Improving My Blog in 2018

New year, new beginnings, new opportunities. A chance to embrace your writing with fresh vigour and enthusiasm, to remind yourself why you’re doing this and what you really want. I haven’t gone back to my old habit of posting my daily word count on Twitter because I didn’t want to jinx it, but I am thrilled to report that since January 1^st, I have started doing my 1000 words a day again! So far, so good. I have also bought a shit-ton of DVDs with the gift cards I got for Christmas, so I’ll have plenty to occupy myself with in-between writing and working.

Now that I am finally pushing myself back into writing, I have started thinking more about this blog. This is where I market myself to the world, it’s the starting point for introducing myself as an author, and I need to get better at it. As it stands, most of my blog posts are thought up the second I sit down to type, and usually I am so freaked out about other things in my life that the content itself doesn’t get much attention from me. It’s all instinct and whatever passes through my mind at the time. I really want to do something about this, because the more I take my writing seriously, the more I have to take my blogging seriously. So here are some ways I intend to do that this year.

Online Classes with Skillshare

If you are at all familiar with people like Jenna Moreci, you’ll have heard about Skillshare. It’s an online learning community with thousands of classes. I’ll be using it specifically for classes about blogging, self-marketing and building my author platform, because I know those are the things I will be struggling with in the future. I would like to get into a routine where I regularly take courses at a scheduled times, but since I am so fucking precious about my personal time and love routines, I’ll need some time to work out how to do this efficiently. It is going to be hard, but it’s necessary. If I ever want to make my writing-dreams come true, I’ve got to work for it. I hope Skillshare is a good place to start.

Scheduling and Planning Blog Posts

I want to get to a point where I actually have blog posts ready to be polished by the time I sit down to work on them on Saturdays. This is definitely going to be a challenge for me, because I have certain character traits that make it very hard to do things that I don’t have to do, even when I really want to. Let’s call this trait “laziness”. When you combine laziness with depression and anxiety, it would be easy to never get anything done, ever. But with enough motivation, I believe I can make this happen. Not overnight, though. There are probably going to be a few more months of random blog posts about my writing progress and other things, simply because I need to keep forcing myself to be consistent until I get to where I want to be.

Find My Fucking Voice

I know I have been doing this blogging-thing for over a year, and I know what my voice sounds like. I know how I write, I know how I talk. I know my writer-voice when it comes to my novels and short stories. It changes a little depending on exactly what I write, but the spirit of my writing-voice is consistent and feels genuinely my own. This is not the case with blogging. I write in the same tones, I write honestly and sincerely without editing myself out of my posts, but that’s not really what I mean when I say I want to finally establish my voice for this blog.

What I want – what feels lacking up until now – is giving my voice and this blog a proper purpose. I established early on that I want to write for writers, with writers, sharing the frustrations and joys of just going through your life being a writer, but I’m starting to feel like that isn’t enough, or that I could and should do more with it. I have gotten fairly comfortable writing like this, but I can’t let my comfort stop me from evolving and getting better.

The whole point of this blog is to present myself as a writer, to introduce myself and my stories to this strange, wonderful and terrifying world of The Internet, so it’s time I nailed down how exactly I want to present me. I never want to stop being honest and writing how I feel, but I have got to be more organized. I need to be consistent and yet varied enough to keep things interesting, to keep readers I already have and draw new readers I might get. I have a voice, I have something to say, I have a point of view. I  need to figure out the best way to use it through this blog. I hope the two points above might help me in this goal, because I know my voice matters, and I need to figure out the best way to use it.

So those are my vague plans for getting better at this whole blogging thing in 2018. It will be challenging and it will require some sacrifices, but who the hell ever achieved any dream without a few sacrifices? Why dream at all if you’re not willing to give up a few things?

I hope 2018 is off to a good start for the rest of you, as well. With holiday decorations coming down and the world returning to its usual state, it can be easy to forget that just because there are no twinkling lights and glittering decorations, there is still magic all around us. Try to notice that every once in a while. It’s good for you.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a novel to write.

Rain S.