A month has passed since I started writing posts again for this Blog. As I explained in Wise Words in a Notebook, after my cancer treatment and surgeries I’m trying to get back into regular writing. A commitment to a daily blogpost should help.
Some of my posts during February have been re-cycled from 2018 and I’ve added extras to the text I wrote back then. Other posts are new. And over the next few weeks I expect to create more and more new content and to stop using re-cycled posts as a prop. (That explains my choice of image for the header of this post: Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay )
A friend asked why I want to write a blog and not just keep a journal. The answer is because with the blog I’m not just writing for myself. I would like other people to read my words. A blog demands better quality writing. You can’t invite an audience to read your blogpost if it’s not the best you can make it.
My daily diary, which is very private, is full of long rambling sentences, crossings out and exclamation marks; plus expletives and spelling mistakes, non of which I would dream of sharing with anyone.
During the last couple of weeks I’ve finalised what my blog is going to be about in the future.
I shall have
a book blog,
a music blog,
a gardening blog,
a weight watching blog,
posts about living with cancer
and some walks down Memory Lane.
I want to write a third memories book to accompany “Cabbage and Semolina” and “Jam for Tea”. Before my cancer diagnosis in 2017 I’d made a start and written about 5000 words. I’ve looked at it again but can’t get back into that zone just yet. I find that as a result of thirty months of chemotherapy and my two major operations I become tired easily and find sustained concentration a challenge. I’m hoping that writing this blog every day will be like training for a marathon.
I’ve been reading other blogs recently which offer advice on writing good posts. There seems to be general agreement amongst those who know about these things that a blogpost should have at least 300 words but after that opinions are mixed.
This helpful blogpost from Joe Bunting offers the pros and cons for writing blogposts of various lengths ranging from a couple of hundred words to a word count of more than two thousand.
In the past, some of my posts have been very short. I’m certainly aiming to write longer posts in the future. But whether or not I will consistently write a set number of words is unlikely. Many decades ago when I was a student, one of our lecturers said that if we weren’t given a word count to aim for the writing should be “as long as it needs to be”. I think that remains good advice to this day.
Of course, there’s a huge difference between those who are blogging commercially and hobby bloggers like myself. Obviously I’d prefer someone to read my efforts but I don’t have to meet any readership targets as is expected of professional bloggers. I don’t have any advertisers seeking multiple hits on their websites and an increase in their products’ sales as a consequence of appearing on my blog.
When I started writing this blog I hadn’t realised that lifestyle bloggers actually give up their day jobs because they can make so much cash from their blogging. Hmmm. Nice work!
My target when I started this blog was to write a post everyday. And that’s my target once again.
I’ve also started using the “Reader” side of the WordPress website and am completely amazed at the number of blogposts published every few minutes.
I put a tag from my own blog of the day in the WordPress Search and set the filter to sort by date. This throws up recent posts with relevance to my subject of the day and has introduced me already to lots of interesting and fascinating blogs. And some absolute rubbish as well. But it’s easy enough to scroll over the rubbish and get to the good stuff.
The only problem is, this becomes rather compulsive and I have to ration the amount of time spent reading other writers’ blogposts. Otherwise I won’t achieve my goal of a blogpost every day myself.
Well thanks for reading. Hope you’re having a good day.
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