Yzabel / August 19, 2005

Why Keeping Several Blogs Can Be A Good Idea

A comment left by Silmy on the French version of my blog led me to think a little more about this question: why do we keep several blogs, and is this a good thing to do? Why not keep everything in the same place?To someone who’s not into blogging, or doesn’t have a lot of interest in it, it may seem a weird thing, not to mention a waste of time, to write in different blogs. This just creates more work for us, in a life that is already busy enough as it is. I used to think the same way, to be honest; I don’t mind taking one or two hours every day to write, because I really like doing it, but whether it’s a pleasure or not, there are days when time is short, period. So why?Here are a few reasons why I consider that it can be a good idea, after a while if not from the start, to keep several blogs instead of one.

  • People in general tend to “expect something”. If they do a search for business-related matters and find your blog through a keywords search, they want to read about business-related matters, not about family stories. They’ll visit a dogs-related blog to read about dogs, not crochet nor gardening. Although reading about “all and everything” is an interesting way to get to know a person, there are times when we just want to grab the info we’re looking for, without having to sift through ten pages and five categories first.
  • Remaining clear and focused is always a good thing for blogs. This applies to professional blogs mostly, although I suppose one could want this for a more personal blog as well. Avoiding to clutter it with too varied topics is an appropriate choice.
  • For AdSense (or other targeted ads) users, better have a blog to revolve around one theme, or at least very similar themes, for purposes of ads relevancy.
  • Different topics call for different settings. This may seem a little restrictive and sectarian, yet the fact is that in the world of websites, one doesn’t usually design a personal page the same way as a professional one. There often are “codes” to use, and it’s evidently easier to choose one of these codes if you don’t have to pick among thirty very different areas of topics.
  • You may want to heavily advertise one blog, while keeping another one in a more restricted sphere. You can’t do that with one blog only, in which case it’s an all-or-nothing matter.

There probably are other reasons than these, perhaps more personal ones as well, and this list is by all means no holy word. For someone who wants to take on a more professional way of blogging, or at least not spread oneself too thin, I however feel that it is an important point.Y Tags:

Yzabel / August 19, 2005

100 Blogs in 100 Days

Passing the word along: Duncan at The Blog Herald is holding a 100 blogs in 100 days projet. Starting Monday 22, he’ll be presenting one blog per day, during 100 days, in order to help promote less known blogs.

Email me at editor@blogherald.com with subject line of “100 blogs in 100 days” with your blogs details (name, url etc..). You also need to include up to, but no more than 100 words about your blog, what it does, what it’s about, or why the readers of the Blog Herald should visit it that will be published as part of the post. In return though I’ll be inviting Blog Herald readers to provide some feedback in the comments here on what they think about your blog.

Feel free to send your blog URL along—or to simply check The Blog Herald, which is an interesting read in itself anyway.blogging, 100blogs

Yzabel / August 18, 2005

Writing Exercises: A Follow-up

Following my ponderings about whether reading “books about writing” can be useful or not, here’s a short article on Ezine: Are Writing Exercises Effective?.There’s really a middle-ground to be found here.On the one hand, one cannot spend their time on such exercises, nor focus continuously on writing tips and “doing it like the Masters did”: when it comes to fiction, to novels, to imagination, creativity must remain on the foreground no matter what, else we may simply end up losing ourselves in too many attempts to reach perfection. We need to retain some spontaneity, as well as develop a “voice”.On the other hand, I’m standing my ground here: it’s not true that if we don’t produce THE perfect novel on the first attempt, then we’re failure as writers and should never touch a pen (a keyboard…) ever again.That’s where I place “writing exercises”—both reading and practicing them.Read More

Yzabel / August 17, 2005

The Need for Deadlines

I must be psychic somehow. I had been toying with this revelation for most of the day, slowly putting it into words, when, guess what, my RSS aggregator picked this post at To-Done. Well, it doesn’t matter: I still feel the need to write down all of this.Although it’s not as sudden an illumination as it could seem, when I started reading No Plot? No Problem! during what was left of my “lunch break”, I immediately felt in harmony with what the author, Christ Baty, was describing: the sheer need for deadlines, and, opposed to it, the tendency to procrastinate when we don’t have any. (Sidenote: the book is about writing a novel in one month—see NaNoWriMo for more details. The theory is that the busiest we are, the easiest it is to write like mad, because compared to the rest, writing time then feels like a treat. We’re more prone to just do it, instead of procrastinating.)That’s right, I’m of these people who need deadlines. I never perform my job as well as when I have a limited amount of time to do it. As stressing as they are, deadlines are what make me efficient, in most areas of my life. I don’t like them—to be honest, I hate them, they stress me to no end and even send me into panic fits at times when they’re made of a hundred little tasks rather than one or two big ones. However, the facts speak for themselves. I need them. I need my day to be compartimented. I need to get up in the morning and be able to tell myself “today, at work, I must do this, this, and that”. When I can’t have these thoughts, the day goes to waste almost immediately.I’m thus considering trying a little something: completely scheduling my day, from work itself to puny housework tasks, even though there aren’t any external circumstances that demand me to do so. It may seem weird, it may seem stupid, but I definitely need to focus more on my works as a writer, and if I keep on playing with my dog or cleaning the toilet instead of setting myself to write, I can’t have much done. Delaying is easy. Taking years to complete a novel is easy. The more time I have, the less I do. Setting myself to work with clear, timed goals: now this is harder, but also something that can and will work better for me.Weird, how easy and evident it all seems to me, now that it’s written here on my screen…deadline, writing

Yzabel / August 17, 2005

Et In Arcadia Nos – Part 2

[Part 2 out of 4. Read Part 1.]They should have listened to MARA, when she had warned them of the hard times to come, of the military coup in Varsa, of the declining Senate of the Llenane Confederation, too big and loose to keep a whole continent under its guidance any longer. They should have paid more attention to the alarming signs of the previous years, to the escalation of political incidents, when governments had begun to worry and slowly admit to themselves that the situation was getting out of hand, on the diplomatic level as well as on the economic one. They should have listened to her, indeed, when she had told the Council of Nations that they had to step in as moderators between Mornen and Llenan, before it was too late.The negotiations had lamentably backfired, the two other continents taking offense at Ewell’s repeated ingerence in their foreign affairs, and in the end, war had taken its claim on them all.In his office of the highest tower of the Core Research Center, Vall’Eran was replaying for the tenth time the latest holo-display he had received on the secured Ministry channel. Obeying the new orders would only send them spiralling even more quickly on the road to destruction. A nano-virus! Using the units to assist the medics wasn’t enough anymore. He had consecrated his life and work to this research in the hopes of helping medicine progress, of bettering life conditions for the Ewelli and for the rest of the world, once it could be adapted to the human race, and now they wanted him to turn his precious nano-bots into a weapon of mass destruction against Mornen and Llenan.”Eran, we need to talk.”Read More

Yzabel / August 16, 2005

The Writer’s Block

I used to believe that when I couldn’t write, I should just give up and go do something else. After a few years of working as a technical writer, I’ve however come to realize quickly that this is all well and good when you don’t write professionnally, or at least when you don’t have deadlines, but not in other circumstances. When a manual is due on a certain day, my boss doesn’t want to hear “I have writer’s block, I can’t write” (technical documents are never inspiring to me anyway, so this is a constant problem). What boss, come to think of it, would accept to hear an employee say “I’m not inspired today, I can’t answer the phone/type your letters/repair this database”?Answer: not even one.Since then, I’ve understood that the writer’s block, when it happens, is something I just need to swallow and do with. There are moments when doing something else for half a hour or a few minutes only will indeed trigger “inspiration” again, and some others when all of this is vain. In the latter case, I now try to force myself to write. Not necessarily on the problematic text, not necessarily aiming at perfect writing… just doing it. In a way, it’s like sports: I’ll moan that it’s hard and that I can’t make the effort, but after ten minutes lifting weights or running, things flow by themselves (well, for me, at least!).Read More

Yzabel / August 15, 2005

Tips on Starting a New Blog – Part 2

Here’s the second installment of my Tips on Starting a New Blog post.DesignThere aren’t many people who like to look at an ugly site, this is a fact—and it’s perhaps worth for blogs even more than for regular pages, as visitors will regularly come to check the new posts! Try to get at least a clear, readable and pleasant template here. Blog services as well as most standalone platforms will provide you with a handful of templates to choose from: Blogger does have a good twenty of them, while platforms such as WordPress can gather an even wider amount, developed freely by other users. After a while, it can be a good idea to set a test blog and learn and tweak templates a little, in order to come up with “your” own design, easily recognizable by your readers; for non-professional blogs, I however don’t consider it an absolute must-do from the start, and contents will here be more important to build a readership.For business blogs, things are a little different: better get someone to work on the design before launching the blog. Templates in this case are more important.Note: If testing new templates, do that on a test blog. At some point, your templates will contain wrong code, styles that display oddly, etc… With a test blog, your readers won’t stumble upon a broken, unreadable page.Read More

Yzabel / August 15, 2005

Tips on Starting a New Blog – Part 1

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.Read More

Yzabel / August 14, 2005

Considering NaNoWriMo

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.nanowrimo, writing

Yzabel / August 13, 2005

Et In Arcadia Nos – Part 1

[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.Read More