Birthday Cards for the Dead?

Have you ever seen a birthday card for someone already deceased? I don’t mean recently, someone who passed away but people still have a memorial sort of birthday for them. What about when it is your Father, long gone.

Today is my Dad’s birthday. I forget how long ago he died, it has been about 15 years, possibly more. I can’t give him a pretty or funny card. I didn’t find any wise or witty quotes. Not a single birthday card found for the deceased.

Has no one else ever thought of this? I will see what I can think of. Nothing brilliant so far.

What would you write, draw, create as a birthday card for family or friends long dead?

Editorial Services You Can Provide as a Home Business

Looking for ideas to try as a home business? I found a good list. Some require skills in editing, some lean towards technical knowledge, etc. Technical writing isn’t mentioned. But, indexing was interesting, not something I have heard much about.

Copyediting. This is where fact checking takes place, and where grammatical, stylistic and typographical errors are caught.

Proofreading. This is the last stop for a “finished” piece. The proofreader makes sure the copyediting changes have been properly made and no new errors are created in the process.

Indexing. There are indexing courses available and you can get indexing software.

Developmental editing. A developmental editor works with a manuscript on big-picture things like organization and content issues.

Book doctoring. This is an editorial service provided for manuscripts written by experts. They create a manuscript as best they can and then a book doctor puts it into publishable shape.

Ghost Writing. As a ghost writer, you actually do the research and write the book and someone else’s name is attached as the author.

Copywriting. Also known as business writing, this is writing that promotes a product or a service.

Book writing. Do you have an expertise in something professional, such as accounting or interior decorating? Or personally, like knitting? Why not write a book about it?

Magazine article writing. Magazines and newspapers are a great way to get your writing published before tackling the daunting task of writing a whole book.

Web page content provider. Providing content for a web site is a good way to make some money writing.

via Need a Business Idea? Here are 55 | Entrepreneur.com.

Speculative Fiction merging Non-fiction, History and Horror

Create a story, with some element of horror. An even that would give you nightmares, if it happened to you.

Don’t start with a family photograph. I think that would be a bit creepy, for you and your family. Find an old photograph, black and white works well for the dramatic effect. Also, anyone in the photograph is likely no longer living, if it really is an old photo.

Build a life for a person, or people, which could be real, but might not be. If you want to work on it, look into history for the local area. Find real stories which you can link to the people in the photograph.

Make a mix of non-fiction, possibility, and your worst nightmares.

Writer/Director James Marsh’s first feature, WISCONSIN DEATH TRIP, is an intimate, shocking and sometimes hilarious account of the disasters that befell one small town in Wisconsin during the final decade of the 19th century. The film is inspired by Michael Lesy’s book of the same name which was first published in 1973. Lesy discovered a striking archive of black and white photographs in the town of Black River Falls dating from the 1890’s and married a selection of these images to extracts from the town’s newspaper from the same decade. The effect was surprising and disturbing. The town of Black River Falls seems gripped by some peculiar malaise and the weekly news is dominated by bizarre tales of madness, eccentricity and violence amongst the local population. Suicide and murder are commonplace. People in the town are haunted by ghosts, possessed by devils and terrorized by teenage outlaws and arsonists.

Source: Wisconsin Death Trip – About

See also: Dakota Death Trip – Site by Derek Dahlsad. (Archived, but still online).

Could you go this far and make a site about your own town? It would be tricky, the mix of real stories, real people in photographs and the addition of speculation.

The Cathedrals of the Fields

            We hear about the grain elevators from Saskatchewan but less often about our own Ontario barns. Those hand built, long standing structures right in our own backyard, not literally in most cases. But, there they are. You don't need to drive far outside of a city or town in Ontario to find an old barn.

Cathedrals of the fields is a great description for them. Probably the best I have heard. I should look for more.

“These are our heritage buildings in the rural landscape,” she said. “They’ve been called the cathedrals of the fields. The craftsmanship is beautiful. They might all look the same from the outside but, on the inside, they tell stories of the farmers who built them.”

Quote from Krista Hulshof – Source: Preserving Ontario’s barns | Farms.com

Are There Psychogeography Enthusiasts in Ontario?

            "There is a class of walkers who share a certain camaraderie. We are not drunks, tramps, hookers, cops, priests, party-goers or night-shift workers; we are merely outsiders. On the rare occasions when we meet we acknowledge one another with a tiny tilt of the head, or a quick nod; but each of us carries his or her own solitude. We are invisible and cannot be touched." - Sean Stewart

A quote for explorers and those who enjoy psychogeographical explorations.

I started Ontario Psychogeography on Blogger but I haven’t found a lot to post there.

Thank You, But is Your Mind Part of Your Body?

Can you thank your body?

I’d thank my body but I don’t know if it can communicate enough to understand it. I guess having the gratitude is enough, or will have to be.

The idea of writing a letter to your own body is off putting. Speaking in thoughts or out loud doesn’t seem as odd.

Not that I don’t appreciate it being there, I just don’t know if it can understand anything I think (say or write) without my brain. Do you include your brain as part of your body. Probably, its part of the hardware. But, the software part, isn’t that not quite included.

Autonomy – does your mind have independence from your brain? Thinking of the mind as the software, not something tangible and physical like the brain. Without your brain your mind couldn’t really do much. Is there some kind of line between the mind and brain, where they connect but are individual too?

Anthropomorphism – is your body an inanimate object which you have feelings for due to your close association? Does that make it real, or do you make it real by existing inside of it and using your brain to make it move?

Pareidolia – Not the same as feeling connected to inanimate objects, this is seeing faces in them. Different and yet a lot of fun. I thought it was worth mentioning.

Thoughts inspired from Pieces of K Blog, writing prompts:

Write a love letter to your body thanking it for carrying you and keeping you alive.

Shutting Up Instead of Talking

According to Hersh, "songwriting is about shutting up instead of talking."

Hersh is Kristin Hersh, a songwriter.

This quote reminds me of the old one about writing being easy, just slit your wrists and bleed over the paper, something like that. Possibly less dramatic and drastic sounding, but with the same meaning.

In the end most communication is about shutting off one thing so the flow of ideas can come from another source. Like stop talking and listen instead.

You could go on in this theme of writing and blood and mention about writing being like killing babies. But the babies are your words and ideas. You can’t keep them all. It’s not so much the writing but the editing stage where you have to start killing things in that way.

What is the Best White Elephant Gift?

Do you know what a white elephant is?

A white elephant is something you’d like to get rid of, its not useful and usually too expensive to use or keep. People sometimes have white elephant gift exchanges, like re-gifting, presents they have been given and would like to get rid of, graciously. The idea is to try finding someone who will love, or at least like, the extravagant, and not useful to most people, gift.

What would you bring to a white elephant gift exchange? Coffee table books, they look nice, they tend to be big with a lot of photos but almost no one actually reads them. Trendy gifts often become white elephants when the fashion turns out to be a fad. There are a lot of small kitchen appliances created for very specific things which are otherwise useful and just taking up space. Or, things which could have been useful if they weren’t too exotic, or embarrassing to use. Things which are personalized, too exclusive to be re-gifted and not likely to be accepted for resale at most stores.

My white elephant, from years ago, came with good intentions and thoughtfulness. It was an espresso machine from people who knew I enjoyed coffee but didn’t know I had no idea how to get an espresso machine to work. All my attempts ended in kitchen clean ups, not too many steam burns luckily. I never got the hang of it. But, I appreciated the thought.

  • art socks
  • magnetic poetry
  • pet rock

Not the entire list but a few I picked from: 34 Best White Elephant Gift Ideas – FudgeMyLife.

Save the Diary

I think it is sad to see so many personal journals disappearing. What happens to old diaries when the writers are gone? If they were a celebrity of some kind they would be kept, valued. What about the rest of us?

I read about some groups and organizations keeping journals from ordinary (for lack of a better word) people. They were keeping them as historical records, which is a good idea. The average person may not make or change history in huge or noticeable amounts, but we do take part, have our own thoughts, and make our own notes.

Have you ever found one of your old diaries, one you had thought lost? I have. What do you do with it, the unfinished and the already written pages? Do you just continue on, not minding the gap? What do you do with the journal you were already writing before you found the old journal?

It doesn’t seem like a big issue in the achene of things. But, some of these little things do matter, sort of.

I just continue on, posting to whichever book until one or the other is full. Then finish filling up the other one. I date my entries. If anyone does ever find and read them, they can figure it out. Chances are, no one will. So, don’t feel you have to be a strict self-archivist. Write as you please.

But, consider saving your diary/ journal. You never know, you could be famous posthumously.

Cleaning Up Your Website For Yourself and Readers

I routinely get rid of plugins and themes I’m not using. At this point I only use GeneratePress, so dealing with themes is as simple as not doing anything, I just have one theme and it updates itself.

If you have found one theme you like working with, get rid of the rest. Including the WordPress default themes. If you are not using them, don’t keep them hanging around asking to be updated for no reason. If you ever do want to go back to one of them, or use it to test your site, you can just download one again. I did this when I had an error and wanted to be sure it was nothing to do with my theme. It wasn’t.

Don’t keep plugins around for cosmetic reasons, in case you decide to use it later, or give it another try. Even dormant, deactivated plugins can cause errors on your site. Just make a note of the plugin name (or have a test site you can leave stuff like extra plugins) and delete it from your working/ active site.

If you have any plugins which are not automatically updated, get the newest file and update them. I have some plugins which I did not get through the WordPress plugin directory, some of those need to be manually updated. Plugins I like using with ClassicPress I update from files on GitHub. Plugins I have paid for I download from the developer’s site.

Most of the steps to clean up your site are simple. Get rid of the unnecessary clutter like:

  • old post revisions
  • tags you don’t use (or merge them with tags you make more use of)
  • pages no longer used (some may have been created by plugins)
  • comment spam you’ve been ignoring
  • user profiles which aren’t in use (update your own)
  • broken links in posts, resource lists, or bookmarks
  • image and media files not attached to anything (or not being used as headers, banners, etc.).
  • generic/default content from the theme you are using
  • plugins and themes (as I wrote above)

You can also clean up your database. Some plugins which tackle this also go through old post revisions and comment spam. Read the instructions and always backup your site before using a plugin to clean it. It is so much easier to delete the backup file you don’t need than to regret not having one while fixing the damage later. If in doubt, talk to your web host. See what they recommend.

The Broken Link Checker plugin does a really great job of finding broken links (including broken image file links) and helping you fix them.

Cleaning Up Posts

Cleaning up posts is a much bigger job to tackle. It will help if you have already done all the other cleaning first. That will help you find broken things and fix them or choose not to keep them. So some of your post clean up is already done.

My site isn’t for business, commercial or marketing so I don’t need to focus on a big post clean up to impress Google, or any other service. I clean up posts for human readers. I don’t mind to keep old posts around. Even the outdated content is an archive of things I have seen and done.

I am going through and updating links, or unlinking the original site if I can’t find another option. It’s fun and sad to see which sites I remember and which are still online. I get sidetracked trying to find people who used to run the sites and see what they are doing now.

I do have broken image files, a lot of them. I moved and merged my sites together. I’ve been slowly cleaning up which means finding old images on my hard drive or making new images to replace those I can’t find. I’m far from done. If you have moved things around chances are you have a trail of broken links and images too.

Also, posts I planned to write but have left as draft or pending posts. After sitting in pending awhile the original post you had linked to or gotten the idea from may be gone. Or, the idea has lost its importance, relevance, or inspiration for you. If you haven’t published something in there after a year you have moved on from it or have plenty of other fresher content and ideas to keep you busy.

This is a list online, no doubt there are others. I’d add to the point about similar content and say that you could link all the related posts instead of merging or out right deleting them. Turn them into a series of posts with an index linking all the relevant posts at the bottom (or top) of each post.

  • Content that is out of date or irrelevant now and needs to be deleted.
  • Information that needs to be updated (in particular, check your About and Contact pages).
  • Poor-quality content that’s better off removed or replaced.
  • Content that is too similar (for instance, if you have two posts on identical subjects, you may want to only keep the best one).

Source: Complete Guide to Cleaning Up Your WordPress Website – DreamHost

Celebrate the end of the clean up, especially if you had a lot of clean up to do.

Keep the clean up in mind as you publish and maintain your site. Not everything has to wait for a once a year cleaning. Maintain as you go along.