rock band, but can you get your hands on some secondhand drums and play them in your basement when no one’s around to hear? Indulging your secret dreams can please your inner artist and be a fun diversion from your workaday life. You might even find an opportunity to live them on a higher level, if you get the opportunity to vacation on a ranch, or bump into a couple of musicians who’d be willing to jam with you one Sunday a month.

When I indulge a passion I don’t focus on, like my guitar playing, it can open up windows through which other creative juices flow. I get something different out of each of my moods. My writing style varies, as does my subject matter, depending on whether I’m feeling down or happy, pedantic or just plain weird.

Think about your secret dreams today. Can you tap into them, even just for an afternoon? You might discover a whole new side of yourself.

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A Morning for Meandering

I’ve spent half an hour playing around on Toasted Cheese‘s site instead of writing in here. I am a bad, bad, blog writer. I also have typoitis today, apparently. My rate of typos is up about seventy-five percent. Possibly more. I don’t chart these things, but it’s a lot worse than usual. I blame squirrels.

Kubuntu screenie

As usual, I’m working in Kubuntu in the not-quite-as-warm-as-usual study, with my classical music stream streaming along in VLC. I decided on a whim to reduce the opacity of my text editor window so I can see my desktop through it, so it looks like I’m typing over top of a beautiful Caribbean beach. “Look!” say the tourists behind the camera, “there are words floating in the air, being typed with a plethora of typos which are then being backspaced over and corrected, before my very eyes! Hey, mysterious typer in the sky, you got some typo issues, don’t'cha?”

Yeah, we covered that already. But I suppose you were too busy ordering your girly drink to have noticed the beginning of this document, eh?

Clearly, I am in some kind of odd mood today. But this is my privilege, as I am a writer, and weird-ass moods are where we get some of our best stuff.

The Eyre Affair

Jasper Fforde

As I was perusing Toasted Cheese, I recalled Jasper Fforde’s series of books about the Bookworld. I’ve touted the Bookworld in other journals I’ve kept online before, but let me do so here: go read these books. Begin with “An Eyre Affair” and move onward from there. Ever wonder what the characters in your favourite stories do when they’re not being read? I didn’t think so. Read. You’ll find out. Fforde’s stories are hilarious and brilliant. Anyone who loves to read should grab them up straight away. Go! Go to your local library and seize them!

Ahem. See aforementioned odd mood. Yeah. This is probably the least professional-looking blog I’ve done in here since deciding to dedicated myself to writing about writing (almost) every day.

I mentioned the Bookworld novels because Toasted Cheese had for sale a tote bag emblazoned with the words ‘Boojum Hunter’. The word ‘boojum’, in Fforde’s novels, refers to a jurisfiction agent (read the books) who gets lost in a previously unexplored novel. It’s used as a verb in the Bookworld, but, having not read the books in a while, I had the thought that there was a something called a boojum which attacked bookpeople. I don’t think this is true, and if you go read the books, you’ll be able to tell me if I’m wrong!

Anyway, my apologies for taking time from your day to be random at you. But this, too, is an aspect of my writing life: the ‘what the heck /is/ this, really?’ bit where ideas float around in the air near my head like twisted, broken little dragonflies, each whispering fragments of coherent thoughts which are lost in the incessant twittering of the mass of them. May your dragonflies fly in formation today.

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