Sherri Cornelius

Darcsfalcon has started a little feature on her blog called Thursday Thankfulness, and I thought I’d jump on board for at least today. It would be nice if it spread throughout the blogisphere. Maybe I’ll make a little header graphic for Thursday Thankfulness posts for fun.

So today I’m thankful for Akismet, which controls my spam comments. Even though there’s only been one legitimate comment caught in the spam filter in the entire previous year, I still check all spam before I delete it.

However, I’m also grateful for the spam itself, because I always get a good laugh, normally because of the way they sneak the stamina-enhancing drugs into the conversation, or the enormous lists of crazy porn categories. But lately there’s been a trend where the spammers include a joke. Here are a few I’ve received:

• What do you call three rabbits in a row, hopping backwards simultaneously? A receding hareline.
• What do you call bedtime stories for boats? Ferry tales.
• What is a Mummy’s favorite kind of music? RAGtime music! or wRAP!!!
• What do cats like to eat for breakfast? Mice Krispies.

They have the right idea. Spammers should make us smile, then we won’t hate ‘em so bad.

Well I am really liking this template. I feel like I’ve seen it around, but I guess it’s not over-used. I usually choose cleaner blogs with simple lines and a focus on the content, but I realized I rarely post pictures anymore, and having a busy template seems doable, as the graphics won’t be competing with images and video and yadda yadda. I still have a couple of chores to do with the template before I can call it good enough, such as adding an RSS button up top somewhere. (There’s one at the bottom…don’t ask me why the designer put it down there.) I’m also writing a new front page to tell a little bit about me and probably include a picture (which I must take), and I have to figure out how to get all my pages to show up where I want them to, but that one can come later. Tell me if you have any problems.

I walked with my daughter’s kindergarten class this morning on the yearly trip to the Pumpkin Patch. It’s not a real pumpkin patch, but an empty lot where the local Methodist church sells their pumpkins, and which over the years has grown to be a bumpkin amusement park. There’s a train engine and tractors and a fire truck to climb on, roping and bean bag toss games, and a homemade kiddie train pulled by a lawnmower. It’s country fun at its finest, and the kids have a blast. I was happy to have a school activity for which I could actually volunteer–since we were outside the whole time, the fragrance was negligible, especially since I took it upon myself to be the caboose along the way, while the other parents stayed up toward the middle of the line. Not only was I helping myself, but I also provided a needed service, which was keeping the stragglers somewhat with the group.

Maggie Rose was delightful, as usual, and was proud to have me there. I befriended a couple of other kids whose parents couldn’t come. I wish I’d had more time to talk to those two boys, because they seemed to have things they wanted to get off their chest, like having an adult willing to listen was an opportunity to be jumped on. I remember what it was like to be a kid without a voice. We all need to be heard.

So cleaning up the old posts on the blog got me to thinking about privacy on the Internet. Basically, there is none. Right? Google knows your every search and much turn that data over to authorities if presented with a court order. The ghost of the blog you deleted 3 years ago still lurks on its servers, and possibly other places like another individual’s computer–Google Reader is web-based, but FeedReader stores the files on the reader’s computer. Pedophiles troll the Internet looking for pictures of your children. You’re a celebrity, you just don’t know it.

And there is why I’m streamlining and culling this blog. When I started it I was a budding writer, rosy-cheeked and wide-eyed, finishing up my first book. I absolutely knew nobody in the world would read my blog. I imagined a cloak of invisibility based on my self-perceived importance in the blogisphere, which was no importance whatsoever. It was fine and dandy for me to shout out my writer’s angst, the struggles of finishing a manuscript, and following that, the struggles of form rejections from agents. Then I got an agent, and while I had the feeling things should change, I wasn’t sure what, exactly.

And no, I haven’t had huge rants about the inanity of any certain industry professional, nor have I given scathing reviews of any books. But I’m starting to get uncomfortable talking about the process at all. I find myself reluctant to mention anything about my writing, yet sometimes I still force myself to, because this is a writer’s blog… But I’m going to stop that. I will talk about writing in more general terms, which in the long run will probably snag more readers anyway.

The general idea in the comments yesterday was that a blog represents the road you’ve walked, and it’s nice to have that history for people to peruse. Only thing is, if I look at someone’s archives and find in January ’07 a rant against stay-at-home moms, that’s going to affect how I see that person’s present personality, even if they made peace with the SAHM who was giving them problems in January ’07 and that rant no longer applies.

I’m not the wide-eyed, over-sharing, timid person I was 3 1/2 years ago. This is my career blog, with my name on it for all the world to see. At this point, I want the blog to reflect what I’ve learned, not how I learned it.

The best cure for a birthday hangover is a complimentary email from a new reader. The second-best cure is to take steps to get your life in order. So when the complimentary reader asked me how to subscribe to Sherri Blossoms, I took a look at my template and made some changes which should have been made already.

If you look above the header, you’ll see a few buttons with various subscription options. You can either syndicate the content to your favorite RSS reader or get the posts in your email. You can also register as a user of the blog, which is most useful for solving avatar issues, apparently. After you’ve registered, there’s a login button which should (if I’ve configured it correctly) bring you directly back to the blog once you’ve logged in.

I’ve deleted approximately the first half of my posts. My first blog was 3 1/2 years and four URLs ago, and I’ve just been dragging those old posts around with me. I feel pretty good about leaving them behind on my previous blog site, and soon I’ll be cleaning up that template to reflect its abandonment.

I have a strong urge to wrap things up, finish old projects, de-clutter my life. We’ll see how long the urge lasts. Meanwhile, wear out that “Subscribe by Email” button, why don’tcha.

Well, I finally got Windows Live Writer installed, hooray. I tried fixing many different things, but I think the thing that made the difference was updating my .NET thingymabob, whatever that’s for. But who cares, it worked and I’m composing this scintillating post in the aforementioned program.

Since I’m constantly connected to the Internet, the main reason I wanted WLW was to back up my blog, and I’m hoping one of the Darcs can help me figure out how to do that. Once it’s backed up I’ll start pulling some of the old posts which are simply spam magnets and fluff. Who knows, maybe I’ll delete everything and start from scratch. That’s a terrifying prospect.

We had a lovely Saturday, with a spontaneous outing to our town’s annual Frontier Days festival. My daughter got to walk in the parade with her academic team, and afterwards the kids rode the tiny roller coaster and the Scrambler, one of my favorites but I’m too old for spinny rides now.

We got home just in time for OU/Tulsa kickoff (I fell asleep before the end, but it was pretty clear we would win) and generally shirked all responsibility for the day. Oh, that’s not true. First thing this morning I wrapped up a little editing work.

I guess we can’t shirk responsibility forever, and tomorrow will see the yard mowed and the kitchen cleaned and hopefully some writing done.

The feedback I received on the long synopsis may be the best ever. Many of the reader’s comments overlapped, giving me specific areas to focus on, and I have every intention of emailing this tomorrow, just like I’d planned. So raise your glass, or mug, or whatever, and join me in toasting Sarah, Matthew, Vanessa, Dane, Ian and Tony for a job well done. Kristy had offered to help, but life got in the way (this is me officially letting her off the hook). She still gets the brownie points, because it means a lot that she was interested in the first place. So to all my critters, thank you so much! If this thing lands me a deal, you will have had a direct hand in getting me there.

On a technical note, did you know you can register on my website? I didn’t either, until I did some snooping around my WordPress dashboard. If you have an avatar which shows up on every other site but this one, registering as a user might fix it. I’m not sure how it works, so if anybody tries it out, could you tell me about your experience? The link is in the upper right-hand corner of the header.

Does anybody even use Feedburner anymore? Back when I started blogging, Feedburner was an important tool, but now my only subscriber on there is the Google Feedfetcher. Thinking of getting rid of it, but as soon as I do somebody will ask where it is. I guess it’s not hurting anything except my pride, sitting there empty.

I can approximate my readership by combining my Google Reader subscribers with my Feedbook subscribers and allowing for overlap, also using the stat meter as a guide. I think it’s about 30 but it could be as low as 20 or as high as 40. Some are perpetual lurkers, and that’s okay. There are plenty of blogs I read daily but don’t comment on, so I don’t mind. I’ve made the blog to be as public and accessible as possible. There will be lurkers.

I do wish I could get better stats from Google Reader, though. It only tells how many are subscribed, not where they are or how many items they’ve read, which would be nice. Since the lurkers who subscribe to my feed don’t show up in the stat counter, it’s really impossible to tell which posts interest them.

It’s no big deal, I guess, just something I’m thinking about this morning. It’s the great unsolvable Internet mystery–How Many People Actually Read This Damn Thing?–and greater minds than mine have pondered it.

Y’all have a great day, those who comment and those who don’t. You’re all important to me. :)

There’s been a discussion over on Darcsfalcon’s blog which started about leaving behind toxic family members, and then morphed into personal boundaries and expectations. Last night I was all gung-ho about continuing the discussion here on my blog, but the moment has passed. I’m not feeling particularly analytical or reflective today, but if you’re interested in these topics, go on over to Fal’s place and add your two cents.

So today is the last day of NaBloPoMo in the month of July. It was an interesting exercise, and I’m absolutely amazed that I managed to come up with something to talk about every day. Here are some interesting tidbits I’ve come away with.

• It’s funny how the little throw-away posts can garner the most discussion. I guess when I touch on a subject and throw it out there, it generates more thought than if I impose my ideas on my readers.
• I simply don’t have any interest in creating long, article-style posts. That’s not what this blog is about, and it’s not what my readers expect. I feel like those blogs are more legitimate than mine, but I don’t know where I got that idea. The blog is not the only place I limit myself by arbitrary “shoulds”, so hopefully I can take that lesson and apply it to other areas.
• Posting 31 days in a row did little for my daily hit count. The same posts get all the search engine traffic, I don’t think I picked up any new regulars, and my old regulars visited only slightly more often, as far as I can tell.

Those little tidbits add up to one thing: I can relax and have fun on my blog. Duh.

Thanks for hanging around for my experiment. Now I’m taking off the month of August!! Not really.

I found something else about myself the past couple of days. Yes, Sherri is Blossoming right and left. The thing is: I hate blogging! I hate REAL blogging, with the declaring of opinions and the researching my topic and linking to relevant articles. I think I mostly hate it because I’m not very good at it and it takes me a really long time. Or maybe it takes me so long because I hate it. I don’t know.

I end up sorry everytime I try to mess with my system, which consists of blabbing on until I’ve hit one hour or I run out of blabb, whichever comes first. And every time I tell myself I’ll never try to be a “real” blogger again–it’ll be anecdotes and silly observations from here on out–but I always compare myself to others and feel I should try harder, which leads down that road. And doing a post every day is just magnifying every tiny problem, and I am really thinking of taking a day off. My hand hurts from typing.

This template is growing on me. I know it’s missing the bright color of my old one, but I think I want to be subdued for a while. I can change the header later if I feel the need. I miss having two sidebars, though. Having one sidebar is very clean, but people have to scroll down to get to some stuff I want them to see. I haven’t even bothered to put all the widgets on there yet.

My daily hits have evened out since the switch. I’m getting 40-50 per day pretty steadily. I LOVE being able to track all my stats, something you can’t do with WordPress.com. I hope I’ll be able to continue the hosting, because I sure as hell don’t want to have to go through all this crap in reverse.

Okay, ran out of blabb.

I’ve been putting off writing this post for a couple of hours, now. Not because of the subject matter (obviously) but because I feel quiet. There’s no room for quiet in NaBloPoMo, only constant chatter, and that sure does get old. It’s fine for testing myself, but I don’t think I’ll do it again. I don’t like spending 1 to 2 1/2 hours per day (depending on how often I’m interrupted) blabbing about nothing. I’ve gotten a couple of gems out of it, maybe, but I may feel they’re gems only because of the shit which surrounds them.

Bloggers get advice to write posts regularly to draw readers, but you know what? If I come across a blog I like, I subscribe to the feed. I know if there is a new post I’ll be alerted. It’s not the frequency with which they post that keeps me reading. In fact, if the posts come far enough apart, it’s a nice surprise when they do show up in my reader.

I feel the same way about NaNoWriMo. It was a good exercise I don’t feel compelled to repeat. The pressure to produce words over meaning is ultimately destructive, for me, at least. It’s a really cool idea, and I’m glad a lot of people have enjoyed the experience, but I do hope those people are actually thinking about whether or not it’s right for them, rather than just getting caught up in the enthusiastic atmosphere as I did. I did it two years. The first book is sitting half-finished, abandoned, and the second one I’m still trying to straighten out. Not only did I fail both years, adding to my guilt, but I actually created a huge amount of extra work for myself. Hindsight.

I know some of you really believe in NaNoWriMo, and a lot of you have participated in NaBloPoMo. What did/do you get out of them?

(This post took only 20 minutes. The day I feel the least like blogging was the easiest. Hm.)