Writing/Weblogs

Since I have two blogs, a web site, several laptops, and an iPhone, I keep wondering why Twitter hasn't tweaked my interest.Everybody seems to be twittering, or "tweeting," these days. Well, nobody that I actually know. But I've been reading about The Twittering Class. Which makes me wonder, should I join the Twittergentsia? I don't want to be left out of a cool social movement, especially when it involves technology. So I tried to convince myself that I needed to start tweeting.First stop: a couple of important people's Twitter pages. First impression: yawn. John McCain has over 254,000 followers of…

Since I've been actively blogging for over six years, I've seen the best and worst of people when they're able to leave anonymous comments on blog posts -- a practice I've always allowed.It bothers me when someone hides behind a made up name -- "slugface99"-- spewing venomous insults, idiotic falsities, and profane rants into an otherwise mostly courteous blog conversation.It warms my heart when someone reveals an intimacy about themselves -- a deep fear, longing, forbidden lust, or whatever -- that would have been impossible to share with a real name attached to it.In a previous post I took TypePad,…

Blogging is a big part of my life. Thus so is TypePad, the service that hosts my HinesSight and Church of the Churchless blogs.By and large, I'm happy with TypePad. But not with their TypePad Connect service, which I tried out for a week before shutting it down when it seriously screwed up my blogs.I've spent quite a bit of time communicating with TypePad staff about what they need to do to improve both TypePad Connect and their basic blogging service (actually, I'm a "Pro" member, several steps above "Basic").Invariably I get a prompt, friendly reply along the lines of,…

Well, more of a publisher. Before, my best-selling book (in the admittedly rather narrow "Greek philosophers: Plotinus" genre) had the Unlimited Publishing name and logo on the cover and title page.Now it's just me, me, me -- in the guise of Adrasteia Publishing, which is tasty little me with an assumed business name sprinkled on top.In the photo I'm holding a proof copy of the Adrasteia'ized "Return to the One" that arrived today from Create Space. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I decided to cut my ties with Unlimited Publishing, a print on demand publisher that looked…

In the old days, writing a book and getting it published was a crazy, frustrating, time-consuming, and often expensive proposition. Now, much less so. Especially if a writer comes to grips with reality (not the easiest thing to do) and gives up the fantasy of his or her work of literary art being picked up by a major publisher. Then, becoming a best seller. The chances of that happening range between zero and next to nothing. I know. I've had three books published. Each was better than average. None were accepted by a publisher in a traditional way. I've become…

Ever since I flew the Windows coop and embraced a Macintosh again, I've been drawn to extol the virtues of my beloved MacBook (here, here, here, and here). And now I'm doing it again, with two exclamation points in a blog post title. That reflects how thrilled I am to have put up a revamped BrianHines.com web site -- something I've been meaning to do for a long time, but kept putting off owing to how tough it's been for me to find easy-to-use web site creation software for a PC. I've tried quite a few programs, such as WebEasy…

I like to write blog posts. What I don't like is: (1) Losing part (or all) of my brilliant musings when a word processor crashes, or the Compose Post screen of a blog hosting service decides to do something weird.(2) Wasting time on formatting a post because the above-mentioned Compose Post editor is based on buttons that must be clicked to italicize, boldface, underline, or whatever, instead of using keystroke controls like word processors do.A couple of days ago I decided to help get the economy back on track, and also soothe my financial crisis'ed soul, by purchasing a freshly redesigned MacBook.I…

Given the self-referential nature of the blogosphere, it seems obligatory for me to put up a blog post about a blog post milestone – namely, TypePad having informed me that today HinesSight passed the one million page view milestone. Congratulations to me, from me. However, the question to me, from me, is "so what?" A embarrassingly high proportion of those 1,000,114 page views came from people looking for photos of Paris Hilton. So whoop-de-do, I'm serving humanity by including some photos from other web sites that got ranked high on a Google Images search for "Paris Hilton," thereby generating thousands…

Oh, my god, I'm in love. At first blog post. I just installed Word 2007, which I bought at Amazon for a reasonable $90 (upgrade price). Right away I wanted to see if the blog publishing feature worked as promised. It did. Appropriately, my first Word 2007 post was about Shakira's "Hips don't lie" Grammy performance last night. She's beautiful. So is Word's new blogging capability. I write my posts in Word. I don't like to use TypePad's online editor. One glitch and all your writing can disappear. Plus, I like to have a backup of posts on my laptop.…

These “Pearls Before Swine” comic strips humorously address the sad state of the blogger who doesn’t get comments. I know just how the goat feels. It’s cool to get blog comments. Or, reader reviews. Last month Boudewijn Koole of The Netherlands made my day when I noticed his lengthy Amazon review of my book about Plotinus. The ending made me smile: Altogether this is a very valuable introduction into the original philosophy of Plotinos. Not difficult to read, nor does it reduce to meaninglessness the sometimes profound or complex questions that can be posed. On the contrary, this book is…

If you can understand the title of this post, then you should buy the recently-published German translation of my first book. Heck, even if you can’t understand it, go ahead and buy the book with the same name anyway. Currently Amazon is selling it at a generous discount. So for $10.17 plus shipping you get 300 pages of either comprehensible or incomprehensible German. Either way, that’s a great deal. Kudos to Matthias Schneider-Marfels, who I know as “Matt,” for having the linguistic fortitude to translate a revised version of my “God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder,” which has been out of print…

Today my HinesSight blog passed the 500,000 page view mark. In celebration of this milestone I’ll reveal what people look for most in my corner of the blogosphere. Can you guess? Three choices: (1) Cogent political analyses, (2) Profound philosophical insights, (3) Photos of sexy women. No big surprise here. I should have said: “three choices, and the first two don’t count.” My “The Tao of Paris Hilton” post accounted for a large share of those half a million page views. After Google Images put several of the photos in that post on the first page of a “Paris Hilton”…

I was admiring Keith’s remodel of his Word Shadows blog when I noticed that his link to HinesSight now was in a “Diogenist” category. Wow! My heart fluttered. Diogenist sounded so cool. At first. Then I started to wonder if it meant what I thought it did: someone who, like Diogenes, searches for an honest man or, more broadly, truth. Maybe it’s really an insult, something bad, like misogynist. I rushed to my dictionary. And couldn’t find it. “Diogenes,” yes. “Diogenist,” no. Clicked on to Google. Found a mere 36 entries. None seemed to be informative. Keith, man—I think you’ve…

A day after my blogger self was prominently displayed in the Salem newspaper, complete with not one but three photos of my blogging face, I’m finding it easy to handle my new fame. I’m handling it in the same way I handle the leprechauns in our garden, since managing something non-existent doesn’t require a lot of work. But before I realized that those who say “fame is fleeting” are vastly overstating the duration of my local blogging notoriety, I wasted quite a bit of time yesterday fretting about how to deal with the repercussions of the newspaper article. I wanted…

Namely, me. I pulled our paper out of the box today and saw a graying, grizzled, plaintive face peering from the top left corner of the front page next to a “Local blogger likes instant feedback” caption. It didn’t take me long to realize, “Aaaagh, that’s me! I look horrible.” Well, at least I got some instant feedback from myself. Fortunately, the larger photo in the Life Section article “Got blogs?” cast my quizzical look in a broader context and, thankfully, reduced the focus on my face. Unfortunately, Serena (our dog) was crouched just out of sight. She had popped…

I really appreciate an Amazon reader review that's titled, "All my life I've been looking for a book like this." But I do wish that the "suck" in the first sentence could have read "such." That is a typo, I hope.

There's a lot of rejection letter humor on the Internet. The best of it is put there by people who reject the rejection letters rather than letting the letters drag them down into drunken despair, which is just what the bastards who sent them want. I came across this classic today. It's probably been circulating in cyberspace for a long time, but I hadn't seen it before. And I like this rejected writer's sardonic reply style. I'm still waiting to hear back from Beacon Press about my query concerning my own ultimate rejection letter. I'll keep checking the mailbox.

A NYTimes.com article, “Bless Me Blog, for I’ve Sinned,” pointed me to the PostSecret weblog where anonymous 4x6 confessional postcards are displayed. They’re wonderfully creative and moving. You need to see the artwork pasted on most of the cards to get the full impact of the PostSecrets. But here’s a sampling of words: “My older sister has tried to kill herself three (3) times. Sometimes I wish she’d succeeded.” “I make up fantasy stories because my real life sucks. And now my fantasy life is starting to suck, too.” “Sometimes I think that other people are reading my thoughts so…