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The Lashed Author

We, as authors, are lashed upon the whale we hope to tame; we are lashed by our publishers against the rail, who fail to tame us; we are lashed by our detractors upon the sun, and, they too, cannot tame our darkness — and yet! — we still try to thrive in the memorialization of what we hope to know, and what we know must be shared. In the light of that pitiful delight, the Authors Guild have released a new report concerning the overall mean income for authors, and the results are astounding, resounding, and, unfortunately for too many of us, sublimely familiar.

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Weaving the Social Mesh: Write What You Want to Know

I am often asked by friends and associates what they should write.  They want to know how to get people to read their blog, buy their book, get more followers on Twitter or more Page LIKEs on Facebook or lots of plusses on Google+.

My answer to that inquiry is always the same: “Just Write Something!” — and everything else will eventually fall.

That advice jumps in the face of two common writing canards: “Write What You Know” and its doppelgänger, “Write What You Don’t Know.” The first school of thought allegedly makes you an expert on your own selfie life; the second avenue of percussion quickly resounds into a research project where the self often goes missing.

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State of Boles Blogs on Bing and Yahoo

It’s been about a month since all 14 of our former network blogs, Urban Semiotic, Go Inside, Boles Blues, Panopticonic, Carceral Nation, Boles University Blog, 10txt, RelationShaping, United Stage, WordPunk, Memeingful, Scientific Aesthetic, Dramatic Medicine and Celebrity Semiotic became this Boles Blog.  In that brief time, we’ve published over 80 new articles.  That’s a World Publishing Record for any of our single blogs.

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The New Boles University Blog

We welcome you to the new Boles University blog This blog used to be hosted on the awful and mundane Blogger for several years We decided to move the blog to our Pair Networks setup to bring all Boles Blogs Network writing under a unified Movable Type container.

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Baby Blogging: Signs the Blogosphere is Imploding

If there is such as thing as the “Blogosphere” I discovered over the weekend it is imploding with the weight of bad intentions gone wrong. We have discussed the perils and predilections of Mommy Blogging in the past — but Baby Blogging — the worst possible aftereffect of The Mommy Bloggers, takes the entire idea of precious children on the internet, into a whole new sad level of self-importance. I read one blog “written” by a one-year-old baby using words like “dimorphic” and “ball sack” and “fistula.”

We also learned what was digested that day, how it came out in the end, and how many times Daddy was punched in the groin by baby’s precocious fist. I’m making it sound much more entertaining and funnier than it was because there were five entries per day for that kind of babbling diarrhea.

What is the point of Mommy writing a blog as if her Baby had written it?

The idea can’t be humor. It must be some sort of prospecting for genius in their offspring:

“My baby was blogging at nine months, what’s your excuse for an illiterate 11-month old?”

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Helicopter Parents and Militia Mommies

A good friend of mine in Nebraska — who shall remain nameless unless he steps forward here — sent me a great email yesterday full of fascinating thoughts and feelings as well as the following riff on unsavory and selfish parents:

I have personally witnessed and heard stories about minivan moms. These are the women — who have one, maybe two kids — but don’t work regular jobs, and take their kids to school every day. They band together in packs, always drinking their morning coffee in the drop off lanes at school.

On the surface, this of course is a “Leave it to Beaver” scenario. But I have discovered that many are prejudiced against those of us that have jobs, and drop our kids off and go to work. If we are in a hurry, they bitch and honk at you like you ran a red light or cut them off on the interstate. They travel in packs, socialize at the school, and help out at the school like it matters to their son’s or
daughter’s education if they are there or not.

What I have read, later on in life, these parents, usually women but sometimes men, become “helicopter parents.”  Right now in the Lincoln paper, there’s another article how they follow their kids to college and continually intervene in the guidance of their children who need to start thinking and figuring life out on their own.

In trying to be protective and nurturing, these people don’t do justice to their own offspring and get a bad name for themselves. Like an alcoholic or
drug user, they deny a problem exists. Some of these parents I have run across at the elementary level are down right nasty to deal with.

Have you heard of the “Helicopter Parents” phenomenon before?

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