Review: Death's Blog

Death's Blog is a humor blog fiction written by a fictionalized Grim Reaper. The blog picks up right after Death retires. He blogs about dating, his mother, and reminisces about memorable killings. When it started it had new postings 3 to 5 times a week, but posting slowed down through and eventually stopped. Fortunately, the blog is scheduled to come back at the end of this month.

Plot
This is a humor blog. It does not pretend to be anything else. You're not going to find a lot of deep soul searching(figuratively speaking, there IS literal soul searching!) nor are there epic quests. It is simply the story of Death going into retirement, dating, and eventually being pulled into semi-retirement. Every post is quite funny and as the blog goes on the situations only get more ridiculous.

Format
The story is presented as a standard blog fiction, that is, a single fictional character writing a blog. The blog makes good use of it's formats. There are usually humorous pictures to go along with the topic of each post. It will also provides backlinks to past events so you can dive into the blog at any point. Best of all, Death responds to comments regularly.

When starting out, posts were only about 250 - 300 words. However, as the blog went on posts gradually became longer. 500 - 600 words quickly became the Norm.

There isn't any graphic sex or violence. However, the blog still isn't for any kids who might still believe in the "boogeyman". Flesh eating demons tend to get a PG-13 rating.

Pros
It's funny. The cast of Characters are hilarious. The Devil as an umpteen times married pervert, an alcoholic reaper, a clinically depressed reaper, egotistical philosophers, and a never ending cast of Death's victims(well, he uses the word "clients"). All that before we even get into Death's disastrous dating life.

There's also a lot of satire built into the blog. For instance death often speaks like an annoying corporate boss when talking about managing his reapers. Another favorite example of satire is his recounting of when he was delayed bringing a busload of victims to heaven because of heavy "traffic", because it's a hilarious parody of airline delays. Sometimes satire just comes from Death explaining certain how certain rules in the afterlife came about, like the one grocery bag rule.

There's often also a surreal feeling to some of the posts. Like the way Death nonchalantly describes a restaurant in hell where you can hear the screams from the kitchen and human flesh is served. It's just funny reading a description of this the way one would describe eating at Applebees. It's made to seem perfectly normal.

Once you combine all 3 of these aspects you get posts that have you in stiches as you read about Death having to tell the devil not to eat the flesh of a bunch of nuns that were dropped off in purgatory instead of heaven because the alcoholic death wanted to make Happy Hour!

There are other good things I like about Death's blog. He makes full use of the blog format. He uses pictures, responds to people's comments "in character", and links back to past events (usually).

Cons
As funny as most of it is, there are still some problems that plague Death's blog. The first one you will probably notice is the color scheme of the site. White on Black background, as appropriate as hard on the eyes to read. The second thing you'll notice is an even worse problem. The text of published comments are black so you can't read other people's comments without somehow highlighting them.

Another strike against the site is that it starts so slow. You have to slog through about the first 15 or 20 entries to get to the funny stuff. Don't get me wrong, humor is attempted, but it gets old fast. The editor, Donna Sirianni, at Web Fiction Guide, explains it perfectly in her review of the site.

I kept thinking of Norm MacDonald’s Death in The Family Guy when I was reading this and there’s a stark difference between the two. Family Guy’s Death isn’t seen very often so when we do see him, it’s with something new and the laughs at what he does maintain their freshness. With Death’s Blog, it was cute and quirky for the first few entries (I actually read the first ten since they were so short) but I think the schtick got old quick. The constant reiteration that he was once Death and is searching for a new life just dampened the humor that could have been there.

Unfortunately, you can't just skip the posts, otherwise you probably won't get future jokes.

My last criticism are 2 cheesy running jokes in the story. The words "Scythe and "Reaper" being constantly substituted into other common words or phrases. Like "Scythemore University" or "Reapernecking". I know that comedy is subjective, but in my subjective opinion it quits being funny after about the second time you do it.

Conclusion
If you can get over the bad color scheme and slog through the beginning posts you will find a very funny story. As I said in the beginning, the blog will be coming back at the end of this month. So if you hurry, you should have time to read the archives just as your rss feed starts loading up new humorous posts for your enjoyment. Overall Death's Blog does come squeek by with a recommendation. I give it a:
6 out of 10
(rating scale)

Back from the Brink

Two Blog Fiction sites that I had written off as abandoned are once again showing signs of life. Thanks to the Blog Fiction Widget I was able to notice that both The Time Traveler Blog and Trish Tales are posting again.

The Time Traveler Blog had been dormant since Febuary, and before that there hadn't been an update since December. Apparently, however, it seems that it is back to posting weekly.

Trish Tales is also back. Unfortunately, it's been limping along with only 1 post a month. Once it missed April I figured that it was finally over. Fortunately, the writer's wrote into the story an explanation of their absence.

Rating Scale

I already did one review. I have another review coming up. Before releasing it, I thought that I would clarify my numerical rating scale. I wanted to be clear that 6,7, and 8 are very solid ratings. So, if you are looking for a good blog fiction, you should know that a '6' is worth your time, even though it may only translate to a B-\C+

10. Masterpiece - No way to improve it without ruining it.
9. Near Masterpiece - Room for only the most minor of minor improvements
8. Solid, Professional, and entertaining - Better than most writing
7. Recommend taking a look, guaranteed you won't be disappointed.
6. Worth taking a look.
5. Average writing that's Worth a look if you've already read everything else
4. Below Average - Suffers from either bad writing, bad story, bad characterization, or terrible site layout
3. Bad, suffers from several of the following: Simplistic plot or severe plot holes, flat writing, too much "telling", 2 dimensional characters, bad site layout
2. Nearly Incomprehensible story, characters, and\or writing
1. Dan Brown

No Comments?!

I was reading My Super Hopeless Romance the other day and noticed something peculiar about it... it doesn't allow comments! A blog fiction without comments? What's the point? Just write web fiction. Actually, web fiction is more fun with comments too... So you may as well just write a book. Seriously, without comments, I can't give feed back, can't interact with the character, and I can't interact with other readers.

One of the words in Blog Fiction is 'Blog'. While the comments function is not necessary for a website to be called a blog, it is important. As Wikipedia says:

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Comments is one of the cool inventions that made blogs so popular. So while a blog fiction that doesn't have comments is still technically blog fiction, it's peculiar and... just not as fun.

Use Wikipedia to promote yourself? Don't Bother

I was checking out twitter and found this tweet about Wikipedia from Muse's Success.

Added our link to the Blog Fiction article on Wikipedia. Let's hope it doesn't get removed!

The link did not last more than a day before being removed as "spam". Compared to how quickly most links get removed from Wikipedia articles that's practically a record. Wikipedia is meant to be used as a research tool, not a promotion tool. The editors have a lot of rules in place to keep the site from being used for promotion.

Wikipedia has a "bot" (computer controlled editor) that looks through all articles and removes the most obvious self-promotion updates. What criteria does it use? I'll let the XLinkBot article answer that:

XLinkBot is primarily intended to deal with domains which may have a legit use on-wiki, but are frequently misused by new and anonymous users (or have a history of being misused). The bot allows established users to add links, while reverting links added by others. IP's and new users can still edit a page that contains links on the bot's revert list, they won't be reverted unless they add or change a link themselves.

So if you add an external link, and you aren't a frequent editor, it will remove your link by reverting the article. So, if you're a blog fiction writer, don't bother trying to promote yourself on the wikipedia page. All that will happen is that you'll add an external link to your site and seconds later it will be gone.

Even if you somehow manage to defeat the XLinkBot's logic, you'll still have to deal with human editors. If they think that your link was either self-serving or irrelevant, guess what? It's gone.

It's not worth trying to get your link on the site. This blog was around for nearly a year and a half before someone finally decided to add me to the external links portion of the Blog Fiction article. Now that I'm listed I get about 1 hit every other day from it. So getting listed on that page is hardly worth the time. Rather than trying to defeat the bot and other wikipedia editors, might I suggest something more constructive, entrecard, Web Fiction Guide, or Muse's Success.

A splog stole my content! Now what?

When I started offering full text rss feeds, I knew that I was putting my content at risk for easy theft. I received a google alert for my keyword on a website I didn't recognize. When I checked it out I found a splog that had my last few posts on the website. Eventually, I got the content removed. Being successful, I thought that the steps I took might be of interest to others who have had their content stolen.

1. The first step was of course finding out that my content was stolen. I'll again direct you to Kate's brilliant tactic on prevening rss scrapes for details.
2. My second step was to search around the website for an email address or contact page. I could not find one.
3. My third step was that I left a comment on each post of mine that was stolen. I said, "Stop stealing my content you are commiting a crime by doing so." I then left a link to the original post.
4. Unfortunately, the comments required moderation. I waited 4 days and nothing happened. I decided to go after his hosting company.
   
5. I opened up a command prompt(start-> run-> type "cmd"-> press enter
6. I pinged the domain name to get the IP address of the website (ping domain.com)
7. Once I had the IP address, I went to this website and typed in the IP address and got the information on the name of the company that owned it.
8. I googled the name of the company and found their website. The company was indeed a web hosting company.
9. I located their "terms and conditions" page and discovered they posting copyrighted material was against their rules.
10. I found the company's "abuse" email address and wrote them an email explaining the situation. I included links to the offending content as well as links to the original content. I asked that they contact the owner and have the owner remove the content, or, failing that, take down the website as he was violating their own terms and conditions.
11. A day and a half later the content was removed. I sent a follow up email to the webhosting company thanking them for their help.

I never received a follow up email from anyone, so I don't know if it was the webhosting company contacting the owner, or it was the comments that I left that eventually prompted the offending content being removed. I don't know if following these steps will work for everyone, but they did work for me. Hopefully, they'll work for you too.

Voice of the given up

The Voice of the Living has closed up shop.



It's a shame when Authors do not receive the attention and audience that they are entitled too...

Short Posts or Long Posts

Is it better for your blog fiction to have a lot of short posts, or is it better to have fewer long posts? This is something I've thought about a lot. When I'm reading Blog Fiction, I prefer nice short, bite-sized posts; however, when I'm writing, I seem to prefer writing longer posts. In deciding which is better, I broke it down by pros and cons for each.

There are a lot of things I like about short posts. They are easier for me to read. I can read a short post quickly and get a sense of satisfaction very quickly. When I write short posts that means I can (usually) write more total posts, even if the word count is the same. With more posts, that gives readers more of a reason to frequently check the website for updates.

One of the cons to writing short posts is that your writing can get choppy. If you're stringing together a lot of events, readers may forget certain details. When it comes to new readers, they may get lost because there won't be much context in shorter posts. As a writer, you have to be more careful to provide backlinks or sidebar summaries for your new readers.

There are a couple reasons that long posts are better in Blog Fiction. First of all, when it comes to fiction, most readers are used to long passages when reading fiction. A post that is considered "long" by Blog standards would more than likely be considered very short in terms of chapters in a book.

Another advantage to long posts is the ability to have a more contained story in each post. Each post has a better chance to entertain and interest new readers. A longer post could be more likely to be linked\stumbled\dugg\reddit\etc... That of course means more readers for your blog fiction.

There are of course some disadvantages to longer posts. The biggest thing is that longer posts is going to reduce the frequency of new posts. That means readers are going to be very disappointed if the writer misses a post. This places a burden on the writer to make sure to post on schedule. If you're posting long chapters once a week and miss a week, that means readers will think they have to wait a whole week for an update. Whereas if you're posting short articles everyday, it just means that they only have to wait one more day for an update. In the A.D.D world of the internet and blogs, that might mean losing readers.

Speaking of A.D.D., that brings me to the other disadvantage of longer posts. They are going to be harder to read. Internet readers are used to nice short posts. Better yet, they prefer nice bulleted top 10 lists. It's just like when reading a book. When I read a book, I'm always more likely to read "just one more chapter" before putting it down if the next chapter is only 3 pages, as opposed to 30 pages.

Which is better to do? I'm not sure. As a general rule, I prefer reading blog fiction that has generally short posts (with occasional long posts being tolerated). I'd like to hear from you what your preference is when reading blog fiction (or any online fiction): Long posts? Or Short posts?