Comments on: We Are Not Alone

By: Joan Kelly

Joan Kelly — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 03:36:50 +0000

Thanks for explaining. It does sound like a neat thing, and I kept wondering what that “Syndication” stuff meant on your site. At first I thought it meant you were syndicated like a Dear Abby column, but without ever subjecting your readers to the phrase “good luck and god bless, love Booksquare.” Glad to know that it actually means something cooler than that as well.

Happy America-tells-itself-it-kicked-England’s-ass-back-then Day.

By: Booksquare

Booksquare — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:18:38 +0000

I agree with you on the deeply considered, carefully crafted posts. Thud.

RSS, my friend, is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. This site, like most blogs, has an RSS feed, meaning it is capable of pushing content to subscribers. Because I am lazy, I put all of the sites I read regularly in my feed reader (in this case, I am trying Sage because I have not yet found the perfect reader for a Mac, something I find strange, but don’t think about too much). I can then catch up on my reading from a single place rather than typing in URLs all day long. You know the little orange button on many blogs? That is the link to the RSS feed (though many feed readers have the intelligence to determine the link for the feed on their own). If you scroll up a little on this page, you’ll notice buttons to make it easy to this feed to a variety of sources.

I adore RSS, though like anything, it can get overwhelming because I subscribe to a lot of sites…

By: Joan Kelly

Joan Kelly — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 07:09:33 +0000

I don’t know, Kathy. I haven’t read your novel obviously, but lots of good books end up not-so-wildly-received by editors. I prefer to blame editors over your writing, as a preliminary gesture of good faith.

And Booksquare – I feel like a dork for asking, but what is RSS? If it’s the greatest thing ever, I’d like to know, more than I’d like to maintain my dignity by pretending I’m already hip to it.

P.S. I felt appropriately dirty after reading your refusal to make that dirty joke. Thank you for that.

By: KathyF

KathyF — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 06:57:29 +0000

…throwaway posts, of which this comment was one–take out that “take” in the first line.

By: KathyF

KathyF — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 06:56:17 +0000

I’ve often noticed that those throwaway posts that take I spend little time and thought on are often the most linked-to and talked about. The ones I spend days agonizing over are ignored. Which says a lot about my writing, I suspect, and why my agonized-over, six-years-in-the-making novel hit with a thud on editors’ desks.

By: Booksquare

Booksquare — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 05:04:18 +0000

Seriously Joan, if one is reading your blog regularly (tell me that RSS isn’t the greatest thing ever!), one would make an appropriately dirty joke at this point. Of course, I’m all class…

I will say that it’s okay to suck — sometimes. We all have bad days (weeks, whatever) and part of the blog’s job (if that’s your tool) is to teach yourself to move beyond the “this is crap and I’ll never be any good” mood. I cannot begin to count the number of lousy posts I’ve forced on people, but I do know that each and every one of them has been read at least once — and since my mother doens’t read this site (at least to the best of my knowledge), it’s not family doing the reading. If I were a better person, I’d offer to do penance. I am not a better person.

However, if I think too much about what I want to write, I don’t do anything (cue Jill Monroe and her constant nagging…).

By: Joan Kelly

Joan Kelly — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 06:46:31 +0000

And special thanks to Booksquare for making the point to me a little while ago, about there not being a right or wrong way to write for a blog, as it stayed with me and helps me not give too much of a damn about what I end up posting on my own blog now. I mean I definitely don’t want it to suck, but thanks to BS I don’t obsess self-consciously to the point of getting nothing else done.

I am compelled to add that Booksquare, the site and the writer, disproves the theory that there is no “right” way to do a blog.