One Month of Features – Stats!

07/17/2014 1 Comment

As is my wont, now that I have experimented with something, it’s time to consider it! What has the blog looked like because of features? Let’s look at the stats!

Blog views for the past month, by day.

Blog views for the past month, by day.

Okay, so there have been daily visitors, with peaks for original content – the first one is Introducing Features, the next one is my first feature post, and then the big spike in later June is the Writing Process Blog Tour. The day with no views was 4th of July weekend, and was a day when I did not post anything. Since then, a few a day.

The other thing those stats show is that this is a really small blog – incredibly low view count in general. So having features has accomplished a few things. First, it’s given a reason for people to check out the site on a more consistent basis. But second, it has me actually creating and putting things here – the first step, really, to having more engagement in general with the blog. So really, I think these stats show the picture much better:

Average blog visitors per day.

Average blog visitors per day.

This shows that this really has been a pretty uneventful blog. Then I did the A to Z Challenge in April and that spiked things considerably! In an effort to not waste the connections formed during the challenge or the momentum gained, I think the features are a good way to keep this blog alive and moving forward! And the best thing to see is that, with features kicking in there in June, you can see that there is a more steady number of visitors per day than the blog has seen before – even if it’s only a handful of people per day!

One part of this also is that the posts are so short that people might be taking them in without visiting the site – which is fine! – but that means that some of the likes and views aren’t showing up in the stats, but people are still experiencing the content! I think this is just going to be an effect of photo blogging. In my experience already, there are posts that get interaction (likes) through the reader because of pictures – without generating views. At least with these, there isn’t any content being “missed” because of this effect!

Okay, so those are some of the quantitative aspects of what Features have done for the blog! Tomorrow, I’ll be considering some of the qualitative aspects – what have features done for me? What have people liked? These sorts of things! But for now, let me know what you think of the Features I’ve been doing! Have you been stopping by here more? What would you like to see? Let me know!

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A to Z Recovery and Reflections

05/08/2014 16 Comments

Hello all! Thanks for stopping by my blog once more. Last week saw the end of the A to Z Challenge here on DBCII, and a great many other blogs, and it was a genuinely fun time. Just looking at my archives, that was by far the most posts in a month that this blog has seen. It adds a fantastic collection of reflections on writing to the blog, really beefing up the purpose of the blog. And, with completing the challenge on two blogs, it really got me writing!

survivor-atoz [2014]I did a reflection and looking-forward post on Comparative Geeks yesterday, and it was good to do so. For Comparative Geeks, it was a zero-sum change in the amount of content we did in the month: we regularly post Monday to Saturday, once a day, so the challenge’s rules matched perfectly. We went with a theme, so it got us blogging about characters for a whole month, which I think is good. Our character studies are regularly some of our most popular posts, so I think all of these are going to remain popular over time. At least, I hope so; I hope that the challenge-themed titles and such don’t detract from the posts. The one that got away from me was the one on Hermione and Harry – and the recent J.K. Rowling comments surrounding them. Which is a fun and relevant post here, too: does the author really get to challenge the meaning or content of their stories once written? Feel free to check it out and join in the conversation!

Anyway, I’ve been thinking and decompressing, and a four-day vacation helped. But it has me thinking about the state of the blog; the purpose of the blog, and my blogging; the future of my writing. Which is all supposed to happen, I think, doing something like this challenge. So below are some of my thoughts after working through the A to Z Challenge.

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U – Understanding

04/24/2014 4 Comments

U

Okay, so on the one hand, this seems like me reaching for something that starts with U for the A to Z Challenge. On the other hand, this is one of the ones that made some of the most sense to me.

The famous quote is, of course, Write What You Know. Because in so many ways, writing is taking what you know, and making it so it’s a thing the reader knows. Maybe they won’t know all of it – maybe they’ll only take a quote away. Nonetheless, you’re adding to what they know.

However, as you may have noticed, I am a fan of science fiction and fantasy – genres that are impossible if you take a literal interpretation of “Write What You Know.” Only a handful of people would be qualified to write about travel in space. No one has been to Middle Earth (except apparently anyone who has been to New Zealand). And yet, these works can be written, and read, and understood.

So that is the crux of the matter: it’s about understanding. The writer should understand what they are including in their book: understand the language they are using, understand the grammar and words; understand the characters they are including, their psychology and experiences; understand the setting and the things that happen there, whether that’s the climate or how the people fight or what they eat for breakfast.

And maybe you don’t have to know all of those things. And certainly you don’t have to have experienced them all yourself. But the writer should have an understanding of these things – whether that comes from education, research, reading, experiences, talking to people or experts, or wild extrapolation.

Because when you understand it, and put it in such that it makes sense and is believable, your readers will get it too. Not to say all writing must be realistic in that it is only real things that happen; however, the things that happen should be internally consistent, should have a realism within the world they are in. Whether that’s how alien technologies work or magic systems or biology or computer software (No click enhance! Bad!). By understanding these things happening, you can create that consistency, make things make sense, and have their own logic. And then your readers will understand, too.

What do you think? Write What You Know? How much do you need to understand? Let me know in the comments down below!

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J – Journalism

04/11/2014 Leave a comment

JI was planning from a pretty young age on pursuing writing as I grew up. Every year through elementary school, I went to what our district called the Writer’s Conference, where you basically just went as a kid and presented something you wrote. In third and fourth grade, I was running a lending library of my books during recess. No one was really checking them out that I remember, but my goal was in creating them more than anything. Around that same time, I also was one of the founding members of my school’s Newspaper, eventually ending up as one of the last two original founders by sixth grade, and doing a news report on the local public broadcasting.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, and I think also reading about and learning about the lives of famous authors, I really thought that Journalism was going to be that thing I did to make money while working on novels. Because it’s what other writers had done. It made sense. You could write. You were a writer. A natural fit. Right?

Right?

Flash forward and I didn’t do much with Journalism in high school, so maybe that’s its own bad sign for it. Who knows. Then by college, I wasn’t really in with the folks doing the paper and all either, actually eventually writing a letter to the editor about their poor editing skills and fact-checking. However, none of this stopped me from looking at writing jobs when I graduated, and finding them all smiling back at me saying, “English Majors or Journalism Majors only.”

So wait. My 40+ page, heavily edited and pared down (it was originally 60+ pages), highly researched History Honors Thesis and associated degree didn’t make me a writer? I had to have those specific degrees?

I guess, like my Fine Arts post the other day, it all comes back to a question of what makes you a writer? Your specific degree? Being trained as a writer? Being a published author? And yes, I need to stop planning so much and do more writing to really call myself a writer. But I do blog quite a bit.

And that’s the closing thought on Journalism I want to go with: increasingly, I feel, the Journalism that we are turning to in our Internet-heavy world is blogging. The Journalists are turning to the blogging format and style. blog news sites are huge – just think of The Huffington Post. While its star is rising, where are the newspapers and other news sources going? Restricting, restructuring, playing with pay-walls and commenting.

So I guess, maybe I’m doing something right.

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Building a Blogging Community Through Social Media – With Examples

02/15/2014 6 Comments

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.

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