Introducing Features

I shared a post the other day that has really inspired me on figuring out my content here on DBCII. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the idea came from Gene’O, of The Writing Catalog, as he is someone who blogs similarly to how I do.

The idea presented, and one I see a lot in reading blogs, is features. Posts that you can just expect to see, daily, or weekly. As a creator, they help you know what content you’ll need to create, to keep your blog going. As a reader, they help you expect what you’ll see, let you know to come back for more later when you find something you like.

Gene’O lists a number of features on Sourcerer that they run, but I thought I would note a few of my other favorites. On Love Pirate’s Ship’s Log, there’s a quote of the day. I love them – generally a picture from a movie or TV episode, and then a few lines of quote. They just make me stop and smile as I skim through my WordPress reader. Another favorite is the Box Office Top 10 on We Minored in Film, which just fill me with joy each week as I read it.

I see other features, such as episode recaps and reviews of popular shows, or Wednesday New Comics (it’s nice that most all new comics come out on one day, for the purpose of blogging about it!). These are the sorts of features we might consider on Comparative Geeks, but at the same time, because others are doing it, we want to leave it to them. Because we do so little content, as it were – with just our 6 posts a week – features would eat up a lot of that.

Also, it would force us to keep up with shows or reading comics or whatever we chose – which is against what we’re doing with the blog. We are writing for the joy of it, for the thought and sharing, and forcing timelines like that on ourselves would not be great. The closest we get is our ongoing LitFlix – where we read the book/comics and then see the movie.

And we have other ongoing series, like Science Fiction Today, Character Studies, or Science Fiction and Religion, but we don’t follow a schedule on those… it’s more like we try to do at least one of those a month. We could try to make these a scheduled feature, but they’re more of just an ongoing series, and for a blog, those are good too.

So let me introduce the features I am planning on here!

Monday Meme

I love Memes. I sometimes speak in Memes. I try to keep them from overrunning my writing, and I’m hopefully doing okay at that.

Memes fit a variety of things we might have called by other names before. Running jokes. Collective unconscious. Archetypes. Maybe I’m pushing it, but underlying Memes is this idea of something that captures the imagination of a lot of people, an idea or an image or a phrase, or better yet all of the above.

Meaning, what Memes have become on the Internet is an image, with an idea, based on a known phrase that either goes with the image, or doesn’t and draws new meaning from this difference. For instance, one I put together that has been floating around Tumblr ever so slightly now:

Found on http://comparativegeeks.tumblr.com/post/87712313562/now-youre-thinking-with-portals and put together by me!

I Tweet random mashups like this all the time, these sorts of changed meanings (or not!) by combining a phrase with an image. I love it. I have a list of ideas that I just have had no time/outlet to get out there, and I think that this is the space.

Expect these posts to largely just be the Meme. And, I’ll probably be sharing them on the Comparative Geeks Tumblr as well!

Images are popular, as are new creations, so I am hoping that you will like these and they will spark interest!

Wordless Wednesday

I am stealing this one from Gene’O, and it sounds like he got the idea from other bloggers, who also do this post type. It’s a thing.

Wordless Wednesday (when I’m not typoing it as Worldless Wednesday, which would be a very different feature) is a feature that is basically just an image. Really, it’s photo blogging. My first inclination is for my photos to have text… you know, for them to be Memes… so I had to get that covered to be able to really think about just an image!

I used to draw a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I don’t think I ever got terribly good at it, but I enjoyed it. In part, I would say I lacked an artist’s eye in creating art, though still in seeing things I can see good stuff. So I am thinking that trying my hand at photo blogging would be good. Simple, elegant, fun!

Re-connecting to the visual also feels important to me because I am thinking about working on my novel ideas as graphic novels, so I need to be thinking about more than just text. So here I am with a couple of visual projects to get me thinking and interacting! I’ll also be using picture-editing software more; I got some tips from Gene’O about how photo blogging should be done with cropped and resized images, so that they load quickly and efficiently.

Here’s a picture I took, and edited following this advice:

Six Word Saturday

Okay, so I’ve only really been a part of it once, but I really like the idea of flash stories, of having to convey a story in only a few words. Recently, we played around with the hashtag Six Word Story, to great effect. To move beyond blogging and back into creating fiction, I figure baby steps might be good, and writing six-word stories is about as short as you can get!

If I can write at least one Six Word Story a week, that should be good. I may go about them the same way we did before: I may post it to Twitter and then share the Tweet in the post.

@compgeeksdavid @Sourcererblog @parttimemonster He wept openly; then died peacefully. #sixwordstory

—
Comp Geeks Holly (@CompGeeksHolly) May 31, 2014

I have several other books of writing prompts and writing exercises, and in the future, working some of these in as a feature would get me writing more. But for now, let’s work on getting these elements going on a consistent basis! If I can get these posts up each week, along with a Sunday Re-Blog, three posts at Comparative Geeks, and a post at Sourcerer, then I’ll be doing pretty good.

Those are my plans! What do you think? Or better yet – what features do you run, or what features do you love? Let me know in the comments below! And please feel free to self-promote!