Where the Blog is Going

Two months on

So, I started the writing for this blog back in January as part of an assignment for a college class. And I had a lot of ideas about what I would write, what would be compelling content. I have a list of titles (most of which I’ve already posted) and I have this huge master list of “what people like.”

But most of that is just sitting in a notebook as I keep changing my mind, or, to put it better, I keep second guessing myself. My Sunday posts are the only ones that I am completely adamant I will continue… but even they cause me to wonder if I’m handling it right.

Plans versus Reality:

So, the original plan with the Sunday posts was to post a variety of Types of articles. It was going to be Torg Game Writeup (I run), D&D game write up (I play), Past D&D Story, RPG World Building, Character and Meta Talks. But then I wrote up the first game session of Torg and it hit nearly 8,000 words, and that was with cutting out character dialogue and using shorthand for most of the action. I try to keep my blogs at 2000 words, 2500 max, I don’t want to bore or scare away readers.

That first Torg post had to be cut into three posts and I quickly realized that if I do 1 game post a week, I could probably post every Sunday for a year and never catch up to my game at all. (I have currently just run game 12 and as of the writing of this post I have only posted halfway through game 3, in 6 weeks of posts.)

Suddenly all of those other planned posts have gone to the wayside. I mean if I pepper them in between the Game posts, will I lose some of my readers? Or perhaps breaking them up with other stories would generate more interest? It’s hard to tell.

Move them to Wednesday?

Maybe the answer is to move them to Wednesday slot… after all the Wednesday slot is meant to used for worldbuilding and advice and the craft of writing. So, a lot of those posts would make sense here.

But for some reason I keep feeling that Wednesday needs to be about novels and fiction, and even though Gaming Campaigns and World Building is handled the same way, using the same skills, I worry that perhaps my horror writing friends who are the bulk of my Wednesday readers might be turned off by my subject matter if I post them here.

Wednesday has been my best day for posting. I get three times the amount of views on a Wednesday than I do a Sunday post. Now it could be subject matter OR it could be that Sunday is a really crappy day post. I just don’t know… unless I test the waters and see what happens. Of course, then I get worried I might chase off those who are reading now.

Second Guessing

See it’s a cycle that keeps compounding.

This post is about the blogging itself and it also strays into both Novels and Gaming, so perhaps this is the test.

Do I start posting more often, or move the Sunday post to a different day?

To answer the first, as much as I have a ton of things I want to write about and talk about, I just can’t commit to scheduling three posts a week. As is I only have 1 or 2 posts in the back log ahead of the next posting. I still have papers to write for school, a novel to occasionally put some time into, a game to run (that requires hours of writing each week), and I have to work and earn a living as well. That doesn’t mean I can’t throw in random posts. (more on that in the next section).

Moving the Sunday post… I was thinking perhaps Saturday would be better, but Saturday is the day I actually run the game, and is also the main day I finish up all the writing for the game. Therefore, it kind of primes me to post the old games the next day.

Random Posts:

Above I mentioned adding random posts to the rotation. Basically, an extra unscheduled treat to add some extra flavor to what I’m doing on the regular. I have also decided to left the ban on gaming-based writing articles and the Wednesday blog will feature both writing advice, and stories about games and gaming. If I notice more love for certain posts over others then I will tailor the content to suit. The Sunday post will stay exactly as it is, though I do have some thoughts and questions about that (again see the next section below).

The random posts will probably have some gaming content to them that is not writing based, such as reviews of games, thoughts on rules systems, anecdotes of games/gaming. I still want to keep Wednesday themed to writing and creating. I also plan on putting up some historical essays (and other essays from my college classes… though I wondering about formatting on them).

The historical posts will mostly be Military History and focus on Ancient and Medieval warfare. Though I do intend to dip into a wider area of study. I also will dip into my Lit. essays from College and share some of them.

Formatting the Essays:

As you can see through all of my posts, I tend to break down the blogs into small chunks with lots of sub-headings and I occasionally throw in some pics and such to make it more visually interesting.

My Essays were not written in this way and many of them completely break my 2K word limit. I’m not so much worried about the word limit as I am about the style of writing. My blog does try have SEO and does employ a plugin that reads the post and yells at me if I DON’T have links, sub-headings, and other such.

So the question I put to you dear readers, should I post the papers as they were intended to be, or should I try to clean them up and edit them to be more blog friendly? Comments below would be appreciated.

Wrapping it up:

Ok this was a fairly short post, I have been tending toward baring my inner thoughts of late. I promise next week we’ll get back unto some writing mechanics. Either more world-building or maybe I’ll talk about Characters. Yeah, next week we’ll talk about creating characters and the various tools I’ve used to get to the end results.

See you then.