Bloglove

I found the post Bloglove on my wonderful friend Laetitia's blog and I wanted to share this with others as well.

--------------------
If I love you I will link to you.

If you link to me, I will feel loved.


Go on. Share some love.
-------------------

Of course, Laetitia's link's are different from mine and I am sure you can keep following all the Bloglove being shared. Check out her blog to see to whom she has linked.

A new look & plans for the coming week

After playing with the layout for a bit I think I have gotten Behind Dreaming to where I want it to be: at least for now. This means having the same template as To Write is to Dream but I have altered the colours to suit my current mood. Like my moods I may look at this next week and want to make more changes.

My next challenge is to figure out how to refer to the online petition organized by the Creative Freedom Foundation on Monday morning. In New Zealand on February 28 a new copyright amendment to the Act is coming into force - Section 92a. Even though someone will be given 3 warnings about downloading content that is copyright protected: the kicker is really that that a person can have the internet access cut without the sort of evidence a court would require. Welcome to the age of Guilty until proven Innocent and the innocent part - well it does not seem very clear how you can prove your innocence.

Creative Freedom Foundation has some fantastic information on their site about what is happening in New Zealand. If you are not from New Zealand this does not mean it has no connection to you as there are other countries like Australia that are facing similar laws. You can bury your head and think it will not happen to you but never say never and try to remain informed just in case.

My profile picture here, in twitter and on Facebook have been blackout as a form of protest. Many others have done the same, including Stephen Fry in twitter.

On Monday there are many sites will refer people to the online petition organized by the Creative Freedom Foundation.

Portfolio - 1

There is a certain amount of damage I do to my writing by trying to maintain a blog of poetry. By posting over 40 poems I have taken away from what I could strive to have 'published'. Not that I am saying that many of those pieces are ready, but there are few that I believe have potential.

The question I need to ask myself is should I stop posting when I love doing so? I want to not just call myself a poet, I also want to know that it is not just a dream I once had many years ago that I never grew out of. I know that my poetry has grown; but it is not hard to move on from the darkness and anger of ones teens, it is called growing up.

This post is not - this is how you create a body of work to submit for publication. The post is trying to figure out where to go from here. Where do I separate what I post from that which I put aside to try and have published?

Where to from here? I have grown fond of my blog of poetry and I do not intend to stop. I just have to find time to write more. Then I need to resist trying to share with all of my friends in such an open forum.

Though truthfully only 2 of my friends have felt comfortable pulling my poetry a part, at least in this forum. The thought of telling me how to change my poetry scares most people. So I am lucky that I have 2 people in my life that have found ways to teach me things, while not losing sight of the core of what I write. Thank you to them. I will prod both and point out I posted my thanks so they know that it is them that I am talking about. I have other people in my life that have the ability to guide my writing, they just have not done so via my blog.

If anyone stumbles upon this seemingly hidden blog and knows the answer to the question: how does one maintain a blog of poetry while at the same time grows a portfolio of work that has the potential to be published? - Can you let me know.

Where the idea began

I have to admit that the idea for a blog of poetry began with an idea someone else came up with: Barbara Flowers who contacted others about creating a place online for people to share the writing. As each writer created their own blog Barbara would all these blogs of writing to one central place - this central blog is now called the Writers' Blog, and began as the Queensland Writing Blog. There was also the possibility for meeting in person, but that never occurred and now I live in another country.

I have realised I have never thanked Barbara for starting me on this journey and I think it has been a very thankless task. That is bad on my part. Part of this post is to tell others about the Writers' Blog and suggest that if you are intending to start a blog of writing that this blog is worth looking into.

Thank you Barbara for helping me find a voice :-)

What CC licences I have selected

Across this blog and my blog of poetry, I have chosen 2 types of Creative Commons licences. The second choice I made was whether I would apply a CC licence across the whole blog or on each post within a blog.

The blog Behind Dreaming is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License and has been applied across the whole blog.

While the blog To Write is to Dream... has a CC licence applied to each post within the blog. Some posts have had a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License and others Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

The choice of applying a licence on a single post instead of across a whole blog comes down to the fact that almost all of the posts within my blog To Write is to Dream... are poems that I have written. These poems are each works by themselves that I have chosen to make available through a blog. I started applying a single CC licence across my whole blog of poetry but ran into problems with a few poems where I want to know if someone else wants to remix them. One of these poems that made me glad that I have more than one option when it comes to CC licences is It is not fair.... This poem was difficult to write and I posted it on the blog because I did not want to hide it away any longer as I felt it was something I had to say, especially if it takes me a few more months until I am ready to work on it again.

The last issue for me is still really a question I have to find the answer to and it is around the area of a CC jurisdiction. I am Australian who is now living and working in New Zealand and I have no idea how long I will be in New Zealand for. I posted my 1st poem on my blog of poetry on August 3 2008. The chose I made was to apply an Australian CC licence on both my blogs. My question specifically is what jurisdiction should I apply to my blogs while I am living in New Zealand if I am Australian? I will see if I can find an answer to my question about jurisdiction and will post it here.

• To read about what Creative Commons is read my post Creative Commons: Share, Remix, Reuse - Legally or go directly to the Creative Commons site.

Focusing a blog

When I began my blog To Write is to Dream I only wanted the blog to contain my poetry. My aim was to create a space where anyone could make their own mind up about each poem. This is another reason I rarely leave comments about the poems I post.

In the last month or so I ended up taking the extra information that on a few occasions I had added to a poem and pasting them as a comment. This means that it now appears like I have added some comments after the fact. Maybe down the track I will add a note to explain that the comment actually happened earlier (I will just have to wait and see).

As for other people's comments: when someone comments about the structure then I simply take a look and I make change if I agree with them. I believe the comment that someone has left will help others figure out the changes I have made. There has only been one occasion that a comment left me rethinking a whole poem. Initially this was titled Touch, which then became Touch (revised) and both are on my poetry blog. I am still not completely happy with the results so there may be a new revision sometime in the future. However, you will not find the comment on the blog as it was made in another location where I feed my poetry blog to. I will go into feeds in another post.

Why decide to focus my blog only on my poetry? Well I have noticed that blogs can end up being about many things and when that occurs they become hard to use. The added bonus to this sort of focus is when I added things like a cloud tag this only lists the keywords that describe the topics of each poetry. These keywords are a form of commentary, but are needed to allow a reader to pick and chose the topic of a poem they read.

The main thing I wanted to avoid is becoming a person who starts a blog and then lets lapse and I know many people who have done just that. The biggest bonus of this whole experience is the only writers block I have had in the nearly 2 years I have been working on To Write is to Dream is poetry blocks.

To Write is to Dream....

I have realised that it is almost 2 years since I created my 1st post on my main blog To Write is to Dream. My main blog is where I post many poems I write, which I want to share with my friends and family. By placing these poems in a public forum has meant I also need to think about when I am truly ready to share each poem with the world. Working on To Write is to Dream has been both a challenge as well as something I have never regretted doing.

So many times I have wanted to comment and go beyond the original intention of the main blog. The reason I have only commented a few times is because in the beginning I made a decision about what my blog of poetry would be. To go beyond that would only take away from why I created a blog of poetry. This decision was to leave it to you to decide what impact my poetry has left upon you. I never wanted to tell you what to think, I just hoped you would tell me what you think about what I have written.

Nearly 2 years after I began this journey I now know it is time to share with you why I started this journey, what I have learned and to look into what is yet to come.