Tag: About This Blog

New goal: bog every day (except Sundays)

For a long time, I’ve struggled to figure out exactly how this blog fits into everything that I do. And while, in the past couple of years, I think I’ve figured out a better way to integrate it with my other creative efforts, I still occasionally go through periods of time where this blog gets neglected, followed by periods where I struggle to come up with relevant content. Not only does this mean that the blog isn’t running as well as it should be, but it also takes energy away from my writing.

After thinking things through, I’ve decided to try out a new approach: blog every day (except Sundays) for the forseeable future. The last time I did this was probably the A to Z blogging challenge several years ago, and that turned out really well. Why not try it again?

But Joe, isn’t that going to suck up more time and energy from what you’re already doing?

Not necessarily. Writing is a muscle that gets stronger every time you exercise it, and blogging every day is one way to keep that muscle toned. Also, when something you do becomes a habit, it takes much less effort to keep up on it. 100% is easier than 99%.

But Joe, this is 2019. Blogging is dead.

I’m not entirely convinced of that, but even if it’s true, I don’t plan to shutter this blog anytime soon. Better to go all the way than to do things halfway, especially if there are benefits other than increasing my unique visitors and engagement stats. Besides, it’s not like this blog is monetized (beyond my own book pages and affiliate links, of course).

So yeah, that’s the plan. We’ll see how it turns out. I don’t expect the content to change much in the near future, but it may, especially as I figure out what needs this blog best fills. If you have any thoughts or comments, feel free to share them! I always appreciate hearing from you.

New blog design

So perhaps this wasn’t the best thing to do at 2:00 am this morning, but I downloaded the new Twenty Sixteen WordPress template and tried it out. As you can probably tell, I liked what I saw.

Specifically, I like this one because it’s a lot less busy, which probably translates well to mobile devices and tablets. Also, it makes the landing pages for my books look much cleaner. The sidebar is a lot wider, but the design is less distracting. It really puts the focus on the images, which is good, because that lets my book covers really shine.

This blog has evolved a lot over the years. It started in 2007 as just a space for me to gush as I wrote my first novel. From there, it turned into something of a public journal. When I graduated from college and started publishing, it gradually turned into something for my friends to something for my fans.

Nowadays, it’s as much of a book site as it is a blog. All of my books and stories have their own pages, complete with buy links, and connected by series and genre. The teasers in the backs of my books all link to these pages, as well as the subscription page for my email lists.

All of this has necessitated making some changes in the site’s design. I like this template, but I’ll probably play around with a couple of others before I settle on one for the long-term.

What do you guys think? Twenty Sixteen: yea or nay?

Book banner!

Over the weekend, I put together a banner for my books. The main reason was so I could use it on Twitter, but it’s probably useful for other places as well:

bookbannerIt’s kind of cool to have all my books laid out in one place—and this isn’t even all of them! It does get all the big ones, though, like Star Wanderers, Sons of the Starfarers, and the Gaia Nova series.

I’m also toying with the idea of a more minimalistic website redesign. The starry header and background are kind of cool, but they do make things look a little bit busy, especially on the book pages. Those pages serve as landing sites for the links in the backs of my books, and I want them to be as intuitive and non-busy as possible.

This blog has certainly evolved quite a bit over the years, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve further. In the meantime, I am quite pleased with this book banner.

Blogging vs. journal writing

So as you may have noticed, I generally blog a lot less nowadays than I did just a couple of years ago. That doesn’t mean I don’t blog at all, or that I don’t value keeping a blog, but it’s just not something I do as frequently as I used to. I’ve been wondering why that is—about what changed to make me blog less frequently. And I think I’ve found the answer.

Last year, one of my new year’s resolutions was to keep a detailed weekly personal journal. All of my other 2014 resolutions eventually fell by the wayside, but that was the one that I actually accomplished. In fact, towards the end of the year, I switched from keeping a weekly journal to keeping an almost daily journal. By December, I had written 169,000 words—more than four hundred pages—about the personal events in my life for the year 2014 alone.

I’ve been a journal writer ever since elementary school, but when I started this blog back in 2007, I kind of took a break from that. My reasoning at the time was that my blog was my journal, and while I recognized that there were some parts of my life that I wanted to keep private, I figured that those just weren’t worth writing about.

After living and studying in Jordan for a summer, I realized that there was value in keeping a private journal in addition to my blog, and I started up another one. But I kept it fairly infrequently, sometimes with months going by between journal entries. In 2012 when I went to Georgia, I had a lot more things happening in my life to write about (and a lot less access to the internet), so I kept it much more regularly. But then I came back to the States, and life fell back into a monotonous routine.

The thing that changed in 2014 was the realization that I wasn’t just keeping a journal for myself, but that I was keeping it for my children, grandchildren, and others who would come after. When I was a teenager, journal writing was an act of self-discovery, and for that reason it was much more private. As an adult, though, I already have a pretty firm sense of who I am, so the self-discovery is much less important. Keeping a personal historical record, though, both for myself and for my family, is much more important to me.

Even though I’m not just keeping a journal for myself anymore, there is still a lot of sensitive information in there that really shouldn’t be available for public consumption at the present time. That’s especially true now that my blog is less of a personal project than it was when I started it. Now that I’m a professional writer, I’m a lot more careful about what I post here. I still try to be honest and genuine, but I’m probably not going to blog about, say, my romantic relationships or personal spiritual experiences.

It’s weird, though, because the roles are now reversed. Back in 2007, I felt free to blog about anything but didn’t know what to write about in my journal. Now, I know exactly what sorts of things to write about in my journal (I’ve already up to 42,000 words for this year) but have no idea what to write for my blog. And that’s the main reason why I haven’t been posting quite as much.

So for those of you who do keep up with this blog, what sorts of things do you want to hear about? I’m happy to post weekly updates on my writing, though I’m worried it might get tedious after a while (contrary to popular belief, writing is one of the most boring professions on the planet). Do you want to hear more of my thoughts on current and political events? More reflections on life as an indie author? More insights about the worlds and characters in my books? More tvtropes?

This blog is not going anywhere, so don’t worry about that. But it’s going to change as I figure out exactly what I want to use it for.

1000 posts and counting

1000dollars
Not quite the same, but we’ll run with it anyway.

According to my WordPress dashboard, this is the 1,000th post on this blog.  I was going to hold off and do something big and momentous for the occasion, but then I figured it would be better to do a quick footnote and get on with the regular program.

Nine hundred ninety nine blog posts ago, I was a college student at BYU who had just decided to write my first novel instead of a massive Final Fantasy VI fanfic.  The year was 2007, I had a bunch of unfinished novels and stories left over from high school, but I’d never actually finished anything.  I started this blog so that my writing friends could keep me honest.

If I could have seen myself now, I probably would have thought that I’m crazy (I think I got those verb tenses right…).  Back in 2007, writing was still a hobby.  I had dreams of turning it into something a little bit more, but I never intended to try and make it my full time career–though if you’d asked me what I wanted to do for a career, I couldn’t have given you an answer.

A thousand blog posts from now, where will I be?  Married, probably, with a couple of kids (or at least one on the way).  Hopefully by then, I’ll have turned this writing dream into a full time career–heck, I’m not all that far from making it happen right now.

The 2013 me hopes that I’ll be living somewhere exotic, having an extended overseas adventure with my lovely wife.  But the truth is that I’ll probably be settled down somewhere, trying to pay off a house and raise a family the responsible way.  If that’s the case, I’ll probably look back on my 2013 self and think he’s crazy.

But hey, who knows what the future will bring?

One thing that’s almost certainly true is that I’ll still be blogging.  I don’t just blog to promote my books, or to build my “platform” (oh how I hate that word), or anything slimy like that.  I’ve been blogging since before I decided to turn this writing thing into a career, and I keep on doing it because I love doing it.  Because really, how in the heck can you get to a thousand of anything without loving it?

On that note, I should add that I’ve signed up for the Blogging from A to Z Challenge for the month of April.  Every day (except Sundays), I’ll do a post that starts with a different letter of the alphabet, starting at A and going down to Z.  My theme is going to be things I love about science fiction and fantasy, and it’s going to include a number of common tropes.  It’s going to be fun!

So yeah, here’s to the first thousand posts on this blog.  It certainly won’t be the last! 🙂

New theme

Hey guys, I decided to update my theme to make it a little less cluttered and easier to read.  What do you think?

A lot of the stuff in the sidebar seemed rather useless, so I got rid of everything but the bare essentials (book links, email newsletter, progress bars) and the visitor map.  The header images are from my book covers–they should cycle randomly.

At first, I thought I’d keep the tag splash, but it didn’t seem to fit with the word sizes.  Not sure if I should bring it back or not.  And as for the categories and archives, I’m not sure whether I should keep those somewhere or just get rid of them.

I like this design a lot so far, but I think it’s kind of annoying that the tags and categories are listed at the top of the blog post, instead of at the bottom.  I’ll see what I can do to change that.  I don’t want to tweak the actual theme files if I can avoid it, since they seem to update every now and then and when they do, all the modifications are lost.

I’ll probably make a few minor changes over the next couple of days, until I get it where I want it.  If you have any thoughts or feedback, please let me know.  Thanks!

Ira Glass on storytelling

I just listened to this awesome presentation by Ira Glass, host of This American Life, on the art of storytelling and narrative, and I wanted to share it because it’s that good. 

If you haven’t ever heard of This American Life before, do yourself a favor and check it out.  You may or may not love it, but it’s one of the best produced radio shows out there, with fascinating stories from all walks of life that will completely blow you away.  My favorite is probably the one about the department of the LAPD that exists entirely to identify the next of kin of people who live and die alone–and how many people in this world have essentially no connections with the people around them.  It was an incredibly sad and incredibly moving story.

Anyhow, Ira makes some very good points about how stories work, and how we as humans are wired to see the world around us in terms of story.  It’s not enough to simply convey facts–you have to hook your audience by making them feel emotionally involved, and creating suspense by giving them the sense that the events in your story are leading up to something.

He finishes the lecture by recounting the basic frame story of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights: how Scheherazade saves the kingdom from the sultan’s madness through the power of story.  It’s a wonderful tale, one that has a lot of bearing on why we write and why fiction matters.

That’s one of the reasons why I decided to name this blog “One Thousand and One Parsecs”; it implies a combination of the magic of the Arabian Nights with the science fiction elements that I love so much. Like Scheherazade, I hope to tell stories that have the power to transform individuals and ultimately change the world for better.

That’s enough from me. Here’s Ira Glass:

How’s my new blog template?

It’s up!  What do you think?

I especially like the sidebar layout, with the featured item on top and the double sidebars below.  I think I’m going to put all my promotional stuff (books, social networks) on the right sidebar, with all the blog stuff (tags, archives, recent comments, blogroll, etc) on the left.

I’m not so sure about the Current Projects bar, though.  Does it look good on the left, or should I put it on the right, above my books?  I don’t want the sidebar to look too busy, but at the same time I don’t want to push my books too far down from the top.

I made a few tweaks to the color scheme, though there will probably be a few more kinks to work out in that area.  The black text on white is a radical departure from the previous template, which is going to take a while for me to get used to.  However, now that my blogging goals have shifted from personal to more professional, I think it’s a move in the right direction.

Things I’d like to change but don’t know how:

  • The blog header font.  I’d like to go back to Courier New small caps, like the old one.  Every time I try to tweak the CSS stylesheet, though, nothing I do seems to work.
  • Font size for pages and categories (pages are above the blog header, categories are below). Jerle pointed out that they could be larger, and I agree with him.
  • Background color for the child category pages.  They blend in too much with the current shade of gray.
  • The favicon.  I don’t want the generic WordPress logo, I want to make something unique to this site (like the eye).

That’s about all I can think of right now, but I’m definitely open to any of your suggestions.  My goal is to turn this blog into a home site for my writing career, where readers can connect with me and easily find my stuff.

Also, if you have any cool ideas for my Error! 404 page, please let me know.  Those are always fun.

Fighting for a Homeland

For the past few weeks, I’ve been brainstorming ideas for my next big novel project.  One of the ways I’ve been doing this is to by trawling tvtropes and putting together a mashup of the story tropes I’d like to play with.

By far, the one that’s struck me the most is Fighting for a Homeland.  This is basically when a band of displaced warriors is wandering the Earth, trying to find their own promised land.  There are a lot of examples of this on the tropes page, but the coolest one is probably this from real life:

The first Czech legion, after World War one. Their country was then merely a province of Austria-Hungary, who started the war and teamed up with the Germans. The Czechs had very little reason to fight for them, and surrendered to the opposing Russians whenever they could. Through a lot of political scheming, the Russians were convinced to raise a Czech legion of 60,000 men to fight against the Austrians.

Then the Revolution broke out, and with the peace treaty between Russia and Austria, and the vicious warfare and politicking in Russia, they would not get their goal, an independent Czechia, so they turned to the western allies. They could not leave the country through the western side, so the allies chose to rendezvous with them in the port of Vladivostok, on the other side of Russia.

They crossed the country in three years, using the railways that they hijacked, joined with the Russian White Army (anti-communists) and the allies, stole the Tsar’s gold, traded it for free passage to Vladivostok with the advancing reds when they lost, and safely sailed home, to the newly founded country of Czechoslovakia.

Isn’t that friggin awesome?  What’s even cooler is that I might have ancestors who fought in the legion.  My great grandfather emmigrated from Moravia right around that time, perhaps a little before.  Man, if I ever write a historical novel…

But yeah, the trope almost perfectly characterizes Danica and her band of mercenaries, who feature prominently in Bringing Stella Home.  Their homeworld, Tajjur V, was fighting for independence right before the Hameji conquests began, and the New Gaian Empire put down the rebellion rather forcibly.  Later, when the system fell to the Hameji, their homeworld was bombarded and slagged into oblivion, leaving them with nowhere to call their own.

Long story short, the story of the Czech Legions and their epic journey across Siberia has totally inspired me for this next novel.  I’m going to make Roman (Danica’s NCO) a major viewpoint character, bring back the old mercenary team, throw in a few new ones (including a character from Desert Stars)…man, it’s going to be AWESOME!

In other news, “Decision LZ1527” and “From the Ice Incarnate” are both available for free from Diesel Ebooks.  Genesis Earth is also up there too, so if you feel inclined to post a review, I would certainly appreciate it!

Also, if you REALLY want to help, drop by the Amazon pages for “Decision LZ1527” and “From the Ice Incarnate” and fill out the little form where it says “tell us about a lower price.” I’m trying to get Amazon to offer my short stories for free, but the only way to do that is to make it free somewhere else and get Amazon to price match.

Hopefully, by making them free it will get me more exposure and drive more interest in the novels.  Moses Siregar did a guest post on that just this morning.

Also, I think I’ve found a new template that might work well for this blog.  What do you think?  Obviously, I would tweak the background and header (and possibly the color scheme as well). The main thing is that it has multiple sidebars, which will make more room for my books.  But if you have a better suggestion, please let me know.