Post Number 91 Over many years of trial and error (actually more a case of trial, error, another error, a bit more trial, error etcetera) I have learnt that I work best in short sprints, with a brief break between, followed by another sprint. This usually takes the form of Read more…
Find your niche, they say, then make it yours! (They often say this with an exclamation point!)!! (Deliberate over-punctuation there, sorry.) What’s your Unique Selling Point (USP)? (And, yes, I did put ‘an’ before USP in the title — I thought it worked better than ‘a’.)
This is, actually, very good advice for the blogger — and, in some ways, for the writer in general. It is important to know where to sit, how to connect with “your people”, or “your tribe” (see Alastair Humphreys’s advice for travel bloggers here, for some very good points and discussion).
However, I have a problem with this. I have no idea what my niche is…
I want to blog about all those things that make me, me. I want to talk about things I love and love what I talk about — otherwise, what’s the point? (more…)
I use Scrivener to keep much of my online presence in one place — all these blog posts are crafted here. In the binder, within the “Blog Ideas” folder, there are currently 76 different pieces in various stages of composition. Five are mere titles with a question mark, but most have some further notes. At least half of them are mostly written, amounting to thousands of yet-to-be-seen words. Some may morph into Things to Pitch and Sell, but many should appear here. One day — wait and see.
I do not want to rush pieces to conform to a schedule. So many blogs I have seen are peppered with “Sorry I haven’t posted anything in a while” posts — I have been guilty of this myself on more than one occasion — when this is not really needed. (more…)
I will expand on this note in the future, but for now this should suffice. Some years ago I made a decision to step back from social media. The reasons behind this will be one of the things I’ll talk about later. Yet even this statement is problematic, although I Read more…
I suppose this is a good time to discuss Twitter and other social media.
I, like many others, followed the recent debacle regarding the announcement Jonathan Ross would be hosting the Hugo awards this summer. I watched as people took to Twitter to voice their opinions in increasingly unconstructive ways and then I stopped watching as it became crueller and crueller. I am not going to delve deeply into the matter here, or into the whole slew of issues the SFF world is slowly attempting to deal with; perhaps I will one day, but not now.