Now That You've Hit 1337 Page Views, What Are You Going To Do?

I'm going to Disneyland.

It doesn't have anything to do with noticing last night that I'd reached 1337 page views though, even though that's pretty funny.

I'm going to Disneyland to see if I corrupt the virtue of some Disney princesses. Also because of my seven-year anniversary with Supportive Girlfriend. We've given ourselves four days because I hear the line for Star Tours is pretty long right now. I'm hoping we get on it by about midday on the third day; I'd like to see The Haunted House too.

I'm going to try to keep posting, but it might be a bit light or show up at weird times.

I'm also going to break my newly established rule by posting both parts of a two part entry in one week since it is about Disney movies and thematically relevant. Look for part 1 tomorrow before we leave.

Guy Goodman St.White Reviews The Epic of Gilgamesh--Epic Genre Crap (Literally)

You can't demonstrate the human condition without realism.
And there's nothing realistic about that thing in the middle of the tablet.

Good Evening. I'm Guy Goodman St.White your terribly British sounding host, and tonight we'll be delving back into the Western canon, long before Beowulf, to explore some of the roots of Western literature. I'd like to start our evening with two small disclaimers. For starters, we will only be reviewing dead religions as literature. While there is some qualitative value in examining living religious texts under literary scrutiny, I already receive enough death threats for reasons I cannot possibly fathom, and I don't want to exacerbate those uppity religious sort to be any more irrational than they already are. Don't worry though, we will only briefly study a few texts of the Ancient Middle East, and will revert quite quickly to the works of Europe.

No need to worry that we're not studying enough white voices.  Just a necessary evil.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: I'm not even sure where to begin with this one.

I'm genuinely overwhelmed. The sheer level of preposterous absurdity going on in this story has literally overwhelmed me. Gods. Demigods. Ogres. Giant bulls. Scorpion people. Precognitive psychic dream powers. A fight scene pretty much once a tablet. Huge, Earth-covering floods (which, as you know, are only achieve credulity in Judeo/Christian tradition, and become completely implausible otherwise). Immortality. In many ways it is no surprise that we had to endure an epic like Beowulf as the fountainhead of English tradition. Look at where the older tradition lies. Look at what they had to work with. This non-stop melange of genre imagery is chock full of speculative tropes and is real literature's and high art's worst nightmare.

Clearly there is nothing of literary value within The Epic of Gilgamesh. It is just another superhero versus a monster-of-the-week mash up with no redeeming qualities or meaningful themes. I haven't seen anything this god awful since my 14 year old cousin from America forced me to watch a disk of some Yank show called Supernatural. If Enkidu had been questioning his sexuality and killed by homophobic bigots, Gilgamesh had been struggling against the preconceptions of his society and raging alcoholism, and the whole thing had been set in the seedy mud brick reality of Babylon, this might have been a better story. As it is, I had to gird myself against actual physical revulsion with each new tablet. The Mesopotamian people certainly had enough real-world struggles trying to establish the patriarchy and civilize an entire world of hunter/gatherers to need to resort to fanciful tales of the supernatural. Is it any wonder the whole of Western society is not capable of determining what is actually good to read?

Thank you for joining us this evening, and please tune in next week for another edition of Speculative Fiction Sucks Balls (And Not in the Good Way) where we'll return to the British Isles and take a look at what some seriously white dead white guys have written. Good night.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Writing Part-4

Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3

Research—Don’t be a stranger.

Sponging may not cover it for prewriting. Sometimes you hit something you just don’t know enough about, and no amount of the life YOU’VE lived is going to make you able to portray something you don’t know about. You have to do some research.

You have to do SOME research.

You’re going to have to accept something that might be hard right now. Repeat after me: “I do not know everything.” Now go find a mirror and say that fifty times. Go ahead. I’ll wait. A lot of writers really think they’re too good for research. They “would rather actually write.” Noble...but bullshit. I’m here to tell you that your actual writing will suck rocks if you don’t take the time to learn the things you don’t know about a subject. And unless you want to spend your life writing about personnel meetings and TPS reports, you will probably eventually write about a culture, place, era, activity, or something that you don’t know about. Having emotional Legos won’t help you with this because you need to portray your topic accurately. I don’t care how poignantly you describe a character’s angst, if you’re ascribing a Catholic burial ceremony to your Inuit characters, you’re going to come off like a moron.

I know a lot of people break out in hives at the mention of research. If you’re picturing the lonely stacks of some giant library’s twelfth floor or a montage of pouring over first edition tomes with rubber gloves, you’re probably over thinking this. That was my parent’s generation. I mean I could go all gumtoothed voice and tell you about something called an Index of Periodical Literature, little slips of paper, and a weird smelling guy in a back room who handed you tattered magazines. We didn’t have the newfangled Lexus Nexus. But seriously, computers have been streamlining research more every year since I was about twenty. Not that a stern librarian in boots would be unwelcome—one who undoes her hair from a tight bun when she tells you how hot she finds your dedication to knowledge.....

You know what? This is probably more MY thing, really. The point is unless you like trolling for librarians by appearing erudite, you probably won’t have to do much of that kind of research unless you want to.

This process is as involved as you want it to be or your type of writing requires it to be. If you don’t like to do a lot of research, you can just do the kind of writing that doesn’t require a lot of research. Or you COULD go raid the most esoteric volumes on being a fifth century seamstress in order to have such a character in something you write, especially if that’s just the sort of nerdgasm thing that would really turn your crank. Remember this is your art. If you’re getting pleasure out of it, then you win. Other people can suck an elf.

If you’re not into deep research, don’t sweat it, but you still can’t get past this aspect of pre-writing completely. Now I am going to say something that I’ll say again and again, so pay attention because these are words to live by when it comes to setting and character—which are, you know, elements of fiction and sort of important and stuff.

Don’t be a stranger.

I like this better than “write what you know,” because “write what you know” is a cliché and it doesn’t even begin to touch the full range of writing that matters to me. We can recombine and reconfigure what we know into what we don’t if we take some time and effort to do so. I’m pretty sure Orwell didn’t KNOW 1984 since he wrote it in the forties, nor do I think he ever met a talking pig. I’m pretty sure Tolken had never had a conversation with a dragon. Most people use their sponged experiences like Legos to recombine and rearrange what they do know into what they can’t know. So “Don’t be a Stranger” seems to cover much more accurately what it means to be a fiction writer. You only KNOW what it means to be your gender, your age, your race, your age (or younger), your social status, and dozen other things, and while this will always inform your work in ways you should be aware of, but I’m pretty sure you don’t want all your characters to be exactly the same as you lest you end up in a world like when John Malkovitch went into his own brain tunnel. I don’t think that would hold up well for a whole novel.

“Don’t be a stranger” also carries with it the keys to the kingdom. “Write what you know” has sort of been perverted into a flip, dismissive way to say “Sorry, you don’t know, kthxbai.” People who are tired of bad portrayals of their life experiences sometimes make claims like “you can never really KNOW what it’s like,” and honestly, there’s some truth to that, but a fiction writer has to break out of essentialism unless they only every want to write a journal. Plus, it’s the sort of thing that leads to writers doing damn fool things like trying crack cocaine so they can describe it. A writer in today’s social landscape is going to have to navigate minefields like “appropriation” and avoiding stereotypes, and it can be intimidating as fuck when you realize you don’t know how to do that. Don’t be a stranger is how.

If you’re going to set a story in Santa Monica, you better know Santa Monica. Describe the shops, the air, a corner people will recognize, and the great pizza place near the pier because if you say “this is Santa Monica” and then describe Walnut Creek, bullshit detectors will go off in your readers. If you’re going to describe a culture that isn’t your own, you better understand that culture, how they look at death, what they think of life, marriage, morality, religion, and not from YOUR outsider point of view either—don’t be a stranger. Go find out from them.

Access to knowledge-wise, you are the most empowered human beings ever to walk the face of the Earth. I’m not just fellating you with en-vogue self help slogans either. You’re reading this blog, so I assume you have a computer with Internet. That makes you able to find more information in five seconds than your average surf had to absorb in their entire lifetime. Most of you can do this from a device that's smaller than a deck of cards. Seriously, the only thing slowing down your acquisition of knowledge in our era is how fast you can read and the 10 terabyte estimate of ultimate human brain storage capacity. You almost never have to go on some first edition book safari unless you kind of want to.

Let me share a story with you that is almost completely unrelated. As Will and Grace finished up its run they had a bloopers episode as part of their Will and Grace last night finale two hour event. My ex-wife was a huge fan so I ended up watching. In one of these bloopers Grace has a bottle of something, and they tell Debra Messing (who plays Grace) they want the bottle to be more empty for the shot. She goes to the kitchen and pours it down the drain. And then all hell breaks loose. She screams and laughs and says she’s sorry. See, the sink wasn’t really a sink. They weren’t in a real kitchen. She was on a set. The drain probably went to where they stored paint thinner or something. Everything “on camera” looked real, but it wasn’t, and Debra had just ruined some set designer’s day. How does this matter to you as a writer? You may not need to be some deep expert to reveal enough “on camera” to make a good story. You just need whatever you’re writing about to look like a real “kitchen” for the confines of your story.

There’s an element of "Hollywood magic" in what writers do. A writer might become an expert on just enough of a subject that their story is going to need. That’s why a lot of writers are strangely well informed about the most bizarre and random stuff. They needed it for some story. But you don’t have to find out everything on a topic to be able to write anything about it. You just need a few significant details to make sure you know what’s up, and to check yourself.

I constantly have a search engine open when I’m writing. I look up all kinds of things all the time. Who starred in this movie? What’s that word? What does an archery stance actually look like and what kind of advice would a coach give a beginner? How is this city laid out? I’m not doing a marathon session in a library (and I would probably personally eschew a character or setting that would require me to). But if you add up the amount of times I change my window over to Google something or other, you probably end up with hours of research.

As I wrote one story about a character in the mid 21st century involved in a water war, I realized that I was going to need more details about the setting to fill out some of the trouble that the story was having in its third draft. I didn’t really know much about water wars. So I spent an hour or two on Google learning where they were likely to happen and why. I picked The Danube, but I didn’t know much about eastern European geography so I had to look at Google maps. It was kind of fun really—if a little alarming and scary about the future of war. A couple hours and I had enough detail not to be a stranger for what I was doing. It doesn't have to be a big deal, but just think of how vague or misinformed that story would have seemed if I hadn't done that.

Be careful. One of the really important places to not be a stranger is when you deal with writing a character who is experiencing some of the difficulties of their own culture or group. You can’t use Hollywood magic here. You have to try to really understand with all the writer empathy you’ve worked so hard to cultivate. Google “cultural appropriation” if you want to see the epic insensitivity and resulting shit storms that can develop if you don’t take this very, VERY seriously. Some people out there are basically going to tell you that you can’t successfully write "their" story. And they’re right if you sit down and write it from your point of view about what you think their point of view would be. You’ll end up with something like that travesty of well-intentioned idiocy about what the middle class white guy would do if he was a black kid from the inner city. Oh. My. God. Don’t be that guy. Do your research. Instead be more like Jeffery Eugenides. He did enough research on five alpha reductase deficiency syndrome that people who read Middlesex assumed he HAD to be intersexed to have described it so well. He is not. And there are fantastic examples of fiction of people writing from perspectives that are not their own in ways that are so convincing that people didn’t realize they weren’t from that group. So don’t lose faith because P.C.-ness makes your job a little harder. Just don’t be a stranger.

The thing that is particularly cool about fiction writers and research is that “don’t be a stranger” can lead back to one of our core tenants. Research for academics and non-fiction writers can be an arduous affair taking months and even years depending on the subject matter. Fiction writers usually aren’t going for that level of detail and precision, and all we need is the right “Legos” for the job from a culturally accurate viewpoint so we have this totally awesome option of reading a few great stories on the topic. When I say "hear it from them," I don't mean you have to do a cultural ethnography. The voices of this culture (and almost certainly of this struggle) already exist--you just have to read them. And you thought this was going to suck! Imagine reading the great literature of a culture to try and get the sense of it. That doesn’t sound like unpleasant research; that sounds like someone just said “Okay, I need you to taste test the final products for my gourmet chocolate and tell me which one you like the best.” Only a stern librarian with a very healthy respect for a dedication to knowledge could be more fun.

Of course, sometimes you can’t research something because it doesn’t exist yet. That’s when you have to build worlds. [Continued next Monday.]

Awesome Writing Quotations From Jan-June 2012

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Richard Bach

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
Ray Bradbury

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.
Ray Bradbury

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.
Ray Bradbury

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
Walter Bagehot

Far better to live your own path imperfectly than to live another’s perfectly.
Bhagavad Gita

I suspect that every teacher hears the same complaints, but that, being seldom a practicing author, he tends to dismiss them as out of his field, or to see in them evidence that the troubled student has not the true vocation. Yet it is these very pupils who are most obviously gifted who suffer from these disabilities, and the more sensitively organized they are the higher the hazard seems to them. Your embryo journalist or hack writer seldom asks for help of any sort; he is off after agents and editors while his more serious brother-in-arms is suffering the torments of the damned because of his insufficiencies. Yet instruction in writing is oftenest aimed at the oblivious tradesman of fiction, and the troubles of the artist are dismissed or overlooked.
Dorothea Brande

It may be that the root of the trouble is youth and humility. Sometimes it is self-consciousness that stems the flow. Often it is the result of misapprehensions about writing, or it arises from an embarrassment of scruples: the beginner may be waiting for the divine fire of which he has heard to glow unmistakably, and may believe that it can only be lighted by a fortuitous spark from above. The particular point to be noted just here is that this difficulty is anterior to any problems about story structure or plot building and that unless the writer can be helped past it there is very likely to be no need for technical instruction at all.
Dorothea Brande

The grain of truth in the fin de siècle notion, though, is this: the author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the ‘innocence of eye’ that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeonholing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word ‘trite’ hardly has any meaning for him; and always to see ‘the correspondences between things’ [I’ll write about this soon] of which Aristotole spoke two thousand years ago. This freshness of response is vital to the author’s talent.
Dorothea Brande

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus

That's not writing, that's typing.
Truman Capote (on Jack Kerouac)

With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes satin. With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.
Chinese Proverb

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Winston Churchill

If suffering brought wisdom, the dentist’s office would be full of luminous ideas.
Mason Cooley

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, 'press on' has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge

If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying. "Here comes number seventy-one!"
Richard M. Devos

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Albert Einstein

‎Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge
Albert Einstein

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.
Nora Ephron

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
Nora Ephron

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
Nora Ephron

If you wish to be a writer; write!
Epictetus

[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
William Faulkner (on Hemingway--who has a return quote you should check out)

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
F Scott Fitzgerald

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?
Charles De Gaulle

If you want to be a writer, write.
Neil Gaiman

The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.
Natalie Goldberg

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Goethe

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.
Robert Graves

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
Ernest Hemingway (on Faulkner--who has a return quote if you didn't see it)

When a thought takes one's breath away, a grammar lesson seems an impertinence.
Thomas W. Higginson

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard

I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
Steve Jobs

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
James Joyce

A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it.
Stephen King

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King

While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad one, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
Stephen King

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work and enriching your own life as well,.  It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over.  Getting happy, okay?  Getting happy.
Stephen King

Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Robert MacNeil

There’s only us, There’s only this, Forget regret, Or life is your to miss.
Mimi, Rent

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.
Moliere

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.
David Nicholls

We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North

People who say they like to write but do not like to read are like people who say they only like to exhale.
D. de la Perriere (an instructor who may have been quoting someone else; I'm not sure)

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.
Edgar Allan Poe

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
David Sedaris

Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about this?
Mark E. Smith

I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
Rex Stout

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
Jesse Stuart

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
Vita Sackville-West

Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.
Joss Whedon

People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.
Joss Whedon

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E. B. White

You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like.
Phyllis A. Whitney

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Virginia Woolf (about Ulysses)

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland

Sunday Prompts--Recombine, Reconfigure, Reconstruct

Not exactly what I.....
Eh, you know what?  That works just fine.

Here are a few prompts for this evening. I picked these based on some of the ideas going on in the blog this week. Don't forget that these are JUST exercises, and most importantly don't forget to HAVE FUN!!

Prompt 1- Let's work on writing what you know without everything needing to be completely autobiographical. Think of an event in your life that was intensely emotional (good or bad). Now remove yourself from this event and place another person who is very different from you in your place.  I'm not talking Mr. Bean or Ed Grimly or something but like and actually genuine, but very different person.  The more changes you can make, the better. Change the gender, the class, the education...whatever. They are having the same emotional reaction that you did, but they will express their reaction based on who they are as a person. Here's the catch--you may not simply state their feelings. If you use first person, they can't wax emotional about how they feel. You have to show through their actions and words. (And you might want to avoid having them cry--it's a lot less effective in fiction than it is on TV/film.) Use lots of visceral details. This can be as long or as short as you want, but try to push yourself to write at least a page.

Prompt 2- Imagine your current favorite character (or yourself) in a situation they've (you've) never been in. This doesn't have to be a supernatural or speculative situation, although it could be. The trick is to imagine something with a different emotional core than what you have personally experienced. If you've been to a funeral, having a funeral on the moon is probably not going to be sufficiently new. Try to think of things that would be emotionally unique. (Death of a loved one, marriage, divorce or a huge break up, having a child--though many people have experienced all these things--would be the kind of thing I'm thinking of.) Now imagine what experiences you have had and their aspects that might help you write about the moment you have chosen. Make a list. (If you picked a funeral of a loved one you might something like "1- The time I attended my friend's dads funeral--for visceral details. 2-The sudden break up with Hanna Tompkins--for the sense of loss and grief. Etc..." You can actually write up the scene if you want, but the exercise here is just to consciously consider how you would use the experiences you HAVE had to recombine and reconfigure into an experience you haven't had.

Prompt 3- Look around you. It's probably just pretty ordinary stuff unless you happen to enjoy reading W.A.W. in exotic locations (in which case put the computer down and enjoy the exotic). Find one detail around you something beautiful that isn't supposed to be. The way the light shimmers off an empty soda can, or the way a power cord looks like a serpent attacking the Dust Off can of air, or the way a pile of clothes says more about the person you love than a sonnet. See that thing not as ordinary you, but as artist you--the person inside of you that can see beauty in its opposite. Write about this in extremely sensory language for no more than a paragraph (about 300 words max). Try to describe what you see (or hear, or smell, or are experiencing from a new perspective), and avoid describing how it makes you feel.

Stale Fortune Cookies

Fortune cookie wisdom from the past.

They might be a little stale, some are clearly other advice that I've only reworded, and the worst part is that adding "in bed" doesn't always work. Plus many of them would require fortune cookies as big as your fist and/or writing you need a magnifying glass to see in order to actually fit in a cookie.

But here they are....

I October 2012
II December 2012
III January 2013
IV June 2013
V November 2013
VI March 2014
VII May 2014
VIII July 2014
IX March 2015
X August 2015
XI October 2015
XII March 2017
XIII June 2017
XIV October 2017
XV May 2018
XVI September 2018
XVII June 2019
XVIII July 2020

Quick State of the Blog

W.A.W. has plateaued at about 45-55 page views per day.

That means that just about every person I count as friend, who isn't absolutely bored by the idea of writing, is currently reading. So...thank you and cheers! I reiterate my strong encouragement that if you know anyone else who might like W.A.W., please point them my way. Of course, even that number is only once I account for the weird sites that send me traffic like online pharmacies and what I can only assume is spam designed to get people like me to click on the link BACK to their site. (I say something like "Why is there a link to W.A.W. from this weird URL." Then I click to see what the URL is. And then my anti-virus does something not entirely unlike the quarantine procedures from Monsters Inc.)

I hope the readership goes up, but I know it's not the kind of blog with mass appeal. There are probably a few things I can do to generate traffic, but I wouldn't want to do them before I was cruising at 50,000 ft. anyway, and right now it seems like I'm still getting the "ground floor" set up. Getting a million readers now might be sort of like walking into a big crowded gala with my fly down.

I might need to restructure things (again). So everyone get your Dilbert REORG hats out!

Here's the skinny. After those first few weeks where I kind of felt like I was passing a kidney stone every time I put a post up, I noticed that most blogs have much shorter entries. I mentioned shorter entries, and more than a couple of people said, "Yes plx kthxbai." (Which is valuable input, and thanks for not just kicking The Blog's vociferous butt to the curb.) I don't want to post as much, and I'm sure you don't want to read an opus a day.

I'm trying to pare down the entry length to something bite sized, and it'll probably shrink even more than it has this last week as I find the sweet spot, but this means when I have ten or fifteen pages worth of thoughts rattling around like "What We Talk About When We Talk About Writing" it's going to end up getting spread out over weeks. I'm already down to a two page max, and that seems like it's still a little un-bite-size-y. I'm not going to apologize too much for having writing in a blog about writing, but I feel like a page and a half might be a better fit.

That probably means I'm going to tweak the schedule a little. The idea posting nothing but one article for two or three weeks because I'm only posting it a page or two at a time, gives me hives. What if you don't LIKE that post. Maybe you'll get bored and start seeing other blogs. Maybe there will be dinner with the other blogs. Maybe you'll reach across the table, and say "I've never felt this way about a blog before." And then I'm going to have to go crazy and boil rabbits, and it's all bad. So be ready to see the schedule change a bit next week. I'll probably still do "meaty" writing on M/W/F. I just might run my series posts on a specific day.

Potpourri should be up in a half hour or so.