{"id":27113,"date":"2024-04-20T11:29:58","date_gmt":"2024-04-20T15:29:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=27113"},"modified":"2024-04-20T11:30:02","modified_gmt":"2024-04-20T15:30:02","slug":"ramh16-the-plate-tectonics-of-blogging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/ramh16-the-plate-tectonics-of-blogging\/","title":{"rendered":"RAMH@16: The Plate Tectonics of Blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-27116\" style=\"width: 100%;\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/millerscrossing_5loops.gif?ssl=1\" alt=\"\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n<p class=\"smalltext\"><em>[Image: animated GIF (five loops) of a brief clip from the film <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Miller%27s_Crossing\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Miller&#8217;s Crossing<\/a><em> (1990). Why five loops? Well, I had to stop <\/em>somewhere<em>! The original version of this GIF looped endlessly, which might be fun\/interesting as a meme-type image on a social media platform, but looked ridiculous &#8212; compulsive and twitchy &#8212; when spread across a canvas this grand. Heh.]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">Per tradition, here&#8217;s a playlist to start off my anniversary post this year. It&#8217;s the soundtrack from &#8212; yes! &#8212; <em>Miller&#8217;s Crossing<\/em>. (Tempting to select just track <a rel=\"tag\" class=\"hashtag u-tag u-category\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/tag\/3\/\">#3<\/a>, for obvious reasons, but this is the whole thing.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-spotify wp-block-embed-spotify wp-embed-aspect-21-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe title=\"Spotify Embed: Miller&amp;apos;s Crossing (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)\" style=\"border-radius: 12px\" width=\"100%\" height=\"352\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/album\/34usFub7uPwMfvptnWlpTC?si=T3XFp0NNQ1yJuKq43OOIvw&#038;utm_source=oembed\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>[Original score for <\/em>Miller&#8217;s Crossing<em> by Carter Burwell (a.k.a. &#8220;the third Coen Brother&#8221; for his frequent collaborations with Joel and Ethan Coen (writers\/directors\/producers of this film and others). In the film itself there were also a handful of songs not written by Burwell, including Jelly Roll Morton&#8217;s &#8220;King Porter Stomp&#8221; and Jimmy Campbell&#8217;s &#8220;Goodnight Sweetheart.&#8221; Note that the score as embedded here is brief, only about a half-hour in length.]<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">The <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/how-it-was\/\">very first post<\/a> here on <em>Running After My Hat<\/em> laid out what &#8212; as I prematurely imagined &#8212; the blog would be &#8220;about&#8221;: a series of booklets I&#8217;d originally written as Christmas gifts for my family. In fairly short order, I added posts providing further information about the background of these little things, such as <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/where-it-was\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">this one<\/a> about the real-world town which provided the setting for the books&#8217; accounts of growing up there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Well, things happened (as things, yes, tend to do). I kept revisiting the <em>How It Was<\/em> stories, in my head and <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/category\/06_writing\/howitwas\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">on the blog<\/a>. When such a thing became possible, I experimented with turning the booklets into <em>e<\/em>-booklets, for distribution to a wider audience. But these experiments never quite got off the ground&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230;until recently.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image is-style-default\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-medium\"><a href=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/authorsproofs.jpg?ssl=1\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"225\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/authorsproofs.jpg?resize=300%2C225&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-27135\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/authorsproofs.jpg?resize=300%2C225&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/authorsproofs.jpg?w=500&amp;ssl=1 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p>Mainly, and outwardly, this newfound effort was driven by my rediscovering a cache of short stories I&#8217;d written over the course of some 25 years. (Of course, this rediscovery itself had to wait until The Missus and I finally settled down somewhere after our two years&#8217; rambling around the country, post-COVID lockdown, and started unpacking boxes.) After about four months of modestly revamping and reformatting the stories &#8212; to say nothing of banging my head against the whole &#8220;make an e-book, and then make a REAL book&#8221; learning curve, those stories are now available via Amazon either in Kindle-readable format or in print (paperback) editions of two anthologies. Yes, that&#8217;s a photo of the &#8220;author&#8217;s proof&#8221; editions of the paperbacks at right. (The gray bands across the covers do not appear in the books as finally printed.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The links below take you to Amazon&#8217;s pages for the paperback editions; once there, you can if you want opt for the eBook (Kindle) version &#8212; and regardless of format, there are several pages of sample text available:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B0CY254MRR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Webster, Unabridged<\/a><\/em>: a half-dozen tales featuring the same protagonist &#8212; occasionally mistaken for the author &#8212; known only as Webster.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B0CY2D7ZHZ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Left-Handed Inventions<\/a><\/em>: a full dozen stories &#8212; different characters, different genres, different &#8220;voices,&#8221; and so on.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8230;all of which has led me to visit &#8212; again &#8212; the notion of &#8220;publishing&#8221; the <em>How It Was<\/em> series. I should have more on that front sometime in the next few months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the meantime&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-drop-cap\">You probably know already of the <a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Substack<\/a> platform for making one&#8217;s writing available to wider audiences &#8212; basically, a form of what we&#8217;ve always called blogging, with some 21st-century accoutrements (easy subscriptions &#8212; paid or free; easily managed mailing lists and commenting systems; &#8220;Share&#8221; buttons and the like).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Substack first made its way into my consciousness because they&#8217;d signed up some &#8220;big names&#8221;: Garrison Keillor, for instance, and Salman Rushdie, and novel\/short-story author George Saunders. It&#8217;s a very simple platform both for posting occasional writings and for reading them: more restrictive than, say, a WordPress blog in terms of what you can do <em>besides<\/em> post writing there, and in terms of the look-and-feel of your site, but yes, much much simpler.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway, long story short, I set up <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.substack.com\/\">a Substack site<\/a> &#8212; also called <em>Running After My Hat<\/em> &#8212; back in November. As you can see, I haven&#8217;t really figured out (or &#8220;decided&#8221;) what exactly I&#8217;m doing <em>there<\/em> as well as <em>here<\/em>. The things I&#8217;ve posted there are original, not duplicates of what&#8217;s here&#8230; on the other hand, there was no particular reason why I didn&#8217;t post them here instead. They&#8217;re pretty much <em>RAMH<\/em> posts in Substack garb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But of course they&#8217;re not identical, except superficially. &#8220;Under the hood,&#8221; a post on Substack (vs. on a WordPress blog) is more likely to be read by a wider variety of new folks, because of the easy subscribe-and-share features.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don&#8217;t expect to abandon <em>RAMH<\/em>-the-original for the new platform; I hope eventually to figure out a way to keep both healthy and familiar to the people used to reading them, without cross-posting duplication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But the main reason I&#8217;m bringing it up now is because of a series called &#8220;The Fiction Garage.&#8221; (The series as a whole is collected <a href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.substack.com\/s\/the-fiction-garage\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">here<\/a>.) It doesn&#8217;t get into the nuts-and-bolts of self-publishing on Amazon, but it does lay out the general outline (for now) of how and why the two anthologies &#8212; <em>Webster, Unabridged<\/em> and <em>Left-Handed Inventions<\/em> &#8212; came into being. At some point, I hope to add a related series on getting <em>How It Was<\/em> (subtitle: <em>The Boy&#8217;s Year<\/em>) into print as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Which will sorta bring the whole &#8220;running after my <em>How It Was<\/em>&#8221; saga full circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the meantime (again) I&#8217;m glad you &#8212; whoever you are* &#8212; are here, reading this. Thank you for 16 years&#8217; attention, however intermittent or steady!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"smalltext\"><em>[Yes, I know &#8212; corny and obvious, maybe. But surely I&#8217;m entitled!]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<p>_____________________________________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>* &#8220;Whoever you are*, haha. <em>Right<\/em>. I probably know who you are &#8212; among others, thank you for your years of reading, especially: Cynth and Michael (someone&#8217;s bruther); Marta; Paul in Southeast Asia and Susan in Italy; and a bunch of people who may still be putting in silent appearances from time to time: Nance, Misssy, Jayne, Squirrel, whaddayameantheresnodessert&#8230; the list is endless! And it goes without saying, maybe, but thank you as well to my anonymous (because, really, <em>unknown<\/em>) source of weekly blogging inspiration: the always thoughtful, always challenging <em><a href=\"https:\/\/whiskeyriver.blogspot.com\/\">whiskey river<\/a><\/em> &#8212; hard to imagine <em>RAMH<\/em> without that mysterious hat blowing by the window and pulling me outside every few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Image: animated GIF (five loops) of a brief clip from the film Miller&#8217;s Crossing (1990). Why five loops? Well, I had to stop somewhere! The original version of this GIF looped endlessly, which might be fun\/interesting as a meme-type image on a social media platform, but looked ridiculous &#8212; compulsive and twitchy &#8212; when spread [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27119,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federate","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Still chasing the damned elusive hat: 'RAMH@16: The Plate Tectonics of Blogging'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":false,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,38,53,74,4878,42,105],"tags":[1158,1160,1256,5366,5793,5839,5897,5898],"class_list":{"0":"post-27113","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-everyday-life","8":"category-backwards","9":"category-movies-media","10":"category-music","11":"category-fiction","12":"category-ebooks-etc","13":"category-short-fiction","14":"tag-anniversary","15":"tag-millers-crossing","16":"tag-anniversaries","17":"tag-looking-ahead-or-trying-to","18":"tag-substack","19":"tag-5839","20":"tag-self-publishing","21":"tag-carter-burwell","22":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/millerscrossing_5loops.gif?fit=480%2C272&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-73j","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27113"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27152,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27113\/revisions\/27152"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}