It's my (blog's) birthday! So here, have some books:

It's this little blog's sixth birthday! To celebrate, I want to thank you all for reading along. And what better way to honour readers than with a book giveaway? (EEEK BOOKS!!) I've selected a handful of my favourite books, with an eye to including something for everyone, and the winner of this giveaway will get to choose two of these books to be delivered straight to their door. Yippee!

I've chosen a mix of non-fiction and fiction, with books ranging from middle-grade to adult. Three of the books are by Australian authors. One is autobiographical. Four deal in some way with World War II or its fallout. One is a short story collection. All of them are books that have impacted my life, my thinking, or my love of words in some way. I hope that, if you win, the books you choose will do the same for you.

Check them out here, mull over which two you'd pick if you win, order the other six for yourself or get them in from your library, because they're great.

The Giver by Lois Lowry
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner
Going Solo by Roald Dahl
Pennies for Hitler by Jackie French
Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
Wonder by RJ Palacio

Here's how to enter:

Convergence, transmedia, and the death of comments.

During our sometimes-regular, sometimes-not phone calls, my sister Andrea and I often analyse social media, how it works, and what place it has in our lives. One of the things that has come up recently is how blog comments seem to be a thing of the past. It's not that readership has dropped, but while more people read my blog than they used to, less people leave a comment than they used to.

At first I thought it might be just me. I don't post as regularly as I once did, and I don't read as many blogs as I once did. Perhaps I killed the conversation all on my ownsome. But as I've wandered around my favourite blogging haunts, I've noticed what seems to be a trend. I know very little about anything, so this is just my personal observing skilz in action, but even on sites that boast readerships into the thousands and millions, the number of people engaging in conversations directly in response to blog posts via the comments section seems to have significantly and proportionately reduced. As an example, I watched a video on an MTV blog the other day and noted that it had thousands and thousands of views. But the comment box below the video was startlingly empty. This posed an interesting question: if comments are/were ever the way we measured success and/or interaction, what does a lack of comments tell us?

This semester, I've been taking Children's Media as one of my final classes, and one of the topics I've found most intriguing -- possibly because I'd already been thinking about it a bit (don't you love it when two different parts of your personal world come together?) -- is that of transmedia and convergence. If you're not familiar with either term, wikipedia it up, but in the meantime, an oversimplified summary (thanks to my lecturer, Dr Elizabeth Hale) could be that convergence is the delivery of content across multiple media platforms while transmedia is the creation of content across multiple platforms, with various media working together to create one story told in numerous places (the Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a perfect example of this). You'll likely be familiar with the concept, even if not with the terminology.

I think that convergence and transmedia could quite possibly hold the answer to why commenting is happening less while reading is happening more. Most bloggers no longer confine their blogging world to just, well, blogging. I'm a major dork and pretty old-fashioned with a lot of my approaches to communication, so my use of the internet is fairly standard, but even dorky old me tends to cross-post links to twitter, tumblr, and sometimes even instagram whenever I publish a new blog post, and many bloggers use pages on facebook to drive traffic to their blogs. Because I am talking about and sharing my blog post in media other than just my blog, readers tend to respond in kind. Someone might send an @reply on twitter, while another might leave a comment on my instagram account. Someone else might reblog a post on tumblr, while another texts me to add their thoughts. Less people are leaving comments, but it doesn't necessarily mean less people are engaging with the words.

The MTV video I mentioned earlier is powerful proof of this. I'd found the video initially by following a link from a tumblr post. The tumblr post itself was a gifset someone had created from the original video, and it had been reblogged tens of thousands of times. If reader involvement were gauged based on the comments at the blog post hosting the video, things look pretty grim. But many thousands of people had engaged with the media, just not in the form of commenting.

So while it might appear that commenting is dying off, engagement and reading is not. Content being delivered across a range of media means the conversation will be continued across a range of media, which is always a healthy thing.

Having said all that, if you're the commenting kind, keep it up. I love me a good comment conversation.

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Conversations:

• Amanda Holmes -- if you don't want to buy it new, try op shops. It's a classic!
• Asea -- I love your idea of reading one book per week for fun. Keep me posted on which ones you choose! (and which Hawkeye are you up to?)

Safety zone.

Blogging is such an interesting communication dynamic. If you think about it in the barest sense of what it actually is, it's weird. It's a person talking to nobody, and at the same time it's a person talking to everybody. Personal blogging (as opposed to, say, tech blogging or something) is even stranger. It's someone saying, "Here. Sit down. I'll write you a letter and tell you all about my life. I might know you, or I might not. You might read it, or you might not. You might reply, or you might not. You might approve, or you might not." There are so many variables and unknowns and blogging leaves a lot of room for abuse of the medium. The (seeming) anonymity of the project can lead to oversharing, or fake curated lives. Similarly, the open-ended nature of the discussion can result in a misuse of trust. There are just as many jerks on the internet as there are in real life, but on the internet the jerk can walk right up to someone and say something jerklike and -- then walk away (without either being recognised or punched in the nose).

Yet even though the ability to misuse the medium is dangling within everyone's reach, I think it's worth it.
In spite of everything, I love blogging and what it represents. Even more than that, I am wowed by the people who have jumped into this pool with me. Life's busy; we've all got a million things to do. So when someone takes the time to read and, even more, comment, it blows me away.

I think I'm feeling this especially after my last post, which was raw and uncool and kind of intimate, in a way. Intimacy scares people. But in spite of the shaky ground, a whole bunch of you responded with your own honesty and genuineness and -- I'm actually grinning at my computer monitor just thinking about it.

So here's to you guys, the readers. I wish you tiny apples, fresh sourdough, and bush honey. You've made this blog a safe space, and you're great.

Why I still think blogging is important (even though I'm kind of terrible at it):

Recently I've been dipping into the archives of Pink Ronnie's lovely blog. It's composed by the mother of a gaggle of little boys and is such a beautiful, gentle record of one woman's life. I've been especially struck by the little excerpts from her personal journals. Her voice comes through in these snippets so clearly, yet there is also a refreshing sense of contemplation and self-examination.

Ronnie's words remind me of why I love blogging and how good it can really be. I think, back in the day when blogging first moved from the domain of geeks to the domain of anyone, there was some cheesy sheepiness associated with blogging. There was this idea that blogging was a play medium, not a legitimate form of written expression and certainly nothing approaching literary expression. I still hear people discuss blogging as though it is a craft for fourteen-year-olds talking only about high school and who they're crushing on this week.

If blogging ever was merely this (chalk me up as a skeptic), it's certainly moved beyond that place. In the western world, almost everyone communicates online to some degree. The proliferation of facebook, twitter, and email mean that (for good or ill) lots of people articulate their thoughts in a written context on many different occasions any day. Blogging, which was once considered the obnoxious upstart, the death of thoughtful self-expression, can now almost be thought of as long-form writing.

Now, though, amidst the myriad of snippet-like thought-bubbles we leave behind us like a little trail on the internet, blogging has almost been left behind. Blogging is no longer the illegitimate lovechild of the journaller and the journalist; rather, it's the elderly gentleman in the room who doesn't even realise how unintentionally hipster he's being. My analogy's all wrong, of course; it sounds like I think blogging is outdated -- and I absolutely don't. But what I mean is that blogging represents a slower pace, a deliberateness, an intentional deceleration that is starting to feel vaguely peripheral or old-school. I haven't researched it, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that the rate of new blogs being created has dropped somewhat over the last few years. Why spend half an hour composing a blog post that receives three comments when you can spend half a minute composing a facebook status that receives thirty likes?

But that's the very reason I think blogging is still important. I don't mean a reverse of what CS Lewis calls "chronological snobbery" -- that because something is older, it must be better; I mean blogging is good because slowing down and considering is both healthy and helpful. We are too lazy -- I am too lazy -- to slow down. Perhaps that sounds contradictory. But we are used to biting off information and spitting it out in tiny chunks. There is no chewing or digesting; there is no waiting for our food to settle between courses.

Composing blogs and reading the long-form blogs of others is the long Sunday brunch in our little world punctuated by the drive-through meals that are twitter, tumblr, and facebook. None of these are wrong, neither are any of them inherently better, but blogging is important simply because it offers something that these other shorter forms do not.

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I've mixed the metaphors and gotten a wee bit excited. You'd never guess I'd been sitting on this post for a week. But I just have a lot of feelings about blogging, you know?

Words take time:

My sister Lauren shared the following quote recently on her blog:

A culture that is rooted more in images than in words will find it increasingly difficult to sustain any broad commitment to any truth, since truth is an abstraction requiring language. -- Kenneth Myers

It explains, far better than anything I could come up with, the radio silence that's been beaming loud (heh heh) and clear from my corner of the internet.

I am a big fan of images, and one of the reasons I love the internet so much is that it gives me access to this massive treasure trove of gloriousness from all around the globe (my reblogging tumblr account is basically a collection of everything I find pretty pretty, lovely, wondrous, or cool). Plus, in my own sometimes pathetic way, I get to contribute to the treasure trove. I can add to the discussion with snippets of my life, and pictures are so easy to capture and share that it can happen in just a few moments. All of this is good and lovely. But I've been realising lately that "snippets" were never the original intent for my blog. Originally, the guiding principle that my blog bounced from was Socrates' idea that 'the unexamined life is not worth living.' I think pictures enhance life and capture life, but -- for me, at least -- to really examine life requires words, and words take time.

So that's why it's been a bit echoey in here. I sort of told myself I wouldn't post again until I had something worth saying -- no, not worth saying, because that's far too great a burden to bear. Who among us would say anything at all if we were forced to weigh our words in the balance every thing throughout history that has been most worth saying? Let us just say, instead, that my goal is to post when I have something worth thinking about. And that doesn't necessarily mean something grave or heavy; no, just something that requires a little space to stop and pause.

I rush to add that in a war between words and images, there is no winner. We need them all, and no single form of artistry is greater than another. That's why I'll still be sharing pictures here, but as accompaniment to my words, not in place of them. For the other little snippets of daily life, there's my tumblr. (Oh, and I finally got around to creating an "about" page -- which goes a long way to destroying everything I've written here about finding things worth saying. Never mind...)

A writerly giveaway:

It's my birthday week! To celebrate, I want to give you a present. Well, one of you, anyway. Writers need excellent and lovely tools, and this little giveaway bundle is made up of three things I think are particularly handy:

• a brand new edition of the current Australian Writer's Marketplace. This hefty volume, worth $49.95 from the Queensland Writers Centre, contains pages and pages of listings of Australian and New Zealand writing markets, publishing houses, writer's organisations, and writing competitions. There's also a bunch of info on writing and selling your work. John Marsden says, "First, buy a pen. Second, a dictionary... then, The Australian Writer’s Marketplace. That’s the hard work done. Now, just write your book!" So there you go.
• a beautiful little blank journal from Brisbane artisan, Paper Boat Press. To me, there's nothing quite like the allure of the blank page, and pretty pretty notebooks like this one basically cry out to be filled with both brilliant and banal thoughts in scrappy wild handwriting (keep it on your bedside table for those moments of midnight inspiration).
• two Pilot Fineliner pens in black. These are my current favourite writing tools -- so smooth and fine, and they actually make my hideous handwriting look a little neater (or at least more arty).

To be in the running for this prize pack, simply leave a comment on this post. Obviously, this giveaway is biased in favour of writerly types (sorry!) but you're welcome to enter even if you just like a writerly type. Tying a bow around a fat writing book is the perfect way to earn brownie points with your favourite wordsmith person. Or maybe winning this prize will turn you into a writerly type. So have at it. Oh and here's a bonus: if you leave a cool writerly link, resource, or quote, I'll throw your name in the hat twice.

Leave your name and a contact email address before 2.02am August 11th (birth minute!) AEST and I'll draw a winner after next Saturday. Joy!

* * * * *

Conversations:

Laura Elizabeth -- you should know you have launched me on a Nerd renaissance now. I am blaming you.

Sarah -- thank you so much for your lovely congratulations! How's your world of study going?

Andrea -- yay! I'm glad I was your first tagger :). Thanks for the excellent phone call tonight, too! x

Staish -- eee! I'm excited you'll be joining us.

Hannah Joy -- I hope you found some yummy nerds to munch on. Seriously, their colour is part of the delight!

Carla -- it's a Nerds Rope. Find one and eat it immediately!! Plz start practicing gymnastics so you can fit in Meaghan's luggage. Thx.

Amanda -- :D

It's a million little things:

Given that I post nothing for thirteen days and then emerge with thoughts that only I am likely to relate to, I feel I owe you more, oh excellent blog friends. So it is more that I bring you, a whole selection of more.

Point the first: my sister Andrea is now blogging! For me, this is on a level of delirium to which I might compare earth-shattering things of such calibre as, 1) "Oh, didn't I tell you? Harper Lee is coming to dinner tonight and she wants to talk to you about her secret second novel which no one thought she wrote but which she actually did and it's every bit as good as To Kill A Mockingbird"; 2) "News flash: Willy Wonka stepped out of storybooks and into the real world in order to create a Magnum icecream which not only is not disgustingly bad for you like the ones you know and love on only rare occasions, but is actually positively good for you and therefore you should consume one a week or possibly even one a day"; or 3) "Congratulations, Danielle, you have won a competition which you never even knew you entered and suddenly the entire contents of one Kikki-K store SHALL BE YOURS." So basically I'm excited that Andrea is blogging. Also, she somehow thinks of herself as not a writer but she's obviously delusional because even though she only has one post (and an About page) up so far, they're both excellent. And this completes the trifecta of immediate female family members blogging: my Mum, my middle sister Andrea, and my littlest sister, Lauren. Cool beans? Very.

Point the second: since my so-called not-a-writer-not-a-blogger sister who now is blogging (and thus writing) has an About page on her blog, I am overcome with the sudden need to create such a thing for myself. But is there anything more awkward than writing a blog introduction? Okay, yes, falling over while rollerskating and clutching the shirt-front of a teenage boy whom you don't know in order to save yourself from certain death is definitely more awkward than writing a blog introduction, but still. So I am trying to think of a less awkward but certainly still silly and yet hopefully slightly intelligent way to do said About page, and since I can't just outright copy my sister's format, I'm thinking of going for a Q&A style thing. The only catch -- I need some Q's before I can fill in some A's. So hit me with your best -- and even your most random -- questions for my About page, and I will attempt to use them to talk about myself in that mildly humorous yet endearingly self-deprecating voice which we all somehow want to emulate for our blogs. I should probably state that in a less tongue-in-cheek way: Ask me questions, please? I will love you forever and send you imaginary cupcakes.

After a break for April, I'm doing the photo-a-day project for May. I won't be posting my daily pictures here except for the occasional one, but you can see them at my tumblr under the hashtag #photoadaymay. I'm loving being back in the challenge of taking a picture in response to a word prompt every day. It's a great and yet manageable little creative project.

While we're talking blogs and photography challenges, I have to tell you that my lovely friend Abbie has just started blogging, too! Her pictures are serene and feminine -- actually, that's a perfect representation of Abbie -- and I love the URL she has chosen. Very appropriate!

Over at the Walker Books Walk-A-Book blog, there's an excellent article on why kids in the internet age still need to be exposed to good old-fashioned paper books. It's called iKids Need Books, Too.

Meanwhile Louise Cusack, a writing tutor and mentor I've been privileged to learn from, is exploring the world of publishing in a series of blog posts. Her recent post, Doing The Work, is an excellent, excellent reminder not to plan for harvest when we haven't even done the ploughing. Also, she references Ira Glass's brilliant creative advice which is always a winner.

And this post is a month old, but it's a discussion which will never go out of date. Pete Peterson discusses the value of creating habitually. It's a good read.

Done.

-- well, virtually done, and I feel as happy as my precious little niece looks. Also, allow me to digress for a moment and point out those two teeny baby teeth. I defy you to show me anything cuter.

So yes, uni for the year is basically finished. I say basically because I do have one more essay due in a fortnight, but it's not too long and (I hope) not too difficult, and all the really big papers and deadlines were done and dusted on Friday. It's a nice feeling, and you can tell I've turned my self-editor off for the holidays (or a few days, at least) because there were four 'ands' in that last sentence alone and I'm leaving them there.

That's (almost) that, and my self-imposed short&sweet blog pseudo-hiatus is over, leaving me free to post as much as I want. Of course -- because there's always an of-course -- I now have blogging stage fright and can't remember all the marvellous things I thought I really positively had to tell you.

So while I find my feet again, the floor is yours, friends. What should I chat about? What do you want to know? What do you want to see pictures of? This is my little wooden chest of letters to you all; feel free to demand posts on anything you like.

* * * * *

Conversations:

Mothercare -- we really do. There are some pretty cool spots around here.

Un -- we'll have to go there!

Lauren -- that's one of the better ones; it was fun to learn more about my camera.

Samantha R -- it requires more forethought than more spontaneous snapshots, doesn't it? Plus you need your tripod handy and all that jazz.

[short + sweet] living life

Mary Oliver wrote the “instructions for living a life:” Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it...

I like taking photos, I like writing, and I like telling people about things that I find. I like telling stories on blogs, because truthfully, it’s the best way I know how to.

Here.

I'm free!

There was a man, once, who was thrown into prison for a crime he did not commit. After he had served twenty-five years of his life sentence, some fresh evidence came to light, and the man was released from prison. As he got off the bus delivering him back into his old neighbourhood, he couldn't resist kicking up his heels and dancing a quick jig.

"I'm free! I'm free!" the man shouted.

A little boy standing on the corner looked at him scornfully. "That's nothing," the boy said. "I'm four."

So, I know that it's "nothing", but this little blog is free -- ahem, three -- today, and I thought I'd take a little trip down memory lane, a look back on the bloggy adventures which have been the most conversational/most interesting/most bothersome to the rest of you all. Behold, the top ten most commented-upon posts here:

1) It's a blog party! This post, from August 2009, comes in at the highest-commented here in Danielle's Little Blogland. And all because I used the emotional blackmail that was the occasion of my twenty-ninth birthday to force you all into commenting. You made me grin.

2) A very long-winded way to say: I'm thankful Now this is more apropos. This post, from January this year, was me talking about how very appreciative I am of the true friends in my world -- and I think a lot of you could relate to just how much of a blessing real, genuine, true friends can be.

3) Hey hey it's a Christmas giveaway Who doesn't love free stuff? This post is from November last year. Amy won. (Hi, Amy!).

4) Ding dong, the witch is dead? This post appeared just this week, and it seems you guys had as much to say about the death of Osama bin Laden (and the incongruous rejoicing thereof) as I did.

5) A short story about dolly steps In which I flailed all over the blog about having a short story published and illustrated by a real children's book artist, and in which you guys joined me in doing the happy dance -- proof that you guys know how to 'rejoice when others rejoice'. That was October 2009.

6) Post-it note I asked for updates, and you guys -- very nicely -- answered. In the picture in this post, from June 2009, I look noticeably less chubby than I do now. Rats.

7) Step inside Just last month, I took you on (half) a tour of the new Housie. I still have to show you round some of the other nooks.

8) Mr. & Mrs. Webber When my sister Lauren got married to her love, James, in June last year, you guys were as excited to see pictures as I was to share them.

9) Flashback Friday: the waiting In September 2008, I reminisced about what it was like to be six and a half years old, waiting for the arrival of a new little baby who was surely going to be born in the middle of the night.

10) A decade(ish) of faith and fellowship and flaws In November 2010, the final issue of Whatsoever Magazine, a part of my life for over ten years, was mailed out. It signalled the end of what had been an amazing journey.

BONUS! The trail of carnage: an epic adventure -- which is really just a post full of pictures of gross dead things and my excellent friend Meaghan and I being ridiculous.

Thank you, blog buds and real life people who somehow want to read my words. It's fantastic to know you.

* * * * *

Conversations:

Katie -- yes, I love shuffle! It reminds me how much of my music I haven't even listened to fully. Ridiculous!

Jessica -- Yes, you should definitely try a Daybook-style post at LJ! You'd make it interesting :D.

Samantha R -- Ooh, enjoy Spring! Spring and Autumn are my favourites.

Bek Axe -- We need a cheeseburger date sometime, hey?

Mothercare -- Thank you! :D (Good thoughts re. Osama, too).

Brooke -- So, so true. It's just a messy situation all round.

They're HERE!

Oh, sweet sweet school holidays! How I have longed for your bright presence, your warm greeting, your loving embrace! And now -- now you are finally here with your opportunities for reading in the middle of the day, for spending time with people, for writing letters, for learning to like talking on the phone, for sleeping in, for watching movies, for baking nice foodstuffs. Holidays, I love thee.

PS. The tribe has spoken. In-post-replies return -- starting today.

* * * * *

Conversations:

Meaghan -- I don't need profound reasons from you; your excellent opinion is quite motivation enough, oh wondrous friend!

Mothercarey -- my eyebrows blush and thank you.

Julia -- thank you! xx

Ruth -- I took it for what it's worth and then some. I like the in-post-replies, too, but I'm weird and so I thought it quite possible everyone else would find it vaguely disturbing. Apparently not so! Plus, it feels more like a little hippie commune when we're all in dialogue together.

Rachael -- thank you and I think we're all on the same page re. comments. Yay!

Caitlin -- precisely so! The internet is great for connections like that :). Oh, and yes, hopefully we'll be down your way more often now!!

Samantha -- we are like-minded souls :).

Katie -- thank you, friend! x

Ten thousand.

Last week, a little milestone slipped by mostly unnoticed -- the ten thousandth hit at this wee blog. I know some sites get that many visitors a day, let alone in the almost two years this space has been floating around the netherworld of the internet. However, it makes me happy that ten thousand people (or more likely two people, five thousand times over) have visited here. After all, that's what this is about. It's about words, certainly. It's about life, for sure. And it's definitely about faith. But life and words and faith could be explored solo. No, blogging is about interacting and discussing and relating and learning, and it can't be done alone.

So here's to you. Here's to your visits, your thoughts, your ideas, your encouragement, and most definitely your comments. You rock.

Can haz cheezburger book blog?

I've done it. I've begun a book blog. Because books are one of the best things to talk about. Seriously.

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So please feel free to follow. Favourite. Feedread. However it works for you. (Pretend I'm famous on the internet). And let's talk books.

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Go there: bookity boo.

Fabulous five thousand

Last time I checked my sitemeter stats, the number of visitors to this blog was at 4,999. Because I am my mother's daughter, I like statistics, and I'm kind of tickled to think that the next visitor to my blog will be the five thousandth.

.

Five thousand visitors in under a year seems wondrous to me. Now, I know that lots of sites get five thousand hits a day. Others get that many hits a week, or a month. Me, I'm happy with that in a year. There's no way I could hang out with you guys in person 5,000 times annually (that'd be fourteen visitors a day. Eep!), so I think it's bordering on awesome that I get to do so virtually.

This little pie chart -- are pie charts not fantastic? -- tells me that 75% of you come from Australia, 13% of you come from the US, 6% from the UK, 2% each from Canada and Russia, 1% from Germany, and 1% from unknown nations. Say 5% of the Aussie blog readers are local (and that's generous. I know of two; one is my mother); that still puts 95% of readers outside my day-to-day life zone whom I'd never normally get to hang out with on a regular basis. Oh, I love technology!

So here's to technology, and here's to you, loyal blog readers. I think you're fabulous, and I'm thankful that through this unique and still fairly uncharted medium, our lives can intersect. Thank you.

P.S. I'm planning a giveaway in celebration of 5,000 visitors. Stay tuned.

Hello, 2009

Meaghan delightfully suggested I "come back, already!" so I'm here, ready to jump into blog-land for 2009. My summer break was lovely and altogether too short, consisting of a diversity of small happinesses including birthday celebrations, Christmas day, canoeing, visits from loved ones, unexpected gifts of kindness and encouragement, reading in the middle of the day, sleeping in till embarrassing hours, melting in the Queensland humidity, and growing inspired about the fresh beginning.

I'm glad my blog didn't dissolve in the gaping void of inactivity. Sitemeter informs me that numerous visitors kept popping in via a Google search for polyphyria. I couldn't help but wonder how; have I ever used such a word? Turns out I have, in the discussion that took place on vampirism and the Twilight books over here. Obviously, my memory ain't what it used to be.

With the shiny newness of a fresh beginning, I find myself wondering what my blog's purpose ought to be in 2009. I know I'm determined to share more pictures, and to write better and oftener. But a part of me craves the narrowing freedom of a specific goal or theme. Life and faith? Writing? Books? So far, I've explored a bit of each, occasionally mentioning current affairs (which I generally know nothing about), too.

So I require your input, oh smartest of blog writers and readers: does your blog have a specific goal or theme? And if you were my blogging headmaster, what theme would you assign me?

I look forward to exploring 2009 with you.

Web roundup II

Good stuff on the web this week:

biblical womanhood :: In the (rather small) online circles I'm a part of, there's been some discussion lately about whether the choice to bear children at all (note here that I'm not even saying how many or when) is entirely up to us or to God. The Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood blog had something interesting to say about that, couched in a post about Rebecca Walker, daughter of The Color Purple author Alice Walker:

"When women completely deny their God-given right and ability to bear children we are seeing a complete giving over to the desires of the flesh (Romans 1). To see children as a burden to be thrown off is a reversal of the created order and a sinful repression of the desire that probably once burned bright. It should make us weep for them."

blogging :: In the current voyeuristic climate of our generation, the seedy world of reality television and the equally seedy world of reality blogging tend to make us all lust after the juicy details. In a blog post over at The Line, Thomas Jeffries discusses why too much information really is too much information.

faith :: A beautiful post about hungering after the Lord. Just read it.

media :: Ted Slater offers the best thoughts ever on why Christians should be thoughtful about the content of the movies they watch, even in spite of the necessity of "cultural relevance."

shameless plug :: Back issues of Whatsoever mag on a big sale :).

Dear blog:

Justin Heazlewood waxes sarcastic in the latest issue of Frankie* magazine:

Dear Blog, Today I did this and said that and made this private joke and generally my grammar was terrible and I got myself into a situation with no dramatic tension or character arcs and I guess you had to be there. *SUBMIT*
Sound familiar? Yes, tickle me Qwertyuiop: it's blog-o'clock! Enter the literary dark ages as a million-volume omnibus of misspelled first drafts and textual healing is spammed out of Generation-Why? keyboards quicker than you can Yahoo! 'line breaks please!'. Hey, don't get me wrong, this influx in self-narration can only be good for the online diary industry -- it's just the readers' unions I feel sorry for.

So is it evidence of some severe fetish for self-punishment or simply a nod to irony that I should actually publish such a scathing rebuttal of blogs on, of all things, my own blog? No, it's simply that I believe he has a point. A hilarious** point. Dare I say it? An LOL point, even. His conclusion says it best:

How will historians look back on this e-era? A liberating lattice of language and interconnectivity or a billion gigs of ego gunk? Academics keep saying how isolated and disconnected we're all feeling, despite the communication age explosion. Perhaps if we all took a big, virtual *breath* and deeply pondered what we really want to say to the world, and to each other, artistic discipline could win over from, "This morning my friend said something hilarious but I can't remember."

Well said, Mr. Heazlewood. Let us redeem blogging from the muddy pool of "a billion gigs of ego junk".

notes:
*Not a magazine I'd universally recommend, but I happen to have a copy of this month's issue.
**We have dispensed with the "an" in front on silent H's, have we not? Justin Heazlewood is making me nervous.

Back to the blog

I don't think I've ever thought quite so hard about a blog post before.

I shelved my public blog over a year ago when life was full and other obligations clamoured for attention. I wondered if there was any real necessity for my small voice against the millions of blogs floating about in cyberspace.

Today, life is still full and those other obligations have blossomed rather than dwindled. There are millions more new blogs chiming in on the great chorus that is the blogosphere, and my small voice is in no way a powerful or an essential one. But the last few months have been an incessant, needling nudge to begin again and I find myself here, typing a first and not-so-first post.

I think it really began at my local writer's group where a handful of aspirants have gathered to work for the past year with a published fantasy author and skilled teacher. The subject of blogging came up several times in conversation. Always it was kind of spat from the mouth like a dirty word (practice it; you'll find it can sort of sound that way). I listened to my comrades' loud despisings of the blogging world and found myself wanting to jump to the defence of blogs. It isn't all sixteen-year-old girls offering minute-by-minute accounts of their trip to the mall, I thought to myself. But I smiled mildly and ignored their blog-rage.

Apparently my fellow writing groupers are not alone in their thinking. Robin Hobb compares blogging to the death-bite of the vampire, and perhaps rightly so if blogs take priority over other work in the way she suggests it will.

But over the last few months I've been able to see that there are others who respect blogging as a valuable, contemporary medium for rich communication. First, J. Mark Bertrand suggested that all hopeful writers need a website. 'Hopeful writer' is me to a T. And since I'm sadly devoid of valuable geek points, a blog seems the most apt synonym for website I can find (a blog, I can manage; a website, not so much). Then the recent issue of Writing Queensland arrived in the mail and, with it, the exhortation to build author platform, beginning with -- you guessed it -- the humble blog.

Finally I stumbled across a Desiring God blog post titled 6 Reasons Pastors Should Blog, and that clinched it for me. Obviously I'm not a pastor, but the spiritual benefits from regularly interacting through a blog, as outlined in the article, provided the last encouragement I needed to jump back into the blog world. Along with a few notes from friends ("Why aren't you blogging anymore?"), I was well and truly inspired.

So here I am (as in olden days / happy golden days of yore) with a first post that's been some months in the works. I've discovered that first posts are something of an art form. I've discovered that all the cool kids were blogging way back in 2002 or earlier (how does "fashionably late" sound to you?). And I've also discovered that I am dangerously prone to a temptation involving me wanting to compose the world's most awesome first blog post ever. Which is one of the problems with blogging, as Bob Kauflin deftly points out. So I've settled instead for a simple explanation of why I'm here.

What this blog ain't:

• Danielle ruminating over which pearl to share from her great storehouse of wisdom. Because, if there is one lesson God has been driving home over the last twelve months, it's that I really know very little.
• Danielle providing an example of scintillating wit and incredibly snappy writing. I like to hope that in about, oh, fifty years' time, I will be writing like that. But for now, it's the apprentice stuff.
• Danielle offering those aforementioned moment-by-moment accounts of her exciting trips to the mall. I'm sure you can find that kind of material elsewhere. Then again, I am fond of bargains...

What I hope it will be:

• The 'web presence' and 'author platform' that the writing gurus keep telling me I need to develop. Therefore do not be alarmed by frequent and seemingly mindless repetitions of my own name (Google, my name is Danielle Carey. Did you get that? Danielle Carey. Repeat after me: Danielle Carey).
• You and me, sharing the good stuff that God brings our way, whether it be through a friend, a stranger, in the words of someone far smarter, or in the holy pages of Scripture.
• And perhaps just a place to rejoice in the beauties of every day and life and love and people and God.

Come join me?