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Blogging Fundamentals: Day 1 – “Who am I and why am I here?” (in 500 words)
Well, Learning the Fundamentals, day one (of fourteen) and day three of my very-short-story blog – simonjwood.wordpress.com – going live!
I waited until the blog was up and running – now I’ve got some spare time again! Looking at the assignments ahead I see there’s still much to learn, so onwards and upwards…
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Why am I here? Principally to get some readers for my stories!
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Who am I? Well, a guitar teacher, but read on…
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It’s been a sharp learning curve since starting my blog four weeks ago, at first rereading and re-punctuating 90 stories, copying and pasting them from Mac Pages into the WordPress editor and thinking ‘this is easy!’, then previewing and finding all my indents and paragraphing had disappeared!
Perhaps you know the feeling?..
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There’s too much info on-line. I just wanted someone to say “look, this is how it’s done…”
Some ‘workarounds’ did the trick though (maybe I’ll detail them in a future blog) and I think my site works well now.
If you’re in the same boat, try and get a friendly geek to help – it’ll be considerably less painful!
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I started writing almost a year ago (joining a monthly 100 word story group in September 2015) and I find the creative process interesting and enjoyable, the editing less so!
I soon wanted to write another story, and another… so I started a 200 word fortnightly group that October. It’s still going, but with only two authors at present; several others are ‘interested’ but ‘don’t have time right now’, hmm…
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With the blog set to ‘private’ it seems my visits whilst building the site were counted. Consequently I’ve amassed nearly 3000 views! On ‘public’ they don’t count. Straight away I had some ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ (whoopee!) but now my posts have presumably dropped off the WordPress reader I’m waiting for Google to kick in.
I submitted my site map to Google and Bing to expedite things but it didn’t quite work like the articles said (no surprise there!), so not sure if it’s helped.
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Incidentally, my story index is a post. After going live I updated it and received an avalanche of e-mails, one for each story! Seems I shouldn’t have selected ‘allow ping-backs and trackbacks’!
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What do I hope to achieve with this blog? Well, in addition to gaining readers, it should help me develop, by writing for a (potentially) larger audience and seeing the bigger WordPress ‘picture’. Maybe I’ll get to interact with some ‘proper’ writers too?!
Over the next six months? Well, I aim to publish twenty six 200-300 word stories and about ten longer ones, plus twelve Tetford and Salmonby Writing Group assignments starting in October, when we meet again.
I’ve entered some competitions too – ‘first time lucky’, but nothing since, unfortunately. I’ll keep trying though!
Paraphrasing our TASWG slogan – “who knows where my writing journey could take me?”
If you made it this far, many thanks for reading – see you with my next blog!
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