Just saw this article at Locus Magazine regarding their new Clarion reality show. I have to say, their death match concept intrigues me.

Bowing to hard economic times, Clarions East and West1 have joined forces under the auspices of newly appointed director Dave Itzkoff and signed with the SyFy channel to participate in a new reality show called “Clarion Call: “Fight to Write.” Effective immediately, both workshops will be scaled back to three weeks and 15 students each. At the end of every day of shooting, one student will be eliminated. After the first 15 episodes have aired, the survivors of both Clarions will take each other on in a cage match televised live by SyFy and their new affiliate Shyte TV.

This has inspired me.

I’m going to borrow a video camera from my good friend Andrew LeBlanc and shoot a guerrilla-style Clarion West reality show, then upload it here (and by extension YouTube). Though Andy seems to think differently, I kind of believe a “battle to the death” style show starring writers would be boring as hell, but an informative documentary about a bunch of budding writers on the cusp of succeeding might be fun. And, as far as I’m aware, it’s never been done before.

So all you Clarionites, get ready to mug, cause you’re going to be on camera!

Tags: Clarion West, Locus

I sent this in response to a post by David Farland called “Nobody Wants to Read Your Blog”. Farland runs an e-mail list which is simply awesome and highly recommended (Comment if you want info on how to subscribe to his list). This is a list of helpful tips for writers looking to draw people to their blogs

Anyways, here it is:

I’ve studied blogs fairly extensively because I create them in my night job as a webdesigner. Here’s a brief list of things that I tell clients.

• Write regularly. Not everyone subscribes to your blog via e-mail or a feedreader. If you publish content, publish it on a specific day of the week (say, Friday). That way people will know when to look for new content. It’s a truism that the more articles you write, the more your blog will get read. All the top blogs (Boing Boing, Whatever, Engaget) post upwards of five times a day. You don’t have to write that much. Aim for once a week, and then gradually aim for more.
  
• Become an authority. Concentrate on a few topics, and become a resource for them. For example, on my blog www.withoutreallytrying.com, I’ve added a page which centralizes all of the important Writers of the Future related articles and resources I could find on the web, and I am doing the same thing for Clarion West. When people search for these topics, I show up on page three of a google search (and climbing).
• Have a hook. A hook is something that will draw people to your site (for me, it’s a win in Writers of the Future, but it could be anything that separates you from the herd). People just don’t want to read about your recent rejections, or even your semi-pro sales–more specifically, it’s not that they don’t want to read about it, it’s just that there’s so many places they can already read about rejection, that they don’t need to go to your blog.
• Become part of a community. Go to well read blogs like Whatever or Jeff Vandermeer’s blog, or even Mamatas’ Nihilistic Kid and make intelligent comments on a regular basis. People will click on your name and follow it back to your site if they like what you have to say on these blogs.
• SEO your blog (and make it look appealing).
  • No ugly colours, and at least one picture with every article.
  • Exchange links with every author friend you know.
  • Make it easy to subscribe to your blog with a “Call to Action” right out front (a subscribe button for instance).
  • Get listed on Technorati and other big directories like DMoz. Make sure Google and Yahoo can find your blog.
  • Enlist a site designer to create a sitemap and add meta tags with keywords you want to target, as well as making sure your blog is pinging the right directories.
  • If you’re on WordPress, you can add widgets that rebroadcast your content to your LiveJournal, Facebook, and even twitter accounts.
  • Set up some Google Alerts (they’re free) on your name, and your blog’s name so that you’ll be notified immediately when someone posts about you, so that you can respond professionally and courteously (that’s key. Flame wars kill reputations and sometimes careers).

Now, it’s important to note that if your blog takes away from your writing time, DON’T BLOG. Always remember that the goal is to have your blog work for you, not the other way around. If you’re not writing, you’re not getting paid. This is the reason I haven’t done an all out push on my own blog. I’m too busy writing a book!

Tags: blogging

It seems that my re-introduction to blogging post is generating quite the discussion.

In that post, I basically said that it was a waste of time for new writers to keep a blog, and that they should focus on writing fiction instead. Since I’ve stirred up a little controversy, I’d like to elaborate:

Writers are basically small business owners with a product to sell: their words. A blog should really be a sales tool, and I think even beginning writers acknowledge this when they say they blog to “get their name out there”. However, if you’re writing short fiction (or have written an unpublished novel), you are not selling to the public (the people who will be reading your blog), you are selling to editors (who very likely do not read your blog). In any case, a cleverly written blog post will not make them accept a poorly written story. Therefore, writing a great story will sell your work more than writing a better blog. QED.

However, if you DO have a product to sell to the public, as Robert Swartwood pointed out in the comments, now it makes sense to keep a blog. The target audiences are the same. People might read your blog, like your writing, and go out and buy your book. This has been demonstrated time and again by John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, and Charles Stross (of course, it helps that they all wrote terrific books).

So, from a business point of view, new authors should not write blogs and newly-published authors with novels to sell should.

From a personal point of view, as Deven Atkinson and Suanne Warr mentioned in the comments, if you like keeping a diary, by all means put it on the net. Just be honest with yourself about how much it will really impact your career.

Tags: Deven Atkinson, Robert Swartwood, Suanne Warr

This blog will now post entries automatically to my Live Journal feed.

I’ve been annoyed for quite some time that I had to have an LJ account to post to any blog on live Journal. If people followed my link, they came to a dead LJ page instead of to WordPress. I’m happy to say that’s no longer a problem.

Head on over to http://jlapp.livejournal.com/ if you’d like to see the result of a cross post. Worth checking out.

Tags: Cross posting, Live Journal, Wordpress

Hey guys,

Music to write by: “River of Deceit“ by Mad Season

Welcome to the first in a two-part series on Writing.com. There’s a lot of information to cover on this massive site, so I thought I’d break up the post into one section that details the advantages of using Writing.com’s services, and a second post detailing the negatives. (If you missed the pun in the title, I’ll give you a hint: “Pros” = “Prose”. hahaha…I kill me…).

Writing.com is a massive website that provides a lot of resources for a writer free of charge. It’s a meeting place for new writers and the largest critique group in the world.

Writing.com’s website centers around a writer’s “portfolio”, which is a place for writers to publicly post their work and invite reviews. You can using “Gift Points” to entice other members of the site into giving you reviews of your work (Gift Points are purchased or given as payment by writers you review) . These are certainly not professional quality reviews like you might find on Tangent Online. Usually these are short little shots of encouragement, but sometimes a writer will write you an essay on how to improve your work. Unfortunately, as with any site, Writing.com has their share of trolls, but it’s pretty easy to ignore them.

One of the services that I found most useful was the variety of genre-specific newsletters that get sent to your Writing.com inbox every week. Though these newsletters are often written by amateurs, often they contain valuable tips on how to improve your craft and find markets (much as this website does, but without your charming narrator). Some of the latest newsletter subjects have been “Hero’s Journey – The Belly of the Whale”, “Creating the Perfect Victim”, and “Dealing with Rejection”. There’s a newletter for every genre, including fantasy, mystery, horror, …etc. I’d recommend keeping the number of newsletters you sign up for low, or the reading can get a little intense.

Every newsletter, the editor posts their “picks”, which are often just stories that authors have sent them with a “please put this in your newsletter” note. This is a great way to put your stories in front of a lot of eyes and get some valuable feedback from other readers. Be warned, an “editor’s pick” means nothing, so don’t try to use it as a writing credit or even a good sign about the quality of your story, but it is great exposure.

Other activites include forums to participate in, crossword, games, and contests, so if the two features I mentioned above don’t appeal, don’t write the site off. You can get a base membership to the site for free, so I suggest you check it out.

If you thought this post read like an ad, tune in next post for a scathing critique of Writing.com. It’s sure to be dripping with bile, swimming in sarcasm, and rife with righteous outrage. You don’t want to miss that, do you? Do you? I thought not! See you next post!