monagustafsonaffinito   CHATS AND RANTS — PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE

Maybe my major communication-by-blog problems have been solved. Thanks to you wonderful folks who were willing to go through so much to respond to me. I think I’ve replied to you just now on the blog. Please let me know if you got the reply and if responding to it was easy.

By the way, If you see my blog via Facebook, I think you could make that easier in the future by clicking “follow” on the blog itself. You’ll then get notification by email. I’d be so grateful if you try that and let me know if it works.

If this basic problem has been solved, I’ll go back to the [really very helpful] support folks for help in updating my “information about me,” including a somewhat more honest photo to reflect the years I’ve added.

Then, oh joy! I might be able to get back to writing On My Way Out: Becoming Psychology (working title) and finding an agent. I won’t publish it unless I do find an agent — can’t afford to self-publish, and besides, self-publishing has its limits about where people can buy it.

Life used to be so simple. I just wrote my blog content in a word document, copied the word document, came here, logged on, clicked on “new post,” pasted it, and added some “tags” to help draw attention to it. Then the Word Press system began to offer more and fancier options, very helpful new things, I’m sure. The first thing I noticed was that one was to enter stuff in “blocks.” But I didn’t take time to play with it — just continued in my old fashioned ways by choosing “classic editor.” And people sometimes responded (not as many as I would have liked, of course), and I would hit “reply” and we’d have the start of a conversation.

But then things changed. In order to respond to your comments I had to give my name and email every time. Obviously that’s not conducive to easy conversation. And I responded to the idea of “blocks” as if encountering a rattlesnake in my living room.

In the meantime I’m trying to carve out time to work on my next (I hope) book — tentative title On My Way Out, so I kept postponing getting smart about how to use my blog. The result — panic — as the new blog methods felt like monsters casting a shadow over my computer and I began to feel more and more like a fat little kid with buck teeth, glasses, and old fashioned Scandinavian braids.

So now I’m asking you to help — or at least to cheer me on — as I try to get more productive with communicating with you this way. Basically all I want you to do right now is to let me know you’re here with me.