I’ve been playing with plugins on my blog, and we might have success, Zesties. I’ve installed Comment Luv, which Writer Unboxed uses to good effect. If you keep a blog and have an account with Comment Luv, check the box above the metadata section in the comments. (Where you type in your name, url, etc.) You’ll see a menu pop up which includes links to your last 10 blog posts. Select one and it will become a hyperlink in your comment, making it easier for others to become intrigued by your work.
- If you give it a try, I’d love to know what you think.
- If you don’t care to go that route, the old comment system should still work.
- And if I’ve screwed things up royally, so that you can’t comment at all, please have the kindness to let me know elsewhere. I’m reachable through a number of social media venues. (Yes, I’ve modeling understatement on this crisp, fall morning.)
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Last month’s post on Writer Unboxed was pure fun, exploring a fictitious dictionary of authorial words containing “WIP”. Today’s is more personal, serious, but I hope ultimately empowering. (It is for me, anyway.) In a nutshell, in the writing world, I’ve often felt torn about conflicting expert opinion, or my choices to ditch “best practices” as advanced by a guru. It’s one thing to say “follow your gut”, quite another to do it, much less be at peace with the results.
Then I realized I’d turned off my brain. I had a system to evaluate data and opinions in the medical field, but I wasn’t employing it here. When I did, can you guess what happened? Liberation. No more second-guessing, peeps.
Okay. You caught me lying, but the truth is, decisions became a whole lot simpler. Hope you’ll join me on Writer Unboxed for:
Stop Feeling Like an Author-Wishbone at a Table of Industry Experts (Part I)
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Giving it a try, and already see it works like a charm! Does Comment Luv work with WordPress, too? I’ve been liking it on WU, and definitely follow links back to other commenters.
Loved the post, Jan! I agree, it’s sort of like remembering yourself; like waking up to the fact that we’ve already been through a lot of what we’re ‘choosing’ to deal with all over again. Great observations, and great comments already (sorry mine was so long, but I know you’re not surprised).
Wahoo. Thanks for testing it for me, Vaughn. I tried, of course, but you never know if it will work for others.
Yes, I use Jetpack for my basic comment system, but if you’re self-hosted, you can use the Commen Luv plugin as well. With this theme, anyway 🙂
Glad you enjoyed the post. I wish I’d had this understanding about three years ago, but what can you do? Maybe it will help a few other people.
Please don’t ever apologize for your comments. They’re always thoughtful and meaty. Nothing better when one has worked hard to try and make something meaningful. But you’d get that.
Jan, after reading this, I bopped over to WU to read your post there. I figured I’d comment here on both.
First, thank you for the CommentLuv information. I’ve seen that happen on other blogs, but didn’t have a clue how to add it. Now, we’ll just have to see if it works on Writing on Board.
Second, lemming behavior has always horrified me. I would have been one of your patients who said, “Why? Explain.” And then I’d have asked about divergent studies. (Sometimes.)
As a writer who now needs to figure out marketing, I’m one who’d rather park her intelligence at the curb and find someone else to do the next bits. Really. Just let me write the stories, please, and you do the selling part.
Fine, I know I can’t hide my head in the sand, but all those divergent do-this/do-that books and articles are enough to make me throw up my hands. I get the analogy to medical treatment options, but I also know that the marketing-advice folk have a huge advantage when facing someone like me, someone who isn’t comfortable with the whole idea of selling anything, much less her art. Because I’m just the sort who will get whiplash from turning to the right and then the left, hoping for that magic answer, that cure, the one that will turn me from the hider-in-the-sand into the one who can market anything.
I tried posting this once and the link was there to my blog. Then it rejected me. I came back. It accepted the note, but without the link. See, this is one reason why I go so crazy. The Internet and I seem to be adversaries. Sigh.
The good news is that CommenLuv worked the second time. I’m sorry, Normandie. I’m not sure why it would have changed. Maybe the service was having issues when you happened to try it first.
To your larger points: Regrettably, if you asked for divergent studies, I might still have persuaded you to take meds. To the best of my abilities, I always provided a weighted score-sheet of pros and cons of interventions. It’s one of the reasons my patients tended to trust me, and why my conviction became a powerful recruitment tool, much to my chagrin.
You might have felt on balance, though, that there wasn’t a compelling case. That’s where values and life experience can change perception so that following the herd can be one’s worst. Thing. Ever.
I understand what you’re saying about the perplexing choices about promotion, especially when a person feels like they’re holding their nose as they make any and all decisions. It’s good to know that discomfort and, in a sense, rebellion against reality, makes you vulnerable. (If this is sounding judgy at all, I do not mean it that way. I’m familiar with the fear-abdication paradigm, because I’ve done it myself.) There are people who’ll exploit that, but there are also people who’ll do their best to give you what you need, regardless.
My question is, why not ditch the revulsion and do your best job to decide who’s in which camp? Make the effort to decide on your team, at the very least. When they’ve earned your trust, then you can defer the smaller decisions, if that’s what you’d prefer.
Either way, your choosing and you’re paying and you’re the one who’s fronting the gig, so might as well do it from a place of empowerment rather than seeing it as I’m-cooked-before-I’m-done.
I have no idea if that makes sense! LOL.
Holy cow that’s a long comment. Sorry!
Hi Jan. We are new to your blog by way of writer unboxed. We’ve been knocking around your site, and enjoyed the posts. Look forward to swinging by from time to time and reading future posts. Thx.
Cheers, Inion. Thank you for dropping by and testing out the system.
Hey Jan, I just installed commentluv this week on my site too, after seeing it on writerunboxed. I’m still trying to figure out how it all works though. Your comment area sure looks better than mine though 😛 Did you get the premium version, or just the free one? (mine is the free one). I guess the theme you installed might have a little bit to do with it…
Hi, Isaac. This version of CommentLuv is the free one. It’s been a few weeks now since I installed it, and other than choosing how I wanted to have it display as an option–whether I wanted the heart bubble or not, whether I wanted to text to be in black or white, for instance–I don’t recall doing any customization. I’d actually like to figure out how to make it narrower than it is and not have it alter the text on my blog comments, so as you can see, I’m not a sophisticated programmer. 🙂 Sorry I can’t be of use, but yes, I imagine if it looks okay to you, that’s a function of my template’s compatibility with CommentLuv rather than anything I’ve done. Best of luck figuring it out.