Bear Blog Question Challenge
Because all the cool kids are doing it, and I always want to be in with the in-crowd, I'm breaking with my usual format for posting here and doing the Bear Blog Question Challenge that Ava put forth earlier in the year. I thought it was an interesting set of questions, and that since I'm new to the Bear Blog space, it might be nice for you folks reading this to know what I am and what I'm up to.
And so:
Why did you make the blog in the first place? I've been blogging in one form or another for over twenty years now, and there have always been people who've stopped by to read what I'm writing. It's been lovely, putting things out there and having people find them, like notes in bottles along the shore of an ocean. Sometimes they leave you little notes as well, put them in your bottle and toss it back into the water, and it finds its way on the tides back to you, and you have a moment of communication with one another. It's so very lovely when it happens.
It's also becoming more and more rare now, in this time of endless noise and chaos and corporate dominance. People used to find a lot of bottles washing up on the tide, and there were so many thoughtful, creative, and lovely notes inside, waiting to be read. Now, most of those bottles are caught out in the deep waters, trapped in floating garbage islands, or sunk by marauding corporate pirates.
I got more poetic there than I meant to, which happens. The short version is that I'm here making this blog because I have things to say, about life in general, common things, sometimes uncommon, and I keep tossing my bottles into the sea, and hoping that the tides are favorable.
Why did you choose Bear Blog? I'm here on Bear Blog specifically because it feels so very much like a community, which is how the blogosphere (man, I haven't used that word in decades) used to feel in ye olden times. Part of this is because of things like the Bear Blog Discover page, which is amazingly useful for presenting people to me that I want to know more about. Part of it is also because so far everyone on here seems to have similar feelings about how the Internet should be, and acts accordingly: with kindness, warmth, and humanity.
Have you blogged on other platforms before? Oh most definitely: LiveJournal, Tumblr, Blogger, Wordpress... most of those live only on my hard drives now, but they all were part of this online thing that I keep doing. It's too late to stop now, obviously.
Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software? Most of what I write is done in Scrivener, both desktop and iOS versions. Since Bear Blog uses Markdown, I've started doing a little writing in Obsidian as well, since it's a nice and quick copy/paste to get from one to the other and keep my formatting in place.
When do you feel most inspired to write? I'm a night owl from way back, so it's usually later in the night when I most want to get creative. Unfortunately, with my work life the way it is now, that's not a schedule that lets me stay awake until dawn anymore, and so I get the words in when I can throughout the day, and generally finish off whatever I'm working on while in bed, on my phone. I'm much better with a keyboard than swiping or tapping on a screen, so it's less than ideal that way. Still, I do what I have to.
Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? For blogging, I mostly publish as soon as I give the piece a quick proofread. Sometimes I'll catch a typo after I hit publish, but that's what the edit button is for.
Your favorite post on your blog? I think the correct answer for me is: whichever one is most recent. I know that's not helpful, not really, so how about I change it to the post which most illustrates what you're about? I think in that case I'd say Aching Waves of the Lonely Tides. That one pretty solidly nails what you're going to find if you read the rest of my blog (which I hope you do).
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.? Just to keep on doing it until I'm dead, which hopefully is a long time into the future still. I have zero coding experience, so I'll play with Bear Blog here and there, and see what tricks I can make it do. I don't want to go too crazy with it, though. I like the simplicity.
And there we go: questions answered! Thanks for reading it, and for poking around my blog. Hope something you see here sticks with you, and that you come back later for more. If you'd like, click the little email button at the bottom of this page and shoot me a message. I'm always glad to hear from members of this little community.
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