I have enjoyed cleaning cleaning in the past but it isn't something of which I am proud. I joined cleaners anonymous. That was a joke, Son.
My attitude about cleaning is exactly like Mr. Natural, R. Crumb's Comix book hero:
Our Lives Change The World
I have enjoyed cleaning cleaning in the past but it isn't something of which I am proud. I joined cleaners anonymous. That was a joke, Son.
My attitude about cleaning is exactly like Mr. Natural, R. Crumb's Comix book hero:
The prompt I'm using today comes from Nablopomo and I've chosen it because today is the day for the Letter D in the Blogging A to Z Challenge: “In Spring at the end of the day you should smell like DIRT.” — Margaret Atwood
This image is from Morguefile.com and reminds me of early Spring when I was a child in Northern Indiana. A muddy trail through wooded acreage that shows bits of green beginning to peak through the fallen leaf cover of the Winter.
How could any child who grows up on a farm resist the call of life ready to explode everywhere around her after being cooped up inside for much of the Winter. And how could any child not smell of dirt after exploring favorite places unvisited since autumn? I'm sure author Margaret Atwood intended her reader to think of gardens when she wrote the line, but for me early Spring, first Spring is a wet chilly thaw that signals a time, still weeks away, when tilled soil, seeds, and the scent of gardening permeates clothing, hair, and thoughts that will turn to memories fondly recalled in Springs far away in time and space.
Today’s post comes from the NaBloPoMo prompt: “Compare yourself to an element of nature” which was the prompt suggested for yesterday, April 2nd, because the A to Z treatment of Reason Creek’s participation in the A to Z Challenge is over and above NBPM’s rather minimal requirements. Some might even say it is over-the-top to include two blogs in A to Z while having one of them also be included in a NBPM challenge, but that would be an O or T post, and not a C post. Actually the prompt for today on NBPM could be another C prompt but I will cover the CAMPING prompt another day when I blog about “tree stumps and time outs.” I’m not sure whether I will use it for my T post or as a weekend free or open-writing topic blog post.
If this all makes no sense to you, don’t worry. It is a bit manic writing-wise, and there is no reason you should understand. The crux of the matter is simple… and a great C word. Challenges (Ooh Ooh another C word!) can ramp up productivity for some writers, and while I could not blog ever single day, an occasional monthly challenge does provide me with motivation.
Basically, all I am doing is writing every single day on this blog, Reason Creek, in order to participate in BlogHer’s monthly writing challenge grew out of NBPM, aka National Blog Posting Month. Yes, the challenge occurs every single month, so participate whenever you get the notion to do so. Participation is free and easy. Just follow the link earlier in this post.
But since I am writing every single day for NBPM I asked myself, “Self, why not mix up the challenge a bit and have each post sequentially focus on individual letters in the English Language so I can have every post serve double duty and include it in the April A to Z Challenge too?” Rather than get in an argument with myself, I just decided to make this blog’s April posts serve two blogging masters.
Then I decided that what I was supposed to be working on was my site, that has a blog, but also other elements, as that is part of my business. If I participated in this A to Z Challenge for BoomHer.net, the new business site would have more very much-needed content. 26 BoomHer-related topics on the basics of women of a certain age changing everything while using the latest global communication tools. So as soon as this is posted, I am off to Boomher.net to write about cohorts – the C word on that site.
So shall I actually compare myself to a Summer’s Day or an element of nature? Nah. Other than the very real fact that I consider my ultimate role model to be a Northern European Goddess, Nerthus, probably the Mother of Freja.
She is of the swamp and very powerful… just like me. She could write two blog posts every day for a month, no problem.
April is here and for many bloggers, me for example, that means the A to Z Blogging Challenge at http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com. If you are particularly crazy, another challenge can be included too. So this month I will be attempting to write 2 posts every day, one for my personal blog and the other for my professional site.
I have the first week planned out for both my blog and site, more or less. I use some of the prompts from the NaBloPoMo section on BlogHer, but I’ve scrambled the days on which suggested topics or prompts are used into an A to Z list too.
The A to Z Challenge gives you Sunday off, and weekends are for free writing during NaBloPomo, so I may try to do the weekly GBE2 prompts during that weekend time.
I am also finishing up an eBook this month. Wish me luck!
FIRST WEEK of April 2013 Blogging
ReasonCreek.com A to Z & NaBloPoMo Challenge:
BoomHer.net A to Z Blogging Challenge
Women, as Apple used to say, “Think Different.” Thank heavens for that difference. I think it might save the world.
As I say in an article which I am honored to say was selected to be live during the inaugural launch of the Generation Fabulous site,
Women’s culture, which had been desperately filling every small crevice not already claimed by male culture, was bursting at the seams – and when the electronic niche of a globally interconnected world wide web opened, we flooded in with blogs and e-books, and all the knowledge, skills and strategies that we as women have been trying to keep alive in a world where ubiquitous limiting constraints worked against us.
This quote is wordy, and a bit intellectual, but what do you expect when we are describing one of the most significant spin-offs of the early electronic age?
Women’s empowerment and equalization of women in history were not among the intentions voiced in the planning of ARPAnet, Mosaic, and other defense and education communication technologies that led to what we now know as the internet, inter-webs, web, net, cloud and/or information highway. Cultural evolution is tricky that way. If you try to constrain, control, channel or “pipe” it, it will spring a leak, wriggle away, or morph into something completely different. Go with the flow.
Women flow, women think different, women persist. There is a flow or an energy among women of a certain age. I’ve written about it before.
No matter how troubled, unappreciated, stressed, overworked, or underpaid we women writers of a certain age may be, we are creating the structure of future with the paths we walk, the words we write, and the myths we disintegrate with our raging ray-guns powered by the energy released during hormonal fluctuations.
Zeitgeist is the word that comes to mind. The “spirit of the times” is real and perceptible to people who are aware of trajectories and trends as they emerge. I became aware of a group of women acting on Zeitgeist at the BlogHer conference last year who formed a critical mass. I was planning to launch a site, Done Nesting at that time, and found a group of women of a similar age to me, women who are of a certain age, and who were all, each and every one of them, ready to act or acting on the need for a non-Mommy-Blogger community, alliance, group, recognition… I spoke to many folks about how we, women of a certain age, felt about the how some of feeling that the unofficial but widely known target audience of BlogHer being Mommy Bloggers. I talked to Lesbian Dad, aka Polly, who is of a certain age, about this; but she is a mommy blogger even though she calls herself a dad. Even though Polly understood what I was talking about, and she was the only one besides Denise who understood what I, and other women who do not have children living in their household at the moment, were talking about when we said we felt excluded and ignored.
I do have to say as a disclaimer that there was one session at this conference last year, that addressed an older mommy blogging constituency, “Blogging into Midlife.” I missed it. Duh. I thought it was for 30 or 40-somethings. Yes, I am 50 something. I am still 24 in my head but time passes. So, I attended “Strength in Numbers” because of my interest in online organizing.
I met several other women, of a certain age, I had followed, read, admired, or just discovered at the conference at the Birds of a Feather Breakfast, and at another event that had nothing to do with BlogHer that was in NYC at the same time: a “Bloomer” gathering put on by the Boom Box Network.
There was change in the wind. Soon after the conference a group, GenFab, popped up on Facebook and I had found my Homies/Tribe/Peer Group.
I ruthlessly read and share with this group. Competition be damned! We are all Fabulous women writers who are for the most part of a certain age. Knowing what other women who were similarly motivated were doing helped me hone my ideas for a site. Done Nesting is on hold and I am moving forward with BoomHer.net. No writer creates for exactly the same audience, we all fill different niches. Few people, or marketing agencies, are skilled enough to even know how to determine real market share or audience and then create something that would target exactly the same group. If you know of anyone who can do this, please let me know! I want to work with them.
I choose to move forward together, create synergy, and increase the momentum of the trajectory of women creating their own legacy, in searchable form, on the internet. I am absolutely pleased as punch that Generation Fabulous, the site, (apart from the Facebook group) launched today. Women know how to coöperate, if we didn’t the species would have died out ages ago. So when asked about how I feel about great sites that might be viewed as competitors, I respond that we are not competitors, but rather, are smooth operators and cool collaborators . (Cue Sade here.)
I an SO freaking happy. I have been working on infrastructure for several projects, including finding public domain graphics, which I posted about on Wednesday. Today I’m talking templates in the area of infrastructure. A big project I’m working on, two of them, in fact, require them; both are e-publications. (UPDATE: Just skip to the bottom for a link to a download site. ) Or skim on to enjoy the jaunty angle of my semantic hat.)
Digression: I’ve never approached graphics and templates in a systematic fashion. It is sort of like” the cobbler’s children have no shoes” sort of dilemma. Infrastructural elements require systemic consideration if you are building an infrastructure that will be able to tapped for many projects. As a semiotician and taxonomy-loving nerd I should be organized, but I’m not. This is a post in and of itself too! I’m just so freaking creative when I think of infrastructure! It gets me all excited!
Anyway…
Basically, I am hunting for Pages templates that I can use on the iPad. (Pages is a document creation and processing application offered by Apple.)
Digression… again: I will spiff some up and maybe even open then up for download, possibly for a teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy fee. I have to quit giving everything away for free. There is a name for girls who do that… collegial. Sheesh, what did you think I meant? But, that’s another topic.
I am working on an iPad 2 so apps on later versions may behave differently from what I experience. I just am not sure about this and do not have time for a trip to the Apple Store to find out.
Pages for the iPad, on my iPad 2, has no ability to create landscape documents. This is utterly stupid. However you can open landscape documents in Pages on an iPad. I found an entire collection of landscape documents which you can download to your desktop, make a folder – that is what I am doing, then send the folder to yourself, open on an iPad and Ta-Dah you have your templates. Just be sure to copy them before you use them or you will lose the template document and only have your altered document.
So where do you get these lovely document templates? At imore.com. You will have to register with the site to get access to downloads, forums, or blogs. If you register I recommend registering with Facebook, Twitter or Open…whatever it is called, because the Captcha for registering with an email is a booga-booga of hassle.