Fred Warren's Blog

Discovery takes place in the near-future, as humanity is pushing out into the Solar System, has established major habitats in Earth orbit, on the Moon and on Mars, and has begun commercial mining operations in the Asteroid Belt. Zero-gee is a great equalizer for workers in space, where coordination and balance often trump physical strength.… Read More Book Review: Discovery, by Karina Fabian

So, my middle son got married a few weeks ago, and it’s taken me this long to process what happened, though it seemed inevitable almost from the beginning. These things have a way of sneaking up on me, no matter how well-prepared I think I am. The conscious mind accepts the reality without much argument… Read More A Wedding, Again

I’m trying to get my writing life back on track, but I’m done making promises I can’t keep about how, or when, or how frequently, or in what quantity that’s going to happen. If you’ve followed me at all over the past several years, you know by now that inconsistency is my hallmark, and I… Read More Gone Adulting

This is pretty cool. NASA just released a simulated flyover of dwarf planet Ceres, using composite imagery from the NASA Dawn probe with a bit of color enhancement. They even added some pleasant, adventuresome music to enhance the experience: I wrote a short story a few years ago set on Ceres, and it would have… Read More Ceres Flyover

One of the great things about living in the greater Kansas City metro area is ready access to one of the nation’s premier art museums, the Nelson Atkins. Its collection spans history from ancient times to the present day, and includes a particularly large and varied assortment of works by the European masters, American artists… Read More Local Tourist: The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art

Unfinished business is a common theme in two anime from the current broadcast season that have caught my interest.… Read More Two Picks from the Winter 2016 Anime Season

Let's see if I can keep this train on schedule.… Read More 2016 Timetable

I won’t talk about politics! I won’t, I won’t, I wont!… Read More Random Randomness, 1/22/2016

Blogging 101, Lessons 2 & 3

WordPress is emphasizing the communal nature of blogging in their introductory course, which is a good thing to do right out of the gate. A blog without interaction is little more than an online diary, something better accomplished in a woodsy spot using an attractively-bound notebook and a quality pen. Following other blogs can yield more followers in turn to your blog and provide a good source of fresh ideas and hot topics to write about.

The focus for Lessons 2 and 3 was not the blog per se, but WordPress’ integrated Reader, which allows you to search across the entire WordPress blogspace by subject matter tag and follow specific blogs you find intriguing. Followed blogs appear under a separate tab of the Reader in an abbreviated digest and update automatically whenever there is new content. It’s a lot more efficient than blindly clicking around to your favorite sites. You can also subscribe to blogs and other content outside the WordPress domain via RSS link, but there are plenty of standalone applications for this purpose, too. Just search on “RSS readers.”

This tag leads directly to me.

Anyhow, the task for Lesson 2 was to add some topic tags to the Reader. I already had several from past activity, like “writing,” and “faith,” and “anime,” and “science fiction,” but after perusing some discussion among other bloggers in the class, I added the tag “Kansas City” to pull in some local flavor. Unfortunately, most of the resulting articles were from people who had visited relatives in the Greater KC Metro area or had stopped here on their way to somewhere else. I did find one post from a SF&F writer who’s on the planning team for this year’s Kansas City-hosted Worldcon. That was interesting. I went to his blog and added it to my follow list. Following was Lesson 3, by the way.

I also added tags for Korea (yielding mostly foodie articles and a couple of diary blogs), animation (which spammed my Reader with “Hey, watch this!” animated GIFs), and comics—I’ll have to drill down into those results a bit to find some promising comic artists to follow, but I saw some interesting stuff on my initial scan intermingled with the ubiquitous Marvel and DC reviews.

So, today’s nugget of wisdom: use tags to search and follow the good stuff that bobs like a message-stuffed bottle atop the waves of internet noise.

Filed under: Writing Tagged: blogging, Blogging101, Writing

I’m taking a blogging class from WordPress this month. I’m mostly looking for some fresh ideas.  Assignment #1 is to post an introduction to my blog, say hello, maybe list some goals for the year.

Did I mention I was hoping for fresh ideas?

Okay, fine. Hellooo out there…there…there….

As to what this blog is all about, here’s the gist of the mission statement I offered in my very first post:

Stream of consciousness, no cause, no agenda, no method to my madness.  I’ll probably make some observations about whatever happens to be on my mind on a given day.

Eight years later, I still don’t know what it’s about. Book reviews, movie reviews, topical posts, confessionals, stories, rants, satire, cultural commentary, sports, humor, religion, anime, family, travel…nothing consistently attracts and keeps readers. I’m grateful for the handful of loyal followers I have, particularly the two or three who aren’t family, but my traffic doesn’t vary much whether I’m posting or not. The statistics are utterly unremarkable.

I aimed at randomness and struck my target squarely in the bullseye.

So, I’m background noise, it’s my own fault, and I’m okay with that. Background noise is necessary for good things to happen. It provides a baseline for identifying the exceptional. That which rises above the background noise is, by definition, signal. Without background noise, we wouldn’t know what’s worth a listen.

I could probably do better if I renamed myself Dash Blasterson and chronicled the troubled life of Chuffins, my gender-fluid cat. In Esperanto. Maybe I’ll try that.

Maybe I won’t.

No, I think I’ll keep throwing my random spaghetti against the wall, waiting for something to stick. If you care to hang around and wait with me, welcome. I’ll try to make it worth your while. Browse around, peruse the archive (there’s eight years of un-mined gold in there, I’m telling you), and see if there’s something that strikes your fancy. If so, tell me about it, and I’ll be happy to revisit the topic.

 

 

 

Filed under: Writing Tagged: blogging, Writing