A Writer's Notebook By Molly Schlemmer

The Gunner's Daughter Articles.

VOTE

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Thinking a lot about Kyle Tran Myhre’s poem “Voting As A Fire Extinguisher” this week. Hoping we can put out the fire on Tuesday. The fascism threat isn’t going to magically disappear if Trump loses, but maybe we’ll all be able to unclench for a little bit.

One can hope, anyway.

Be sure to vote on Tuesday!

10/31/24 – Happy Halloween!

Status

Co-working with a friend today. Hoping it doesn’t start pouring with rain. I’m looking forward to handing out candy to Trick-or-Treaters tonight, and it would be a shame if they had to wear raincoats over their costumes. It snowed on Halloween once when I was a kid, and wearing your coat over your costume sucks.

Not much else to report. It’s been a quiet couple of days. Wordmakers’ #Plot4in4 starts tomorrow. I hope I’m in a good-enough place to hit the ground running. We’ll see.

You see, at this restaurant, we do small plates…

Long-Form

There’s a version of the “why writers should blog” story that is tawdry and mercenary: “Blog,” the story goes, “and you will build a brand and a platform that you can use to promote your work.”

Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.

Thank you, Cory Doctorow, for summarizing why I hate blogging so much. The pressure to “build a platform” is enormous in the writing world; gotta be posting on X/Bsky/Threads, dancing for the TikToks, importing those TikToks as Reels on Instagram, and dumping all of your worldly writing knowledge into a blog on your website. Dance, monkey, and you too will see success.

What they don’t mention is that you might do all that and still not see success. You’ll shout into the void, and the void will not answer back. The futility is disheartening.

Blogging to create the perfect SEO that will bring readers to my website (and therefore buy my as-yet nonexistent books) always bothered me. I don’t feel like any sort of writing expert, and while you can argue that I’m an expert in my stories, I’m not entirely confident in that either. There’s loads I don’t know about my stories; if I did know it, I wouldn’t be as interested in exploring them. I may have learned how to outline, but I’m a pantser at heart: the journey is in the discovery.

So, why are we here? What is this website for, if not blogging? Well, I do intend to blog, just not in an SEO-friendly way. Like Doctorow describes in the above-quoted article on The Memex Method, this blog is more Commonplace Book than polished content. It’s a place for me to dump my online brain and give you glimpses into the stories circulating in my brain.

Doctorow continues:

This is the final inversion of blogging: not just publishing before selecting, nor researching before knowing your subject — but producing to attract, rather than serve, an audience.

Maybe, just maybe, if you like what I post here you’ll be more likely to buy a book in the future.

Until then, I’ll chose how and when to shout into the void, thankyouverymuch.

10/29/24

Status

It’s an uncommonly warm day for almost November. Decided to get out of the house to do some worldbuilding for the sci-fi novels I’m planning. I need to get a lot of it done by Friday so that I can have some idea of what I’m doing for Wordmakers’ #Plot4in4 event.

The basic idea of these novels is to “fix” Star Trek, according to a list of ideas my husband and I had a few (ok, many) years ago. We love Star Treks both classic and current, but there are issues inherent in the series simply by dint of having been conceived in the 60s. Combine that with the limitations of TV budgets and timeslots and there are some things I think I can improve upon.

Anyways, it’s a beautiful sunny day and I’m sitting on a patio drinking Thai iced tea and writing. Can’t really complain.

© 2024 The Gunner's Daughter

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