A Magazine of Blogs?

Yesterday was a super January day. It was warm enough to go out in a light jacket, and more important, the sun was out like a suspended lemon! Winter landscapes with sun can be beautiful too. The yellowing grasses, burned fields, exposed tree limbs of winter all look radiant and sculptured in sunlight. It was a good day for DH and me to go idea shopping. We are getting ready to remodel a bathroom in the spring and needed sizes, prices, etc. This job means an outside wall must come out so a tub can come inside this tiny bath off our bedroom.



So we took off to make what seemed like a hundred stops at warehouses, plumbing supply showrooms, home improvement stores, and window places. It sounds easy and was until about five hours into it, we were tired, hungry and done in—and we hadn’t even picked up a hammer on this job yet! We stopped for a quick sandwich and pushed on to two more stops before calling it a day. One of those was a trip to Books a Million to peruse bathroom and building magazines, which was not productive. Those bathrooms shown in magazines are either ultra modern, not my taste, or gorgeous baths the size of a small barn, not my luck. There were no pictures of a tiny bath built like a shoe box off a modest bedroom!


While there, I searched out other magazines, always hunting a new writing market and checking on the publishing trends. They have such lovely magazines for special interest groups now like weaving, scrapbooking, beading, wood crafts, spirituality, genealogy, even body tattoos and beer drinking ones. There seems to be a slight increase in literary journals and even magazines devoted to strictly short mysteries. However, I still miss plain the old “women’s stories” that appeared in magazines such as Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and even Family Circle. I am showing my age, but names like Pearl Buck, Marjorie Franco, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh come to mind. Some of those old stories are still a mighty fine read.


A magazine that really surprised me was Artful Blogging. I had never seen or heard of this publication before, and it is a whole publication devoted to the online blogs of other writers. It was pricey at $14.95, but it is a quarterly publication. Although I really need no help in wandering off the beaten reading path to get lost in blogs, this magazine highlights a variety of blogs a reader might want to check out. The pictures are lovely and personalities varied. Published by Somerset, this is a new magazine by publishers of many other writing opportunities. Writers might want to check out the writing guidelines at http://www.stampington.com/ .