Newsletter #49 — And Still More Baseball
December 15, 2022
Newsletter #49 — Still More Baseball
And Yet Again — After that "deluge" of three baseball requests in one day, I had a fourth a day or two later, from the Glenside Public Library, asking me if I would be willing to give my When Women Played Baseball presentation some time in March 2023. At first I was going to decline because I want to concentrate more on writing fiction and less on giving public presentations.
But then I realized that the library was probably asking me because March is Women's History Month, and this particular program is very popular in March. (One year I gave it eleven times in March: that was a bit much.) So, I decided to say yes.
Which means that I need to update the whole program on Keynote. I created it in 2011 or 2012, then updated it twice. Now I want to update the templates once again, the colors, and other aspects of the program, giving it a more modern look.
Margaret Nabel and the New York Bloomer Girls — And then, after I said yes to the Glenside Public Library gig, I received an email from a Staten Island native who wanted a bit of information. He is trying to get Margaret Nabel elected to the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame and wanted to ask me some questions.
We talked, and then I sent him copies of all my research notes pertaining to Margaret Nabel and the New York Bloomer Girls. These are all available through the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, and usually that's where I send people who want information — but in this case it was just friendlier and easier to work it out via phone call and email.
Most Popular Blogs — I started my blog, "Much to Write About," back in 2014. From the very beginning I blogged on the things that interest me, without regard to whether or not they were all in the same field. By field I mean something like "Mystery" or "Baseball" or "Writing Skills." At the time I wondered whether people would find that appealing, or whether they would prefer that I stick to one field. I personally don't find limiting myself to one field interesting, so no way was I going to do that . . . but I did wonder what my potential readers and subscribers thought.
Well, when updating my web site a couple of months ago, I took a look at the stats — and what I learned pleased me. I learned that the top ten blogs people view are, in fact, scattered over several fields.
Those blogs, in terms of views, are listed below. The parenthetical information is the year the blog was published
Jack Graney and the Broadcasting Dawn Era (2015)
Five Figures of Speech (2017)
Punctuation Marks: 1 (2018)
Ridge and Furrow (2017)
Emily Dickinson (2019)
Mountain Passes: Raton Pass (2019)
The Strawberry Roan (2014)
From Here to There: Transitional Devices (2018)
The Golden Age of Mystery (2015)
Foreshadowing (2020)
If I break these down into areas, fields, or categories, I have:
Baseball — 1
Writing Skills — 4
Poetry — 2
Mountain Passes — 1
Memoir — 1
Mystery — 1
It pleases me to know that those who read my blog are interested in a variety of topics.
Plot Twist for the Mule — I've been working on the mule book steadily, five mornings a week, and last week I had a kind of exciting experience. I was writing a scene that hadn't existed in Draft #4 (I'm working on Draft #5), and just as I was finishing the scene, or thought I was finishing it, a character and situation popped into my mind. A character who wasn't present in the first third of the book, but whose appearance at this juncture seems very right. I love it when things like this happen in writing.
So far, the mule is happy with this new turn of events.
Poetry and The F Words — In my December 15 blog I talk about the surprises I had in writing poems for The F Words.