Peromyscus
This is a blog. At one time, anybody who wanted to write had a blog.
In the
mid-nineties, search engines heaved into view. If someone wrote a blockbuster
piece on their Page on the World Wide Web, no one except their
mom would be able to find it. Some people who were terminally online, for
nineties values of terminally online, would visit their favorite pages and
write about them on their own page. The search engines, on learning that
someone had linked to a webpage, would be more likely to index that page and
show it to others. (Search engines ranking sites by the number of links to them
is still a thing thirty years on.)
These early
online people were logging the web, web-logging. Blogging. My blog, which
started in 2006, was also a place where I could write about music, art and
news. I could express myself to my full capability.
Blogs can
help writers in many ways
They can
serve as a base camp, establishing personal credibility and stability, as well
as demonstrating expertise in your craft. Publishers can see your passion and
commitment to your cause or genre. A long-term, regularly updated web presence
gathers more search engine credit and ranks higher in searches.
A blog is
also platform for advertising your pieces. Publishers rarely pay for press
junkets or book tours these days, and so the burden of raising public awareness
of your writing falls on you. There are not many places where you can just say,
“Hey, I got a story published. Here’s the link! Hope you like it!” I mean, try
it sometime. If you do it on someone else’s Facebook, or do it too often on
your own, you’ll get unfriended. To build an audience, you need regularity as
well as quality of output. And pieces on
blogs keep your name in the readers’ minds between published articles.
As I became
more interested in writing fiction, I let the blog languish. I took a class
from Bob Cohen and I’m following it up with a
college class on non-fiction writing helmed by Scott Hays, both at Saddleback. I’m working my way back to regularity –
updating at least once a week.
A daily
writing discipline is healthy practice for a writer, as well.
What’s my
audience? My blog gets about 27K views a month. That’s tiny, given that most of
the views will be people who clicked on a Google result, realized it wasn’t for
them and clicked away immediately. That’s why I’m taking the class right now!
Finding
Blog subject matter
What should
you write about? Writing is writing. If the plot twist in your latest story or
research on your article has you banging your head against the wall, close the
document, open Blogger or Medium or Substack or Wordpress and write a couple of
hundred words about your garden, your motorcycle engine rebuild or if all else
fails, what your cats did today.
There!
Blogging done, writing practiced, and head cleared, all in one sitting.
Taking
notes
A blog can
also serve as a notebook. You’re in Starbucks and a couple opposite is arguing?
Write a character study. Sunset is fantastic today? Describe it. Incredible
writer M John Harrison does this on his microblogging site.
Writing “story
behind the story”
As well as
publicizing stories and articles as they are published, your blog can support
the work you have out in the wild. I recently wrote a short horror story about
a plant biologist on the Welsh coast encountering ghosts of Vikings. It drew on
a trip I took to that area to study seaweed. When the story is published, I’ll
follow up with a blog post about my long-ago trip. Seaweed’s really
interesting!
What do I
write about? Here’s the frequency listing for the labels on the posts.
