Refocussing the Writing
The original aim of this blog was to show the process by which I changed from being an aspiring writer to the point where I became a professional author. The idea behind this is simple: There are many aspiring authors out there. By sharing, I hope to help and encourage others who are involved in the same activity.
Over time my personal goals have remained the same, but the methods of achieving them have changed. For instance, most of my writing these days is freelance and this is an unexpected direction for me to have taken. While I will always consider myself a “wannabe” author until my first book is published I can no longer say that I am inexperienced as a writer. So, progress has been made, but is it in the right direction?
Freelance Activities
Most of my recent activities have involved either writing “copy” for others, or developing websites – which is really also copywriting, but with me as the client. Writing copy as a freelance is actually more dependable than any other form of writing I have tried so far. Even though I feel my standard of English and grammar usage is still lacking, it is possible to make some money. The income is small, but at least it is there. It will no doubt grow over time.
I still want to be a science fiction author, but I really have no control over when this will occur. It depends on when an editor thinks my work is worthy of publishing. So, unless I want to write a blog about rejection letters received from publishers, there needs to be content produced on other subjects.
This is a Science Fiction Writing Blog, or is it?
Regular readers of this blog will know that I recently changed a number of things in order to speed up page load times and make the blog more user-friendly generally. While I was carrying this out I had a look at the blog using Google webmaster tools. This tool gives you an idea how Google sees your blog and thereby how likely it is that folks interested in the activities of an aspiring science fiction writer will find your site.
What I found out shocked me.
This site ranks best in Google for…chess clothing! OMG!
(I don’t normally use net abbreviations while writing this blog, but here it is probably for the best. What I actually said is unprintable.)
How Can Science Fiction and Chess be Confused?
So how can a science fiction writer’s blog rank best for chess clothing? Well, quite easily apparently.
I allowed myself to go off topic in two areas: I posted about the subject of chess clothing a few times and secondly I have more chess links on the site than writing links. [Note: Shortly after this post goes live I will be removing the offending links.] The reason I included them at all (before I knew better) was that I wanted to show other aspects of who I am. A pure writing blog seemed a bit one dimensional. I now realise that writing about wider areas has a strange effect on Google’s search bot. Alas, although the search algorithms in use by Google are designed by highly intelligent people, there is still no AI – it remains science fiction! 🙂
New Computer Chess Blog – Coming soon!
During recent weeks I have opened a number of new websites and so the process has become increasingly easy and straightforward. When I realised that my interest in chess was taking the site “off message”, as the politicians are fond of saying, I decided to correct it by opening a new blog site about computer chess. The cost of doing so is merely the price of a domain registration as I already pay for hosting.
This new site should mean that I can still say the things I want to on the subject of computer chess, but this blog will be better focussed on what it was originally set up to do: Detail the process of growing from a science fiction “wannabe” into a full-time, professional writer.
Of course, right now the site is merely a few lines of blue text, but then this page started life like that too.
Wish me luck.
Dave Felton
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