Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Blog goals, life goals

Things I'd like to do with my blog:
  1. Learn how to post book covers on my blog like I can on MySpace so I can have a stack of "tiles" that represents my reading pile or what I've read so far this year.
  2. Learn how to make an active link with html. For instance, have a line that says, "If you want to buy my book, click here" and the words click here are the underlined link. That's cool.
  3. Try having a guest blogger. Preferably one of my favorite authors.
  4. Settle on a bio that reveals my goofy, obsessive, lovable self. I find bios as difficult to write as cover letters. Hopefully, I'll get over that someday soon.
  5. Occasionally post a scene from one of my WIPs. I'm hesitant to do so because of publishing rights. Publishers want the work to be unpublished and to not have been read by more than X amount of people. If portions of it are on the Internet, any number of people could have read it already. I think excerpts must be okay, though, because I see a lot of them on writer blogs. But it feels odd to always talk about my writing on my blog and never share any of it.

This time of year, my thoughts gravitate toward orderliness and organization. Perhaps it's from spending so much time indoors? This year I've taken the orderliness and organization to heart and decided to eliminate activities that drain my energy or rob me of my writing time.

I'll let you know how that works.

3 comments:

CJ said...

Good luck!

And I'd love to read an excerpt but I realize you do need to be careful.

Let me know if you figure out how to eliminate all of the distractions. I can never do it.

cjh

Madison Leigh said...

I believe thirteen lines is the magic number that you can post with absolutely no worries, mate. Big name writers usually have their blogs endorsed by their publishers or agents, who set the rules for that particular author or even book; they know the book will sell anyway, even if people do read it (and in that case, the excerpts actually help to sell the book. but the dynamics are different for someone who has only been published very little so far). But if you do not have an agent or publisher, and you post something, the agent/publisher that you query might not want to take the chance that people will read the page of writing that you put up and be turned off by it, and not give your book a chance. I just read an article about this, I'll let you know if I find it again.

I'm there with cj though. I think my life IS one big distraction.

elysabeth said...

setting your html links is easy to do - I found the nice little set up on Criminal Brief - http://criminalbrief.com/posting.htm - go to the bottom of the page where the easy instructions are for using the html link thing like you want - E :)