Lucy Viret » Bloggage

How not to write a blog.

Lucy Viret — Thu, 27 May 2010 09:50:43 +0000

Confession: I’m challenging myself to write a blog post each day. But I have no idea what to write today.

A second confession: I feel like I should carry a notebook everywhere, but I don’t. So I have a bunch of ideas for blog posts that never get written down.

Conclusion: Today I could be writing an amazing pre-planned blog post, but I’m not.

In fact I do have some pre-planned. At least, I’ve got a Scrivener file for blog ideas and there are some post titles in there. But none of them even have any notes in there – even though there are notes in my head for some of them.

And they feel like “big blog posts”: the kind of thing that would have to be perfect, or at least Very Very Good, before I posted them. Which is probably part of the reason I haven’t even made any notes.

I’m honestly not sure where this blog post is going. I don’t want it to be about my own failure to do cool stuff for this blog. So let’s call it a peek into my brain. I’m sure there’s a good reason that all of these things happen. And if I don’t like them, it’s a pattern that I can work on shifting.

I’ve got what feels like a full day to me today, just working through my “Daily Quests”, preparing for a trip I’ve got coming up next week, and keeping on top of some other things too. But maybe I’ll put “look at one of those abandoned blog post ideas” on the schedule for tomorrow.

Comments

Do you store ideas for your blog? Or do you just write off the cuff when you fancy it? What’s your writing process like?

Taking the standards off.

Lucy Viret — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:33:33 +0000

So, ladies and gentlemen of the audience. I’m working on a new idea to get myself posting more often, and it’s this: I’m going to try to stop telling myself that this blog has to be Great Writing. Or even that it has to help people. I love that people read this, I really do, but if I’m obsessed with the idea that this blog has to be full of amazing insights, I’ll never write another post.

That’s partly because the nature of my depression (hi, there !) is that I don’t think anything I say is particularly insightful. And it’s partly because, while I’m glad when the occasional cool insight pops up, this is a process blog and it’s about… well, process.

What this blog is mostly going to be full of, is me.

And I’m cool that it’s mostly read by people who kind of cared about me already, or have stumbled across it and found something about me to like. So I’m going to work on making it a little more – well – me-ish.

So: hi there.

I’m trying to get myself writing more often because it helps in lots of ways. The first – this blog, the existence of the blog itself, writing the posts – that helps me to process. Helps me to get stuff out and learn new things about myself. The second – I want to be a writer, dammit! Writing is kind of a prerequisite. So getting the words out is good.

Another thing is connecting with my lovely readers and commenters. You guys are awesome, even if I don’t really respond to comments.

So you might, from now on, get some random ramblings of what’s going on in my world. News and randomness. I might also experiment with the idea of actually planning the occasional post (this would be new!).

We will see.

I’m hoping you’ll hear from me more often.

Goodbye for now!

On not blogging.

Lucy Viret — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:53:58 +0000

I’m noticing that I haven’t posted to this blog for months. Last post date was – actually, I don’t even know without checking. (And I’m writing this post in a word processor, not in the Wordpress interface, so I’m not even looking at the site just now.)

(Edit: August 16th – almost 3 months!)

So in the spirit of the “process blog” thing, let’s try writing a blog post about why I’m not writing blog posts.

The first part is depression.

Yeah, right now, I’m still off work (as of the beginning of July) and I’m personally not expecting to be back at work this year. That’s kind of… weird to admit to, and weird to feel relatively calm about. Okay, so I need the time to recover from whatever it is that I’m recovering from. I’m kind of accepting that right now. And accepting that the recovery will happen, in its own sweet time.

And the depression makes it hard to do much of anything – including write. That’s tough. I signed up for NaNoWriMo in order to try to force myself to write, but I’m not holding myself to the full 50,000 words in 30 days. It seems too much right now. So I’m committing to writing something each day on this new piece of fiction I’ve started, and we’ll see what we have on the 30th of November.

So that’s the first reason and it’s totally legitimate and I’m kind of okay with it, even though I’m not okay with the not-writing-blog-posts. (I want to write more. I don’t want to say I intend to, ’cause I can’t seem to commit to very much right now, but we will see, okay?)

The second reason feels a bit less legitimate and a bit more complicated.

When I was first off sick, I was toying with the idea of quitting my job. (In fact, I’m still toying with the idea. But it’s on the back burner.) Or at the very least, reducing my hours. And because of that, I was looking at other income streams. And one of the potential income streams I thought about was this blog.

To the end of trying to get some money out of the blog, I signed up for three affiliate programmes, and started the process of changing the links (which linked to the things I was affiliate-ing anyway) all around here to my affiliate links instead of the ordinary kind.

I then got totally squicked out about it, stopped the changing, and haven’t posted to this blog since!

Argh. That totally wasn’t the effect I meant to have. Either on myself, or on my readers.

I guess I was concerned that I didn’t want to be trying to squeeze money out of innocent readers who didn’t come here to be sold to. And I didn’t want to sell – still don’t, in fact. I was concerne about money, and I can still be concerned about money, but I didn’t want to do something so not-transparent as changing all the links on my blog without telling anyone about it.

Right now, it’s kind of pot luck, so you may or may not be earning me a few pennies if you click on a link from this site, and then buy something. I will probably be changing all the links back to non-affiliate links – at some point when I can be bothered to do the admin. That’s not now, though.

If I do decide to “go affiliate” at some point in the future, there’ll be a blog post about it, and I won’t suddenly start trying to encourage my readers to buy stuff. That’s not how I roll and it’s not what I want to do, and officially? Ick.

If I’m going to do something other than what I do now for a living, probably I’m going to need to start thinking about money. And maybe this blog could at some point become a source of income for me. But I’ll have to find a way to do it that doesn’t make me feel gross – or cover my blog with advertisements. Because, ew.

I think my next post might be about rituals. Or play. Or saying no. Or one of the other three million things I’m trying to figure out.

A brand new blog.

Lucy Viret — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 21:09:35 +0000

First thought: WordPress is rather awesome.

Second thought: I have a new, pubic blog! This is rather new territory for me. Hoping it’s going to work out!

Third thought: I had better put some content up here. Ooh, lots to do!

Welcome, boys and girls!