Prompted
A short story collection by Anila Syed
The first illustration is here!
How Did I Add A Poll to My Blog?
I don't know what the success rate will be, or even whether I will have to rename my success rate later on to reflect the actual acheivement - little statistical joke there, but because this is the very beginning, it is easy to catalogue all the elements.
How I added a poll to my blog post was as follows:
I wanted my poll to appear in the form of the different themes that I had thought about for my blog background.
* So first I set each theme and used print screen to paste each image into a word document.
* Right clicking each image let me 'save as picture'
It was really easy to upload my images and add a question. Then I had to select a background.
To get it into my blog post, I clicked 'Share' and then 'Embed' and just pasted the whole thing into my blog.
The amount of html was a little bit daunting, but there you are! It worked!
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*No affiliate links, no connection to this blog apart from using it to make a poll.
The Paradox of Choice
I realised I need a new theme, but how do I make it sing so that visitors will be instantly enamoured by it's elegance?
After spending nearly a whole day playing around with only a minute fraction of the available themes, colour palettes, images, fonts and layouts, it occurred to me that what I have is the paradox of choice. Or, as Barry Schwarz called it in his book of the same name, the tyranny of choice. Here is his talk about it:
The more options there are, the easier it is to regret the option that you choose! Adding choices increases the expectations that one of them should be perfect and so incrementally increases anxiety levels - what if I choose the wrong one? When I thought of the title for this blog post, it was as a half-hearted joke that, man, I had a hard time picking a theme I liked, I had no idea that it was a major psychological research topic in it's own right.
So, anyway, after a lot of fiddling around, I've stuck with this theme with this background.
I hope you love it!
Does it really matter? :)
Let me know what you think - here's a poll about it!
The Beginning
I have been writing these short stories for nearly 10 years and have decided to bring them all together into a short story collection. The stories were written for various writing competitions, so there is an eclectic mix of genres and styles. But rather than sending them off on their own into the world to see if they could get published in magazines or websites, I wanted to keep them together as my stories - in a collection.
That is how Prompted was born.
The book is written completely and here begins its journey through finishing and polishing, publishing and marketing.