Question for Writers – The Sunday Reblog

Looking for input from writers on their process? Want to chime in on your own? Here’s a great conversation starter from over on The Writing Catalog! Make sure to look through the comments!

Gene'O's avatarMy Former Blog

Do you compose in your head? If so, how much can you compose before you have to write it down to keep from losing it?

I can mentally compose a couple of pages of an essay, and that’s frequently how I do it. When I am in composition mode, I can’t follow a conversation to save my life. Sometimes, when people try to talk to me while I’m in the process of working myself up for a writing session, they think I am just not interested in what they have to say.

I can’t write fiction that way. Maybe three sentences of fiction is the limit, and I have to write them down as soon as possible, or I lose them.

How does your composition process work? Is the cognitive stuff you do before you actually sit down to write different for different types of writing? You should think about…

View original post 30 more words

Building a Blogging Community Through Social Media – With Examples

Let’s face it, as much fun as it is to write, and to blog, and to think about the fact that your ideas are public, published, out there… you want readers too. Readers who enjoy what you write, or interact with what you write, or share what you write… or even better, all of the above.

Through the social aspects of blogging, how it works, and realizing we should do for other bloggers what we want done for us… the best followers you will have on a blog are likely going to be other bloggers. With a WordPress blog, for instance, it’s people with WordPress accounts who can “like” your post… who can follow your blog with a click of a button, and then read your posts in their WordPress reader. WordPress – like other blogging communities, like Tumblr – does a great job of letting you connect and share with other bloggers.

So last week I blogged about how I am considering some changes on Comparative Geeks and while informational and data changes like I proposed and discussed can do a bit to network better with other WordPress blogs, there are more channels out there we need to hit as well, and which have different sorts of purposes and users. Though also of course a lot of overlap! But let me look through the Social Media avenues we are using, or considering, to look at some folks I see doing this well, and how we might use it in the future.

Read more of this post

One Year Anniversary of Comparative Geeks – The Sunday (Tuesday) Reblog

I posted this yesterday over on Comparative Geeks. Today would be the to-the-day anniversary for us starting our weekly schedule of posting. I ask below for more ideas for posts, for input from my community – and I would happily accept input here as well! Let me know what you would like to read from my blog!

Last year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Holly and I started a blog. We had been toying with a few different ideas, thinking of what niches we saw and conversations lacking. And we thought a lot about how we talked about things, and what we wanted to say. And Comparative Geeks was born from that – the thought that we would talk about Geeky things, and not alone or by themselves, but in comparison to each other, or to other aspects of life.

I’d like to think that we’ve accomplished that, and written a blog at least a little different from what else is out there. For instance, we’re not a news blog – there are other blogs out there doing a much better job of giving you day-of updates on what’s going on in the world of geek. We tend to speculate a bit more instead. Nor are we a review site – there are other blogs out there doing episode-by-episode show reviews, issue-by-issue comic reviews, and more detailed sorts of movie reviews.

Instead, we’ve taken our comparative approach – things like our LitFlix, which compare the book or comic to the movie based on this source material. Or like our Science Fiction and Religion posts, which consider a topic often touched in science fiction but which is treated in interesting ways whenever it shows up. And we have now, for a year, successfully kept up with our publishing plan – six posts a week, three each. Granted, not always on the days we plan on, but we got you some content!

And that leads to what has been great about this blog: you. The readers. While we had enough to say that we likely would and could have kept going on our own, you make it all the more worth it. While we may not reply to comments in a timely fashion, know that each one makes us happy. When you take the time to read our posts, thoughtfully consider them, and add to the conversation? That’s where this is worth it.

So that’s what I wanted to do for a one-year anniversary post: ask for input from you, the readers, on what you would like us to write about in the days, weeks, and months to come. Help us make another great year for Comparative Geeks!

Read more of this post

10 Great Things From Blogging This Year

It was nearly a year ago that my wife and I planned and began to build our blog, still going strong today. We’ve kept with 6 posts a week, 3 each, with the occasional guest post. We’ve used a variety of post types, like I learned about in my class on blogging – though perhaps not as many as we could.

We do a great deal of reviews, talking through the things in our life we’re experiencing – mostly the geeky things. But then, what might one expect from a blog called Comparative Geeks?

From a blogging perspective, we’ve seen some great results, though there’s more that could happen. We are happy with where we are at, not planning on this as a form of income, or necessarily caring about being a big thing. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not nice to get noticed, seen, read, shared, and the community-forming we’ve seen this year has been great. So let me walk you through ten great moments for Comparative Geeks this year!

Read more of this post

The Sunday Reblog – Geek 501 – On NaNoWriMo

This post is part of a new recurring element on Comparative Geeks, Geek 501. The idea being, we have Master’s degrees, so we wouldn’t do Geek 101, but 501. Apparently. Anyway, this post was written by me to introduce and discuss National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo, which I and thousands of others are currently participating in! Read on!

You may have heard of it. You may have participated in it. You may be wondering what the heck I am talking about. NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMoNational Novel Writing Month. Well, it’s an international thing, and novel ends up being taken pretty loosely… but it is definitely a writing month. Happening in November every year, NaNoWriMo is a way to get started on writing. Useful for someone who does a lot of writing, or for someone just getting into writing, or someone who always wanted to write… Basically, it’s a great idea.

This is just a bit of an explanation of NaNoWriMo, so that if you, or someone you know if doing NaNoWriMo you know what’s going on. And, if you’re considering doing NaNoWriMo yourself… it’s a little late to get going, but early enough in the month if you put a lot of time in, you could do it! And of course, some of my thoughts as someone who’s done NaNoWriMo, and is doing it this year.

Read more of this post