Aussie Bloggers

photo credit: andyp uk

It’s almost five years ago since I started blogging. I can’t believe that I’ve kept it up for that long and that I still really love doing it.

I’ve kept a written journal of some description or another since I was 18, and I feel quite embarrassed at some of the stuff I wrote. Mind you a lot of things I wrote in a private for-my-eyes-only journal, I wouldn’t even consider writing on a public website.

I’d tampered with typing my journal back in the 1980s, printing it out and sticking it in the written journal but that was fraught with danger. What if someone from work found what I’d printed before I had a chance to collect, or what if someone found my electronic document? I think I did that once or twice before giving up.

So the written journal only tended to really happen when I was travelling or when I felt like it.

Then about six years ago Oprah.com had some sort of online journal setup, kind of like a blog I guess, and I remember thinking that it could be the way to go to get away from longhand.

Then one day I received a webreference.com newsletter which mentioned the Bloggies and I had a cruise around some of the finalists and I thought that this blogging thing could be a really good way to go. I setup a blog on Blogger or something similar and realised that this was something I wanted to do, so I ended up getting an account with Typepad. I blogged using that platform for about three years after which – wanting more control over my blogging platform – I went with self-hosted Wordpress.

When I did my first blog post, you can see (if you read it) that not much thought went into its content and when someone actually commented I nearly fell off my chair.

During the last five years my blogging has evolved enormously. Here’s how.

• I’m sure because I write a lot for my blog that my writing has improved. In fact one regular reader has commented on this. I’ve also had feedback that my blog writing style is engaging.
• I’ve met a fabulous online community of people which has enabled me to go join a blog meet in Perth, one formally and one on the side with an individual blogger. I’m sure meeting people in person strengthens online relationships.
• I also get regular comments on my blog and I wonder if I would have continued blogging without this. The validation, sympathy, good wishes – whatever – help make it worthwhile.
• It’s enabled my passion for photography to flourish. While Flickr isn’t blogging, it is social networking which blogging is a part of, and I do use my Flickr photos a lot on my blog. I’ve also met real people through a local Flickr group.
• Meeting people online has brought opportunities like this Aussie Bloggers forum and blog that I would have never otherwise heard about.
• My blog has also come to the attention of PR agencies who are looking to tap into bloggers to help market for the companies they work for. This has brought me things to try out like a mobile phone, Lego, fruit juice and DVDs. It’s therefore caused me to setup a Reviews and Giveaways section on my blog – something I’d never really thought of prior to the opportunity landing in my lap.
• I also entered my blog in the last 9rules membership round and was accepted.
• I run ads on my blog and while I don’t make much money at all it helps out with the hosting costs. It feeds my hobby and if I start earning more that wouldn’t be a problem. It also helps me give back occasionally.

The above list is probably not exhaustive and if I didn’t work nearly full-time and if I wasn’t a full-time mother and could therefore devote more time to my blog goodness knows where it could take me. A different job maybe? A girl can dream can’t she, or does it have to be a dream?

One of the most helpful tips I’ve discovered during the litany of writing courses I’ve undertaken is to write every day. Even if you’re not writing what you’re supposed to be writing (uh, yeah, about those uni assignments . . . ) writing anything can help.

The same goes for your blog. I’m not suggesting you post every day, unless you want to, but writing every day is a must.

I call it motivation momentum. When you’re writing every day, you’re motivated to write every day. You don’t fall out of the groove. How many blogs have you noticed with reduced posts these days? Yes, mine included. People took time off “writing” over Christmas and are now struggling to get back their motivation momentum.

I can sit and stare at my blog for days, watching my stats diminish by the hour, knowing that if I just wrote a post they would go back up. After a few days I throw one together and my stats rise – briefly. Then they go back down, and I’m back to square one. Clearly stats aren’t why I started my blog. I started my blog to help me focus on writing every day. The positive stats flow from that.

This desire for motivation momentum helps explain the popularity of such insanity as NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo as people struggle to gain momentum on their own. And for November I write furiously. In fact last November I wrote some 70,000 words including 3 university assignments, a 50,000 word novel and some 19 blog posts. Most days I wrote for five hours a day. At least 2 a day.

But where is this momentum now? I lost it somewhere around Christmas. The tempting distractions of shopping, parties and friends proved too much for me and now while I can sit at a computer for hours a day, my writing is virtually zero. I wrote 14 blog posts in January. Less in February. My average last year was between 20 and 25 posts a month. And here I am writing less than half that. I’ve lost my momentum.

This doesn’t just apply for writing. I lost my exercise momentum as well, somewhere around uni exams last year I stopped going to the pool to study, and never went back.

What about you? Have you lost your motivation momentum when it comes to writing, your blog, or some other part of your life? How do you get it back?

Muppets. Marionettes. Shadow puppets. Glove, finger, blacklight. You’re immediately expecting this to be about some other country don’t you? Puppets in Australia? Not likely. So I’m betting that if I told you Australia had a strong and vibrant puppetry industry, you’d probably not believe me. But we do.

When I talk to people, even in the professional theatre scene here in Melbourne, they’re always surprised to realise that there are puppet makers and performers in Australia. The funny thing is, they couldn’t be more wrong. We’re not just here; we’re large and internationally known. Australia is home to some of the best puppetry in the world. Heard of Walking with Dinosaurs? It’s a huge animatronics dinosaur display, and the puppets were built and designed by an Australian. Do you remember the cult TV show Farscape? Produced right in Homebush, Sydney, with puppeteers and builders from our own country. Ever see Richard Bradshaw on Sesame Street with his shadow puppets? Yep, another Aussie. (I’m not even mentioning a particular Aussie show that is a hit overseas… it has to do with genitalia)

Yet you never hear about the puppetry community here. You’d never know it existed. And I’m starting to change all of that.

I became interested in the art of puppetry while studying theatre at university. After graduating, I started up a small blog, really on a whim, and posted some pictures of an experimental puppet that I was building. I wanted to share with people how I made my puppets, and learn along the way. It’s been a few years now, and I’ve found out a lot. In particular, practically everyone in America who’s into puppets is online. American puppetry companies don’t just sell their products online, they perform online, teach online, everything. It made me think: where’s all our puppet blogs? Where are our puppeteers? Why aren’t they online, talking about their work?

My best guess is they’re too busy; but most Aussie puppet companies, builders and performers don’t even have their own website. To fill this gap, I started posting informational articles on my blog about where to buy puppets, or where to find a puppet show for your kid’s birthday party… I’ve collected and collated information on a range of topics, from finding a puppetry festival to where to learn about puppetry in Australia. You’d be amazed at how many people are actually out there working professionally in this craft; and even more amazed at the number of people who want to know about it. I get emails all the time asking for help, someone’s looking for materials, someone else is wanting to buy or sell a puppet…

Over the past year or so, my blog has become more than a blog. It’s become one of the few places online for Australian puppetry. I’m now one of the few Aussie puppet makers to sell parts and patterns online (hell, I’m close to being the only one!). And my site is becoming a vast resource for the overseas community too. It seems I’ve found a niche.

In March this year, Perth was home to the world’s biggest puppetry festival: a biennial event run by the oldest theatrical organisation, UNIMA. UNIMA is the puppetry union and is made up of branches around the world. Everyone who is anyone attends the biennial festival, and delegates came from South Africa, Korea, Japan, America, the UK… and of course, from around Australia. I was lucky enough to attend the festival, with a small travel grant. I was the only attendee to do a liveblog from the event, and one of only three attendees discussing it online at all (the other two were Aussies).

You wouldn’t have known that for two weeks puppeteers from around the world swamped Perth’s halls. There was barely a sign anywhere. Until open day. In the middle of the two-week event, a large free open festival was provided for, and everyone gathered to see the Million Puppet Project, the largest gathering of puppets in the world. The hope was to break the world record. (I think we did, but missed out on the million puppet mark) Students from schools, people from around the world, all submitted their puppets; all of which went to needy children afterwards. It was hot that day, but the festival was packed, with children, parents, adults, delegates and performers pouring into the Perth Concert Hall. Free shows were presented, along with workshops, displays and other activities.

It was my first time in Perth – being a Melbourne girl – and I spent the entire two weeks taking part in masterclasses, seeing shows, meeting other puppet makers, checking out exhibitions, and enjoyed all of it. I only wish more people would realise that puppetry isn’t just for kids, and isn’t just a classroom activity. We’re a vibrant and nutty bunch. We’re not muppets; we love what we do and do it well. It’s time for Australia to start accepting puppetry as an artform on the same level of traditional theatre, or of film and TV. And it’s time for Aussie puppeteers to start getting online and opening themselves up to a wider audience: we should hear more about their shows, builds and activities. Australia has some of the best puppeteers to offer. So why does no one know we exist?

I’ve written before about the blog-niche of blog fiction, and the specific troubles and travails it can involve.

(For the purposes of clarification – by blog fiction, I mean something in blog format, and containing mostly fiction. There are a lot of different definitions floating around there – mine is very
general)

Recently, I read a post by a fellow fiction writer. He was asking – why have a personal blog, as well as write fiction? While composing a long and rather windy reply, I happened upon an interesting insight.

I originally started my personal blog with the intention that it would be an adjunct to my fiction blog, read by friends, some fans of my fiction blog, and few others. Months later, the fiction blog still gets the lion’s share of my time and focus.

Guess which one’s in the Top 100 Australian Women’s Blogs list?

Yup. The sideline personal blog. Weird, huh? Not really, come to think of it. See, looking back, I think that I made a crucial but not fatal error in my logic process. I thought like a vaguely successful writer with a fan base. I’m not a vaguely successful writer. I didn’t have a fan base. And the important thing to know about fiction blogs is this – <b>most first-time visitors won’t come back</b>. The story they read – or skim – won’t be captivating enough, or it will be the wrong genre, or there’ll be a personality mismatch. On the other hand, people visit my personal blog because it’s, umm, personal, and often amusing, and then sometimes they get hooked on my fiction because it’s got the same sort of amusement factor as my personal blog. There are, no doubt, personality mismatches – but people find my personal blog
via links, or comments I’ve left, on blogs belonging to people I get along well with. Which means far fewer personality mismatches.

From this accidental experience, I’ve come up with a new theory of fan-base-creation.

The internet can be used to find people of like mind, and it’s people of like mind who are most likely to read and enjoy a person’s fiction.

There. Bleeding obvious, wasn’t it?

One warning, though. If you’re considering starting a personal blog merely to attract people to your fiction blog – think hard. It requires a genuine effort at sharing yourself – a fake exterior or a simple intellectual discussion is unlikely to help. A personal blog must be exactly that – personal – or it will hinder you more than it helps.

I’m still fairly young at 25-years-old and I only owned about one or two mobile phones before predictive text became ubiquitous in mobile devices so I didn’t really get into the whole SMS language thing with messages like “c u soon” and “wat time u ova” where saving individual letters meant shaving half the time off writing a text message. I admit I’m no master of the English language but I like to spell my words properly and completely with capital letters where appropriate and punctuation – so it’s good to see that SMS culture slowly died off with the introduction of predictive text, mobile devices with full QWERTY keyboards such as Blackberries, web-enabled devices, the availability of email on mobile devices and uptake of short message micro-blogging services such as Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk.

Why the ACT Government has only in the last year or so decided it was cute to try and use SMS language on anti-DWT (Driving While Texting) awareness signs like the “DRIVE N TXT U B NEXT” is beyond me … they missed the boat by about 10 years and is embarrassing.

I wonder how many people still use SMS language and shortcuts given that technology nowadays means its no longer necessary. From what I’ve observed people in general want their messages to be well-formed, correctly spelt and appropriately punctuated and formatted – and that applies to phone SMSs and other short messages such as those posted on Twitter.

What are your thoughts on SMS language? Is it dead? Is it cute? Does it have its place still? Was it a temporary travesty of the English language?