What Happened to Orble.com?

Posted on by taniacreations

Orble.com, a large community of bloggers, disappeared overnight taking with it years of work and sweat of thousands of writers.

What I find strange is that I couldn’t find anything explaining what happened. No chat over the internet, no emails advising it would happen.

It is so disrespectful to the writers. I know it was a free community but there is responsibility even if the currency wasn’t money. We have offered the community our most precious gift, our talents, passions in words. Even a post-the-fact announcement would have been better than nothing.

In my last statistics report, from the 27th August, 2015, one of my blogs “Aussie Folly” stated:

Rank for www.orble.com (Aussie Folly): 477 out of 21910

21,910 blog sites gone…

I am fortunate to have had all my writings backed-up offline but it still makes one sad to see the history, the work I have done, simply vanished. I noticed things were going badly once the special domains went offline and I managed to copy the main blog here.

In the end this has made me move to WordPress and learn how to make the best of it. It gave me incentive for the change and developing new blogging skills and knowledge.

If you have been an Orble blogger and knows anything of what have happened please post a comment. Just knowing more about it would help with the feeling of loss not only mine but of all the community members.

Into Focus

Posted on by taniacreations

It is working. Having made a decision on what to write, I’m feeling inspired and motivated. I am re-creating my website in WordPress, for now it is www.taniacreations.wordpress.com once it is complete I will divert my domain name to it.

What I am looking for is something many creatives say you should not look for: validation. What I call “the green book”, The Icarus Deception, is the book that made me understand the internal need we have for validation and how to transform it in me.

In a sense what I am looking for is not for others to validate my writing, it is for others to recognise what I know it is true: that my writing has value.

Not because I need this internally but it’s public view will help me in my future pursues. I intend to submit texts for competitions and any sort of writer incentives I can find. Having viewers, blogs, votes and prizes will help with statistics when continuing my path to becoming a full time writer.

Unfocused

Posted on by taniacreations

I had been feeling quite unfocused in my writing. I have completed my Masters in creative writing and felt myself a bit addrift. I have found that I have hundreds, or better, many hundreds of ideas for writing, they are from ideas for blog entries, short stories, and books, I even have full books delineated. Ideas I had forgotten about and only found now that I decided to organise my “ideas for writing”. I am putting them down into Scrivener, separating them in types and into appropriated project folders.

For a couple of months I was simply without focus and that left me completely unsettled. Whenever I sat down for writing I didn’t know what to write and always felt I should be working on something else.

Then I saw this TED talk about the science of happiness and understood that until you make a decision about something — or until you are given no other choice by circumstances — it is difficult for the brain to create happiness about anything. That explained why I felt it was so difficult writing about one thing alone.

That is when I realised that if I decided anything, anything at all, it would be all right. I put down a list of all the projects I could be attacking and the moment I wrote “organise my ideas for writing” I knew this was “the one”.

That one decision took me out of my unproductive phase. I started organising and lost the will to do that. But the drive to write more often in this blog replaced it. Then I felt like re-writing my website taniacreations.com which is quite old now.

I have Brazilian friends who have lived in Australia and were not happy because they missed Brazil, then they went back to Brazil and now they miss Australia and are still feeling dissatisfied. That probably happens because they live inside the eternal possibility of being here or there without making a decision for real.

Making one decision doesn’t mean you will not change your mind. However, if you decide with certainty for something and a new possibility presents itself you might make a new decision, with certainty for a new thing. By doing that you will leave your brain free to create the hormones and sinapses necessary to provide you with happiness. Doubts, indecisiveness, no acceptance, are not conducive to creativity and peace.

My solution to any doubt is: decide anything, as long as it is certain. Even if five minutes later you decide something else.

So now, I feel quite happy… writing away!