How I Blogged

Where shall I begin? (You can sing that, if you like ... . I never saw the movie.)

The short answer is that I spent hours -- chunks of days and even weeks, in some cases -- ruling out what I would eventually write.

Then, I would just open up the blog's Rich text editor, and just start typing. I'd go back later and cut out a lot of redundant words and phrases (like 'just') or add a sentence or two when I felt more explanation was warranted (as I 'just' did.)

With prompting from a then-commenter on LJ, I learned to do what I'm doing now -- spacing double between paragraphs, single within, and keeping to roughly one sentence or two short ones per paragraph.

The sentence-per-graph (as we used to call them when I was in the biz) rule I learned as a "journal" (my tongue-in-cheek name for what we weren't). You had to write that way, or the editor on the desk would spend his or her valuable time doing it for you (and making sure you tasted 'assignment pain' if you did it again). As I tried to indicate just now, I began by using ' ' for all quotations, unless I was using a book title. Then, I got worried that maybe somebody would 'get' me if I actually quoted something and did not use the double-apostophes for "quote" marks. Then, I got really inconsistent with it. Then, I started reposting (re-posting) everything and got more consistent.

See how hard big paragraphs are to read online (on line, on-line, on the internet, Internet, 'interwebs')?

See how irritating inconsistent style usage is?

OK, do the single-sentence-consistent-style thing I just taught you, check your spelling yourself, then double-check all your facts from now on and you're a 'journal"!! (Yes, the quote marks are a joke.)

Double-check them with two independent sources, and you're Woodward and Bernstein.

Wow!! And you didn't even need to mail me ten cents! With a 28-cent stamp!

There's more to it than that. You'll need to buy yourself an Associated Press Stylebook and read the chapter on libel for the rest. I won't cheat you on the privilege.

Back when I was one, I was famous locally for being able to write hard-to-write stories really fast. I, shortly after achieving that fame, found out for myself what "assignment Hell" was (or hell, or Hello, or Hellabad, or hellabad or ... .).

The "ellipsis trick" I learned from a well-known writer on spirituality, who was better at it than I am or was or ever will be. I learned ironic titles from two things -- the punning titles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVD chapters, and my own outline titles for the outlines I used to write in college after I wrote the paper, for professors I thought could handle joke subhead titles on papers with outlines obviously written after the fact.

I was a stickler for what I'll call "Punctuated Stream of Consciousness" in the beginning, but I learned soon after what to check beforehand and what to leave to a "correction" post. Sometimes I got this right, sometimes wrong. I learned to handle being wrong in broadcasting. Over 18 years, I was wrong a lot.

Does this help? I don't know. And right now, I don't care, either.*

Good luck.

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*Obviously, I do care, or I wouldn't have left this up. I have also left up some other posts from LJ but have now re-posted everything I wrote on the old LJ blog account usernamed mercurius_21, with additional posts I made in 2011 and more I wrote starting in 2012 to a backup on WordPress, on a new site here:

https://sites.google.com/view/inourselves/home