No, I’m not starting a new one myself; this post actually got inspired by the questions Darren Rowse posted on ProBlogger, and I wondered about how many things exactly would’ve to be taken into account when starting a new blog. Even though I haven’t many years of blogging behind me (I guess you could say I really started in the spring of 2004 only), I think I’m now able to put the finger on tips centered on this theme—I may not always have followed them myself from the start, but now I sure know them.

Please note that I’ll be posting these tips in two separate entries, as it is quite a long read.

Why blogging?

First of all comes the aim of the blog itself. Blogging just for the sake of blogging isn’t going to get you very far, so one should question why they’re doing it. Is it to give news to friends and family by keeping a place easy to update as well as to check? Is it to promote a book, a product, freelance services? Is it to share knowledge and reflexions about a specific field (what one could call “niche blogs”), or to simply gather news about said field? Will the blog have a professional orientation, or a personal one? There are many purposes to a blog, and depending on what you want to craft here, much of what’s going to follow will have to be planned in a different way. One shouldn’t write on a business blog the way they write about their families on a personal page, unless they want their professional readership seriously wonder about what they’re up to.

Make also sure that you will know what to write about for a long time. Granted, this isn’t a problem in the case of personal blogs: life will always provide you with events. Things are different for niche/professional blogs: if you’re not sure that in a few weeks from now, you’ll still have material to post about, perhaps focusing on a narrow topic isn’t a good idea to start with. So, make sure that you’ll know what to write about in order to publish at least two or three times a week.

50,000 words in one month of writing: doable or not? An impossible task to set myself to, or a very attainable goal?

I say it’s a perfectly attainable goal. When I try to watch more closely my writing rythm, I realize that in one month, it’s really nothing impossible (to be honest, I’ve already done it more than once). Sure, I don’t do that every day, and regularly enough I’ll scrap out entire weeks of work because I’m not satisfied with it anymore. Regardless, NaNoWriMo, given my current cadence, is totally doable.

I’m very tempted to try, just to see how writing with a deadline of this kind works for me. It’s nothing professional, it won’t bring me any prize or money, but I really couldn’t care more. When it comes to creative writing, I’ve never had to do with deadlines so far: technical documents is the only field I do have them, and these don’t demand the same kind of focus. Both “genres” are way too different from each other to be comparable.

I don’t know which degree of involvment I’ll have in it, whether I’ll take an active part in their forums and the likes. I may however post excerpts and works-in-progress here. None of this will start before November, in any case. I like this game, and I’ll stick to its rules.

Y Tags: nanowrimo | writing

[A draft for a short story I’m trying to put together. It can be seen as specific material, as it’s set in the world I’m working on, and I’m not sure yet whether I’ll manage to give it enough sense to stand on its own, or if it should forever remain stashed in a folder until I publish a longer story presenting said world itself. I’m also still trying my hand at using proper dialogue mechanisms in another language than mine. Please bear with me.]

Et In Arcadia Nos

Once the communications were restrained, Chief Engineer Vall’Eran knew that it was only a matter of hours before the personnel would get at him.

“This is going nowhere! What do you want?”

Enhanced by the nano-transmitters whirlwinding around him from his personal unit, his voice boomed in the vast conference room of the Core Research Center, covering for a second the shouts of the workers. Coming from all nations of Ewell, from the white-haired Rims to the stern Kellens with their icy gazes, they were all gathered on that day for the same reason, and he couldn’t ignore their claims any more.

A little useful tool, for those who don’t mind slightly dabbling with HTML coding: a meta-tags analyzer.

While meta-tags are not “the” thing anymore when it comes to SEO (search-engine optimization), they’re still quite useful when it comes to getting properly indexed by search-engine spiders, and making sure that the ones on your webpage are up-to-date and appropriate can never hurt. At least, running my sites through it has pointed a few flaws to me, that I can now correct.

Y Tags: html | metatags | seo

At some point today, I seriously wondered how I managed to weed through nine volumes of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, when there must actually be 1.5 characters I somewhat like in it (yes, you read this number right).

Let’s not be mistaken, there are good sides to the series, including the fact that it allowed me to go through three weeks of illness during a hot summer month, a few years ago—that, and some nice concepts as well (even though I keep on thinking that the world is better fit to a role-playing game setting than to a written story). However, no matter my efforts and how many times I’ve tried, I never managed to find a character that I’d really like in it. Female characters especially are the worse; “strong women” definitely doesn’t mean “know-it-all beasts who think they’re above everyone else” (who can I nominate… Nynaeve-Egwene-Faile-Elayne, perhaps?). His male characters aren’t really better; the only one I used to really liked is turning in a sour way, as far as my reading goes, and the others are too often the bland or annoying types. Can’t say that Rand is extremely attaching, is he?