nbi2014

Permission to Suck

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The Ugly Baby

Something that is probably useful to know about me is that I am absolutely an NPR junkie.  Several years ago I made the decision to stop listening to music and instead use that time to catch up on the worlds events.  There is a concept among NPR listeners, called the “driveway moment” where you have reached your destination but you cannot leave the car because you are enthralled by whatever is happening on the radio.  Yesterday I had one of these and in a way I found it extremely relatable to the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  Ed Catmull is most well known for being one of the founders of Pixar Animation Studios.  Yesterday afternoon on the Diane Rehm show, he was talking about his new book.  But he dwelled upon a specific chapter, and I was able to dig up the same basic discussion in the youtube video above.

The chapter of the book is “The Ugly Baby and The Hungry Beast”.  In his example the “Hungry Beast” is the part of Pixar or any creative studio that is the most productive.  They are the ones churning through content and making things happen.  The front of the studio, the creative side however is the “Ugly Baby”.  He said that when Pixar starts a new project the output is always horrible.  Nothing looks quite right, nothing fits together, and generally speaking it is rather ugly.  The creative ideas need time to grow into something fully fleshed out, and during this period they need to be protected and given time to nurture.  When you are just starting out blogging, your blog is this Ugly Baby.  Nothing quite works the way you want it to, things don’t quite flow, but you have a vision for where it can be and you have to give it time to mature.

Permission to Suck

One of the hardest things about creating anything, be it a blog or a web comic or a podcast is giving yourself permission to suck.  We intellectually see failure as being a necessary part of the creative process, because it allows us to grow and change.  However as people…  we never want anything we do to fail, because culturally we have placed all of this weight upon that happening and attached all sorts of meanings to it.  In order to make a blog work, you have to give yourself permission to suck, and to not know all the answers.  Like most things in life you can figure things out as you go.  My blog has evolved over time into what it is, because quite frankly the first two years of it were pretty lousy.  Still on a daily basis as I sit down at my desktop and put fingers to keyboard each morning, I question if I know what the hell I am doing.

As a writer you need to create enough space around your work to allow it to grow and mature into what it can be.  At least when you are getting your feet about you, you need this judgment free zone.  Realize that in six months most of what you create today, is going to embarrass you.  That is part of the process and if you somehow manage to get everything right immediately… then you are some sort of freakish prodigy.  That said… no one gets everything right immediately.  Blogging is one of those things where you learn more by doing, and doing often.  I don’t feel like I really learned much about myself or the process until I was forcing myself to do it every single day.  While I don’t suggest anyone follow me down that path of madness I do suggest you pick a schedule and stick to it.  This can either be a fixed number of posts per week, or an actual schedule like Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Just Write Anything

There are going to be days where you are scheduled to write something and you don’t have a clue in the world what you are going to say.  I’ve found it is important to observe the routine, and brute force your way through the issue.  If you look through my blog there are massive several month long lapses in content.  Each and every single one of those started with a day when I just could not think of anything to say.  I used to get to the point where I would feel like, each time I made one of these lapses that I would need an extremely epic post to start back up again.  As sort of a payoff for those who still had me in their RSS feeds, that I needed to make a really good one to make the outage worth it.  Problem is… this only complicated the process and make it all the more unlikely that I would be making a post to start things up again.

When I have days where I am quite literally experiencing writers block, I just start writing.  I might rattle off three paragraphs of completely banal bullshit, but there is something about the act of writing that gets the process started.  Flowing words out onto the page, somehow clears the logjam in your head and within a few paragraphs of crap you start seeing genuine content.  So when this happens I keep writing my way through the post, and end up deleting most of the “bullshit header”.  Ultimately relying on inspiration is not sustainable, so many times you have to make your own inspiration.  This could be playing a game that inspires you, or crawling through your RSS feed looking at what others are writing… or it could be just forcing yourself to produce content by sheer will alone.  In any case, the more you force yourself to write, the better your content will be and the more mature your blog will become.

New Challengers

In many ways “winning” NaNoWriMo has forever changed the way I look at things like the Newbie Blogger Initiative.  While I still have so much editing to do, the focus of that exercise was not necessarily to write really amazing content, but instead to focus on getting my 1500+ words a night.  During the Newbie Blogger Initiative I really see the focus on getting your blog off the ground, and posting content regularly.  The content can be horrible, but the act of doing it over and over will improve your own personal process… and similarly improve your blog.  So far the Class of 2014 seems to be busting down all expectations I might have for them and producing some really great posts.  Additionally there have been several new people added to the mix since my last post so I wanted to post an updated roster.

I highly suggest you check them all out and add them to your RSS reader.  We have a few that are on their first or second post, but we have quite a few that are cranking them out on a pretty regular basis.  Just remember to give yourself room to post things that you don’t immediately like.  Cranking out the posts is the only real way you can develop your own process.  The Newbie Blogger Initiative is this great judgment free zone, where each and every established blogger wants you to succeed.  Use the hell out of this space to experiment and try new things.  Figure out what it means for “you” to write “your” blog.  This experience is worth what you get out of it, it is like an optional boot camp, and those who really take that to heart seem to be well served by it.  As I look out on the class of 2012 and 2013 I see many well established voices, and I look forward to being able to say the same about 2014.

Class of 2014

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Class of 2013 Revisited

Now that we are officially underway in the Class of 2014, I thought it would be interesting to look back and see just how well the fruits of our efforts with the 2013 have paid off.  I have to say based on past experiences I was expecting to see about half of the blogs either no longer resolving or not having been updated in months.  However it appears that the class of 2013 was one of the most productive to date.  Looking up my blog post from the close of NBI 2013, I counted 23 blogs that finished the event.  Out of those fifteen are still updating fairly recently, or have at the very least had a blog post in the last few months.  A handful have even been updated semi-weekly for the past year.  I think this is pretty cool that the Initiative was able to create some really dedicated bloggers.

Here is a quick rundown of the folks who beat the odds and have kept up with their blogging habit on a regular basis.

All of you out there that are still updating your blogs regularly… take a well deserved bow.  There are some massive lapses in posting in the history of this blog, so the drive to keep making content is something I truly respect.  Last year seems to be the most successful year to date, and here is hoping that going into 2014 we can top that.

Class of 2014

It is still pretty early in the process but I wanted to get some link loving started already to the folks who signed up right out of the gate.  I expect as the month rolls on we will have significantly more participants, but already we have an extremely impressive crop.  So if the group we have gathered already are any indication for what we are likely to see in 2014 as a whole… I feel like this is going to be a really great year.  One of the big challenges when the Newbie Blogger Initiative was rebooted last year, was to not only get new bloggers into the community, but also to retain them.  It seems to be working and I tip my hat to the folks who have been making sure this happens.  Without further ado… on with this years list of blogs.

A few of these folks I have already engaged with via Twitter, and I am hoping to be able to do the same for the others as well.  If you are not already there, twitter is somewhat a vital too for maintaining the sense of community as a whole.  Generally speaking that tends to be how the majority of the gaming blogosphere communicate with each other on a regular basis.  My contact information is at the top of the right side bar and I welcome anyone to approach me in any venue I happen to be using.  If there is anything I can do to help make your blog more successful, please let me know.

Gaming Lite

The last few days I have been all over the place as far as gaming goes.  I recorded a new Trove video the other night as I tried to figure out all of the changes… which are pretty massive.  Adventuring now seems to revolve around the creation of portals that take you to various tiered worlds.  Additionally there seems to be a system now that prevents you from equipping too high of level of a weapon.  I end up screwing myself over by upgrading the one set of weapons I could equip… too high to actually equip them.  So now I am back at square one, working on leveling up my Knight and finding weapons to do so with it.  The pace of the game seems to be significantly slower, and I am going to have to figure out exactly what all has taken place since I last played.  I still really dig trove in that it is a funky and friendly little world full of random adventure.

Another random thing I did the other night was decide to record a walkthrough of our guild hall in Rift.  I still love what she did to the place and how awesome it looks.  I have been pining for Rift lately, so I will likely start poking around over there again.  I wish I could get some elite groups honestly, but the random dungeon finder queue is insane.  I might end up working on my tank spec and doing some streams of me tanking for random pugs.  I am just not sure if I really want that kind of stress.  Surely as long as the queues are… folks will be appreciative of tanks right?  At least that is the theory and I hope they don’t rip me to shreds.  There are a few other streamers that I might be able to connect with that also seem to want to do elites, so maybe I can get that going.  Right now both my Warrior and my Rogue are geared almost entirely through the free patron chests that we get every week.


Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTV
Lastly I am still playing a ton of Elder Scrolls Online on a nightly basis. I streamed for about an hour last night as I wandered around in Bangkorai trying to finish up objectives that I still have out there. I ended up completing a few major quest steps, and generally faffing about killing lots of imperials. I show off my new armor and my new fast pony. I finally gathered up the 42,700g needed to buy the +25% speed mount, and while it is not necessarily the color I would have chosen… I am happy enough with it. It seems like the campaign against bots is actually working, as the few places I went last night with bosses… the traditional gathering of bots was absent. I feel like Zenimax is trying hard to combat the gold spammers and botters, but it is a constant and ever changing battle. Right now they have shifted almost entirely to using the email system… which is a bit more manageable. I am religiously reporting each and every spam email I get, hoping that over time they can lock down on these accounts. I am super interested in ArcheAge, but right now honestly I am still having a ton of fun playing ESO.

Not as Hard as it Seems

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So You Want to Blog

This will be my third year participating in the Newbie Blogger initiative, and each year I have lead off with a post along these lines.  Without a doubt the hardest part of blogging is some how conquering that little voice in your head that says that you shouldn’t.  If you can ever defeat this inertia you can do truly wonderful things.  The problem is, this is the step no one can really help you with.  If you are like those of us who are already blogging…  you have ideas and thoughts that you feel like sharing with the world.  Chances are you started out as a poster on your guilds forums and then worked up courage to posting on your game forums.  Maybe you are the “social network pundit” that comments on various topics when someone else brings it up.

Essentially at this point you are this bottled up fountain of ideas.  I am here to tell you there is a cure for what ails you.  There is nothing quite so cleansing of these ideas as trying to write a post.  You can go from having thirty million things to say on a variety of topics, to not having a single thing at all to say when presented with the blank page of your own blog.  For the past year I’ve engaged in Mortal Kombat with the blank screen every single morning, and for better or worse made my mark on it.  When you finally wrangle an idea out of your head and break its will transforming it into written word…  it is a miraculous thing.

The hardest battle however is actually hitting that publish button.  There are many mornings I simply close my eyes and hit publish and then walk away from the screen for a few hours.  In truth this is helped by the fact that I write at 6 am as I am drinking my coffee and have a natural built buffer to keep me from fiddling with it otherwise known as my drive into the office.  There are going to be days where you write something you thought was great… and no one seems to care.  You are going to have topics that you threw together in five seconds that get way more hits than the rest of your blog combined.  But at the end of the day you get to call yourself a blogger, in a completely real fashion.  You are a content creator, you put words out into the internet and even if no one knows who you are…  eventually those words will reach someone thanks to the sorcery that is Google… and hopefully touch them in some way.

Not as Hard as it Seems

There are a lot of decisions to be made about your blog, but the most important one hopefully is that you have decided to make one in the first place.  There are tons of great free options that you can have started and running in a few minutes.  I happen to be in the WordPress camp and I choose to host my own version of the software.  However there are many people who have great results with Blogger, including my own wife.  I personally suggest you create a little proto-blog on each of the services and get a feel for how the tools work.  They each offer unique benefits, but also have some unique constraints as well.  I’ve personally found WordPress to be more flexible and more easily modified to do exactly what I want, however if Google already controls your life… then Blogger more easily integrates with G+ and Drive.  In either case you can literally have a blog up and running and open to the world in less than ten minutes.

There are as many ways to write a blog as there are people.  Some folks like to stage the entire post in a word processor and cut and paste bits into the blog software when they are ready to post.  For a few particularly tricky posts I have done this with a Google doc that allowed me to “chew on” the topic for awhile before finally entering it into my blog.  Other people like to stage their posts ahead of time in the blog software and schedule a specific post time.  This allows you to write an entire weeks worth of posts in a Saturday afternoon and have them trickle out throughout the week.  I’ve never been a huge fan of this, but it works well for a lot of people, especially those who write for multiple blogs.  Ultimate you have to find the option that works best for you.  I highly suggest you try lots of different things.  If you read my early posts they look nothing and feel nothing like they do currently.  This was a slow evolution over time where I found what I liked and didn’t like and started to develop my own blogging style book of sorts.  Ultimately you will end up doing the same thing for your blog whatever it might be.

Picking a Format

Now we start getting down to the more difficult decision territory.  Your blog is this “thing” and that thing needs to have a hook that will draw people in.  What is your “thing”, are you supremely devoted to this one game or even this one niche of this one game… or are you more of a generalist wanting to talk about lots of different things.  Tales of the Aggronaut for example started its life with the intent of being a World of Warcraft blog.  More so than that… the intent was to be a World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking blog.  A niche within a niche within a very specific game.  I have to say there is a beauty and a simplicity of writing a blog about one specific thing.  When someone asks you what your blog is about you have a very handy answer, that immediately makes sense…  at least to anyone who has ever played World of Warcraft.

I quickly realized that I had boxed myself in a corner, because it meant that from that point onwards… I would have to write about World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking.  The biggest advice that I can give you after five years of blogging… is to pick a “thing” that is livable.  Essentially you want to try your best to quell any excuse you might have NOT to post a blog post.  For the first few years of my blog there were some massive lapses in posting, and each one relates to a period where I just was not feeling the theme of my blog.  I didn’t want to be a rant blog, and if I didn’t have anything that made me excited about something… I stopped writing about it at all.  This was the achilles heel of being about a specific thing.  So I went through a series of “format changes”.  For awhile I tried to be a blog about raiding, or a blog about World of Warcraft in general.

Finally I had a massive reboot and become an official Rift Fansite for a bit, when I was hot and heavy over that title.  Thing is it wasn’t just my site that was changing, but it was me as well.  I had played this one game for seven years and I was entering a phase in my gaming where I didn’t really want to be tied down to this one thing any longer.  I am so thankful that early on I picked a pretty ambiguous title for the blog.  “Tales of the Aggronaut” can be so many things, and regardless of the game I am playing I always seem to have Tanking tendencies…  so Aggronaut always makes sense.  Had I been thinking properly at the time I would have simply named my blog Belghast.com and been done with it, shedding all illusion about what it would be.  Having an open ended name to the blog has allowed me to shift the format around a bit to fit whatever felt right at the time.

Now five years on you have a blog that is vastly different than where we started.  I am now habitually and happily poly-amorous when it comes to gaming, and my blog has become a cult of personality of sorts.  People are interested in reading what I write more than what I happen to be writing about.  I feel grateful and lucky to have reached that point, however in the beginning after watching lots of new bloggers hit the scene… it is probably better to try and be a blog about a “thing”.  Those blogs seem to have far better traction because they are easily relatable and more importantly easily integrated to an existing community that is whatever that “thing” happens to be.  All that said… when you name your blog, I highly suggest you give yourself an escape clause. Name your blog something that will make sense as this “thing” you want to write about, but also make sense as something else too.

Accessing the Community

I know the irony that is me writing about community after various posts I have made in the past about blogs and community.  However if your blog is going to get traction you need a community to support it.  This can mean different things, but ultimately you want to find a niche in the “thing” you are writing about, and also a niche in the community of bloggers that share that space.  This is the aspect of the Newbie Blogger Initiative that makes it so helpful.  By starting a blog right now, you are getting dumped into a shared space with lots of other budding bloggers, and a huge chunk of the blogging community is paying attention to you.  For example within the next few days I will be starting up a special blog roll again just for the NBI Class of 2014 giving each new blogger prime placement in my visual blog roll.  Similar lists are going to be spread throughout the verse showing you as someone they should be checking out.

One of the hardest things I find about making a successful blog is the self promotion aspect.  It is the piece that feels the least genuine and the most needy.  By entering the Newbie Blogger Initiative you are getting a bit of a pass on this one… at least for a little while.  We the established bloggers are going to be doing your promotions for you.  All you need to do is sit down and focus on producing great content.  There has been talk over the last few years that blogging is a dying art form.  While I don’t necessarily agree with the dying part… I do agree that we are in desperate need of fresh blood in our community.  So much of what we do is fed by interaction with others, and we need an ever widening circle of people to talk with.  There are moments when I swear I have had the same discussion with the same bloggers multiple times… and the more of us IN that conversation the less that is going to happen.  Won’t you please join the madness that is blogging, and leave your mark upon our community?

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