
This is an old artwork I have never shared before, except when I originally shared this post in 2016 and again in 2018. I can’t say it is my best work. But there it is.
There are many things that I have noticed about being a blogger that are the opposite of what you might expect. Let me list a few…
- Listing stuff makes a daily post easier.
- I have posted something on WordPress as a blogger every day for five hundred and eight straight days. I will try to hit two years in a row without missing a day for the second time.
- Writing every day makes the ideas flow more easily rather than running out of ideas. The well refills faster than I can drink its waters constantly.
- My most popular post is Be Naked More , which gets views practically every day, but including artistic nudes randomly in a post does not increase its views and popularity even when I put “naked” and “nude” in the tags.

- Reproducing artwork on a blog is difficult when you draw things too big for your little scanner/printer. No matter how good the camera and how bright the lighting, white becomes gray, and the sparkle and luster of good colored pencil color is lost.
- Good writing becomes more about writing less. But it also has to be more carefully crafted. The more I brew prose in my black cauldron of a blog, the more it seems to boil down to poetry.
- Readers don’t seem to object to metaphors and purple paisley prose as much as editors and book reviewers do.
- I like writing purple paisley prose (overly-complicated grammatical structures with alliteration, metaphor, and asides that interrupt the flow like this one… taken to the extreme for humorous effect).
- Art pieces can be manipulated and re-used or re-combined to make something new out of something old. Computers make art editing infinitely easier.
- Most people don’t actually read your blog all the way through. Some just like it for the pictures. If you actually read this far, you can let me know with a smiley face in the comments.
- There are many, many good writers on WordPress… as I am sure there are on other blog sites as well. I despair of being able to find and read them all. If you are reading this bullet point, you are probably one of the ones I have found and read and liked. Blogging becomes a mirror that shows you your own self more naked than naked… not just what is under your clothes, but what you look like to yourself in your own head. And the more you walk around WordPress naked like that, the more you want to show it all off. (How’s that for an idea that will pull in the readers from the lonely parts of Siberia?) 🙂

















Stuff That Works
What makes people visit your blog and maybe even click “like”? I should tell you up front, I have no idea how best to navigate the crazy internet. I want to. I have a book to promote. I have ideas and experiences to share. I am a writer and I would like to make something more than excessive heartache out of being one. But how you actually go about it is still a mystery.
I know what I surf the internet for. I like artwork, especially original artwork. That is why I try to post as much of my own stuff as I can. I am an amateur artist, self-taught with a little bit of college art classes, contact with real artists, and a lot of TV Bob Ross. I surf to find other artists whose stuff catches my eye. I post about artists like Loish, Maxfield Parrish, Paul Detlafsen, and Norman Rockwell. I go to sites like DeviantArt (Example at this link) and follow artists like James Brown and Shannon Maer on Facebook. I help promote their work by sharing as often as I can. Do I worry about copyright violation with my artwork? No. I am long past the point of making a profitable career as an artist. I like having people see my work and if someone decides to claim they are the artist instead of me, I have the real originals and even some pictures of work in progress. The Big Eyes thing will not happen to me.
So sharing pictures seems to matter. I got lots of hits from the monster picture post because I used a lot of monster-movie images that people normally search for on the internet. Pictures of pretty girls work too. It doesn’t seem to matter if I drew them or if they are a picture of a relative, those pictures pull people in too.
Pictures of photogenic nieces aid my blogging popularity in a rather noticeable way.
Yes, I do believe I have just intimated that Minnie Mouse is my niece, a daughter of my sister-in-law. Lying is part of blogging. You have to put spin on things and make people understand the things they want to understand more than you need them to see what is really true in the empirical sense.
Being able to put the words “nude” or “naked” in titles or in the tags brings in more views too. Those words get lots of hits on search engines and some of the people who visit my blog looking for that actually read what’s posted. Just because an idea is a little bit naughty, it doesn’t mean only perverts and bad people respond to it.
This is a picture of Rowan Atkinson as Mr. Bean. It is NOT a picture of me.
And it doesn’t hurt to be a little funny now and then. Humor is something I look for in the posts of others. I try to be funny in my posts too… though whether they are hah-hah funny or merely eeuw! funny is debatable. Much of my humor is only intended to raise a smirk or half a smile. I am most satisfied when I make you think, “heh, that’s right, isn’t it.”
This is Millis, not me. He was an actual rabbit that was turned humanoid by a scientist’s experiment with alien technology.
So why is this post called Stuff That Works if, as I am claiming, I really don’t know anything about how blogging works? I may have been a little less than truthful when I made claims. Or maybe I was claiming with a little bit of “tongue in cheek”? I hope I have demonstrated that I do know how. The thing I have yet to wrestle with is WHY. So now I have to get busy and work on that.
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Filed under artwork, autobiography, blog posting, commentary, humor, nudes, Paffooney, surrealism
Tagged as artwork, blogging, goofiness, humor, nudes, paffooney, philosophy