I Will Not Die

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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.

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

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