Laura's blog

If you've read some of my early posts, you'll know I am a bit of a nerd for statistics. So whenever I visit my blog, I spend a fascinated (and fascinating) 10 minutes looking through my Stats bar. You can view how many hits, on what posts, from what countries and computer systems, referring sites, all by day, week, month, or ALL TIME. ;) So far, my most popular post is "The Twilight Problem." But that's beside the point. The most fun part of all this is that I get to see the search keywords people use to get here... For example: vegetarian roommate annoying "kissed a zombie" laura littlethumbs (me: *looks at thumbs in confusion*) analysis of juletane "amodern hell" ...and a lot of amusing (and inappropriate) things about hating Twilight. Anyway, the point to this post is that I found out how to view the search keywords people use to get to the articles I write for brighthub.com. Specifically my review of Rango (Rango - For Kids?), whic...

As you may have noticed, I've added a blog tab with a new page: Writing. Exciting, no? Took me long enough to figure out how to do it... This has made me think a bit about writing online. Of course I have this blog, and you can find links on the Writing page to other things I've written. But for the most part, I don't write creatively on the Web. I write a lot about writing, I share my opinions, and I review--but with the exception of my Haiku for Japan post, I don't post my "writing." Offline, I write poetry, stories, etc. But you don't and won't get to see them on here, for which I apologize. I follow the blogs and Twitter accounts of several writers and artists who use their blogs to share their poetry, short stories, novel excerpts, photography, and other creative output online. The advantage to that is reaching a wider audience--many writer-bloggers get the views, comments, feedback, and fans they wouldn't get if they published traditional...

So a while back I got into this intense #poetparty discussion on Twitter...well, two intense #poetparty discussions. To be completely honest, I'm one of those people who will try to offer differing opinions to further disucssion. It makes life more interesting. But in these two cases I happened to believe very strongly in my opinionated opinions--about confessional poetry and "prose poems." I've already written a post about confessional poetry ("Confessional Rant" http://lauraplusthevoices.blogspot.com/2011/02/confessional-rant.html  ) explaining why I distrust it so much. As for prose poems, I generally dislike them...with a few exceptions. Well, two, to be exact. On the other hand, I love microfiction and short short stories. Needless to say, the #poetparty's were rather spirited. However, in the past week I have done three things I never thought I would do. One: I wrote a purely confessional poem. Two: It was a prose poem. Three: I read it out lou...