writingrobin

So I was tagged to do this by River and I thought, why not? This could be a good starting point for this blog where I haven’t written anything yet!

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Oh gosh, I’ve been writing online in some form or another since the time immemorial. Gather round young ‘uns, I remember the days when you had to built your own Geocities website and you could have spinny glitterly logos that surrounded images of whatever your particular craze was at that time. People built their own social networks and it was good. Well mostly good...you still got weirdos (not the good kind) and people up to no good. But it was a simpler time. What was the question? Oh yeah, I suppose I’ve been writing online for many different reasons. Sharing art, sharing angsty teen diary entries, making new friends and sharing interests. I don’t think we even called it blogging back then. I was on LiveJournal, DeadJournal, Blogger, Tumblr and all the other cool places. Then Facebook supplanted MySpace and it all started to go a bit sideways.

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why did you choose it?

Currently I’m using write.as, predominantly because I wanted to move away from Big Company Drama and shitty AI policies. I know that by putting my work out there it’ll almost definitely be scraped and while that really gets my goat, I feel there’s something different going on there than a company you’ve trusted for years suddenly turning on an AI function without really asking first. I’ve been sitting on my write.as account for a little bit too long so I’m appreciative of these prompts to get me actually doing something. Dunno why I’m treating write.as as a shiny new notebook I’m afraid to write in.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yep, mentioned a few of them above but my biggie that I was fully committed to for years and used for personal and professional stuff was WordPress. Always recommended it to friends and such. But not anymore, it’s just gone so corporate and fixating on monetising content instead of being what it was good at – a decent and simple means of hosting a space to write. Ah well, their loss.

How do you write your posts?

Well I used to throw caution to the wind and just write stuff out in whatever text box/editor function was available to me but after a few accidental refreshes and internet connections dropping out, I’m writing this in LibreOffice before doing a good ol’ copy & paste job into write.as. The reformatting might be a pain but worth it. [Reader, it was indeed a pain.]

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Now that is a question. I often get inspired to write when I experience a cool thing or a frustrating thing and I just want to pour my thoughts out onto a digital page. But I’ve found that lately that has steered more towards the angry posting and any blogging becoming a bit of a proxy for a really long rant on some unnamed mainstream social media platform. So, let’s not do that.

If I’m being honest, the thing that is inspiring me most to write these days is getting back into writing fiction and having different scenes or characters pop into my head as I walk about. I’ve had to get a notebook just so I can jot them down as as soon as I’ve thought of them, they start to sneak away again. I’m hoping I will start to share some of those writings on here in a more regular fashion because I like to write. I’ve always enjoyed writing and used to do it loads as a kid but then fell out of it. That’s probably what doing an English degree will do to you.

Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer?

I think with any conversational or just sharing-my-thoughts, I tend to hit publish. But with anything else I’ll definitely let it percolate a bit. With my fiction, I do tend to do a big writing splurge and then do some light editing before letting it sit before coming back to it. I don’t often make any big changes but I also just like to leave stuff to breath, at least for a while.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I haven’t got one yet! I’ve been proud of a lot of my writing but so far, I have yet to write the best blog post ever on here.

Any future plans for the blog?

Just write little and often. I don’t want to say regularly because I know my own limits so little and often sounds good.

Who will participate next?

Ooh...I don’t really know and don’t want to pressure folks so if you (yes! You! Right there!) want to pick this up, then please go for it. Just let me know what you did as a result of my attempt because sharing is caring...or something like that! x