Ok, the last day or so I’ve learned a few things about blogging.  The first thing is that blogging is just not blogging.  In other words, you can’t just type out a bunch of words and hope that people will like you enough to visit your blog.  In order to be successful at a blog, you need to head on over to a bunch of other people’s web sites and make a lot of comments about their stuff.

I figure that this is alright with me, because my stuff is about writing a book, so I am going to read blogs and forums and other such things about writing books, or maybe just about writing.  Hit two birdies with one stone, eh?

It’s not really about writing, but here’s a good start about blogging.  I say a good start because blogging, as I’ve found out, is like it’s own animal.  It’s a sub-genre of a genre.  You could spend years in the vast wastelands of the outerspace of blogging and never find another Class-M planet.  (Yes, that’s a reference to all of you other Trekkies out there.)

Here’s a particularly useful piece of advice:

I have a long list of ideas and links that I find and want to share. Most of them will never become blog posts, but if I’m stuck or uninspired, I’ve got my list to prompt me.

So it’s no secret that I use WordPress.  I like the community over here, and let’s face it, the creators of the blog are just better than all the imitators.  You get your share of dud blogs, yes, and I’ve even been guilty of that myself.  But the one thing that I’ve learned about WordPress is that is is really easy to schedule (and list out) all those other wispy inspirational blogging posts.

It’s called a “Draft”!

So I’m going to head on over to my sidebar, the one on the right hand side here, and I’m going to type out a bunch of titles of stuff that I want to write about in my blog.  So, tomorrow, when I sit and face the computer and I draw up a blank, I can head over to the “Posts” and pick up an idea that’s already there.

This is so useful!  I might even float around my own (real) writing stuff, too.  You know, the stuff I might actually want to publish.