Let me start by saying this is all Raimey Galant’s fault. She had this idea to create a Social Media and Blog Hop for NaNoWriMo so those of us working on a novel in November could all list ourselves on it and follow each other. And I didn’t want to be left out. But when she asked me, I did not have a blog to list.
I’m so not ready to launch my author blog. As of this posting, I don’t have any published fiction; articles I have written were ghosted; whenever I think about blogging, I have 99 topics and a cohesive narrative isn’t one of them.
This post is about how I managed to pull this blog together in 36 hours and launch it despite the fact that my inner perfectionist is having a litter of kittens over my woeful lack of preparedness, strategy, focus and polish. (These “lacks,” and my inner perfectionist, I might point out, have served no purpose so far except to keep me from blogging.)
I’ve been talking about blogging for months/years/lifetimes. Here is a snippet of the conversation:
People: You need to start your author blog as soon as you have the idea for the book.
Me: I’ve got at least seven ideas for books and two unrevised Franken-manuscripts in the can, clearly this ship has sailed, can I just go back to figuring out what a character arc is.
Raimey: NO. You need a blog NOW.**
Me: *whimpers and complies*
How did I do it?
I took advantage of past false starts.
I’ve tried to blog on my own before, and I’ve written posts for clients at work, so I know basically how it works. My personal blogging false starts include
a series of now-deleted posts on MySpace 700 years ago
a set of now-deleted art posts for the first month or so of an Art 365 project, which happened to include the header graphic I’m using for this Creatorology blog
a defunct crafting blog for sharing Etsy tutorials
a still-functioning blog about zombies, which is waiting for me to reanimate it at some point
the empty shell for this Creatorology blog – I’ve owned the domain name for a couple years and sometime in the last year when I was dreaming again about blogging, I installed WordPress, chose a theme, and then got distracted, presumably by something shiny, and walked away from it until now.
In looking over this list I realized I had all the starter ingredients I needed: the domain, the WordPress install, and some content I could repurpose and use here. I couldn’t reuse everything but I had enough to get started with something I wouldn’t mind listing on Raimey’s page.
Note: Even if I hadn’t had the domain and WordPress all set up, that part would have only taken a couple hours. I could have even gotten a free WordPress.com account without a fancy name as a temporary fix.
I acknowledged that “time spent thinking about blogging” does count, once you’re actually going to act on it.
During all the time I wasn’t blogging I was thinking about blogging. I read some books and posts on blogging. I thought about what sorts of things I would enjoy writing about. I kept coming back to my interest in creativity and my own creative journey. Even though writing is my top creative priority, I love making things, performing with people, seeing things others made, and encouraging people to be creative. I had some thoughts about how I might package all of that into a site. Even though I hadn’t settled on any arrangement I was crazy about, it was enough to get started.
I acknowledged that this does not have to be perfect or permanent.
This whole blog thing can evolve over time. I can improve the design later. I can change the name. I can change or narrow the focus once I see what I like writing about, and what people like to read about.
I pressed “publish.”
**Raimey said no such thing.