You’ve got your new blog. Now you want to decorate, and make the space your own; I get that.

When I made my first website back in the dim-dark days of 1996, I had to learn about HTML and Hex values and the ‘table’ tag; and all kinds of barbaric things like that.

Luckily for you, lots of designers are out there today creating beautiful themes that you can hang up, ready-made, or customize with your own artwork.

The Simplest Way To Change Your Theme

From your dashboard, look at the left-hand sidebar and find “Appearance”

Click on that, and then on “Themes”.

You’ll be take to a page full of gorgeous layouts and colors. In fact, there are pages and pages of them, so scroll through them until you find one you like.  Under the screenshot of the theme you like, click on the ‘preview’ link.  A pop-up window will show you how your blog (with your words, even!) will look, dressed up in that theme. If you’re lucky you’ve chosen a free theme. If it turns out you have expensive tastes, you can either pay the designer for their premium theme, or you can close the little window and go back to browsing until you find a free theme you like.

Once you find a theme you like and have previewed it with your blog, look in the top right of the preview window. There is a link saying ‘Activate theme’. Click it.

Now, when you visit your blog you’ll see the new theme.

Searching For Themes

If you know you want a blue theme, or one that lets you upload your own background art or header, you can use the search box (on the right side of the themes screen) or even better the “Features Filter” link. The more options you ask it to find for you (Custom header, custom background, custom colors, one sidebar, two sidebars etc.) the more likely you are getting into Premium Theme territory (i.e. you’ll have to pay money), I recommend playing around with a few free themes before you buy one. Look for themes with “theme options”. These will give you menus that allow you to check boxes to change the color of your background or titles etc. If you really can’t find anything you love in the free themes, by all means go shopping.

Blogging With WordPress.com Series

• So you want a WordPress blog?
• Logging Back Into WordPress.com
• Post your next blog entry
• Change the subtitle of your blog from “just another wordpress blog” to something smarter (or nothing)
• Change the appearance of your blog (select a theme)
• Customize your ‘about page’
• Get to know your dashboard better
• Learn how to upload pictures

Along with the sample first post and the sample first comment, WordPress has an annoying habit of putting an automatic subtitle on all new blogs.

It reads “Just Another WordPress Blog” and looks like this:

Now, I’m a fan of WordPress and all, , but I don’t really want that as my subhead.

To change the subheader, go to your dashboard and look at the menu on the left hand side.

One of the options is “Settings”. Click on that and then, if necessary on “General”.

You’ll see something like this:

There, on the second line is the offending “Just Another WordPress Blog” in the space for your tagline. Either come up with something better, or just delete it.

Don’t forget to click the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page, then go and check out the front page of your blog (by clicking on the blog’s name in the black, navigation bar along the top of the browser window.)

Ahh, doesn’t that look better? And speaking of looking better, you’re probably going to want to customize the look of your blog. More about that in Changing The Appearance of Your Blog.

Other Settings

While you’re in the settings menu, why not open up the other options and see what’s available to you? You don’t have to change anything now, but the more you blog, the more you  might start to hear about things you want to do on your blog. This settings menu is a good place to root about when you’re ready.

You might want to have a look at ‘discussion’, which is how you control how comments are handled on your blog. It might be best to start out with all comments needing to be approved by a moderator, of you can leave the site the way it is, and change the settings if you start having problems with spammers.

Also, if you find the box for entering your blog entries annoyingly small (I do), click on the Settings > Writing link. Change the ‘size of the post box’ option from 20 lines to something more comfortable.

Blogging With WordPress Series

• So you want a WordPress blog?
• Logging Back Into WordPress.com
• Post your next blog entry
• Change the subtitle of your blog from “just another wordpress blog” to something smarter (or nothing)
• Change the appearance of your blog (select a theme)
• Customize your ‘about page’
• Get to know your dashboard better
• Learn how to upload pictures

Now that you are logged in to WordPress.com, you are either staring at the dashboard

or the New Post window.

From The Dashboard

To post a new entry on your blog, look at the left-hand menu. Hover over, or click ‘Posts’. This expands the menu. You’ll want “Add New”. Click it.

Posting Your Entry

I know there are a lot of boxes and buttons and general stuff on the page, but all you need to concentrate are the two at the top middle of the screen.  You can make friends with any of the other areas of the ‘new post’ page as and when you want to. But really, you might never need them, so don’t worry about them now.

In the top box, right under the “Add New Entry”, type a title for your post.

Underneath, type your entry.

Yes, it’s that simple.

Visual or HTML?

The main blog entry box has two tabs on the top right. One says ‘visual’ and one says ‘HTML’.

Unless you’re a code monkey or want to do something fancy, just let the box stay on ‘visual’. This will give you a nice little row of buttons that let you use bold, italics, bullets etc. If you’re feeling fancy, clikc on the last button in the row (the one that looks like a series of dots) and a second row of buttons will appear. These let you designate a paragraph as ‘paragraph’ text or ‘Header’, and includes the styles built into your theme (more on that in another article). To create the header for this section, for example, I put the cursor in the line “Visual or HTML?” and then used the drop-down box to select ‘Heading 1′).

None of this is essential, though and you can cheerfully ignore it all. Just type and I won’t think any less of you!

Save Draft & Preview

Over in the right sidebar, there is a box named “Publish”. In it you’ll see three buttons: ‘save draft’, ‘preview’ and ‘publish’. There are some other entries in there as well, but you can happily ignore them too, for now (unless you want to keep your entries private, in which case you’re going to have to introduce yourself to the “Visibility Public Edit” link).

I do, however, encourage you to make good use of the ‘save draft’ and ‘preview’ buttons. WordPress.com says it saves your entries as you type, but there’s nothing as reassuring as hitting that ‘save draft’ button after you’ve written a particularly profound paragraph.

The ‘Preview’ button will allow you to see your post as it look on the blog (to a reader). It opens in a new window, so your editing window is still open, underneath. This means you can flip between the two of them, correcting the inevitable typos that don’t show up until you see the post on your blog.

Publish

When you are happy with your draft, hit the ‘Publish’ button. Your post will go live. You’ll be brought back to the post editing window (where you just wrote it). If you want to see the live post, click on the ‘view post’ button just below the blog entry’s subject line.

Category

This is a little more advanced, and certainly not essential, but you might want to make your posts easier to find by organizing them in categories. Believe me, it may not seem like a big deal now, but it is really nice to be able to link to all your articles on ‘recipes’ at once.

If you do want to assign a category you can do it right from the ‘new post’ page, as you’re writing the post. Below the publish button, is a box marked ‘category’. At the bottom of the box is a link: “+ Add New Category”. Click that. Type the new category name and click the ‘add new category button’ (you can ignore the ‘parent category’ option for now).

Some basic category suggestions to get you started (you can always add to these and change them):

• Personal
• Recipes
• Kids Stuff
• Travel
• House
• School

Tags Vs Categories

• Imagine your blog posts as a pile of printed-out pages. If you wanted to organize them, you might put all your posts that contain recipes in a file folder marked recipes. This is what ‘categories’ do for you.
• Within the file folders, however, you might have sticky notes poking out of the edges with things like ‘cakes’ or ‘steak’ or ‘pasta’ so that you can quickly find the right ones. These are your tags.

You don’t have to use tags, and they certainly don’t have to be consistent or boring, but it can be fun to go back in and click on ‘firsts’ and pull up all the entries that had to do with the first time you (or your kids) did something. If you tag your posts (put commas between tags) then pulling up that ‘firsts’ tag, for example, will pull all the entries you’ve tagged that way, no matter what category (file folder) you put them in.

Finishing Up

There are many other options on this screen, but for now, this is all you need to know. Go forth and blog!  (and if you have questions or used this advice, please leave a comment below and I’ll come and visit your new blog).

Blogging With WordPress Series

• So you want a WordPress blog?
• Logging Back Into WordPress.com
• Post your next blog entry
• Change the subtitle of your blog from “just another wordpress blog” to something smarter (or nothing)
• Change the appearance of your blog (select a theme)
• Customize your ‘about page’
• Get to know your dashboard better
• Learn how to upload pictures

So, you’ve set up your first WordPress.com blog. Congratulationss!

Now, How Do I Get Back To My Blog?

Well, if you haven’t been away from your computer or haven’t logged out it’s as simple as going to wordpress.com. There, at the top right of the screen you’ll see your username and a user icon in the black bar along the top of the browser window.

If you have been logged out, you’ll see this instead.

Just enter your username and password (you do remember your password, don’t you?) and the little logo will appear in the top right of the black bar (as in that first picture up there).

Hover your mouse over the username/icon and you’ll see a drop-down box that looks like this.

At the bottom of this box, you’ll see the WordPress logo and the name of your blog. Here you have two options:

1. Click on the name to see how your blog looks to readers
2. Hover over it and select from the menu that pops up. You’ll probably select ‘new post’ to, er, make a new post; or  ’dashboard’ if you want to change the settings or work on your ‘about page’

(if you end up creating a second or third blog, you’ll see more blog names, like in my picture above. Just click on/hover over the one you want to work on today.)

Blogging With WordPress.com Series

• So you want a WordPress blog?
• Logging Back Into WordPress.com
• Post your next blog entry
• Change the subtitle of your blog from “just another wordpress blog” to something smarter (or nothing)
• Change the appearance of your blog (select a theme)
• Customize your ‘about page’
• Get to know your dashboard better
• Learn how to upload pictures

You want a blog, and lots of people recommend WordPress, but you’re are finding it all a bit confusing That’s fair, because the blogging tools are quite powerful and have LOTS of options built in.

Happily, you can start small with a basic blog (ignoring most of the options on the screen to start with) and I’m going to show you how:

First, we’ll decide whether you want/need a WordPress.com or WordPress.org site.

Secondly, I’ll assume you’re going for the WordPress.com option and walk you through that.

WordPress.com or WordPress.org

or Do I Need Webspace Of My Own?

If you simply want a space on the web to call your own, post your thoughts, maybe put up some pictures, then you’re probably a great candidate for a WordPress.com account.

WordPress.com is hosted by Auttomatic (the company that makes it)  meaning:

• It is free
• You don’t need to buy webspace
• You don’t need to know anything technical

With a WordPress.com blog, you can not monetize your blog (i.e. put ads on it or sell things from it). If you want to make money on your blog, then you need to think about buying web space and downloading the (free but kinda complex) blog software from WordPress.org.

What If I Start Small But End Up Wanting To Make Money Blogging?

As you grow and gain experience, you may ‘outgrow’ your WordPress.com blog and its limitations. The good news is it is relatively simple to export your WordPress.com blog and import it into whatever platform you end up using. For personal blogging, however, WordPress.com is probably going to suit you fine, possibly forever.

Getting Started With WordPress.com

First you’re going to need a username.

Go to WordPress.com and click on the “Get Started Here” button.

This takes you to a page where you can sign up for your blog.

Choose a name for your blog. Your address will look like this “http://blogname.wordpress.com”. If you care, and don’t mind spending $17 a year, you can use the drop-down box and register a unique domain for your blog (so, for example, this blog’s address is “www.julieduffy.com”, no mention of ‘wordpress’ anywhere). Unless you’re building a brand or really care about being seen as tech-savvy, save your money and just fill in a blog name. You can change it later if you change your mind.

Your username cannot be changed, so don’t pick something you’re going to hate later.

After you’ve chosen your password and told them your email address, you can ignore everything else on the page. Scroll down and click “Create blog”. Don’t sign up for the upgrade yet. There’s no need. (Try before you buy!).

The first page you’ll see after sign-up looks like this:

What’s all this about? It’s about confusing you, that’s what. Not really, but it is WordPress trying to be all ‘social network’ and encouraging you to find other blogs to follow. That’s probably not why you’re here right now. You just want to blog, baby! So ignore all this stuff.

Instead, click on the header that says “My Blogs” (yes, confusingly, you can have multiple blogs associated with your username – say you want one blog all about your Troll doll collection and another about your experiences as a back-packing county & western star). When you click on “My Blogs” you’ll be taken to a page where you should see the name you chose for your blog. Click on it.

Now you are at the WordPress Dashboard. Next time you log in, this is where you will go, and it is the heart of your blogging set-up. It’ll look like this:

You’ll need to get to know your dashboard but the good news is that, for now, there are only a few parts that will concern you:

Posts

Pages

Appearance

But before we even worry about them, there are a couple of things you should do straight away.

First Things To Do

Click on the place where it says “1 post”, right in the central area of your screen. That will take you to a page like this:

Click on the title of your first post that the WordPress folks have helpfully placed on your blog. (It’s called “Hello World”.). As well as telling you how to add a new post (we’ll get to that in a moment), it offers you your first look at the window you will see whenever you want to add a new blog post.

Start by deleting “Hello World” and entering your own title.

Then delete all the text and type your first post. (it doesn’t have to be ground-breaking or even intelligent. Just type anything.)

Now you have a choice. You can make your post go live, by clicking ‘update’ (over on the right) or you can instead click on ‘preview’. This will open a new window and show you what your blog looks like. It’s going to look pretty boring as you haven’t dressed it up yet, but don’t worry about that yet. You can choose a theme and update the appearance later.

Once you’re happy with your changes, hit ‘update’ and you’re up and running.

Blogging With WordPress.com Series

Things you are going to want to do soon:

• Logging Back Into WordPress.com
• Post your next blog entry
• Change the subtitle of your blog from “just another wordpress blog” to something smarter (or nothing)
• Change the appearance of your blog (select a theme)
• Customize your ‘about page’
• Get to know your dashboard better
• Learn how to upload pictures

[links to these articles will go live as I write them.]

]]> http://www.julieduffy.com/technology/so-you-want-a-wordpress-blog/feed/ 0 http://www.julieduffy.com/technology/so-you-want-a-wordpress-blog/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/julieduffy/~3/PJ1ja4PLcGs/ http://www.julieduffy.com/personal/novelling-demon/#comments Wed, 30 Nov 2011 03:14:25 +0000 jwordsmith http://www.julieduffy.com/?p=1741

I wrote seven thousand words on my novel today.

Seven thousand!

I feel great.

Apart from the slight ringing in my ears.

(Is it possible to break your brain?)

More importantly I learned a lot. But I’m going to have to get away from the computer, so you’ll have to wait to hear about my great epiphanies.

OK, only 5,500 words to go tomorrow, and I can call myself a NaNoWriMo winner two years in a row.

Quite a feat considering that, four days ago, my word count was only 34,000 and I couldn’t see any way to get to 50,000 in that amount of time. Pah. Just goes to show. What goes for running also goes for writing. We are often limited only by what we think is possible.

Yesterday, by the way, writing anything was impossible. Hope that doesn’t happen tomorrow!

So I voted this morning.

I’ve only done that twice in my life before, and the last time was at some point in the early 1990s when I was still a student ¹.

With all the hoopla over recent elections in the US (hanging chads, anyone?) I was under the impression that everyone had these fancy voting machines, and I was a bit nervous about pressing the wrong button or pulling the wrong lever or not knowing what to do. I was also nervous about forgetting my ID and being turned away, so I carefully punched out the Certificate of Voter Registration that had been sent to me (ironically, while I was in Scotland), and made sure my photo-bearing driver’s license was in my wallet and that my wallet was in my pocket.

We dropped the kids off at school and then drove to the First Methodist Church, to cast our first votes as US citizens. I patted my pocket to make sure my wallet and all my documents were still there. I wondered if I should have brought the little flag I had been issued during the naturalization ceremony.

A forest of lawn-signs in reds and blues and whites festooned the sides of a curving path, showing us which door to use. Two party volunteers flanked the path, one clutching sample ballots and a Kindle ². We took a sample ballot each and discovered they had been put together by the Republicans and only showed the names of Republican candidates. Which was pretty useful, in the event…

Once inside, we discovered a scene that looked very familiar from the couple of elections I voted in before: three little old ladies with perms and tailored jackets sitting behind a table, ready to give out ballot papers. K announced his name and the first little old lady looked him up on a print-out that lay on the long folding table in front of them. We could see the whole page of names, so he pointed out my name as well – and had a look at all the other people on the ‘d’ page too, no doubt.

The first little old lady copied our names in flawless copperplate into a little lined journal and jotted then numbers “016″ and “017″ next to them. The middle little old lady, called out our names to the third little old lady, who carefully hand-printed them and our newly-issued numbers onto a pre-printed page. We shuffled along the folding table and signed a piece of paper where ever she pointed, and were handed a ballot paper stuffed into a manilla folder. This was all starting out much less high-tech than I had expected.

At the end of the room, in front of a wall of windows, someone had erected a rickety standing desk, with three yellow, metal partitions. A fellow citizen was already at the right-most box. K took the one furthest away, and I slipped behind the stranger to take the middle one. As I passed, I considered taking a peek over his shoulder, just to see if I could, but was suddenly distracted by the huge cross standing on the window sill. Despite the fact that we were in a church building, I was still a bit surprised that they were allowed to keep such a flagrant display of religiosity in a room being used for the pursuit of democracy! Separation of church and state, people!  I’m afraid I have to allow that I may have been unduly influenced by that thing to remember all my Christian principles and that might have affected my opinion on social issues and that, in turn, may have affected how I voted. Oh, the shame!

So anyway, around the other side of the box I discovered that our local voting place uses the extraordinary voting technology of: a piece of paper with blank dots on it, paired with a pen on a string.

I have to tell you, I was pretty happy about that :D I stood at the creaky, rickety desk, happily finishing up my colouring-in while K went off to hand in his ballot.

Instead of folding my ballot paper and stuffing it through the slot on a locked metal box, I handed my folder to the election official (and older man, this time) standing beside what looked like a big, upright photocopier. He held the folder gingerly, with my ballot paper poking out, ripped off a perforated stub from the bottom of the paper and then asked me to pull it out of the folder and slide it into a slot on the top of the machine. I’m guessing there are very strict rules about who is allowed to touch what, and when. When the automatic sheet-feeder thingy refused my ballot at its first attempt, he could only coach me to pull it out and try again, all the while keeping his distance. His hands may have been behind his back.

Which strikes me as pretty hilarious considering no-one ever, not once, asked for any proof that I was who I said I was.

As I was finishing up, one of my neighbors came in. He jovially asked the coven whether or not they ever asked for ID.

“Oh no,” the first little old lady said. “We don’t get too many shady characters around here.”

The neighbor and I looked at each other and laughed, but now that I’m home I do wonder what would count, in that little old lady’s mind, as a ‘shady character’ and whether or not I should have laughed at all. I also have a much clearer idea of why there are so many people out there crying foul about election fraud.

But hey. That was the big excitement today. K took a picture of me, as I left the polling station, we said good morning and an insincere ‘good luck’ to the Republicans outside, and walked together through sunshine and autumn leaves to get on with our day.

So I’m sitting here listening to people on the radio rant about Class Warfare In America.

Uh-huh.

I know about class. I may carry a US passport, but they didn’t take away my British one, and that’s where I grew up. Class is not about income. Class is about hierarchy and exclusion. If you’re not perceived as being from the same class as someone else (upper, lower or middle) you are never trusted by the groups you don’t belong to, and you are looked down upon if you try to get out of that group (to be fair, the UK culture is such that you’re mocked pretty much constantly for anything you do, but it’s all ‘just a joke’ so you’re not supposed to get upset about any of it, but that’s a different rant…)

In the US there are social strata tied to income, no doubt, but if you can claw enough money out of the economy to buy the big house and pay the country club fees, you’ll be accepted on your merits and your behaviour and that’s all there is to that. If you fall to the bottom of the heap, there is a prevailing mood that, hey, we might not like you but it will be because of what you do, not where you come from (until we tip into issues of immigration and race. But that’s not about class either.).

Of course, these are wild generalizations and it’s never that clear cut, but whatever the Occupy movement is talking about, it’s not Class Warfare.

Call it Income Equality, call it Socialism if you must, but it’s not class warfare.

No-one in the US is talking about redistribution of wealth to the point where everyone lives in a state-run apartment complex and receives equal wages for an equal number of hours worked. That would be Communism and I think we’ve all realised that that’s not a perfect system anywhere. It’s ridiculous to even worry about something like that in a country of rampant consumers (where people are, to my frugal horror, actually told to go and Buy More Things when money is scarce. Eh?!).

Some Truths About Income Equality

1. It is harder to live on not-very-much money than it is to live on slightly-less-than-you-used-to-get-excess-wealth.

In a time when people are jobless and hopeless, it’s hard to look at people with ridiculous excesses of money and not feel like maybe things are a bit unfair. Especially when the system is set up to make it easier to save and accumulate money if you have pots of the stuff to begin with, and don’t mind pretending you have less money than you have, so that the government can’t take away more of it for things like libraries and medical care for the poor – things that might help your family claw their way out of poverty.

2. The tax system is kinder to the rich than to the poor.

When our family’s joint income was half of what it is now, we couldn’t afford a house, we had no investments or savings of any kind, and we often made up the short-fall in our income by carrying a credit card balance, complete with outrageous interest accumulation. We paid the standard tax rate for our income bracket, no deductions, no discounts: every penny in our possession (however briefly) was subject to federal, state and local tax.

Now that we are much, much more comfortable (complete with house and children we wouldn’t have had if we hadn’t had a generous medical benefits package thanks to the husband’s good job), we get to take a chunk of that extra income that we no longer need just to feed and clothe ourselves, and — before our tax rate is calculated — we get to hide some of that money in a pre-tax investment scheme. (Sure, we’ll pay tax on it when we withdraw it, when we’re older, but the whole system is set up to let us cheat: don’t pay tax now, when you’d be in a higher tax rate. Pay it when you’re older and have no income, and avoid paying as much tax on it. Nice for us. Not so nice for the social schemes that might have used the money to help everyone in society.)

So we do, because we can. And by hiding that money, we can, potentially, stay out of a higher tax bracket.

We get to deduct our mortgage interest from our taxable income figure too (although that might have gone away, but we did get that benefit for ten years). We also get deductions because we have children. We also, because we can afford to sock away some money at the start of the year, get to put money, tax-free, into a medical spending plan, which means any prescriptions and our vast expenditure on eyewear decreases our taxable income figure. This would not have been the case fifteen years ago when we really could have used the help.

If you’re rich enough to be on the borderline of going into a higher tax bracket, you can bung some money to a charity, and claim a deduction on your taxable income there, too. Who cares if the charity is actually doing any good? As long as they meet certain accounting criteria, you get your deduction. Hooray!

This how people like us, who aren’t living off investment income like Warren Buffet, still pay less as a percentage of total take-home pay, than we did when we were living off credit cards (the interest on which is never tax-deductable).

It’s Not That I WANT To Pay More

I’m just saying that taxes represent something totally different to a rich person and an, ahem, less rich person. 25% of a $50,000 paycheck is very much different from 33% of $370,000, especially when that $370K is probably fiddled down so that they’re only really paying 33% on , say $200K. You can live on $310,000 and still feed your family. It gets substantially harder when that figure is $37,000.

Calling this a bit unfair, is not a call for class warfare.

(And if you have never lived on overdrafts and credit card debt, then you would have to have super-human insight and empathy to be able to understand what a huge, grinding difference it makes to your life. I know, because I’ve been there, and I still forget.)

What The Solution Isn’t

I don’t know what the solution is. But I know what it isn’t: pretending that people who question the reasons for the income gap are waging a class war. That’s not a solution. That’s obfuscation. It’s insulting and it’s harmful because it precludes reasonable discourse on the issues.

The real issues are:

• Poverty vs. wealth and whether or not we live in a society that is OK with leaving the poor to flounder and the rich to dispense charity (or not) as the mood takes them.
• Whether we want to offer a safety net and who pays for it.
• Whether or not we’re happy with society in which the tax code institutionalizes the idea that it’s OK to cheat as long as everyone else (that matters) is doing it.

If that’s class warfare then put me in the class that says it’s not all right to cheat; that it is desirable to share with people who don’t have as much as you; where it’s great to succeed but it’s no sin to fail; where we help each other up when we fall down; and where, when one person is sad, everybody cries.

Oh yes. That would be Kindergarten.

Wow, winter has come quickly.

I mean, it’s November and we’ve had snow already, and its not that I’m surprised at having to scrape frost off my windscreen at 7:55AM, it’s just that that it’s so sudden. October spent a good part of its time this year pretending to be August (or at least early September) and then it turned around and dumped three inches of snow on our unmowed grass and previously-thriving tender annuals. I was still growing cucumbers — cucumbers! ¹

So, November is here and I’m participating in NaNoWriMo again. I must have heard of NaNoWriMo for the first time just a couple of years after it started, thanks to Debbie (who, by the way, has a book coming out, of which she is the illustrator. She is a multi-talented thing, that Debbie and if she wasn’t so adorable, and hadn’t fed my neices and nephew candy at Halloween all those years ago, we’d have to travel to Toronto with a sack full of squirrels who had been carefully briefed.), but I didn’t ever pluck up the courage to try it until last year, after I had spent the previous May writing a story a day. At some point during the year it occurred to me that writing a little bit each day on the SAME story might actually be possible – and maybe easier than having to come up with a different one every day.

So I tried it.

I did write – fairly coherently – on the same story every day last year and what was more, I enjoyed it. It was the most fun part of my day, even when it was hard. It made me happy for the rest of the day, even when I was fretting about which words when in which order and how to get my characters from here to there at the right time so that they could bump into that character – who didn’t want to be bumped into.

I had planned out my characters and the major events in the story, so I was was pretty confidence of reaching the end. I did reach the end: the end of November, that is, with my 50,000 words and my “winner” certificate. And I felt great.

What I didn’t feel so great about, however, was the shape my story was in. I could tell it wasn’t quite working and that made it hard for me to push on, when November was over, and make it to the end of the actual novel. I couldn’t quite tell what I was doign wrong. I knew it needed a massive revision, but I didn’t know where to start.

I put it aside and spent the past year listening to other authors talk about their writing process in podcasts and lectures. I read about writing. I read books. I hosted StoryADay May again, and even ran a contest. I got lots of heart-warming feedback from other writers who enjoyed StoryADay. I failed to take part in the wonderful Write1Sub1 challenge, although I consider myself a charter cheerleader.

Lots of writerly information was swirling around in my head looking for a catalyst to start some kind of reaction ².

I think I found it in Larry Brooks’s Story Engineering³

Happily for me I found it right at the start of October and have spent all of that month ignoring the crazy weather and instead sketching out the bones of my next novel. I had to fight hard to stop myself jumping back in time and revising last year’s NaNo novel which I really loved, but which was ugly and in need of a fix.

So this year I’m writing a simpler novel, with the idea of trying out Larry’s techniques. They’re based on screenwriting formulae. I’ve watched (and loved) enough TV shows and movies for the idea of a formula to seem normal and natural to me ⁴. This book has given me insights into what I was doing wrong last year and what I might do right this year.

My plan is to write, write, write and keep writing past the end of November, to get to a proper novel length (50,000 words is a little short).

I’ve started out with a plan, a knowledge of my characters, notes on what scenes have to happen when. On Oct 28 I was super confident. On Oct 29 I was still working on the outline. On Oct 30, well I think I spent that day going “huh?” as we got snowed on. On Oct 31 I was busy and on November 1 I was nervous.

Yesterday, Nov 2, I remembered that, even with all the planning in the world, writing stories is actually quite hard. Much time was spent staring at my screen, trying to wrangle the first 800 words of that day’s quota into shape.  Then I remembered that the first 800 words are always the hardest, every day ⁵. Which is why I’m rambling here.  Even though they’re not novel-related, I’m hoping these words will serve as my warm-up. Tomorrow I’ll write something that’s not about writing⁶.

Amazon has announced the first Kindle tablet PC and the first touch-screen Kindle e-Readers.

Highlights

• Three new e-Ink Kindle models, two of which have a touch-screen
• Larger screens, smaller bodies (no keyboards)
• Lower prices – with optional on-screen ads. $79-$189
• Kindle Fire – a color, touchscreen tablet device for $199

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