Category: Uncategorized
I am More Than Just a Chronic Pain Statistic
Last year on my birthday I wrote about my experiences with bullying. This year I’m writing about the elephant in the medical profession’s closet: chronic pain.
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I am a human being with hopes, dreams and goals. Some of these have been forever altered or have become impossible because of my chronic pain. You see, I’ve had chronic back pain for three years this fall and have yet to receive even a diagnosis. My pain starts in my lower back and migrates up to encompass my entire back all the way up to between my shoulders after only a few hours of being awake. My knees have an almost arthritic ache and occasionally pain shoots down my right leg, making it impossible to walk normally some days.
Luckily I was born in Canada so I have not become bankrupt because of my illness. I have had X-rays, an MRI and multiple physical exams. I’ve been to chiropractors, massage therapists, orthopaedic surgeons, physiotherapists, back pain specialists at the provincial clinic and multiple GPs. I’ve had orthotics, massages, special exercises and chiropractic treatments and nothing has helped. Some things like the physiotherapy (which I did for nine months) made things worse than ever. Continue reading
Discussion: Blogging Pet Peeves
Everyone reading this now is probably a regular blog reader and not just of The Mad Reviewer. Most people that read one blog read at least a couple of blogs on a semi-regular basis, especially when those people are bloggers themselves. But like books, there are some blogging deal breakers and pet peeves. Here are just a few of my pet peeves:
1. A busy layout. A nice, unique design is perfectly okay but when you’ve got yellow spirals on a pink and purple polka dot background my brain starts to hurt.
2. Not responding to comments at all. I know I’m not always the speediest when it comes to replying to your comments, but I really do try and eventually 99% of comments do get a well thought out reply. But on blogs where the blogger never responds to comments? It just seems like they’re not that interested in what their readers have to say.
3. Bad grammar. Everyone makes typos; that’s pretty much expected when you’re editing yourself. Yet when I encounter a blogger that doesnt like using capitol letters and doesnt spellchek it really starts to get irrtating. Ya know? Its worse when they do things like make run on sentences like this and never seem to know the difference between a colon semi-colon period exclamation point and especially a comma.
4. Bloggers that don’t have a consistent posting schedule. I totally get that life can get in the way of blogging sometimes. That’s okay. Yet when bloggers post every other day and then suddenly don’t post for a week, that gets annoying. I like bloggers with a consistent schedule with very few exceptions.
Really, this could be an entire article but I should stop now. After all, it’s your turn: What are your blogging pet peeves? Why?
Discussion: The Changes to Goodreads
For those of you that don’t know, Goodreads announced a change to their terms of service the other weekend. Essentially, they will no longer permit readers to create shelves or reviews about author behaviour. For more information, you can see the entire thread here.
Now, in theory this is a great change because I am fully aware there are reviewers out there that make mountains out of molehills and accuse authors of bad behaviour when they’re actually the innocent party. I get where Goodreads is seemingly coming from. Yet I feel this policy actually hurts reviewers and allows bad authors to thrive.
You see, if a review just completely trashes the author, go ahead and delete it! I’d be first in line to say that Goodreads needs far better moderation. Yet if the reviewer points out in their review in a non-threatening manner something the author has done (i.e. told a reviewer to kill themselves) I don’t see anything wrong with that. It allows the potential reader to see if they really want to give this money to this author and it can warn any potential reviewers that maybe this author isn’t the best to work with.
The thing is: how do you decide what constitutes a trashy review vs. a snarky one? Who decides this? And if Goodreads is doing this to protect authors from us nasty reviewers, how about banning authors like the one that told me to kill myself? If authors are supposed to be protected, shouldn’t Goodreads work just as hard to protect reviewers? The thing is, the abuse goes both ways.
I could do a whole article about this and likely will in the future but now I want to hear you guys weigh in: What do you think of the changes to Goodreads? Do you think they’re for the better or worse? Could Goodreads have done something differently in order to protect both authors and reviewers? Please, I would love to hear your thoughts!
Your Shameless Blogging Self-Promotion Thread
Since I have a lot of blogging related things to do today (which include interviews, reviews and actually starting books I have a deadline to read) I’ve decided to turn over the site to you guys. Basically, in the comments below tell us a little about your blog and leave a link to it, even if it’s already linked to in your profile.
Your blog doesn’t have to be a book blog and I won’t be moderating this thread too heavily but obviously blogs with spammy or pornographic content aren’t acceptable. That’s about the only rule aside from my regular be nice commenting policy.
So tell myself and everyone else reading this what your blog is about and why we should read it. Go on! Who can turn down a little self-promotion?
Discussion: Favourite Book Covers
I don’t feel like tackling any huge issues today, so why not finally have a light-hearted, fun discussion post? Favourite book covers definitely fits the bill.
Yes, the cover for Feed by Mira Grant is one of my absolute favourites. Why? Because it’s simple and still effective. I mean, you have the blood representing the zombie aspect of the book and the RSS (or feed) sign representing the blogging aspect. And with a teaser like the one below the title, how you can resist reading Feed?
Now what I want to know is this: What’s your favourite cover? (Obviously you can link to an image of it in the comments.) Why is it your favourite?