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Sunday, January 17, 2010

Blog Housekeeping

Le Stiratrici--Carlo Cressini-1864-1938 I’ve been thinking about 2010 plans for my blog and there were a couple of ideas I had for guest posts this year. Also, I wanted to update my bloglists in the sidebar (which is always a work-in-progress), and so I’m working on that in the next few days, too.

1)I’ve been interested in hosting guest posts on different series of topics. There has been some interest in writing processes lately, and I’m always really interested in other people’s ideas on the subject.

What I thought I’d do is to open it up to guest bloggers. What’s your writing process? And to make the series run more logically, I think it would be great to divide it up into: Prewriting (What you do to prepare.) This could include brainstorming, research, reading writing reference books, how you decided on your genre, finding and refining your original idea, and—if you do it—outlining or storyboarding. Or anything else you do to prepare for writing.

Writing (The actual process.) This could include how you schedule it into your day, what your writing goal is, how you develop characters or plot, etc. Do you start at the beginning? Do you hop around as you write? Or you can write about any other part of your writing process.

Revision. Do you revise as you go along? Do you revise after your first draft is done? Do you revise for grammar and spelling errors first or for global changes like more character depth, etc. Do you mostly reword during revisions, or do you slash out extra verbiage? Do you find that sometimes you need to add text? You can also write anything at all about your revision process.

I’d like to have them run on Fridays. It doesn’t matter if we get 5 people writing on pre-writing and then 8 people writing on writing, and 10 writing on revision. That will work out fine because we all have different approaches.

You can include links to your blog or website, pictures, etc.

If you’re interested, please email me at elizabethsguestpost@gmail.com and let me know which part of the writing process you’re interested in covering. I’ll try arranging them in order—first prewriting, then writing, then revision. I’ll make sure the posts are Tweeted and out on Facebook, etc.

I’ll email you back to work out the details and date for your post to run. It might take me a few days to work it out (and I’m under a revision deadline right now), so bear with me. :) It will probably be next Friday (Jan. 22) that I manage to launch the series.

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2)Also, if you have a new release coming out this year (and I know a couple of you definitely will) then I’m open to guest posts with book covers, buy buttons, and author photos. Let me know your release month and I’ll get it set up. Again, if you could shoot me an email at the above address.

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3)Finally, I’m doing some bloggy housekeeping. If you’re a blogger and read “Mystery Writing is Murder,” is your blog in my blogroll in the sidebar? If not, let me know in the comments and I’m happy to link up to you. If you lurk—no problem! I’m a lurker myself, so feel free to pipe up once and return to lurking if you’d like. It’s just that sometimes I think my linking falls through the cracks, and I don’t want to miss anyone.

Thanks everyone!