Back On The Horse And How We Got There

We're at the half-way point of Blaugust now and I think it's fair to say it's been an unmitigated triumph. It's an especially impressive performance considering there was no Blaugust in 2017. In his inaugural post in July of this year, announcing Blaugust Reborn, Belghast gave some reasons why we'd skipped a year:

"...the tail end of 2016 and all of 2017 were extremely rough to struggle through.  There were events that happened in the real world and events that happened in gaming that caused people to fear for their own safety and sort of batten down the hatches."

This is true. I could (but won't) name bloggers who stopped blogging altogether around that time, giving exactly those explanations for their blogs going dark. The blogosphere was not a happy place just then.

There was also no New Blogger Initiative in 2017. No-one stepped up to organize it and there would most likely have been little enthusiasm if they had. As for Developer Appreciation Week, I don't actually remember if anyone hosted it last year or not. If they did it was very low-key.

Bel, with the indefatigable enthusiasm and energy he constantly demonstrates, had the genius idea to roll all three events into one. Bringing them back as a package deal was risky but it's a risk that's paid off wonderfully.

The list of blogs officially participating in Blaugust stands just shy of ninety, of which a great many are either entirely new or at least new to me. For the first time in ages there are more posts than I have time to read in a day and I've had to curtail my tendency to comment on anything and everything just to get through them.

The Blaugust Discord is lively and active every day. There are quite a few bloggers and blog-readers there who aren't officially participating but who have come to hang out and give their support. Anyone is welcome - it's not too late to join in. 

Blaugust Reborn has a loose structure, designed by  Belghast, for those who choose to follow it. This week is earmarked for the aforementioned outpouring of thanks and goodwill towards the people who make the games we all enjoy so much - or at least enjoy complaining about.

I was going to post about my ongoing appreciation for the sterling work Daybreak Games has done on the EverQuest MMOs since the dying days of the Smedley administration all but drove the franchise into the ground. I might still get to that later in the week (not that there is much "later" left) but I thought I'd turn things around and offer some much-deserved appreciation for the person who made all this possible in the first place - Belghast.

He may not be a developer but he's an elemental force in this corner of the blogosphere. I knew his name before I ever read his blog because so many bloggers would refer to his ideas and initiatives. Most people would be more than content with curating a single annual event like Blaugust: to curate three at once is going far beyond the call.

I'd like to think that 2017 wasn't missing its summer festival of blogging because of bad vibes. Instead I'd rather think of it as having taken time off to let the grass recover, like Glastonbury. After a year lying fallow it's back, bigger, brighter and more successful than ever and that's entirely thanks to Belghast.

Take a bow, Bel!

How Do You Write A Blog Post? You Just Write A Blog Post.

Syp has an excellent post up about preparing for Blaugust and maintaining an active blogging presence longer-term. He says

"Probably the most difficult and challenging aspect of blogging is keeping the posts coming. It’s a constant, ongoing event, unless you don’t care about building up an audience and want a once-in-a-blue-moon post frequency. Everyone gets excited about writing at first, but consistently churning out posts requires discipline, effort, routine, and — pertinent to this article — strategy".

He goes on to give some really good, solid advice on how you can maximize your output while minimizing your stress levels. If you're the kind of blogger who worries about deadlines, topics or schedules then I highly recommend you read Syp's Tips (hey, that could be a column title!).

But what if you aren't that kind of blogger? Or that kind of person. What if you're the kind whose skin begins to itch at the very thought of opening a spreadsheet or marking a date on a calendar? What if you run on a combination of overexcitement and underpreparation and like it that way?

Let me introduce you to Seat Of The Pants blogging. Hmm, "seat of the pants"; that's a weird phrase, isn't it? We all know what it means but where does it come from? Let's ask Dr. Google.

“When my senses tell me one thing and the little dials on the instrument board tell me another, usually the dials are right. … Next to the instruments, probably the pilot’s safest guide to the position of his ship is the seat of his pants.”

Okay, that was interesting. It was also an example of how SotP blogging works. It's also known as "winging it", which I just bet derives somehow from the aviation industry too, although I'm not going to look that one up.

Strategy

Here's how I prepare for a blog post. Mostly I do them in the morning, so first I have to wake up. Then I switch on my PC and leave it to grumble while I go have breakfast. In a while I come back with a mug of tea, sit down and go through my email, Feedly and my own blog roll, in that order.

Sometimes I have an idea for a post already. It was probably something that happened while I was playing yesterday, or maybe a piece I read that stuck in my mind. I might have vaguely thought about writing about it at the time and now that I'm looking at a blank screen it's popped back into my mind.

Absent that ( I love that phrase - it's so unecessarily faux-technical) it's more than likely that something I've just read in Feedly or my blog roll will act as a spur for a post. One of the very best things about blogging is that it's a conversation. Think of it as a very long-form Twitter.

On the subject of comments, as well as being a blogger I'm also an inveterate commenter. I was commenting on blogs long before I started a blog of my own. Indeed, as I've said in the past (and never be afraid to repeat yourself - there's another blogging tip) it was when I realized I was routinely dropping comments that were longer than the blog posts I was commenting on that I decided I ought to get my own blog.

I one hundred percent recommend and advise any reader to comment, whether or not they also blog or plan on starting. Comments are the life-blood of blogs. Bloggers love comments and commenting leads to blogging. Do it!

Getting back to the point at hand, as I try to remember what it was, a thing that happens to me quite often is this: I'l be sitting here reading through other peoples' blog posts prior to starting on my own and I'll read one that makes me want to stick my oar in (gosh, I'm all about the metaphorical cliches today, aren't I ?).

Planning

I'll start commenting and within a few sentences it will occur to me that a) the comment is going to run long - most likely very long - and b) it would make a perfectly adequate blog post! At this point, out of blogging solidarity and politeness, I usually change the comment to something along the lines of "Great post! I was going to comment but then I realized I ought to make it into a post over at my blog".

I'm not sure if that's what the blogger who sparked the thing off wants to hear but at least I said "Great post", right? Everyone likes to get comments that begin "Great post!". It never gets old, let me tell you!

From there, I'm up and running. I just write the comment I would have written only even more fulsomely, find some arguably relevant screenshots and bingo! Post done!

It takes bloody ages! Compared to a comment, anyway. A comment may be 1000 words long - some of mine certainly are - but I bang a comment out freeform, without revision or editing, and I usually don't even read it back once before hitting the button.

The same comment, turned into a blog post, requires both revision and editing (the two most important parts of writing and publishing, respectively) but it also frequently requires research. I'll say anything off the top of my head in a comment but if I'm going to put it in a post I fact-check first. Always check your facts before committing to print.

Preparation

An ad hoc blog post at Inventory Full (which is about 90% of all of them) generally runs around 900 - 1500 words (very long) and takes me about two to four hours (waaaaay too long). Of the time taken, maybe 25% - 50% of it is the writing itself. The rest is revising, editing, fact-checking and illustrating. The pictures themselves often take the longest, especially if I have to log into a game and take them specially.

But what if the blogosphere lets you down? What if no-one has said anything thought-provoking overnight? What if there's not a single news squib on your gaming news provider of choice that you give damn one about? What if there's no little niggle in the back of your mind, no annoying little wrinkle of gaming (this is assuming your blog is a gaming blog...) that just irks you so much you need to let everyone else know just how furshlugginer annoying it is?

Screenshots! Screenshots, that's what!

On a slack ideas day I open my screenshot folders and flip through them. Six years in, I have in excess of 12,000 screenshots of GW2 alone. I have hundreds and thousands of shots of all the games I've played, going back about a decade and a half. Before that, tragically, all is lost.

With luck it will only take me a few minutes of folder-flipping before something strikes me. I generally try to avoid all-screenshot posts. Some bloggers absolutely excel at them - Kaozz for one - but if I do a screenshot special I like to have a good reason.

Whether you just like to post your snaps or need them to give you ideas, I recommend taking plenty. Screenshots will get you through times of no inspiration better than inspiration will get you through times of no screenshots. Or something. Not sure that works but let's keep going, maybe no-one will notice...

For a gaming blogger, the other gift that never stops giving (does that even make sense? Geez, once you start to think about cliches they really begin to fall apart sometimes...) is gameplay. There are those who deny, denigrate or simply don't see the point of diary blogging (Hi, Gevlon!). Who wants to hear what quests you did yesterday or which boss you killed?

Execution

Well, lots of people, apparently. Or so it seems when the comments roll in. If you write entertainingly on the topic of What I did In My Games Yesterday, lots of people will find it... entertaining! What's more, if you can manage to be insightful about it too, other people with similar experiences may even find it instructive and educational.

Enough. You get the idea. Planning ahead is absolutely fantastic and the exact right thing for them as likes it but there is another way. In fact, there are as many ways to blog as there are bloggers. If you're just starting out you probably don't know yet what's going to work for you. I certainly didn't.

The trick - really the only trick - is to keep plugging away at it. Try it this way, try it that way, try it her way, try it my way. (Oh, the temptation to link...but, no...).

I find blogging easy. I've been writing this sort of stuff since I was a punk in the late 70s. I wrote and published fanzines on music and comics, sent letters of comment to anyone that would print them, then ended up in the apazine scene for a decade and a half until gaming took me in the mid-90s.

I realize it can be intimidating to commit but it's like diving into cold water. You just have to do it and once the shock fades you realize it's not cold at all. In fact, once you get used to it, it couldn't be warmer.

Dive in and swim!

I, Me , Mine

By now, everyone reading this knows it's Blaugust. Okay, technically it's not Blaugust until Wednesday but this is Blaugust Prep Week, which might as well be Blaugust for Mentors, of which I am one.

Belghast's plan was for everyone who threw their hat (mine's one of those elaborate affairs with a feather) into the mentor ring to come up with some sage advice that might help and encourage the less-experienced, more nervous or possibly completely unprepared among this year's Blaugust intake.

There's been a plethora of posts already, all of which make some excellent points, but there are a couple I would particularly like to endorse, re-iterate and expand upon. This post is also a practical example of both the suggestions in question, so that's neat. There's probably a word for it. Autological recursion, that's the thing!

Wilhelm, who I would pick out as the blogger from whom I have personally learned the most over the years, says

"Don’t worry that somebody else has already posted about a topic if you want to write about it."

Too right! If you sit there, crossing off topics that you feel have been done to death and trying to come up with something new that no-one has thought of before you will literally never post anything at all.

If you do have some amazing insight previously unthought of in the annals of blogging, yay for you! They do exist. I read posts like that every so often and they're amazing. If I had to wait for one of those every time I wanted to read a blog, though, my Feedly would be nothing but tumbleweed for weeks at a time.

Furglebin

There are two great reasons to write a post about something everyone else has already written about (some of them twenty times over). 

1. You're already thinking about it. That means you're interested in the topic, whatever it is. If you're interested in what you're writing about, your writing will be interesting. Or it could be. That's up to you. You can be as fresh about a stale topic as you can be stale about a fresh one. 


2. Your potential audience is already thinking about it - and out there actively looking for posts about it. There's a reason the same subjects come up over and over again - they're what matter to people. Plenty of those horses aren't really dead; they're just sleeping. The issues themselves have not been resolved. Just because everyone and their Aunt Ethel already had a thrash doesn't mean you can't get a few licks in as well. Get in there and see if you can't wake the darn thing up!

What's more, if you haven't written about it before then everything you say about is going to be new. And even if you have written about it before, maybe your opinion has changed or you've learned something since the last time.

Aywren, one of the most articulate and insightful bloggers in this quadrant of the blogosphere, has something to add which dovetails perfectly with the point Wilhelm is making. She talks about the importance of finding both your voice and your audience. She says 

"...establishing your blogging voice and knowing who you’re writing for early on makes things easier". 

It really does. Ironically, it can also be a lot harder than you might think. Some writers seem to be born with their own, unique, unmistakeable voice but most of us have to go through the same process as the video games we play.

Your blog probably won't emerge full-blown, first post, in all the glory and splendor of mid-WotLK WoW.  More likely you'll look back on your early efforts as some kind of pre-alpha. Here, take a look at one of mine from just under seven years ago.

Milo

At that point I hadn't thought of starting every post with a picture and I hadn't discovered the trick that breaks Blogger's inbuilt width limits. I also thought small spot illustrations akin to those I used to use in apazines were cool and for some insane reason I thought it was a great idea to begin every post on MMORPGs with a link to a music video on YouTube.

And none of those were bad ideas. I could have stuck with them all and maybe made them work. But they weren't my best ideas. They were stages in a process, stations on a journey. Blogging is iterative. Each post builds on the post before. Keep putting up those posts and your voice will emerge. Eventually.

It's one of the things that throws some people off at the beginning, but don't despair. If you stick at it your voice will find you - and so will your audience. Keep writing, keep experimenting. Switch things up a little sometimes. Don't be afraid to try something different.

It won't always come off. Apparently I was the only one who appreciated Furglebin although Milo struck a chord with some. I wonder what Milo and Furglebin are doing now...?

One final thought . I ended up there linking to myself and talking about me. I can do that. This is my blog. I made it to entertain and amuse myself and seven years on that's still the main reason it exists. Your audience is important but never as important as you.

We none of us in this corner of blogdom are doing this for a living. We may be doing it for fun, to meet a creative or emotional need, for attention, for self-improvement, for lack of a better idea but in the end, whatever the reasons, we are doing it because we want to.

See how much I've learned in seven years? No, don't thank me, you're welcome!

Therre's Something In The Waterrr!! : The Return Of The NBI

A little over a year ago Syp of Bio Break and Massively fame ran a month-long event intended to encourage would-be bloggers to take the next step. This year Doone at T.R.Red Skies and Roger at Contains Moderate Peril have taken up the challenge.

The main hub of activity is the new forum they've set up, which this time is planned to be a permanent fixture, providing an ongoing resource and source of support and advice for bloggers old and new. The whole thing kicks off officially on October 1st but don't feel you have to wait until then to get started.

Last year well over one hundred blogs were created on the back of the NBI. A year later, Wilhelm at TAGN in his absolutely invaluable role as Chronicler of All Things MMO, checked back to see how many were still up and running. That turned out to be thirty, a pretty good score in my opinion, and some of the bloggers who began as Initiates last time, like Ocho of Casual Aggro , return this year as Sponsors.

If you've ever read a blog and thought "I could do that", you were right. You could and you very probably should. You might even find you enjoy it. 

Of course, I'm not really thinking of you. Oh no, my reasons for promoting the NBI are entirely selfish. Last year's crop produced two blogs that became personal favorites of mine, blogs I've read throughout the year and which have given me great pleasure, plenty to think about and a lot of laughs. I'm hoping this year brings at least a couple more blogs as good as Why I Game and That Was An Accident!

You could be working on one of them right now. What's stopping you?

How The Bhagpuss Came To Be: NBI

The New(bie) Blogger Initiative requires three things of me: 

1. An Introduction, 
2. Some Advice 
3. A Conclusion.

I'm good with Number One and Syp is going to provide Number Three. It's Number Two I'm not so sure about.

I first thought of starting a blog back in February 2010. Look here and you can see how far I got! I found a host (Blogger) and came up with a name. Here's my first piece of advice:

The Name of the Blog

Check if someone else thought of the amazingly clever, original blog name you just came up with before you commit to it emotionally or practically. Gosh! Who'd ever have thought it? There's another Inventory Full and they're still above me on a Google search! That said, I've not noticed any confusion or animosity between us since I camped on their lawn so it probably doesn't matter all that much...

I came up with the look and layout for Inventory Full in a couple of hours and then took about a year and a half to come up with my first real post. Why so long? Fear. Second piece of advice:

Don't Be Afraid

It won't be anything like as scary as you think it's going to be. My main concern was harsh feedback. It is to laugh! I got one comment on that first post, and that took ten days. (Thanks, Fluff Factor, now known as CRT Musings). If you end up being Tobold or SynCaine then being abused by complete strangers will become meat and drink to you but it's much more likely the only voices you'll hear will be friendly ones because people who don't like your blog won't waste a nanosecond reading it, far less stop by just to say something snide.

Inventory Full is my first and so far only blog, but I come from a very long background of writing for relatively small, obsessive, responsive audiences. I co-published my first fanzine back in the punk wars in the late '70s, moved to co-publishing a comics fanzine in the early '80s and went on to contribute to many more comiczines in the U.K. and U.S.A. throughout that decade. I was also heavily involved in the APAzine scene right through to the late 1990s.

Then I discovered Everquest and all that stopped, replaced by endless posting on countless forums, primarily EQ's long-gone but never-forgotten original TNZ. I used to post under a different name but sometime in the mid-noughties, for some reason I now forget I needed a new identity. I was sitting at work listening to the radio and two news items came on in quick succession, one about the Oliver Postgate children's TV character Bagpuss and another a report about something terrible going on in Bhagdad. Which brings me to my third piece of advice:

Think About How You Want To Be Known

If your blog gains any traction at all you'll be stuck with whatever you decided to call both it and yourself for the foreseeable future so make sure you can live with it indefinitely. Do you think I imagined I'd be going by the name of Bhagpuss, possibly for the rest of my life? If I'd thought it through, don't you think I'd have come up with something, well, cooler and less demented?

So, I'd named myself and made my blog but I was too nervous to step out into traffic and use it. Yet at the same time I was posting wildly, profligately, and often irrelevantly on a hundred other blogs and forums. Next piece of advice:

Get Your Name Out There Even Before You Start

If you want to give yourself at least a fighting chance of having someone read your first blog, try to build up a subliminal awareness of your existence in your potential audience. Comment on blogs you read and try to comment appositely, relevantly and intelligently. (Do not, however, follow my example and feel that you have to comment on every post because not to do so would be rude. This is a hangover from my apazine days, where to leave anyone's zine uncommented on was tantamount to a direct insult. Blog comment threads don't work that way, as I eventually worked out after Zubon from Kill Ten Rats banned me from commenting on his posts there due to the disruptive effect of my completely irrelevant pontifications. A much needed lesson, thanks Zubon, although one which I can only claim partly to have learned even now...)

In the end I largely embarrassed myself into getting my blog off the ground. Not infrequently my comments on various blogs were longer then the original post. A couple of bloggers pulled my name and/or comment out and used it in the title or body of their own posts. While the attention was great, it was starting to feel unseemly, taking up all that space on other peoples' blogs while not offering any means to reciprocate. Which brings me to my final piece of advice and more importantly encouragement.

Just Do It

Really. Just do it. For the love of all that's holy I do not want to invoke Richard Branson here (or anywhere, unless perhaps there's a large wicker structure standing by) but really, just do it. If you don't like it you can stop but at least then you'll know whether you like it or not. And you probably will, at least for a while. It's fun. Sort of. Sometimes. When it works.

Go on, give it a shot. I've added all the blogs that have outed themselves on the NBI forums
in a Blogroll to the right. If yours isn't on there it's because your URL didn't work - link in the comments and I'll add you. Some of the blogs on there get more traffic than I do and I think calling them "New" might be a stretch but hey, I haven't been doing this for a year yet and here I am handing out advice so if they want to be "New" then they're New. For this month at least.

I haven't had time to visit all of them yet. I will keep the sidebar up for the whole of May and then I plan on merging my current "Places We Go" list into that much superior updating format while winnowing out the places I don't in fact go from both of them. If you've read this far you probably have the time and stamina to go visit some of the links. If you do, tell em who sent you!