Writing a blog

I write many blogs during sports game. Today it is a football game. The cable show will take 3 hours to televise a 60 minute contest. A typical play will take about 6 seconds with about 120 to 150 plays per game. Doing the math there is about 10 to 15 minutes of sports action in the 3 hour time period. This leaves plenty of time to do something else. As a manager this was a great time to write employee reviews or next year’s budget. Now it is a great time to write a blog.

What to write about? I have read much online about writing successful blogs. Based on my research I have no chance of creating a successful blog.  The basis of a successful blog (so the theory goes) is identifying your target audience and crafting your message to that audience. I don’t have a desired audience and I don’t have any message for a specific demographic group. There are a number of other rules, such as post every day. My postings, like my subjects, are irregular and random. Why do I have any readers? Even a meaningful number of readers, why?

The web site manager has metrics I can review. My audience is about half American with (by order of size) Russia, Germany, Mexico, UK, France, Netherlands and China. The key word searches are mostly political questions closely followed by dog questions. The dog question search I get. The political searches I don’t get, political blogs are a very crowded area and I do not proselytize a consistent political position, usually I am being ironical. The political web sites I visit, such as Redstate or Daily Kos, I know what I will read before I even open the page. With my blog you don’t even know if I will write a political blog.

Why am I writing a blog? When I retired I wanted to write a science fiction book. I wrote about three chapters. Then I reread what I had written. It really sucked. I felt that I had a good plot, reasonable characters, good action and surprise scenes. The actual writing was terrible. The grammar was bad, the sentence structure was bad. I mixed tenses and genders. Complete with horrible dangling participles, that sort of stuff. I did not know how to write a narrative. So I started writing a blog to learn how to write. Like most adults I learn by doing.

Most of my writing is practice. Trying to write a narrative that allows the reader to believe that reality the author is creating, Examples are: http://lifewithsciencephc.blogspot.com/2011/12/from-hammock-on-caribbean-beach.html or http://lifewithsciencephc.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-north-wind.html or http://lifewithsciencephc.blogspot.com/2012/09/back-in-caribbean-hammock.html some just a short tale http://lifewithsciencephc.blogspot.com/2012/07/dog-needs-bath.html or http://lifewithsciencephc.blogspot.com/2012/01/clueless-paranoid-buys-used-book-mostly.html or http://lifewithsciencephc.blogspot.com/2012/09/you-cant-fight-clock.html .

Reviewing my writing the mechanics have improved but I have a desperate need of good editing. I am starting to understand that it is impossible to edit your own writing. I wish to thank the many readers that have helped me improve the story telling, the pace and sentence structure. I have a long learning curve ahead of me before I write that science fiction book.
 Hopefully this will help my blog audience. One of the “rules” is that you should clearly state the purpose of your blog.