Tag: blogging

Search Term Bingo

Pavowski2 Comments

If you run a website, or even a modest blarg like this one, at some point you will ask yourself the question: “who is reading this?” and maybe, “why are they reading this?” and possibly, further, “shouldn’t they be doing something productive, like culling wombats from their backyards, instead?”

WordPress, in its wisdom, hides a lot of search results — apparently google searches automatically hide the search terms that leads its users to wordpress sites, so I’ve heard (correct me if I’m wrong) — so most of the searches that lead people to my blog are redacted. However, there are some gems in there, and reading through them never fails to make me laugh. In particular, I get a lot of enema-related searches, due in no small part I’m sure to the post I made last year about giving my son an enema. (It remains one of the most frequently visited on this site, despite also being one of the shortest, and contains, sadly for visitors no doubt, very little information about the actual giving of the actual enema.) But not all of the searches are tied up in poop. Here are some of the best ones this year, so far, and I have tried to theorize about what they mean.

“he hadn’t pooped in five days” — quotes were included, not by me. Okay, so searches about enemas notwithstanding, searches even tangentially tied to poop can still land you here. Maybe I need to examine my lifestyle.

how to write a charasmatic [sic] valedictorian speech — I don’t write about it much any more, but I am still a high school English teacher, and I did write some (I feel) helpful posts about speeches. I am pretty sure I spelled all my words correctly. Charasma seems like one of those things you don’t want to exude so much as perhaps see your doctor about.

my wife is an overachiever / homemade wife overachiever — I’ve written now and then about my wife and how she’s better than me in practically every way. I am not sure what a homemade wife is, but I can only assume that the searcher has built an artificial wife out of toaster parts, and is pretty proud of himself for doing so.

occams parenting — I am pretty sure this is not a thing, but if it is, I don’t know if I want to be associated with it. Razors and children don’t usually play well together, and I do not endorse this product.

arsenal never give up — In addition to being a high school teacher, I am also the coach of a high school soccer team, and mentions of that have crept in here from time to time. I can only assume that this is somehow related to the Arsenal football team (that’s proper football, not American football), although I must recognize that it may also be about maintaining and not relinquishing your own personal arsenal of automatic, lethal, and totally necessary weapons for “home defense”. Because America.

poopy toddler story — I won’t lie, I tag all my relevant posts with “toddler poop stories” so I guess this shouldn’t surprise me. Still, the fact that somebody is out there searching for such things is firmly in the neighborhood of troubling.

parental exhaustion — yup. You have come to the right place.

jenker what does in mean — Language are no meaning. Jenker in cat. Cat only cat.

freelance exorcist — the searcher, who I can only assume has a very real problem and is looking for a very real solution without all the red tape of dealing with procuring a legitimate (lol) exorcist from the legitimate Catholic church, was probably disappointed to be directed to my blog full of drivel about toddler poop and dubious writing advice. Still, that’s more views for me.

mum and daughter strengthen bonding by pooping together — *heavy sigh* I guess the family that poops together…

Maybe it’s time to accept reality and re-write my blarg’s tagline: “your internet destination for poop: figurative, literal, and copious.”

WordSpawn

Pavowski11 Comments

It’s a little-known perk of writing that writers get to do something truly remarkable. I’m not talking about the godlike power to create empires of the mind, to breathe life into characters and to spawn images in the minds of our readers. Nor am I talking about the Herculean ability to overcome the blank, intimidating expanse of the blank page. I’m talking about a quieter power, but a greater one.

Writers get to invent words.

This is a subtle power, one that can’t and shouldn’t be waggled around like a magic wand in a seven-book epic about teenage wizards (if ever there were a metaphor). It’s a power that should be practiced with care, delicacy, and great reservation. It’s the power to change the way people think and communicate, if you use it right.

Imagine where we’d be without words like “schadenfreude?” (The Germans are really good at this.) “Kerfuffle?” “Google?” Seriously, imagine your life without Google and try to tell me that the power to create words isn’t incredible and earth-shattering.

Sure, English is chock-full of words already. Good ones, too. Great ones, even. Still, there are those times when you’re casting about for just the right word, one that perfectly encapsulates the thing you’re talking about, one that leaves no room for confusion, one that immediately creates meaning in the mind of your reader, even if they’ve never heard that word before. And the problem is, as broad and expansive as the language is, we just don’t have words for every situation. ‘Twere impossible to have a word for every situation locked and loaded in our memory at any time. Sometimes you just have to make one up.

I do this all the time, and most of the words suck. They’re good for one use only, and once used, they disappear down the gullet of memory and are never seen again. Once in a while, though, you hit on a winner: a word that’s useful, memorable, and catchy enough to merit use by others. Because communication is a two-way street… it’s no good making up an entire lexicon of new words here in my lair if nobody else sees fit to use the words, too.

But today, a breakthrough. A word that might — might — catch on.

I didn’t even make it on purpose. I was just trying to alliterate, and I accidentally created a word that’s already resonated with two readers here in my sphere. Maybe it’s resonating with you, too, and you don’t even know it.

A thing I do a lot here at the blarg is ramble. I have a way of overstating and overthinking things, and I end up going on at length… possibly longer than is necessary. I own that. It’s a fault, but it’s fun for me, and this is my sandbox. I also love to complain, again, probably more than is necessary or healthy. And what do you get when you combine the two? A rant? Sometimes, but not always. I don’t usually rise to the level of anger characterized by a rant. A gripe? Well, a gripe is quick and small-scale. No, when I complain at length it’s like those rumbles in your stomach leading up to a really unpleasant excursion in the restroom. They go on forever and leave you feeling cranky as your innards get all twisted up in knots. The only remedy is getting it out of your system. A grumbling ramble. A “gramble.”

I recognize that this word sort of describes the thing that maybe your grandfather might do about the state of his retirement checks, or that your cranky English teacher might do about the work ethic of his young, irreverent students. As such, it’s not a particularly glamorous addition to a lexicon. But it’s a good one nonetheless, because sometimes you just need to bitch and moan about this one thing specifically, perhaps well beyond the point where the average listener feels sympathetic to you. You need to gramble.

So it’s time to start a movement. You read a blog entry from some guy going on and on about how long he had to wait in line for his driver’s license? Call him out for his gramble. You need to spout off about your boss’s idiotic cornflower blue tie and how ridiculous it makes him look? Fire up the gramble. Kids kept you awake all night and it’s all you can think about or talk about at work the next day? Ask your co-workers to pardon your gramble.

You know this is a word you need in your life. You know you’re dying to use it. Do it. Embrace the dark side, and embrace the raw creative power of language. It’s time to make this a thing. Go get your gramble on.

#gramble

Not Okay

Pavowski2 Comments

WordPress is loaded with nifty little features. I can sort my posts by subject or keyword, I can see which posts get the most traffic, I can see who leaves the most comments, I can see who’s binge-eating ice cream while they read. Okay, maybe not — but the technology must be in the works.

I can also see the search terms people enter to end up at the site.

Some of them make good sense and tell me I’ve written posts that may actually have been useful to people: “how to write a graduation speech”, for example. Or posts which might have provided some advice or peace of mind: “vasectomy” or “should adults read YA lit”. Then there are the searches that just make me scratch my head: “dead bird on porch meaning” (I had just written a nifty short story about birds dropping out of the sky), for example, or “time drowning a groundhog” (seriously, what the fargo), or, my personal favorite, “I’m talking and I can’t shut up” (methinks the blarg might have a new tagline). Lots of searches related to writing — getting started writing, writing a first novel, etc.; and toddlers, naturally.

But by far the most searched family of terms that lands people on my site is enema-related.

Let’s start off very clear. The post that gathers all this traffic is this one, in which I talked about how I wasn’t going to talk about the time I gave my son an enema, because some things are best left unimagined. It’s one of my shortest because, unlike some times when I say I’m not going to talk about things as a springboard to talking about those very things, I really didn’t say anything about it, except perhaps to mention the amount of poop involved, which was extensive. But seeing the searches accumulate made me chuckle, because I pictured poor terrified parents — much like I was — faced with the prospect of giving their son or daughter an enema and searching in a cold, nervous sweat through the internet for guidance that wouldn’t make them vomit.

But I saw another search today which has thrown those other searches into another, darker, altogether more sinister light: “stories 10 year old boy enema stories.” And I read it, and I leaned my head to the side in thought, and I read it again, and then I wanted to throw up, because I can’t imagine a scenario where it’s not a pedophile on the other end of the wire, fantasizing about doing some really weird really sicko sharknado to a kid to get his jollies. I was really upset. Almost took down that post because I don’t even want a whisper of a hint of the foul odor of a degenerate like that fogging up the air around here.

But then it occurred to me that maybe I got in the way of said pedophile, and maybe I ruined his, uh, browsing with my drivel. And that made me happy. Still disgusted, but somewhat happy (we need a word for that. Something like “disgustiflappied”).

I still don’t know quite what to make of it. I’m still really uncomfortable with the thought that a search like that could land you at my site, even though all I post here is harmless diversion, and the closest thing to pornography at this site is a post about the time I ate a steak in the bathroom (life gets weird when you have a toddler, okay?).

I guess I can’t control what people search for or what the internet gods serve up when you search for it. But if you’re here for stories about kids getting enemas… well… I don’t know what to say. They’re here, but they’re not what you’re looking for.

Ew.

And if that other filth is what you’re here looking for, I hope an avalanche of toddler poop washes over you. Unless that’s what you’re into, in which case I hope you get stung in the face by legions of bees.

There’s Productivity, and then there’s Productivity

Pavowski8 Comments

Momentum matters.

The things you’ve been doing are the things you are going to keep doing until you make a concerted effort to stop doing them. The things you haven’t been doing are the things you will continue to not do until you force yourself to do them.

That being said, I am having doubts lately as to the quality of the things I’m doing in regards to my writing.

I’m guest-posting at LindaGHill’s blog, which is kind of a cool thing … not entirely unlike giving a fifteen-year-old the keys to a… god, I was going to say a Lamborghini but that’s not the hotness in cars anymore, is it? (God, it sucks getting older. Did you know that Friends is now showing reruns on Nick at Nite?) Anyway, I made a post there introducing myself and I mentioned all the writing I’ve gotten done this year and it got me thinking.

Because for all this capital-W “Writing” I’ve been doing this year, I’ve done more than my fair share of drooling nonsense onto the virtual pages of this blarg. At a rough estimate, I’ve probably got almost half as many words again here on the blarg as I’ve committed to the novel. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course — word count on the novel has slowed necessarily from almost 1200 words daily to about 100 (I’m editing, so some in, some out), and I can probably say that my active time working on the novel has declined from roughly an hour daily to more like thirty or forty-five minutes (editing feels so much more mentally taxing than drafting). I could be way off, but it feels like I’m not working on it nearly as much as when I was drafting. Meanwhile, the word vomit I’ve done here on the blarg has remained more or less constant.

Which is okay. I’m not complaining, because even when I’m not working on the novel, I’m kicking ideas around in my head, thinking about how changes would play out, about passages that need moving and restructuring, and dreaming up ways to break the story even more than I already have (and currently, it’s in more pieces than the wineglass I dropped the other night… not that that particular incident is in any way related to my novel, I promise).

But there’s the rub. Can I qualify “thinking time” as “working” with my novel? Can I justify a day wherein I didn’t actually sit down in front of my manuscript at all? If I wrote a blarg post on a day that I didn’t Write, was I still productive?

I want to say yes, because I’ve thought from the beginning that this blarg was as much an active piece of my Writing as a distraction from it: equal parts sharpening stone and shunting circuit (heh heh… shunt). From the beginning I’ve used my drivel in this space to puzzle through problems with characters, plot holes, scenarios and obstacles, and in a fair few of those situations I’ve actually found some new inspiration just from talking to myself for a while. But I’d be lying if I said that this page didn’t serve the equally important function of distracting me from The Project. Blarging about tv shows or books or shiny new things or toddlers or running or whatever else is front-of-mind on a given day is the pressure release valve on my overtaxed water heater. It’s low-stakes (if not no-stakes) relaxed musing that takes me away from the self-imposed pressure to produce quality work for the novel.

But is it productive?

On the one hand, I’m of a similar mind on writing as I am on running. Some runners who run exceptionally long distances or blistering fast paces refer to practice runs without a specific distance or pace goal as “junk miles”: miles that you get in just because you need to, because your training plan calls for them. But even when I was running more than 20 miles a week I couldn’t think of my runs that way. Every day I get out there feels like a victory, even if I’m hobbled and can only run a quarter of a mile from the house before I limp back. Every run is a good run. Likewise, every word written is a good word, even if it’s a horrible word, like “moist”. Every sentence, every paragraph, every page, every detour into excessively long lists to pad my word count sharpens the knife that little bit more. It’s all practice. Every step on the path teaches me how to step properly in the future, and every misstep reminds me to watch out for wonky rocks and tangling roots.

Then again, there’s the inescapable truth that time spent writing on the blarg is time not spent working on the novel, and time not spent working on the novel feels a little bit like wasted time. I waited long enough in my life to even leave the station on this little excursion; it feels sacrilegious to put it off any more than I have to.

Often at the end of one of these rambles, I come to find out that I really felt a certain way about the issue in question, I simply didn’t know it before I put it in words. That’s not the case here. I really enjoy the writing I do on the blarg–I’m even proud of it at times–but it’s a poor substitute for working on the novel. Then again, the unemotional side of my brain says, better junk writing than no writing at all. All that considered, there’s no denying that I do feel a sort of accomplishment after writing anything including a pointless blarg rumination, even if that something is just a rant about baby poop.

If anything, then, I guess it comes down to two kinds of productivity. Productive productivity (genuinely gets something done that needs doing) and Hedonistic productivity (feels productive but isn’t, or gets something done that doesn’t necessarily need doing). I used to read a lot of articles on Lifehacker, which is a sort of mecca for all things productivity- and efficiency-related, and there is a tendency for some of the techniques and products discussed over there to be more about cleverness than actual usefulness, placing them squarely in the latter category: the Hedonistically productive. There comes a point where the things we do become more about feeling clever, good, productive, or useful than actually being clever, good, productive, or useful. I think this blarg toes the line. One way or another, though, it’s hard to picture my writing process without the blarg, so I guess I’m stuck with it.

And so are you, if you’ve stuck with me this far.