Hi, I'm Angela, a girl with a blog on five different psyches:
girl,
geek,
reader,
writer,
gamer
Choose your poison ♥
I am alive! This week has been horrible with blog posts, I know, but the past week and this week has been equally horrid with being busy or sick, I did not have time to finish up the posts I was writing. There is a post tomorrow, though! And there should be posts for the week coming :)
That is all!
It’s been a month since I’ve started using an editorial calendar on Whimsical.nu to help me stay organized and motivated with blogging. It’s been four weeks, enough time for Firefox to know that I want my editorial calendar whenever I type “cal” into the address field. Enough time to get into the swing of things.
And we are definitely swinging.
I wouldn’t call it the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s quite close. Anyone who’s known me for a while online can probably tell: I’ve never blogged this regularly before. Using the editorial calendar for a month has helped me develop a (public-) writing habit, which I’ve not done for many years now. It may not be creative writing, but just having the habit back again is a good enough start.
I’ve stuck to my weekly plan: each weekday, at 10am, a post goes up on a certain category.
How soon a post is ready for scheduling really depends. I’ve had posts ready almost a week before, but I’ve also written a post right the same morning it was supposed to go up (call it an epiphany: I suddenly thought of a better topic to post about than the one I had scheduled).
For the calendar itself, I use the Editorial Calendar WordPress plugin. I’ve modified it slightly to change the colors of the table cells, to give me a visual cue of which days are for which categories (shown below).
I move posts around in the calendar by dragging them between weeks, but always never by too much. I keep post ideas as blank posts in the calendar, and keep them in the next week’s category-day for later perusal. It’s fairly quick to type in a topic for a title, add a couple notes in bullet and plain text (that’s how this entry started!), and return to it at a later date.
Two weeks onward in the Editorial Calendar
The photo above is a good example of what two weeks forward in the calendar looks like, for me. I have fairly set posts planned for the Geek, Writer, and Gamer categories in the October 4-8 week, and most of the other post ideas have been moved to the next weeks for those categories. I still have not decided on which post ideas to develop for the Girl and Reader categories here, so I have a couple of choices still up for those days.
The visual prompt of the WordPress plugin is certainly helping me focus on blogging. With a glance, I can see problem points: oh no, I still don’t have a post for the next Writer category! (which is an all-too-often occurrence here, sigh). I can see a quick overview of what topics I’ve already thought of, and pick one to write in when I have time and the inspiration to write about it.
Scheduling posts, instead of quickly posting them after they’re written, is also putting me in a less stressed-out frame of mind. (I hear planning can do that for you.) They also go out at 10am every day, which is a plus (although, well, my 10am is not the whole world’s 10am!).
As with any system, I still need to work out a couple of things. The most significant one would probably be a way to balance light and heavy posts easily. With the way I’ve set things up, there’s no easy way for me to quickly gauge a post’s “weight”. Always writing heavy, content-rich posts can be rather tiring, and honestly it should also be fairly monotonous to readers. Fun, lighter posts would definitely be a good way to break things up a little.
But I suppose that’s also one thing I need to work on: the art of making short, light posts. They sometimes seem to be the most challenging to write! After all, a content-rich post is usually something I feel relatively strongly about, enabling me to talk about it at some length (the usual challenge is: what to not-say in a post!). Lighter posts make me sometimes feel that I’m being a cop-out, or boring. A photo as a post? How interesting is that? A list of links? But how do I choose good links?
I would also like to eventually be able to post on weekends, although currently I don’t think I can handle such a rigorous blogging schedule. Just this weekend was spent writing/finishing a couple of posts–set for the whole week, and a few more days onward. An additional 2 posts/week would be a bit on the heavy side.
I’m pretty pleased that I’ve been able to integrate blogging, and the editorial calendar, into my life: this is something that’s definitely here to stay. I may tweak a couple more things about it as I work with the process: it’s a living process, something that needs to evolve: and it’s flexible enough to evolve with me.
Is this style of blogging for everyone? Probably not. More personal blogs will likely not need this kind of setup. One-man blogs might not need such a system, as well. But the organization and focus an editorial calendar provides–any editorial calendar system, whichever tool you use–certainly has its perks, and is worth a month’s look-see.
To end, here are a couple useful blog posts and resources regarding using editorial calendars for blogging–not details may be applicable but I’ve picked up ideas here and there from these:
I can’t count the number of times I’ve said that I’m “getting back into blogging” and then failing. I’d have to succeed at some point! Where that particular point is, I’ve yet to find: but recently I’ve come across various articles (starting from Smashing Magazine’s Blogging for Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides) revolving on having an editorial calendar for your blog, which have served as inspiration to train myself to write on schedule.
As a child, I used to write stories, or parts of stories, every day. That changed when I got into college, and ever since then I’ve been struggling to write. As an adult, there are so many things that get in the way: jobs, responsibilities, chores, and the fear of failure. So I either never get around to writing (non-journally writing, that is), or when I do, it feels like nothing more than a chore.
I’ve read something a long time ago, from Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer, which I haven’t really done: writing on demand, on schedule.
The important thing is that at the moment, on the dot of the moment, you are to be writing…
There is a deep inner resistance to writing which is…likely to emerge at this point…. This will begin to “look like business” to the unconscious, and the unconscious does not like these rules and regulations until it is well broken in to them;… If you consistently, doggedly, refuse to be beguiled, you will have your reward. The unconscious will suddenly give in charmingly, and begin to write gracefully and well.
- Dorothea Brande, in Becoming a Writer
Most professional writers (journalists, authors, professional bloggers, what-have-you) probably do the same thing–they have trained themselves to write on demand, to write according to a specific schedule. I’ve never really done this before, although I keep a journal I write regularly in.
It’s time to try and take this to another level, and train myself to write on schedule about other things other than my life (heh). It’s not exactly creative writing, but it’s a start!
Enter Whimsical.nu’s editorial calendar!
The current week in my editorial calendar plugin!
So that’s my blog’s calendar week, using the WordPress plugin Editorial Calendar (with the CSS slightly hacked). I’ve decided to plan out my blogging schedule, and since my blog has five main topics, they fit nicely into one week’s worth of posts (weekends kept free-for-all, but likely to be quiet unless there are time-sensitive things to be written about). Jonathan Thomas’s post at ProBlogger on How to Develop a Niche Blog Content Plan was a good read when I was coming up with this schedule.
The colors should be self-explanatory and correspond to the colors I’ve always had for my blog’s major sections:
Yes, those are very cheesy weekly names ;) I won’t be renaming my categories or anything, they’re just a cute (uh…) moniker for my blogging week. Based off from Jonathan’s post, Mondays and Fridays are light days, so I’ve reserved the Girl and Gamer posts for those days. The Writer category for Wednesday just felt right, I put Reader on Thursday because I like having a backup plan using Booking Through Thursday, and, well, Tuesday was what’s left for tech posts. ;) It’s just a nice coincidence that I found good topic-related words to pair up with the day of the week (okay, except for the Writer category).
Initially I thought of going by post type–such as a review every Wednesday and a list every Friday–but as I started to work on the calendar itself, it just made a lot more sense to do it by category as there’s less resistance: I don’t have to re-acquaint myself with a different color legend. That said, posts for each category will run the gamut of types from reviews, tutorials, and even simple photo posts.
It will be challenging to keep to the schedule and have a post for every day of the week, but a challenge I’d like to start. I already have a couple post ideas for some of the incoming weeks, and none for some categories–so it seems the challenge will come early!
As they say–it only takes two weeks to build a habit. Let’s see how far it takes before this becomes a habit for me. ;)
My blogging here is rather sporadic, something which I’m quite sad about. One reason for that is probably that I’ve grown disenchanted (again) with my layout, for all that I loved it when it was new. I’m still trying to come up with a new layout, but it isn’t easy.
I’m trying to get more into blogging, though, and I’m sure as soon as I actually decide on a new, better, more readable layout for Seasonal Plume I’ll be back in the game. (I’m actually thinking of going so far as just downloading a theme and using it… I’m trying to resist, though.) However, I do have two new “blog projects”.
The first is Frontend Friday, over at my tech blog, where I talk about various things related to frontend stuff: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and other frontend issues. I’m still trying to feel around as to what topics are interesting, so feel free to suggest.
The second is I’ve just accepted an invite from Tech Blog Philippines to be a contributor, and in time you should see a couple of posts from me on there, probably revolving mostly on things I find interesting but wouldn’t exactly fall in the realm of what’s “bloggable” in Indiscripts–I’m sure there will be some overlap, but not by much.
As for creative writing…I’ve fallen into a funk again. Sigh.
I found this article by Lorelle VanFossen on Digg a while ago, about blogging being about writing. I couldn’t agree more, although blogging and creative writing have different goals and different means of getting to those goals. As I read through her 30-item list, a good number of them called out to me, having been victim/champion of those items previously.
So now I give you my top three blogging and writing similarities, as well as my top three blogging and writing differences, given her list.
And oh, for the love of all that is good, if you’re a blogger who’s also into creative writing, please don’t blog the way you write your stories. We don’t want to hear about the scent of the roses as you step gingerly into the wide arch of the heavy door, breathing in to control your wildly thudding heart, anticipating the scene that would greet you when you lift your eyes to the…
You get the point.
Phew, seasonalplume.net (the domain) is finally back! It propagated sometime last night while I was sleeping, but I’d been too swamped in the office to comment about it. You can still see this website via the indisguise.org address, but now my real domain is back in action. I’m happy. Those two days were absolutely nerve-wracking.
But naturally those two days isn’t a complete waste: it spurred me on to re-evaluate Seasonal Plume, specifically its contents and architecture, the way it’s served (and designed). Of my three blogs, I suppose Seasonal Plume is the most “hazy” — even with tacking on the “writing and literary blog” handle to it, one might say I’ve always been trying to feel the waters and find the best Seasonal Plume reincarnation. Let’s face it: friends will read my haphazard rambling at my journal, and users of my scripts will always take a peek now and then at my scripts archive; but writing? And someone who doesn’t have 39857394562 bestsellers already published?
Those two things have been in my mind a lot more frequently over the last two months. One might say that I just need to read the 872398435 articles on “how to blog effectively” and “5872985679 tips on blogging” or whatever else the Internet spews out of its (significant) mouth; and I actually have. But I guess, coming from a time when the blogging phenomenon was juuuuust starting, I’m a little old-fashioned in the sense that I need more than just a blog in my website. A blog is a blog is a blog, but what about the content? (*hides from other bloggers*)
That’s why I kept fluctuating between a “regular-style” blog (like the Blue Semi-colons theme and the Wet Sponge theme), and a “blog-style” blog (like this one right now). That’s why I never seem to know exactly what to write here (it’s already complicated by having two other blogs after all).
The forced downtime of my domain somehow triggered a few decisions within me, and now I have an actual direction. It will take a bit of time before these soopersekrit plans actually take place, as I’m still laying everything out (plus I don’t think I should change my blog’s design just yet). I’m rather content about the decisions/plans I’ve come up with, though, so yay for that.
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