. Spinning .

I haven’t been keeping up on the weblogs as I used to, but then, thank your lucky stars for Facebook and twitter so you don’t have to read my rants and feel the cosmic waves of my temper tantrums like you used to.The beauty of tweets and FB is that I can let off steam and go back–usually within a half an hour–and delete the stream.

Just noticed when I came on to post that it’s somewhere around 5,750 blog posts here, with 4001 comments! That doesn’t include Hypercompendia’s posts nor the blogs I’ve started and let die in the past seven years.

I’m not slowing down to a stop here though. The drop-off is mainly because I don’t post as much personal stuff anymore, haven’t read as much in the past year, and have been concentrating a lot on writing. Funny thing though, even though my goal was to get published, now that I have been, each story of mine that I see under a heading other than my own, while thrilling, doesn’t mean any more than just writing.

Yeah, the writing’s the big thrill.

Luckily not so smart that it doesn’t get caught up in Akismet nets however. But just read this one, as one of the finer examples:

“Hello, I have been reading your sites content for a while now, actually, probably since you started. It consists of very intriguing and informative content. I love to start my day off at times just by browsing through and seeing if there is anything new up on the site. Good work, I really hope you can get in touch with me and we can possibly have a chat together. Would love that.”

Yeah, me too; I’d just love having a chat with a place that sells imitation designer handbags.

Aside from the obvious flaws in grammar and typos, what blogger would not want to believe these words of a comment are coming from the heart of a legitimate source:

This is a good post, which features worthwhile information. If you invest your time in reading this, article it really worth it. This article starts in a perfect way. The author has full grip on the topic through out the article. I like the way in which writer has ended his article. It is not a regular useless post in which even writer is not sure that what exactly he wants to say.

It’s the new spam. It comes in the form of flattery and it’s been around a while but not usually to such a degree of attempted eloquence and well, bullshit. And, it’s from semi-legitimate sites rather than the drug companies and game and porno lords.

But, it’s still spam. Ah, if  t’would only be written by genuine readers and friends, enamored truly of our output of words!

Yes, I’m STILL reading Confessions of Nat Turner and will post on it soon, but it’s obvious that I haven’t been the twice-a-day poster girl here for a while. Well, there are some good reasons for that. I’m writing. And, I’m getting quite a few stories published.

So in this age of me-me-me, I’m focusing on my own writing more than reading someone else’s–though I am reading about fifteen stories a day on the writers colony site fictionaut. There’s a sense of enthusiasm and support from the writers gathered here that I’ve not found elsewhere at this high a level of quality writing. These people aren’t wannabes, they’re for the most part, published authors and editors so they have that burning fire and unrelenting drive that makes writing a big part of their lives.

In the past few months, I’ve realized my own ambitions of being published or forthcoming in literary journals such as The Blue Print Review, elimae, Bewildering Stories, The New River Journal, fourpaperletters, metazen, Litsnack, Istanbul Literary Review, and others. A Valentine’s Day Challenge turned into a group of 25 stories and poems that will be published in chapbook form and I’m glad to say that my story is included. But it’s taken me a long time to get to this point and I can’t sit and rest on my laurels. What pleases me very much is that a couple of the stories were written in hypertext and that I’m finding publishers willing to work with me on this and include it in their journals.

So that’s where I’ve been and that’s where I’ll be for a while, particularly now with many of the submission deadlines closing before the summer. I’ve got a whole batch of new stories that need endings, and a long way to go before I can rest, but Spinning and its sister Hypercompendia are not dead, just holding their breath while I play on the railroad tracks.

Because Lunar has threatened to kick me off for over-utilizing resources I’m doing everything I can to adhere to their instructions, though I can’t understand how these two weblogs are hogging resources (I suspect rather that the server is under-resourced). Since the problem according to them seems to be in my main index.php script, all I can do is whatever they suggest which has been updating WordPress, Askimet, knocking out plug-ins while adding two at their suggestion for cache and commenting captcha to keep out the bots. It’s this latest that I sincerely apologize for instituting but I’ve picked a 5-starred simple one.  You have to add two numbers together and type in the answer.  Sort of strange because even a 50 year-old adding machine can do this, but hey, hopefully, so can you.I just hate that it kills the spontaneity of commenting, and while I have only two dedicated commenters here that I appreciate tremendously, it will indeed discourage anyone else who thought they might one day give it a go. The only other thing I can do is eliminate the “click here to enlarge map” which is a great feature for this 100 Day Project (on Hypercompendia), but which may have to go as well. Again, I apologize and while I’ve just renewed with Lunar this month, I may be demanding my annual fee back and go shopping for a more qualified, heartier server.

With the birth of the weblogs came a whole new generation of writers who may have that novel within them or may never entertain the idea, but we are the better for their gifts of sharing and Roberta at Elusive Abstractions is one of those gifted writers I regularly read.

You need to read the whole post, but the gist of it is a husband-wife thing and the wanting to offer support while stymied by new behavior, and the ultimate challenge overcome by the closeness of two human beings. This makes it sound dramatic and serious, but it’s not; it’s a wonderfully funny slice of married life:

And so, for these reasons, I am immediately alert, when Hub says to me at the breakfast table this morning, “Do you know the words to this song?”

I perk up my ears and wait for him to hum a bit of the melody, but all I hear coming from his side of the table is a deep muffled rumble like a slipper tumbling in a clothes dryer. His lips are ever so slightly parted in a duplication of Mona-Lisa’s famous smile, and I can tell he is deeply concentrating while exhaling a soft sound, so I go to his side of the table and bend over and listen. An uncommon thing for me to do, because normally Hub talks and sings, so very loud.”

It’s getting so I’m beginning to welcome spam in comments. Except the Russian and the falsely complimentary that raise your hopes for the flash of moment that somebody actually cares.

Obviously the way cloud tags work is that the more uses of a tag, the larger the text. So far, and I’m only about a third into it, Kundera and Calvino have just beat out Ham Sandoval in size.

There’s always a decision to be made on categorization and sorting and on this single category of Literature I’ve already had to decide between book title and author. What I’d decided to do is use title for those that I’m more apt to have only a single work from the author or if the book is a particularly well known classic, and use author name for those that I’m frankly enamored with and will read more if not all of their work, i.e., Kundera, Marquez, Calvino, Faulkner, McCarthy, Borges, Steinbeck, and well, St. Augustine.

Then of course there are those which I may have read a single work, but I should have known that I’ll want to read more, such as Bellow and William Gay. Oh well, there’s never a perfect system.

Yeah, it’s been a while, but I’m again starting to ask myself “Why bother?”  prompted by lack of response (gotta find that Mark Bernstein post on why comments on blogs are not a great idea) but stirred to think more about it this morning by Carolyn’s tweet: “I STILL DON”T “GET” TWITTER…or blogging” and this, from Hugo Schwyzer’s weblog:

When W.H. Auden was asked by a Michigan graduate student “What can I do to become a better poet?”, he replied (this may be apocryphal) “Stop keeping a journal or writing long letters.” What Auden explained was that we do our best writing from pent-up thoughts and feelings; if we release that tension in diaries, for example, we might miss out on the chance to do some first-rate work. I am no Auden, and I am no poet. But if I want to write something that gets published somewhere other than on my blog, I need to be willing to give a bit more time to that project. This blog will continue, and fresh writing will appear here regularly — but it might just be once per week.

What struck me is Auden’s “we do our best writing from pent-up thoughts and feelings; if we release that tension in diaries, for example, we might miss out on the chance to do some first-rate work”  Well I’m certainly no Auden either, and no Faulkner or even a Steele, so I don’t have high hopes of publishing outside of my weblogs and so don’t mind sharing my thoughts and writings for free.

There’s an emptiness, however; an obvious emptiness when the work is out there and read–or not–and receives no reaction at all. Sort of like Friday night at the Improv, playing to an embarrassingly quiet full house. It’s likely less emotionally upsetting to keep things private–particularly when you feel like you’re hanging yourself out there and folks are just walkin’ on by. At least if kept to oneself, one can still feel that one’s words and thoughts have value since they’re not being judged if they’re not being offered. The creative mind imagines that one’s friends are either so bored that they don’t bother stopping by, or that your work is so bad that out of pity they avoid making a remark, tip-toeing silently away.

On the other hand, even as I write so much and so often here and in Hypercompendia that I must appear to have no live friends at all, I think that it has sharpened my writing skills rather than wasted them. And I do realize that blogging is more successful if it is focused topically, rather than shotgunned as I tend to do here. My Reality’s are boring or whiny to some; Literature discussions dreadfully tedious/interesting insight–but you can see that it limits the audience. And of course, political views on Current Affairs tend to always turn people off, regardless of the passion or writing put in. Something to think about.

Well I had wiped out Hypercompendia over at Typepad, but put it back temporarily to use as a redirect if I can do with it what I’ve done with Spinning. I’ve managed to change the Spinning main index template to linger just a couple seconds on the main page before it redirects over to Spinning here at WordPress. I know how to do it, but have to re-upload the banner image to Hypercompendia to make it work I think. I’d supposedly deleted all the files, but I believe they’re still on the server.

What’s more important is to somehow make that work on the archives, individual post files and that’s something I haven’t figured out how to access yet. The Typepad permalink templates are hidden from me, so all I have to work with is the tags, such as <$MTEntryPermalink$>and I may have the nerve to fiddle with that before I just wipe out the weblogs permanently.

Decided that the soft coral waves didn’t truly suit my personality except perhaps for about an hour in the early morning around five to six a.m.

This is a bit more me; same angles and round edges, but photoshopped a bit more and some pizzazz with intensity of color. This is more like I’ve been lately for the majority of each day.

Well the css studying I’ve been doing has paid off in that I was confident about moving ‘.blog-title’ out from the list of headlines and give it its own font of Desdemona, with alternates of Colonna MT and finally Georgia to cover all browsers.

&#8230;design a new banner here. What was I thinking?

&#8230;the other design was just too shy.

This is too funny; still unused to the format here at WordPress posting I tend to forget to select a category and that’s why if you’re following via feed you may see a lot of updated posts. But this: Not quite with it on the ‘tag’ concept and in my cloud, amid “Literature” and “Blogging” and “Reality” you’ll see “Add new tag.”