Blogging

Rory’s Morning Dawdler — 02/09/23

Fandango17 Comments

Rory, the king of questions, also known as the Autistic Composter, has come up with a new series of questions that he calls “The Morning Dawdler.” He poses four questions three times a week, questions he says are “inspired by life, humor, conversations and observations, town life, blog posts, writers, gardening, news stories, television, entertainment, and human curiosity, and so on.”

Here are Rory’s four morning dawdler questions from yesterday that I’m just getting around to today.

What is the weirdest fact you know?

This is not the weirdest fact I know, but it’s the most disturbing. There are more firearms in the United States of America than there are men, women, and children combined. And Americans purchased more firearms in 2020 and 2021 than at any point in the nation’s history. Furthermore, the leading cause of death for children in the U.S. is guns. Think about that.

Which meal is your favorite: breakfast, lunch, or dinner?

I’m going with breakfast because I have same breakfast almost every single day: a bowl of half Special K, half Wheaties, with a scoop of raisins and a sliced banana over which is poured enough organic 2% milk to just cover the cereal flakes. It’s a no brainer, whereas lunches and dinners require more thought and preparation.

What do you enjoy most about your blog?

Interactions with other members of the blogging community.

What are you passionate about outside of writing?

Right now I’m most passionate about doing everything I can to facilitate and speed the healing of my broken hip and injured right shoulder, including religiously doing the assigned in-home exercises.

SoCS — Put Down That Cellphone

Fandango19 Comments

I have to say, all modesty aside, that I excelled at being a host for our out-of-town guests this week. My wife insisted that I put down my cellphone except for taking photos with it, so that we would be able to view those photos and remember the excellent times we all had.

Wanting to be attentive to and present for our visitors, I did as she suggested and minimized my cellphone usage this week. I really wanted our guests feel as if they were being treated like celebrities during their visit.

The only day we had to cancel any of the miscellaneous plans I had made was on Tuesday because it rained all day. Otherwise everything went off without a hitch. We were able to celebrate together our decades long friendships.

Last night was cool and crisp, and there was nary a cloud in the night sky. So we all gathered around our backyard fire pit to keep warm and to gaze up at the sky and look at stars and planets in their celestial splendor. It was spectacular.

But alas, all good things must come to an end, and tomorrow our guests will be leaving and heading back home. I will miss them after they leave, of course, but because I tried very hard to minimize my time glued to my cellphone, as I often otherwise am, I have missed reading many of your posts. And I have missed our interactions.

My plan is to resume my normal blogging activities, which I do exclusively on my cellphone, the day after tomorrow. I’m looking forward to reading your posts and responding to more of your prompts and challenges.

Written for Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, in which Linda asked us to find a word that begins with or contains “cel” and use it in your post any way we’d like.

Fandango’s Provocative Question #106 Revisited

Fandango18 Comments
FPQ

Note: Because I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge this month, I will not be posting any new provocative question until May. Instead, I will be revisiting some previous provocative questions that you might have missed. This one was originally posted on January 27, 2021 and can be found here. Please feel free to respond to it if you haven’t already.

Welcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration.

By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.

What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.

Blogging is a medium of words. All of us who blog are wordsmiths. We use words almost exclusively to express ourselves, to tell our stories, to weave our tales, to write our poems, to help others to understand and possibly even appreciate our perspectives.

In the real world, words can take on different meanings depending on context, inflection, facial expressions, body language, and other countless factors. But in blogging, such visual cues are, for the most part, absent. Thus, the challenge of conveying your intended tone and the underlying meaning of what you write can be daunting. It gets down to the age old writer’s dilemma. Is the content what matters, or how the content is portrayed or presented?

So, as we are all writers who use words to paint pictures, my provocative question is simply this:

In the context of blogging and writing, what do you think is more important: what you say or how you say it?

If you choose to participate, write a post with your response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments. But remember to check to confirm that your pingback or your link shows up in the comments.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — March 18th

Fandango25 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 18th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on March 18, 2018.

How Much Is Too Much?

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Do I post too often?

I have been averaging three, sometimes four, posts a day lately. But this morning I read a post from a blogger, Cristian Mihai, who has more than 120,000 followers. His post is titled “The 7 Golden Rules of Blogging.” One of his seven rules: “Blog often enough, but not too often.”

Mihai wrote, “You need to find a balance here.” He went on to point out that “it’s pretty safe to assume that constantly posting more than once a day won’t work really well.”

Okay, here’s an extraordinarily successful blogger with more than 120,000 followers (compared to my blog’s 583 followers) who is essentially telling me that I post too many times a day.

Then I read an article in Forbes that advised, “If you post too infrequently, your audience will forget that you exist and you will quickly fade into the deep dark recesses of their minds. However, if you are posting too often, you will become a complete nuisance and they will dread seeing your posts overcrowding their feed.”

Oh my God! Do you dread seeing my posts in your WordPress reader? Am I a complete nuisance, unnecessarily filling up your email box and your reader with all of my posts?

But how do I go about posting less frequently? What prompts should I stop responding to? Should I curtail my flash fiction posts? Should I refrain from posting about the moron in the Oval Office?

Hmm. Maybe the first thing I should do to avoid being a nuisance is to stop whining about how often I post.

Note: my original post had a link to the referenced post from Cristian Mihai, but it is no longer working, so I removed it from this flashback post.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — February 25th

Fandango8 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 25th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on February 25, 2018.

Hiding in Plain Sight

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To a post that I wrote for the WordPress one-word prompt yesterday, a short, somewhat tongue-in-cheek piece of flash fiction, I received a comment from one of my regular readers (and favorite bloggers), Marilyn Armstrong at Serendipity, who wrote:

“This is one of those times in which I wish there was more of you in this and less verbal play. It’s cute, but where are YOU?”

Marilyn’s comment got me thinking. Marilyn is very open in her excellent blog about who she is in “the real world.” She posts about herself, her husband, her family, her home, her dogs, her work, her play, and the trials, tribulations, and joys of her life. Her blog is very personal and she’s quite forthcoming. And that’s why she has more than 10,000 followers.

My blog’s About page notes upfront that “My real world identity will remain a mystery.” I once had my identity stolen and it took many painful months to get that all straightened out. Consequently, I am perhaps overly guarded about revealing too much about myself, my personal life, and my family, which is why I blog anonymously.

Also on my About page, I reveal that I’m a retired, liberal, practical, and pragmatic septuagenarian. I also admit that I can be a bit cantankerous, as well as somewhat pedantic (i.e., fussy) when it comes to grammar, spelling, and usage.

Now if I wanted to be glib about answering Marilyn’s question about where I am, I could respond by saying that I live in San Francisco with my wife, our dog, and our cat.

But in reality, I’m a boring man, a senior citizen who lives a rather routine, nondescript life. I’m neither particularly inspiring nor especially interesting. Which is why many of my posts on this blog recently are flash fiction pieces in response to various prompts. What goes on inside my imagination is much more fascinating and colorful than what goes on in my real world.

So to answer Marilyn’s question, I’m right here. A piece of me is in every post I write, whether I’m expressing my opinions, sharing my observations, offering my perspectives, or flexing my imagination. This post and my words that you are reading is where I am.

I’m right here…hiding in plain sight.