apostrophe, by jimmiehomeschoolmom on Flickr (CC-a licensed)

Way back in school, you were probably taught that contractions had no place in your essays and reports. School was to be for formal writing. You put two spaces after every period, you compiled a perfect bibliography, and so as not to sound like a kid you banished the contraction to the lowly realm of notes to pass to your friends while your teacher blathered on about spelling and grammar.

But this is now, people. You’re not in school. Or maybe you are, but you’re also online. And for all the varied things you write that aren’t written to a teacher, please, for the love of gods, use contractions.

Don’t know what a contraction is? It’s when you combine two words into one, indicating the combination with an apostrophe. “You are” is contracted into “you’re”. “Do not” becomes “don’t”. “I am” becomes “I’m”. (If you have trouble deciding to use “it’s” or “its”, remember that the one with the apostrophe is a contraction. Same goes for “you’re” and “your”, and for “they’re” “their” and “there”.)

Writers who don’t use contractions sound like robots. So yeah, I’m gonna just go for broke and say it: CONTRACTIONS MAKE US HUMAN.

If you’re at all concerned about connecting with your readers, give some thought to your use of contractions. If people tell you your writing doesn’t sound like you, go see if you’re using contractions.

And for the love of all that is holy in style and usage, when you comment on something online – which is perhaps the most informal of all types of online writing – use contractions. (Brother, this is for you! No more, “You are nuts,” on my Facebook wall, okay? Okay.)

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Oh, my glee when I got an email a few months ago from Diane, of Craftypod, and Paul, of Dudecraft, asking if I’d be up for joining a little project they were cooking up.

Through their own blogs, these two have blown my mind pretty much on a weekly basis for the last year. The prospect of them starting a bigger project with a focus on the thoughtful examination of pretty much everything having to do with making and crafting was enough to make me giddy. To be a part of the project sent my imagination into the stratosphere. And I was very, very flattered.

And today, that project is a GO!

The other contributors are Betsy, of Craftivism; Pip, of Meet Me at Mike’s; and Alice, of Futuregirl.

Our first few posts are already up, and given that there are six of us that means you have a good hour of reading ahead of you. I’ve written so far about getting out of a crafting dry spell and about my favourite topic: opinions. I’d love to hear from you about those pieces, and in general I’m psyched about the discussion and community that will hopefully build up around this new project.

In sum: YAY.

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I didn’t finish my novel last November, but I’m going to try very hard to finish one this November. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, get thee to the National Novel Writing Month website, stat).

This despite the nagging reality that, at mid-afternoon on November 1st, I have almost no idea what I’m going to write about. I’m pretty sure I’m going to start with a bartender. In a bar. And there likely won’t be anything to do with leaf mold*. Anyway.

Last week I was on a Greyhound for a few hours, and staring out the window I found myself thinking about how I might manage to write 50,000 words in a month, work, attend two weddings, throw our annual massive U.S. Thanksgiving dinner, read and discuss our book-club book, and eat. Where by “eat” I mean nourish myself by ingesting foods that aren’t sitting in the giant plastic cauldron leftover from last night.

A familiar thought bubbled up through the hum of the engine and my sidelined wondering about how a cool draft was managing to seep through the heating vent below the window: I’ve felt this way before. I bite off more than I can chew all the time, but the times it ends up being a very good thing are the times I do it in public, online. And, more specifically, when I most certainly don’t do it alone.

So.

There are two things I’m going to do all month, and in both cases I hope you’ll join in on the fun. Not only because I would very, very much appreciate your help, but also because I really do think it’ll be fun for all of us.

Thing the first: When I get stuck (and note that I don’t even have a plot yet, so), I will boil down that stickiness into one, concentrated question. I will ask this question of you. If it’s short enough or I’m desperate and don’t want to wait, I’ll ask it on Twitter. If it’s too long, I’ll pose it here on the blog. And at the end of the month, every person who’s chimed in with an answer via tweet or blog comment will get a shiny PDF of the novel I’ve written, whether I used their suggestion or not. (Note: The novel will almost certainly be crap. Participate at your own risk.)

Thing the second: Hugh over at Book Oven is doing a nifty thing with NaNoWriMo participants. He’s asking writers to upload their novels-in-progress to Book Oven so they can invite people to do bite-size edits as the novel progresses. (The nifty thing Book Oven does is allow members to perform edits on very small sections of text, so a writer doesn’t need to feel awkward about having lovely strangers read their whole project and a proofreader can get a lot done and not even realize it. Read more about Hugh’s Nano idea here.) Book Oven works in such a way that only members can perform bite-size edits and only people I’ve invited can work on my project. If you’d like to have a crack at my half-assed prose this month, leave a comment and I’ll invite you to the project. Everyone who performs bite-size edits will receive a shiny PDF of the (hopefully beautifully proofread by you and you and you) novel I’ll have written. (Note [again]: The novel will almost certainly be crap. But at least you’ll have gotten that impression yourself, one snippet at a time. Participate at your own risk.)

* Amy O’Neill Houck and I started sending each other random notes last week in an effort to spark some sort of inspiration in preparation for today. One such note she sent me was “leaf mold.” I spent a few days thinking about how mould on leaves could in some way tie in to an apocalypse of some sort (we know of my love of apocalyptic fiction, yes?), and then I looked it up and discovered that in fact leaf mold is something to do with composting. So what I’m sure of right now is that my novel will most certainly not be about leaf mold. On Book Oven, my project is called “Leaf Mold: This Novel Is Not About It“.

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Yesterday, in a fit of bluntness, I let loose on Twitter an idea I’ve been simmering for a long time.

If you’ve disabled commenting on your blog, I’m gonna go ahead and say you’re not a blogger.

I had a conversation with my friend Scott about it. And a bunch of people responded on Twitter. And I talked about it at work with Zak.

@meagangracie asked, “how would you classify @mimismartypants then?” And I replied, “As a writer.”

I mentioned Seth Godin, the master of profoundly stating the obvious*. He has a tremendous impact on conversation in the marketing and publishing worlds, but he’s pretty much inaccessible. How would I classify him? As a writer. (And as a speaker and a consultant and whatever.)

Blogging is about conversation, and not just the conversation a blogger might spark elsewhere. It’s about a conversation on that writer’s blog. Put another way (or perhaps a different way; I’m still working this out in my head): a blogger is a participant in conversation, whether it’s a conversation they start or simply join in on. Just starting it and walking away or watching silently from the sidelines is simply not participating.

What do you think?

* I say that without sarcasm. There’s a true talent in conveying such things to people, and he really, really has it.

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It’s a busy heatwavy week over here. As the dog alternates between sleeping and panting and I sit very slowly wishing I could do the same (everything is done very slowly during a heatwave, see), I marvel a bit about how much I’m getting done.

First, here’s a link to the interview I did with Mary Beth on Getting Loopy last night. The audio quality isn’t great, but we talked about the new Crocheted Gifts book (on shelves now!), The Creative Life project, my new blond hair, Twitter, and about how we didn’t have time to talk about the future of publishing (which is a shame, because I think that would have been an awesome topic).

Next, I wrote and recorded an essay for episode 84 of Cast On. The topic was industrial fashion, and I deliver a rant in two parts. About said delivery: I attempted to speak slowly. This is very hard for me. I think it sounds choppy and ridiculous in places, and I hope that doesn’t make you want to rip your ears off as you listen. That out of the way, the essay is about 30 minutes into the recording; as always, though, I recommend you listen to the whole thing. Brenda puts together a great podcast.

Finally, Sister Diane of Craftypod and I are going to do a bit of an experiment this afternoon. At 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern time, I’m going to interview her via Twitter. You can follow the conversation via the hashtag #weavebook. We’re going to discuss the three books she’s released in as many months—two self-published, one published with Watson-Guptill, an imprint of Random House. Not only will we talk about the books themselves, but we’ll also go into her varying experiences with self- and traditional publishing. I’m really looking forward to it, as I know Diane has given a great deal of thought to publishing and she’s one of the smartest people I know. After the interview part, we’ll open things up to Q&A, so come ready with questions!

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An unexpected and thoroughly delightful side effect of quitting my job last year is that right after I did it I managed to get know some incredibly cool people whose work I’d admired from afar for a long time. I really don’t know how or why it happened; maybe cutting myself free somehow opened me up to forging new relationships.

One of those cool people is Betsy Greer, whose work over at Craftivism I have long loved. For several months we’ve been writing emails to each other in a sort of throwback to pen pals from days of yore. We come from very different backgrounds, we have somewhat different goals, but our concerns, fears, values, and challenges are very, very similar when it comes to creating a career that is truly fulfilling. What a relief to discover we weren’t alone. A profound relief. And then we wondered if other people might also feel some relief to know they’re not alone.

So we’ve done what bloggers do: we’ve started sharing those email exchanges on a new blog called The Creative Life*. Every few days we’ll post another email from our correspondence and when we’ve run out of them we’ll continue our exchange right there on the blog.

Today’s inaugural post is light, but there’s more to come. I hope Betsy and I have as much fun with the blog as we’ve had getting to know each other, and I have a good feeling we will—especially if you chime into the discussion over there, hey? It’s really all about the discussion.

*TheCreativeLife.net has been the centre of a few different plans over the last half-year. If you’ve been privy to any of those plans, I hope this final incarnation will grow into something along the lines of what you might have been excited about.

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Over on the Booknet Canada blog, Morgan Cowie wrote about subscription models in online news and how they don’t work in part because they stifle the sharing and conversation that make the Web go ’round. She wonders if similar models would work for ebooks, which are very different from news articles*.

But I’m not really wanting to talk about ebooks. I want to talk about this quote from the post: “Online content is the currency of connection and limiting the way this can be spread undercuts one of the primary functions of reading news in the first place.”

I agree with the second part of this statement: restricting people’s ability to share online content not only stifles one of the primary uses of the web (to share the stuff we like or dislike), but it also consequently inserts a great big barrier to people finding that info at all. That can’t be in the best interest of media sites, eh?

The first part of that quote I’d like to pick apart a little. I don’t think it’s online content, per se, that’s the currency of connection. I think opinions are the currency that makes the online world spin. We share opinions in exchange for content. That content is the product, really; opinions are the figurative coins. Sort of. Really, opinions are the value we place on that content. (This is a difficult metaphor to run with; forgive me.)

People aren’t interested in any old content just because it’s there. We’re interested in things we relate to in some way or another, and we’re interested in things other people we relate to are interested in. It matters to me that someone I like and admire enjoys a certain book, or that someone I know has similar taste to mine loves a new band. I like to engage with people who hate things I love and vice versa.

Opinions are the things that matter, from the passive endorsement of passing along a link without comment, to the commenting on said passing on, to big long rambling blog posts like this one.

What’s your opinion?

* I haven’t really taken the ebook plunge yet, for several reasons. One, I despise the DRM and proprietary formats of Amazon’s Kindle (also, the Kindle isn’t available in Canada yet), and I’ve heard iffy things about the consistent working of the Sony Reader. Also, books are about the one thing we collect chez Werker, and I love full bookshelves; we also lend books to friends all the time. Maybe when Sony puts out a new version of their reader I’ll take the plunge for books I won’t feel compelled to keep or lend out.

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Once upon a time there was a woman who started a website in her basement. It wasn’t a dank, dusty, musty basement like you might imagine. Her room in the basement was painted green. It had windows that let in some light but not too much light and the ceiling was very low and it’s dramatic to have started such a project in a basement. She started her website and people liked it and one day just over a year later she went to Ohio for a trade show to see if maybe she could make that website into a business. She flew on points and stayed at her friend’s house and felt lucky to be able to take such little financial risk.

Before her trip, her kind book editor suggested she email another author who would be at the show, thus ensuring she’d know at least one other person. This book author was friendly and outgoing and showed the woman what a trade show is all about.

Over the years she never did make a very good business out of her website, but she did enjoy the website a lot and she made great friends from all over the world because lovely people volunteered to work on it with her and she got lots of work doing other things and all that made up for her only sometimes barely breaking even on the website. And twice a year she would fly to that trade show except once she took the train, and she would do lots of business and see some of her great friends.

After a few years, the woman got a wonderful job that made her too busy to work all the time on the website, and so she changed it so it wouldn’t take up so much of her time but also so that it would be better and would allow all the people who enjoyed it to participate with it lots more.

Eventually, the time came for the woman to move on. There were other websites she wanted to play with and other topics she wanted to spend her time on. Someone else took over the wonderful job and a company took over the website, but the woman still went to the trade shows. She realized at her last one that she was mainly going just to see her great friends and to make new ones and she started wondering if that’s a good enough reason to attend a business event.

She hasn’t figured out the answer yet.

The end.

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Garbage Pail Kid image by krystal.pritchett

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing—about how much I want to be doing it, what I might do it about, whether someone somewhere might pay me to do it. Since the theme of this year is “It’s no longer the time of sitting around and thinking about doing something,” well, welcome to Thursdays Are for Stories. Long or short, fiction or non- (most likely non-fiction, at least for now), proper stories or just memories, I’m going to do my best to write up some anecdote, thought or tale every Thursday, beginning today.

As I write this I’m sitting in my parents’ living room in Upstate New York, two weeks into a nineteen-day trip. Having ventured all over Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Gunks/Catskills region and this, the strip-mall town of my adolescence, I’ve been overcome by memories big and small and I’ve started keeping a list. This first story isn’t so much a story as a memory of a particular childhood era, such as it was.

Until I was nine years old my family lived in an apartment in Brooklyn. Not a historic once-tenement brownstone in some western neighbourhood ten minutes from Manhattan by train, but a top-floor two-bedroom place in a nondescript three-story walk-up in Canarsie. You’ve probably never heard of Canarsie. It isn’t one of the more romantic parts of Brooklyn. Working-class, at the end of the L subway line, it’s the setting of the ill-fated boating jaunt in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; that’s the only time I recall encountering it in literature or cinema.

There was a proper shingled house next door to our apartment. I remember it being white and black. A young family lived in the basement suite. They yelled a lot and had a daughter a few years younger than I was. I played there a few times but never had fun. The mother’s parents lived in the main part of the house. They had guard dogs in a fenced-in area along our side of the building. I was terrified of dogs until I was eight. When I was a teenager, several years after we moved upstate, my mom casually mentioned that these neighbours were drug dealers. I’d had no idea. I’d thought limousines double parked on a residential street was a normal Brooklyn thing, like mothers yelling out third-story windows to their kids or playing in the street and yelling back up to your mother. As a teenager with my eyes newly opened, I felt simultaneously unsettled and like I’d earned an urban-dweller notch in my belt.

My world, up to age nine, was about three or four square blocks. I went to elementary school around the corner and across the street (that was exactly how I thought of it; if somebody asked, I’d say “I go to school aroundthecornerandacrossthestreet.”) Beginning in first grade I walked to and from school by myself. About two-thirds of the way down my street, away from the corner I rounded on my way to school, was an alley that cut through the block. On the other side of it and across the street was the school’s fenced-in asphalt field, but I didn’t walk through the alley to get to school. The alley was also asphalt, old and cracking, creating its own gravel grittiness. It sloped down at either end and a run-down convenience store sat at the bottom more toward the school than my street. I couldn’t quite see over the high counter. It’s possible the store did its entire business in candy, baseball cards and cigarettes.

Around fourth grade, a new obsession hit. It came after plastic charm necklaces and my first perm. Nod with a crooked smile if you also were obsessed, in the mid ’80s, with Garbage Pail Kids. Oh, how clever these collectors’ cards were*. The same size and shape as baseball cards, you didn’t have to follow a sport to collect them (I didn’t become a Yankees fan till after college, and I’ve since lost touch and regret it). You didn’t have to know the relative value of the cards you lucked into, or differentiate one league of teams from another. You just had to laugh your tiny ass off at grotesquely rendered caricatures like the iconic Adam Bomb (a Cabbage Patch Kid-like wee boy with his head exploding into a fiery mushroom cloud.)

I found one of my first packs of cards in the alley store. I went back all the time looking for more. I was nearly always disappointed. I became frantic and obsessed. I simply couldn’t wait. Consequently, Garbage Pail Kids were responsible for my growing familiarity with the greater neighbourhood. There was, a couple of stores in from the corner of Flatlands Avenue and some other street, a less falling-down store that also, on more frequent occasion than did the alley store, carry Garbage Pail Kids. This store may or may not have been called The Nosher, or some such variation. A “nosh,” in Yiddish, means a snack.

I carried my Garbage Pail Kids with me at all times. I amassed a stack a couple of inches thick and wrapped it with a rubber band. The corners bloomed and the edges got dirty.

A friend and I spent an afternoon on her stoop, skipping around, sitting cross-legged, giggling, drinking juice, coming up with new Kids for a contest Topps was having. My genius idea was for for Eli P. Hunt, a kid with an elephant trunk for a nose. It would have been awesome! It didn’t win. I couldn’t understand why.

Wikipedia says the cards came out in 1985. That means the first series was released at most a mere six months before we moved upstate. In my memory, I was younger than that**. It’s hard for my adult brain to make sense of this timeline. I’m certain I wasn’t obsessed with collecting cards when I started fifth grade in my new school. The more I think about it, the happier I am that my brief passion for the collectibles seemed to endure for so long even if it really hadn’t. They were happy days, filled with ridiculous chatter and imagination. Those cards turned the more saccharine pop-culture phenomenon of Cabbage Patch Kids (I named my blond doll after the stars of Little House on the Prairie) on its head. They made it apparent to me as a young kid that even the most powerful fads could be flipped over. I’m tremendously grateful for that, and for the ooey gooey rhyming names and stickers I would never, ever peel off.

*I learned while looking up links for this post that the Garbage Pail Kids were an Art Spiegelman creation. No wonder they were so awesome.

**UPDATE (12 June): It turns out it’s my adult brain that was confused. We moved in 1986, not ’85, as gently pointed out to me by my mom last night, which means my original memory of having Garbage-Pail-Kid fever in the third grade was accurate. It was nice to have that happy feeling of inaccurate memory for a day, but today it’s replaced by a different happy feeling—that of having been right all along.

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Yesterday on Twitter, designer Vashti Braha started listing crocheters who use the service. She did so in response to Amie Hirtes‘ tweet wondering where all the crocheters are. Ah, yes. Where on earth are the crocheters? I replied:

Since the earliest days of CrochetMe.com, I’ve wondered where the crochet blogs are. I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t many crocheters online; of course there are. For this post, I’m focusing entirely on blogging and tweeting; forum participation is a different breed of online activity (ask me why). But, compared to blogs from other types of crafters—and yes, the sewing- and knit-blog communities are at the top of my mind—there just aren’t that many. The explosion of crochet blogs I anticipated five years ago hasn’t manifested. That’s disappointing. A large, thriving community of crochet bloggers would not only make hordes of people happy, it would also provide a fertile ground for experimentation and collaboration. These things are the foundation of the evolution of the craft.

This morning I had the first spark of an idea, though. I had a lengthy (well, for Twitter it was lengthy and please pardon my typo) conversation with designer Jocelyn Sass, who asked me if I have a theory about why there aren’t very many crocheters blogging and tweeting.

We discussed further, and during our exchange she mentioned keeping her tweets and blog posts mostly related to crochet. That’s when the switch clicked. It’s a rare blogger—on any topic—who can remain entirely on topic all the time and still be engaging, still inspire readers to care about what they have to say. They have to be a wizard with words, they have to absolutely kill with high-quality information, they have to post the most beautiful photographs around. The rest of us—well, the rest of us have to bring in other topics to keep things interesting. We have to relate our craft to our everyday lives, we have to go off on entertaining tangents, we have to write about major events going on around us, our work, art, other crafts. What might be considered irrelevant tangents to the most narrowly focused crochet blogger are actually the ingredients that make many blogs worth reading.

I didn’t say it before, but I will say it now: Of the relatively few crochet blogs that are out there, a vast number of them are boring. They’re the blog equivalents of Bubba listing all those kinds of shrimp. Kids, that’s just not interesting.

And so here’s my first theory in five years about why there aren’t very many crochet bloggers: If there were more riveting crochet blogs, more crocheters would blog. More people would want to participate in the conversation. More people would be inspired to share their own stories.

What makes a blog interesting? Getting to know what makes the blogger tick; seeing the amazing products of their imagination; learning new techniques or tips; being entertained; being inspired.

Sometimes I want to shout to the world, “Would you please be more interesting?!” I could make a top-ten list.

Top Ten Ways to Be More Interesting

1. Blog for you. Write the things you need to say.
2. Your readers are people, and likely crafters just like you. Make them think, and make them feel.
3. Tell us what inspires you.
4. Blogging is about conversation. Converse.
5. Have an opinion. Share it. Don’t apologize for it.
6. Read blogs that aren’t just about crochet. Read the news. Talk to people. Listen to music. See movies. Watch television. Understand that doing all of these things informs what you do with your hands. Let that come out when you write about your craft.
7. Stop! Do not post another blurry photograph on your blog. Take another picture. Turn off the flash and use natural light. Rinse. Repeat.
8. Use spell check. Seriously. It prevents you from undermining your own credibility.
9. Punctuate. Seriously. Punctuation is what makes written works understandable. To be interesting, you must be understood.
10. Tell a story. Tell your story. Tell any story. (But don’t steal someone else’s.)

What do you think? Do you read boring blogs because you feel you have to? What interests you? What do you do with your own blog to keep things interesting for yourself and for your readers?

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