WATERMARK

HOW
do
YOU

Blog?

It’s a textual thing. Pure text with some inline CSS. No graphics required.

Frank Paynter at Sandhill Trek is collecting posts on How Do You Blog, complete with this very cool text graphic from Mandarin Design.

How do I blog? Difficult to answer on this stubbornly blank day. When I’m less blank, I write. I take pictures. I respond to inspiration I find on the web, and link to it.

How do I write?

I’ve recently discovered that I
have two different poets inside me. One writes in the daytime. She
tends to write ‘in the moment’ poems; a bit meditative, and completely
accessible to even the quickly scanning reader.

The other
writes in the middle of the night, directly from sleep, and often from
dreams. She shares a vocabulary with the first, but writes in a
different, and often mysterious, context. She sometimes writes about
things she does not know.

Both write initially by hand, in a
Circa notebook, with a fountain pen. The daytime poet moves fairly
quickly to the keyboard (this did not used to be the case) and the
second tends to move closer to the final draft in the notebook.

Both
write by falling in, by settling deep into some just-verbal space that
seems to be located in the midsection. This is a dark place, from which
she pays attention; from which boundaries between self and the world
fade. She is skinless.

Both of these ‘shes’ usually write in the first person.

And how do I write other things, like this post? I sit at the keyboard, and just begin.

How do I photograph?

I
am rarely far from home, and usually have the camera with me when I
leave the house. I watch. When I see something, when something
‘catches’ me, I take pictures. I take point and shoot pictures.

As
a writer, a poet, I have studied my craft; as a snapshot photographer,
I have not. I have been surprised to find that others enjoy these
photos taken simply to please myself. I do some tweaking with Adobe
Photoshop Elements, but have only begun to explore the possibilities of
digital transformations.

How do I blog?

I use
TypePad, since I’m not a geek and mostly don’t want to worry about
hosting or CSS or controlling spam. The first year, I was madly
interested in anything to do with blogging and constantly changed and
updated my sidebar; now it’s way outdated. I use TextEdit to draft my
posts; then add links and edit in the TypePad interface. I use Flickr
to host most of my photographs.

I’ve talked some about other
tools I use on my Blogging Blog, but the most critical one is this
laptop. I type on the iBook my readers bought me. This, I think, is a
stunning fact.

I don’t believe I’ve ever blogged in my
pajamas. This is because I blog in the daytime, and I associate pajamas
in the daytime with illness. I do my absolute best to deny that I am
ill, so blogging in pajamas is to be avoided at all costs.

But I do sometimes blog while serving as a cat sofa. And I cat blog.

I
notice that Chasing Daisy describes Watermark this way:  If I said
"poetry and cats" you’d roll your eyes heavenwards wouldn’t you? Go
see, it’s so much more than that.

I love my readers.