Day #12: Editorial Calendar
August 17th 2009 07:53
I've been working through the 31 Days To A Better Blog workshop, and I've reached #12. Exercise number twelve is to design an editorial calendar, in other words a posting schedule.
Being a very fluid writer and blogger, I'm not sure how well this is going to work for me. I'm going to try a couple methods and see how they go. The first is a two week alternating schedule, which I'm going to try to keep to for at least three or four weeks to see how well it works for me.
I'm very bad at following a schedule, as has been proven time and time again by my own personal scheduling before starting to blog and my various attempts at blog schedules. I'm going to try this again, though, for the sake of the exercise. If it goes well I may well have a schedule. If it goes badly, I'll try a different schedule or two until I get bored of the experiment and give up and/or until I succeed in following a plan for a month or more.
You can find the schedule that I will be starting to use when I wake up today/tomorrow (Monday August 17th in Torontonian time) at my new Google Calendar for Fictional Worlds. I've also decided to experiment with this Google Calendar thingie and see if it actually works to remind me of things better than the Facecrack calendar does.
You'll notice there's nothing planned on Sundays. Those are my Do Whatever The Hell I Want days.
We'll see how this goes.
A brief explanation of each theme:
Prompt/Exercises This should be pretty obvious. I'm making it a goal of mine to post at least one prompt or exercise a week, whether or not this schedule thing works out, because prompts are good. And so are writing exercises.
Excerpt Again, pretty simple. According to this schedule, I will be posting an excerpt of whatever I'm working on at the time once a week. This could be as short as a paragraph or as long as a thousand or two thousand words. I might cut back on this to every two weeks, or every month. I do hope to post one excerpt per month though.
Market List (5) This will be a list of five markets compiled from the various newsletters I get each week (the three free Funds For Writers newsletters being the most notable) and some that I randomly find on forums, in blog posts or via Duotrope's Digest (Link to my review of the site). Some weeks it will focus on fiction markets, other weeks on poetry markets and once in a while non-fiction markets.
On Fiction This will be an article about some aspect of fiction writing, characterization, worldbuilding, plotting, editing, whatever I feel like writing about on that day.
Updates Each update will be about what I did in terms of reading and writing during the week that's passed since the last update.
Review Post This will be either a review of a book or a website. Every two weeks should give me enough chance to finish a book, but if not (I'm reading two big books at the moment) then I'll review an author's website or some website useful to writers.
Archives This kind of post will highlight up to three old blog posts on a specific theme that I think worked well and should be remembered.
5 Great Blog Posts This will be a list of the five best blog posts I've read over the previous two weeks that are related to writing, usually on a theme of either fiction, blogging or general nonfiction but sometimes they will just be random writing posts.
List Post This will be a post with some sort of list to do with writing. Maybe a list of great books, great authors, great resources for any number of things, great online stores, writing exercises, things to do, writing challenges and/or classes, et cetera. They will usually be lists of five or ten.
There we go. Now let's see how long this lasts. I'm betting I'm not even going to make it through the first two weeks but I'm damn well going to try.
Being a very fluid writer and blogger, I'm not sure how well this is going to work for me. I'm going to try a couple methods and see how they go. The first is a two week alternating schedule, which I'm going to try to keep to for at least three or four weeks to see how well it works for me.
I'm very bad at following a schedule, as has been proven time and time again by my own personal scheduling before starting to blog and my various attempts at blog schedules. I'm going to try this again, though, for the sake of the exercise. If it goes well I may well have a schedule. If it goes badly, I'll try a different schedule or two until I get bored of the experiment and give up and/or until I succeed in following a plan for a month or more.
You can find the schedule that I will be starting to use when I wake up today/tomorrow (Monday August 17th in Torontonian time) at my new Google Calendar for Fictional Worlds. I've also decided to experiment with this Google Calendar thingie and see if it actually works to remind me of things better than the Facecrack calendar does.
You'll notice there's nothing planned on Sundays. Those are my Do Whatever The Hell I Want days.
We'll see how this goes.
A brief explanation of each theme:
Prompt/Exercises This should be pretty obvious. I'm making it a goal of mine to post at least one prompt or exercise a week, whether or not this schedule thing works out, because prompts are good. And so are writing exercises.
Excerpt Again, pretty simple. According to this schedule, I will be posting an excerpt of whatever I'm working on at the time once a week. This could be as short as a paragraph or as long as a thousand or two thousand words. I might cut back on this to every two weeks, or every month. I do hope to post one excerpt per month though.
Market List (5) This will be a list of five markets compiled from the various newsletters I get each week (the three free Funds For Writers newsletters being the most notable) and some that I randomly find on forums, in blog posts or via Duotrope's Digest (Link to my review of the site). Some weeks it will focus on fiction markets, other weeks on poetry markets and once in a while non-fiction markets.
On Fiction This will be an article about some aspect of fiction writing, characterization, worldbuilding, plotting, editing, whatever I feel like writing about on that day.
Updates Each update will be about what I did in terms of reading and writing during the week that's passed since the last update.
Review Post This will be either a review of a book or a website. Every two weeks should give me enough chance to finish a book, but if not (I'm reading two big books at the moment) then I'll review an author's website or some website useful to writers.
Archives This kind of post will highlight up to three old blog posts on a specific theme that I think worked well and should be remembered.
5 Great Blog Posts This will be a list of the five best blog posts I've read over the previous two weeks that are related to writing, usually on a theme of either fiction, blogging or general nonfiction but sometimes they will just be random writing posts.
List Post This will be a post with some sort of list to do with writing. Maybe a list of great books, great authors, great resources for any number of things, great online stores, writing exercises, things to do, writing challenges and/or classes, et cetera. They will usually be lists of five or ten.
There we go. Now let's see how long this lasts. I'm betting I'm not even going to make it through the first two weeks but I'm damn well going to try.
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