Spontaneous ∂erivation

(Man, I’ve been blogging a lot lately. I don’t know why. Probably because I’m trying to think about anything else than the quiet downtime I currently have to, well, marinate in the past. Anyhoo….)

A long time ago (2.5 years, which is Forever in Internet Time) I started this blog, and I blogged about writing. I discovered that you can get a decent audience that way, provided you networked via some kind of blogging network, like Ning or something like that, so I blogged some more, despite not having a freaking clue (almost all of these posts are gone. I am so embarrassed by them).

Then I switched to blogging about blogging, which is a meta discourse snake that can really boost your website visits through the rough, especially if you manage to write a couple of nice articles that get caught up in StumbleUpon. One month I think I managed 10,000 unique visits a day. Relatively small potatoes, but bigger than tiny potatoes.

From this kind of base, you really can work yourself up. I made a goal for myself of gaining an average of new 10 feed burner subscriptions every week, a very modest goal indeed.

And then I got bored. Blogging about blogging can get repetitive after a while, and lots of other people did it better than me. This resulted in serious visit falloff as I disconnected myself from all blog networking sites (I just couldn’t keep up with some of them anymore, so it became pointless) and changed the focus of my blog. If you could call it “focus”; marrying my Kindle helped, and getting interested in the science fiction genre and more into the fantasy genre helped a lot.

I lost just about all my subscribers. And almost all my unique visits. It was rebuilding time, but this time I really didn’t have any external support. So I wrote about things that interested me, and made me happy, and this resulted in more articles where I felt the zing of my better articles from my meta-blogging days, even if they would never get Stumbled.

At some point I started blogging about more specific items. At some point Tor.com said “Hi there.” At some point I started blogging about PTSD, which I had sworn I’d never do, because I thought there was nothing that dropped all your numbers like writing about, well, very personal woes and sorrows. But I wasn’t looking for numbers anymore, was I?

I still had my web analytics software installed, of course, and my Feedburner wrapper around my RSS, so what the hell, I left them on out of curiosity.

And, gradually, ever so gradually—definitely more gradually than my meta-blogging days—the numbers came back up. These days I generally think about getting an average of 10 new feed subscribers every two months, and that’s happened somewhat regularly, but not because I’ve done much about it—I just blog about stuff that interests me now.

I do want this to be among my last blog retrospective posts for a while, because they can get boring, especially as I now am bored by meta-blogging.

One day, maybe, I’ll have a real platform with medium potatoes numbers, but it will take years, more than a decade perhaps—not just a few, as some of my former compatriots in the meta-blogging world have managed. And by then blogging may well be dead, so it all won’t matter anyways.

I have no idea what’s bringing on the current spate of entries, but they’ve all been interesting to me at least, which is more than I can say for the first months of S∂. I even have what I consider a bonsai blog now, my Tea Blog, where I barely care about hits, and just want to write it for fun.

It’s temporary, but it’s always nice to see a statistics graph that looks like this.

Much of this is directed at HTML for Dummies, Part 1. It’s got parts two and three but I never got further, which makes me feel a bit sad.

But at least I didn’t do anything flamboyantly stupid to get the hits. :)

Hello and welcome (and also welcome back if you’ve been here before!).

This site is a bit of a mixed bag at times. At the moment there are days when I post about new SF/F books in the Kindle store, days when I post thoughts about stuff I’ve read, days when I post about personal stuff that I don’t mind people reading because why else would I put them here (lots of it is traumatic, though the heavy has been more light of late), and days when it’s nothing but videos and linkspam.

This site in the past had a lot of articles about blogging, a few of which got stumbled like crazy.

To this day you’ll find that my most popular post is on the Sherlock Holmes sister site, which made it into Wikipedia as a footnote.

I am such a geek at times.

The unholy marriage of writing and blogging.

You probably don’t know that this blog used to be about blogging, not SF/F, and certainly not about the Kindle.

A couple posts from April 2008—the only two posts, in fact. It was a light month, but I was trading some 16k visits in traffic that month. These days it’s perhaps 5k a month if I’m really lucky.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen, etc etc etc.

As you may discover, these posts are full of irony, given where S∂ is now versus where it was a year ago.

April 24: Blogging for Writers: Bring Focus to Your Blog by Discovering Your Inner Authority

April 26: A Personal Discovery of Authority

However, I currently enjoy my blogging as much as I did back then. We change and all that.

When we reach October is when the real fun is going to start. Or perhaps even earlier, in July.

We change a lot in one year.

This blog has been four things in the past, and it’s still kind of four things now, but at the moment it’s mostly one thing: Fantasy and Science Fiction Mostly On the Kindle Love. Of course, it wouldn’t be my blog if I didn’t occasionally cover the other three things from time to time, but it’s nice to have found a focus that I’m happy with.

As a retrospective, I’ll give you the best of the best from the four periods in S∂’s first year as a blog.

Period the First: Spare Bits

The very first post in its entirety I’ll quote here:

Tap tap tap FEEDBACK ow.

Okay, it’s on.

Hey, are there better colors? Hmmm. No. That will have to change.

Hello there.

I’ve decided to try out a new Blogger blog. I’ve been toying with that idea for ages, but since Blogger has improved remarkably, particularly under Google, I feel comfortable enough to go ahead.

Say, the page settings are really neat, drag ‘n drop.

I might stay a while.

The next post for the day was a recipe for Chinese tonic soup.¹ Most of October was more than a little droll and unfocused. Which isn’t universally bad; for me, lack of focus makes it difficult to blog.

Period the Second: Novice Writing

I was, and am still, an idiot when it comes to fiction. Mind you, I am an idiot with potential. As far as I’m concerned, the only fiction writing entries in 2007–2008 that aren’t shaky are:

• the one about synopses, because I actually took a workshop to learn all that
• the one about strange ideas people having about writing, because it’s chestnuts² and also slightly funny
• a theory of beginnings

Everything else that isn’t, say, a writing blog recommendation or a word count declaration, should be ignored. This was sadly the rest of 2007 and the first half of 2008.

Period the Third: Meta-blogging

This overlapped with Period the Second, mostly because the article about synopses got Stumbled. I contemplated why, which got Stumbled even more. Afterwards I studied quite a bit about the medium of blogging after that, and wrote about it—blogging about blogging, or meta-blogging.

I accumulated most of my greatest hits during this period, all of which continue to bring in traffic to this day:

• 4 Principles for Packing a Punch With Unique Content
• Getting the Most Out of Entrecard³
• Looking for Love in All the Wrong Bounce Rates
• Moving From Beta Blogger, my first tight series (in 4 parts)
• HTML for Dummies, my first loose series, and sadly short; the third one has something like over 20,000 hits because of the Straight Talk About <div>

Much of the rest is a little fluffy. I might add more (these days I hack up my WordPress templates and plugins) but it’ll be technical at best, because I got quite bored with meta-blogging.

Period the Fourth: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Kindle,
and Oh By the Way Sherlock Holmes and Wodehouse

Could I be successful writing about something other than meta-blogging?

Well, yes. One fevered weekend morning, in the bath, I wrote the outline for a rather deep, perhaps manic, essay. When I got out I wrote quite a bit, and also dug into references from two canons for support. All told, 10 hours later (it’s rather longish) it was done. Then I posted it to the House, MD community LiveJournal.

A House, MD and Sherlock Holmes Special: Predicing Season Five Based On the Sherlock Holmes Canon has hit many House boards in multiple languages (including the official Fox one), blogs, journals, StumbleUpon, I think maybe even del.icio.us. Currently it’s also referenced in Wikipedia, although that’s a bit ephemeral; you never know who might wipe it out.

Questions answered in the positive.

More greatest hits today, although they are nowhere near so great as that one:

• 2008 Hugo Awards Countdown
• Thoughts on the Hugo Nominees for Best Novel
• How I Met and Married My Kindle
• A Date with the F&SF Oct/Nov All-Star Issue
• Kindle-licious on Wodehouse’s Psmith

The Future and Beyond

In another year, things will have changed again, but I think less so than in other years (I mean, I’m sure the theme will have changed by the time another revolution around the sun has been completed). I so enjoy what I’m doing now, and actually have been able to keep up the posting energy, that I’m fairly sure I’ve Found My Way. Plus my Kindle has been very supportive, and I appreciate that.

I have always loved Fantasy, and am starting to love Science Fiction. I still love Sherlock Holmes and definitely love Wodehouse. I love creating and thinking about eBooks, although I try to tone down the rabid there. I accept my love of LOLcat and PunditKitchen and that I have a life beyond the stuff I blog about.⁴

So: definitely more ‘o that to come. And maybe something else, depending on whether things work out (I am a pessimist; I think things won’t work out until they for-sures do, even if the probability of for-sures is about 99.99%).

Enuff Srsz Talk!

And now for a fun and apolitical word from the sometimes wonderful and always confabulous PunditKitchen:

1. Which I need to start making again now that fall is advancing upon us [↩]
2. Ye olde fashioned writing chestnuts that all experienced writers and editors with clue say. [↩]
3. I no longer participate, lacking the time, but it’s a nice program for beginning bloggers. [↩]
4. Just a bit. [↩]

This may interest people who know me from my meta-blogging (blogging about blogging) days. And maybe other folks who want to keep going but are at a loss as to how to keep going. I can’t really answer that for everybody, but I can tell you how I started doing the serious blogging again.

I think the way to really fall in love with something is to look deeply into the matter. My stint as a meta-blogger was a cool way to do this, as I contemplated the whys and hows of blogging, beyond the technical (although the technical did help) and into the more nebulous realm of generating great content. I looked at others in the field of meta-blogging and beyond to bloggers in other fields (like John Scalzi). I experimented with different blogging methodologies and different ways of promotion and all that.

I learned that blogging isn’t shallow. Not if you want to do it well and sustain a certain level of quality. And, of course, you have to really love the process and beat of blogging; if you don’t have that, you can’t do it. (And that’s not a bad thing at all.)

And then I stopped blogging about blogging. I was tired of it. In its own way, the niche is crowded with great bloggers and the subject is too narrow to specialize well—or at least all the niches are well-taken. I didn’t know it at the time, but I needed something less regimented, more flexible, and just fun. And at the same time not so without structure that the net was too wide.

Plus I’m into the re-inventing yourself business.

Anyways, I got a Kindle, loved it, still do, you know how it is if you’ve read this blog for a little while. Around the same time I started to love science fiction and fantasy in strangely deep ways, and I wanted to learn more about that. So, la, the best way to learn about something, where I’m concerned anyways, is to research the heck out of it and write it up for other people. Obviously S∂ needed to swim in that direction.

And while SF/F is a field chock-full of blogs, there’s so much stuff here that anybody could simply keep going. The field changes far more often than that of the meta-blogging world; having a history that goes back more than a couple decades does that. You can review books or movies (and they never end), write about themes and lists, play off from the huge number of other posts in the arena. You can even write SF/F if you so desire (and my little writer heart so desires to, except that it’s still afraid). I also create eBooks; for some reason, the ability to create a product outside of just my blog is inspirational all by itself.

Plus the writers are so freaking accessible in SF/F. You can read their blogs and stuff. They become people. The better blogs are by fun people, and that rubs off on you. Suddenly I felt like I could blog about other things than just my blog’s main theme, so long as I could write in an entertaining/elucidating fashion, so long as I could think about what I wrote instead of just writing random stuff. Not that it’s bad to write random stuff, but the best blogs have “thinky” posts amongst the lighter fare.

I learned another important thing, which is based on running, actually. Blog a lot. Or at least that’s what works for me; it’s easier for me to keep blogging if I blog every day than if I just blog once in a while, just like it’s easier for me to run if I keep running instead of slowing down for walks. Blogging often keeps my brain cells going, keeps me researching, keeps me inspired. It helps that I have a tendency to want to entertain others, for if I’ve learned anything about the web, it’s that despite the plethora of stuff out there, it’s too easy to get bored.

Combine the need to blog a lot with a field that’s freaking huge and insanely informally friendly. That’s fireworks right there.

From John Scalzi’s A Month of Writers—well, actually, just reading John Scalzi’s blog in general—I learned that you can generate a ton more material by writing about people, not just treatises on techniques or thoughts about your day or your writing. Helps if said people are outside your circle of friends, too, and if there are a lot of them related to your field who have blogs—oh look! SF/F! It’s also interesting to research other folks, because people are so different from one another. Yes, that’s kind of Captain Obvious level thinking, but you don’t see that in most blogs.

And then—I dropped the more obvious blogger networking tools. StumbleUpon I keep around, of course, because it’s so darn useful; same for Twitter, which is also utterly fascinating to watch; but I no longer think of them as solely or even mostly promotion for my blog. And EntreCard? BlogLog? Stuff that’s purely for networking purposes? For me, they got in the way (and yet for others, they inspire; again, this is not a one-size-fits-all entry). I’m glad they’re gone, and their absence gives me more time to write and interact (and I do need that time).

So at the moment, I blog for the love of my Kindle and science fiction and fantasy. I blog for the love of entertaining and removing as many moments of boredom as I can for people who are interested in what I write about. I blog because I love to blog. The amount of love is at such a level that I’ve put aside writing for blogging and feel but a faint twinge of guilt. Which is not so bad, since I get to explore the field and read like crazy and analyze like mad—and still write, after all.

Blogging makes me happy. Sometimes it drives me nuts, but far less often than it used to.

I guess my advice for people who’d like to keep blogging is: experiment and figure out what you love and don’t be afraid if it takes like months or years to figure it out. And just don’t worry about promotion—but interact with others in your field in many, many ways.

S∂ is nearing its first birthday. My blog already outlasted most blogs out there when it reached the three-month mark. And I love it very much.

Goodbye old Simplicity (Sd edition) theme! You were a good one.

And helloooo hot red Kindle Love.

By the way, if you’re stopping by for the first time, say from The Last Colony Pimp thread on Whatever, here are three entries’ worth of pimpery for various writers.

Photography: * Sandra *

Spontaneous Derivation used to be about writing. This, of course, was a great way to distract myself from actual non-blog writing, because I was still writing about writing, see? Didn’t quite work out for my temperament.

Spontaneous Derivation used to be about blogging. This worked out much better, and was a nice fit. And all was well, and got some Stumbles on a consistent basis, and that was good.

Then, someone said that the only blogs that do well are the ones about sex, blogging, and writing.

Well, I love a challenge. I love to tack into the wind, I do.

And at the same time, I realized that if I was going to write SF or Fantasy, I needed to do some research. You need, I think, to love a genre in order to write it (or sub-genre, or whatever).

And around the same time, I got a Kindle, and loved it very much. I looked around for sites about the Kindle, but mostly they were Kindle news sites and tended to repeat the same news over and over. Nowhere was a Kindle site that focused on science fiction or fantasy; or even, say, mystery; or even just the Best Mainstream Content For The Kindle. Perhaps it’s because book reviews already exist for the paper versions, and Kindle-specific content is just not as prolific—heck, that would apply for eBooks in general, not just the Kindle.

There are a few things I learned in the blogging world, and one of these was to find a niche that lets you link out, but have your blog be a unique voice in that niche. And we’re not just talking about writing style, because while that’s great, that’s also weak without the meat of content behind it. And I was always about content, not about technique.

So Spontaneous Derivation, which is not the most aptly named blog in the world for this purpose, is going to be about science fiction and fantasy content for the Kindle. Kindle news can be covered by other sites, but watching Tor, Roc, Ace, and even the more mainstream publishers as they approach the digital age and, in specific, the Kindle, is something other people are not covering.

They aren’t even covering the concerns that eBooks raise for authors—no, I’m not talking about content stealing. I’m a blogger, and that’s really old news to me; instead, I’m talking about contracts and rights; important things like the redefinition of what it means for a book to be “out of print”, at which point rights revert to the author, rather than staying indefinitely with the publisher who can claim that a digital edition left on an archive counts as “in print”. Because if I ever get published, it will be in the digital age, and it behooves me to be aware of the “new” publishing.

And, y’know, I love my Kindle.

Anyways, that’s where Sd is heading. I’m going to need a three column theme, with a widebar at the top right. I have one in mind, but it’s going to need some tweaking (all themes on this site do). Nothing like spending hours installing a theme for a special occasion.

Every once in a while I do this nutty thing where I shake up my blog. So far it appears to be in three-month cycles.

One thing I use my blog for is as research inspiration—nothing really gets me up and going to dig into something as the chance to get to write about it afterwards. For the first three months of its life, Sd was your standard writing-about-my-writing blog. The next three months after that, I switched to writing about blogging, with a focus on writing good content.

In the next three months after that, somewhere I ran head-first into the Hugo Awards.

Click here to read more »

Photography: logan.fulcher

Hi there, io9 visitors! There’s been quite a lot of you visiting the 2008 Hugo Awards Countdown, and I hope you enjoyed the series (which is going to take a finisher in the form of a small series talking about the novel nominees one by one).

You may or may not be wondering about the nature of Spontaneous Derivation, and why a blog-about-blogging is suddenly swerving into the science fiction/fantasy territory. And I’m sure some of my regular readers are wondering about this too. And both of you may be wondering about what’s to come—for after all, Spontaneous Derivation has had a sordid history of not remaining what it currently is. And the About page is sorely out of date at the time of this writing.

The reason behind the evolution of Spontaneous Derivation (such as it is) comes from a development of my understanding of the concept of the blog.

Click here to read more »