10 Minute Adventures, Fiction and Coffee Breaks
It was a late summer day. I was on break from college in San Francisco but today, my girl friend and I had a bike ride planned and it was going to be awesome . . .
A peer blogger triggered this memory and the next day, someone posted on a Facebook group I follow, a photo of the same spot. After this, I just had to capture the full memory and offer it now for your enjoyment. The full 5 minute story may leave you both smiling and hungry for a certain cheese.
Most of you know I’m part of a group of bloggers who meet each weekend to share stuff.
Today, my Coffee Share essay is about goals: those completed and those frustrated.
It’s a quick literary look at such things set within the imagery of ‘chapters’. And, yes, I certain unpopular bug plays a part. It’s less than 5 minutes long so I hope you’ll check it out.
Here’s the link for the full essay.
Coffee Share 210918: Closing Out Chapters
Why do I use both a blog post and a blog page for my essays? WordPress has two devices for bloggers to publish with.
(1) Pages, for non-time-dependent things like items for my permanent story collection and,
(2) Posts, which are automatically chained into a chronological linked list AND every time I post, my followers are automatically invited to view.
When I want to both; add a new story and notify my followers, I must do both and add a link I hope you’ll click on to read the actual story. Thanks for visiting.
Yesterday was a day of blogging frustration and this post is just my place to vent — because, frustration is best bled off by sharing it — right?
I don’t make money from my story blog, in fact I’m close to starting my second year of paying money for the privilege because I no longer use the free plan from WordPress. I now pay an annual fee to prevent WordPress from putting ads into any view of my work – hopefully making visiting my blog and reading my stories a more pleasant, ad-free, experience for my readers.
So blogging is for me a hobby, not a vocation; and yesterday something changed that bugs me and makes my hobby more difficult and in fact I had to spend several hours just to get back to the place where I ended the previous day.
Yesterday I had a quick inspiration and produced a new short story for my “I Recall” story collection.
These are autobiographical essays, accounts of things that actually happened to me somewhere between my birth and yesterday. They all match a basic format: a certain rowdy voice used to tell the story in first-person, no longer than 3000 words to make sure that most readers can enjoy them in 10 minutes or less and some attempt to draw a smile of entertainment, maybe a full laugh if I tell it well enough and vivid imagery to attempt to put the reader right there with me as if they were close enough to “see” the event in their mind. So far, I’m pretty pleased with the result.
Early on I learned that each blog page or post could include photos and while I want the main point of my stories to be the words and how they’re assembled, the “Featured Photo” which is always at the top of each essay, along with any I choose to include along the way to help tell the story or somehow add entertainment value, have become a useful tool that I’m always trying to use better to support my goal of providing a fun reading experience.
So normally, as I craft a new story, I keep in mind that I’m going to need at least a “Featured Photo” to lead off each essay before sharing it. Yesterday, I finished the text of; One Child’s View of Economics, and thought I’d have no problem finding a suitable photo to use from one of the few places I knew of which allowed the free use of the works of many photographers — and it should have been easy, a cute young girl with an toothy smile, was all I needed. It should have taken me no longer than 15 minutes to select and install such a photo.
But that’s when I hit a wall of basic reality of blogging economics. The irony of the problem was not lost on me, but I was then too busy trying to just finish and post the story to enjoy the humor before me.
My photo selection process is not supposed to be a big deal because the photos support each story. They rarely ARE the story. So my normal photo search process went like this:
. . . Until yesterday, because Unsplash has been sold and the new owner, a long time pay-to-play photo licensee dealt with their free competition by buying them out and shutting down the free option, so that full collection is no longer free to use. To use anything at Unsplash, you must now put up your credit card and buy a subscription.
So, I began a search for a free-use site to replace Unsplash and what I experienced was hours of deceptive advertising; thousands of sites than have both ad and non-ad matches to the search string of “free photos”. Most of these consider it honest to match that string with some version of “give us a credit card and we’ll let you try us out for free for 6 months after which we’ll quietly change your account to paying customer and hope you’ll not cancel right away”.
So here’s my formula of blogging reality and regret.
All that said, I did find a site that looks for all the world like they picked up the abandoned Unsplash search algorithm and use interface (which was always pretty crummy anyway). In case you too would like to keep using a really free photo sharing site, here’s one that works – for now anyway.
Oh, and should you like to see the 5 minute story that inspired all this angst, here’s the leader and link.
I was minding my own business; conducting the every-other-Saturday ritual of mowing the lawn in front of our Colorado Springs home, when the cute little gal from across the street emerged from her garage, saw me and came darting across the street — I thought, to greet me. But, of course if she had a simple greeting in mind, it’s doubtful I’d find the event worth writing about, so no, something more was in store.
I was minding my own business; conducting the every-other-Saturday ritual of mowing the lawn in front of our Colorado Springs home, when the cute little gal from across the street emerged from her garage, saw me and came darting across the street — I thought, to greet me. But, of course if she had a simple greeting in mind, it’s doubtful I’d find the event worth writing about, so no, something more was in store.
Click the link to read the full 6 minute story. It will leave you smiling.
Someone told me that a meme can’t be a meme if a reader has to click to read it.
If true, I’m going to have to recast mine as restrained memes because blurting out smart remarks in public with no concern for whether anyone wants to hear them is just not my style.
Most of you know I’m part of a group of bloggers who meet each weekend to share stuff.
Today, my Coffee Share essay is about capturing a friends photo of us all dressed up for our high school prom. Yes, I warmly recall having that head of hair.
But I also did some quick updates of the ongoing backyard adventures and lessons learned about shade cloth, plums and blue belly lizards with strangely short tails.
Here’s the link for the full essay.
Coffee Share 210813: With Summer Waning
Why do I use both a blog post and a blog page for my essays? WordPress has two devices for bloggers to publish with.
(1) Pages, for non-time-dependent things like items for my permanent story collection and,
(2) Posts, which are automatically chained into a chronological linked list AND every time I post, my followers are automatically invited to view.
When I want to both; add a new story and notify my followers, I must do both and add a link I hope you’ll click on to read the actual story. Thanks for visiting.
