The Gotta Write A Blog Blues

by Janis Patterson

Don’t get me wrong – I love blogging. It’s wonderful to be able to chat with readers and fans and people who get lost on the internet. What I don’t like is schedules. Each time I check my calendar – and every blog and everything else I do is ruthlessly noted on my calendar – I swear this time I will get my next blog done well in time, pre-schedule it and the announcement to be sent in a timely manner and have no worries or last minute rushes.

Then Life happens. You know what I mean. All the writing gurus say that if you are a writer (or want to be a writer) writing should always come before anything other than dangerous illness or death. Well, that makes a good talking point for writing teachers to use to encourage you, but in practical life it’s not much good. Things come up that you didn’t expect. Things that are not life-threatening, but which really do need to be handled. Then there’s laundry, and cooking, and cleaning, and marketing, and…

And your time for writing gets shorter and shorter.

Now there are those who say writing is not done just at the keyboard, that no matter what your hands are doing your brain can still be plotting, so that time spent at the keyboard is really just transcribing. While that is true to a point, it can also be dangerous. Once I was driving from Dallas to Ft. Smith, Arkansas. While I drove I tried to work out a really knotty plotting problem on my work in progress. When I finally had it worked out I had no idea of where I was. Turns out it was Missouri, and I had a lot of backtracking to do. So one does need to be careful when using this technique.
Back to blogs. Blogs are short. Blogs are fairly localized in focus – in my case, a subject that can be wrangled by hook or by crook to the world of writing. The only trouble is, you have to have a reasonably cogent premise, or something informative, or at least interesting to say. Otherwise all you’re doing is stringing words in a line and hoping they say something at least minimally interesting.

Like this post. Well, negative examples can be a teaching tool too!

Before I go I must share that my new anthology (shared with the fabulous Sandy Steen, Penny Richards and James Gaskin) releases on June 14th and is currently available for pre-order on Amazon. It’s called The July Fourth Murders and features four different wars and four murders on the Fourth of July, written by four authors. My part is World War One. It’s a nifty book! Go take a look.