Kristen Lamb started it all off with a blog explaining why writers should not blog about writing. More recently Roni Loren mused on the question too.
And it's all probably true: if you only blog about writing, your audience is limited to people interested in that. If I were a published author, would readers want to read my musings on character development and outlining? Maybe. I don't know.
Should I talk about my interests, like my knitting? I suppose, but I'm not doing much knitting lately. I'm writing.
Do readers want random anecdotes from my everyday life? To be honest, I don't want random anecdotes from my life outside of writing. If any of that was worth mentioning, I wouldn't be writing.
And then I remembered a recent Ninja chat (over at the Ninja dojo) where Scrivener came up. I use Scrivener, and I mentioned how it helped me organize all my notes -- which is a godsend, because I write a lot of notes. Never realized, in fact, exactly how much until Scrivener could tell me.
Course Corrections came out at 77K. Plus 28K in notes. Outlines, worldbuilding, conversation sketches, porny asides.
And there it ended. And there it sat with a little "draft" label while I flailed around looking for other stuff to blog about.
Voice in the back of my head kept saying: blog about world-building, silly, it's what you obsess about.As if anyone wants to read about worlds that haven't seen publication yet. I can count on both hands the number of people who've read more than the samples I've posted of my work here.
(Note: to see samples of my writing, click on "sample" in the label index in the right-hand column.)
Social media is all about self-promotion, right? Got to put yourself out there, right? But yikes, why put me out there? Put my work out there instead, it's got half a chance of being interesting.
Several people posted very kind comments on my MC blogfest about Tanner's voice and backstory (thank you so much, everyone!) and now I'm looking at Tanner... and Maggie... and the rest of the cast... guys? Care to do some more interviews? We could talk about back story. It would be a writing sample, world-building and character development all wrapped up together.
I also resolve to try to put more pictures in my blog posts.
BUT FIRST, you may notice that I'm posting less. I am not on vacation (don't get any of those) I am trapped in the black hole that is the climax of Orbital Shifts. This often happens when I hit the crux of it all: I lose what little ability to think outside the book that I might have had. Laundry doesn't get done, dinners simplify, I stop reading/watching anything else.
Probably won't be a Word Choice Wednesday this week. I got nothing. But I'll see you on the other side of the black hole. Could be a couple weeks.
2 comments:
Good luck with your book. I've thought too about whether I should not post about writing so much, but that's really what my blog is all about and I like connecting with other authors. Maybe I need something different to connect with readers. It's worth thinking about.
Good luck with your novel!
I read that post by Kristen Lamb, too. I found it interesting, since I don't only post about writing--and it made me think more about what effect that has on my readers.
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