And So We Come to the End

This is the last post I’ll be making here at The Bluestocking Blog.

But never fear. This doesn’t signify an end to my writing or blogging for that matter. I’m just switching over to a new domain:

laurencteffeau.com

When I first started this blog, I had no publication credits and no real clue to what I was doing. All I knew is that I wanted to write and blogging seemed like a good way to plant my flag, so to speak.

But my ever-present insecurity demanded that I do so under an alias. I started posting, was pleasantly surprised as I made connections with other writers, and slowly built a platform for myself.

Now, however, that identity is starting to chafe. I’m not a beginning writer anymore. I still have things to learn, mind you, but I’ve progressed to a point where I feel comfortable with what I do and the skill level I’ve achieved. I’ve made two pro sales in the last two months and had accrued a respectable number of credits before that. It’s time to fully own my identity as a writer, and I feel I can best do that with my new site.

But first, a look back.

The Bluestocking Blog Stats:

1,452 days active (just over four years!)
214 posts
over 69,000 hits
over 7,000 unique visitors
10 short story credits
4 novels written

Top posts:

Nefarious Narrative Distance
Resource Roundup Part 1 – Finding the Right Word 
Resource Roundup Part 4 – Opening Your Story
Resource Roundup Part 2 – Conjuring Up Titles
Coffee Shop Etiquette 

Not bad for an alias.

So please follow me to my new site at laurencteffeau.com or stay connected with me on twitter. And, as always, happy writing!

Photo courtesy of Olivander of Flickr

Odds and Ends

Sometimes there are no themes, no ways to organize life. Things just are. Kinda like this post.

The Seven Year Pen – The Seven Year Pen from Seltzer Goods is just flat out amazing. I bought one the other day, since I’m a big fan of ballpoints and writing longhand. According to the packaging, “100 million pens are discarded every day,” and this pen is designed to write 1.7 meters a day for 7 years. Sign me up! Um…literally.

Local Writing Group Resumes – Today, I’m meeting with the ladies in my local writing group for the first time since November. I’m really looking forward to reconnecting with everyone and getting back into the rhythm of critiquing and exchanging work. Taking December off was great for personal reasons, but now it’s time to get back to writing.

Fat Girl in a Strange Land ARC Giveaway – Crossed Genres Publications is offering three advanced reader copies of the Fat Girl in a Strange Land anthology (which includes my story “The Tradeoff”) through Goodreads. Go here for your chance to win. I'll also have an interview with the editors when we get closer to the anthology's release in February.

Another Resource Roundup Forthcoming – I’ve just started to pull together a post on querying, which should be ready to go next week. Fingers crossed. I’ve been putting it off since these types of posts are so time consuming, but hopefully it will be worth the effort!

Taos Toolbox – I found out this week I was accepted to this year’s Taos Toolbox, a two-week master class in science fiction and fantasy writing this summer. It’s led by Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress, with Daniel Abraham as a guest lecturer. I’m really excited for the workshop, but now I’m already paranoid about what projects I’ll be workshopping, whether I’m well-versed enough in the genre (I’m not), and other feelings of unworthiness. There’s still time to apply to Taos and other SFF workshops this year – check out this great post by John Joseph Adams for Inkpunks breaking down the different options.

That’s it for me this week. Happy writing!

Social Media Considerations

The digital age has given writers amazing opportunities – connecting them to other writers and potential readers, facilitating the exchange of information and resources, and creating new channels to distribute content.

But there are implicit assumptions we all make about social media. After my Social Media Guilt post a few weeks ago, I said I wanted to explore this topic in greater detail, so here it is.

People engage in social media to connect first and foremost.

• to find like-minded individuals. Ex. I like to write, you like to write, so let’s be friends.
• to find experts and tastemakers. Ex. I want to stay on top of the writing industry, so I follow publishing professionals.
• to find consumers for their own content. Ex. I’m a writer so I’m going to build a blog to reach out to potential readers.

In all of these cases, writing could be substituted with, say, knitting or Civil War reenactment, or French cooking, or what-have-you. Most of us have interests outside of writing, and use social media to stay on top of the things we care about.

It is also important to note that there is a degree of self-interest associated with each of these reasons to connect with others. People use social media because there is a benefit to them using it. If there were no benefits, or if the benefits didn’t outweigh the negatives associated with social media, it wouldn’t work.

And there are degrees of involvement:

• Invisible consumer – Someone who seeks out content but does not engage with the creators/sharers of the content. Your classic lurker.
• Masked consumer – Someone who seeks out content and engages with creators/sharers of content on some level but uses an online persona to do so. For example, people who leave comments or follow people, but don’t use a real name or have any contact information.
• Visible consumer – Someone who seeks out content and engages with creators/sharers of content without hiding their true identity.
• Masked creator – Someone who creates content but does so using an online persona (like me).
• Visible creator – Someone who creates content and does so without hiding their true identity.

These are simplistic categories, and not mutually exclusive. And chances are, if you have a blog or a website or what-have-you, your followers are combination of all of these types of people.

So what does that mean?

Well, we have people connecting with each other for different reasons with different levels of involvement on the one hand. And on the other, we have analytics that only capture (or imperfectly capture) parts of the activities that comprise social media use and consumption. Things like blog hits, number of followers, RTs and mentions, likes and +1’s. Numbers, quantities, that supposedly illustrate the value of someone’s blog or twitter stream, whatever constitutes their social media presence.

And frankly, regardless of whether they are right or accurate, numbers matter in social media.

We are told ways to increase our followers, comments, etc. We are told that the numbers don’t really matter so long as you have an online presence. We are told numbers only matter depending on what stage of your career you are at.

We are numbers-obsessed as content creators, but consumers of content also rely on numbers to determine how relevant the content is to them. Especially with the glut of writing-related content out there, the importance of numbers and the endorsement of influential experts in the writing blog-o-sphere is huge.

As a content creator, I pay attention to:

• my number of blog and twitter followers
• comments on my blog posts
• RTs and mentions of my tweets
• Overall blog traffic
• Referring/incoming links
• Relative influence of my followers (based on, in part, you guessed it, numbers)
• Relative influence of people who RT/mention my tweets (based on numbers)

As a content consumer, I pay attention to:

• Who created the content (how visible are they?)
• Who endorsed the content (how influential?)
• How many followers do they have?
• How many people commented?
• Quality of blog layout
• Quality of content

Quality content, for me, is always king, but I’m more likely to give a post a chance to grab me depending on the other, primarily numeric, factors.

Lots of followers? I think, hmm, maybe this person really knows what they’re talking about. Lots of comments? I think wow, what an engaged following they have. But if I scan the comments and they are all clones of each other or bland “I agree” or “Author, you are so awesome,” I tune out.

Same with Twitter. I don’t auto-follow back someone. I see if they are relevant to me, and then I look at their followers to tweets ratio. Lots of followers but a small number of tweets? This is someone on a follower blitz, relying on people’s autofollow policies to inflate their numbers.

These are some of the things I look at when evaluating online content. There’s no right or wrong here, and I’m sure you look at content in different ways or weight things differently than I lay out here.

But I think it is important to analyze your own behavior when it comes to social media consumption, not only to better understand yourself and your online habits, but to also examine your own content and the way it can engage consumers.

So the next time you engage in social media, ask yourself what are your implicit assumptions in consuming and creating content. How are you really evaluating what you consume online?

Pen Names and Other Problems

So my name is not Bluestocking. Did I just blow your mind?

Blogging under an alias is something I started for a variety of reasons, including the fact that:

• I was unpublished.
• I was uncomfortable with labeling myself a writer.
• I wasn’t sure if this whole blogging thing was for me.

All those things made sense back in February 2010 when I first started the blog. But now:

• I am slowing getting publishing credits.
• I’m growing more comfortable calling myself a writer.
• I’m still blogging – less as an experiment and more for a platform.

So having a blogging alias is not so necessary any more. But I’m still using it. Why? Well, as I was telling my CP Lori M. Lee the other day, it’s complicated, and it mostly comes down to what I write: historical romance and speculative fiction. Two very different genres, with different expectations and readerships. It’s not so bad as say picture books and erotica, but the gulf between the two is still there.

Despite whatever level of success I attain in either area, these are the genres I see myself writing in for the long haul. Considering the prevailing wisdom out there about author branding and platform-building, I should have an author persona for each genre I write in. Some people like Kristen Lamb predict that pen names will eventually go away in the digital era, but for now, like a lot of other things in publishing, pen names are still around.

Since I have three stories either published or forthcoming under my own name (and two of those are specfic), it makes sense to put out my historical romance (if I ever do) under a pen name:

Historical Romances ---> Pen name
Speculative Fiction ---> Real name

So now the question is where does my blog fit in?

Now occasionally I will talk about my historical romance or my speculative projects on the blog, but to me, these distinctions don’t really matter since ultimately this is a blog about writing and writing-related things (putting aside the whole writing blogs are bad argument).

I used to think I’d figure it all out when I had to. But when it comes to blogging or any social media presence, it is important to have a strategy. I want to know how I will handle my online presence now even though it’s rather self-indulgent to assume I’ll succeed in any genre let alone both. At the same time, I don’t want to make a wrong choice at this early start of my career, and have it haunt me later on down the line.

I don’t know. But after blogging for over a year and a half, after putting together so many posts I’m proud of, losing this blog or starting over isn’t appealing.

I don’t have any easy answers here. I’m still Bluestocking for now. We’ll see how long that lasts.

What are your own thoughts/concerns about the pen name debate? Here are some other resources for you to peruse if you are considering a pen name:

• Kristen Lamb’s Why Pen Names Suck and Can Make Us Crazy
• Edittorent’s On Pen Names
• Jami Gold’s To Pen Name or Not to Pen Name?
• Men With Pen’s Should You Use a Pen Name or Pseudonym?

First Campaign Challenge and Blog Award

For the first challenge as a part of the Writers' Platform Building Campaign, hosted by Rach Writes, we were asked to do the following:

Write a short story/flash fiction story in 200 words or less, excluding the title. It can be in any format, including a poem. Begin the story with the words, “The door swung open” These four words will be included in the word count.

If you want to give yourself an added challenge (optional), use the same beginning words and end with the words: "the door swung shut." (also included in the word count)

For those who want an even greater challenge, make your story 200 words EXACTLY!

So that's what I did. Behold:

The door swung open as Mrs. Fawcett took the rattling tea service out to the parlor. Bright bursts of laughter invaded the kitchen before the door cut it off, swinging back on well-oiled hinges.

Kitty caught the sickly-sweet whiff of roses from the funeral home bouquets, set out like trophies in the hall. They would need to throw them out, but Madam enjoyed her life as a widow too much to destroy the evidence just yet.

Kitty couldn’t blame her. The Master was not well-loved in life, nor would he be sorely missed in death. The increase of afternoon teas was the only impact his death had below stairs. But talk of gambling debts and unrealized investments made Kitty wonder just how secure her placement at Bethany manor was.

She had gotten better at interpreting Madam’s imperious tone, knew how to avoid the son’s roving hands, and which cook didn’t mind her sneaking a bite here and there. She didn’t want to start over. Not again.

Mrs. Fawcett pushed back into the kitchen with a look that said “Mind yourself, Kitty.” The only thing she knew how to do.

More laughter. More roses.

Kitty shuddered as the door swung shut.

200 words exactly. Boo-yah!

***
Also, I learned today that Gail Shepherd who blogs at Paradoxy gave me the Versatile Blogger Award. I met Gail through the campaign and have been impressed with her series of interviews with other writers. Thanks so much for the award, Gail!

In accepting the award, I must share seven random facts about moi:

• I'm a big fan of tennis and I've been trying to catch US Open matches this week in between my writing and reading time.
• I have a freckle smack dab on top of my right foot. Growing up, my parents used to take a marker and put a polka dot in the shoe intended for my right foot, so I'd know which one went on which foot -- just connect the dots. I contend that this is why I still have trouble distinguishing between right and left today.
• I got a little verklempt last week when I went to my local Borders to buy books for the last time. I've been going there since middle school and have fond memories of the place despite all that's happened.
• I tripped getting out of the limo at prom. I tripped and nearly fell on my first date with my now-husband. I tripped and fell on a run with my dog last year. I fell off the sidewalk walking around the neighborhood with my husband and my dog. Clumsiness is a constant in my life. The good news is I know how to fall without hurting myself. Usually.
• I love spicy food. Not so hot I can't feel my tongue -- no hot wing eating contests for me -- but I love a little heat and bold flavors in my food. So bring on Mexican and Thai food.
• I'm allergic to cats. The only thing that I know of that I'm allergic to.
• I have never broken a bone in my body. Pretty amazing given #4. Let's hope it stays that way.

Thanks again for the award, Gail!

Happy writing!

Social Media Guilt

Last week I did something I don’t usually like to do. I posted a book review on Wednesday – the day I tend to post more craft- or writing life-related content.

Things like book reviews, awards, internet memes I try to keep to other days of the week. Especially because Wednesday is the day for this blog, ever since I decided slow blogging works for me.

But last week I didn’t, and now I feel guilty.

I had good reasons of course (it was the last day of the month to post an August review; no other content was readily available) but I still feel like I punted.

Social media is flexible, but sometimes that flexibility can bite you in the ass. That’s why we are told to have a blog, post regularly, and no matter what, don’t stop.

Other writers, far more successful in both blogging and publishing than me, like Elizabeth Spann Craig, Jody Hedlund, and Roni Loren have all talked about the demands of social media and ways they’ve balanced promotion, writing, family, and (gasp!) personal time.

Elizabeth Craig had a post today on this very topic, Juggling Social Media and Writing, about how she balances her social media demands, with some helpful tips we can all use.

Jody Hedlund also offers up some ways to protect your writing time in When Social Media Becomes a Time Suck. She also has examined the amount of involvement writers at all levels should have in How Much Time Should Writers Devote to Social Media? – I’m probably in the B-C range, based on her definitions.

Roni Loren uses blogging and other social media obligations as her version of Julia Cameron's morning pages. And in fact, this is often something I do too, where I’ll draft a blog post before starting my real writing or editing work for the day.

The good news -- there are ways to harness social media to your advantage and keep it from taking over your life completely. The bad new is social media will take as much energy as you give it and still want more from you. Which makes it that much harder to walk away from it sometimes.

If I’m feeling the pressure now, I can only imagine how it will increase if/when I transition from an apprenticing to a professional writer. When platform building transitions into promotion. And what of the spread of social media outlets? Facebook and blogs, and Twitter and Tumblr, and then Goodreads, and now Google+… There’s pressure to have some sort of presence on all these sites (and more still to come). When will enough be enough?

I still feel guilty -- about something that means only as much as I’m willing to let it, as much as I’m willing to buy into it. I think this dynamic is worth puzzling out – but that’s a post for another day.

What ways have you found to banish social media guilt? How do you balance your social media demands?

A Case of the Not Enoughs

I’m constantly worried I’m not working hard enough on my writing. That I’m not writing enough. That I haven’t had enough life experience to write anything worthwhile. I’m already pretty sure I haven’t read widely enough even though it seems I'm always reading when I'm not writing. And I suspect I’m not revising enough, even though I’m not sure how I should approach that process differently.

Bottom line, I fear my attempts to better my craft just aren’t good enough.

It’s a debilitating spiral of negativity to be caught up in. But consider:

It is no longer enough to have a webpage. Writers must blog, tweet, share on Facebook. And the list of Thou Shalts keeps getting longer when it comes to social media. (On a side note, Paulo Campos over at yingle yangle has a great post on how social media affects people’s perception of writing success.)

It is no longer enough to land an agent. While agents are still a writer’s number one advocate in the publishing world, the writer still has the ultimate responsibility for selling, positioning, and managing their work. Now, this is nothing new. With so many aspiring writers out there, armed with record levels of literary, the market will favor those writers who can seemingly do it all.

Am I one of them? I don’t know yet as I’m still struggling with this notion: It is no longer enough to write a book.

I’ve written a book (and completed a number of solid drafts for other projects). One that I’m proud of. But is that enough in today’s marketplace? NO. I need to ensure both my idea and story execution are marketable. Competitive. The best I can make it and then some.

This means it is not enough to write for yourself. You must look past your own narrow view of the world. You must know your audience (Found in Translation by Michael Cunningham provides a fascinating take on how to envision the audience for your work). Ultimately you must have a built-in market if your book will win the struggle to stay relevant in our evolving digital culture.

When making the leap from writing for myself to writing for publication, aspects of my work that didn’t bother me before were thrown into sharp relief. I had to ask myself if my work was still good enough for a wider audience. And I didn't like the answer.

It’s hard enough to write a book from start to finish. I don’t mean you have to write in a linear fashion, but that you actually complete the project (tinkering aside). When you hit that point, it can be a tremendous relief. After all, how many other people have great book ideas but get stymied by the execution? But then the real hard work looms ahead of you. Revision. After too many passes to count, you have a polished book, sure, but is it one people want to read? One you can market to publishing houses? One that people will plunk down money for?

Is it that good?

This is where I stumble every time. I just don’t know. I think my work is good. My few readers think so too. But is it good enough? Have I done enough? And if I haven’t, how do I take my work to the next level?

Am I overstating things here a bit? Probably. Am I so discouraged that I will stop linking words, creating dizzying chains of sentences that when fused together make for some awesome storytelling? Hell no. I started writing because I loved it. I won’t stop now. But I still think I haven’t done enough to get things right. I haven’t learned enough. But as always, I’m willing to try.

If this post is a little too grim for you, take a gander at the Agency Gatekeeper's take on debut novelists and what they need to beat the odds:

What do you need? The ability to write really, really, really well. And a great query, a great first page, and The Jeff Herman Guide. Or another  method of finding agents who are likely to be a good fit.

 Until next week.

Slow Blogging

Lots of theories abound when it comes to social media and how blogging should be utilized:

• Post every day.
• Respond to each and every comment.
• Read and comment on other blogs indiscriminately.
• Flaunt yourself as much as possible.

Trouble is, I’ve never been much of an exhibitionist. Admittedly, blogging is a bit of a contradiction for me. Every time I post, I put myself out there in the ether for public consideration – except I do this under an alias because I’m not ready to own up to being a wannabe writer unless I make it. So why do I do it? Because the benefits of writing practice and engagement with the larger writing community far outweigh the nuisances of blogging.

That said, I’d rather be working on my WIPs instead of putting together my next blog post. But when I do blog, I want my posts to be as strong as possible. I’ll revise, research, and let them sit until they’re ready. This takes time. I guess I’ve always preferred quality over quantity.

When it comes to commenting and interacting with others, it’s all about the content for me. Not the brown nosing, the contests, the polls. If I feel I can’t add to the discussion on someone else’s blog, I don’t bother to comment. Blasphemy, I know. I’m just not comfortable saying something for the sake of saying something. I like to think about things, and I don’t want to rattle off the first thing that comes to mind. Especially when it is so easy to follow things back to the source. I don’t want to be haunted by half-assed comments years from now.

So when I heard about the notion of slow blogging, I felt relieved that it wasn’t just me who took issue with the time pressure of producing content and interacting with others. The concept has been around for awhile now. Anne R. Allen provides a great overview of the movement with respect to writers, which I stumbled upon thanks to a post by Elizabeth Craig. If you want to know more, you can read the Slow Blogging Manifesto and a New York Times article on the movement.

So from here on forward, I will aim to post once a week – usually on Wednesdays.

Before, I loosely coupled my posting schedule to the number of trips I took to the coffee shop to write – roughly two times a week. It was an informal schedule at the best of times before it was utterly destroyed during the big move and subsequent babysitting of contractors over the last two months. But weekly blog posts? That I can get behind. People have talked about the benefits of having a posting schedule before (Elizabeth Craig again comes to mind), so we’ll see how it goes.

I see this move to slow(er) blogging as:

• a way to help me handle the time pressure of blogging,
• a justification of the pace of posting I’ve already unconsciously set,
• a way to reinforce the quality over quantity criterion I’ve always valued,
• a formal acknowledgement of my accountability to myself and my readers, and
• a way to ensures I have time to do justice to the topics I post about.

Hurrah.

And if this builds in extra time for writing, who am I to complain?

I’ll also be tinkering with some of the labels and tags this week, so apologies for any inconsistencies on that front.

Assessing My Blog's Impact

Today is a special day. This is my 28th post, and if you look on the sidebar, as of this writing, I have 28 followers. One follower for every post I’ve written. That’s pretty cool for someone going into this whole blogging thing without many expectations.

I started this blog in late February 2010 and it’s now mid-May. And as you can see from the picture below, interest is taking off. Relatively speaking, of course.

Something that is both frightening and heartening at the same time. So I’m trying to make sense of where I’m at, where I’m going, and who I’m indebted to for making my little blog more visible.

To begin with, here are my top five posts overall:

Top Posts (in pageviews)

415   Coffee Shop Etiquette
244   Lessons Learned – My First Writing Conference
132   A Tale of Two Writing Groups
84     Resource Roundup Part 1 – Finding the Right Word
46     Anatomy of a Story

Total page views: 4,528

The first three I tweeted (via @bluemaven) and were picked up by some Influentials and their followers. The last two I tweeted and were picked up by others in the twitterverse, but not to the same extent as the top three.

@elizabethscraig has picked up a lot of my posts and retweeted them, and I credit a lot of my traffic to her. (You should be following her!) She scours the web on a daily basis and posts the best finds over the course of the day. And I know if something I post and tweet about doesn’t get picked up by her, then I just need to work harder on my next post. Kind of a built-in quality detector.

So what is immediately apparent, Twitter is my friend. This is confirmed when I take a look at my top 10 sources of traffic for my blog:

Traffic Sources (accounting for 791 of 854 unique visits or 92.6%)

178   Direct Link
156   Twitter.com
132   Inkygirl.com
103   Blogger.com
62     Lauramarcella.blogspot.com
51     Google.com
45     Stumbleupon.com
35     Blog.writersdigest.com
18     Hootsuite.com
11     Childrenspublishing.blogspot.com

Number 3 on the list, Inkygirl.com, featured Lessons Learned: My First Writing Conference on the website and it was tweeted widely by @inkyelbows and her twitter minions (you should be following her, if you aren’t already). Thanks to her influence, that post was featured by Writer’s Digest’s weekly blog feature Best Tweets for Writers, which sent an addition 35 people to my blog (source number 8 on the list). If this isn’t a convincing enough demonstration of how getting the attention of the Twitter Influentials can work for you, I don’t know what is.

Another big surprise was how much traffic Laura Marcella’s blog Wavy Lines generated for me. Laura’s been a great blogging buddy in terms of passing along awards and commenting on a regular basis. (Thanks again, Laura!) She has all the blogs she follows displayed on her sidebar, and I’m sure that has helped send some of her readers my way since her blog has really taken off thanks to all her hard work. The blogroll feature is something I don’t have on my site just yet, but after seeing what it has done for me in terms of increasing my visibility and gaining followers, I am thinking about adding it and providing the same benefits to others. Geez, this social networking does work.

Number 10 on the list, Adventures in Children's Publishing, surprised me as well. They’ve been great followers and commenters, and recently featured my post A Tale of Two Writing Groups on their site. That sent another 11 people my way. You hear all the time how links are the lifeblood of blog traffic yada yada yada, but this really cemented that concept for me. Thanks, ladies!

All in all, I couldn’t be happier with the reception my posts have had and the followers I’ve gained here and on Twitter, and all in less than three months.

I’m encouraged, I’m honored, I’m thankful, and now I’m even more determined to keep up the hard work!

So to recap, here's how I attribute my blog's success so far:

1. Using Twitter to bring in new readers.
2. Following Twitter Influentials and others with similar interests, and hope they'll take note.
3. Reciprocating in terms of comments, following, and linking.
4. Striving for quality in every post.

PS. All the data came from Google Analytics, which is tied to this site. There are other services out there. Wordpress has analytics built in, and StatCounter is another free service you can use to monitor your blog.

Why Blog?

Building a writing platform is all the rage these days. A few google searches will reveal hordes of articles and, yes, blog posts on the subject (a good place to start is here). Bottom line is you can’t start soon enough to build an audience for your output, even if your creative works are but a twinkle in your eye. And I have reluctantly jumped on the bandwagon.

I am not necessarily happy about this, mind you. While the internet and social media afford people unprecedented ways to connect to and engage with others, I can’t quite convince myself that the whole “if you build it, they will come and buy your books” mentality is something a beginning writer should be concerned with as opposed to say developing your craft. Plus I really don’t want to see the publishing industry devolve any further, becoming a popularity contest where followers = book deal and prose becomes little more than loosely linked tweets. Right now, good writing still holds sway regardless of your stats, if you believe what the agents say. And that’s a good thing.


So where does this leave me and my blog? Well, I have no expectations of grandeur for this little endeavor. It is just one more tool in my arsenal, another line I include in my query letters (whenever I get to the point of sending them out). One thing I keep hearing over and over again is that you can’t really take shortcuts when it comes to writing. You have to do everything, including following all the trends to be competitive. And when the trends say use social media to your advantage, you blog, you tweet, you do what you can to demonstrate your commitment. Or so they say.

While I would love to see my name in print, I am far more interested in documenting my trials and tribulations, my insights and inspirations that result from my foray into creative writing. If this blog evolves into something more, all the better.