Category: Writing

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Reflecting on the A to Z experience

English: Hurdle Suomi: Estejuoksija ja este
English: Hurdle Suomi: Estejuoksija ja este (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Blogging in a vacuum isn’t very much fun. The wave of activity I signed up for by participating in these posts is a like running a marathon, I suppose. {I’ve never run a marathon, but after running a mile once when I was kid, I bent over and threw up.} I’m not feeling nauseous, I’m feeling a little bit accomplished. This year I did complete the challenge. I did browse the other participants’ posts and started new conversations with new people and stirred up new conversations with old friends.

The blogs I follow and link to on the far right column of this blog are a mix of blogs I’m interested in, but also blogs of people I have started to really admire as writers.

These bursts of content, whether relevant or not, are the hurdles in the race. This year we had 1000+ people sign up to publish one post per day having something to do with a letter of the alphabet. A little trite, but as a club activity, it’s a lot like a team building activity. At work, I was once asked to teach someone to juggle three balls. I didn’t have any juggling experience, but I had to do it anyway. I learned to communicate and give directions even though I wasn’t sure of the subject matter. I had been given all the details and tricks I needed. With practice my partner started to get the hang of it.

This exercise is very much like that situation. As we all scrambled to come up with ideas, some people dropped balls, fell over the hurdles, or out right threw up all over the track. {What-ever, you get the picture.}

We were also asked to visit the people who commented on our posts and look around at the other runners while we ran. I did try to CONTROL CLICK on the names and blog links to open their posts in new tabs. My strategy was to open several tabs and hunt for new interesting blogs as I prepared my posts and responded to comments. I started focusing on the Educational blogs first. I follow a lot of homeschooling people on Google Plus, but found so many new exciting people running alongside of me.

If you participated with me on this journey, I hope you didn’t trip up over any of the flying balls or falling runners.

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Zymurgy on the shelf or ZZzzz And Scene. Goodnight! Exploring storytelling through dreams.

From fruit to ‘punch’.

ZZZ, are we cheating by using a string of ZZZ’s for the last post of the A to Z Challenge? Okay, let’s talk about Zymurgy instead. Zymurgy is the study or practice of fermentation in brewing, wine-making, or distilling. It’s the last entry in my little computer dictionary. How fitting is that? Let’s look back through some posts to explore some choice posts on fermentations:

SF Daddy | Science Fiction Daddy: F Ferments and Krauts
SF Daddy | Science Fiction Daddy: B Boozy Botanists

On to the ZZZ’s conversation anyway…

We’ve established that we’re storytellers and we’re going to let stories create the structure for the learning environments we create around us. Some of us are writers, published or not, writers of novels, poetry, and whatnot. We all have ways of conjuring up a story to tell. Hopefully, if you find yourself employed to write you have plenty of inspiration and no shortage of ideas.

My kids need to be reminded sometimes how to come up with an idea to write about. We’ll prattle off lists of topics and ideas, hoping to be so mundane that they come up with something that will interest them on their own. “Dryer lint, speed bumps, how many shades of blue does paint come in?”


Let’s look back at a few older posts and talk some more about dreaming.

SF Daddy | Science Fiction Daddy: D is for Dreaming
A Dream from March. Star Wars Episode III – SF Daddy

Journaling and especially dream journals are great ways to collect bits of stories that can be pulled from later. A twelve-year-old won’t believe you if you tell her this. She’ll have to figure that out on her own first.  She won’t believe that she’ll dream MORE if she merely pays attention to the dreams she’s already having. Then, after she has tuned in, she’ll find that the dreams flow whether she’s paying attention or not. If she’s right there in the morning ready with a pen to collection them in her journal, she’ll have an endless supply of ideas to cull.

I wonder if many of the writers we follow have used inspiration from their dreams to work out their stories.

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Why Not? Google+ Comments…

Notice that all the Kool-Aid is gone! Google 貼牌冰箱（Google Refrigerator）
Google 貼牌冰箱（Google Refrigerator） (Photo credit: Aray Chen)

April 23, 2013: In the past week, Google+ has blazed its way into the Blogger comment world. Initially I was really happy to see it. Your comments here appear on your G+ stream, giving them an audience to your followers. The promise there is an easier way to spread your work across the social space.

Update May 2019: Wow, what a difference six years makes to older content. Zap! No more Google+ and commenting is so controversial these days. I struggle with this. Is commenting even a thing anymore? Sure it is.

Why Not?!

Notice that all the Google Kool-Aid in the fridge is gone.

I started seeing discussions and interactions on my G+ stream instead of just the one-liners and direct links to everyone’s posts. Leading into the posts from the comments gives me an even more targeted or curated selection of links to explore.

I said I was “initially”happy, because my jury is still out. I’m still looking at it. When you have an occasional party that people aren’t showing up for anyway, you have lots of time for experimentations like this. The real tests will be by those who have a huge audience to lose if it the commenters don’t follow you into the Google space. (But who doesn’t have a Google account these days? Who doesn’t have a couple by now for work, personal, research, etc.)

Do you use Google+?

Did you notice the change on peoples’ blogs?

Did you notice that you could change your whole commenting scheme at all? Care?

Did you switch it on just to see what would happen?

(If you usually have 50+ comments on your blog, did you see more or less after switching?)

Did you go back?

If you have a link a poll. I’d love to see it.