Technical Topic -- Using the City

A wonderful reader wrote, asking "What sorts of resources do you use to make your cities--London and Paris, in particular--so convincing?  . . .   find your London to be almost a character in and of itself."




As to making the city part of the story . . .  I think we gotta use scenery in a dramatic sense.

When two characters are talking, we layer in lots of stuff between their dialog and internal thoughts to make 'time' pass at the correct rate.  Scenery is one of the things used as a pacing device.

When Justine is walking down the steps in the Coach House and she's really scared I put in description of what's on the walls and what the downstairs looks like so the reader can get a gut feeling of being scared along with her.  That emotional response wouldn't have time to form if I took fifty words to move her from the upstairs to outside the door where she listens to the Tuteurs. 

Likewise, when Jess and Sebastian have left Lazarus and sit looking out over the Thames, the description of the Thames spaces out realization and revelation.  Lets it  unroll slowly. 
Likewise the underground journey in Forbidden Rose is meant to make clear that the rescue attempt is a long, perilous, uncertain, process. If I just said -- "and then they spent a couple hours bumping around in the semi dark till they found ... "  -- it wouldn't let the reader absorb the emotion.

Scenery puts the characters in passing time.

 attrib esprit du sel

Scenery is also symbolic.  It has meaning.

In Forbidden Rose, that passage through the darkness is Orpheus rescuing Eurydice.  Justine going down the stairs to face a great fear is every hero picking up his sword and going forward to meet the dragon. Sebastian and Jess sit face to face and talk, while the River Thames, which is their past, (Jess' mother used to take her there; Sebastian used to scavenge the banks,) flows beside them and away, carrying their past while they reveal it to one another.

The writer needs images.  Contemporary paintings and drawings are great for this. 

But it's not just about having the images in the writer head.

I think it is a mistake to just  'travelogue' a setting.    Sure enough, we need to describe the city.  Describe it vividly.  Tell everybody what the city looks like and what the weather is and colorfuldetailslikethatthere. 

But that's not enough.  The writer has to use the setting to accomplish more than "Isn't this exotic?"  We have to make the setting tell us about the characters.  We match setting to the characters' feelings and purpose. We make setting symbolic.

We supercharge the visuals.  We make them full of feel.

Technical Topics -- Scene Breaks, Chapter Breaks and Hiatuses

Elsewhere,
folks were chatting about what a scene is and what a chapter is and how we change POV invisibly.
I made comment, and it's all written out neatly, so now I'm dragging it back to the blog to enjoy.


Starting out small and basic --
A scene is a sequence of continuous action. It's a cohesive section of writing that occurs in one consecutive period of time. Probably follows the same POV character. May have the same setting.

A scene break happens when a chapter has two or more scenes in it. The end of one scene and the start of the next is the scene break. This is marked with a hiatus.
You see this all the time without much noticing.


For instance:
Jenny puts the gun down and crosses the room to drag the body to some more convenient spot.

 (hiatus)
In the kitchen, Helen eats raisins and talks to the cook.

A hiatus is represented in a printed book by an extra empty line.There's a little space.
Except when a hiatus in a print book falls at the bottom of the page.
In that case, the book designer will put a pretty symbol there  ~ ~ ~ or ♛^♛ or whatever to show us there is a hiatus.

A hiatus is traditionally represented in the manuscript by a # centered on a line with empty lines above and below. But a hiatus can be represented by any convention the author chooses, so long as this is all clear to the editor and copyeditor.  The author can use asterixes or a note in brackets or a piece of chewing gun.

In the print book process, the copyeditor is going to get hold of that manuscript and will change whatever the author uses to mark her hiatuses with the conventional centered # mark before the manuscript goes to the book designer and onward to the printer.

An e-book probably won't use a couple empty lines to show a hiatus because this is too easy to lose in the various formats. So e-books will use something pretty to mark every hiatus. ≈^≈ ⚔⚔⚔ or ♛♛♛ or ****.

Now, Let's say you want to change POV.

A) You can change POV and stay in the same scene by using a hiatus.
You go writing along.  You want to flip to a different point of View.
You hiat.



This is simple and clear.  The downside is, it may cause a break in the action.

(You can click on any of these images to get a larger view.)

B) You can change POV by using a chapter break.  
In this use of a chapter break you stay in the same scene with no time lapse, but now you are in a different head.
This is another easy and clear on the POV front, but the feeling of interrupted action may be larger than with a hiatus.

I want to note that you can stay in the same scene and in the same POV and still lob in a chapter break.
Whoee.

The Chapter Break used in the middle of a scene may signal some change of mood or action or location or you may simply have gotten sick of the scene and want to do something -- anything -- to add excitement. A Chapter Break is less troublesome than shooting a minor character which is another alternative.

When I do my own changing POVs I'm as likely to reach for a chapter break as a hiatus.  But when I use two POVs in a scene it's likely to be a very long scene and well worthy of an interruption.

C) You can also change POV in the middle of a scene without starting a new chapter and without inserting a hiatus.
This is so exciting.
You change POV right in the scene itself with everybody watching.

It's like putting on a bathing suit under your clothes when you're sitting in your car and anyone might walk by.
You want to avoid showing the indelicate bits.

Or, in this case, you want to avoid knocking the reader over the head with the face you are doing technical stuff to vhange scenes.

This is the Hand-Off method which is one of several ways to do it.
You hand the POV from one character to the other.

Your goal is to avoid disrupting the scene and breaking the reader's fictive haze as much.
But it's really technically difficult to do this POV change inside a scene.
I've done this maybe twice.

Okay.  The stages of the hand-off ares:

1) -- we are in POV One.
2) -- we make POV One shallow.
3) -- we slide into narration that is without obvious POV for maybe 50 words.  We pick a word or an image out of the narration.
4) -- we pick up POV Two. It contains one of the words or images from the narration.
5) -- we enter  POV Two at some depth so the reader 'sees' at once that we're in POV Two.

To make this transition, it helps if POV One and POV Two are in different paragraphs.  The separating narrative  is happy in its own paragraph as well.

So, for example:

She thought, I want this. I want only this.  

Desire washed across her like a warm sea. Resistless, she let him lay her back on the stone. Magic entered the threads of her sinews, the pulse of her blood.  The domed ceiling of the crypt gathered shadows into the tracery of its design. The candles on every side wavered with the drumbeat. Dark and light wove across sweating shoulders, legs, the smooth muscles of a powerful arm, the taut plain of a belly. The chant deepened as it filled the huge space.

Etari found himself moving his lips with the words of the chant, "Gaudé, gaudé, Pirri tem. Piri tem."


What's happening here is (the numbers ref the stages above):


(1) She thought, I want this. I want only this.
 
(2) Desire washed across her like a warm sea. Resistless, she let him lay her back on the stone. Magic entered the threads of her sinews, the pulse of her blood.

(3) The domed ceiling of the crypt gathered shadows into the tracery of its design. The candles on every side wavered with the drumbeat. Dark and light wove across sweating shoulders, legs, the smooth muscles of a powerful arm, the taut plain of a belly. 

(4)  The chant deepened as it filled the huge space.

(5) Etari found himself moving his lips with the words of the chant, "Gaudé, gaudé, Pirri tem. Piri tem."
 

Technical Topic -- Being Introspective

Elsewhere, somebody says, more or less  --
My WIP is full of introspection.  I'm going overboard. 


It's good to spot this going-overboard-with-introspective problem before you disappear under the waters.

Introspection distances us from the story.
It is generally pretty boring unless the character is introspecting about how to murder someone with a can opener.
Or overthrow the government. 
Or lure somebody into bed.


This exercise is one approach to the introspection problem:

-- Make a new document of the scene.

-- Remove ALL the introspection. I mean -- just all of it.  All the internals. All the flashback.  All the philosophy and self-doubt and angst and toing-and-froing about what to do next, all the moral uncertainties.  In short, every moment the author takes the reader into the character's head.
This includes flashback and thinking about what's happening elsewhere or mulling over what just happened and roughly about anything that is not under the POV character's nose at the moment.

-- Put the internals into a separate document.

-- Nudge a bit at this stripped-down version. Can you goose up the pacing? Can you give the scene more forward momentum by adding dialog or action?

-- Move internals into dialog

Instead of him thinking 

He was so sad Connie had failed her exam. Why wouldn't she study? What was wrong with her? He felt frustrated and annoyed.

Write it out as dialog

He snapped, "Why the hell can't you study?"
"I try--"
"You failed another goddamn exam. Do you think you're going to become an architect with a bunch of C+ grades?" He kicked the chair beside the fire.
"It's not my fault."
"Bullshit it's not your fault."


You do this movement from introspection to dialog because dialog (and action) is more interesting than introspection.
Because dialog allows folks to react to all the stuff that's floating around in the POV character's head. Because the POV character gets to react back.

Actual brain contents and why we avoid introspection.

-- Now you go to the snippets of introspection you have saved in the other document and allow yourself to use a tenth of that introspection.

-- Do not re-add the rest of the introspection till the next draft. After a couple weeks away from the introspection, you will be less in love with it. The new, faster, sleeker, more-vivid story will compare favorably with the sluggish, introspective story.

The Lights of the Solstice

I posted this over at Word Wenches and forgot to put it here.

Now I'm putting it here.
Because i really do get to most things, just not very fast

So, me,  writing about the Winter Solstice.
And lights.

If you want to be picky about it, we're two days past the solstice, which was on December 21 this year, but I will just go ahead and talk about the Winter Solstice anyhow.

What is this Solstice I speak of?

Your ordinary woman in the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Centuries and in all the days right back to when women woke up and stretched and strolled out of the cave in Laxcaux, France, might watch the sunrise every morning.

Authorial intrusion here to say that I wake up every morning at sunrise because that is when the dog and cat wake up and they want my company.
They are worried if I don't get up.
They are determined.

But, anyhow, let's say our historical woman is shuffling through the farm yard to empty the chamberpots or feed the chickens. She notices the sun does not just get out of bed any old where along the horizon. When she stands on the doorstep in July, the sun is rising from that pointy pine over there.

Every morning the sun gets out of bed a little to the left of where it got up the morning before.
Not enough so's you'd notice it from one day to the next.
But enough so's you notice it over weeks and months.

In December when she drags herself out of bed and stands shivering at the door, there's the sun waking up all the way over next to the church spire.

That extreme, leftmost sunrise she sees, on December 21 or 22, is the Winter Solstice. From then on, day by day, the sunrise heads back in the other direction. Our New Year is tied to that astronomical event, being a little inexact about it.


 I go on to talk some more about the solstice in the rest of the posting, which is here

Technical Topic -- Where does the Spy Stuff Come From?

Most Excellent Reader Elizabeth asks:

"Could you talk about how you come up with all the various capers and escapades for your spies? 
All the fiddly bits that string together to make up the jobs they pull basically. 

How do you do that? How do figure out the pieces and then put them together?"


Hah!  Bit of a tough question.

Plot devices. I haz them.

One good thing is that the spy stuff is all 'plot device', really.  The stories do not hang on the outcome of any of the spy stuff, except in Forbidden Rose where the actual historical politics are important.
All this running around, doing stuff, is just plot device, That means I can plug one thing or another thing into that spot in the story.  I have something to accomplish and it doesn't much matter which 'device' I choose. 

So, for instance,  I had a spot in Spymaster's Lady where I want my heroine to escape Meeks Street.

I set up an event -- a plot device -- that makes the escape possible.

I need a plot device because it is not like my Meeks Street guys are going to go out one afternoon and leave the door open behind them.

But it could be anything, so long as it opens up Meeks Street so my heroine can escape.

I considered a bunch of possibilities. 

Sorta like this coach

I can have a coach drive by and men shoot out of it, hoping to hit somebody in the house. 
(My heroine escapes because they have loosened the bars on the windows.)

Or I could use a cat playing bagpipes

I could have some bad guy throw a satchel bomb over the side wall.   Or they leave a box of explosives at the front door as a delivery.  Or they park a wagon outside with a bomb in it.
(That would loosen the window bars but good.)

Or maybe somebody drives up a load of cobras and dumps them in the back garden

Cobra, which Adrian could have got hold of

(and everybody has to get out of the house and she escapes in the confusion.)

Or the baddies could steal Congreve rockets or fireworks and set up on the next street and lob some explosive rockets through the air.
(That makes a nice weakened spot in the house wall for the heroine to pull the bricks away and slip through.)

Or somebody could sneak up to the roof and drop a keg of gunpowder down the chimney.  Boom.
(Which blows through the bars they have blocking the chimney and the heroine is up and away through that chimney.)

There are others.

I don't have to stick to one possible caper.  I have a choice of many.
I pick the one that lets my hero and heroine do exciting things together.

And is, like, plausible.

I try out all these possibilities in my mind and toy with them and brainstorm with myself.

Gordon Riots. My answer to folks who think London wasn't violent

I go with the scenario that comes to my mind most clearly and strongly.

Where did I get the ideas for the possibilities I list above?

The coach drive-by comes to my mind from the Gordon Riots and various other riots of the period.

The satchel bomb -- I was in Paris when somebody threw one of these into a building.  Shook the glass in my windows but good. 
Cobras are in an old trunk novel I have under a bed somewhere. 
The rockets came to my mind because I like fireworks.  (I did a Word Wenches blog on period fireworks.) 
The keg of gunpowder is from the 'Infernal Machine', plot to assassinate Napoleon. 
Putting something down the chimney is from the story of how Hawker first entered Meeks Street.   

How do I figure out the details of making the 'spy stuff' happen?

Research.
And more research.
(Le sigh.)
Lotsa research.

None of that shows up in the scene, drat it, but my life is just full of finding 1800 stuff out. 

If I want my bad guys to do something as simple as arm up and go shoot into a house,
I can't do that till I ask myself --

What kind of neighborhood 'police protection' would be available at that time. 
(Short answer -- none.  Paris had police.  London didn't. That's why London had muggings and gang rapes in good neighborhoods and periodic riots.) 

Would the available neighborhood protection prevent a shooting or chase down the criminals who did it?

(No.)

What kind of weapons would be available? 
(I know more than I want to about period guns  Much more.  Ye gods, that is boring research and there is infinite scads of info.)

Would somebody be able to get hold of a bunch of guns? 
(Peace had come.  Much corruption in 1802 in the matter of army weapons.  Lots of weapons lying about in London) 

Would Frenchmen be conspicuous in London?
(It was the Peace of Amiens. Lotsa Englishmen travelling to France. Lots of traffic the other way.  London was full to the gills with Frenchmen.)

This is a metaphor for Research

How fast could they shoot? What would it sound and smell like?

(Y'know, Youtube is just a wealth of research goodness.)

What were security bars made of, how did bars get set in the windows; did London houses have bars; would a shotgun blast loosen a bar; how widely were they spaced; how much space does somebody need to climb between bars
 ...?

(Endless research.  Endless.)
And yes I really did work all the stuff out.  All the details of the 'spy stuff'.

So the long answer is above.
And the short answer is, "I dream up what should happen.  I picture it.  I spin it out of all my experience.  I blue sky it.
Then I research the details
to see if it could really happen."

Adoption in the Regency

I was doing a little research into one of the Regency staples the other day.  A girl is adopted into a noble family.

Does this actually work? I asks meself.


After looking around, I've decided,
loosely speaking -- yes. 
Strictly speaking -- no.

And isn't that helpful?

We speak loosely of 'adoption', but there's an important distinction between legally taking a child to stand in the position of a biological child with all the rights that come with that and assuming care and custody of the child in a limited way.

Until the 1920s, there was no formal legal mechanism for adopting children in Great Britain.

What you had was fostering, indenture, wardship, guardianship, apprenticeship, and various less-formal-arrangement-ships . . .  but nothing that put the child on an equal footing with children born in a marriage. 

So how did they manage the whole orphaned-child problem?

Ordinary working folk, from simple decency or from a desire for another pair of working hands, would often take in a neighbor's child when the parents died.  The local vicar might find space for another scullery maid in the kitchen.  No official legal guardianship was established, but everybody in town likely sighed in relief and went on to other problems, of which they doubtless had a plenitude.

Because if no one stepped forward to care for orphans, they 'fell upon the parish', which was a hard place to land.  The local officials might solve the problem by apprenticing them.  Unfortunately, few localities had the funds to buy children desirable places.  (One common form of charity was to leave money in one's will to buy apprenticeships for poor boys.)

This apprenticeship was a mixed bag.  For parish orphans, it might be called the poor man's guardianship.  The contract gave the master rights over the child, but also bound him to feed, clothe, care for the child, and train him or her up in a trade.  In earlier centuries, apprentices were often treated as part of the household -- an extended quasi family of Master, servants and apprentices.  Even in 1820, in Rural Rides, Cobbett could still speak of traditional farms where master and servants, dairymaids and the farmer's daughters sat down at the same table, a disparate but united household.
So some orphans got lucky.  Some, like Oliver Twist, not so much.

Looking up into the upper echelons of society --

The laws and customs of primogeniture meant that men of substance, titled or untitled, would often consider themselves responsible for a widespread group of family, friends and dependents.  They'd snabbled the property and money.  The flip side of that concentration of wealth was that they were supposed to take care of the family.  
So your average Merchant Prince or belted (why belted and how was everybody else holding up their trousers?) earl might have a pack of widows, spinsters, dotty great uncles and assorted orphans, only tenuously connected to him, land on his doorstep, expecting to be provided for. 


Remember in Heyer's Frederica . . .  our heroine applies to the 'head of the family', a very distant cousin, for assistance.   He was the winner in the big primogeniture lotto.



Another sort of fosterage was not uncommon.   Couples without children of their own would often foster a child, usually related, and raise it as their own.  The child would inherit from this couple through the will.  For instance, Jane Austen's brother Edward left his family to be fostered by a much richer cousin, Thomas Knight, and eventually inherited his estates.

And we come, finally, to three of several sorts of legal guardianship

First off were guardians in socage.  This is for heirs and heiresses of landed property.

Blackstone says, " . . . who are also called guardians by the common law.  These take place only when the minor is entitled to some estate in lands, and then by the common law the guardianship devolves upon his next of kin, to whom the inheritance cannot possibly descent ; as, where the estate descended from his father, in this case his uncle by the mother's side cannot possibly inherit this estate, and therefore shall be the guardian . For the law judges it improper to trust the person of an infant in his hands, who may be possibility become heir to him.  
           Blackstone's Commentaries




What that is saying is that if the young woman has a piece of property -- say a nice house -- her guardian will not be, for instance, the father's brother.  The custody of the child goes to the closest blood relative who could not inherit. 

Second, we have guardians by nature.  That's going to be the father, first off, and the mother if the father is dead. When the father does not explicitly appoint a guardian for a female under sixteen, the guardian was the mother.  Her guardianship extends until the girl reaches 21.  She doesn't get control of the property.  Only to the custody of the child.

And you can catch up on the rest of this posting here, at Word Wenches.

Selling vegetables in the Regency

This is sort of a pictorial posting today . . . Looking at some pictures of what a vegetable market would have looked like in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.
We can start with this Scharf painting of Covent Garden in 1825.  Covent Garden was the huge central martet of London.  By the Eighteenth Century it was sort of a combination open-air market, red light district, and raffish hang-out, which must have been interesting for everybody concerned. 
Anyhow, glancing at the picture, you'll see if contains all the elements of a fine city vegetable market.
First off, there's protection from the rain, or the occasional sun. Look up at the top of the painting.  These substantial market vendors at Covent Garden have a wooden stall with a fine, permanent substantial roof. Awnings stretch out to shelter their customers. Those are wood frames with cloth stretched across them.
Here to the right, a simpler shelter covers this fruit seller. She's set up shop under a cloth awning.
Display tables are another most desirable market feature. Tables get the goods up off the ground and present them enticingly.  Apples and green beans are where they can be seen and handled.
To the right, our fruit seller has a simple but permanent-looking and useful bench.
That table in the substantial booth in Covern Garden seems to be long boards set up on a variety of blocks and barrels that probably double as storage.

Read the rest at Word Wenches:  Here.

I'll add one more painting that didn't go into the post at Word Wenchs.  This is just for the blog followers.

Markets continued to sell into the long evening.  When the sun went down, it looks like our sturdy marketfolk kept on selling into the long summer twilight.

If you want to take your folks on a stroll through Covent Garden after the theatre, it need not be deserted.  There'll be somebody there keeping an eye on the booths.  If you want to run your heroine through there in the early morning hours, before dawn, Covent Garden will be a hub of activity, noisy, thronging with people, and reasonably well lit.

Take Down Letters

Somebody brought up DCMA letters and their intention to charge in, sword swinging,

and take down the enemy. 

I have thought about this a good bit and will now for no particular reason share my conclusions with you.

I am not fond of folks who swipe the hard work of writer and  editor.  It sticks in my craw, to use the technical term.

But if you send this site a take down notice ... and send them another take down notice six weeks later when they have reposted the illegal download ... and then send them another ... and another ...
It is all very iterative.

And, I gotta say, there are lots of sites out there ...

How much time and effort will you spend? 
How many actual $$ sales have you thereby gained?
Is this the most efficient use of your time?
Is worrying about this the most efficient use of your energy?

If you google "joanna bourne" and  "free download" you'd get about 2000 hits.

Most folk who go for these illegal downloads never actually read the books.
Most of them never would buy the book if you put sugar candy on the cover.

Some folk who illegally download you go pick up a legal book later
or recommend you to friends who are more conscientious
or suggest you to their library. 

Some folk who illegally download you give you good reviews.  (I hope.  I mean, to first steal your book and then give you a bad review seems a bit much.)

Some folk who illegally download you can't get hold of a legal copy in their own country and to them I say, "Have at."

Go into the tavern and play your songs and if somebody throws money into the hat, bless them.  If somebody listens and enjoys and walks away without contributing, that is the burden on their own back.  Don't let it be one on yours.

About the Rogue Spy publication date ...

In the comment trail, I'm asked, "When does Rogue Spy come out?"


This is what I said:

"I am typing away on the edits of the final draft of Rogue Spy right now.

I mean ... I will push the blue 'publish' button at the bottom of this little white box I'm typing in
and go get a cuppa coffee in the kitchen,
(stepping over the dog on the way,)
and come back,
(stepping over the dog again,)
and set myself down,
and start typing on Chapter Ten's edits.

Chapter Ten, btw, is where we wander off from the main plot and see what the villain is up to. NOT one of the great moments in Literature, I'm afraid.

Anyhow. What I'm saying is that I have dealt with all the IRL problems that beset me and am now working like a dog,
(a conscientious dog, not my trusty hound who sleeps 23 out of the 24 hours a day,)
and am getting close to finishing the manuscript.

Amazon has the Kindle edition ready for preorder and informs us it will be available in November 2014. Presumably that is what the publisher has told them. Also, presumably, the publisher is not committing itself to a print edition -- if any -- until it has the manuscript in its collective hot little hands.
(And who shall blame them?)

So I guess we'll have to wait till I turn in the ms and the publisher decides when and if a print edition will hit the shelves. That might be November 2014."

The writer is always the last to know ...

Captcha

Dear Folks --

I tried doing without word verification for a while.  I hate those little boxes you have to fill in.  I hate making people jump through stoopid hoops before they can talk to me.

But when I turned word verification off, I started getting three to five spams a day. 
It takes time for me to deal with that crap, and I have no time.

So I apologize for the inconvenience and hope you will be patient with me.

Jo

Technical Topic -- A Girl and her Blog

Today, I am blogging

Cat available in some other posting

on blogging
which is somewhat iterative,
like the Worm  Ouroboros.

This is a primer on blogging for the writer who doesn't know much about blogging.  If you do, you can just skip to another posting that will probably have cats in it.

(The title is a riff on Harlan Ellison's A Boy and His Dog, except that none of this is bloodthirsty or post apocalyptic and that is all to the good, says I.)

So.  What is A blog?
(I said we were starting from scratch.) 

Blog  is short for weblog. 

"the term weblog to G. Raikundalia & M. Rees, two lecturers from Bond University on the Gold Coast. The term was first used in a paper titled "Exploiting the World-Wide Web for Electronic Meeting Document Analysis and Management."  Popular use of the term Weblog as we know it today is from Jorn Barger of the Weblog Robot Wisdom (robotwisdom.com) in December 1997. Barger coined the term weblog meaning logging the Web. In 1999 programmer Peter Merholz shortened the term weblog to blog. " Webopedia


Every writer, the marketing mavens tell us, should have a website or blog or maybe even both to keep in touch with the world at large and to publicize since you cannot just shout out the nearest window and expect to be heard.


How to blog:  Lesson the First.

Let's begin with your Kindly Host:

To blog you need a host.  That is, you need a company that puts your blog on the web and saves all the old blogs in an archive where folks can get them and does the magic that translates your desires into pictures and words.  They do all the technical hard stuff so you, the writer, can not worry about it but just go write.

I use Blogger, which is one of several choices.

Look around.  This is Blogger.  The first word in the URL address uptop is 'Blogger', which is one of those subtle clues we writer folks pick up on.  Blogger is owned by Google.  They charge nothing for shaping the electrons into a blog and I have no idea how they make their money which is something I should worry about shouldn't I? 
Blogger is one of the three or four big blog-hosting companies.  Wordpress is another.  Livejournal is both a blog home and a community.

A blog on Blogger doesn't have to look like mine -- all cerebral and peaceful and blue with birds on it.  There are many 'looks'.   At the strip on the top you'll see a button that says "next blog".  Punching that will let you see a few more blogs before it runs into a dead end.  Then you can go back to my blog and do it again.

When you sign up for Blogger they'll walk you through the process of picking a template and choosing the fonts you want.  You have many choices.  You can be artistic.  You should probably expect six or ten hours getting familiar with the system and making all those choices as to how your blog is presented.


Hark -- Who Goes There?

Blogger can tell you how many people look at which of your blog postings.

This is on your Stats Page in Blogger.  How many 'hits' did you get on a particular day or for a particular post? -- Blogger can tell you.  What page did they visit just before they came to your post?  Did they google to come to your blog, and what did they google?  Were they on another site that links to one of your posts?

This stats page  is where you find out what draws the audience to your blog?   What are you, in fact, doing right?

For instance,  even though this is a writing blog, I talk about all kinds of things.  When I look at my Blogger analytics, I got folks looking at the posts on historical knitting and historical aprons.  The posts on historical underclothing are always popular.  And I have a post on where to find public domain pictures that folks consult a lot.

I mean, who knew there were apron fanciers out there?

Now, a writer creates her blog to attract folks who will buy the books.  If they've already bought the books -- and indeed that is why they are at the blog -- you want to encourage them to buy the next one or to recommend the books to their local library or their friends or both.

What should the blog creator write about?

Because you're a writer and an avid reader, maybe you want to suggest good books that you've found.  Maybe one of your blog features will be book lists or reviews.

Or there's research.  Maybe, if you do some interesting research for one of the books, you want to share that research with the readers.
Maybe you want to blog something related to the books.  Don't be shy writing about the Southern wildflowers your heroine is picking or the history of mountain cabins like the one she runs into the escape the storm. 
Folks really are interested in the nuts and bolts of the fictional world you create.


Search Engine Optimization:

SEO is a good thing, like flossing your teeth. 
Read here and here and you will know more than I do.

How Much Work Is a Blog?

Rule of thumb here ... Your blog should have new material added at least twice a week.  This doesn't have to be an 800-essay on Transylvanian wildlife.  It can be 250 words and some pictures.

Blogs love pictures.

But you do need new material.  You will not attract and hold followers if you have a 'dead' blog.
You saw those abandoned blogs as you scrolled through hitting the 'Next Blog' button a while back.   Blog after blog started and given up on.  The overwhelming majority of them have not been added to for a year.  So sad .... those are blogs that lost all the love and work put into them and went defunct.

That's why it's important to write about stuff that interests you.  So you won't get bored.       

You know about this need for new content because you just read the SEO info above.  Fresh blog stuff is harvested more actively by the 'bots.  So do short posting each time, but get the words up there.

Expect to spend an hour or two per week on a healthy, active blog.  If you are a successful writer and promote yourself a lot on the blog, rather than on a website, be prepared to spend more than that.

Smiley lion knows why you're doing a blog

Remind Me Again -- Why Am I Doing This?

Why am I doing this? is a question of general applicability and one I return to again and again.

Before you commit yourself to the time and work involved in opening a blog, ask yourself what you want out of it.

Do you like to write about wine making or the Kyber Rifles or your turtle breeding operation?   If so, your satisfaction will come from just writing.  Book sales are secondary.  Write about horses or mushroom collecting and mention your books from time to time and enjoy yourself,

Are you thinking of the blog primarily as a vehicle to promote your writing when you publish or self-publish?  Then try to pick a theme related to your books.  You write Historical Mystery -- write about famous unsolved crimes.  Write about the history of forensics.  Write about the Bow Street Runners.  Pull in an audience interested in the time and place and theme of your writing and you will attract people who will then go out and buy your fiction.

Post excerpts, talk about your ongoing writing, include outtakes ... everything you can imagine that will enrich the reader's experience of your books. 


When do I start my blog?   I'm not published yet.

It's a good idea to have your blog or website in place and active before you publish, because after you publish you will not have any time.  You should get your blog or website  up and running about the
time you're submitting your queries for the first book.

And yes, you really do need one or the other.
The readers have to know where to go to buy you, and then, where to go buy all your backlist.
Provide covers.  Provide links.

Reviewers need to know if you will give them free copies of your book to review.  Fellow bloggers need to be able to invite you to blog on their site.   Foreign publishers need to know how to get in touch with you so they can ask to buy your Italian rights.  


You keep saying 'blog or website'.  Do I need both?

The publicist at your publisher will say you need both.
And if you are self-publishing, I'd say you need both
But you can start with just one.  And you can pick.
There are advantages on both sides.

A website is more difficult and more expensive to set up.  It requires money to keep it in place and non-negligible expertise to modify it.  But a website requires very little feeding and maintenance once it's up. 

A blog is free, easy to modify, and gives you the chance to interact with readers.  It does the necessary.  It takes more work on your part.  

Will a Blog Give Me a Platform?

Well, geeze, I dunnoh. 

Okay.  Platform is good.  If you have a 'platform' you're more likely to sell that first manuscript.  More likely to get lots of money for it.  More likely to be offered glamorous speaking engagements.  More likely to hit the best seller list when the book does come out.

If you can blog with splendor and excellence and attract many followers, you may find yourself building a platform.
But then, if you can blog that well, your books are probably dynamite and you should be working on them.