Place of Stuff

Feel free to emphasise any of the words in the title.

No, this isn’t another “Seinfeld post“, at least, I hope that’s not how it comes out. Firstly, an apology: I do not consider myself qualified to write about blogging, beyond putting down my own experiences. If you are interested in the mechanics, there are far better sites out there who can talk knowledgeably about SEO and link farming (or pharming) and the best ways to get your blog seen by readers, some of them are on my Links page and others are not. Seriously. I think my all time highest view count was 200 and my most searched terms are “lesbians” and “donkey sex”. So please, get your blogging advice elsewhere.

OK, caveat over with. Anyone who may read this site will realise, ever so quickly, that it is totally random. It really is a place for me to just drop whatever is in my head onto the page. I have never hidden this and, in fact, take a sort of perverse pride in it. It also accounts for the fact that updates are only semi regular and ideas I say I’ll come back to I never do. But, recent posts on Untwisted Vortex made me think a little more about what I write about and about what others write. In particular, this post. And, by the way, if it looks as though I’m providing a load of links to one site then don’t worry - that site has a lot of good ideas and I read it every day, so it’s only natural that it will be on my mind.
Continue reading ‘What Do You Blog About (And Why?)’ »

I fancied a change from regular stuff today, so I decided to post a book review to my other site: Bookstuff. This was space that I got for free from Wordpress.com when I signed up with them (very useful if you don’t want the hassle of finding a domain and maintaining it yourself) and it has been very neglected indeed. I last posted there a year ago.

And it got me wondering. When Wordpress lists the number of blogs it hosts, they list the “live” blogs - blogs that still exist and haven’t been deleted. But how many of them actually exist in the sense that they are regularly written to? If you search the web for titles of books I’ve written about, I doubt the site will be high on the list, but it will be there. How many of the sites have been all but abandoned?

When I started blogging I thought it would be easy. How hard can it be to write about whatever I want to and post to something that’s already templated? Far easier than a normal website. Right? However, I quickly found that a lot of what I think about doesn’t translate well to the “page”. And if I think it’s not worth writing about, why the hell should I expect someone to read it?

Continue reading ‘Abandon Blog’ »

While noodling around the internet, after following a number of links and then following their links I happened upon an interesting site: Write and Publish Your Book. In fact, I landed on the current lead story: Common Mistakes for Beginning Writers (written by Nancy Moore).

What leapt out at me the most was that I have been guilty in my own writing of at least 3 of the errors and, had I written more, I am sure I could hit all 8 easily. I won’t list out all the errors since I have linked to the site and believe that you should read the page itself. What I will say is that I have read many many books and errors number 1 & 2 on the site are something that really annoy me.

If your character says something, have them say it, don’t have them declare, speak breathily, announce or anything else unless it is necessary to the character or their situation - if they are in a coffee shop they would usually “say” something. If they are secreted in a warehouse watching a drug deal, then have them whisper. Any other words are usually unnecessary, if your character is announcing something and you have already set them up in a situation where they will announce, don’t say “they announced”, it’s redundant. He expostulated.