Tag: blogging

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The Ghosts of Blogs Long Gone

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned how this blog is now nine years old, and I’ve updated it without any significant gaps. Regular readers will probably be able to identify my style of writing. This is no accident. Before moving to WordPress, I cut my teeth on LiveJournal for many years, and some of what I learnt has carried over to this very day.

Affectionately known as LJ to its users, the site was big news around the millennium. I was relatively late to the party, making my first entry there in 2003. Nonetheless, I kept it updated with day-to-day events until around 2013. My experimentation there was crucial to how I approach blogging today. I found out what topics would engage and disengage an audience, how to structure the text, and the optimum length for a given entry.

Looking back, I’m surprised that some of my least engaging updates were made between 2011 and 2013. I knew LJ was losing its audience by then. In a misguided attempt to keep it alive, I’d largely dispensed with the diary style in favour of a dull series of weekly posts titled #MusicMonday, featuring a different rock or pop track.

By that point, I was starting to take my writing more seriously, so I chose to start afresh on WordPress. This would have a focus on fiction and poetry, and would go on to be updated on a strict weekly schedule. From the moment I set up my account here, I could see why users were moving away: WordPress offered basic features such as scheduled posts and picture uploads as part of their free account, but LJ still charged for them. Most of these features are now free, but LJ still charges $15 just to change your username.

That’s not to say LJ is dead. I still have one pal who updates to this day, and it was a comment underneath her most recent entry that led me back to another blog I kept at Dreamwidth, based on LJ code with modifications.

In 2009, I set up what would now be termed an alt-account to share thoughts that I didn’t want a wider audience to see. I stopped regularly updating there at the same time as I opened WordPress. Then the rabbit-hole deepened when I remembered I’d set up a secondary account to record fragments of dreams. The intention of using them for writing prompts never came to fruition and that blog has remained untouched since 2011.

I have one other LJ page that’s now inaccessible. This was set up for a juggling society at what is now the University of the West of Scotland. Members were kept updated on that page because this was an era before MySpace went mainstream. The student email address no longer exists, my password guesses have been incorrect, and I never set up a recovery question. As such, it’s remained fossilised since 8 Feb 2005.

Reading the LJ Help pages, there is no hope of recovery, so I’ve written to the helpdesk to ask when it’ll be purged. This is often done with accounts that have been idle for too long.

That’s the story of how this WordPress blog came about, and why it’s written the way it is. I can still look back at entries from its earlier days and see what I would have done differently, but I am generally happy with how the past nine years have gone.

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Acting as Gallery Assistant and Finding the Time to Read

I’m a regular visitor to the Dundee Contemporary Arts building, which holds around three major exhibitions per year. No matter what’s on display, I’m forever fascinated by the job of the gallery assistants. Aside from opening nights and special events, the pace is normally relaxed enough that some of them read novels while on shift.

Last week, I had the chance to experience this for myself on a smaller scale. First, a little background.

On Thursday, I visited an art exhibition called Funeral For My Deadname at Saltspace in Glasgow. This was run by an artist pal, and the highlight of the opening night was him completing and signing a document to legally change his name to Luke ‘Luca’ Cockayne in front of a crowd of visitors.

Luca also displayed a selection of his artworks in the gallery, some dating back more than a decade. These were available for viewing until Sunday, and some are featured below.

Close-up wall of paintings and drawings, laid out in a salon style.
Wide view of paintings and drawings, plus two freestanding pieces.
Exhibition viewed over the top of The Thursday Murder Club book.

As I hadn’t originally planned to be there on the opening night, I’d already booked my travel for Saturday. I didn’t intend to waste it, so I visited again and spent the day at Saltspace. In contrast with the busy opening night, there was a mere trickle of visitors during the day.

I’d brought with me the Richard Osman bestseller The Thursday Murder Club. It had been sitting in my bag for a long time, and by last week, I’d reached the halfway stage. With a combination of a long bus journey and quiet conditions at Saltspace, I was down to the last few pages by Saturday evening, then I finished it on Sunday.

I also promised my pal I’d dash off a quick clerihew in honour of the event:

Funeral for My Deadname.
I hereby proclaim,
announce and swear
that a change is in the air.
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A Regular Writing Routine

I’m part of the Wyvern Poets group in Dundee, having been a founder member in or around 2015.

Unlike my other groups, this one does not actively recruit members but it does publish its work. Most notably, Dundee University has invited us to put together a pamphlet for the Being Human festival every November, and to perform our work on campus.

For the rest of the year, the members each write a poem ahead of our monthly meetings. There is always an optional prompt; normally a single word like ‘environment’, ‘pace’ or ‘journey’. The poems are then discussed on a peer-review basis and suggestions are made between members.

I find if I undertake no other writing in a given month, I always submit something for the group, even if it’s at the last minute or if I’m not entirely happy with it. As there’s only around a week until the next meeting, I’m going to crack on with this month’s prompt – villanelle – right after I finish this.

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What’s Occurring in September

Eschewing my usual ‘columnist’ format, this week’s entry takes the format of a bulleted list all about this month’s upcoming projects.

  • The following week, on Wednesday 21 September, I’m leading a gameshow called The Literal Flow Test. This is part of the Dundee Fringe, and takes place at Dock Street Studios. You can book tickets now, but there is no direct URL, so go to the official website and look down the page.
  • The following day, Hotchpotch has been granted a stall at Dundee University Freshers’ Fair. That’s on Thursday 22 September from 11am to 4pm where we’ll be introducing ourselves to the new crop of students.
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Nearly Nine Years of Staying on Topic

I have something I want to write about, but it needs to wait until at least next week. So in looking for inspiration to fill this week, I decided to go and look back at the entry I made around a year ago today.

Unfortunately, I was similarly uninspired back then, with topics I wanted to discuss, but my motivation was trampled by a couple of other factors.

Going back two years, I talked about the hurdles that beginner writers face, while 2019 took a look at how subtitlers caption TV programmes. In 2018, it was an entry about effective complaint letters, while five years ago, we discussed submitting Christmas stories during summer to meet publishing deadlines.

At this point, I was tempted to stop looking back, particularly as I didn’t have a point to make that would tie together these disparate threads. However, I was now curious.

In 2016, I was in the middle of an MLitt degree and running short of time, so I set readers a challenge. The year before that, it was all about saying goodbye to pieces of writing that weren’t working. Back in 2014, the topic was introverts and extroverts, and that’s as far back as I can go because the blog began in Oct 2013.

⭐⭐⭐

After leaving this entry overnight, I realised the connecting thread: in almost nine years, this blog has stayed relatively on-topic.

I think we’ve all had an experience where we subscribe to a newsletter or a content creator, only to find the topic either evolves or abruptly changes into something you didn’t sign up for. With this in mind, I’ve long been careful to make sure each entry harks back to writing in some way.

Just before I make a post on WordPress, the site tells me that it’ll be sent to more than 1,100 readers. That’s a pretty loyal fanbase to have built up over these nine years.

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Proofreading at Speed

One of the best ways to proofread a new piece is to leave it aside for a while, and then revisit it in the future. Writing and reading are two distinct processes, much like cooking and eating,

My preferred formula is to leave one minute per word, or 24 hours, whichever is longer. To find this, divide the number of words in a piece by 60. So a 600-word short story would be set aside for 24 hours, while an 80,000-word novella would be left for over 1,333 hours or around 56 days.

But what if you have a deadline that won’t allow the piece to be set aside for long? Here are three ways I’ve learned over the years to speed up the process.

Change the typeface

Microsoft Word is usually set up to type in Arial or Times New Roman, with equivalent typefaces available for Mac. However, there are countless others pre-installed on both operating systems. Save your work, then convert the text to something completely different.

I suggest picking wider letters than usual and increasing the font size, because the eye tends to focus on different parts of the same words, and any errors will seem more obvious.

Read it aloud

For the avoidance of doubt, there’s no need to read it to anyone, just as long as it’s out loud to yourself. This method is good for picking up poor grammar and clumsy sentence construction that reading alone often misses.

Make your computer read it out

I used to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking a lot, and that has a feature to read text from the page, although Word and other word processors also have this built in. I have a particular problem with typing form when I mean from, and vice-versa, and this method is particularly good at finding these.

Older speech synthesis is a little grating for longer pieces, but the inflections have become much more realistic over the last decade. Just ask the actor Val Kilmer, who was given a cutting-edge system after he lost his voice.

… and a disclaimer

Murphy’s Law dictates that a blog entry about proofreading will contain some errors that can’t be attributed to stylistic choices. I haven’t found any, but I’m sure my many readers will be all over it.

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Creating and Performing a Story in Six Hours

The tale in this entry happened on Tuesday evening of last week, just too late to be included on the blog.

At around 3:15pm, I received a message from a comedian pal. He was due to debut a new show that evening, but one of his warm-up acts had dropped out. He asked for anything of a spoken-word nature to fill a ten-minute gap.

I have plenty of pieces available, but Tuesday night is also when I lead National Novel Writing Month on a Discord server. Some of the members love to put together collaborative stories, so I gave them a challenge.

Starting with a line from a book, namely Clubbed to Death by Grant Hill, I invited them to add up to three lines of action or dialogue in each subsequent post, inviting them to be as humorous and/or surreal as possible. Subject to minor edits to keep the flow, the story was read out to an audience that very evening.

So here for your interest is the version created after editing.

We also have a recording of how it sounded at the venue; the technical quality isn’t great, such is the nature of live performance. Starting at 4:33, listen out for how I accidentally printed one sheet on top of another, rendering the print unreadable, but didn’t realise until I was well away from home.

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Secret Projects Abound!

I’ve recently been asked by a poetry production company to write a letter of support for a funding application. As I’ve spent most of the week composing this, I was going to make it the subject of the entry.

However, once I actually began writing, I started to doubt myself. It’s fine to announce the good news once the funding is actually awarded, but posting details of the application is a much more private affair. I’ve chosen to leave that aside for the moment.

The other topic I’m dying to write about is a non-urgent pet project I’ve had in mind for months.

However, I’ve yet to ring-fence the time to start it and – while I dislike clichés intensely – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was spot-on when he said a goal without a plan is just a wish. The time spent writing about it could be time spent actually writing the project.

So what can I tell you about this week? The answer is a programme of events called Rep Stripped.

In 2019, Dundee Rep ran the inaugural Stripped event. Members from my open-mike group successfully applied to appear in a special hour-long poetry show alongside many other and varied acts. All the restrictions and uncertainty over the last two years has meant that 2022 is only the second edition of the programme.

For the avoidance of doubt, we’re not taking part in the Stripped programme this year, but I know people who are.

In particular, I’m looking forward to seeing Elfie Picket Theatre as I’ve met the owners a few times at their productions. Each ticket allows entry to more than one show, so I’m also looking forward to seeing what surprises are in store for us.

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Writing a Character Backstory

On the weekend just past, I had a chance to play Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) after a substantial gap of around two years. This was to be a fresh game that required a new character.

The Dungeon Master (DM) is the person who both manages the game and reacts when a player takes an action. She asked each player to write a backstory for our characters that could then be worked into the game.

When writing a novel, it’s a good idea to write up the backstory of the main characters. This helps to keep the action consistent throughout the story, even if you don’t end up using every detail.

The same technique can be used with a D&D character. Mine is called Kat Herder, and she:

  • grew up in a small town and worked as a butcher’s apprentice
  • left to join the military so she could travel, and became a highly-ranked soldier
  • unexpectedly left the military after 15 years, but kept travelling and taking on casual work

But I also don’t have to think of every detail. We’re playing the game in a fictional world that already has its own story, and Kat simply needs to fit into it.

The DM has asked me further questions to enhance the story, so I’ll be working on that this week.

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Grammar, and the Importance Thereof

For a long time, I’ve used Grammarly on my computer. It acts as a spellchecker and grammar checker, but works across the whole of Windows 11, not just the Microsoft Office suite. Every week, I receive an e-mail from the company telling me how well I’ve been writing in the previous seven days. Let’s take a look at the one from yesterday.

That claims I was more productive than 76% of Grammarly users, was more accurate than 78%, and used more unique words than 81%. I have a streak when I’ve used the software for 124 weeks in a row, so there’s a lot of data to mine from that. It also points out my most common errors, but it must be stated that around half of these are stylistic differences from what the programmers expect. For example, I would write ‘6pm’ and not ‘6 PM’, and with the free version, there’s no way to inform them that’s just how I write.

I routinely watch educational videos on YouTube, and over the last few weeks, I’ve stumbled across a language tutor called Olly Richards. His method of teaching is what he dubs the StoryLearning method, in which learners are encouraged to read materials in the target language and hold conversations with native speakers – and to be less concerned by individual words, phrases and sentence construction. His view is that the grammar of a language will be learnt naturally through everyday use.

I’ve been considering how this applies to the English language. In everyday conversation, few people think about every word they say, and the general sense will usually shine through even when the words aren’t precise or are in an unusual order.

When I’m writing this blog, on the other hand, the words will probably hang around for some years. As such, I feel it important to maintain a decent standard of writing, especially as the subject is prose and poetry. Grammarly is one of the tools I use for this, but it isn’t the only one.

I drafted this entry on the evening of Monday 16 May, and I came back to it this evening. I redrafted the previous paragraph to include another relevant point, and I deleted two instances of ‘and’ right next to each other. I consider that time away from the writing to invaluable for spotting such errors.