blog-a-log

Here’s a (portion of a) notation from Wil Wheaton’s Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir on blogging and writing.

…my editor has continually reminded me that there’s a difference between writing a speech, a novel, a novella, a blog, and hundreds of notations.

…there was a very distinctive voice we all used in the 2000s when we wrote in our blogs.

Unfortunately, as I read through it now, it isn’t aging well for me. There was a deliberate immediacy, an unpolished, unvarnished, raw, conversational tone that, today, feels amateurish. In the moment I sent these thoughts out into the ether, though, it was important to me that the readers receive only real emotion and real truth from me…

I say all this because I hope you’ll believe me when I say I’m a better writer now than I was then. More experienced and more confident.

…writing is a process. It should be about putting words down on the page, revising those words, throwing out some (or all) of those words, and continually honing and shaping and polishing and crafting.

In the early 2000s, that’s not how really anyone blogged. I certainly didn’t.

So maybe I’m not “great” at writing yet, but I’m literally decades better, and that’s part of being an artist: keep working on the craft.

I read (/heard; it was an audiobook) this notation in Wil Wheaton’s new book last year. (So good! A must-read for Wil fans!)

I agree with him on how blogs were written back then. I still prefer to read more personal blogs than “professional” ones. There are very few blogs I keep up with now though.

I mean, based on my own blog I can kind of understand why. Teens and twenty-somethings have more free time and have more they want to say. Older people just settle into life and don’t remark on anything new because… there is less that is new.

I wonder if how the culture of the internet has changed also has something to do with the decrease in personal blogging. The fear of the older, nerdier internet was creeps finding you offline and your irl friends finding you online. Now we have to fear doxxing and your employer(s) (current and future) discovering too much about you.

But back to the reason behind Wil’s notation, that he’s improved as a writer. I love reading Wil’s blog. His posts are well written. Another longtime blogger I still follow has improved her writing as well, coming off more polished and … I don’t want to say professional? (Because she wouldn’t call herself professional, I don’t think, haha.) She’s given more thought to her writing.

Whereas I am still just throwing stuff on the wall my blog and seeing what sticks. Or … lands. This ended up weird.

All this to just say, the “state of my blog” is the same as the last time I gave serious thought to the subject. It’s a place for me to stretch my writing muscle (ugh I need to stretch way more often) and write whatever I have on my mind that I want to share here.

everything’s a-ok

I’m a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad blogger. I know. This is the first entry this month, and last month I posted only twice? It would seem like I don’t have much to say, wouldn’t it?

But I do have stuff to say! I have three topics I can write about at the moment. But I am too lazy to do so. Or maybe I’ve psyched myself up too much.

I don’t really like writing, as I’ve said many times before, and I guess it’s still the same. There’s no research involved, no grade hanging over my head, and yet I still don’t enjoy writing.

Oh, I have opinions. I like to share those opinions. But after I’ve done so, or maybe while I’m in the process of writing, I tire out. I don’t want to think of beginnings, and endings, and middles, and how to transition between everything! Which is ridiculous, because I’ve written persuasive essays since 8th grade, I should be very near a pro at BSing at writing, right? All that thinking poops me out. (As they say, GrC students don’t really do anything, ha. ha. ha…)

It’s much easier if I’m just relating events that happened (like my Disneyland entry, I churned that out in a couple hours), but then who wants to read about the boring things that go on in my life?

Right now I’m thinking of an entry about this letter I got from the White House (my family was very worried when I came home from work one day, “What did you get in the mail?”) which outlined something or other that our dear leader George W. Bush did to further the cause of saving our oceans! (“What could he possibly do?” you say? Just wait, I’ll write about it eventually.)

I’ve been planning to write that entry since August 13. I’d probably write it this moment, if I weren’t writing about something else entirely. What’s keeping me from writing is that it involves Bush, and the environment, and my feelings on both.

As I said, I’m opinionated, but when I’m really passionate about something my mind tends to move ahead of logical reasoning and I tend to write gibberish, or something close to it. So I feel like I’m just posting some weird rambling incoherent fanatical entry that people will pass by. (What people? Not like I get many visitors to this blog, other than spammers…)

If writing about what I’ve experienced and about what I think are out, then what the heck else is there for me to update with? I’ve toyed with the idea before but gave it up because I wasn’t sure how much disk space or bandwidth I was willing to give up. Now, though, I’m desperate enough to try it. I’m going to start up a photoblog! Well, technically. It’ll just be a feed from Flickr linked on my blog. Or maybe I’ll write short entries on my blog and link to the Flickr image. I’m not sure exactly how I’m going to do this.

(I’ve already got over 1000 entries on this blog, and my .sql file is over 4 megs, so I’m sort of finicky about posting short little quips on this baby, but I think I’ll have to get over that. Or maybe I’ll go back and forth. Post larger entries on blog, leave smaller ones on the Flickr feed.)

What really sucks though is that my camera is currently getting repaired so I won’t have it for about 2 weeks or so. (That’s another entry I want to write.) I’ll have to make do with some photos I’ve taken over the years, I guess.

Madeleine L’Engle’s Chronos and Kairos

I really have to work on posting entries when I first think of them. I’ve got a few ideas waiting to be written. This is the first one! (Chronologically speaking in order of when I thought of them, as well. Funny.)

I read through my Madeleine L’Engle books over the past couple months, seeing which ones I really didn’t have an interest in any longer. (Of course I read through them chronologically: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, The Moon by Night, The Young Unicorns, Arm of the Starfish, A Ring of Endless Light, Troubling a Star, A House Like a Lotus, and An Acceptable Time. I don’t have Meet the Austins or Dragons in the Waters.)

It turns out this is harder than I expected. If I were to go solely by story, I would get rid of The Moon by Night, The Young Unicorns, Arm of the Starfish, and Troubling a Star. But if I were to consider the whole book, the only title I’m still willing to give away is The Young Unicorns. It’s because the other titles have characters connected to the books I’m not giving away. Argh! Me and my sentimentality!

A bit of likely unnecessary backstory: the books I’m considering disposing of I’ve read only once or twice before this winter (except Troubling a Star, which I’ve read a few times), and probably bought only to read more about Ms. L’Engle’s characters. For the most part, I find them somewhat dry and dragging. Possibly because of the printing. If it looks like it came from the ’90s, I tend to read the story as dry.

Seriously, newspaper-quality paper and thick type? Come on! How much money were these publishers trying to save here? How much money did they really make in the long run? Especially A House Like a Lotus. I don’t know what typeface was used, but it looks like a modern typeface. In a book? Yuck.

Back to the original topic. If I take into account the characters in the books, I really want to keep Arm of the Starfish because it has Polly (Poly?) O’Keefe in it. Don’t really care for the story (never liked mysteries; once I read it the first time, the re-read value goes down by about 95%), but I like seeing how different she is from in AHLaL. I see growth, change, damage from your average high school setting.

Since I’m keeping Adam Eddington’s story before ARoEL, I feel like I should keep TMbN for Vicky. Zachary Gray is also in TMbN, who’s also in ARoEL and AAT. (Ooh, even longer period of development!) After that, I begin to think I should keep TaS just to wrap up the whole Adam/Vicky story, although I figure I can just remember that they stay connected. (One time I tried reading TaS again and I couldn’t even finish it. Do you know how rare an occurance that is?)

So I end up giving away only TYU and TaS. TaS is a fairly thick book; I’ll gain lots of bookshelf space giving that book away. Which is the main reason I’m reading through the books. (Mum made me a new bookshelf last summer for the foot of my bed where I can put my comics and some DVDs and CDs, and already I’ve got a stack of books about two feet tall with no place to go!)

AotS and TMbN are thin books, they won’t take up much shelf space. But it bugs me that these books are sitting on my shelf that I never ever ever plan to read ever again! Unless I’m really bored with whatever else I have. *twitch*

A comment about the two later Polly books: I know the two fit into two different series (does AHLaL go in with the Chronos books? it does have Zachary … but then he shows up in a Kairos book as well…), one is more grounded in reality and the other is more of a fantasy. But still. Does Polly feel like a completely different character in each book? Or is it just my mind yet again getting influenced by appearances (this time the covers), so AHLaL feels more dry (the type doesn’t help either :P) and AAT is rich and fun?

I know in AHLaL she’s recovering from a deep hurt, and she’s around people who aren’t her grandparents (everyone cleans up for their loving grandparents, right?), but still. The AAT Polly seems younger. And some other stuff that would come to mind better if I weren’t writing this at 1:30 in the morning. Wow, I typed a lot. Why do I always do that? And writing school papers just sucks hardcore! I’m lucky if I come up with the bare minimum required.

list of (stressful) wants

Ahh! I haven’t updated here in a while. >.> School is getting to me. Two and a half weeks left of the quarter!

List of stuff I want to do:

  1. register a domain and transfer (or copy some) stuff from Elsewhere to there, so I can add it in my resume
    (I want to show that I know webdesign (somewhat) but I don’t exactly feel like including my personal domains in something I’m giving to potential employers >_>)
  2. ✓ make a [fanlisting for a Japanese movie (link to Rajio no Jikan fl)] I saw recently
  3. ✓ make a new layout for fsnet and also smcasmin
  4. ✓ go home, be done with classes!!
  5. ✓ be done with writing my lab reports
    (I don’t want to write them, I want to be done with writing them. ;b)
  6. ✓ sign a lease for an apartment! o_o I need a place to stay next year where I won’t be imposing on my aunt and uncle!

lazy blalala … stupid speech

I want a new layout for this place. I kind of have an idea for a new one, but that would require a lot of work, i.e. me finding some code that’ll display a random image, and only to end up with a short-lived layout, since it’d be plain, I’d be taking down the layout maybe two weeks after it goes up, ahaha.

I also need to install WordPress and see if I can convert all my old blog entries to WP entries. Uhm.

I’m too lazy to do all that. I’m going to blame it all on speech class. Hate that class. -.- Not really the going up in front of everyone and talking part, that’s just a few minutes of stupidity and humiliation (and no one cares about me anyway, so haha). No, I hate writing the speech even more. Ahhhhahaha … yeah anyway. I also don’t like having to memorize what I wrote and remember it all in front of the class. Meh. Two things I never do in a class if I can help it: writing, and memorizing. In the same class! Gahhh!! *stabstab*

I will always complain about writing. You can bet on it. >b

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And … although I disabled commenting on this entry, I still get commentspam. I wonder what’s riding on this program, or what code entrenched itself in … or whatever sh— stuff those rats came up with to get their money. euwwwww, I feel unclean.