Creative Nonfiction Awards

While I have still been getting responses to my online poll (36 responses so far) I have been writing on my blog and working on my book about Johnstown.   I saw a post on Facebook about the 

Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction and Essay Contest

The essay writing contest was of interest to me.  According to their rules an essay is any nonfiction writing that has 6,000 words or less.  I thought of submitting one of my blog posts but which one?  Which one had the most positive response recently?

Looking at the recent comments on my posts, I chose the one on poverty in the Greater Johnstown School District.  I had to add information to it to supplement it for those who are unfamiliar with Johnstown.  The essay was far less than the 6,000 word limit but longer isn't always better.  

I don't count on winning it but it is a way on increasing exposure for the blog.  I have updated the look of the blog with snippets of each post on the front page.  

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A Look at My Blogosphere

Three weeks ago a member of a wrtiers group on Facebook posted this image asking "Who (in this group) is a blogger?"  The post received over 630 comments with 206 unique blogs listed.  I thought I would take a look at the blogs listed to see what kind of platforms that they used (Wordpress vs. Blogger) and what types of topics that they covered.  I also added the 24 blogs on my blogroll (on the right of this page) for a comparison.  I know this sample only scratches the surface of the blogosphere and is not representative of it but it is representative of what I see on the web.  You can see the sample of blogs and the topics I used to categorize them and can view them yourself here.

Host	Number	%
Wordpress	97	42.2
Other	79	34.3
Blogger	39	17.0
Wix	7	3.0
Facebook	2	0.9
Medium	2	0.9
Squarespace	2	0.9
Tumblr	2	0.9
Total	230	100.0
Margin of Error		6.8

I expected Wordpress to be the most popular host forI the sample of blogs and it was as can be seen in the table above with 42.2% listing it as the host.  The second most popular domain was "other" which included blogs with no host listed or with obscure hosts.  Blogger (which hosts this site) was a distant third at 17.7%.  This survey has a 6.8% margin of error.

Topic	Number	% of blogs
Author	51	22.2
Writing	46	20.0
Fiction	25	10.9
Travel	20	8.7
Politics	14	6.1
Poetry	14	6.1
Psychology	12	5.2
Business	11	4.8
Religion	10	4.3
Personal	10	4.3

I looked at each blog to determine which topic it covers and what it's general orientation is.  Some blogs were hard to categorize so I gave it the most generic term "Writing."  Aren't all blogs about writing you say?  These are blogs that (sort of like this one) goes from topic to topic wherever the author wants to go.  This was the second most common topic at 20 percent.  The ten most popular topics 

The most popular topic/orientation was Author at 22.2%.  This refers to bloggers who use their sites to promote their books.  The third most common topic was fiction at 10.9%.  These topics shouldn't be surprising given that they were sampled from a Facebook group for writers.  There was a wide variety of blogs that were easier to categorize with 84 other categories found.  One blog in this survey could have up to four categories.

It was very time consuming to survey each blog.  It took two weeks to put this simple analysis together.  I say this just to give you an idea of the difficult work of putting these analyses together.  If I missed anything please let me know.

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I Figli della Madre Terra (The Children of Mother Earth)

Buon Natale a tutti.  My cousin from Italy, Lorenzo Serpente (pictured below in the Clayfox  and Spider man shirt) has written a book called I Figli della Madre Terra or The Children of Mother Earth.  It is a science fiction/fantasy/coming of age story of a boy growing up in a prehistoric tribe.  In January there will be an English version of the story available on Amazon.  I have met several authors who have published books.  A few are listed below with links to their amazon pages.

Lorenzo ora (Lorenzo Now)

Merry Christmas to all.  Il Mio cugino d'Italia, Lorenzo Serpente (nella camicia "Clayfox" sotto) ha scritto un Libro I Figli della Madre Terra) una storia di un ragazzo alla prima della storia in un tribu`.  Si puo` comprare il Libro al Amazon.  Conosco molti auroti chi fanno libri.  Tre di quelle altri autori sono sotto in questo posto con un link al Amazon.

Lorenzo quando ho incontrato lui

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