Category Archives: Uncategorized

The blog is on holiday today. I hope you all had a great Christmas (or at least a long weekend).

Hello, Facebook. I hope.

I’m trying yet another method of sending blog posts to Facebook. Let’s see if it works.

I’ve been playing with If this, then that. It’s a nifty service that does what its name says–you set up the this’s and that’s.

For example, If a new post appears on my blog’s rss feed, Then tweet a link to it. Or If a new blog post appears, Then post a link on Facebook…

It will connect to a bunch of different services, and will even send you email or text messages. For the most part it does a bunch of things that I don’t need.

But. One useful thing I’m doing with this is to turn my Instapaper account into an automatically updating sf magazine. I’ve put a few rss feeds from online magazines into IFFT, and told it to send them to Instapaper. Now I can open Instapaper and magically find new stories (or articles from a few select blogs) to read. Nice.

Jim Hines recently gave the secret to writing a good blog: Be interesting.

But what is interesting? This is a topic I keep thinking about, thanks to my growing up as a shy, quiet kid who just wanted people to care that she existed, plus some jerks who told me specifically to my face that I was boring (in high school, they said this because my hair and eyes are brown; in college, it was because my parents had given my brother and me ordinary names instead of less common ones (I suspect that guy and his siblings had been teased about their names)). And while I no longer think that I’m boring, my greatest fear as a writer us that even if I become a master of the craft, there’s something inherent in me that means no one will ever want to read my stuff (I don’t need to be reassured about that, I do know it’s irrational and untrue–and I like worrying about irrational things, because I don’t really have to worry about them!).

So, what is interesting? Some months ago, I ran across a couple of posts by Justine Musk that led me to Cal Newport’s blog. Newport is specifically writing to high school students making plans for applying to college. His advice? Be interesting.

Newport’s instruction for how to do that is roughly to focus. Don’t do a ton of extracurriculars; instead, explore things and then delve deep into the ones you like best.

Which is where I start relating all this to blogging. Some bloggers have a niche.

If this blog has a niche, it’s “What Elizabeth has been doing lately.” Which I write partly so I have a record of it, and partly so family and friends know what I’ve been up to. I hope that it’s interesting. But if my goal were to build an audience, I’d focus. This would be a gardening blog, a cooking blog, or a fitness blog. Maybe even a writing blog. But since it’s an Elizabeth blog, it cycles through all of those topics and then some. Because my life would be pretty dull if I only did one thing.

For a while I was going to at least one convention a year, every year (mostly Wiscon). But then, I guess I got bored, after the “so this is what a con is like” wore off. [1] Last year I didn’t go to any – I kept thinking about it and not getting around to signing up.

So this time I’ve decided to plan way ahead. Aside from Gen Con in Indianapolis this August, which I’m told has a great writing track, I’m registered for Worldcon in 2012 (Chicago, so I have no excuse to not go) and World Fantasy in 2012 (Toronto, which hopefully will mean a nice visit with family as well). And now I don’t have to think about those for a long time. See you there?

[1] Plus, the whole introvert thing makes “spend a weekend with dozens/hundreds/etc of strangers” not exactly appealing. Yes, there are friends there too, and interesting people to meet, but there’s also a lot of standing around watching other people have conversations. Yay. I’ve always had a good time, it’s just tough to motivate myself to go.

I’m running another 5k in two weeks, and am trying to get a bit faster. My husband entered my average pace tonight into Wolfram|Alpha (he wanted it in min/km):

Oh yeah? I bet I could outrun the server!

I am way behind on book reports, but have read lots of good things in the past couple months. I do plan to write them up.

Links

Via zanzjan, the stats behind redshirt deaths on Star Trek. The chart is excellent.

I was amused by this article on whether listening to audiobooks instead of reading is cheating. I prefer to read them, but if I listen on tape it goes on my books read list, and even though I mark them as audio, I don’t consider it cheating (at least the unabridged versions).

Life

Busy weekend: Irish festival, Simpsons movie, dinner at the Turkish restaurant.

The festival was fun, and much bigger than I’d expected. We saw a couple different bands — though considering how long we were there, it seems like we should have seen a lot more, missed all the dancing, and participated in the attempt to reclaim the world record for largest number of people doing an Irish jig at one time.

The stickers they handed out to help count people say “Guinness World’s Record Largest Irish Jig Attempt,” which sounds more like it’s for the largest number of people trying to jig. Which is pretty appropriate.

They had music workshops, but I didn’t go — wouldn’t have wanted to drag my flute around. I suppose I could have brought my whistle. One booth had really nice whistles for sale, but I refused to be tempted. (If I took up playing again, I’d get a low whistle, because the regular D whistle is too shrill. Assuming the low whistle didn’t hurt my hands like the flute does.)

The movie was better than I’d expected, especially given that I stopped watching the show years ago because it wasn’t funny anymore.

Dinner (stuffed eggplant) was great, but I’d expected that.

If you are using the plugin to add Google Reader Shared Items to your sidebar, you need to update it to account for recent changes in Google Reader.

Either download the new version, or make this simple change:

On line 346 (that’s near the bottom), there is a line
htmlspecialchars($item->link[1][‘href’])

Delete the “[1]” and the plugin should be fixed.