Week 33 of mental_floss blogs

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Yeah, so that post last week with 90 comments? Now it has 186. So pleasing to me.

Thought on blogging: it's getting both interesting and tiring -- I think these things are related. What I mean is, I finally think I understand what I can do with the mental_floss blog -- I can pose interesting experiential questions to this audience to trigger a personal interaction. The best examples so far are asking about authors you've "finished" last week, this week's one song on repeat, the post a while back about a borrowed cat. The 120 Minutes post brought out some of that connection for people of a certain demographic. In general I think my contribution to this blog will be in finding and relating these sort of conversation-starting questions -- this is a bit different from the (very well done) "list of things" or "where are they now" posts that are the core of the blog, but I think it's my personal brand of content. In some ways, the novel writing is seeking a similar connection, it's just not as direct or immediate.

Having said all that, I don't think I can figure out a new compelling question every day (nor will the audience really want to engage that much, I don't think), and filling in all the days takes some doing. But...so far, so good.

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Contacting Chris Higgins

I'm a writer based in Portland, Oregon. I mostly write for Mental Floss magazine (and their website), though I just had a story on This American Life, and had a cover story a few weeks back in The Portland Mercury. You can follow me on Twitter for occasional jokes and complaints about the weather.

I'm also an iPhone developer. Working with Night & Day Studios, I helped create Peekaboo Barn, Peekaboo Wild, Big Fat Lies, Life in Short, Cocktail Compass, Nick Jr.'s A-Z With Moose and Zee, Quibble, Savage Love, and a bunch of other apps.

Need to contact me? Click the following link, follow the instructions, and you'll have my email address: get Chris's email address.

Note: I'm not the (apparently famous) hockey player with the same name! You'll have to find his homepage in order to contact him.