Hi My Name is Kori and I am a Memeoholic

Here is what I know about Kori. Kori is in recovery. She is intelligent and often thoughtful. Kori has a steady job she is good at. Kori has four kids by three different fathers. Kori has serious Baby Daddy Drama. Kori has a shitty man picker. Kori has a daughter that when the blog first started was going to purity soirees but is now a single, pregnant seventeen year old. Kori is a Dr. Phil guest waiting to happen.

I gave this blog a fair shake. I tried to like this blog. Miss Missives nearly always roots for the underdog but I never warmed up to Kori, her life or more importantly, her writing. On a personal note, I find it maddening when people do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. I find it perplexing when someone has a child with someone who turns out to be a, let's just say, less than stellar model of fatherhood or mate and then continues to procreate without getting a serious head-shrinker autopsy of what went wrong the first time. Miss Missive's very own mother got herself knocked up with the lil' Missives at the tender age of seventeen, married young and divorced young. But she didn't go ahead and repeat that judgement lapse three more times. Yes, I'm sure Kori loves her kids and it's not their fault she saddled them with suckfest fathers. So when she blogs about the problems these decisions have caused her over and over again, I can't shake the feeling that I need to buy Kori a copy of Smart Women Foolish Choices and read it aloud to her until she can recite it by memory.

As the title suggests, Kori Rants and sadly little else. Clearly she gets something out of her brain dump. Using a blog as a safe place to dump your internal rant to rob it of its power is a perfectly legitimate use of the space but not something other people will necessarily flock to. I know life is hard and we all make choices that bite us in the ass now and then, but Kori is intelligent and thoughtful and at least on the road to some level of self-awareness, so it's hard to watch her stumble over her own feet time and time again. She herself quotes,

I'm the piece of shit around which the world revolves.

The better part of the blog reeks of the self-abasement, self-pity and self-involvement that the quote suggests.

In 2008, Kori's friend April introduces Kori to her new drug of choice, the meme. Very quickly, See Kori Rant devolves into See Kori Meme. Kori, if you must meme then cut the verbose intros and jump right into the story. You can finish the piece with an epilogue crediting who gave you the idea. Put more simply Kori, you need to fuck the reader first and then take them out for dinner and banal convo.

Kori also gets caught up in all that is bad about blogging.

my ratings over at buzz are slipping, and I actually care

You must not care. Kori, forget the rating, clicks, hits, blogrolls and the like. You are not at the writing level where you have a shot to turn See Kori Rant into See Kori Reach Heights of Blogger Fame and Make A Dooce-Like Fortune While Brain Dumping on the Hapless Masses. Not that you couldn't someday, god help us all, but right now you have to focus on your writing as a craft not a popularity contest. Most of us have moments where we pine for comments and accolades but at the end of the day, you must be content that there are people reading, nodding their head or pulling for you.

Ok, now that your bum cheeks are all pink and stingy, would you like some good news? Once in awhile, when you are not ranting, you can actually write.

This is memorable. Now if you had cut the first two paragraphs and started with the third, it would be better, much better.

he would disappear and I wouldn't know where he was at all. The last time it happened, he and I had argued and he threw Sam’s stroller through the picture window and, literally, walked off into the night. I have a very clear memory of that August evening; he walked out of the house and I could clearly see him stroll across the yard nonchalantly, keys jingling (my keys, too, as I later discovered) and whistling. Then he stepped off of the curb into the street, and it was like something out of a movie; as soon as he stepped out of the light shed from the street lamp, he was immediately invisible, instantly gone from my life.

This is good, really good because it is solid, evocative. The way you describe it I can see it in my head, I can feel for a moment what it must have been like to have the person you should have been able to count on just disappear, leaving you alone and vulnerable with a young child.

This is the stream of consciousness stuff that Miss Missives abhors. Skip the mental To do/I did lists, slice of life stuff can be done well, like this,

So I thought I would get him fixed, thinking that at least then I would have to worry about any gross cat ejaculate on my blanket. Took him in, got him fixed, all was well until about two months LATER when one of his testicles grew back. Sure, sure, maybe the vet who had been practicing for 20 years made a mistake, but I am convinced that the fucker was just that special. For some reason, the fact that this guy loved me so much that he stubbornly grew back at least one testicle, well, it made me fall in love with him as well.

This has potential but needs ruthless editing. The purpose of your blog shouldn't be to just post, it should be to post something worth reading. Go back over a post like this and as I have said before, pretend you are on a word diet and cut out what you don't need. Your words should move the narrative forward, or add color to a story, evoke details, smells, feelings, not simply fill a page.

So Kori, since you are familiar with the Program, I'd like to give you Miss Missives Blog Recovery Twelve Step Program:

1. Admit that you are powerless over Memes. If you have to utilize them as a jumping off point, then at least jump right into your story(stop the relentless posturing intro and just tell us) and finish it off with the "blah blah blah thanks to Sookie at SookieSniffsSuperglue for this Thursday Theme blahhgity blah blah.

2. Come to believe in the power of ruthless editing. The backspace and delete buttons should become your two new besties. They are there to help you rid your writing of the minutiae that no one cares about and clogs your writing like a giant ball of hair in a shower drain.

3. Make a decision to focus on moments and feelings, words that evoke, not a laundry list of first I said this then I said that, then he left, now I'm scared and confused. You write like salt and pepper and I want more coriander and fenugreek dammit.

4. Make a searching and fearless inventory of your crimes against blogging.(see our FAQ or a good litany of gross missteps)

5. Fix them.

6. Don't stop believing that you can write, but work at it a little. Stretch yourself and be better. There are plenty of writing exercises to be found online or other writers you admire that you can use as a jumping off point. Don't be content to brain dump, you are better than that.

7. Check your work. Blogging doesn't require the relentless fact checking and editing of academia but errors like bow instead of now, typing mishaps and spelling errors are distracting.

8. Mix up the length and type of your posts more. People will be more likely to chug through a long post about your current man problems if you vary it a little.

9. Stop whining so much, you created this life you are living. Have a little cry, blow your nose and move on.

Well dearest Kori, the summer swelter threatens to put a little blush on Miss Missives alabaster visage so I will have to let the peanut gallery fill in the last few.

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In the meantime, you get one of these:







And one of these for forcing Miss Missives to step through so much shit to figure out that you CAN write.