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hrjYou ever have one of those times when you think, "Didn't I write a blog on this topic once upon a time?" and then you try to work out the keywords to find it again? (Dreamwidth content doesn't show up in web searches, as far as I can tell.) My ultimate sledgehammer technique for content old enough that it was once on LJ is to pull up the folder of month-by-month LJ downloads (which are in a raw comma-delimited format) use the power of Apple's search function on my best guess at a distinctive phrase, and try to narrow down the possible dates, at which point I can browse in DW (because I migrated everything over).
Tags are, of course, intended to make the process easier and, to the extent that I use them usefully, they do. Hence, when I decided to follow up on the idea of identifying all the posts I've made that contain interesting philosophical explorations, I pulled up the tag "personal history and philosophy" (which was designed for that exact purpose) and reviewed the hundred or so posts it pulled up for the sort of thing I had in mind.
As a result, I now have a list of almost 50 blogs that contain writing that I consider potentially worth revisiting. Or maybe turning into a collection. Or something. They fall in some general categories: applying analysis techniques from cognitive linguistics to life and literature, my experiences and thoughts on writing queer fiction, thoughts on my own personal growth.
There's another entire body of blogs I've written about my writing process that get tagged "writing process" that aren't included here. That would take a longer review and a lot of them are over on the Alpennia blog (which I haven't mined yet).
Is it egotistical to think that some of my casual (or not-so-casual) writing might be worth re-purposing? And some point I jotted down in the Notes app on my phone "if you ever have to write a guest of honor speech, check out those "personal history and philosophy" blogs for content." I think I jotted this down while listening to someone's brilliant guest of honor speech and speculating that my mind would go utterly blank if I tried to come up with one from scratch. I mean, time's growing short for fantasies about "some day when I'm famous" but I think it's plausible to suppose that I might some day get asked to be GoH of some small local convention. (OK, technically I was GoH at an OVFF but I don't think anyone noticed or remembers it.) I could put together an interesting speech from "the uncanny valley of fictional representation," "under what circumstances am I a man writing gay sci-fi?", "the coffee shop metaphor of LGBTQIA as a literary category", "how to create non-tragic queer characters", "all 31 flavors of lesbian fiction", "expectations for sex in fiction, or why are you calling my cat a bad dog?" and similar topics.
Tags are, of course, intended to make the process easier and, to the extent that I use them usefully, they do. Hence, when I decided to follow up on the idea of identifying all the posts I've made that contain interesting philosophical explorations, I pulled up the tag "personal history and philosophy" (which was designed for that exact purpose) and reviewed the hundred or so posts it pulled up for the sort of thing I had in mind.
As a result, I now have a list of almost 50 blogs that contain writing that I consider potentially worth revisiting. Or maybe turning into a collection. Or something. They fall in some general categories: applying analysis techniques from cognitive linguistics to life and literature, my experiences and thoughts on writing queer fiction, thoughts on my own personal growth.
There's another entire body of blogs I've written about my writing process that get tagged "writing process" that aren't included here. That would take a longer review and a lot of them are over on the Alpennia blog (which I haven't mined yet).
Is it egotistical to think that some of my casual (or not-so-casual) writing might be worth re-purposing? And some point I jotted down in the Notes app on my phone "if you ever have to write a guest of honor speech, check out those "personal history and philosophy" blogs for content." I think I jotted this down while listening to someone's brilliant guest of honor speech and speculating that my mind would go utterly blank if I tried to come up with one from scratch. I mean, time's growing short for fantasies about "some day when I'm famous" but I think it's plausible to suppose that I might some day get asked to be GoH of some small local convention. (OK, technically I was GoH at an OVFF but I don't think anyone noticed or remembers it.) I could put together an interesting speech from "the uncanny valley of fictional representation," "under what circumstances am I a man writing gay sci-fi?", "the coffee shop metaphor of LGBTQIA as a literary category", "how to create non-tragic queer characters", "all 31 flavors of lesbian fiction", "expectations for sex in fiction, or why are you calling my cat a bad dog?" and similar topics.
