Sunday, May 29, 2016

Blogs, blogs and more blogs

I have had this blog and a sister blog on the history of religion  for some time now. Recently I began other blogs using Wordpress, which works better as a combination blog and website. I wasn't sure what I would do to sort out this mess of blogs. My mind does tend to disorder which, against all rational evidence, I maintain is a strength. Well, no matter, it is.

What I have decided to do is maintain my two 'blogger' blogs as places where I can and will ruminate on general aspects and thoughts about religion and writing.

My WordPress blogs will be places where I present actual works that will be published, usually as eBooks. I came to this idea after attending two online Indie Fringe festivals - one congruent with the London Book Fair and the second at Book Expo America in Chicago, with a third this year to come at the same time as the Frankfurt Book Fair.

In the first fringe festival, Nina Amir presented a session on turning a blog into a book. My daily life is such that I rarely have good blocks of time free to write. Rather I usually have 10-15 minutes here and there throughout a day. Nina Amir's session noted that if you wrote three or four blog posts a week, each running around 3-400 words, by the end of a year you would have at least a 50,000 word first draft of a book. This I can do, no matter how constrained my writing time.

This is the genesis of my idea to separate the essential functions of each blogging platform. Blogger, or blogspot, is well designed for a straight blog, but less so for functioning also as a website. WordPress works well as a website, with a blog function attached.

So..... I have several books planned for WordPress:  The Man who fell from the Sky (in the editing stage now); World Religions, Religion and Society, a book about the experience of teaching online courses, and a few poetry books.  I am also working on a novel which is nearly in its editing stage so won't appear as a blog.

Thus, this blog about writing and the writer's life, will continue but better focussed now. My History of Religion blog will also continue with ideas, thoughts and observations as they occur to me about religion and how it functions in the world.

I may cheat a little from time to time by mentioning the books I am blogging as they take shape.