Q. For new readers, how long have you been blogging and what is your main topic?
A. The full archive since 2011 is indexed on your right. This is primarily a book and writing blog, but it's also about cats, nature, activism, needlework and other things.
Q. What was your proudest blogging moment of 2018?
A. Not one, but several: when clients read my blog and hired me to contribute to their blogs or books.
Q. What was your biggest blogging challenge of 2018?
A. Making time for the blog! People were paying for posts here and for posts elsewhere, and while the actual writing on my home computer was no problem, checking links and uploading posts took time.
Q. Which of your 2018 blog posts was your favorite and why?
A. That would be this book review, written in aid of a nice little independent start-up publisher. I regret that Amazon wouldn't post the short version of this review because Jee Leong Koh didn't buy the review copy he sent me with a CREDIT CARD--which is nothing less than religious discrimination! But I'm glad I was able to boost his first book in the U.S., a reprint, and I'm glad it's done well with U.S. fiction readers.
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/new-book-review-malay-sketches.html
Q. Which was most popular with readers? Why do you think it did so well?
A. Blogspot tracks which posts are visited and makes it possible to tell to some extent when and why they were visited. This gives the popularity contest three clear winners in separate categories.
The post that seems to have done best with readers-for-pleasure was a nice, jokey little song parody that I would imagine inspires people to add more verses:
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/09/schadenfreude-song.html
The one that attracted most readers overall is a serious reference post to which I keep steering people.
I am The Celiactivist. I observe that glyphosate is the common factor in ALL the health problems I've had since midlife, which I reached about the time different manufacturers started aggressively, competitively encouraging farmers and gardeners to use more and more of this poison. Even when bacteria were going around, I've not been ill unless I've also been exposed to glyphosate! And then while working my town's Friday Market I watched just a faint whiff of good ol' "Roundup" (the glyphosate formula sold in garden supply departments everywhere) make a good half of my townsfolk ill too. It's incredible even to these people themselves. Everyone reacts to glyphosate in a different way, and that reaction has become familiar to them over the years. They say "age" or "allergies" or "something going around," but that is very obviously not the true explanation.
So I found documentation of the different effects glyphosate has in each of the studies manufacturers submitted to the EPA as (they thought) proof that this chemical is not the sole and whole cause of cancer. Well, it's a factor in cancer, but if you're exposed to enough of it, it can kill you in lots of other ways before cancer has a chance to form! I have all the documents stored on my laptop, but as long as they're up on the EPA web site I urge people to read them and comment on them there. This is the post where I tell readers what's in which link, so they can read them selectively if they don't have much time, and order copies from me if the EPA pulls the studies off their site. The title warns people this one is not meant to be a fun read--spinach, not strawberries. But it's a useful read; it just might save somebody's life.
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/this-web-site-loves-vegetables-here-is.html
All good activists maintain communication with our elected officials, so posts from politicians have always been a favorite with some of our readers. Some people visit this web site to get printouts of their elected officials' newsletters and press releases. They can get those directly from the officials but, if they trust Google's cookies more than the officials' own web sites' cookies, they're welcome to read this web site too. Some of these people are out-of-state readers considering candidates for national office and, if this web site helped Senator Kaine get picked as a vice-presidential candidate in 2016, that would be a proud moment indeed! In 2018 this was the readers' favorite guest post from a politician:
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/09/morgan-griffith-on-us-oil.html
And finally, in the "pets" category...I suspect readers like this one because the story about the tomkitten (which is true) becomes a sort of encouragement to young men.
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/tortie-tuesday-burr-rises-above.html
Q. Did you implement a new feature on your blog in 2018?
A. I did not. One thing I like about Blogspot is that it automatically set up this web site looking pretty much the way I think a blog ought to look. It'll do flashier formats, but I don't like flashier formats; they use up too much memory. The improvements I'd like to make at this blog, like cross-posting everything to Live Journal (where everyone can comment and I use no live Amazon links), involve more human attention. That is why those improvements have been so slow in being made.
Q. As the social media landscape changes, how are you promoting your blog posts and connecting to new readers?
A. I'm not, really. I like to see the numbers grow, but realistically this is not a big commercial web site and never will be. I've learned that most people read this web site on work or school days, which tells me something about where they do their Internet reading, and readership drops in summer. Well, that's good. Even tablet computers put out a lot of heat; it's good to unplug from them and go outdoors in warm weather.
I knew before I started a live chat about Glyphosate Awareness, on Twitter, that a lot of people don't want to know any more about a person who mentions any digestive problems. In fact, while doing research for a paid writing job, I'd seen how a few tweets about yucky health problems had helped a young rising starlet fade right off the movie scene. There's a quick fix for that. Instead of backing away from Twitter in shame she could have gone back to Twitter and posted lots of cute fluffy things that would have buried the squick. She didn't do that. Well, maybe she was too sick to care. Personally, I can think of nothing that would make me happier than to get glyphosate banned, stop having yucky health news to report about myself or anyone else, and post only nice things on Twitter. Animals definitely help people do that.
There are a lot of pet blogs out there. I'm partial to Mudpie, and Abby at the "Book of Barkley" blog, because I've been following those blogs so long. Other animal e-friends, like Leelee, have grown old and died while I've been reading their web sites...and a lot of pet blogs, including this one as well as Barkley's Human's, are about the pets the human currently lives with as a sort of memorial to a great pet who died long ago, like Barkley, or like our Founding Queen Black Magic. Some pet blogs die when the animals do; the great ones carry on with the stories of the younger animals bloggers adopt in memory of the ones we've lost, recognizing that most humans are likely to outlive at least ten favorite cats or dogs. I can't follow all of them, and I can empathize when a pet blogger feels discouraged by the thought, "What use is one more pet blog among so many."
So I'd like to say this to people who may not feel free to enliven their sweet generic animal posts with more comments on human events, as I do. Animal blogs are fluff. You post one more picture of your cat posing adorably, one more story of your dog cleverly breaking into something you've tried to keep him out of, or maybe a wild animal where just being able to snap a recognizable photo is the news item. Somehow neither Iams nor Purina nor Sam's picks it up...they have so many cute images to choose from. What good are you doing in this world? you ask. Well, some of us go online primarily in order to do grim and boring stuff, and animal posts do much to relieve our grim and boring journeys through cyberspace. On Tuesdays, when I've been banging on about glyphosate all day prior to the live chat between 2 and 3 p.m. (Eastern/NYC time), that first cute, fluffy animal story I read after the clock ticks past 3 always feels like pulling off wet boots and drying my feet by the fire. Carry on, pet bloggers of the world, carry on!
Q. If your blog accomplishes only one thing in 2019, what do you hope it is?
A. To get glyphosate banned. Of course the blog's original purpose was to encourage writers--myself and others--and that's still its goal. Encouraging legislators and their staff to do the right thing, generally, is another goal. And I sell real physical books in my home town; any time the blog encourages local people to buy a book, or other people to visit my town, that's excellent. (We may be an insular little town, full of oldies trying to revive or perpetuate sixth grade social cliques, but we love visitors.) But those things lack the life-and-death urgency that getting glyphosate banned necessarily has for anyone with the celiac gene.
Q. What steps are you planning to take toward that goal?
A. Oh I would love for anyone to come up with a more interesting alternative, or supplement, to "Just keep nagging everybody about it." One of my more popular posts in 2018 was a short story, where I projected current issues into the remote future and wrote about the one way I've ever seen something that "little" citizens needed defeat big financial interests. That was for a beautiful, promising young person, the teenager every parent wants, to die. I'd really like to see something else defeat the glyphosate lobby, rather than that.
Q. Is there an area where you could use some advice or would welcome comments?
A. I'd like readers to know that I welcome all comments, although I'll "mute" the ones that link to commercial sites (as distinct from linking to academic sites or your own personal blogs). Google has its own agenda. If you don't want to have a Google account of any kind, you can always tweet to @5PriscillaKing .There's also an e-mail address at the bottom of the page, for those who don't like Twitter.
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