Bad Mentor

It is generally this point in the month that I start to feel like I have not done enough to help out the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  I am not very active on the forums, and I thus far have not been active at all in the Steam Group.  I managed to miss both the Hearthstone tournament and the League of Legends night because I was recording Aggrochat during the events.  I’ve only managed to post a few articles relating to the NBI so far this season, so it is generally at this point that I feel like I have to get my act together.  One of the things that I did as a result was port my blogroll over to a database driven system that I had been meaning to for some time.  This has made it far easier for me to update not only my main blogroll but also highlight specific groups, in this case the Class of 2014.

At some point when I was not paying attention, we zoomed from about fifteen blogs to twenty seven as of yesterday when I was setting up my blogroll.  Had I been watching the forums I would have realized this, but this so far is a really impressive turnout for the third running of this event.  I’ve added them all to my feedly and I look forward to seeing the wonderful stuff they post over this next year.  Several of the folks have hit the ground running and have already racked up a dozen or so posts on their respective blogs, so I am thinking this might be one of our most prolific groups yet.  In light of this I am not sure what sage advice I really have to give that they don’t seem to be taking to heart already.

This year has been less about making proclamations for me, and more about reaching out and getting to know some of the individuals involved in the NBI.  While it seems like the sort of thing I do normally on twitter, I have fielded a lot of questions from various members of the group.  Hopefully in some small way this has helped, but I still feel like I could be doing so much more.  Ultimately May is a fairly horrible month for me, as the spouse of a teacher there are two hellacious time of the year…  beginning of school and end of school.  Couple this with a string of weddings and graduations to attend and I feel wildly off balance right now.  Its moments like these that I entrench and try and narrow my focus so I keep doing the things that have to be done.

The Ritual

In the middle of this hell month, I feel mostly void of good advice, however there is one thing that I feel like I can pass along.  There are as many kinds of blogs as there are bloggers out there, each of them can and should be unique.  However each of them should also have some form of a natural schedule.  While I do not promote the daily blogging madness that I embarked upon over a year ago, I feel like most bloggers can and should find a specific schedule for writing.  One of the interesting things about a schedule is it forces you to think about how you can find the time to specifically carve out that chunk of time, and what you need to reschedule or push to one side or another to make it happen.

As I said my personal schedule is blogging each and every day, and in order to accomplish this I had to build a sort of ritual.  Every morning I get up, turn on the television to start my wife waking up and stumble into the kitchen to flip the Keurig on.  I hop in the shower and after getting dressed make a cup of Revv for myself and a travel mug full of whatever flavor my wife happens to be making.  At this point I mutter “going upstairs” and find my way to my office.  Here I sit for the next thirty minutes to an hour banging away at the keyboard in Live Writer until I have something that vaguely resembles a post.  I give it the most summary of glances to look for anything odd, assign categories and tags and post it as a draft.  Finally I open up the wordpress backend and edit my posting options, making the tweet have the relevant hashtags before finally publishing.  On a good day this all happens within a thirty minute window… on a bad day upwards to an hour.

In either case I have set up a block of time every single morning and committed it to a routine.  The weekends are a bit more haphazard as I find that it seems writing with time constraints tends to speed my process.  When I have too much time available and no real pressure to finish quickly… I can take upwards of two hours to knock out my post.  Occasionally when I know I won’t have time to write on a given morning, I stage my post the night before… but I really don’t like doing this.  When you have a pattern and follow it religiously… your entire day feels off when you don’t blog.  So those days where I have staged content and I simply hit the post button in the morning… I feel like something is missing from the day.  In essence my brain has learned to crave these little data dumps.

Finding Your Schedule

This pattern works for me, and it is something I have come to rely on.  You need to find your own pattern, be it posting something each week on a specific day or posting something every few days.  The pattern helps, and your readers come to expect your content.  It is getting to the point where if I do not make my morning post for some reason, folks start emailing/tweeting/IMing me to see if I am okay.  Thankfully this has happened only a few times, and due to extraneous circumstances, but I still made posts those days albeit significantly delayed.  The schedule helps me think more than anything, it helps focus me on a goal of doing this one thing and repeating it.  The interesting thing about carving out a block of time like this, is that you realize you can do the same for other things you want to do as well.

Basically look at your routine, the things you do every single day and see if there is one of those you can hack into “also” being writing time.  For me this was simple… I was already used to going upstairs each morning and drinking my coffee while reading my RSS feed or playing a game for a bit to wake myself up.  I simply stopped doing those other activities, and substituted writing in its place.  Look at your daily activity and see if you have a similar places where you could substitute in writing instead.  Do you have a long commute to work on public transportation?  I wish I had one of those… I would spend the entire time banging out ideas on my chromebook and then posting them later when I got to a stable internet connection.  Do you have a lunch time ritual, that you could including writing in?  Each of us has some time that we can claim for ourselves and for writing, and you need to find yours.

Ammunition

When I make my posts, they tend to be very spontaneous and stream of consciousness, as I compose at the keyboard without a lot of thought beforehand.  This works for me, but it doesn’t work for others.  I’ve had conversations with Gypsy Syl about this a few times, and how instead she tends to sit on a post for a bit and groom it until it is ready to be made.  Both are awesome ways to write, and both have strengths and weaknesses, but in both cases they need something to feed the process.  One of the hardest things about keeping a schedule is always having something you want to say.  I find I have to keep various things for inspiration that can be drawn upon at a moments notice.  Since I only have thirty minutes to an hour to write each morning, I need to have a system for getting my creative juices flowing quickly.

The biggest source of inspiration for me is my blogroll, and as a result I tend to keep mine packed full of stuff.  At this very moment I have 626 unread articles in my feed reader, from an unknown number of sources.  If I find something interesting, I dump it in my reader and I do a pretty poor job of categorizing.  I tend to have a “Gaming” firehose that I try and drink from when I need inspiration or have idle time while running errands or at the beginning of meetings.  Sometimes this just isn’t enough to start the process in motion.  Additionally I try and keep a google doc going of little fragments of ideas that come to me throughout the day.  Inevitably the second you hit publish, you think of thirty other things that you should have said.  Capture these… while some of them are crap, some of them will be absolute gems that need to be refined at a later date.  Keeping this list of potential topics also makes for a great start on those days when you don’t have any ideas.

Contingency Plan

I am extremely devoted to my chosen schedule, and I will do absolute silly things to make sure that it is maintained.  Part of this is knowing your schedule ahead of time, and plotting your life around it.  Like I said before, I write every morning, but occasionally there are mornings where I cannot write.  As a result I set aside time the night before, or later in the morning to be able to get my post ready and out the door.  Before you embark upon a schedule, have ways that you can juggle your writing to make sure that the schedule is maintained without breaking you in the process.  If you are going on vacation, it is perfectly okay to write a bunch of topics ahead of time and schedule them to post periodically throughout your time off.  Other bloggers have had great luck with guest posts during these lapses.  I personally just bring my laptop with me and bang them out in the hotel room either that morning or the night before.  Hell at one point I even made a morning blog post while sitting in one of the terminals at Chicago O’Hare.  Whatever you choose to do, it is important that you at least think about what you will do when you can’t post for some reason.  The one thing I have learned above all else is that your readers crave consistency.