Inspiration Bit

After featuring last week one of the stories by O.Henry, who was called “the American answer to Guy de Maupassant” it’s only natural to showcase a story by the famous French short story writer and novelist, whose work influenced many other writers, like Anton Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham. One of Maupassant’s horror stories, The Inn, bears lots of similarities with Stephen King’s novel “The Shining”.

Guy de Maupassant (1850 – 1893) was one of the rare writers who were recognized from almost the beginning of the writer’s career. But the success, popularity and numerous affairs have destroyed him. He was never married, suffered from illness and depression and died in a mental institution. The madness is a reoccurring theme in many of his stories. His friend Emile Zola described him as “the happiest and unhappiest of men”.

Today’s story is one of Maupassant’s stories with the twist ending, written in a typical pessimistic style depicting real people and true emotions, serving us with a reminder to cherish what we have in life when we have it.
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Today I want to share with you eight phenomenal blogs whose authors managed to uncover a smarter way to blog.

Reading and watching these blogs’ progress and gain in popularity make me question myself as a blogger, the purposefulness and usefulness of my blog. They make my inner voice loud and clear: “Vivien, if you don’t smarten up and start paying more attention to your blog, one day soon you’ll wake up to only a few dozens of RSS readers of your blog, who’d stay with you only because they’re your friends and won’t have a heart to unsubscribe”. (oh, yeah, smarty pants… will you be the one taking care of my family, work and clients then?… but then there are others who have jobs and families, and somehow they do manage to find time for everything, so I guess it’s time for me to stop making the excuses and learn, learn from others, from those who found the smarter ways to blog.)
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No short story collection can go without including something by William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, the master of twist endings. The origin of his pen name is said to be borrowed from the writer’s family cat, Henry, whom he frequently called “Oh, Henry”.

In 1892, at the age of thirty six, Porter was found guilty of embezzling funds at the First National Bank and sentenced to five years in an Ohio prison. That’s where he started writing short stories to support his daughter. He was released three years later for a good behaviour, starting a new life with a dozen of short stories under his belt and a new name. He went on writing over 400 stories, famous for their witty narration, colourful characters and surprise endings.

Porter started his writing career in 1894, working full time on his humorous weekly called The Rolling Stone, which lasted only a year perhaps due to Porter’s humour making fun at some powerful people. But looks like he based our today’s feature on his days as a humorist.

O. Henry is one of my all time favourite authors, and I’ve been itching to showcase one of his brilliant short stories in A Bit Of Literature, but I couldn’t make up my mind which one to choose. I didn’t want to post his well-known, though beloved by many, stories, like “The Gift Of The Magi” or “The Last Leaf”, until I found this one below. Tell me, what do you think of it, and what is your favourite story by O. Henry?
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A few months ago I wrote about 8 Bits of Unforeseen Traffic From Search Engines - 8 atypical keyword phrases that land people on Inspiration Bit from Google. Simonne from AllTipsAndTricks also shared her funny search keywords with her readers, and I commented that one of the most popular keyword phrases for my blog is “thought provoking questions”, and she suggested I could “build on that ‘thought-provoking questions’ phrase which brings readers to your blog”. It got me thinking and I’ve decided to invite Simonne to talk about that and share with us some of her other helpful SEO tips.
Simonne is a blogger who wears many hats, she blogs about different topics and is not afraid to experiment with various blog monetizing and promotion techniques and test everything herself. That makes her to be very knowledgeable and direct about the subjects she writes about not only on her blog but also for RA Project. Add to that her wicked sense of humour and you get a blogger who will make you think, laugh, be challenged, mad - sometimes she can achieve that all with only one article.

Now, without further ado, let me pass the torch to the great Simonne herself and find out what she has to say about optimizing your blog for search engines, and how you and I can capitalize on some lucrative keyword phrases that land many new readers on our blogs and how can we actually make them stay.
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One of the reasons for starting A Bit Of Literature series was to feature short stories by modern time writers, so that the rest of us can get inspired and enjoy reading not only the well-known masters of the written word, but also those whose talent has not yet been widely recognized.
So when one of readers of Inspiration Bit, Joseph Devon has contacted me and asked to check out some of his stories for my Literature Bit, I got really excited, because I already knew about his ambitious project to write “26 Stories (and possibly 1 book) in 52 Weeks” and blog about his writing process.
I’ve decided to feature here his shortest story Private Showing about a man struggling with a loss, and living in the “largest art gallery in history, with the entire world being the work of art and him being the sole patron”.
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Everyone knows about the importance of having the right logo. It’s the first impression we get about the company or the individual. The great logos burn that impression forever into our memory banks. Have you noticed though that the most recognized and eye-pleasing logos are the simple ones. Some logos are just logotypes, others get that distinctive look with the help of intricate or more familiar geometric shapes.

So if you’re looking for some design inspirations for your logo, it’s time to get back in shape, into geometric shape that is. The simple shapes that are used as the foundation for all other shapes are the square, rectangle, circle, oval or ellipse, and triangle. Each of them comes with a certain meaning that can be used in design appropriately.
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Yesterday on my way from one work to another (does it already sound a bit crazy?) someone at the bus stop got attention not only mine but others as well: a young guy was performing peculiar pantomimic dance with a crystal ball. At first his behaviour did look a bit crazy, but then I saw a smile on his face that said, “I know what you think of me, but no, I’m not…”. He got on the same bus, and even sat across me. He took out another ball, this one was blue, and carried out with his sphere-play magic to the sheer delight of the two young kids across him. You could see that the kids never questioned the guy’s sanity, they were sincerely fascinated by his wizardry with the ball, while adults were looking at him quite impressed yet trying to appear indifferent.
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The original idea for Inspiration Bit was to share with readers not only what inspires me but also what I’m fascinated to be learning about while surfing the Web, reading other blogs, working. The motto of this blog is “Knowledge comes from inspiration - one bit at a time”.
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