Writing/Weblogs

I finally got around to checking out the blogs mentioned in TIME magazine’s June 21, 2004 issue, in the “Meet Joe Blog” piece. The sub-headline was: “Why are more and more people getting their news from amateur websites called blogs? Because they’re fast, funny, and totally biased.” Right on! We bloggers also can bask in these words (by Lev Grossman, who wrote the article) about blogs: “They represent—no, they are—the voice of the little guy. And the little guy is a lot smarter than big media might have you think. Blogs showcase some of the smartest, sharpest, writing being published.…

When Jack Bogdanski emailed me and asked to use my recently-posted photo of the Three Sisters on his way-cool and way-popular Jack Bog’s Blog, I was thrilled. Wow! I never dreamed I’d be almost a professional published photographer, the “almost” a necessary qualifier because (1) naturally I’m not being paid for use of the photo, (2) the heading of a weblog isn’t really a publication, and (3) simply snapping a digital photo when the camera is on automatic barely qualifies as photography (I did, however, press the zoom lens button with my right index finger, which involved some minimal decision-making).…

An author’s scariest moment is when the first advance copies of a book arrive from the printer. Also, this is an author’s most wonderful moment. But scariness precedes the wonderfulness. “Are the pages printed all screwy? Is the cover color wrong? What major typo did we miss?” Yesterday Laurel yelled from the front door at me: “A box just came. It looks like books.” Oh, God, I thought. This is it. My writing life is over. And it is just beginning. Both. Neither. I couldn’t think straight. I didn’t want to go up and open the box. I dearly wanted…

From an essay in “Writers and their Craft” by novelist Frederick Busch: “I write for a living. I write, that is to say, for my life—for my life’s sake. Which is to say: when I write, I consider my life to be at stake; the values that help me to measure it, and the moments, memories, and emotions of it that I cherish—the people, therefore, whose presence in it makes me want to keep experiencing my life—all are at risk when I work. It feels that way to me. I believe the feeling to be true, and I write from…

James Alexander Thom has a great piece in the Spring 2004 Author’s Guild Bulletin: “Rejection Flip.” I sometimes wonder whether forking out $90 a year to belong to the Author’s Guild makes sense, but articles like this one are priceless. Plus, I get a certain satisfaction in turning to the last page of each issue of the Bulletin and reading the names of some fellow members who serve on the Guild Council: Judy Blume, Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton, Erica Jong, Scott Turow. Writing fame and fortune have evaded me so far, but hope springs eternal that someday I can…

Orblogs: Community of Oregon Weblogs—This is a great service to the Oregon weblogging world. I’ve learned about some interesting weblogs and met, cyberspacely, some equally interesting webloggers. The first few lines of postings pop up here almost as soon as they are posted. I love to troll down the listings and see the wonderfully wide variety of subjects people are writing about. Child Safety 101—I talked today with a friend, Benny Mares, who wrote this book and told me that this Child Safety 101 website is up. Click on “Book” and you’ll find a nice blurb from Laurel. Benny has…

I’ve just finished the index for my book about the Greek philosopher Plotinus: “Return to the One—Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization.” There are various ways to prepare an index. The approach I used must be the hardest on the back and the knees, but fortunately I don’t have any back/knee problems—until now, at least. I scattered 18 pages with index entries in a semi-circle around me on the floor. Then I leaned over and jotted down the page number(s) that had entries for various subjects, working from the galleys that the book designer had sent me. It took me three days,…

News item I just noticed…“'Dawn of the Dead' debuts with $27.3 million, dethroning 'Passion'” And, no, I haven’t seen “The Passion of the Christ.” My distaste for the movie is based on utterly sound philosophical grounds, discussed previously in my “Plotinus and the Passion of the Christ” posting. Since my book about Plotinus, a marvelous 3rd century Greek mystic philosopher, is about to be published, you will find me shamelessly using every opportunity to work, and rework, Plotinus into this weblog. My (probably vain) hope is that these humble meme-seeds somehow will cause interest in Plotinus’s admirably non-religious approach to…

Oh, man, I’m so excited. I’m a publisher! No, wait, I misspoke, and left off two exclamation marks: I’m a publisher!!! I can prove it. I have my not-really-framable piece of paper from the corporation commissioner that says I’m doing business under an assumed business name: Adrasteia Publishing. If I’d wanted to pay $10 more I could have gotten a rather cheesy only-slightly-more-suitable-for-framing certificate featuring a background photo of the Oregon state capital, but I decided thriftiness was going to be one of the hallmarks of Adrasteia Publishing—along with, hopefully, publishing (my own books, of course). After much exploring in…

Actually, several someones. My fantasy starts with the Fulton County (Georgia) school system, which recently expelled a high school freshman for writing a fictional tale in her private journal about a student who dreams she kills a teacher. I saw this girl, Rachel Boim, interviewed on CNN today. You couldn’t ask for a more intelligent, articulate, and mature 14-year old than Rachel—who undoubtedly surpasses the Fulton County school administrators in all of these qualities. When asked if she would write the tale again, given what has just happened, she wisely said, “Of course I would. It was just a story,…

That's my sentiment at the moment, having just reinstalled the blogging software after more than a week in the deeper depths of upgrade-to-a-larger-hard-disk-hell. Reinstalling, and then posting an "I'm back" message resulted in the disappearance of every single trace of the old HinesSight postings--which, in retrospect, was entirely predictable, since the newly installed software had me starting from scratch. The message, my friends, is to faithfully backup your precious whatever. This is relatively easy to do with computer whatevers; I just had to copy a folder from a backup drive to the new drive. Its a bigger problem with more…

My sister recently reminded me that it had been five days since my last posting. Indefensible! I shall punish myself severely, in a fashion that I cannot let myself know, or I would be able to take steps to avoid it. Let the punishment fall when I least expect it, which it will, since it isn't known even to myself. My only defense, and it is a weak one, is that dear Dell 8200 is still suffering from some start-up and performance problems, not unlike yours truly. So I continue to spend more time than usual fussing with computer maintenance…