Bastet and Sekhmet

My Desktop…by GSK

I’ve been writing this blog now since the second of January, 2013.  So far, it’s been a satisfying experience.  But why did I and do I write a blog?

Basically, I thought it would be nice to see if I could write something (outside of my tattered notebooks) and see if someone in the general public would find it interesting.  Then again, I also thought it might be a way to leave something for my children and grandchildren to remember me by once I “shuffle off this mortal coil”.

It’d been a long time since I’d written poetry and writing fiction has never been my forte.  I thought when I began that I’d just write about my opinions and ideas;  you know, the usual stuff like politics, world affairs, that sort of thing.  Then I found myself starting to write about my childhood memories and things that have (had) happened in my everyday life.  One thing led to another, and my first photo poem popped up, and I started a new category to house it called Pills, which has grown since with two sub categories called Haiku and Power Shorts (a nice prosy type of Haiku, I’ve discovered through another blogger, Rick Mallery). The possibilities grew, with the idea of using my umpteen bazillion photographs and writing stories or travelogues around them.

Some of my favourite pieces languished though, so I went back to them to see why they’d never been appreciated, and I discovered that yes, they may have been interesting to me, but they were poor things indeed.  The style was stilted and they weren’t very well illustrated…so I rewrote them and dressed them up a bit…sure enough, there was a lot more interest expressed in them.  Some of my older pieces I’ve rendered private though…I may or may not go back and have a look at them.

Next is the housing project…that is where I blog, my site or whatever you call it. I’ve worked on it from time to time, changing the header, adding and removing and rearranging widgets but, I’m still not happy with it.  So, I’ll have to go and figure out how to actually use the instruments that are provided to make a better site.  I’ll also have to figure out how to do a little work with computer language too if I really want to do those things that your standard WordPress word “elaborator” doesn’t allow you to do…like changing your script size gradually…from smaller to bigger.

Then, there’s the one thing that really bugs me a bit.  I’d like my blog to go beyond a Facebook sort of life.  I look at my stats, and they’re pretty great for a beginner I think, and I love it when I see all the places my blogs have been read  (love those maps)!  I’m happy that people read and like my posts, but I’d also like to see some comments from time to time.  The age of Facebook and Twitter seem to have reduced blogger’s comments to mere “likes”.  I was happy to see an article written about this on Blogher, so I stopped feeling paranoid, it’s a general problem.  I myself find myself reading and liking, just as though I’m browsing through the Facebook…but, I say to myself,  if I’d been satisfied with Facebook, I wouldn’t have started blogging.  Of course, the problem is that there are literally millions of people who are writing and posting daily…so I say, I work on my style right!

I’ve also joined Blogher recently.  They have some pretty awesome suggestions on how to write better, how to use computer languages and how to cook a great soufflé ( )…jokes aside, I’ve been learning a lot about blogging from them and hope to start posting there as well, once I can figure out what I’d like to say and how to do it effectively.

Me by my webcam

Just a last word:  I comment on people’s blogs from time to time…the problem is, that when I write my blogs, before I transfer them to WordPress, I use a program that has an automatic word corrector which keeps track of all my mistakes and either automatically corrects them or at least points them out…not so for comments.  There was an old rule that I’d learned in school, and it goes like this:  I before E except after C…when in doubt, I  follow that rule.  I’ll never understand why I keep misspelling this word: experience?