Questions over lunch with Lorraine Murphy – @raincoaster

Today I had lunch with Lorraine Murphy – known online as raincoaster – one of the most well-known people in Vancouver’s blogging / social media community. She gave me great ideas and encouragement – but before I get to that, here’s something really disturbing…

Back in the 1980s, Lorraine met – and got asked on a date by – convicted serial killer Willy Pickton. This was so many years before he was in court, when many of his eventual victims were still alive – and even then, strangers at a cafe warned her about Willy when he left the room.

Lorraine told me the story in person, then I came home and read her post Date with a Devil. The topic of Willy Pickton came up in reference to blog analytics. Someone landed at her raincoaster.com blog when they searched Willy Pickton.

Questions for Lorraine

I brought two pages of questions to my lunch date with Lorraine at Steamworks today. We talked about this mainwriter.com blog – my personal / creative / portfolio – and I’m going to take her suggestion that I develop my writing practice by posting every day for 26 days. If I can’t think of anything or I’m feeling sick – then I will write about how I can’t think of anything to say or describe (maybe in great detail) the bad feeling in my nasal passages.

Lorraine also gave me some ideas re: should I change to wordpress.com from wordpress.org? Ultimately I just want to write and not have to mess around with the blog platform. I was thinking it would be easier to focus on the writing part if I switch. But for now I’ve decided to stay with this .org version and learn more.

I’m hoping to learn more at WordCamp 2010. John Biehler and organizers are looking at June, 2010 and they are running a survey to learn more about people’s interests in attending the event. So I’ll go over and explain what I am hoping to get out of it…

And thanks again to Lorraine!