I Will Not Die

Step right up ladies and gents!

[Blah, blah]: I was wrapping up two different posts; one for tonight, one for tomorrow when suddenly, I learned that a dear friend of mine had shoved (hard) her blog while it was standing on smooth, wet tile causing it to slam onto the floor, dead in a growing pool of its own blood.

Sad, truly.

‘Tis life, I suppose.

I don’t know what made me feel worse, reading about the events, or reading her remarkable cheerfulness about the whole thing.

It reminds me of the time when I was nineteen a few days after Christmas. I was in a very rural area with thick snow, miles from any nearby houses. I saw a small object in the road ahead of me as my car crept along the icy vein between unending snow-heaped farm fields.

It was a very young puppy. Weeks old, at the most.

I stopped my car and got out. I approached it and saw the blood pool. Its back legs were kicking, the front legs and head were not moving. What I saw next was quite grisly.

It was breathing, trying to get up. One eye was hanging out and blood was seeping out of the socket (no joke). When it saw me, it whimpered and got excited, trying to wag its tail. Obviously it was not going to make it.

It still had a red Christmas bow around its neck.

Two choices: walk away or… yeah.

So I broke its neck. I then dug a grave for it on the side of the road and buried it, climbed back into the car, drove off and cried.

And I remember how cheerful I tried sounding the rest of the day.

Truth was, there was nothing to be all that cheerful about.

So she killed her blog, all in an effort to improve her blog. Damn. We can fix this up in a jiffy.

Go read this.

You can help me fix this by:

Subscribing to her new feed by clicking here

Throwing her a link: http://throughtheillusion.com/ (for you bloggers), and

Adding her to your Technorati favorites by clicking here

Tell some friends. With a few backlinks, a few subscribers, and a bunch of “hellos”, we can revive this sucker.

In the coming days, I’ll go through my whole site and redirect the links I made to Hayden’s old blog url to her new one.

Added bonus:

You link to her blog, I link to your blog. If you do, let me know in the comments.

Gracias friends.

Hang in there Hayden

Here is who has helped so far:

• TheAndySan

Dereck :: Nov.14.2008 :: Blogosphere :: 9 Comments »

I often find things worth sharing with you that I don’t necessarily have the time to share with the kind of depth that they deserve. What I’ve decided to do is this: Periodically, I’m going to write a post summarizing them. This will be the first installment.

Another thing I’m going to start doing is dedicating posts to bloggers who I follow who I do not often have enough time to talk about (or even talk to) either here or on their own blogs.

As such, I dedicate this post to Robert at flimjo.com, whose frequent inclusions of me into his “Flimjo Recaps” always gave me a boost and never required anything in return. Thank you Robert, I hope all is well. The collage I’m doing right now reminded me of you and your generous link love.

(These are in no particular order, most likely they are in the order I discovered them)

The First Good Find:

For those of you who have not met Jeremy from Insight Writer, he’s been an active recent contributor here. I have no idea from where he met me but it could have from the guest post I wrote on the Positivity Blog. (Speaking of that guest post, if any of you who use StumbleUpon haven’t gone over there to rate it, please do).

When I first met Jeremy, I went off to read “just another blog.” Instead, what I found was a blog that held the promise of its title, specifically, I found a blog with lots of written insight. The first article I read was Your Capacity is Low Because Your Devotion is Thin. Before you go on to read that, listen to the gravity in that title. Now that’s insight. That article resonated with me in a very profound way because of how closely it matches my beliefs, namely, that in order to maximize what it is you want to do, you have to crank up the heat.

I’ve taken the metaphor of that all the way to labeling that lack of devotion as being like a death.

I Will Not Die, not because I literally won’t cease to be alive, but rather, because I refuse to allow myself to cave to the pressures from around me that tell me I can’t do what I love. In other words, my devotion is very high.

Nice work Jeremy.

The Second Good Find:

I met this blogger through Entrecard which I recently installed as a means to both find new blogs on the Internet and to gain exposure on other blogs. Of course, it turns out that the only people who go to the blogs on the Entrecard widgets are other Entrecard users earning credits, so gaining exposure on other blogs is actually kind of futile, but, and a big but, I’ve found (and am still finding) bloggers I enjoy that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

I have in mind Jennifer from Writing to Survive. What caught me right off was the tagline: “transcending the painful past and the mundane present, one post at a time.”

It immediately occurred to me that she uses writing to define and augment her life, much of the past of which doesn’t sound like all shit and giggles. What it does mean though is that much of the writing is of the highest order, namely, passionate writing that conveys meaning because of its grittiness and source. What I mean is that if you write for laughs, that’s one thing, if you write for passing information, that’s another thing, but if you are writing to survive, then that’s a very different thing.

It’s written from the gut, fueled by a human fire. A good place to start is the Excerpts page.

Some Funnies:

• Wombats in Australia are really like this. You’ve been warned.
• Priceless and imaginative fiction. Do you hate your wife? Beware.
• Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze. We have to start somewhere.

Dereck :: Nov.13.2008 :: Blogosphere :: 3 Comments »

Henrik at the Positivity blog gave me an opportunity to speak to his audience. For the occasion, I wrote an inspirational piece called Your Beacon in the Night. I’d like to encourage you to go and check it out. I’m interested to know what you think of it.

If any of you use Stumbleupon or other social bookmarking sites and enjoyed the article, you can help me return Henrik’s generosity by giving it the nod. You can review the article on StumbleUpon by going here.

For any of my readers who are not familiar with the Positivity Blog, I recommend that you take some time to read through some of the articles there. It’s some of the best on the Internet. You can browse articles in his Archives by going here.

Henrik’s success as a blogger is well deserved. You can sign up for his RSS feed by clicking here. It should be a staple of your reading diet. It’s been mine for some time now, and I’m quite healthy as a result.

Finally, if you’ve come here from the Positivity Blog and are looking for the article Love that I mentioned in the article there, you can read it here.

Thank you Henrik for letting me write for you.

Dereck :: Nov.05.2008 :: Blogosphere, Site Related :: 3 Comments »