Be Considerate to Your Readers

There is nothing I dislike more than being forced to guess if a blog is still active or not. This goes for both fiction and non-fiction blogs.

Here's the picture, you find a page on a blog that's interesting. You visit the blogs homepage. The latest entry is 4 weeks old. Looking at the archives you see that posting is usually at least once a week. Now you have to ask yourself. Is this blog abandoned, or is the person just get a little busy. Should you bookmark it and come back later, subscribe to the feed, or just write it off?

More and more I just write it off. I think it's good blog etiquette that if your normal posting schedule has gone awry for whatever reason, then you need to let people know. That way your current readership will know what's going on, and if any new readers come by they'll know that the blog isn't really abandoned.

That's why today I was going to post at terran resistance that posting was going to be suspended at least until Monday, the 24th (Stupid Day Job!). That's when I discovered that my site was down!!! Well, technically it's not "down", it's just that the server isn't processing my php code. Which, when your entire site is written in php, it results to your site being "down".

Anyways, that site is "down" and even after it comes back up, posting there, as well as here, will be suspended at least until the December 24th (Hello Christmas vacation!).

"Best Fictional Blog" isn't a Fictional Blog

The Black WebLog Awards for 2007 were announced back in September. Much to their credit they had a category for Best Fictional Blog. Much to my chagrin the judges pick for the winner isn't really a fictional blog. It's a serialized fiction published on a blog. Don't get me wrong. It's an entertaining story and it has a solid following, but it's not really a fictional blog.

The story is written as a novel. The only online device used by the author is that in between each post some time passes. The author also participates in the comments as the author and not as the character.

Here's the criteria they used for the category:

This category is for blogs which have over 90% fictional content (as determined by post number). Mainly, these are blogs which are about fictional characters and must be stated as such somewhere on the blog. Think of it as a soap opera or a book, but in blog form.

Based on this the only requirement really is a blog that has fictional content. If that's the only requirement then the winner does meet those requirements. I just disagree on the definition of a fictional blog. The problem is somehow differentiating between a real blog fiction and a blog that just has fictional content.

My usage is that fictional blog is an actual blog written like a blog that either tells a fictional story or is written by a fictional person. A Fiction Blog is a blog about or containing fiction. Just like a Business Blog is a blog about business. Or how a Humor Blog contains humorous content. That'll be my usage of the words and the ones that make the most grammatical sense to me.

How to actually kick Writer's Block

After posting bad advice for kicking writer's block, I thought I'd share a link that give good advice for kicking writer's block. Here's a summary.

Get to Starbucks

Play the Butt in the chair game

Set a deadline

Get out of town

Blog your book

Check out the link for more details.

Save Your Tuition Money, Read This Article Instead

After giving the worst writing tip ever yesterday, I figured I'd give a positive one today. If you're thinking of becoming a writer don't take a class, don't go to college just Read this article, How to create powerful characters. Read it, think about it, internalize it, reread it, and then just do it.

No matter what you're writing, having strong characters is the best advice anyone can give. If everything else in your story sucks, but you have good characters it can be fixed. The opposite is not true. Bad grammar can be fixed. Bad writing style can be reworked. A protagonist that nobody likes(or worse, doesn't care about) can't be fixed.

For Blog Fiction it's even more important. After all the entire story is being told from the point of view of characters. If it's a person that takes credit for other people's work that needs to be reflected in the writing.

As I write Terran Resistance, Alex Chou has the most detailed history. Some of that history will be revealed directly. Like that he was raised in a very conservative even regressive community. Some things are revealed indirectly: Like that he's very smart and doesn't respect authority. Other things may never be revealed. Like the fact that he's the oldest of 4 brothers. Until now, I'd never revealed that to my readers, nor needed to.

Worst. Writing. Tip. Ever!

I was surfing around the internet reading other blogs on writing and etc when I came across an intriguing link. Five Ways to Kick Writer’s Block and Get Inspired. Being that I was trying to get rid of my own case of writer's block, I clicked it. The five basic pieces of advice were:

1. Exercise
   
2. Do Chores
3. Talk to people you haven't talked to in a while
4. Play with your pets
5. Meditate

Now it could be just me, but that list doesn't sound like kicking writer's block. It sounds more like procrastinating to me.

Blog Fiction and Digg

If I wanted this post could probably be one sentence long. It would be:

Hoping to use the "Digg" service to promote your blog fiction is useless, pointless, and a complete waste of time.

If you don't know about Digg, it's a service where you can mark a blog post as something that you "dugg". The top "dugg" blog posts will be on the front page where they get more views from people who are bored and looking for something entertaining. Wikipedia has a more formal explanation:

Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.

News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ.

Digg is really based on promoting a single post. Someone writes something interesting you digg that post, not necessarily the website. Also it's time based. The most recent articles are favoured. Each post in a Blog Fiction is as relevant 6 months later as it is the day it's written.(A few exceptions to this, such as Anonymous Lawyer)

Blog Fiction is about the Blog\Story as a whole. Even if Digg got a "fiction" category, I don't think it would help.

I don't use Digg on my fictional blog and I've yet to find anyone else who did. Despite it's wild popularity, it doesn't make sense to use on a fictional blog.

Promoting your Blog Fiction

An entire sub-industry eco-system that has been built around helping people promote their blog. Here's a list just off of the top of my head:

• Digg
• Technorati
• Blog directories
• RSS feeds
• Feed Burner
• del.icio.us
• StumbleUpon
• BlogRush
• Link Backs
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
  

The problem with promoting blog fiction is that not all of these lend themselves to promoting a fictional blog. For instance, it doesn't make sense to "Digg" a post in your blog. Listing in Blog Directories becomes troublesome because... there isn't a "Blog Fiction" category.

I will be dedicating one post a piece to all of the different blog promoting services, how they work, are they effective for me, and if you should bother with it on your fictional blog. If you're impatient you can always check out this excellent post by Lord Matt on blog fiction promotion.

Blog Fiction That Never Had a Chance

Here's a pet peave of mine. People who go to the trouble of setting up a website, promoting it and then quite 3 days or 3 posts later. A very old list of blog fiction exists on this old blogger site. It hasn't been updated in years. I'd say more than half of the blogs listed their no longer exist, and I think I know why.

Of the fictional blogs that are still there I ran into 4 of them that have about less than 5 posts. These things didn't even have a chance. That means that these writers had a great idea. They thought it was so great that they started and promoted their site by getting it listed somewhere. All of that to only abandon it days later.

Check out Bite of Hope. Great idea for a fictional blog. 4 posts later it ends with a trip to the museum.

Then there's RavenStone. This was going to be a historical blog following a young English boy starting in the year 1968. Well, apparently, the author was as fickle as a 12 year old boy. 2 posts and 3 years later no reports on the status of the boy. I guess he lost his journal.

I learned on thing from the fictional blog, Mexican Year. Apparently, a mexican year only lasts 3 days. Because that's how long this hard working writer kept at it. This was an especially painful find for me because the author is a really good writer.

Finally, we come to And a Chimp Shall Lead Us. While this one lasted for 27 posts. However, all 27 of those posts were in less than a month. Also, about half of the posts read like this:

I had a cheeseburger for lunch, with onion rings. It's my favorite lunch.

So don't give the guy too much credit.

So while my last post was meant to encourage current blog fiction writers to keep at it, this post is meant to discourage. Discourage those from starting a blog fiction that will be abandoned days later.

Here's a test of your dedication. If you're going to write a fictional blog write the first 5 posts before getting a website. If after writing the first 5 you still have an itch to keep writing. Then please do so!(And let me know your web address) Otherwise, consider writing flash fiction.

Keep it up!

One thing that disturbs me is the abandoned blog fiction. I don't mean a blog fiction where the story comes to a logical end or the Author announces the end. I'm talking about fictional blogs where the story stops in the middle of it without explanation. The story didn't end, there's no note from the author, just boom! It ends like it's some HBO show about mobsters.

My best guess about why this happens is that the author either gets bored or frustrated with the lack of audience. If the problem is the former I can't help, but if it's the latter I can. I want to assure these authors that if you keep it up the readers will come... eventually. I have been posting consistently on my own blog fiction for 2 months straight and I am just now beginning to see some traffic. *By traffic I mean that the number of people reading my blog that aren't me, my fiance`, or my mother is greater than 0.

One of the reasons is that it takes time for search engines to find you. It will take time to build enough content for search engines to trust you. It will take time for you to promote your blog. It'll take time to get yourself listed in all the dozens of blog directories out there(*Note I usually put mine in the "literature" categories).

If you are frustrated about lack of readership stay tuned. Promoting your blog fiction will be one of the topics I will be discussing frequently on this blog. In the mean time, KEEP IT UP!!!

What is a Blog Fiction?

The was originally posted in my Terran Resistance Forums. I've reposted it here. It's a topic I'm still learning and thinking through.

As I've been cruising the internet looking at and studying the ways other people have written blog fiction, I've run into a dilemma. What is a Blog Fiction? I have found some people that, while using blog software, aren't really writing what I thought of as a blog fiction. Therefore, a definition, or loose definition has to be decided upon on what really constitutes a blog fiction.

Betsy Friedrich wrote an entire thesis(pdf) on blog fiction. She had a chart of the hierarchy of blog fiction.



The chart shows pretty clearly that she and I agree what blog fiction is. A Blog Fiction includes any story that uses blog software to tell it with a few exclusions.

My first exclusion is a pre-written novel. A novel that's published using a blog is not a blog fiction, it is still a novel. If a novel is pre-written and then a chapter is published every week (or month or etc.), it is still a novel that's been self published by the author.

My second exclusion is a novel using a blog to help write it. For example. Let's say you're writing a blog fiction. You publish 5 chapters to the web. Then, while writing chapter 6, someone leaves a comment that it would be a better story if you changed the setting from Futuristic Japan to Modern day Africa. If you go back and change chapters 1 through 5 to change the setting then it's not a blog fiction. What it is, is that you are using a blog to get help\suggestions from people on writing a novel. This isn't a bad thing nor something that I'd discourage people form doing, but it is not blog fiction.

Third Exclusion: Serialized fiction. This might cause the most discussion because I think it's the closest cousin to blog fiction. Just because you're using a blog to publish your serialized fiction(even if you don't ever modify your chapters once published) doesn't make it blog fiction. To those who think that publishing your story before you've written the entire thing is new, you have a phone call from a Mr. Charles Dickens.
A quick test to see if you're writing a blog fiction vs. serialized fiction would be:
If you're writing in the third person: Serialized
If you took your work and put it into a novel, could someone identify your novel as being a diary\blog? If no, then it's probably serialized fiction.
Is there interaction(in character) with readers as you write it? If yes, then i'd say it's blog fiction.

My fourth Exclusion is commercial\marketing blogs. A blog written by a marketing company to promote a product(like the Captain Morgan Blog). Also, a character blog written by a company to promote a movie or tv show. I object to these when they are used for marketing, rather than revealing more detailed plots. I would reconsider if the blog told a story or reveled plot points you may not have known otherwise.

My fifth exclusion might also cause some... discussion. A real blog written by a fictional person. That is, a blog written just like every other blog. You comment on actual local\national\world events. Muse about things you find funny. Link to interesting articles. That is a blog even if you're a 14year old girl pretending you're an 80 year old man. If the blog starts talking about the 80 year old man chasing after a fictional 30 year old woman, then, I think, it turns into blog fiction.

All of this is not to suggest that my exclusions are not good or proper "fiction". I think it's all good, legitimate ways to write fiction, it's just not blog fiction. If you disagree with one of my exclusions, or think that an additional exclusion should be added, my mind is open and ready to be changed. The purpose of this is to open up a discussion.

Doing My Part to Promote Blog Fiction

As I stated before, one of my goals is to promote blog fiction. There is already a lot out there, but not a lot of people know about it. That's why I'd like to point out what the sidebars of my blog are doing.

The left sidebar is dedicated to the rss feeds of currently active blog fiction. I have 3 requirements for getting onto the left sidebar.
1. The site must be a fictional blog
2. You must have an rss feed for the blog
3. Must currently be posting to the site.

The first 2 requirements are pretty obvious. The third one is because I figured it only makes sense to have feeds from active blogs.

On the right sidebar of my blog you'll notice a header called "Reader Resources" and under that a link labeled: "Grand List of Blog Fiction Sites". This is a link to the forums at my website. It lists all of the fictional blogs I've found. This includes all the ones you see on the left as well as ones that are inactive(finished or abandoned) and active ones that don't have a feed.

If you know of any blog fiction that isn't included, PLEASE let me know. Putting it in the forum list would be ideal. Leaving me a comment with a description of the blog fiction would be the next best choice. If it's an active blog fiction with a feed, I will add it to the left sidebar.

Blog Fiction

Over a year ago, I was doing some random internet surfing and I ran across a blog on blogger called Fleet Commander. It was a blog written by a person from the distant future. I have no idea if the person who wrote it was an amateur or professional writer. What I do know is that I enjoyed it immensely.

After reading all the chapters I started looking for other blog fiction. I found it. I read them and have enjoyed most of them. In time, I decided to start my own blog fiction.

Although I have forums on my own website. I wanted to have a site that could have discussions about blog fiction without my own necessarily being the topic du juor. I'm just an amateur, afterall - There's a lot of writing out there that's really good. I'd also like to discuss other things like tips on writing blog fiction and promoting it. All of this I felt a little constricted talking about it on my own fictional blog.

That's why I've decided to separate the two. I'll still be participating in my own forums - and I may even cross post, but i think it'll be obvious which belong in the forum and which belongs on this blog.