he shoots, he scores!
hey, thanks everyone who responded to my book sale offer. all 10 copies were snatched up within a day of my announcement, which i think is really pretty cool! if there is anyone else that wants a copy, you can always just order the book directly from the blurb website. or if there are 10 more of you out there right now that want a signed copy, let me know and i'll just order another batch.
so i took email announcements of my blog updates down for a few weeks. i went underground, if you will, for awhile. remember when i quit facebook? that's when i stopped email announcements here. sometimes you just feel the need to not be seen, or not be heard. you still exist, you still need to speak your mind but it's not like you always have to know that there is someone scrutinizing your every movement.
and that was really what the exodus from facebook felt like. a need to have some privacy. and some peace and quiet. and it worked! i had a very nice vacation! i got some simplicity back in my life. i lost the constant urge to update my status and read everyone elses walls. i investigated some other forgotten areas of the web that are sort of interesting. ok, fair enough, that was not a total vacation from the computer, but it was an escape from how uneasy i was feeling from the creeping-in-ness of facebook.
i came back to facebook. it's true. i was off for a total of three weeks and did not rejoin because i missed it but because i felt obliged to. my mom and i went on vacation to Chicago for 10 days and i thought it was only fair that my son, who lives in Ireland, have some access to our whereabouts and activities. the other reason i rejoined was for my models. they really seem to appreciate me saving their photographs in facebook. many of my friends there also seem to enjoy having facebook work as a central hub for their net activity.
before i left facebook i told people where they could find me and my work in other places on the web (like Flickr and this blog). a couple of people followed that lead, but most didn't. people just don't have time to be spread out all over the place it seems. and see, this is just another example of this spend-thriftiness with time. 99.8% of the people that read my blog only read it because it shows up in their email box. and i only send out the email announcments because i know that no one will come to the blog to read on their own volition.
this means that i could stop using the blog format entirely, but i don't want to. there is still the chance that an odd, random visitor will stumble upon what i've written because they did a search for a keyword that i might have used in an entry. in fact, this just happened this week. i had posted two sample videos that i filmed with my phone and just put the name of the phone in the title. there was no other text in the posting at all. two complete strangers got into a conversation with each other in the comment section about whether Samsung or Nokia made a better phone. i ended up deleting the videos because i don't really care for that kind of discussion on my blog.
the thing though is that if you were to come to the actual blog to read what i write, you would find some other neat things. for one thing, i have a widget installed that plays music from my last.fm listening history. that's right! you can sit there reading my blog and listen to music! there is also a widget of a slide show of my latest Flickr updates. music and a slideshow while you read. that's pretty snazzy if you ask me.
but, my real point here is that if you were a visitor of my blog and not just a dependent on email notifications/summaries you would have seen the things that i wrote in the past couple of weeks while i was on hiatus. also, if you ever have time, you could explore my blog's archives and see that i've been writing this blog for almost 5 years.
i've started a new blog too. over at Tumblr. yeah, i tried to quit Tumblr too but also failed at that. Tumblr has taken me a very long time to figure out but now i think i may be onto how to best use it. it's a good place to do photo blogging, but you can mix it up. it doesn't have to just be about your own photography. you can display other people's photography that you appreciate, but you can also share mixed media; text, quotes, music, video, all of which should eventually give your readers a flavor of the style of art/music/literature that intrigues and inspires you. again, the main issue there, as with any blog, is readership. how to attract people to come and look at the items that you post. i "follow" about 88 people but am only "followed back" by about 22 people there. the really popular Tumblr bloggers have large numbers of followers with lots of activity on their postings. me, not so much. so again it's a little like just blogging for the hell of it. maybe no one will ever see what i spend my time doing. or maybe there is just one quiet person in the shadows that looks on and smiles, but doesn't want their presence to be known.
i'm still debating with myself about what classes to sign up for next semester at the junior college. i am thinking that a Photoshop class, a mixed media art class, and a writing class would be more in line with my current work than jumping ship and going into screenwriting/filmmaking would be. i know that in the filmmaking class they are going to force me to use Macintosh computers and i really don't want to have to do that. i want to learn how to draw and use paints. i want to get more into my ideas of making story books out fo my photographs and that is not something that screenwriting/filmmaking will help me with. no, i think that is really going in a totally different direction than what i'm on track with now. i mean, maybe someday i could explore that avenue. it's certainly something that i've been interested in learning to do since i was a young man. i just can't do everything at once.
speaking of which, we are only 11 days away from the beginning of nanowrimo. and i am totally planning on writing a complete, new novella this time. i feel pretty focused and have a really good story to go with. it's going to be intense. well, nanowrimo is always intense, but the experience of pulling a story out of yourself, out of your inner hidden places is a dramatic thing to do. and i know i'm going to be pushing a lot of my own buttons in this story, and i also hope to challenge my own sensibilities of normalcy and break some boundaries of safety to take this tale to places i might one time feared going.
stopping now.
so i took email announcements of my blog updates down for a few weeks. i went underground, if you will, for awhile. remember when i quit facebook? that's when i stopped email announcements here. sometimes you just feel the need to not be seen, or not be heard. you still exist, you still need to speak your mind but it's not like you always have to know that there is someone scrutinizing your every movement.
and that was really what the exodus from facebook felt like. a need to have some privacy. and some peace and quiet. and it worked! i had a very nice vacation! i got some simplicity back in my life. i lost the constant urge to update my status and read everyone elses walls. i investigated some other forgotten areas of the web that are sort of interesting. ok, fair enough, that was not a total vacation from the computer, but it was an escape from how uneasy i was feeling from the creeping-in-ness of facebook.
i came back to facebook. it's true. i was off for a total of three weeks and did not rejoin because i missed it but because i felt obliged to. my mom and i went on vacation to Chicago for 10 days and i thought it was only fair that my son, who lives in Ireland, have some access to our whereabouts and activities. the other reason i rejoined was for my models. they really seem to appreciate me saving their photographs in facebook. many of my friends there also seem to enjoy having facebook work as a central hub for their net activity.
before i left facebook i told people where they could find me and my work in other places on the web (like Flickr and this blog). a couple of people followed that lead, but most didn't. people just don't have time to be spread out all over the place it seems. and see, this is just another example of this spend-thriftiness with time. 99.8% of the people that read my blog only read it because it shows up in their email box. and i only send out the email announcments because i know that no one will come to the blog to read on their own volition.
this means that i could stop using the blog format entirely, but i don't want to. there is still the chance that an odd, random visitor will stumble upon what i've written because they did a search for a keyword that i might have used in an entry. in fact, this just happened this week. i had posted two sample videos that i filmed with my phone and just put the name of the phone in the title. there was no other text in the posting at all. two complete strangers got into a conversation with each other in the comment section about whether Samsung or Nokia made a better phone. i ended up deleting the videos because i don't really care for that kind of discussion on my blog.
the thing though is that if you were to come to the actual blog to read what i write, you would find some other neat things. for one thing, i have a widget installed that plays music from my last.fm listening history. that's right! you can sit there reading my blog and listen to music! there is also a widget of a slide show of my latest Flickr updates. music and a slideshow while you read. that's pretty snazzy if you ask me.
but, my real point here is that if you were a visitor of my blog and not just a dependent on email notifications/summaries you would have seen the things that i wrote in the past couple of weeks while i was on hiatus. also, if you ever have time, you could explore my blog's archives and see that i've been writing this blog for almost 5 years.
i've started a new blog too. over at Tumblr. yeah, i tried to quit Tumblr too but also failed at that. Tumblr has taken me a very long time to figure out but now i think i may be onto how to best use it. it's a good place to do photo blogging, but you can mix it up. it doesn't have to just be about your own photography. you can display other people's photography that you appreciate, but you can also share mixed media; text, quotes, music, video, all of which should eventually give your readers a flavor of the style of art/music/literature that intrigues and inspires you. again, the main issue there, as with any blog, is readership. how to attract people to come and look at the items that you post. i "follow" about 88 people but am only "followed back" by about 22 people there. the really popular Tumblr bloggers have large numbers of followers with lots of activity on their postings. me, not so much. so again it's a little like just blogging for the hell of it. maybe no one will ever see what i spend my time doing. or maybe there is just one quiet person in the shadows that looks on and smiles, but doesn't want their presence to be known.
i'm still debating with myself about what classes to sign up for next semester at the junior college. i am thinking that a Photoshop class, a mixed media art class, and a writing class would be more in line with my current work than jumping ship and going into screenwriting/filmmaking would be. i know that in the filmmaking class they are going to force me to use Macintosh computers and i really don't want to have to do that. i want to learn how to draw and use paints. i want to get more into my ideas of making story books out fo my photographs and that is not something that screenwriting/filmmaking will help me with. no, i think that is really going in a totally different direction than what i'm on track with now. i mean, maybe someday i could explore that avenue. it's certainly something that i've been interested in learning to do since i was a young man. i just can't do everything at once.
speaking of which, we are only 11 days away from the beginning of nanowrimo. and i am totally planning on writing a complete, new novella this time. i feel pretty focused and have a really good story to go with. it's going to be intense. well, nanowrimo is always intense, but the experience of pulling a story out of yourself, out of your inner hidden places is a dramatic thing to do. and i know i'm going to be pushing a lot of my own buttons in this story, and i also hope to challenge my own sensibilities of normalcy and break some boundaries of safety to take this tale to places i might one time feared going.
stopping now.
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