Introducing Features

06/17/2014 7 Comments

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! Read more of this post

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Call to Action – Local Board Game Con! (Re-Blog)

06/13/2014 4 Comments

Hi all!

I wanted to push this a little bit to get input. I’ve been asked to help with starting up a board gaming convention here in town, and was hoping for success or horror stories, advice and thoughts!

I’ll likely be blogging more about it as it gets closer, but for now, share your thoughts and stories at the post below:

Call to Action – Local Board Game Con!.

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Contributing to a Blog!

05/14/2014 Leave a comment

Hello faithful readers! Sorry I haven’t gotten much more going on here on DBCII, but I’ve been busy diving into a different writing foray: contributing to a multi-person blog!

Many of you may know Sourcerer, the multi-contributor blog edited by Gene’O of The Writing Catalog. I was seeing mentions of the desire for more contributors, and at the same time I was thinking of branching out and doing some more writing. The timing seemed good.

If I were to point out the best work on Sourcerer, it would be the posts that have been Feminist Friday, an ongoing conversation about the continued relevance of Feminism – and asking the far more challenging question, what can we as lowly bloggers do about it? You should check out the posts – this link will link to further posts from Feminist Friday!

My post will be going up this morning, so be watching for that! You can see I’ve already been lined up on Sourcerer.

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A – Author

04/01/2014 17 Comments

A

To kick off the A to Z Challenge, I gave myself an easy one. My topic for the challenge (as you can check out here) is writing, and the world of writing, and so there is not much more critical to this than the author. Books don’t write themselves, as I’m sure someone in the history of the world has said before, and so it goes.

The question often comes up: at what point can you call yourself a writer? The answer tends to have to do with writing – do you write? And in a lot of ways, a lot of the time, there are folks who are writers who are not paid for it, or not paid yet, not published yet, what have you. Take most bloggers, for instance. A consistent blogger might not be paid – and power to those who are! – but they are writing.

However, is there a difference between this and being an author? Is Author, perhaps, the concept that goes along with Being Published? Being paid for your writing? Or maybe it has to do more with something specific, about writing specific sorts of things. Authors write novels. Or wait, are those novelists? Authors can write short stories, after all. Or what about screenplays? Plays plays? Poetry? Or are there other words for these sorts of people – playwrights and poets?

Clearly, this seemingly simple term needs some help. How about Merriam-Webster?

A person who has written something; especially : a person who has written a book or who writes many books.

–http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/author

So I don’t know if that’s the answer. One who has written something is an author; they might also be a more specific sort of author, like a blogger or a poet. But still an author.

What about you – what do you think of if someone were to tell you they were an author? What would your assumption be about their work, or what questions would you ask them? Let me know in the comment section down below!

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A to Z Challenge – My Post Topics

03/05/2014 10 Comments

A to Z Challenge 2014

One of the many things you can do to interact with and grow community on a blog is to participate in blogging events or challenges. Some that come to mind are Feminist Friday, NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), and, coming up next month, the A to Z Blogging Challenge.

The idea is to post 26 days in the month – all but the Sundays in April – on a theme, and with something starting with each letter of the alphabet. By the end, I feel like you’ll have some great content, or at least some content. The idea is for the posts to be short, not to drive you mad with trying to keep up with something. The idea is also then that you read several other blogs and what they’re doing. This is where you grow community: engaging in something others will be looking at, and going and looking at their blogs yourself. Find out more by going to http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/

So my theme for the month is going to be writing. Looking at the topics I chose, I think that this could be more narrowly said as maybe the business and world of writing, with some highlights on some of the current trends – or dying aspects – of the industry. I guess I do touch on a few more specific points, and for all of this, it will be coming more from my head and my opinions and speculation.

We plan on also doing the challenge on Comparative Geeks, and we’re working on figuring out what topic would be best, given you have two of us who will be alternating writing about things! And also that we want the posts to fit within our blog and be a good contribution to it. This challenge fit our posting schedule over there perfectly. However, there is the fact that there are a few posts that we have scheduled for 2014 that will still have to go up… so we’ll be generating more than our normal amount of content in April!

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