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When I first took over the OUPblog I gave our readers a chance to ask me questions so they could get to know me.  Since Lauren will be in charge starting Monday (get excited!), I decided to ask her a few questions before I go.  I think her answers will give you a taste of how lucky we are to have her on-board.  Don’t worry, I plan on saying a proper goodbye tomorrow (Friday).

What is your favorite fiction book?
Becca, we’ve had this conversation so many times. For the sake of this Q&A, I’ll forgo my top 10 and say The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. This year is actually the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication. Also, fun fact: O’Brien and I share an Alma Mater.

What is your favorite non-fiction book?
Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit. Hands down. No contest. ’Nough said.

What is your favorite guilty pleasure blog?
Overheard in the Office is pretty great.

What kind of flowers should we send you?
Who’s “we”? And why am I getting flowers? I don’t think I should be trusted with flowers. This cactus isn’t looking so good itself. Remember when we had to hide it in a file cabinet for a week? I gave it too much too much sun, Becca. I exposed a cactus to too much sun.

What was your first blog post ever?
I had a LiveJournal back in the day. I have no idea what my first post was, but I’m sure it was something to the effect of, “Hey everyone! I’m Lauren! My favorite color is purple, I have a major sweet tooth, and I’m so totally obsessed with Dark Angel.” I think I had a really big impact on the lives of all (2) of my readers.

What other languages do you speak?
I used to speak pretty decent Japanese, but now I mostly just mumble things like, “aré?” and “éé, nanto ka…” usually directed at my computer. I know some French as well, and one very important phrase in Spanish: “Y para mi, un café con leche por favor.” I recently went to Spain, but that was all I knew how to say, so I was a bit shaky the whole time.

If your friend were visiting NYC, what is the one thing they should do while they are here?
Whenever I have visitors, the first thing we do is go to 5 Napkin Burger. Airport –> 5 Napkin. Bus stop –> 5 Napkin. IKEA ferry –> 5 Napkin. Can you drop off your luggage first? No you cannot. Because: 5 Napkin.

What color are your socks today?
Socks are for people who are wearing shoes…

What is your favorite Twitter hashtag?
#thefuture. Except when it’s being used to denote  something actually in the future.

Fill in the blank: I’m psyched to be the OUPblog editor because it is _tasty_.
…
Oh, we’re not doing this Mad Libs style?

0 Comments on Hey Everybody! Meet Lauren as of 6/17/2010 9:28:00 AM

Blogger of the Week:
Debbi Michiko Florence...


Author Debbi Michiko Florence has been maintaining One Writer’s Journey on LiveJournal since September of 2004. Below she talks about her experience as a writer-blogger.

Why did you start One Writer's Journey?

I’d toyed with the idea for a few months prior, but hesitated because I thought, who cares what I think? But I really loved the idea of being able to keep a record of my journey as a writer. At the time, I didn’t think anyone would read my blog save for family and friends. I was shocked to learn there was a whole children’s writer community already on LiveJournal and as we found each other, I gained a valuable group of friends and colleagues.

What kinds of things do you post about? Has that changed over time?

My intention was to blog about my writing process--the ups and downs, and to honestly catalog what happened and how I felt. That was easy at first because I thought that only a handful of people were reading my blog. As the months wore on, more and more writers found LiveJournal and the children’s writer community, and suddenly I was aware that complete strangers were reading about my writing life.

How boring, I thought. So I started sharing good news about other writers and linking to my author interviews on my web site. The warm community feeling made me more comfortable sharing my opinions and stories about the non-writing part of my life, too.

Then, one day, I received an e-mail from a well-known and respected editor who thanked me for talking positively about one of her author’s books. It was suddenly clear to me that anyone could read my blog. While I never spoke badly about books or other people (just annoying TV commercials and miscellaneous pet peeves), I realized that what I said directly reflected how complete strangers (and editors) would perceive me. So whenever I write a post I imagine four people reading it: my agent, an editor, a complete stranger, and my mother--and if I’m okay with that, then I post it.

These days, I blog about almost anything: my writing, my books, good news about other writers, books I love (I keep my reading list on my blog), my dog, and snippets from my life in general.

How has blogging been beneficial to you as a writer?

Blogging has helped me feel less alone. There are wonderful, warm, and supportive writers out there and we offer each other encouragement and cheers. I suspect blogs help with marketing/sales, although I’ve not done any formal research on it. I definitely believe my blog helped get word out about my book. Certainly, I learn about books from other writers’ blogs and have made purchases after reading praise for a book.

What's your advice for newer bloggers?

There are such a wide array of styles and personalities out there. My suggestion is to be yourself, but also remember that your blog is not like keeping a private journal. Figure out who your target audience is (for me it’s children’s writers and book lovers), but also remember other people might come across it (a 10-year-old, your grandmother, a former nemesis). One of my cousins keeps up with me by reading my blog daily. Consider the length of your posts. I like to try to keep most of my posts on the short side, because I suspect readers of my blog read many blogs and are short on time. And finally, post consistently. Figure out what your schedule allows. Daily? Weekly? Probably more often than once a month. You don’t want to lose your audience. Mostly, have fun! If you don’t enjoy it (some writers don’t)--don’t blog. But if you love it? Dive in!

This post has dual reasons. One to convey my excitement at receiving my comp copy of issue 2 of Sand which contains my story ‘Through the Warped Eye of Death’, along with stories from Bruce Cooper, Patrick O’Leary, Eric Pinder, Sanford Allen, Fred Warren, T.J. McIntryre, and Kevin M. White.

With special thanks to Edward Lupak, the editor; and Aaron Polson, flying-monkey wrangler.

Secondly, it is to thank Mark S. Deniz for introducing me to Windows Live Writer which enables me to write posts both to my new LiveJournal Blog and original The Poisoned Apple blog at the same time. It even takes into account the themes of both. Very, very happy. I recommend using it even if you don’t have two blogs as it is much quicker to compose a post on than the blogger/livejournal template.

All I have to do is figure out how to add tags to my blogger account. I think I can do it for LJ.

Hi there--I'm hoping one of you LJ mavens out there might know the answer to this.

I have created several communities for various online classes/workshops I'm teaching.

In my recent class, Writing Children's Nonfiction Books for the Educational Market, the look of the page (header, sidebar, etc.) remained consistent whether you were reading the post or looking at comments.

But my current class, Getting to a Poem, is different. It looks fine when reading posts, but when you go to read or leave comments, the pretty design disappears and it's just the generic setup. It's ugly.

As far as I can tell, the settings for both communities are the same. Does anyone have any thoughts on why this is happening? Do some designs just not keep their look for the comment pages?

The one that works well uses the Reading Stage (Mixit) design, and the one that's not working well uses the California Poppy (expressive) design.

Thanks for any help!

[Addendum: Susan Taylor Brown from Susan Writes answered this for me. Thanks!]

LiveJournal syndication for Tea Cozy is here. Which means that if you're on LiveJournal, you can add this blog to your friends list and read it that way.

How did I do it?

Actually, I didn't. As is explained fully in this LiveJournal FAQ, paid and permanent LiveJournal members may create a LiveJournal syndication for anything that has a feed, including a blog.

Why would a member do this? So that they can add your blog to their friends list for easy reading.

This means that you may have this over at LiveJournal and not realize it. I'm not sure how you would find this out; but, if you want to be syndicated over at LiveJournal, you need to know a paid/permanent member and ask them. (For what it's worth, I have a free LJ account that I use to be able to comment with a name, LizzB, at LJ posts; since it's the free version I cannot create the syndication for your blog.)

Once you get this, it's a good idea to keep an eye on the LJ feed because people may comment on your posts over at LiveJournal.

So some recent comments from LJ you may have missed:

My post: YA Older? Younger? ...
coppervale / Apocatastasis said, "The fact that the details of BOOK THIEF and CURIOUS INCIDENT were excluded makes it seem a bit like details that didn't support the thesis were deliberately excluded...Just my first take." I responded, "I agree! Especially since the circumstances of the publishing history of both books are pretty well known."

My post: The Rules of Survival
zeisgeist / girl uninterrupted said, "I want to add: Nikki is so scary because she's a REALISTICALLY mentally ill mother. Often when you see "bad Mommies" in YA they are compilations of cliches. Nikki's craziness is unique and believable, which makes her cruelty even more disturbing. There's no need to suspend disbelief, because you know someone somewhere IS Nikki.I freaking loved this book. I want to see it win as many accolades as possible."

My post: Thora
zeisgeist / girl uninterrupted said, "I loved that show, but I don't remember Thora Birch from it at all. And OH MY GOD, what's up with the blonde anorexic version of the former adorable cutie? Jesus. I'm so sick of this bullshit."
Amy McAuley added, "Strangely, I did not remember AT ALL that I totally loved this show until Liz mentioned it. I, too, am perturbed by the blonde anorexic version of Thora. She's wasting way. And, if the Defamer story about her dad is accurate?! WTF?"
and my two cents worth: "Being a total pop culture junkie, part of my WTF reaction is how is it possible that I'm only just learning this? Day by Day was cool because the cast was just awesome -- pre Melrose Park Courteny Thorne Smith, pre Seinfeld Julia Louis-Dreyfus."

As I get comments on the LiveJournal syndication, I'll share them here.

Previously, I have had online ties to the LiveJournal community through syndications of Cynsations and Spookycyn from here at Blogger. However, occasionally errors or blocks occur.

So, I'm launching a mirror Cynsations on LiveJournal. My hope is that--tech gremlins aside--one or the other system will always be running.

You are welcome to read there or here at the original Blogger blog. However, you may want to bookmark both in case of future freezes or other difficulties.

In other news, visitors will notice that I have used the nifty Blogger format upgrade to make some design changes. My hope is that Cynsations now matches my official site better and Spookycyn is, well, a little spookier. Along these lines, I'd like to thank Karl at Blogger for helping me through the last stages of upgrade--most appreciated!

Thanks to Colleen Cook, Jo Knowles, and Sara Zarr for helping me announce these changes.

We've gone over to the new version of Blogger, as of the last post. That's why we now have these odd little labels.

There's a small amount of fiddling going on behind the scenes, and as those with long memories may already know, sometimes LiveJournal and Blogger do not play well with each other. So if your inbox just got a month's worth of old blog posts reappearing in it, we're incredibly sorry. (The industrious web elf says that anyone who feels they need a personal apology can write to her at [email protected] and she will cheerfully abase herself.)