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.