A Blogging Respite and a Work-in-Progress

My posting may be irregular for a few weeks. I usually try to post daily, but I’ve gotten way behind on my reading. As in, I’m covered through tomorrow and not beyond that. The reason: the story that’s the work in progress. 

The idea for the story came during watching an online worship service at our church (a blessing during the virus pandemic). The worship leaders and musicians were leading the congregation in singing, when I noticed the guitar player had stopped for a moment, not losing his place, exactly, but as if something had struck so forcefully that it gave him pause. It was only a moment, and then he continued. 

 

And I asked myself, what might have caused that? Could I build a story around it?

 

I started writing in November. It happened in fits and starts, do-overs and delete-alls. Sometime in the Thanksgiving period, I realized the story wasn’t about the guitar player. He becomes a major character, but the story is about – and told by – someone else, an 11-year-old boy. I rewrote the beginning. I have the boy as a man, 20 years later. And he’s forced to consider what happened to his family when he was 11, when it was torn apart and almost atomized. And it doesn’t happen in a war zone, but in a St. Louis suburb.

 

I’m a long way from London and the Dancing Priest novels. 

 

Inspiration for a setting in Stonegate

By the end of December, I had passed 16,000 words. A week into the new year, and I had doubled that number. Things were moving swiftly, until I hit 40,000 words. Then I hit a wall. I couldn’t see where the story went next. I stopped. It took me a week, and a few walks, to begin to work it out. Fortunately, the weather was cooperating at the time, and we were still having a mild winter. I could go on hour-long walks. To help envision the sense of place, I took photos of three houses that are like three of the houses in the story. 

 

The writing has picked up again. I’ve passed 75,000 words, and the end is in sight. I know how the story will end, and I know the three major scenes left. 

 

The words have come at the expense of reading, which means also at the expense of blogging. I usually blog daily, four days a week about books. It’s going to be sporadic for a while. It’s disorienting to a degree because I’ve been posting daily since 2011, including during five trips to Britain. But to do this story right, something had to give.

 

I have a working title: Stonegate. It’s the story of a family blown apart when the oldest child, a 13-year-old, is accused of a criminal act, and no one believes he’s innocent except his 11-year-old brother. That guitar player, the guy who started the story in my head, is still there, but his role is not related to his guitar playing.

 

We’ll see where we go with this. I have no ETA. Once the draft is done, I’ll have to spend considerable time working it over, editing, and rewriting. I’ll continue to post for Tweetspeak Poetry, and I have a blog post publishing tomorrow for the American Christian Fiction Writers. The Friday and Sunday poems are already scheduled into January of 2022. Saturday Good Reads will continue. But expect the Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday book reviews to be sporadic. 

 

Top photograph by Vlad Shalaginov via Unsplash, Used with permission.

Poetry at Work, Chapter 17: The Poet Blogs the Layoff

Layoffs were coming. The big announcement from the CEO was circulated by email. It was a masterpiece of vagueness. It didn’t say how many people would be affected. It didn’t say when the affected people would know. It did say there would be a severance program, although it included no details. 

In short, the important things people wanted to know weren’t communicated. I’m sure management congratulated itself on communicating, but the rumors had already been circulating and people were already far beyond “layoffs are coming.” What people also knew was that the people being laid off might be the fortunate ones. Those who remained would likely be reorganized, with more work and fewer people to get it done.

Having been through this before at another company, I had a better idea of what would happen and what people really cared about that colleagues who hadn’t been through it, especially younger colleagues. A small group came to me and asked if I would consider blogging about my past experience on the company’s intranet. I said I’d think about it.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Saturday Good Reads

It’s surprising, but people are talking of the “golden age of the blogosphere,” the period roughly from 2000 to 2006 or 2007 when blogging was all the rage. I can remember sitting in a communications staff meeting in 2004 and our boss asking if anyone knew what a blog was. No one did, except for me. I was the new kid on the block and had experienced blogs in my previous job. The blog era was peaking right about then. It would soon be displaced by what people started referring to as social media, and especially Facebook. 

Facebook ended the golden age of blogging, but blogs have hung on (like this one of mine). With all of the controversy now surrounding social media, and especially Facebook, a few people are beginning to ask, is it possible to reconnect the blogosphere? Michael Bates at BatesLine is one of those asking the question. In the years ahead, the answer may be especially important for Christians.

Speaking of golden ages, we may be experiencing a resurgence of interest in and writing of poetry. If what I discovered this week is any indication, we are indeed entering a golden age for poetry. Tom Darin Liskey has a moving poem on a history of grief. Chris Yokel has a timely poem on The Existential Snowman. The Shankill Road in Northern Ireland is the subject of a poem by James Matthew Wilson. Jolene Nolte at Fathom Magazine writes about The Single Life. And Elizabeth Harwell at The Rabbit Room reflects on Mary Oliver’s Gift of Stumbling Stones.

More Good Reads

Writing and Literature

Tracing Footsteps Not My Own: Going Through the Motions, Learning to Write – B.J. Hollars at The Millions.

The Poetry of the Puritans – Andrew Roycroft at Thinking Pastorally.

The Dark and Dreamy Noir of The Great Gatsby – Lisa Levy at CrimeReads.

Their Lives Go On Until They Don’t: The Trouble with Refugee Novels – Robert Rubsam at The Millions.

Life and Culture

Is Big Tech Merging with Big Brother? Kinda Looks Like It – David Samuels at Wired.

Fables of School Reform – Audrey Watters at The Baffler.

Secularism is Boring – Nicholas McDonald at ScribblePreach. 

New Media

The Crisis Facing American Journalism Did Not Start With the Internet – Jeremy Littau at Slate.

Art and Photography

Almanac of the Wheel of Life: The Farm at Mid-Winter – Jack Baumgartner at The School for the Transfer of Energy.

South Thirteenth Street, Sunset, December 2018 – Chris Naffziger at St. Louis Patina.

Faith

Student cracks theologian’s baffling religious code – BBC News.

Jonathan Edwards and the Damage of the Great Awakening – Thomas Kidd at The Gospel Coalition.

Found – Paul Phillips at He’s Taken Leave.

British Stuff

Gravestones & Graveyards – Barb Drummond at Curious Histories.

Ann Cleeves and Louise Penny on writing, mystery, and friendship

Painting: Longing, oil on canvas by José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, 1899.

Darrell Vesterfelt’s “Unblogger”

Darrell Vesterfelt, editor of the online magazine Prodigal, has a story to tell. And it’s his story, a story that he will tell you he was called to bear.

Darrell is a writer. Like most writers today, he did what every publisher on the planet will tell you to do – and that is to build a platform. What publishers mean by that is having enough people who follow you on social media, read you blog, and engage with you that they will buy your book and recommend it to others. Publishers want the assurance that your book will sell, and you have to build a platform to demonstrate that

Millions of writers are out there, dutifully building their platforms. They do everything they’re supposed to do – follow people on Twitter and retweet the important ones, find the cool people on Facebook, and watch their blog statistics like a hawk.

Vesterfelt was one of them, until he unblogged. Having built a successful blog (and platform), he unblogged – pulled the plug and walked away.

His reason was simple. He felt himself in danger of losing himself for the sake of his platform.

He describes what he did and why in a short book (or long essay) with the title of Unblogger: Discovering the Power of Story in a ‘How-To’ World.

What he did, and why, and what happened, is the story he tells. He discovered that an unblogger is first and foremost a person, a human being. The unblogger writes from experience, sharing good stories with people. And an unblogger “lives a story worth telling,…a life of meaning, and then just happens to write about it.”

And goes on and says “we’re called to bear a story, our story.” And we are a character, perhaps the main character in the story. And that’s the story we bear, and the story we write.

This idea of story and character is a post-modern one. An individual like me who is, on an average day, decidedly modernist has to consider the ideas of story and character carefully, that is, consider the idea that he or she is a character in a story. It works if you write the story you live. That doesn’t mean everything you write is demonstrably autobiographical, but is does mean you write from your experience.

I liked this little book (or long essay). Vesterfelt has much to say. And he’s actually doing what he says to do, and is writing his story from experience, as a character in his own story.

He unblogged.

Photograph by Larisa Koshkina via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Most Visited Posts in 2012: A Surprise

This is the time of the year when bloggers and sites are posting their most popular, most visited, and/or best articles of the year. I’m always fascinated to see what draws people’s attention. I hadn’t done it before for my own blog, for no particular reason other than I’m always “writing forward.”

Until now. Out of curiousity, I went and look at the statististics for all of my posts in 2012. And I learned something.

I know I should pay more attention to “the numbers” – visits, comments, RTs, shares, etc. But I don’t. I’m always grateful for these things, of course; like every other writer, I’m always gratified when something I do strikes a chord. But it’s not the main reason I write. That is a more complex subject, comprised of compulsion and the desire to tell a story, no matter how large (or small) the audience.

If you had asked me what I thought was my most visited post of 2012, I would have said “Acknowledging Daily Mercies, What?” published in June. And I would have been right, even without looking. What happened was that Tim Challies at Informing the Reforming cited it in a blog post, and visits soared (once again punctuating how much of the internet is all about influence).

What did surprise me was this: five of the ten most visited posts on this blog were poems, and by a significant margin. Four of the five were in the top five most visited posts. I can’t explain why; there was no Tim Challies of poetry who cited any of them on his blog. But there were tweeted and shared, and a few showed up on some lists.

But still, poems occupying five of the ten top spots? I wouldn’t have guessed that at all. In fact, after blogging for going on five years, I wouldn’t have guessed that at all. (I also wouldn’t have guessed that people are interested in my Poetry at Work column at TweetSpeak Poetry, but they are.)

And while I do a fair number of book reviews, only one book review made the top 10. (And it was the only review that made the top 30 most visited posts.)

So, here are my 10 most visited blog posts of 2012, out of a total of more than 450.

1)      Acknowledging Daily Mercies, What? (June 21, 2012)

2)      I am a path (poem) (Jan. 22, 2012)

3)      Three pearls (poem) (Jan. 10, 2012)

4)      Train to Oxford (poem) (Oct. 14, 2012)

5)      Crepe Myrtles (poem) (June 12, 2012)

6)      Beauty and Love and Grace, Reflected (May 14, 2012)

7)      Using Work to Block Creativity (June 27, 2012)

8)      F.C. Etier’s The Tourist Killer (Nov. 16, 2012)

9)      Archtown Beer (poem) Oct. 23, 2012)

10)  A Riot in Sunday School (Dec.. 5, 2012)

To provide some numerical context, the blog averaged between 200 and 250 visits a day in 2012. "Acknowledging Daily Mercies, What?" had just over 700. The last post on the list had just over 300. The poems had 588, 502, 484, 393, and 324, respectively.

Does this mean I should post more poetry? I don’t think so. I think I’m going to keep doing what I have been doing.

But the poetry thing is still surprising.

Photograph by Peter Griffin via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

It All Started with "Sky Blue"

It’s been a year since I started blogging. On March 19, 2009, I opened a Blogger account and set up a blog, with my first post called A Life-Changing Novel. The novel in question was Sky Blue by Travis Thrasher. That was where it started – with a novel I really enjoyed. The post explains why.

That was one year and 297 blog posts ago. I still think Sky Blue was one of the best books I read last year.

The blog didn’t just happen. It started with me posting book reviews on Amazon, and doing research on the authors and the books for the reviews. And then came the blog, followed closely by me signing up with Facebook and Twitter. The first person who signed up to follow my blog was suspense writer Mike Dellosso. I think he was being kind, but it was a huge boost at the time.

And what happened was this:

I started writing poetry.

I started doing guest blogging.

I’m co-editing an online poetry journal and participating in poetry jams.

I found incredible writers, and new authors to read and new poets to recite.

I wandered into The High Calling Blogs, and now publish articles there, mostly about work.

I started writing articles twice a month for The Christian Manifesto, mostly about culture.

But the most important thing that happened was that I met all kinds of new friends online, and became part of both large communities and smaller ones within the larger.

And it all started with Sky Blue.

Update: Blogging on Layoffs

Trying something different to help communicate layoffs at work, we've been posting articles on our intranet this week. So far, two have been posted, one about a layoff I experienced 10 years ago at another company, and the other about how my family reacted.

The response so far has been, well, what you might expect it to be. Both posts have been read. A lot. I've had people stop by my office, call on the phone and send emails. Several have posted comments on the blog. One person said that the first post had "gone viral" in their 1000+ department. One employee posted a heartfelt response and then accepted our invitation to write his own blog post.

The real understanding came yesterday afternoon, when I was called by one of the company switchboard operators, who was asking the right place to direct a reporter who had called. I told her, and then she said, "I read your blog post." She hesitated, and then said, "It was good. Thanks."

The important thing the blog posts have done have been to say it's OK to talk about this, that we're all feeling the same concerns and fears. They also underscore we have management that's not typical.

Two more posts are scheduled for next week: what happens when you're not laid off, and networking in a totally networked world.

Blogging on Layoffs

Today at work, we started blogging on what it means to be laid off. We have some 900 layoffs coming, beginning in late August, and there hasn't been much communication while the process is underway. We have a lot of younger employees who've never been through this before, and anxiety is running high.

So I blogged my own layoff 10 years ago. We posted it on our intranet. The response has been amazing -- the blog post clearly touched a chord with a lot of people. I've gotten emails and phone calls, and vague reports of the post "going viral" in parts of the company.

Standard operating procedure is don't talk about it. We're trying something different.

The first post was about what happened. Next will be questions you get from family and friends. Then we'll have a post by someone who went through the process but didn't get laid off. And then one on why networking is so important, and all of the various ways it's done today.

I'll provide an update on what happens.