-
Continue reading →: A Duel of words on blogging
Readers add so much to blog posts. Often, readers’ comments turn out more interesting than a post itself. Occasionally, comments give rise to a dialogue between readers regarding a position that the original post touched upon which might have great potential for a discussion. I had two such comments on…
-
Continue reading →: How to write a successful blog post
Many of us write well. Many of us also engage with really important or popular issues in our blog posts. Yet, some bloggers turn out more successful than others. How does that happen? What’s the big secret? The most fundamental answer to this question about the big secret of writing…
-
Continue reading →: Trapped characters at dusk
I was watching some very young kids playing on a pier next to the Hudson on the Jersey side a couple of evenings ago. Summer evenings are great for watching people in a place usually as cold as it is here all year round. The air was balmy and the…
-
Continue reading →: Notes on the condition of writers in the present day
It’s a rainy day today. The river is gray, the air is dense and foggy and the drenched people huddled under their umbrellas also seem bereft of colour. It all reminds me of a line from O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi when the young woman saw a “grey…
-
Continue reading →: Boats
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter–tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—- *** “I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat…
-
Continue reading →: Compassion in city spaces
I wonder why I am drawn to crowded cities– to places where people saturate the streets, to town squares, escalators, stairways, buses, footpaths and every place imaginable in a metropolis. To spaces where unrelated people throng in a crowd, random people sit together, eat beside one another and loiter for…
-
Continue reading →: Aggressive characters real and fictional
I was thinking of blustering Bounderby today, the industrialist character from Dickens’ Hard Times, always lecturing, always talking loudly, always right. I was also thinking of two other people, George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, the innocent idealist and her fraught relationship with Casaubon, the collator of facts, the inhabitant of…
-
Continue reading →: Meeting of no significance
I’m sitting at a coffee shop today and a girl walks in. It’s the kind of coffee shop in Manhattan that is only meant for coffee and food. There’s hardly any place to sit. Yet, I’ve been lucky enough to perch myself at the only ledge with some bar stools…
-
Continue reading →: Summer at last in NYC
Today was rainy but it’s Summer at last in the city. Days are longer, people are less huddled on the streets and the buildings of Manhattan get to show themselves off dazzling those who have the leisure to look up.
-
Continue reading →: Bottledworder is a year old!
When you are a child, you babble away and no one listens. You talk in the kitchen and ask a thousand questions about your new world when it’s only as tall as the height of the lowest cabinet door. When you are an adult, you have a need to do…
-
Continue reading →: Peripheral friends
I remember a woman I met a long time ago who went hiking with me in California. She was a native of those mountains, having climbed those heights often in childhood. Me, a city person, unused to those heights, kept lagging behind. Every few steps she stopped for me, turned…
-
Continue reading →: Electronic writing and the numbers game
Sometimes, a thought comes in a moment and you just record it. You type it as fast as possible and there it is. Just so close to perfect! As it’s coming, if someone interrupts you, walks in the door or calls or sends an innocuous email, boom! The thought is…
-
Continue reading →: Eight great comments from April
I thought my last post this month should be about appreciating my readers. So out of the many, many, many, many great comments, I chose the eight below from my posts in April.
-
Continue reading →: The Reading Police for the Young
The reading police are coming for ’em young minds because they know what’s best. Raja Bose, almost thirteen now, has another showdown with his mother. That’s because he is not as docile, as good a boy as his younger brother Sanjeev. Raja insists on spending the long summer afternoons reading…
-
Continue reading →: On focusing the reader’s attention on your blog
OR On blog content arrangement Part 3 (after Part 1 and Part 2) How would you guide the reader’s eye in terms of content on your blog? What would you want them to look at and for how long? Would you want to present a lot of content or only…
I’m, Bottledworder. Always inhabiting the half-streets, catching paradoxes, thinking in greys, trapping the world in words in my bottle.
Let’s connect
Join 10.1K other subscribers
202,965 hits
Recent posts
- Blogging for thirteen years!
- Durga Puja at Times Square in New York
- Summer ends, fall begins, change is here
- Food carts in New York, stay lively please!
- Creating characters and people
- Who blogs? Who reads?
- Waiting to write
- Libraries, reading rooms, nostalgia
- A moment is for ever
- Is New York City coming back?
- You changed? A Broadway Visit
Archives
- September 2025
- August 2025
- July 2025
- June 2025
- May 2021
- April 2020
- May 2017
- May 2016
- September 2015
- July 2015
- May 2015
- February 2015
- January 2015
- October 2014
- September 2014
- August 2014
- July 2014
- June 2014
- March 2014
- February 2014
- January 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- September 2013
- August 2013
- July 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- December 2012
- November 2012
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
bottledworder 