Blogiversary: 5 years at ChicagoNow

Five years ago this week I published my first post.  295 published posts later, the subject matter has obviously changed.  Whenever the anniversary of our first post comes along, bloggers like to write about it because it’s a clever way to make a post about me we sometimes just cannot think of anything else to write about.

I’m gonna share what I’ve learned either in one not too long post or many smaller posts, depending on how much unsolicited wisdom I feel like imparting.

I’m going to focus on blogging at ChicagoNow, though I’m sure a lot of this advice and experience would translate to other platforms.  We are lucky to have the ChicagoNow audience which is backfilled through the Tribune Ecosystem.  Enjoy it while it’s here because nothing lasts forever.

Cute pictures help too

Lesson Zero:  Do not say you just published a new blog!

When referring to a post that you just published, don’t say “I just published a new blog” or “New blog up at MyBlog”.  Unless you literally went from publishing your posts on Baby Sideburn to Mothers who Drink and Swear, It’s incorrect and just makes you look like a moron.

Lesson one: Don’t set yourself up to fail

One of the gimmicks bloggers fall pray to is the 30 days of blogging challenge or promising a series that is way too long.  Unless you already have half of that content ready to go, don’t make promises you cannot keep.  Life will get in the way.  You will lose steam.

Lesson Two: It doesn’t matter when you publish

The real anniversary of my first post is October 1.  But it doesn’t matter when I hit the publish button, within reason.  Obviously I don’t want to wait until November but the Blog Police won’t come after me if this doesn’t post until the middle of the month.  The thing to remember is that a published decent post is infinitely better than an unpublished perfect post.

Lesson Three:  Keep it brief though

I try to keep my posts between 300 and 600 words because society has the attention span of a litter of concussed kittens.  There are some of course where I have more to say but as I learned from my editor days, most articles can be trimmed by ten percent.  There are a handful of bloggers who can get away with excessive wordiness but I’m not usually one of them.

 

Do me a favor? Click my “like” button and join our Facebook community.

****************
Thank you for reading and I hope you will comment below. Here’s the part where I beg for stuff because we get paid in likes, shares, re-tweets and feedback. If you like my posts, funnies and random facts, please also do any and all of the following:

Follow Mysteries of Life on Twitter (@MysteriesOLife), Facebook or subscribe via email.

 

 

These letters have been in a shoe box for over 25 years. Find out what I’m going to do with them

Back in the day, people wrote one another because phone calls were expensive, especially if they were long distance.  I have this box of old snail mail

Treasure Trove, junk mail, it’s a fine line

letters from my college days and shortly thereafter.  A treasure trove of envelopes of multitudes colors and sizes, stamps of all varieties, and postmarks from exotic places such as Kirksville, Missouri.  Yes, I saved them all, sentimental fool that I am.

I tend to hold on to things too long. Old memories, mementos and more than a few grudges.  I’ve been holding onto these letters for decades, moving them from home to home but never looking at them.  So I figured the time has come to deal with them once and for all.

I thought I could take a quick, first pass through them and cull the less meaningful, superficial ones.  They cannot all be gems.

This proved harder than I thought because often within the contents of a typical boring letter are nuggets of goodness. I see things that I missed, undervalued or outright ignored the first time.

The Case for Getting Rid of It

You should only hang onto old memories, and their physical artifacts, for two reasons. One, they provide some warm fuzzies that elevate your mood. Two, they remind you of what to do or not to do when life throws you in that situation again.

These letters meant something to me decades ago. Leaving NMSU back in my college years was traumatic for me.  I had a good group of friends.  I was doing okay academically and repairing the damage to my GPA that my clueless freshmen self-inflicted.

Alas, I had to leave because of finances and for years I tried to get back to Planet Kirksville and the life I had to leave behind.  I would visit Kirksville and later St Louis, even considering relocating there to be with my college friends.

I spent a lot of my 20s struggling because I didn’t have the support structure here that I had there (or thought I had there).  I spent a lot of time and energy holding onto something that didn’t exist anymore and probably didn’t really exist in the first place.  And had I been able to let go sooner, I probably would have had a better 90s and 2000s.  It wasn’t until I built something solid here that I was finally able to let go.

I saved these letters because I figured I might read them in my old age and enjoy some warm memories. But honestly, if I have to read these to have warm memories when I’m nearly 80, my life didn’t turn out so well.

The Case for Keeping Some of It 

Back then, they only duct tape the important meaningful letters

I googled what do to with old letters and surprisingly half a dozen articles appeared with that title (hence why I’m not using it as the headline for this post).  The best advice was Get rid of all cards and letters that don’t add to your happiness. You know, the letter from someone who promised they’d write and at the tail end of summer you get a postcard saying “hey dude, how’s your summer been? ready to get back to classes,” Signed: Somebody That I Use to Know.

Since I have access to an Enterprise sized scanner I am scanning everything, significant or insignificant.   But this is proving to be a challenge since many of these letters are folded, crumpled odd-sized pages and as such, are a bitch to get into the feeder.

There are a few people I will be able to send the originals back just in case genealogists and family historians want some insight into how their ancestor thought, what made them happy, and what broke their hearts.

Stay tuned.

****************

Like me, you probably dislike all of the ads on this page. They pop up unexpectedly, sometimes cover text, start playing videos and clutter the post itself. We bloggers have no control over any aspect of the ads (content, form, placement, etc). I am sorry that they have taken over our blogs on ChicagoNow and appreciate your continued support.

Follow Mysteries of Life on Twitter (@MysteriesOLife), Facebook or subscribe via

What would you do with a Time Machine?

I posited the following question on my FB the other day:

If you had a time machine, describe your first trip…what time period would you visit, what would you do?

Some of my friends played along and came up with interesting things like “witness the Resurrection of Jesus” or “see Einstein and Eddington prove relativity.  Others were a little more subdued, wishing to spend more time with their kids when they were toddlers or go back far enough to place lucrative sports bets.

Many suggested going back and picking different forks of roads they they long ago traversed. Some hinted at bad decisions, others described them in specific details, clearly still haunted by the Spectres of the Past.

and of course someone pointed out the time travel paradoxes.

Photo curtesy of Rodger Evans

Time Continuum Theories and Paradoxes

Purist believe that any change, ever so slight, will change the future. i.e. you go back in time to when you meet a friend for a drink but this time you order white wine instead of red. BOOM: 9/11 didn’t happen.

Then there is the Destiny Strives to Reassert Itself camp. you go back in time to when you meet a friend for a drink but this time you order white wine instead of red. BOOM: 9/11 still happens regardless. Dune author Frank Herbert believed that individuals do not significantly impact or change the direction of  civilization.  A  Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is going to happens it just becomes a question of when and not if.

I’ve always liked to believe that minor things would cancel each other out, for good or bad.  I’d also like to think that I could go back and mitigate, alleviate and outright avoid many of the pitfalls and painful events that Life threw my way and I’d still end up where I am today with regards to my wife and kids.   Like if I avoided all those playground fights, would I really not have toddler twins today?

What would you do with a Time Machine?  Passively witness an Historical Event or change your past?   Tell me about it here in the comments, then swing by my Facebook page and LIKE it! You’ll find funny, informative links and interesting pictures. Don’t worry, your FB feed won’t get overwhelmed.

 

If you enjoyed reading this post, please share it to help others find it! enter your email address below click the “subscribe by email” button. You can sign up to receive an email whenever I publish something new.

 

Type your email address in the box and click the “create subscription” button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.

Happy Reading! Follow Mysteries of Life on Twitter (@MysteriesOLife), Facebook or subscribe via email.

Who cares if Cursive Writing becomes Extinct?

 

I have always hated my manual writing.  Both my cursive and my printing suck (my writing sucks in many ways, but it is especially noticeable on the visual level).  I do take pen to paper now and again when taking notes or writing up the first draft of some writing opus.  But I usually very quickly switch to electronic writing whenever possible.  Cursive Penmanship makes me curse…But not as much as those who have to read my handwriting.

In school, I’m sure it often dinged me a few points on any written assignment.  I suspect my hatred of handwriting came about because I was one of those people who should write with their Left hand but was prematurely converted to a Righty.

But therein lies the problem with handwriting:    No two people do it the same way.  Some people have lovely penmanship, their todo lists belong in the Smithsonian.  Others have crappy writing as if they are on an Optometrist’s payroll.  Then there are people whose writing cannot be discerned at all, see doctors.

Luckily I was born in the Era of Word Processors with computers putting typewriters out of a job.  In college, I was able to type out many of the letters I wrote to friends in the computer lab.  I still had to print them and snail mail like a caveman but it was a start.  I was actually too ahead of my time as friends lamented that I used the same template for all my letters.

Cursive Writing had its function once upon a time.  Being able to write legibly and clearly so that other people could easily read your handwriting was a necessary skill, at for those who could read and write.  But that time has passed.  cursive writing came about because in the early history of our species we didn’t have iPhones!  No one writes in hieroglyphics or Sanskrit anymore and humankind seems to be muddling along okay.

People lament that penmanship and calligraphy are becoming lost arts.  So the fuck what?  We have machines to do this stuff for us now.

In researching this post I read all the internet about cursive writing so you don’t have to and the arguments for it can be summed up as:

1.  Good penmanship helps to teach kids discipline and develop the fine motor skills needed for other tasks in life;
2. Being able to sign important documents with a unique signature to prove it was YOU that signed them;
3. How are we going to be able to read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?

I’m sure we can find other ways to teach kids motor skills and it certainly doesn’t seem like anyone is reading The Constitution lately amirite?  And when it comes to my signature, not only is it never the same way twice but I usually half-ass it and write a squiggle for most of it.

 

How do feel about the Demise of Cursive Writing? Tell me about it here in the comments, then swing by my Facebook page and LIKE it! You’ll find funny, informative links and interesting pictures. Don’t worry, your FB feed won’t get overwhelmed.

Happy Reading! Follow Mysteries of Life on Twitter (@MysteriesOLife), Facebook or subscribe via email.

What to do with your laptop when you need to go to the bathroom at a coffee shop

A lot of people, writers especially, like to work at a coffee shop instead of a home office or den. I’m not sure what the exact appeal is.  Maybe writers think they are emulating Hemingway or they enjoy the convenience of being able to order food and drink without having to stop working.  Maybe it’s the same reason people go to a bar instead of drinking at home. You want the potential of company without the obligation of company.

Whatever the reason, the results are the same. You score a seat, perhaps on the comfiest chair, the one nearest the power outlet. You get your laptop set up and are ready to write. Suddenly your bladder decides to chime in. What do you do with your laptop and other stuff when you have to answer Nature’s Call?

Photo Credit: Citrixonline

We carefully and thoroughly deliberated this subject in the Super Secret ChicagoNow Bloggers Only Facebook Group and came up with a variety of options.

• You can take your laptop with you to the bathroom.
• You can leave it and hope for the best.
• You can ask someone to keep an eye on it for you.
• Or you can hold your bladder as long as possible.

Each solution has its ups and downs.

Nina of Youknowneen opts for the Leaving It There and Hoping for the Best strategy.  This is playing the odds, which are probably in your favor until they aren’t.  Most people at the coffee shop are off in their own world and if they did notice you getting up to go to the washroom, their thought process would be: oh that seat is available.  oh wait, she left her stuff.  back to Facebook.

Marie Larsen of There’s a Bug in My Coffee does not like this solution.  Her husband is a cop and 20+ years his tales from the beat has influenced her outlook to not trust leaving it there.  However, taking your laptop to the bathroom means exposing it to all the bathroom cooties as some of our more Germophopic bloggers pointed out.

Asking someone to keep an eye on it for you may or may not be effective.  Brett Baker of Dry It In The Water has a strategy that is right out of the Poison scene from Princess Bride.  “ I thought about asking the people at the next table to keep an eye on it, but then I thought, What if they’re the thieves? Then I thought about asking two different sets of people to watch it, just so they could stop each other. And if they conspired they’d have to fight about how to divide up the spoils. Obviously, I’ve put way too much thought into this.”

You could just wait it out and see how long you can hold it.  Unless you were planning to spend all day in the coffee shop (who can do that?) eventually you were gonna finish up and go home.  Pack up, hit the bathroom on the way out and all is good.  Unless you have an accident.  Hopefully there’s a clothing store or laundromat near by.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy this post.  Next time another group of ChicagoNow bloggers will Overthink parking lots: should you park closer or farther from the door.

****************
Thank you for reading and I hope you will comment below. Here’s the part where I beg for stuff because we get paid in likes, shares, re-tweets and feedback. Please also do any and all of the following:

Follow Mysteries of Life on Twitter (@MysteriesOLife), Facebook or subscribe via email.

The First Rule of Write Club: We don’t talk about not posting

Here at ChicagoNow we often get together in our Virtual Club House and talk about blogging challenges.  We give each other advice, support and suggestions for navigating the blogosphere.  That is before things devolve into a virtual pillow fight and soft core porn montage.

A couple of my fellow bloggers have come clean this week and acknowledged that they haven’t posted in a while.  Our Fearless Leader suggests not to draw attention to the fact that you may not have published a post in a while.  He’s usually right but was wrong once a few years ago so he’s due.

This is my one new subscriber! (Photo Curtesy of Debra Paulson)

Alas, I’m in the same boat.  Like everyone else my excuses are a mental cocktail of Lack of Energy, Low Motivation and Life Getting in the Way.  I’ve been a SAHD for the last few months and while that should have provided a boatload of material, it’s really hard to write with twin toddlers nipping at your feet, wanting to be held ALL THE TIME.

When I do get the kids down for nap, I have at most two hours to do anything that cannot be done with small children underfoot like shovel snow or operate heavy machinery.  Sometimes I even take a nap because Moose or Squirrel decided not to sleep through the night.  Some days I’m lucky to brush my teeth before noon.  A shower is a real treat (did I type that out loud?)  And after the kids are put down for the night?  My energy levels are lower than IQs at a Kardashian Reunion.

Blogging is a vicious cycle because you have to write consistently to build an audience but without any interaction it’s hard to motivate yourself to write to an invisible audience.  I’ve written 10 posts this year which isn’t bad for the 14th week of 2016 but instead of being consistent, those posts were in clumps.  I wrote about the cool things we have at CN to inspire bloggers but it’s hard to win best post or gallery if you don’t past.  Darn those draconian rules!

Facebook also does a fucktacular job of showing you what your friends are up to and when I see them liking a faceless Corporate Entities’ FB page, but not mine, I think WTF.

Youknowneen suggests it’s a honest case of “plain forgetting or maybe a ‘oh yeah, I need to like that page,’ and then never getting to it. ”

 

I wish I had her golden attitude.  I also hope my Writing Muse comes back.  But more importantly, I hope I can get my kids back in daycare soon.

****************
Thank you for reading and I hope you will comment below. Here’s the part where I beg for stuff because we get paid in likes, shares, re-tweets and feedback. Please also do any and all of the following:

Follow Mysteries of Life on Twitter (@MysteriesOLife), Facebook or subscribe via email.

Type your email address in the box and click the “create subscription” button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.

How did NaNoWriMo work out of you?

Until last year, I didn’t even know that November was the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, until I saw this piece over at author John Scalzi’s blog.  Known by the hash tag of #NaNoWriMo, wannabe writers are encouraged to write a novel in the time frame of one month. Not necessarily a good or even a sell-able novel, but just a story the length of a novel (NaNoWriMo uses 50,000 words as a marker, which Scalzi says is “slightly short for modern novels …60k is usually the lower bound”).

So this year I decided to buckle down and work on my Great American Novel.  It certainly wouldn’t be good and I doubt it would be salable.  But I could certainly crank out 50K words, right?

Photo credit: Kat/ CC BY-NC-ND

Unfortunately Moose and Squirrel have kept me very busy.  I did make some progress in some intangible ways.  For starters I dug up an old novel that I wrote back in college and scanned it.  Then I converted the PDF to Word.  It still needs a lot of cleanup and I might be better off starting from scratch but at least if there is a segment I wish to use I can capture it without retyping the whole darn thing.

I also did a little research on two elements I will need for the book.  My genre will be likely be sci-fi and as such, my characters need a way to get from one end of the galaxy to another and Uber just won’t do.  I’m researching hyperdrive and the problems I want to create and solve are thus:

• It shouldn’t be too easy to get from one place to another;
• I don’t want the Space Calvary to simply be able to warp into a battle at a moment’s notice but…
• I don’t want to write myself into a corner by having it stated that “even the fastest hyperdrive engine can only get you from earth to planet X in three weeks” either.

On that last point, you can get in trouble with your readers and consistency once you state something like “how long it will take to get to Alpha Centauri from Earth” because as soon as you do that, your reader will point out the fuzzy math when you have your hero get to planet X in less time even though it is further away than Alpha Centauri.

I cannot really share the second thing I looked into because that would reveal the plot twist as it were.  I can share, however, the site I used to ask and answer some questions.  Quora is a site I happened upon — when looking for something else of course — where you can ask experts a question and they will give you an answer on almost any subject you can imagine.  Some questions I’ve seen include:

• How does living in Chicago compare with San Francisco
• The middle ages: was it really as gruesome as it’s commonly portrayed to be?
• Can I freeze my dead body for 2000 years, keep my money legally safe in an account earning compound interest, thaw 2000 years later, re-animate and repair my body, and then live the life of a billionaire?

This site has experts who will chime in and answer these mundane to bizarre questions.  How do they know the answers to something like how where things like in the Middle Ages and other existential questions?  Because they are Time Traveling Wizards of course.

How did you do with NaNoWritMo?  Tell me in the comments.  If you liked this post, perhaps you’ll like this post on Resources for Writers.  Here’s the part where I beg for stuff because we get paid in likes, shares, re-tweets and feedback. Please also do any and all of the following:

Follow Mysteries of Life on Twitter (@MysteriesOLife), Facebook or subscribe via email.

Type your email address in the box and click the “create subscription” button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.