This is the moment of embarking.
All auspicious signs are in place.

Desirée Delgado @ Flickr

I’ve been looking for writing inspiration for a while now. It’s a habit that has fallen by the way side. In fact if you go back through the years on this blog I’d hazard a guess that the most written about topic is actually about me writing more. If it’s isn’t number one then it’s definately in the top three. So I went about looking for something to give me a nudge for something to write about every day and to be perfectly honest I found absolutely nothing online. By nothing I mean I didn’t find anything that wasn’t related to religion but in saying that all I’m looking for is a one word topic. I could have used the daily prayer book thingie that Vonnie was given last year if I could find it as all I want is a nudge. I don’t want to be sitting discussing the ins and outs of whatever passage from the bible was mentioned that day.

With that in mind what I did find was 365 Tao: Daily Meditations. I’m going to take a leaf out of Unclebear’s book and use this as a starting point. Hopefully I’ll get a post written every day but I say things like that a lot and I’m going to be very busy over the next few months so I’m making no promises!

So aside from the thoughts on starting my daily writing exercise I guess the big change is that today is the first day that I have been without work since I started my first job over 15 years ago. It’s terrifying. Let me get that out the way right from the beginning. Who would want to employ a mid-30’s guy with no degree level qualifications and no real transferable skills outwith knowledge of working for the civil service who is also dyslexic? Most folk in their right mind will run away screaming if I were to give them my CV but I have found a couple of folk that will employ me. Those two people would be my wife and I. That’s right we’re setting up our own business and hopefully very soon things will start to speed up and we’ll be well on the way to success.

I sometimes feel like I’m playing that round in Takeshi’s Castle where you have the choice of three doors and you have to run and jump through one of them. One is fake and you bounce off it ending your game, the second you can get through easily enough but someone is waiting on the other side to try and catch you and the last door has no obstacles and so is the easy route. You’ve no idea which one is which though when you try to go through it and it’s all against the clock. I have those three doors in front of me but someone has thrown away the timer. We’ve hummed and hawed over the last 15 months about this business and after a false start at the beginning of last year we’re at the stage of having chosen our door. My job now is to get up enough momentum that even if we hit the locked door we make it through to the other side.

Today has been spent recovering from last year and preparing for this year. If any of you had seen me today you would have said that I was lying and that I spend today doing dishes, cooking dinner and washing nappies. This would all have been true but it’s what was going on in my head that is important today.

I’ve found out what my problem has been with my writing output. I’ve spent the last six months trying to work out why I can’t keep my output up there where i want it and I’ve finally got to the bottom of it.

by mudpig @ Flickr

A little background first. This blog has been going for years in various formats. My Dice Bag RPG blog has been going quite strongly for just over a year. Every other blog I write for gets articles posted as and when I find something to write for them. That was until I became unwell yet again for more than a few days and my resurgence stopped dead in it’s tracks. Two months later I get back to work and I start writing again. So what am I missing? What is the reason that I cannot write at home?

I don’t have a desk anymore.

When I gave up my desktop PC in favour of a laptop I also gave up my ability to sit at home and type. I can’t comfortably sit with the laptop on my legs and type and I can’t type whilst standing at the kitchen worktop either. Basically my productivity is nil when I’m at home.

Almost all of my blogging and writing these days is done over lunch breaks in the office as I’m at a desk in an environment designed to allow me to type without much distraction. Ok ok so open plan offices aren’t really designed for that but you get the picture. I’m in the correct position to be typing so when I do actually try I manage to get some writing down on the screen. Unfortunately whilst at work I can’t research posts very well due to inane firewalls and nosy-parkers wanting to know why your looking at whatever page I happen to have open on my screen over lunch time. This basically means all my Geekdad contributions have dried up completely. I need to rectify this.

Hopefully with the building work going on in my home just now and the possibility of going back to university in 9 months means that I may actually have both the space and the need as well as the desire to have a place to write.

I think I need to go shopping for a desk.

I said it at the beginning of 2008 that I was going to seriously get my head into blogging. I meant it and despite only posting half as many entries in 2008 as I did in 2007 I’ve learned far more than I ever have on the subject.

So with that in mind 2009 is lining up to be a far more productive year. My colleagues at work have finally caught on to what I do during my lunchtimes and whilst some have been really interested others have questioned the point. It’s not as if I’m going to end up with an audience the size of say Perez Hilton or Darren Rowse over at Problogger. That’s not why I do it though. I write because I enjoy writing. I’m completely inept when it comes to written English though despite it technically being my first language. I am gradually getting better though thanks to things like this.

During my years at school I was never encouraged to write. I was told to write but thats an entirely different thing. We had the usual book reviews and structured critiques of plays but we were never encouraged to write for the sake of writing. Actually that’s a complete lie as we had a supply teacher for 3 months that did exactly that but that’s a story for another post. Other than that one teacher the only time we were allowed to just write was when it was short story time and even then we had limitations put on us. No less than 500 words and no more than 800 words put a huge limitation on anyone that wanted to just keep going with a story in their head and no matter what your chosen subject was you had to have a twist. It could be the robber getting away like Robin Hood or the unlucky gambler finally hitting big but you had to have that in. You couldn’t have more than one twist though as that wasn’t allowed and if your story didn’t have any and actually worked without it you were forced to include one or pick another subject to write about.

As the years went on I stuck to my maths, tech drawing and computing and lost almost every skill I ever gained in the English classes. So much so in fact that I had to rely on a girl in class to help me through my final round of English modules before I left school. I did the video production, editing and graphics whilst she did everything else. As it was a group mark we all passed but only just. These days though I have stories running through my heads from all the roleplay campaigns I’ve played in the past as well as those I want to play in the future. I also have the need to write on topics that interest me other than storytelling. Again it’s not my forte but I enjoy it. My wife encourages me and has gave me a huge boost by telling me exactly why she enjoys reading my writing when I put my mind to it. She says it’s like having a conversation with me as I lay things out in exactly the same way as I would when going on at length about something I care about when I talk to her. If just on person other than myself thinks that about something I’ve written then I’ve won a watch.

I don’t write for anyone but myself but I will admit to being a stat junkie but that’s more down to my years of playing computer games and having to get a higher points total than your mate. My wife has a few blogs herself so there’s a constant battle with that side of things. She has more subscribers but I get far more daily viewers… usually.

The only other piece of advice is taken from Wil Wheaton. Don’t be afraid to suck. It’s going to happen and if it does and noone reads what I have to say than so be it. As I’ve said it doesn’t get written for anyone other than myself anyway so if I get it right and people do like it then it’s something to learn from and to try and replicate in future. For every post that I get a new reader from I’ll have ten that will only ever be read by close friends and family so it’s no use it effecting my writing.

That was a bit of an aimless ramble though so I’ll leave it at that and get stuck back into tidying and coming up with a new tructure for my blogs for 2009.

I’ve never really wanted to put paid advertising on this blog. It’s the one thing I actually hate about all the amateur blogs you see on the net but I find myself joining in, all be it for different reasons.

Project Wonderful

A personal blog, unless your famous or are really good at what you do, is never going to bring in the thousands of visitors you need to make decent money from adverts. When I first started out with Project Wonderful it was in an attempt to see just how much cash these other sites are making and do you know what? They aren’t making a single thing in almost all cases. Again unless you have a large audiance noone spends more than a couple of cents on your site and whilst they add up over time most people will reinvest that money into advertising their sites with PW. Basically it works like most social network advertising projects except that you don’t have cash in your credits on ebay to make your money should you ever get enough. I think I’ve had PW on this site since February and I’ve kept it here for one reason only. It’ll pay for about a quarter of my hosting costs for the year after 12 months have gone by. Considering I pay something stupidly low for hosting as I don’t need that much you can understand why $12 in 6 months is worth keeping.

Around the time I started using PW I signed up for another site that dealt in paid links. I lucked out, I had a Google PR 3 at the time which helped, and Bacardi was paying me something like $10 a month to stick a link on my blogroll for thier new range of rum infused cakes. Then my hosting went tits up and as it was down for so long I lost the ‘contract’ and haven’t been able to get anything as good again. In fact I haven’t had anything from that company since.

Performancing Ads

Theres been alot of talk on blogs recently about Performancing Ads so like PW I thought I’d give it a go. Only just signed up for it today but its actually quite easy to setup. My only gripe is that thier Wordpress plugin really doesn’t like my install by the looks of things. It keeps messing up my admin page making moving widgets about a real hassle. Anyway you can set your prices at whatever you like for a 125×125 ad. I think I lowered mine to $1 per week per ad but I think thats still to high to actually get anyone buying anything on my blog. The other side of PA is that if you don’t have any paid ads on your site they fill the space with free ads. Now you might think this is taking liberties but for every free add you host you earn credits which allow you to then get your ad placed on someones website for free until your credits run out. How that all works when you get to the technical side of things I don’t know but hopefully we’ll see as time goes on. I’ll give it a couple of weeks at any rate.

Scribefire Quickads

One ad site that I am liking the look of so far is from the people at Scribefire. Yes those folk that make the blogging plugin for Firefox. I got onto the beta for Scribefire Quickads which is impressing me. They amalgamate several big advertising programs together and basically do all the hard work for you . All you have to do is install the plugin and your laughing. In the dim and distant past I tried out adsence and no matter what I did I could only get paid by the click. I don’t know whether its because you are effectively running the adsense ads via scribefire but I’m getting paid by the impression at about $1 per 1000 impressions. I still have only a tiny site in the grand scheme of things but in the last week I’ve made 40 cents and its getting higher every day. I reckon it will bring in more cash than PW but at a cost as the ads about 4 times the size of a PW ad. Obviously I’ve not actually been paid by this bunch yet so we’ll see how things go.

As for why I’m actually trying all this? I have a few other blogs kicking about and they get a larger audiance than my personal blog ever will. I don’t mind niche blogs advertising so why not join in and see if I can’t actually cover the entire hosting bill

And before you say anything I know they make the site look ugly but I’m working on it! You should also know that some of the links above make me your referer if you sign up. Another test of the systems if you want to think of it that way.

*Edit*

I’ve removed the Performancing Ads widget as no matter what site I go to these days every single one has the same 125×125’s. Either their link exchange isn’t working or it’s a scam so they can advertise thier site until they hit enough users to give enough adverts to everyone. Either way it takes up space I don’t have on here and with the same adverts everywhere I don’t want to look like I’m blindly following yet another trend.