Raven's Roads
Living an interesting life: the travels and musings
of motorcycling author Linda R. Moore

Sep 1, 2007

September 2007

Filed in Blog

It’s September, and two thirds of 2007 has whomped by in a flash. I thought I’d spend a little time today “explaining” my blog for anyone who’s newly arrived. I’ll probably repeat some variant of this post every month from now on, so old-timers can feel free to skip.

Before I do that, though, would you please consider voting for this site in the Bloggers’ Choice Awards? It’s up for best travel blog and every vote counts. Admittedly winning seems highly unlikely, but finishing second or third might be possible… :)

Raven’s Roads started in 2003 as a standard website to log a solo motorcycle trip I was going to take. Unfortunately, my motorcycle broke spectacularly a few days before I was due to set off. I eventually got to go on a long trip in 2005, and wrote a book about it. Signed copies are available from this site, and if you take the ISBN, title and author down to your local library, it will eventually become available from your local library as well.

To get a sense of what I think about such things as link exchanges, privacy, paid posts, and commenting, please read the policy page. The links up top lead to subsections where you might find other articles of interest. I write about travel, motorcycling, and consciously living an interesting life. You can subscribe to this site by its feeds: if you are techie you can use the feeds directly and if not, click the “feed readers” link to get a list of buttons where you can add the site to your favorite feed reader. (If I missed your favorite feed reader, you can either hit me with a nerf bat or just tell me and I’ll find one for you.)

I also run an email list which gives a summary of posts from the week, so that you can click through on what’s of interest. To join, just send a contact form (top of the page) and check the appropriate box. I also welcome email, and have committed to answer all comments. You can subscribe to comments from individual posts if you want by checking the appropriate checkbox when you make a comment.

This site is the home of the White Raven Award, an award for people who bring their personalities to their blogs in a way that makes it just wonderful to read. Know anyone like that? Please nominate them! It is also home to Show Us Yer Bike (got a photo you want to share?) and two blogrolls for motorcyclists, the Women who Ride blogroll and the Blogging Bikers blogroll. Feel free to join.

I’m English, 37, blonde, short, and consistently struggling with my weight. I ride a 1400cc motorcycle called Beastie and have been a motorcyclist since January 1996. I moved to California in August 1997 to marry Don, my husband, whom I’d met online.

For fun, I ride motorcycles, write, hunt landmarks, read blogs, read books, leave books in the wild, and annoy my cats.

I am a freelance travel writer and also run a site about hunting historical markers down to their lair. It’s called Markeroni. I now have a part-time day job as a self-stacker at BNS (a Big Nice Shop). I started my job yesterday, so I don’t have much to report on that as yet.

While I had journaled here for years, this site became a fully-fledged blog in January of this year. I had been (and continue to) a blogger on LJ but the outer blogosphere sucked me in round about the time I did the Blogathon in late July. My blog is now, to my intense surprise, providing me with a modest income.

I decided when I was six years old to become a writer and have been one ever since. Now, I’m getting paid to write. This is rather nice.

Right now we are four weeks from being required to leave our home of eight and one-third years. We live in a mobile home park and the land owner has sold us out to someone who wants to build high-end townhomes. I believe that there are four or five families left where once there were twenty-nine. I currently have no idea where I will be living this time next month.