“Secrets” Is The Topic For The Eighteenth Virtual Symposium - a Blog Post by humorlife

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3/29/2016 4:56 am

“Secrets” Is The Topic For The Eighteenth Virtual Symposium

This month’s voting saw some truly excellent electioneering for “Science.” Well done, campaigners! Your valiant efforts catapulted the topic into a solid… second place. “Secrets” was the blogosphere’s top choice for the upcoming virtual symposium’s topic.

As with all symposium topics, this one does not necessarily refer to anything sexual: Let Secrets reflect as wide a range of interpretations as there are symposium participants!

For those new to the virtual symposium: In short, it’s a simultaneous act of blogging. Anybody with a blog on this site is welcome to join in. Contributors create something – an essay, a cartoon, an erotic story, a memoir, a series of one-line aphorisms, an image collage, a photo montage, a poem, or anything else – relating to “Secrets.” At a pre-arranged time and date (see below) all participants post their contributions.

Want a better sense of how it works – or just some good reads? Here’s a link to the participants’ list from the most recent symposium: Participants List For The Seventeenth Virtual Symposium The First Time

Feel free to take the basic idea of “Secrets” and stretch it to as wild an interpretation as you like -- the post should reflect you! Anything goes, as long as there is a trace of the original idea in the post.

On the morning of Sunday, April 3, all participants will post their creations and notify me via a post on my blog. Please, please, post ‘em to your own blogs early: I want to link to them in a central post here, but I don’t want to be stapled to my desk all day.

I'll be responsible for posting links to your blogs – I want to make this as effortless for participants as possible! Again, once you’ve posted, leave a note in the comments section here so I know to link to your submission. I will, of course, post latecomers… people do check back to see whether new participants have joined the symposium. But after the morning of April 3, I may not be updating the list as obsessively.

As for contributions themselves: The idea is to create something new, as opposed to using posts to respond to other posts (although the comments section will, of course, remain fair game). Leave a note in the blog comments, and I’ll use a post on this blog that day to link to all contributions.

First suggestion: Participants may want to refer to either the virtual symposium or the topic itself in their headline. Not a requirement – there are no requirements, save for originality and participation – but a suggestion which will let the wide blog community know what we’re doing.

Second suggestion: Consider using one of the larger sizes, which can be found in the box when inputting a post. I find the much larger sizes offputting and hard to read… but size 2, to my mind, balances having to squint and the vertigo-inducing larger sizes. (This post has been posted in size 2, for what it’s worth…) Of course, there’s always the trick of holding down the control button and hitting either the + or – keys, which for most websites serves to enlarge or shrink copy and images.

This is not a contest. No souvenir mugs will be sent, nor ribbons awarded. The idea here is for those interested to, on a single day, offer an interpretation of a single topic for the sheer fun of it.

By all means, encourage other bloggers to participate – and to let me know they’re doing so through this post, so on the morning of April 3 I can link to their posts. Oh, and please consider this an invitation – if not a request – to the symposium both on your own blogs, and in individual requests to bloggers whom you’d like to see represented. The more the merrier, right? There are some folks with very distinct voices on this site who aren’t yet participating – let’s bring ‘em in and make ‘em one of us, one of us, one of us!

Remember, of course, to keep things in your voice!

Every symposium, there are a few newbies who contribute posts, and don’t let me know about their contributions (I catch some by watching the “recent posts” feed, but that’s hit or miss). So… once you post, please leave me a note on the master list post, or here! (I get messages about the symposium which are attached to the blog a little faster than the ones which are emailed to me.)

Can’t wait to see the results!

the symposium, the symposium, the symposium... the viewers you bring in may be your own. Can't get more (verbally) naked than that...

Final note: When the page with all the contributors goes live, please consider adding the link to your post, even if the contribution has already gone live. Doing so allows people to readily access all the other offerings… which is, after all, one of the purposes of this exercise.

Stop in, read, and offer comments at my "swinging as seen in the media" blog, "Confessions of a Lifestyle Man" humorlife, which is also the home of the monthly virtual symposium. New post: The Virtual Symposium Returns Lets Pick A Topic

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