I’ve tried blogging several times without much success, so when my relentless friend and writing buddy, Bonnie Myrick, told me about WordPress’s Blogging 101 course, I immediately signed up. After all, my current blog is all about writing to fit any situation, and blogging is a situation with which I need help. You’ll see what I mean when you read the history of my blogging attempts.
Darksideduo
If you go to the Blogging 101 Commons page and check my avatar, you will see @darksideduo as my username. That name is the result of a blog that never happened beyond the signup stage. Bonnie, my above-mentioned relentless friend, and I had published a book of dark fiction titled Dark Side of the Rainbow. Advice from those who were supposed to know about self-publishing said a blog was absolutely essential to our success. However, once we signed up, we had no idea how to use the blogging tools. We lived fifty miles apart and signed up on my computer, which meant Bonnie was not present to bug me, so now all I have to show for it is a username I can’t get rid of.
Seasoned Aspirer
If I could choose a new username, Seasoned Aspirer would be it. It was the name I used for my publishing company when I published books on lulu.com. It was also the name of a blog I had on GoDaddy. It was my longest running blog but suffered from infrequent posting and lack of publicity. I started a version of Seasoned Aspirer on WordPress, but I couldn’t figure out how to transfer the GoDaddy posts to the new platform, so I had to start over. Seasoned Aspirer is now about doing things I always wanted to do–travel, get healthy, and voice my opinions on a variety of matters. My daughter recently said, “Mom, you have an opinion on everything.” She’s right, but those opinions don’t seem to be showing up on my blog. Wait! I have to write and post them.
A Spirited Journey
A Spirited Journey was a short-lived blog containing research for my 1855 historical novel. I went through GoDaddy, and when I didn’t pay the renewal fee, the contents of the blog disappeared.
Keyhole Conversations
The most successful of my blogging attempts was another partnership with relentless Bonnie. That’s because she was in charge of the design of the site and the actual posts. Keyhole Conversations was a video blog where we posted interviews with other writers. Bonnie did the interviewing and posting, I did the camera videoing, editing, and uploading to YouTube. It was a lot of fun, but I moved to Emporia, ninety miles from Bonnie’s home, so doing the video interviews was no longer viable.
Write to Fit
While the actual web address is my name, the blog name is Write to Fit. In January 2015, I retired from teaching English at a community college. Shortly before that, I published Basic Sentence Structure, my first e-book in the Write to Fit series. The second book in the series, Basic Sentence Add-Ons: Phrases was published in February. The purpose of my blog is to build relationships with my readers, answer questions about topics covered in the books, and blog about writing as a series of choices, such as the best punctuation mark, word, or sentence to fit the audience and purpose of the piece of writing. While my target audience is beginning writers and college students, I welcome those who care about writing to join me.
