Day: May 22, 2023

Blogging Insights — Who Do I Write For?

Fandango16 Comments

For this week’s Blogging Insights prompt, Dr. Tanya has given us a quote about writing and asked us for our reaction to the quote.

The quote is from Cyril Connolly, who was an English literary critic and writer. He said…

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”

My initial reaction to this quote is whatever floats your boat. If you don’t care about attracting a large public following and want to blog for your own satisfaction and fulfillment, good for you. You do you. If your goal is to amass a huge following, and that means catering to your public, that’s cool to. I personally believe you can attract a following and be true to yourself at the same time.

I started blogging in 2005 because I felt compelled to write and someone suggested that I start a blog for my writing. It started out mostly as a personal journal where I posted about whatever was on my mind. Most of my early posts were long, meandering posts and I wasn’t really expecting others to be interested. I was writing exclusively for myself and there literally was no public reading my blog. Not even members of my own family.

In July of 2013, I moved my blog to WordPress. By then I had learned to write shorter, less meandering posts. I also started experimenting with flash fiction and responding to WordPress and a few other bloggers’ prompts. And I was thrilled when other people started reading my posts, commenting on my posts, and following my blog.

My writing has continued to evolve. I respond to more prompts from WordPress and from other bloggers. I now host a handful of prompts myself. I continue to write relatively short posts (possibly due to writing on an iPhone), and I’ve tried, for my own mental health and wellbeing, to be a little less political.

But through it all, I still write for myself. Yes, my blog has lots of followers. Yes, my posts get a decent number of views, likes, and comments daily. And that’s great. But even if it went back to what is was like when I first started blogging and I had no “public,” I would continue to write. After all, my most important member of the public is me, and if I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment when I write and re-read my posts, I can say that I haven’t sacrificed myself solely to generate a larger public following. With my blog, what you read is who I am.

So back to Cyril Connolly’s quote, I don’t think writing for the public and writing for yourself are — or need to be — mutually exclusive.

WDP — Broken Bones

Fandango14 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Have you ever broken a bone?
View all responses

Funny you should ask. When I was a kid, I broke the pinky finger on my right hand playing little league baseball. As a teenager, on my paper route, I broke my big toe on my left foot when I ran up a set of cement steps to deliver the paper to my customer’s door and jammed my toe into the step. When I was in my mid twenties I broke a few ribs in a downhill skiing mishap. And then I managed to not break any bones for the next 50 years.

Then, this past January, I was up on a ladder cleaning my gutters and as I started to climb down, the ladder slipped. I fell, fractured my left hip and my right humerus at the shoulder. I had to have emergency artificial hip replacement surgery. Below are the before and after X-rays of my hip fracture.

The arrow points to the fracture
The artificial hip replacement appears white in this X-ray

I don’t have an X-ray of my broken humerus at the shoulder, but trust me, it’s there.

It’s going on five months since the injury and I’m still doing outpatient physical therapy rehabilitation for my bone breaks and probably will be through the end of July. This is not exactly the way I planned to spend the first half of 2023.

Share Your World — 05/22/2023

Fandango13 Comments
Share Your World

Di, at Pensitivity101, is our host for Share Your World each week. Here are her SYW questions for this week.

1. Growing up, were you closer to your mother or father, or was it a balance of both depending on the circumstances?

My father worked six days a week, often leaving for work before I got up in the morning and coming home after I was in bed. And on Sundays, his days off, he was too tired to pay much attention to me. So I wasn’t very close with him. I was closer to my mother, but when I was about ten, she started working from 9 to 5. So with both parents working, I became a latchkey kid. I had two older sisters, one 15 years older than me and the other nine years older than me. I was actually closer to them than to either of my parents.!

2. What was your favorite toy as a child, and do you still have it?

I was into cars when I was a young kid and I had a 1/24 diecast scale model of a red MG TD Classic. It was a thing of beauty and I loved it. No, I don’t still have it. Years later, though, I did buy a 1967 British Racing Green MG-B roadster.

3. Did you have any secrets?

Of course I have secrets, but if I told you what they are, I’d have to kill you.

4. What did you want to be when you grew up, and are you anywhere close?

I wanted to be a radio disc jockey. I actually took and passed an FCC radio operators licence test and got a job as the midnight to 6 am DJ for a small radio station in a semi-rural community in Maryland. But it sucked and it was a lonely job and I quit after three months.

Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge #220

Fandango18 Comments

Welcome to Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge. Each week I will be posting a photo I grab off the internet and challenging bloggers to write a flash fiction piece or a poem inspired by the photo. There are no style or word limits.

The photo below is from Brian Mann at Unsplash.com

For the visually challenged writer, the photo shows a woman walking away by herself on a sandy beach, leaving a line of footprints in the sand behind her.

If this week’s image inspires you and you wish to participate, please write your post, use the tag #FFFC, and link back to this post. I hope it will generate some great posts.

Please create a pingback to this post or manually add your link in the comments.

FOWC with Fandango — Foolish

Fandango40 Comments
FOWC

Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “foolish.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.