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.
Hopefully this will help my blog audience. One of the “rules” is that you should clearly state the purpose of your blog.
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