Search Results for "Notes on the Writing Life"
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Your search for posts with tags containing Notes on the Writing Life found 205 posts
I’ll begin with my mother, Sharon Brezee Zentner, shown here with me and our daughter Carrie, who is now a mother herself. And then there is my grandmother May Brezee, who was a special person in my life. She is shown here having just been introduced...
On November 2, 2011 (the day before my birthday), my agent, Jackie Kaiser, called to tell me that I’d been made a very tempting offer by Penguin to write two YA novels. One was to be about Josephine’s daughter Hortense, and the second was...
Dear wonderful blog subscribers, (Re: http://www.sandragulland.com/the-evolution-of-the-game-of-hope/) Last week, in beginning to draft this photo journal of the evolution of The Game of Hope, I mistakenly clicked “publish” instead of “save...
On November 2, 2011 (the day before my birthday), my agent, Jackie Kaiser, called to tell me that I’d been made a very tempting offer by Penguin to write two YA novels. One was to be about Josephine’s daughter Hortense, and the second was...
I’ve become very fond of a podcast about Young Adult lit called Kidlit Drink Night. They always make me laugh and I end up making lots of notes about books, movies and TV series to look into. They call themselves “Superfriends,” which...
{Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash.} Because I publish only every four or five years, in spite of my best intentions — in spite of being at my desk virtually every day for hours! — I forget how fraught the publication process is. The first sign...
As a blogger, I watch the ups and downs of my blogs’ attendance as closely as I used to watch my Amazon.com ratings. Thanks to Google Analytics, however, I can now find out much more than how many people are visiting my site. Through Analytics...
I’ve been bed-bound for over a week since a minor knee operation to repair a meniscus issue. I’m not going to whine about it! In fact, I’ve discovered that I’m the perfect candidate for this type of life. On the bed beside me are:...
I promised in my last post on beginning a novel that I would write about creating characters. Of course, to begin with, I have characters swarming, ideas both historical and fictional. I’ve already searched photo databanks for images that might...
I’m at the beginning of writing my next novel, and it’s a joy. I feel happy as a kid in a sandbox. It’s a slow process of discovery, and I expect it to take all year. The things about my writing process that never change This will be...
I’ve a newsletter about to go out, and I want to remind my wonderful readers who aren’t on my newsletter mailing list that you’re missing a chance to win one of my books — or (for the first time!) win an Audible edition of the...
I was thrilled to read this lovely review of The Game of Hope on Net Galley. Here are some quotes: Sandra Gulland demonstrates a masterful grasp that she has on history in her book The Game of Hope. While some authors struggle to convince their audience...
Are you a getting-things-done systems junkie? I am, and I thought I had my personal system settled once and for all until I took a Tim Grahl course on being a productive writer. Yeah, I know, my sixth novel will be published this coming spring, so...
Every stage of writing a book is a challenge—the beginning, the middle, and the end—but I think figuring out how to begin to write a book might be the most difficult. I’m at the beginning stage of writing my next novel now. I’m...
My husband and I took a long trip this fall, to Japan for three weeks. It was fantastic! We are culinary travelers, and Japan was a treat. I had spent two summers in Japan as a teen, staying with my aunt and uncle (who flew for Japan Airlines) and...
Imagine a little house—or, rather, more properly, a two-story reading room—containing thousands of books. Imagine this house on the outskirts of Killaloe, a rural village of six hundred in northern Ontario. Amazing. I had the pleasure of visiting...
I started writing this post six months ago, back when The Game of Hope was titled Moonsick. As part of the final check, then, I was looking for “legal” and “illegal” words—that is, words that didn’t exist in 1800....
I’m about to send out a newsletter — my first in six months! I’ve been MIA here on this blog, as well, the result of moving into a house still under construction, all the while working to finish my next novel, THE GAME OF HOPE. Those...
I sent draft 9.8 of The Game of Hope to my editor – a partial deadline met, which is always a wonderful feeling. Right now I’m organizing my beta-reader and consultant feedback notes and making further changes. The final-final draft...
This morning I happened upon a computer file of notes I kept while writing The Shadow Queen. I was particularly interested in a section on formulas for figuring out a novel’s “elevator pitch”—the summation of a story in a sentence...
Notes on Post Tags Search
By default, this searches for any categories containing your search term: eg, Tudor will also find Tudors, Tudor History, etc. Check the 'exact' box to restrict searching to categories exactly matching your search. All searches are case-insensitive.
This is a search for tags/categories assigned to blog posts by their authors. The terminology used for post tags varies across different blog platforms, but WordPress tags and categories, Blogspot labels, and Tumblr tags are all included.
This search feature has a number of purposes:
1. to give site users improved access to the content EMC has been aggregating since August 2012, so they can look for bloggers posting on topics they're interested in, explore what's happening in the early modern blogosphere, and so on.
2. to facilitate and encourage the proactive use of post categories/tags by groups of bloggers with shared interests. All searches can be bookmarked for reference, making it possible to create useful resources of blogging about specific news, topics, conferences, etc, in a similar fashion to Twitter hashtags. Bloggers could agree on a shared tag for posts, or an event organiser could announce one in advance, as is often done with Twitter hashtags.
Caveats and Work in Progress
This does not search post content, and it will not find any informal keywords/hashtags within the body of posts.
If EMC doesn't find any <category> tags for a post in the RSS feed it is classified as uncategorized. These and any <category> 'uncategorized' from the feed are omitted from search results. (It should always be borne in mind that some bloggers never use any kind of category or tag at all.)
This will not be a 'real time' search, although EMC updates content every few hours so it's never very far behind events.
The search is at present quite basic and limited. I plan to add a number of more sophisticated features in the future including the ability to filter by blog tags and by dates. I may also introduce RSS feeds for search queries at some point.
Constructing Search Query URLs
If you'd like to use an event tag, it's possible to work out in advance what the URL will be, without needing to visit EMC and run the search manually (though you might be advised to check it works!). But you'll need to use URL encoding as appropriate for any spaces or punctuation in the tag (so it might be a good idea to avoid them).
This is the basic structure:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s={search term or phrase}
For example, the URL for a simple search for categories containing London:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s=london
The URL for a search for the exact category Gunpowder Plot:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s=Gunpowder%20Plot&exact=on
In this more complex URL, %20 is the URL encoding for a space between words and &exact=on adds the exact category requirement.
I'll do my best to ensure that the basic URL construction (searchcat?s=...) is stable and persistent as long as the site is around.