Why I'm Back to Blogging (On a Personal Blog)

Hello again!
When last we heard from me back in 2015, I was explaining my decision to ditch blogging. I thought it would be a permanent hiatus. It's not because here I am, back to blogging.

Most of my reasons for going on hiatus remain true, albeit slightly tweaked. Read on.

Twitter is still my go-to platform for news and conversation.
If you follow me on Twitter (@meredithgould) you've probably noticed a gradual shift in focus. Since the presidential election, I've become more focused on #digitalactivism and #deliberatekindness. (I'll write more about my call to digital activism in another post.) I still specialize in curating content with (and without) commentary.

Medium has become my primary place for writing about writing.
On Medium (http://medium.com/@meredithgould) I write about writing. After experimenting with a few other topics, I discovered my sweet spot and contribute to The Writing Cooperative.

As for blogging...
Turns out I was simultaneously right and wrong about the value--to me--of actively maintaining a personal blogging. But ever the empiricist, I needed to test this hypothesis.

I was right because: Since 2015, I've written two books for Liturgical Press. Desperately Seeking Spirituality: A Field Guide to Practice was published in 2016. The publication date for Transcending Generations: A Field Guide to Collaboration in Church is August 15, 2017. Last month, a new edition of Deliberate Acts of Kindness: A Field Guide to Service as a Spiritual Practice was published by Clear Faith Publishing. I managed to accomplish this without futzing with ideas and content on my personal blog.

I was wrong because: I underestimated the value of blogging to keep my writing pump primed. Standard advice to writers is to write every day. I do, in fact, write every day but not always the type of writing that builds book-writing muscles. Yippee! A new hypothesis to test. Hence, back to blogging.

I still believe I'm right about group blogs for organizations because: They're a labor intensive nightmare for whoever is charged with maintaing editorial quality control.

And so here I am, back to blogging. Because I always have more to say. 

About this blog and shifting the conversation elsewhere online...

Oh right, I have a blog. This one. The one I haven't posted any written content to since January 4th. And the only reason I know that is because I just looked it up. 

I looked for the last post with text, read it, and saw that I wrote about "being present one day at a time...each hour or moment-to-moment, if that's all I can muster." Clearly, all that being present did not include blogging. Now on my mind, this question: When will it?

At this juncture I'm not sure when I'll get back to this social media platform. If ever. So much has changed since I started blogging in 2007. Blogging platforms have died (e.g., Typepad) and others have emerged (e.g., Tumblr). Blogging itself has gone through some changes. 

Years ago, long form posts, sometimes pushing 2,000 words were acceptable if not normative. By 2010-ish, micro-blogging platforms like Facebook and Twitter, plus changes in hardware, eventually rendered massive word counts as intolerable as they were unreadable on certain digital devices. 

I was fine with all these changes, including the ascendency of visual social media like Pinterest and Instagram. Having started out as a visual artist, I became a very happy camper indeed when it became perfectly acceptable to have blog posts dominated by images rather than text. Tumblr is the blogging platform responsible for that shift. I set up a Tumblr blog and then did exactly nothing with it because I had this one.

There's more to this transition from blogging, including but not limited to these current realities:

• Twitter allows swift access to and the possibility of conversation with more people than my blog could ever generate.
• Facebook provides a platform for sharing thoughts, insights, and ridiculousness with even more space than allowed via Twitter, plus see first point above.
• Both Twitter and Facebook allow me to choose when and how to share my Instagram pics with a slightly different group of connections.
• Books are my long form, a revelation I've finally arrived at as I begin my tenth and another with Liturgical Press. 
• Public blogging no longer functions well, for me, as the place to futz around with book content.
• Any future quasi-long form writing I might want to do online would probably be better launched from Medium.

Still, I'm loathe to completely shut down this online diary (the original point of blogging) of my interior and exterior meanderings over the years, so I won't. Instead, here's where you'll find me:

• I'm sticking with Twitter as my personal comedy club and go-to place for marketing communications intel in the worlds of healthcare and church. Follow me on Twitter (@meredithgould) to find curated content about #chsocm (Church Social Media), #hlthsp (Health and Spirituality), and lively exchanges with tweeps from my overlapping worlds of interest.
• I've set up a Facebook Author Page to update readers about book releases and events, with occasional whining about the process of book writing and the world of publishing. Please "Like" me there.
• For all other longer-than-Twitter observations plus other stuff (but rarely links to articles because those I post on Twitter), "Friend/Follow" my Meredith Gould profile.
• To see what the "eye" cultivated by decades of formal art training zooms in on, follow me on my Instagram account.

Next Advent (November 29-December 24, 2015), Schlep of the Magi will show up on FB and possibly on Instagram.

So there you have it, dear readers. I do hope you'll connect with me via other social networking platforms. Your comments and support over the years have been a blessing that, not to be greedy, I'd love to continue receiving.

An Author's Life: How to Tell Fact From Fiction

Oh let's not call it procrastination. Instead, let's call it creative warm-ups. Jumping jacks in place. While slumped in a desk chair and staring at a computer monitor.

To be a bit more accurate and only slightly less dramatic, I was sorting through seven years of blog posts to...oh, what the hell does it matter? I wasn't writing what I'm supposed to be writing, although I was thinking about it. No news there, because I'll be thinking about the damn thing (aka, manuscript) until I turn it in. Of course, I do need to write it first. There is that.

I digress. See? Not procrastinating! Digressing! A creative detour...sorting through blog posts and stumbling upon a virtual pile of unpublished posts. Some happen to be exactly what I'm supposed to be writing, evidence that I've been thinking about this stuff for ages upon ages.

Along the way I rediscovered this quote from an interview with Hilary Mantel. Mantel, who won the Booker Prize twice, is best known for her historical novels about Thomas Cromwell: Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (Wolf Hall, Book 2). I loved both, but loved even more her novel about the French Revolution, A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel. It's so complex and dark that it makes what Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens wrote seem like light-hearted Disneyfied fairy tales about the best and worst of times.

I digress...again! But not really, because here's how I tie it all together: I write nonfiction. I've always written nonfiction (plus dismal adolescent poetry) for two major reasons. First, I simply don't "get" the process of writing a novel. Second, I've learned that I simply cannot make up the stuff that I have and continue to experience.

And so, imagine my delight to stumble upon what Mantel said about distinguishing fact from fiction. Not kidding, imagine my delight. Whatever you're able to imagine is a probably a true fact.

        

An Author's Life: I'm Declaring the Arrival of Autumn. Right Now.

Earlier this summer, my whimpering and whinging about not quite hunkering down to write my new book was met with sympathetic clucking from some and derisive-yet-loving laugh snorts by others.

Easy to distinguish between the cluckers and laugh-snorters. The laugh-snorters are those who have known me for many years; hardy souls who have observed my writing process throughout the course of writing -- or not writing and bitching about not writing -- previous books.

I thank God for these dearly beloved friends whose FFS response yanks me back to this reality: I have never never ever ever written book stuff during the summer months. Never. Ever. Never ever. These friends remind me that I've always spent the summer gardening (or did, when I had a garden), reading novels, binge watching mindless crap, avoiding sunlight, and praying for cloudy days.

You'd think I'd know this, but apparently it takes a mini-village to calm me the F down, to remind me how summer is my fallow season, that I come to life during the Fall when everything else starts dying. It's true. I perk right up when I see the green-gold of twilight happening earlier; when I hear cicadas chirr at a slower pace. Instead of searching for a cave to crawl into for the winter, I stumble out of the one I've created to escape summer.

There are several official ways to mark the beginning of Autumn. For most (in the USofA) it's Labor Day (September 1) and when the school year begins, even if school hasn't been attended for decades. Purists (of some sort) might insist on waiting for the Autumnal equinox on September 23.

But the air has been cool with crisp edges for many consecutive days. My Thai basil has gone to flower. The plane trees have been shedding bark for weeks. This morning I woke up feeling words forming sentences and paragraphs, which I welcomed as yet another sign that this ghastly season known as summer is finally coming to an end. Also, I suddenly have a hankering for meatloaf and baked potatoes.

So that's it, then. I'm declaring the arrival of Autumn and will stop bitching about not writing. Laugh snorts? Anyone?

What I'll Be Doing On My Summer Not-Vacation...and Beyond

WTW?

Dear faithful and steadfast* readers,

Y'know how I always vow that I'm never ever ever no way ever going to write another book? It's such an absurd and uber-dramatic vow that I really ought to stop making. 

I've just signed another book contract with Liturgical Press. The working title is so boring I almost don't want to trot it out, but here it is [Snooooooze Alert! Receiving suggestions for something better!] Engaging Spiritual Practice: A Guide for 21st Century Seekers. 

This will be my guide for self-identified seekers who have tried some, many or even all of the classic spiritual practices and then, with no shortage of frustration, given up on some, many, or even all of them. 

Hand-to-heart-and-God, I proposed this long before knowing about or reading Never Pray Again, a book I recently reviewed on this blog. My book will, of course, be different (although the authors of Never Pray Again and I do share a certain je ne sais quoi writing style.)

Manuscript due...soon. Time management should be interesting, given my Mayo Clinic for Social Media responsibilities (see: new #MCCSM gig) and upcoming participation on a panel at the Stanford MedX conference in September.

See the picture posted above this text? That's a photo of my husband, Dan Webster, witnessing my signing of the Lit Press contract, artistically rendered (using Ribbet.com) to capture my interior experience of...everything.

*Steadfast relative to reading my stuff.

Quote du Jour (Writing Department): "It's like a major illness..."

Found this eternal truth about book writing

in the Authors Guild Bulletin (Summer 2007)

Image created with the PicMonkey photo editor.

In my toolkit...

I've already mentioned SugarSync which I'm now using on my laptop computer to circumvent an Adobe Acrobat glitch on my desktop computer. Here are some more tools I love:

Aardvark is a Firefox extension I use to delete unwanted content from web pages before printing them out. Yes, I print out web pages. Want to make something of it?

I'm a visual-kinesthetic learner whose comprehension is enhanced by seeing and touching. This explains why I must doodle during live meetings and have been known to clean my kitchen during conference calls. Aardvark also reveals source codes and how pages have been constructed.

While I think jump/thumb/flash drives are just so cute, I prefer backing everything up with Mozy, which offers a 2 GB for free option for its automatic, secure online services. Several months ago I used Mozy to find something I thought I'd deleted and found it safely intact, thus sparing me hours of panic-induced vomiting.

I don't know what I was thinking when I thought I could write without outlining first. I think I thought outlining was for wimps and that real writers just let it flow. I was delusional. And the next writing-related delusion to be decimated? Using writing software.

Over the years, I've tried and rejected a slew of software programs before stumbling upon Writer's Blocks3. I futzed around with the free trial and didn't even wait for the 30 days to run out before ordering my own copy.

It works for me because it works the way my mind works. It also allows me to import content from other sources, shove it all around on the screen, and have that activity reflected in manuscript output without having to open a pile of programs and scores of screens. So far it seems to work well for articles and I hope it makes writing the next book easier.

The next book? Like I noted in an earlier post, thank God for the human capacity to forget pain.







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An Author's Life: Copyedits Continue (III)

As it turns out, the copy editing error I was flipping out about last week will probably be corrected in blue lines, not that blue lines are really blue any more, although (we) diehards still use this term for the near-final part of the printing process.

Changes are such a hassle at this point that fees are loaded onto what are termed "AAs." Although this is the industry abbreviation for "Author's Alterations," I tend think of these as "Author's Altercations" because someone (i.e., the author) has to pitch a fit to get changes made at this juncture.

For the record, I did not have to pitch a fit to anyone at Morehouse. I did, however, casually mention puking.

Father's Day

I was raised to dismiss Father's Day as a faux holiday; a conspiracy between haberdashers and Hallmark; something to be derided if not ignored.

This did not spare Bernie F.X. Gould of blessed memory from receiving a new necktie every year throughout the '50s and '60s. Now, I realize he would probably have much preferred a new ribbon for his circa 1935 Royal typewriter and a carton of Camel unfiltered cigarettes.

We stopped bestowing unwanted neckties and viyella shirts upon him during the '80s. By then, my father had upgraded beyond an IBM Selectric to a personal computer. It was huge and absolutely not portable. For any Father's Day we capitulated to noting, Daddy would probably have wanted floppy disks and a carton of Benson & Hedges cigarettes, the brand he started smoking as a health gesture.

My father died in 1998 at age 86 of -- no surprise -- emphysema and congestive heart failure. I inherited the Royal typewriter and tossed out the many cartons of cigarettes he had stashed throughout his home office.

This morning, I watched fathers of all ages stand up to receive a special benediction at the end of Mass and then make their way up the nave to receive a carnation. I experienced this as a sweet corrective to my family's view of Father's Day. Still, I could easily imagine how my father, if he were alive today, would probably have wanted to make a hasty exit so he could futz with his Blackberry and smoke.

Wearing Life Like a Seamless Garment

Someone called me a "workaholic" earlier today.

Considering the source, I couldn't tell whether the characterization was dig or compliment. It's not the first time I've heard this commentary about my apparent inability or unwillingness to carve life up into "work" and "relaxation." But it's neither inability nor unwillingness on my part. It's a lifestyle choice.

I once thought gender distinctions explained why men felt more compelled than women to make this observation about me. I've come around to thinking that while gender may be a factor, it doesn't entirely explain differences in how women and men organize life. I now believe that personal spirituality factors into an individual's definition of what is -- or isn't-- work.

This epiphany occurred during the recent Triduum. Although I found myself actively disliking John's gospel this year, internal spluttering did not prevent me from having a Holy Spirit moment upon hearing the word "seamless" with reference to Jesus's garment (John 19:23).

I was instantaneously reminded of an invitation, issued more than a decade ago, to "wear life like a loose garment." Next, I mentally drifted through conversations I've had about the perils of making rigid distinctions between life and work. And then, I realized that what I really want -- and have always wanted -- is to live life like a seamless garment.

Lifestyle choice? More likely a calling, which is probably why I can't recall ever being accused of workaholism by other spiritual seekers.

ADVENTure Continues (2nd Week)

Since the second candle on the Advent wreath represents the Bible, I figure it's a good time to write more about what I do, technically speaking, whenever my mind leaps to scripture during the writing process. I'll start by noting how it's a minor miracle that my mind leaps to scripture at all. It wasn't always thus.

For the past two decades, however, regularly reading scripture and practicing lectio divina has clearly had an impact on my life. As a practical matter, I rely on tools when I write. I use a combination of references to chase down full citations when scripture snippets occur to me, or to discover what has been recorded about specific concepts or events.

Bookmarked on my computer: SearchGodsWord and the New American Bible as available on the USCCB site even though I generally can't abide the NAB translation.

By my desk:

• A. Colin Day, Roget's Thesaurus of the Bible, which I find easier to use than Strong's Concordance. I rely on a 1998 paperback edition that I found remaindered
• The Catholic Comparative New Testament, great for comparing translations.
• Tanakh:The Holy Scriptures (Jewish Publication Society translation). It doesn't use the customary two-column page design, which makes it easier to read as narrative.
• I also refer to a copy of the NIV (New International Version) translation. Its version of Hebrew scripture is remarkably consistent with the JPS translation. Imagine that!

You can count on me having much more to say in future posts about how writing is itself a spiritual practice.