pauseRReport, April 2015: On Dry Wells

Tags

blogs, creativity, Dachau, Germany, writing

April 28, 2015 marked the end of my eighth month as a blogger.  While I’m still struggling with consistency and keeping pace with my internal schedule for posts, April, like the four months before it, was a time of slow, steady growth of the site. I now have 92 followers. If I had 100 by the end of August, I would be happy. I know that those numbers may seem paltry to some, but I come into this spot with no expectations. Super Husband constantly reminds me that I’m blogging for fun, not to have something else to beat myself over the head with.

Here are some of the things I noticed in the month of April.

• I am still trying to find ways to balance part-time work and writing. In the last couple of months the job has taken more of my time than I anticipated.  Even though I still have plenty of time to write, my creative well has been dry. Perhaps this is due in part to my body’s muscle memories from the end of the last twenty-three school years.
• I also need to learn to handle responses (or non-responses) to posts that I did not anticipate. The post I wrote about my visit to Dachau did not get much response.  In fact, the posts I quickly put up to explain my lack of comments on other posts got more reads than this piece of writing that I spent a great deal of time thinking through.  I have no regrets about this post—it’s a documentation of how I interpreted my experience, a snapshot of my thinking that my children will be able to read when I’m gone.  I just need, perhaps, to learn to take it more in stride when others don’t see the value in some of my ideas.  Writing is risking, and I’m determined to keep sticking my neck out even if it gets whacked.

In May, I plan to write two more posts about my trip to Germany.  Then I’m going to start a series of posts inspired by other posts I have read in the month of April.

Here’s what I’ll be writing about:

• Why I Cried When He Talked About Mozart
• Beautiful Faces: What I Loved about Germany
• A post inspired by Mom’s Purse, Musing off the Mat
• A post inspired by My Dirty Little Secret about Inspiration by 101 Books
• A post inspired by Geronimo: On Falling with Style by Such Small Hands

I hope everything is copacetic in your world today.  Thanks, as always, for your support.

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blogs

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pauseRReport March 2015: Today, while the blossoms…

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blogs, Brainstorming, mind mapping, monthly reflection

First flowers of spring

Wildflowers appeared in March here in South Texas. We will enjoy their brilliant colors until the sun leeches the chlorophyll from their stems and we once again swing from tree ropes and plop into anemic rivers in an attempt to stay cool.

Although March blistered by with the half-life of a Texas bluebonnet, blogging this month went better than February. In February, it felt like the blog honeymoon was over, and the initial heady rush of excitement when someone “liked,” or “followed,” me gave way to a dose of discouragement and lack of focus.  You know, when the honeymoon is over it’s time to pony up and decide whether to jump in with both feet or quit and move on to some other diversion. I decided to do the former, and it has paid off with slow, but steady growth over the month of March, and a growing perspective about what folks want to read.

I think one of the things I’ve found most helpful is writing the pauseRReport.  As with any other task, purposeful reflection can often lead to positive changes.  I did a couple of things differently this month.

• I listened to my own advice and planned ahead for writing two blogs a week. It took me about 30 minutes to think about what sort of posts I could put up, and I followed through with this plan.  That felt good.
• I learned to schedule my blogs in anticipation of our German vacation. While I was huffing my way up the steep incline to Neuschwanstein Castle, my Saturday Walk post went up.  The Daily Discomfort appeared on Wednesday like it usually does as well, even though I was wandering through a bunch of medieval churches on the other side of the world.  That also felt good.
• I started posting pictures of our Saturday walks, which I plan to continue. Not only is it fun to take pictures of the places we go on our travels near and far, the posts have been pretty popular.  Also, they don’t take very long to produce.  Time has been an issue in the last couple of months because it’s that time of the school year- testing- and my schools have asked for extra help.  Since I learned months ago that it’s pretty important to post regularly, this is a good way to make sure I’m keeping the blog content fresh.  It also helps me improve my novice level photography skills.

Here are some of the posts and blogsites I loved this month:

Wednesday Woodworking, I’m still Cutting: Andrew’s View of the Week

A Message for All of Humanity: butchcountry67

The Lies We Tell, Carter Library (I love her blog. Love it.)

Nutella or Montague: What’s in a Name: IdiotPrufs

On the Road with Animal Couriers– Any blog they write is going to make your day a little brighter.

I read a couple of great books this month, too:

Wool by Hugh Howey.  This book blew me away.  I read so much that I’m not too blow awayable, but this was a fun read.

The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell. This is the first book in his Saxon tales series.  I’ve had to exercise self-control not to download all of them on my Nook.  Really accessible historical fiction.

In April…

I am going to write about our trip to Germany for the month of April. It will be a heck of a chore  to keep my blogs post reader short, because it was a singular experience.

My goal for April is to do some mind mapping before I start the writing about our travels to see if that assists me in any way, and whether mind mapping could have any applications to the work I do in classrooms for the San Antonio Writing project.

If I had a second goal, (I swore off of second goals, but…) it would be to write a couple of posts for the paus(ed) label.  Students have been doing some awesome writing within the activities their teachers and I share with them, and I’m anxious to share my observations about these wonderful young adults.  But I’m not setting a second goal.

When did you experience the end of your blog honeymoon?  What did you do to regain your footing?

pauseRReport: On Six Months of Blogging, Brain Fog, and New Strategies

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blogs, Gallagher's Write Like This, pauserreport, writing

I’m in there somewhere.

Here is one thing I learned in month six:

• In terms of readership, it’s almost as important to respond to what other people are saying on their blogs as it is to write your own posts. My February views and visitors were lower than views and visitors in January, but many of those views resulted from comments I’d made on other sites.

Some of my favorite Blog posts from the month of February are:

• Let’s Play Literary Would You Rather!(6^th Edition) 101 Books
• Friday Book Chat: Movies That Were Better Than Their Book, Such Small Hands
• The Good, the Bad, and the Low Flush Toilet Peg-0-Leg’s Ramblings
• Jesse Fuller, The Lone Cat, The Immortal Jukebox
• A Year of Reading the World: A Q & A with Ann Morgan, WordPress.com
• Permission to Fail, Brevity

My blog just didn’t get much of my attention in the month of February.  I only posted 4 times, and the most read post was Love and Time.  An intestinal infection plagued me for the better part of two weeks, and I lacked a general sense of focus, which is unusual for me.   I think brain fog is a good description for what I felt in the month of February. Is that one of the symptoms of the pause with men in it?  I can’t remember.

In the years before my pause year, I probably had these dry spells, but who has time to think about their missing mojo when that report is due in the next two hours and three people are standing in line outside of your office to have a heart to heart talk with you about what you need to do for them immediately? And before I had major responsibilities in an office, I had major responsibilities at home.  Children don’t understand that Mommy is feeling a little off and therefore cannot make you that grilled cheese sandwich you’ve been craving.  My whole life has been do, do, do, with no time for reflection.

My goal setting for February.

Now I’m my own boss, and I have both the freedom and time to decide how I want my life to proceed. I need some new strategies. So without a real grasp of what these strategies should be, I’m now writing some ideas down and naming them strategies because I have to start somewhere.

• I need solid ideas about what I’m going to be writing in a given month. I have been pretty consistent to write about a topic for a month or so.  In February, I wrote three vague ideas on my whiteboard. They were unrelated to one another, and I only managed to write about one of them.  This month, I’ll get more specific with myself, perhaps by using Gallagher’s if you have 1 you have 18 brainstorming technique.
• It would be nice if I could get just a little bit ahead. Maybe some of my posts could be shorter and the topics could extend into a second post.  It would help if I had something to post when the well runs dry.
• I need one goal for the next month, not three. Three goals feels like an albatross around my neck.  One is more manageable.  So my goal for March is to publish two posts a week, at least one of which will related to the topic of the month, which I will think of soon.

What about you?  What strategies do you employ when your mojo is in hiding?  How do you keep blogging when the blogging gets tough?

The PauseRReport: January 2015

Tags

blogs, goals, monthly reflection

Marfa, Texas  January 2015

Here are some of the things I’ve learn in this, my fifth month of blogging.

• My soon to be daughter- in- law sat with me while I created categories and menus to make the blog more user friendly for people who just wanted to look at a certain type of post. Her assistance was absolutely invaluable, so I learned from my sweet, soon- to- be daughter that you don’t always have to figure everything out by yourself.  I love my children and their spouses.  I love them so much.
• No matter what, it’s really about the writing. Good, solid writing is what really counts, so I need to keep on working to improve my writing.
• It’s okay to write about what you want to write about.
• Fulfilling goals is scary. The Pillow Poll was scary.  The Song of the Month was dry-mouth, head in hands, on the downslide of the roller coaster scary.  But when you have done it, it doesn’t kill you.  In fact, it’s satisfying to take a little thought and blow on the spark of it until you’ve created a glowing ember.
• In writing about my confusion and frustration with the birdy format, I came to a realization. When I voiced my misgivings, my understanding of the platform actually took a cognitive leap forward. I need to examine this idea more.

Books I’ve read this month:

• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• Burned by Karen Marie Moning
• The Mime Order by Samantha Shannon
• Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella

Blog Posts I’ve enjoyed:

• Twirl,  The Carter Library
• He Wrote It Down, In Other Words
• The “Word Problem” Problem, Math with Bad Drawings
• Hiding In The Shadows: The Way We Make a Broken Heart, The Immortal Jukebox
• Why I Would Rather Find the Funny than the Meaning of Life: Peg-o-leg’s Ramblings

 

Total Views in Month Five:                          382

Total Visitors in Month Five:                      194

My top posts:

• To Tweet or Not to Tweet
• It’s the Last Midnight: Reflections on 2014
• Daily Discomfort: The Rose

February Goals:

Every day is new

• Sign up for an online photography course
• Learn to do one HTML move
• Hashtag a tweet and do three more @’s for people I refer to on the blog.

It’s the Last Midnight: Reflections on 2014

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blogs, New year, year end reflection

Came home from Mount Rainier, and started to blog.

When my children were about six months old and three years old, I had one particularly bad day in which I had to change my clothes five or six times.  I got pooed on, peed on, sneezed on, thrown up on, and bled on.  That’s a lot of bodily fluids in one day.

This year has been kind of like that day, if you exchange physical manifestations for internal ones.  My husband has been treated for cancer, and I quit a long-time job with no idea about how I would spend my time in the upcoming year.  Our emotions have run the gamut from elation ( treatment’s over!, got a new job!) to gut wrenching fear and uncertainty.  While I know that other years will bring other challenges, I’m not sorry to step into a new year and call 2014 done. And that’s partially because in 2015, I can blog for twelve whole months.

When I quit my job, I knew I wanted to start a blog.  I wanted to write about my pause, and the new things I learned about the world during the 2014-15 school year.  I didn’t know much about social media (still don’t) and I felt like this missing knowledge was a good topic for exploration.  I’d write as I went, talk about what I’d learned and maybe in the process I could give someone else insight into the tapestry of the technological world from the viewpoint of a 55 year old woman.  I wanted to make myself do things that stretched me as a person, I wanted to touch what makes me uncomfortable, and write about what happened when I push myself.  I wanted to write about education.

And that’s pretty much what I’ve done, with a few dips into the world of poetry and fiction.  In the last four months, I’ve written thirty six posts, had 995 site views and 469 visitors.  Today I have 71 followers.  I don’t have a clear perspective about what these numbers mean to others, or how they compare to other people who start a blog.

Here’s what I do know:

I enjoy writing this blog. It’s the highlight of my day.  If I’m not writing a blog, I’m thinking about what goes in the next             blog.

I haven’t run out of things to write about yet.  I thought that might be a problem, but it hasn’t.  People hand me                      things to put into my stuck bucket, or they tell me to “take a picture of that for your blog.” The whole world is my                    fodder.

I am amazed at all of the talented, insightful, and unique points of view I can read about by reading other people’s               blogs.  I knew people blogged, but I never understood the scope of this world.  It’s like that time when I was six and             my grandfather tried to get me to understand why there would need to be a whole factory just to make gum.  Here               are a few of my favorites: The Carter Library, The Immortal Jukebox, James Radcliffe, idiotprufs, and                                 The Mashed Radish.

I never expected the whole-hearted support and kindness that I’ve received from my blog audience.

It’s the last post of 2014, and I’ll be wireless-less for the next week or so, but Ill be thinking about blog topics in the interim. Here are some topics I’m interested in:

• What do the symbols on Twitter mean?  Why can’t they just write words?
• Why does my left arm pit smell worse than my right one? Could it be that my right nostril isn’t working right?
• Why do people get tattoos?  Is this something I should consider at my age? What kind of tattoo would I get?
•  How long have I been touching walls when I walk?  What does this mean?
• I’ve never been up in the club.  What do people do when they go up in the club?
• How do I set up my blog so that it’s visually interesting?  How frightening will it be to take a basic photography course?  Will I be in there with a bunch of six year olds?
• What is HTML, and why does RSS sound so mysterious when it means “Really Simple Syndication?”
• Who should I interview?  How do I conduct a killer interview?  What happens when I come back and write about it?
• How can I gently break up with Professor McMonagle, who I said I liked on Facebook, but I don’t in actuality like her enough to hear from her three times a week?  When I say I like something on Facebook, does that always indicate a lifetime commitment?

I  let December go by without doing a poll or posting a song of the month.  I didn’t anticipate how much time the family celebrations would take and mine just ran out.  I hope to get to these two goals in January.

Have a great New Year everybody!  Happy Writing!

Thursday Stretch: What I’ve learned about blogging (and the naked truth) in the last (almost) three months.

Tags

blogs, pingback, trackback, writing, writing skills

That’s writing, isn’t it?

I didn’t write about facebook this month.  I’d said I was going to in a previous post, but the specter of Prostate Cancer loomed large and I knew I needed to write about it.  I didn’t post anything for several days, building up my courage to strip my feelings bare, to tell the truth about my truth.

The night after I wrote the first Cancer post, I dreamed about sitting in church in my underwear.  I was watching a children’s Christmas program, and then I stripped off the rest of my clothes and sat in the pew wrapped in nothing but a blanket.  I don’t need Freud to tell me the nature of that dream.  That’s writing, isn’t it?  The guts of writing is truth, even if it embarrasses, even if it means laying your naked hands on the page for others to view.

I did meet one of my goals for the month.  I pingbacked.  I also resisted the urge to use the words pingback and mountain in the same sentence.   Am I the only one who struggles with this word association? My knowledge of the pingback is still cursory at best, procedural only.  The Daily Post told me to follow directions and I did, so now I have pushed the button that made this happen.  I could probably push the button and make the pingback a reality again.  My understanding of the pingback is that if I want to direct someone on another blog to what I wrote on my blog, then I pingback.  Is that a verb? I just used it as one.  I’m still learning about the pingback -now I used it as a noun. I had this moment of frustration when I saw something called a track back on someone else’s blog. What?  Not another one.  I’m on the straightaway, still trying to sight the learning curve.

I still don’t know who my audience is, but I feel more comfortable with what I like to write and what I like to read.  My favorite blogs are by authors, linguists, and musicians.  I also like to read things that are funny.  Since I wrote about Prostate Cancer last month, I haven’t been too hilarious myself.  But I love funny.  And honest.  Maybe that tells me something about who my audience should be.

For those of you who have read my work, I am truly grateful for your support and encouragement.

Here are my three goals for the next month:

1. I will post a poll.
2. In December, I will post a Song of the Month.  I’m open for suggestions.  I’ll play it and sing it.  I had the idea to do this when I first started, but I’ve been too chicken to try.  My hero, Pippalotta Longstocking, does not condone chickenism.
3. I want to explore ways to make the blog visually interesting.  I might play with art compositions and different cameras.

 

The Thursday Stretch: One Month of Blogging

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blogs, social media

I started this blog a little more than a month ago, and I have learned some interesting things.  Here they are, in no particular order.

• After you start your blog and discover that you have one follower, don’t run around the house screaming and celebrating like you just won the lotto.  Your first follower is… yourself.  Kind of like that Goofy song, “I’m my own Grandpa.” Parenthetically, whose idea was it to call them followers?  Jim Jones had followers.  So did Charlie Manson. Ditto David Koresh.  I just want friends.  Wait, I guess friends is taken.  I just want readers.
• If you create categories for your blog posts, they will show up at the top of your post in the description.  I suppose if someone happens to put your category term into a search engine, they might blunder onto your website.  Then, if they aren’t bored senseless by your drivel, they will follow you?  I’m speculating about a lot of this, but as my friend E.S. says, “Fake it till you make it.”
• Tags are similar to categories, but if you want your tags to be public, you have to put them into a widget.  A tag to me seems to be a sub-category, so I’m making them more specific, i.e. if the category is Ocean, the tag would be Underwater Basket Weaving.  I could have my tags and categories mixed up here, but again, FITYMI.
• I have learned that a blog can be an avenue for conversation about topics that people care about.  This is one of the things I set out to learn when I started blogging, because my previous cursory examination of social media left me feeling like venues such as Facebook and Twitter were mainly outlets for shallow topics examined briefly.  Now I know that any media outlet can be the source of deep and meaningful interchange- you just have to work at it a little harder.

In the next month, I want to examine the following:

• What is a pingback, and how and why would I use it?
• What is the difference between blogging and being a blogger?  I am also thinking about the recursive nature of being a writer and being an author.
• The RSS feed.  My brain’s a  flatline.   Will unravel the enigma at least a little this month.
• My on again, off again, relationship with Facebook.

To my 12 follow/readers, I thank you for pressing the button and letting an email go to you every time I post.  That was just nice of you.  My Blogging 101 instructor, Dan Blank, questioned my real purpose for writing this blog, and who my audience would be.  My rhetorical answer was I don’t know.  I don’t know who my audience is.  I’m still trying to figure it out, but that’s okay.   I’m having fun, and I’ll figure out these deep philosophical questions later.