Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
Stephen King
At work we have a new sub-editor checking our articles and after receiving the text about the new person on our team, it suddenly dawned on me that this newcomer, called Ali, might be a fake. It might even be A.I. especially given my previous A.I. discussion.
I revealed this little pondering to my editor who assured me that Ali was real and then sent me some info on how he has found using A.I. in the print media sphere. He talked about the inaccuracies and of the copyright issues.
I thought: Did he think my question regarding Ali’s authenticity mean I was contemplating using A.I. chatbots to write my allocated stories and articles for the magazine?
Because if he did, he was wrong.
There is one overriding reason why I wouldn’t use A.I. and that is:
I like to write.
After all, we choose to be writers so why would we not want to write!
In his book ‘On Writing,’ the famous author Stephen King reveals that the act of writing for him isn’t about seeking fame or fortune, about getting dates or making friends. It is about digging up fossils, those stories that are there in our minds, waiting to be discovered or “dug up,” appearing in our imagination and the writers is the conduit.
According to Stephen:
It is about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.
Stephen king
The Yin and Yang of Creative Writing
Just like the sunflowers, writing, whether it be fiction or non-fiction, can make us feel emotional, broody, sad, even fatigued. Contrastingly, it can also be intensely therapeutic, revealing bright, sunny thoughts regaling with positivity.
Yin and Yang Sunflowers
Just like the sunflowers bursting into bloom – writing does enrich my life. It fills me with contentment and joy. It is creating or expressing something totally original and new.
Rarely do I experience frustration or angst from the act of writing.
Creating a story, a blog post or an informative article can really make my day!
How do you feel about writing?
Is it magical, cathartic or purely expressive for you?
Recently, the Home by the Sea had an addition beneath our feet.
Instead of the verdant grassy backyard of our dreams, a patchy, weed-ridden excuse for a lawn evolved crying out for weekly attention. Attention the M.o.t.h. (Man of the House), neglected to allot, so we thought it might be time to look at options. The Schnauzer dogs vetoed getting rid of it altogether. A compromise was needed.
It is hot here for over half of the year.
Lawns in Australia, notoriously devour voluminous gallons of very expensive fresh water and require careful weeding, fertilising and nurturing. As the M.o.t.h. would rather support commercial television programs than the manure retailers, it was decided to swap out the backyard lawn for a lower maintenance option of exposed aggregate concrete.
For months, we had no luck finding a “tradie,” (tradesman), to do the job, given the current construction climate. The Australian building industry is booming in a, ‘boom, or bigger boom,’ kind of way, ever since Covid. [I am waiting for the bust, but it hasn’t come yet]. It’s crazy, especially given that most building materials are in very short supply. B.C. (before Covid), our Home by the sea was built in just 18 weeks, now an average house build has spanned out to take 18 months or more! Such are the consequences of a pandemic.
Finally, we found some motivated fifty-something guys who were willing to do the job beneath our feet. Well – most of the time, anyway:
Hard at Work – our concreting crew!
I captured this photo soon after these guys told us the young blokes weren’t tough enough and couldn’t hack a whole day of concreting work!!!
But bless them, by the end of the day, we had a super new patio area devoid of grassy tufts that invariably found their way inside my house. That equals less housework for me – Yay!
Friendly Friday Photo and Blog Challenge Theme
-Beneath Your Feet
Noosa National Park, Australia
The Challenge this Friendly Friday is to write a post about, or photograph something, “Beneath Your Feet.” It might be some interesting rocks,
Sunshine Coast, Australia
freshly formed fungi,
a reptilian or animal species,
Bearded Dragon at Coolangatta, Australia
A red-bellied black snake?
or snow!
We were in Norway!
Tips for Shooting Photos on Low Surfaces
When photographing the ground, it helps to include something else in the frame to show context.
Capture an object on the floor, look for something to frame the shot such as overhanging branches or buildings or internal walls, cupboards.
Include a person — or part of a person — to add movement and life to the shot.
If outside, use shadows to capture shapes and details on your surface.
Try different angles for a dynamic composition.
Friendly Friday Photo and Blog Challenge
This Friendly Friday Prompt runs for two weeks after which we will have a collaborative guest post from the What’s on the Shelf Bloggers, Deb, Sue, Donna and Jo.
Everyone is welcome to join in with the Friendly Friday Challenge: Beneath Your Feet. You just need to:
Construct a post
Title and tag it ‘Friendly Friday‘
Include a ping back and url here along with a comment on this post, so we can find your blog and visit your post.
How are your skills in close-ups or macro photography? Need some practice?
The Challenge for the next two weeks is to make a post about close-ups or macros. It is not just about photography, so please note we welcome stories and writing based on the prompt, as well. Perhaps you have had a close-encounter and wish to write about it?
Title and tag your post Friendly Friday to join in with this week’s Friendly Friday Challenge prompt. Find more instructions on the link in the header image.
Be sure to leave a comment below and pingback to this post so we can visit your blog.
Our theme is:
Close – Up and Macro
Even a weed can be aesthetic, in macro?
Snap some vegetables or an insect in your local garden or park?
Photography Tips for Macro Shots
According to a bright spot, who posts amazing photos, including an amazing in camera double exposure of a pink daisy:
Bright sun is often not the ideal conditions for getting colour and detail of flowers UNLESS you underexpose, to get a black background and make the colours ‘pop’.
abrightspot.blog
The Benefits of Joining Friendly Friday Challenges
Showcase your photography, writing and posts
Be inspired to create more diverse posts
Challenge yourself to get creative with the weekly prompts
Make new blogger friends
Build your blogger community
Do you have a Challenge prompt you would like to suggest?
This challenge runs for two weeks after which Sarah will release a fantastic new prompt for the next Friendly Friday Blog Challenge. Follow the host blogs for notification of new Friendly Friday prompts.
What happened to storytelling, to writing a narrative? One Blogger asked this question in a recent post about the direction of blogging. She’d come across a blogger recommending other bloggers attract more readers by offering their readers useful advice:
…figure out what our unique niche is and paint ourselves as an authority, offering them something every time you ask for something back.
List Format Blog Posts and Finding Your Blogging Tribe
Do you write advice posts or entertaining ones? Is the goal, for the reader, to find info that makes life a little easier for them? After all, home hints and time-saving tips are generous, giving and sought after by many. And yet, Snow suggests list-style formats are not so dissimilar from TV reality show: repetitive, unoriginal and uninspiring, proposing there just might be, “too many self-proclaimed experts out there.” She’d prefer a blog that is just for entertainment, or storytelling.
Thinking about this, I wondered whether a story is more valuable than a post dispensing advice? I think that might depend on what kind of person the reader is. Perhaps we need both kinds of posts? Sometimes one and sometimes the other. Diversity is a good buzzword for that, isn’t it?
When I want information – the list format of writing a post helps me find salient information faster. However, posts titled, ‘The Top Ten Places to See in Europe,’ is a style of post I’d read once, but hardly another in the same vein. It is becoming a trite and hackneyed format, short on meatier content, and meatier content is what I personally seek, as a reader.
It seems that if we want, (or for monetizing bloggers, – need), people to read our blogs, we might write in this way early on in our blogging life, to filter and find our blog tribe; our community; those few like-minded souls who follow us and begin to comment regularly so that a fulsome discussion or blogging friendship might develop. Without a few of those list posts to begin with, how can we build that community so many of us enjoy? Would we still find a tribe of like-minded blog readers another way?
Don’t we want any or all varieties of readers?
Diversity dictates that we need differing opinions and readers from all walks of life.
Blogging Stats and SEO
Whilst I don’t read list posts anymore, I do try to use headings when writing a blog post, supposedly it is good SEO. I don’t understand a whole lot about SEO and SEO tips seems to change rapidly. Once upon a time we were told to use 10 tags, for good SEO, now it is not more than 5. It is hard to keep up with so fickle a technological beast.
Are we all getting sucked into looking at stats and levels of engagement? I remember a blogger who posted about getting back to the real reason why she blogged and not looking at stats, or checking for new followers. Great, I thought. To my surprise, she stopped blogging shortly after! I never found out why.
Likes and Comments
I dislike the thought that someone would write to receive likes alone. Fixating on that, to the detriment of our mental health, could render our blogging platform meaningless. You’d do better to mutter a few grudge sentences on Facebook – that will give you ‘likes,’ and save yourself some time.
What would change if I disabled the like button on my posts?
Nothing? Would there be fewer signs of engagement?
This begs the question: would I still be blogging if I had not received any comments? Perhaps. I hazard a guess I would still write, but not be posting as frequently.
The Blogging Audience
Diarist bloggers who inform about the week that was, without crafting a story, are perhaps still learning to make writing interesting. That level of self-expression, in Marie Kondo style, must bring them joy and could be all they need from writing? We’re all different and we all seek out and write different sorts of posts.
One Blogger [Manja], said she seeks friends in blogging, not an audience. Another thought all bloggers are looking for an audience for without it, they reach no one. This highlights a divide between the intentions of bloggers.
Some bloggers are out to make money and need that audience to do that. That is not always art. Others – those who have an urge to write or tell stories, through photos or words, enjoy their art, interact with their audience and along the way, make friends.
Monetizing a Blog
Am I interested in making money off my blog?
No, not really. If a few dollars come my way, I’d be silly to knock it back, but I also won’t put my focus in this direction and spend time and effort chasing it. Already I am slightly embarrassed about reviewing places for some small kickback, such as a free sample.
I wonder how I can write impartially when I receive a kickback from the thing I am writing about? However, I am told of certain readers that do value and appreciate reading product reviews, so I relent a little and try to tap my inner Buddha and again seek the middle path.
Many bloggers have the goal to publish a book, but that’s not on my to-do list either. I do have a book idea, or two, rather lofty ones, but writing my blog posts with that intention does not form part of the reason I am here.
Writing a blog post feels innate, it’s in my blood. For around four centuries that I know of, there have been writers in my family, not famous, nor polished, but writers nonetheless. I could say it’s tradition, but my writing doesn’t come from any sense of historical obligation.
For me, writing just happens when the mood hits or I should do so. It might come out as rubbish, but it is my rubbish and not contrived just to receive ‘likes.’ I once tried to write ‘like’ that (to suit an audience), and the result was bland and boring.
Writing comes from both my heart and my head. I write when I feel inclined to do so, but more often than not, as I sit at the keyboard, words erupt like the meltwater in a glacial stream at Springtime.
The words tumble and run out, splashing around obstacles in their path, anxious to appear on the computer screen lest they be washed downstream and away, (ie. before I forget what I was intending to say).
Poppy, Hellesylt, Norway
Finding More Readers for a Blog.
But aren’t we skirting around the crux of this issue? If we only write for ourselves and from our hearts and heads, why do we want more exposure and more readers? Only to find more like-minds and interesting conversations via comments? Surely there is more to it, than that?
For me, the reward of blogging is the joy that comes from robust self-expression.
Any friendship that arises, from that, is a bonus and the result of two people connecting. The internet is not constraining of geographic boundaries – connection is what blogging gives back to us.
Fundamentally, I am here to learn, and to express, with a little bit of entertainment thrown in. I might find an interesting blogger to read or follow and if I wasn’t here, I’d miss that opportunity to further my knowledge and discuss topics via the readers’ comments.
Blogging is not wasting anyone’s time, it is the best classroom in the world, and the sky is the limit.
Since I moved to a Home by the sea, I have had a beautiful friendship with a young wild bird who lived in the area. Recently, you may have read how I had to end the friendship with this wild bird. You may also be wondering what happened since then.
The fact that a wild bird could be so trusting as to voluntarily come into my house and sit on my dining room table, without fear, should have been a real compliment and I began to think I shouldn’t be angry at him. He was just doing what he could to survive in a suburban environment.
If truth be told, I was as fearful for his safety as I was for mine when he began fluttering around inside the house. And no, he didn’t drop any messages anywhere nor knock a single item over in his flurry. What dexterity!
Old Mate, as I dubbed him did come back the day following his tour of my abode and he sat outside on the fence singing for me to bring him his regular treats. I ignored his pleas. I did feel mean.
The next week went by and Old Mate didn’t visit me at all. I heard him but never saw him.
Yesterday, I heard him in the neighbourhood.
I relented.
I placed a piece of ham (his favourite), on the fence for him. It was still there the next day. Was this a sign he was gone for good?
I had to admit I still wanted a relationship with him but wanted him to respect that he could not enter my house. I would meet him in the yard.
Today, he arrived again and so I extended an invitation to him and his lady partner and offered him ham from my hand. He took it willingly.
Something to Ponder About 