I anticipated that June would be a challenge for me because for the first two weeks of the month we were on vacation in Europe. I knew that both internet connectivity and time to write and post would be limited. The reality turned out to be even worse than I had expected. Internet connectivity was […]
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What I Learned in May In March and April I concentrated on trying to keep my total word count up by writing a number of long posts (1,000 words or more). However, I changed my focus in May: I tried to go short by focusing on topics that I could develop adequately in the 500–750
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In April I continued to look for information about blogging. I found this article: 16 Top Tips from Blogging Experts for Beginners. I’m not interested in ways to increase branding, marketing, building an email list, or SEO (search engine optimization). My focus is on writing for personal discovery, so I chose only a few of
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35 books everyone should read at least once in their lifetime This article arose from a question posed on Reddit: “What is a book that everyone needs to read at least once in their life?” Of the top 35 books listed here from the Reddit responses, I have read the following: Zen and the Art
The first three months are in the books, one-quarter of the year done. I’ve posted reports for each of the first three months with all kinds of numbers. But the most important lessons don’t lie in the statistics. Beyond the numbers, so far I’ve learned two lessons from writing a blog post every day. 1.
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Gestation of Ideas: On Vertical Writing and Living Nick Ripatrazone discusses vertical writing, a concept he learned from writer Andre Dubus’s essay “The Habit of Writing,” which appeared in the anthology On Writing Short Stories, edited by Tom Bailey. Dubus writes that, instead of trying to force stories into being, he gives ideas time to
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Whenever I find an interesting article, I leave it open on my browser because I just know it will form the basis of a spectacular blog post. I’ve always done this, but in the past I would finally just close everything and start over again because the web is, after all, an infinite source of
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Shakespeare’s Plays Reveal His Psychological Signature A hot trend in literary criticism is the use of computers to analyze text, a field known as digital humanities. Recently Ryan Boyd, a graduate researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, and James Pennebaker, the Liberal Arts Regents Centennial Professor of Psychology at the university, conducted one
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Here are my statistics for March: Number of posts written: 31 Shortest post: 220 Longest post: 2,150 Total words written: 23,345 Average post length: 753 Distribution of posts across my three blogs: Change of Perspective: 11 Notes in the Margin: 10 Retreading for Retirement: 12 The total of posts here may not equal the number
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I Read Only Books by Women For a Year: Here’s What Happened A constant topic of literary criticism (in both senses of criticism) is that the Western canon is populated by an over-abundance of dead White guys and that we don’t read or even hear about enough authors from the margins of society (e.g., women,
