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.

For the First Time, Recently Again

Language is an art. You can make it say anything you want it to. Fiction and non-fiction, they just work a little differently. Fiction can be anything you can imagine and manage to describe to readers. Non-fiction relies on explanations. But writers can play with words and make them say or sell anything.

I read this at Wikipedia this morning.

On a side note, I have contributed several times to Wikipedia. Notes like this seem to pop up a few times every year. I do get a little annoyed by the begging and they claim almost no one contributes. Well, I have and this does not make me feel like contributing again. So, it might not be a really smart note to leave up.

The interesting part of this note was “for the first time recently”. Of course, they can’t say “for the first time” because the first time was several years ago and this doesn’t even happen once a year any more. So, “for the first time recently”. Such a clever way of making it seem like this is a first time, again. But, there can only be one first time. It’s not false advertising and it’s not untrue but it is pretty schemy. I chose not to contribute after reading this.

I appreciate Wikipedia. I don’t appreciate feeling that my past contributions are just a drop in the bucket for them and weren’t enough that they aren’t right back begging again. Also, this scheming with words, doesn’t impress me much.

Liking the Creative Struggle

I lost track of where I found this. But, I like it.

Typing in the text for those who can’t see it from the image:

Through this mild and harmless struggle, I acquired a hobby. “How agitated I am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so agitated,” Jamaica Kincaid writes in My Garden Book. “Nothing works just the way I thought it would, nothing looks just the way I had imagined it, and when sometimes it does look like what I had imagined (and this, thank God, is rare) I am startled that my imagination is so ordinary.”