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Google Searches, Part III

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Periodically, I like to round-up some of the strange things that people search for in google that land them on my blog. Certainly I get plenty of normal searches, but there are always a few that leave me scratching my head. Sometimes I can think of the post that might have caught their attention, sometimes I can’t.

  • “wheelchair broom” – No idea what this means. Is it a broom for cleaning off a wheelchair? Why would such a thing exist?
  • “pictures of chicken in the shape of fish” – Maybe they’re looking for some kind of ad campaign? I can’t fathom what on my blog could have registered on this one.
  • “whale with a jelly fish on its head” – I’m intrigued by this one, I might have to perform my own search on it.
  • “Jackie P—– psychopath” – Okay, this one cracked me up. Certainly I know the Jackie in question (name blanked out to protect the innocent), but I don’t think of her as a psychopath! Obviously somebody does…
  • “olympic jelly fish” – I’d pay to see jelly fish Olympics
  • “reasons not to like the dentist”  – Ah, I love it when I have a satisfied customer!
  • “nun skin” – YES! I finally got a hit on nun skin!
  • “a person who smells like a cat” – Yeesh, I hope I wasn’t the one they were looking for. They did end up on my blog…is there something you guys aren’t telling me?
  • “farting in the bathtub” – What did they hope to find? Video? Why did they find me? Oh wait, a quick search did reveal a post. Very well. But I still don’t know why they are searching for it.
  • “supernatural shane” – Of course I have talked frequently about the show Supernatural, but I’d prefer to think of this one as someone who refers to me as “Supernatural Shane”.
  • “you’re not a fox you’re a weasel” – Score! A fellow dog trainer!
  • “bacon wrapped mashed potatoes” – Uh, kind of hard to wrap mashed potatoes with anything. Although if they found a result, I’m all for it.
  • “gateways to hell on earth” – Now I happen to have a post on this, but I want to know what else they found? Was this a serious search, like “I’d like to find all of the gateways to hell on Earth for my own nefarious purposes…”?
  • “hungarian honeys” – All the hot XXX hungarian honeys you can imagine! That’s practically why I run this blog! Truly, I should have just named the thing Hungarian Honeys.

For all the new guys (and some of you who’ve been around too)

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I’ve added a new page under the “About Me” section over there on the right called “About this Blog“. This page describes sort of the nitty gritty details of how the blog works, and how you can navigate around. This page will stay around for informational purposes, but I will display the text below. Let me know if I’ve missed anything, or if there are any questions you’ve had that I left unanswered. Even if you’ve been reading the blog for a while, there might be some tips and tricks you didn’t know about!

Thanks,

The Management

The Basics:

This blog is published 5 days a week, Monday through Friday, around 7 p.m. Central time. Regular features include “Quote Monday“, which is a list of funny things the kids have said, usually collected during the previous weekend.

Older posts can be retrieved from the archives by using the calendar in the right hand column, or the “Older Posts” drop-down below it to select a month and a year.

To search the blog, enter text into the box in the upper right hand corner and press “Search Results”.

General purpose links, such as links to other blogs I read, can be found at the top of the right hand column, under the search box.

To join in the discussion, see the Recent Comments section on the right. This will show you who has commented recently and which post they commented on. Click on the hyperlink next to their name to see their comment.

Advanced Navigation:

Categories:

Posts fall into a few categories, such as “From the Mouths of Babes” or “My So Called Life“. All posts in a category are related in some way. For example, the Quote Monday posts are all under “From the Mouths of Babes“, and posts about my day-to-day life are located under “My So Called Life“. To see all the posts in a particular category, scroll down until you see the “Categories” drop-down in the right hand column. Selecting a category from the drop-down list will display all of the posts in that category (don’t forget to hit “Older Entries” at the bottom of the page to see more posts).

Tags:

In addition to being categorized, each post is also tagged. Tags are sort of short descriptions of what type of things you might find in a post. For example, a post about eating bacon while holed up during the zombie apocalypse might be tagged “bacon“, “zombies” and “zombie apocalypse”.

These tags are used by search engines, but they are more than just informational. If a tag sounds interesting to you, you can see all posts I’ve made that have been tagged the same. There are a few different ways to do this.

One way to sort by tags is to scroll down until you see the “Tags” section in the right hand column. This is called a “tag cloud”, in which my most commonly used tags show up. The larger the font, the more often the tag has been used. Clicking on a tag will bring up all the posts with that tag attached to them. For example, the tag “baby” has been used a lot, and is quite large. Clicking on that link will bring up all the posts I’ve written and tagged “baby“.

Another way is to click on the tags in the header of a post. So if you are reading a post about a topic, and you want to know what else I had to say on that topic, look for a sentence like, “Posted in [Category] with tags [Tags]“. For example, you might see something like, “This entry was posted on August 24, 2009 at 10:35 pm and is filed under Evie Update with tags , , , .” You can see that both the categories and the tags are hyperlinks, which you can click on to find other posts.

NOTE that clicking on these links doesn’t do what you think it should do!! These links will show you all posts on WORDPRESS.COM that have this tag, not only on my blog. If you look in the url field of your browser, you will see something like http://en.wordpress.com/tag/pirates/. To search only on my blog, change the url to something like https://erith1.wordpress.com/tag/pirates/. I don’t like that the provided links go to all of wordpress, but I don’t know how to fix it, so we have to live with it. Sorry!

This does, however, bring up a third way for you to search for tags on my blog: just type “https://erith1.wordpress.com/tag/” into the address bar, followed by a word. If I have any posts tagged with that word, they will show up.

RSS Feed:

This blog publishes two RSS feeds, one for posts, and one for comments. If you use an RSS reader (I use Google Reader), you can add these urls to follow the posts or comments (or both). The advantage of this is that you will see every new post or comment as they go up, without having to check back to blog homepage. This is especially useful for the comments, because people sometimes post comments on old posts.

Blogging Challenge – 1 year down

/ Shane / 12 Comments

In years past, my blogging as been spotty at best. Most years my posts were few and far between. I even took an entire year off from August 2004 – August 2005. Here are my totals through the years:

  • 2004 – 74 posts
  • 2005 – 57 posts
  • 2006 – 83 posts
  • 2007 – 91 posts
  • 2008 – 173 posts

So after averaging just over 75 posts a year, I jumped up quite a bit in 2008. At the beginning of 2009, I started blogging a lot. I thought to myself, “Self, do you think you could blog every day?” Honestly, I thought the answer was no. After a few minor adjustments (Sara convinced me to keep it to only week days), I gave it a shot. I was a little worried that I would run out of topics to talk about, and that I would end up making posts for the sake of posts, which would draw down the quality of the blog as a whole. Surely no one can come up with 5 good posts per week (I’ve at least proven that, if nothing else)!

So I started doing it just to do it and to see how long I could keep it going. I didn’t know how long it would last. Just when I was about to make up my mind on if I would really commit to doing it every day or not, here we are! A full year complete. I can’t believe how fast it went.

So 2009 ended with 309 blog posts, more than all the posts I made from 2004 – 2007 combined. There have been times when I just really had nothing else to say, and something occurred to me right at the last minute. Other times I have 10 posts half-written on the back burner, waiting to be polished up and put out. I even pre-scheduled posts over holidays (excepting the Christmas hiatus I just took).

So what sayest thou? Should I keep going at the same schedule? Any thing you’d like changed around here? More / less regular features? More / less posts? More delicious bacon ideas and zombie escape plans and less darling quotes from my daughter? (Just kidding on that last one, I’ve already heard aaaaall about it, believe me)

Answers go in the comments, and feel free to lavish me with extensive praise. I think it’s the least you can do for me, I like the attention (why else would I write 309 publicly viewable blog posts last year?)

Where are the blogs for writers like me?

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I have been making the “writer blog” circuit for a while now, seeing what’s out there and learning what I can. There is so much advice to be had, really good advice, that it is amazing. And all of them agree: to become a writer you must sacrifice. You must work and scrape and toil for 10 years in obscurity, raking in rejection after rejection, broke and barely surviving, often depending on the good will of those around you. If you have the tenacity to somehow make it through this, chances are you will end up making a living on your writing. Blog after blog is filled with the story of the now-successful writer who spent his early years working crappy job after crappy job, unmarried, childless, friendless, but cranking out a story a day until they acquired enough writing time to really learn the craft.

This is fantastic stuff. The sacrifices most of them made in their lives to get where they are, the top of their craft, is truly astounding. At this point in my life, I am not willing to sacrifice everything for writing. What about people like me? “Hobbyists,” they would sniff. “Permanent amateurs who will never reach the heights of The Craft and will never be able to quit their day jobs. Pathetic.”

But what about those who don’t necessarily want to quit their day job?

To be honest, I like coding as much as I like writing, and I make a fantastic living at it. So I’m going to throw away a good job that I love to make less at a different job I love? That doesn’t make much sense. Sure, I could make it big, become a best seller, but how many millionaire authors are there? How many millionaire computer programmers?

So this begs the question, are authors a bunch of bloated wind bags who are full of crap? Yes. Yes they are. They go on and on about The Craft and how they’ve “just got to write” and then turn around look down at the hobbyists for not making the noble sacrifice they themselves have made. In other words, it’s really about elitism and money. This is especially puzzling from genre writers who already complain about the same elitism applied to them from the “literary” world. What if I know that only writing part-time will double the length of my journey, and I’m more or less okay with that?

Writers like to paint this issue in black and white. Either you’re sacrificing everything for the craft, or you’re not an Author. There are no minor leagues. Far and wide, they sneer their battle cry, “If this sounds too tough for you, then quit right now! You’ll never make it!” What’s wrong with being a college player who dreams of the pros, but may never get there? Why would you discourage them from playing? Yes, chances are they won’t make it. But does that mean we should eliminate college football because it’s not the pros? I think a couple million people would be surprised to hear that nothing good came out of college football.

Look, if we were all really just concerned about The Craft, then we would encourage as many people to write as often as possible. But if we’re really concerned about making a living, then it is in our best interest to use scorn, derision, awful rumors about the barriers to entry of the field, and any other method possible to discourage people from writing. This keeps down the competition.

I am trying to break in for a lot of reasons. I like to improve at everything I do, even if I won’t ultimately make a living at it. And I can dream as big as the next guy about hitting a long shot. Most importantly, I am a person who needs constant outside validation. Ask my wife. And if I make a little cash on the side, I’ll take it.

Even if it’s not enough to quit my day job.

(P.S. Actually though, it is really hard and you should definitely not submit to any of the markets I submit to. Thanks.)

Does blogging help with Author Voice?

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Something that many beginning authors struggle with, is finding their “voice”. I’m not talking about character voice, I’m talking about the voice used for the words in between the dialog. Basically, how does one construct their sentences, what types of words do they use, what is the word rhythm, etc. Another way of thinking about it is, if you know me, and you read what I wrote, is it natural to imagine it in my speaking voice?

Every person has a unique way of talking, but when they sit down to write they have time to analyze each word. Often, instead of writing the way they talk, they write the way they were taught to write, or the way they think they ought to write. Writing like another famous author might be technically correct, but it isn’t interesting. That author already exists in the world. Publishers want something unique (unless you are ghost writing or something like that, obviously in that case you are trying to suppress your own voice).

This search for “voice” has taken on almost an epic meaning. Writing teachers and writers just past the newbie stage spend a lot of time talking about it. In fact, writing in your own voice is the most natural thing in the world. The hard part is un-learning everything you ever learned about how to write, and go back to your natural state. The ironic thing about your voice is that the more you think about it, the less you are able to grasp it. Therefore, most exercises designed to help you “find your voice” usually involve writing really fast or in a stream of consciousness to bypass the rational part of your brain and engage the subconscious.

Now, this is not something I ever really had trouble with (at least, that’s my opinion, I’m certainly no expert). I always tend to write how I talk. Maybe this is because not-thinking is sort of my default state of being, I don’t know. But my other theory relates to the title of this post: does blogging help find one’s “author voice”?

In all the posts I’ve written on this blog, I was not attempting some formal writing exercise. I was writing very informal, in a very “talky” sort of style. So, after all this time, I’ve had a lot of practice writing in my own author voice. Therefore, when I sit down to write some fiction, I naturally fall into that. Since I don’t have any sort of writing degree, I have had less “formal” training than a lot of beginning writers. Maybe years of blogging are actually *better* education wise, because I have less to un-learn.

So maybe there is a benefit to blogging after all! Maybe it is not just a waste of time, as many authors claim.