Tag: blogging

Uncategorized

Helping @SuitedSorted Improve His Blog, and Hints for Everyone Else.

I hadn’t written a response blog for years, and now this is my second in a fortnight. But this time, it was requested.

Scott Graham runs Suited Sorted on Blogspot, where he has recently re-focused on Android technology, although he has back entries discussing music, television, holidays, and weight loss. He has asked for some constructive criticism about the page, and with ten years’ blogging experience, I reckon I’m qualified to pass on some tips.

Tone, spelling, and grammar

Scott wonders if he’s a little too conversational. There’s a certain style that many bloggers go for, whether they mean to or not. The closest off-line equivalent is an opinion column in a newspaper. You’re telling the reader your view on a particular matter, but using everyday spoken words. For instance, you’ll say asked for rather than requested, or use contractions like can’t instead of cannot.

Cartoon about spelling mistakes in blogs
Thats verry true

But this isn’t a licence to spell words any old way, or leave out punctuation where it’s needed. Almost every piece of blogging software has a spellchecker. Spelling extensions are available for Firefox and Chrome, most mobile phones have the facility built-in, and the latest edition of Microsoft Word even lets you post to WordPress directly. If the reader doesn’t have to decode what you’re trying to tell them, your message will come across much stronger.

Scott, you’re doing fine on that front.

Layout

Newspapers and magazines learnt early on that long articles do not translate well to the Web. When you’re reading a three-page printed interview, your neck automatically moves downwards as your eyes follow the text, where scrolling down with your hands requires more conscious effort. A normal screen – not an e-ink display – is also brighter than a page, so it’s harder to read from.

That’s why I restrict my paragraphs to about three to six lines, and leave a clear line between each one. A lot of people will give up reading a wall of text, if they attempt it at all.

Your paragraphs can be quite long, Scott, but certainly not the dreaded wall.

Attracting attention

Using the site analytics tools on WordPress, I’ve found that my posts attract more attention and reaction if I post them between around 6pm and 10pm Monday to Friday. Entries made at any time on Saturday or Sunday simply don’t seem to be noticed. Certain tags also seem to generate interest, while others have no effect.

For years, I posted with LiveJournal and tagged my entries. I very much accepted that hardly anyone except my friends read the page, as they were the only ones to comment. But when I moved to WordPress, I realised I’d been missing out on this vital piece of analysis. Everyone will be different, and some will find that daytime or weekend posts work for them.

So keep tagging your entries, Scott, and have a look at Blogspot’s analysis tools to find out exactly when people are reading you. I hope you’ve found this critique helpful.

To everyone else, I’ll be pleased if any of my suggestions help you with your own blogging.

Uncategorized

Happy World Book Day: A Response to @MostlyYummy.

It’s a rare occasion that Mostly Yummy’s blog topics will intersect in any way with mine, but today it’s happened.

I didn’t realise until this morning that World Book Day was such a big deal among the nation’s schoolchildren. They’re encouraged to dress up as their favourite fictional character.

The theory of this is quite sound. A child’s imagination can be sparked and expanded by his or her early reading choices. The other part of the theory is peer pressure. If a child knows that everyone else will be dressing up, they’ll likely want to do the same.

Like many children, I loved Roald Dahl’s slightly twisted novels, but I also enjoyed the stories from Antelope Books. I can’t find any relevant references to Antelope online, so do comment if you remember these guys.

But as Yummy points out in today’s post, the reality of the aforementioned theory can be very different. She tells us how she tried to cobble together outfits for two of her children, while making a valid point that the dressing up can overshadow the intention of World Book Day which is to read.

I must’ve mentioned this before, but being asked to do anything artistic scares the bejesus out of me; even seeing the words Daler Rowney brings me out in hives. I disliked the subject at school since I could never make the final product look anything like what the teacher asked. I did know what I wanted to draw, paint, or construct, but it became lost somewhere between my head and my arm. In essence, I sympathise a great deal with my fellow blogger.

I’ve been upfront from the start that I’m a latecomer to writing fiction. I didn’t pen a single piece between my last high school English class, when it was mandatory, and just before I turned 27. Despite the long gap, I find writing comes naturally to me, although I still had to learn the rules and conventions of the craft, whereas expressing myself with a paintbrush just isn’t me.

I recognise that some people won’t be able to relate to this as they have the exact opposite talents. I would like to learn, as it could complement my writing. Perhaps someone suitably gifted could put together a Complete Ninny’s Guide for me, and throw in a copy for Mostly Yummy.

Uncategorized

Can you help @Strange_Musings fund an anthology?

Alternate Hilarities
Alternate Hilarities

I’m pleased to report that I’ve had a third short story accepted for publication. New York publisher Strange Musings Press will be printing Amending Diabolical Acronym Misuse. However, it will only go ahead if enough people contribute.

To this end, a Kickstarter campaign has been set up to raise $1,100 by Tuesday 25 March. You can donate at several levels from $1 to $150, each of which buys you increasing levels of acknowledgement, privilege, and general bragging rights.

I wouldn’t ask you to do something that I’m not prepared to do myself, so I’ve donated $22 under my legal name Gavin Cruickshank. That amount includes $10 overseas postage for a copy of the book, due out on Thursday 1 May. You can see my contribution on the backers’ page.

I would be most grateful if you could give whatever you can, and the editor Giovanni Valentino will be delighted. Don’t forget to share this blog post on WordPress and/or your preferred social networks.

If this comes off, I’ll have been published in the UK, Australia, and the US. Canada, I have my eye on you.

Uncategorized

Tabletpunk.

Nothing marks out a generation more than the slang it uses.

If we concentrate on right now, February 2014, you’ll hear people say they’ve, “taken a selfie,” or say, “because,” followed by a single word rather than an explanation. Back fifteen years, and it wasn’t unusual to, “tape that programme,” or answer the phone with, “WASSU-U-UP?”

So when writing a piece that’s going to hang around for a while, most notably a novel, it’s a good idea to decide whether you want to incorporate the slang of the day to make it a period piece, or create a more timeless tale by using more generic terms.

If you want a photo taken properly, do it your selfie.

I recently wrote a story where a major plot element is a pager. This immediately sets it in the 1980s, and I felt safe using the term data bank to describe the device’s storage, rather than the more modern memory. I tried not to overload the piece with dated words, but I did allow myself a yuppie, as the pager’s owner described himself.

But while the eighties is over and we know what it was like, writing a story set in the future is different. One day, selfie and because _____ will be as embarrassing as fab and groovy. For my first novel, where the action takes place in the 2500s, I used, for instance, sound system rather than iPod or even MP3 player. I decided not to try predicting the future term, and write something a little more bland, as would distract from what I was trying to say.

There is an elegant solution to this problem, and those of you who write steampunk know what I’m talking about. This genre imagines modern or relatively recent technology as people in the 19th century might have seen it. There are many literary examples of this, but an accessible non-literary one is the TV series Warehouse 13.

Which leads me to wonder if there’ll be a genre of the future where writers of the 2110s envision their everyday gadgets as we in the 2010s might have viewed them. This decade’s most popular invention is probably the touchscreen computer. So, a hundred years in advance, I’m going to label this predicted genre as tabletpunk.

I’d like to be around to see the look on some geek’s face when they unearth this entry.

Uncategorized

The C-Word.

I’ve seen Chris Brookmyre twice already, and tonight was my third time. I’m a big fan of his work after All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses an Eye, and most recently, a signed copy of Flesh Wounds. Tonight, he was promoting Bedlam, which also has his autograph.

Brookmyre does not fit the stereotype of the introverted author, much like the late Iain Banks, whom I had the privilege of seeing twice. Rather, Brookmyre takes centre stage and spills out anecdotes full of swearing. He’s so well known for it that he’s now been forced to apologise in advance. Indeed, the first time I saw the guy, he read out an e-mail he’d received by a previous organiser, effectively banning him from appearing several years ago.

Tonight, he brought along a guest. Barry Phillips started a parody blog of a local footballer and found it attracted the attention of readers around the world. Now he’s written a book called The Tartan Special One about a 17-year-old who is snapped up by Dundee FC. I don’t follow the game, and I didn’t buy a copy tonight, but it still appeals to me so I might so do in the future.

I’ve started back at two writing classes: a short course in fiction run by published author Zöe Venditozzi, and Level 2 of the Life Writing course at the University of Dundee. A couple of new people have joined us, one of them from Life Writing, and she says she’s having trouble thinking of ideas for passages in the five- to ten-minute exercises we’re given in class.

By coincidence, I was discussing this issue with one of the other short course stalwarts earlier the same evening. We realised we’re so used to thinking on our feet that we don’t even hesitate over it any more. But when we began in 2011, it would be tiring trying to think of stories.

Most of our Life Writing class knew each other from Level 1, and we really bonded over this week’s homework, which was to write a summary of our life, then pick one part and make it into a vignette. The ideas for this class also come to me rather quickly, and I can sometimes think of one before I’m on the bus home.

 

Finally, I didn’t realise until tonight that there’s a reminder feature on WordPress. If you want to post at least once a week, or once a month, it’ll send you an e-mail.

Uncategorized

Taking The Lid Off The Pen

When you speak to a lot of authors, it’s common to hear that they were always writing stories as children or experimenting with poetry as teens. However, I’ve only been writing for three years, since 29 October 2010, in fact. That was the day I signed up to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) on a whim, since everyone else was doing it.

From high school until that point, I’d written hardly any fiction. Since then, I’ve entered NaNoWriMo every year and written dozens of short stories, many of them under the tutorship of Zöe Venditozzi, whom I’m sure would like you to buy her book. I’m also pleased to report that I’ve had a flash fiction piece published in The Fiction Desk, while FourW will publish one of my short stories next month. More on the latter when it happens.

Although I didn’t write fiction until three years ago, I have kept a blog for a long time, and it’s still a powerful way of spreading your message, even in these days of Twitter and Facebook. I don’t plan to give up my with ageing LiveJournal for my day-to-day activities, but I did want to start afresh with WordPress for discussing my writing.

I’m viewing this as an experiment, and it might not last. After all, the more you write about writing, the less time you have to write. But I hope I can whip myself enough to keep this place updated, and more importantly, to make sure you want to read it.

One final thought: I’ve used the tag-line Carry on for a long time, before that Keep Calm poster ever came out. I’m debating whether to have a tag-line at all, and if so, what should it be?