Tag Archives: blog writing

About Blogging

Posted on by Steve Higgins

It’s always nice to see my regular post published on a Saturday at 10am but almost as soon as it goes out into the world of the internet the first thing I think about is what shall I do next?

Well, the next step is to try and plug the post everywhere I can think of so this post goes out on Facebook, on X, on Instagram, on Threads and on Tumblr. I also add it on any relevant Facebook pages so for instance if it’s a sci-fi post I might link it to a sci-fi Facebook page or a sci-fi page on Reddit or any other relevant page. I also publish some of my posts over on Medium and again, link them back here to WordPress. Sometimes I even make a video version and share it over on my YouTube page.

Very few of these posts will work as a video but a couple that come to mind were a post about a letter to my younger self which translated well to a video except that the narration wasn’t really much good. (Must make a note; try remaking the video with a better narration). Another was a post about how to write poetry. The video version involved me just talking to the camera about the ways I write poetry.  To be honest I think the video version was better although looking at it again recently I do seem to rabbit on a bit.

On social media I’m always trying to bring in more readers to my blog page and so I try to add something other than just a link to my latest post. Lately I’ve been making these short 5 second videos that can be made pretty easily on Grok or most other AI image making sites. I usually use these on X or on Instagram but recently I thought I’d upload a few to YouTube. YouTube seem to be trying to get on the bandwagon created by Instagram and TikTok of very short videos that viewers can just scroll quickly through. On YouTube they are called ‘shorts’ and I’ve found that my shorts have actually been really successful, bringing in lots of viewers who will hopefully watch these quick videos and then click on my website to actually settle down and read more.

One of my shorts, a very short AI generated video shows a young woman roaring off on a motorbike with the words ‘NEW BLOG POST OUT NOW’ inscribed on the back of her leather jacket. Currently that video has 4.7 thousand viewers and my YouTube followers have begun to increase. I still need another 60 followers in order to actually make revenue from my videos but happily things seem to be moving in the right direction. A small group of my main videos have great viewing figures but until I hit the magic number of 500 followers, I make no money at all from YouTube.

It’s only fair to say that after publishing that last video on YouTube a little box appeared which said promote this video for only £10!  Ten pounds I thought? What’s ten pounds today? Two or three pints of lager in Wetherspoons? A CD album? Okay I thought, ten pounds, even a tightwad like me can live with that. Of course, that’s where the 4.7 thousand viewers came from, an advertisement. Even so, many of those watchers must have clicked onto my landing page and maybe even read a few posts. Did they go one step further and buy a copy of Timeline or Floating in Space? Well, maybe they did and maybe they didn’t. I’ll find out when a few royalties hit my bank account but until then I won’t be holding my breath. Nice to see that recently though my readership has been steadily expanding.

What I find really interesting is when a post from years ago suddenly gets a little attention. Why did that reader go for that particular post? Did he or she stumble upon it? Were they using a search engine and what were they searching for? Happily Google or Yahoo has directed them my way which is always nice to see.

The other day I was watching one of my favourite films Julie and Julia. It’s a film by Nora Ephron which is about a blogger called Julie Powell who decides she will make all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s cook book in 365 days. Julia was an American woman who learns cordon bleu cookery in France and writes a popular cookbook for American housewives. Obviously, things don’t all go smoothly for Julie the cook and blogger but she manages to get through a different recipe every day and in doing so gets some attention from the local press which boosts her blog even more and eventually enables her to become a published author.

It’s a great story in its own right but also for bloggers everywhere. Of course, they’d have a job making this website into a film unless they wanted endless shots of me, or someone playing the part of me, tapping away on my laptop writing blogs and short stories. Of course they could dramatize some of my stories. The Hollywood Meeting for instance in which a young writer goes to Hollywood to pitch one of his scripts to a producer might make a good film.

This is the point where I try to link a relevant feature film. Films about authors. That’s a tough one. There was Misery, a film based on a Stephen King book where an author is kidnapped and tortured but I don’t think I’m going to go there. Another film I remember seeing some years ago was called How to Murder Your Wife with Jack Lemmon. Jack plays Stanley Ford who authors a comic strip in a newspaper and acts out various situations which are then photographed. Jack’s character uses the photos to inspire his comic strip drawings. Look out for it if you see it on your TV schedules although it’s one of those films I haven’t seen for a long while on TV. When Stanley gets married, he takes many of his real life situations with his wife played by Virni Lisi and uses them in the comic strip. His comic strip character then decides to murder his wife but the wife, on seeing the strip, decides to walk out and people think Stanley has actually murdered her.

The comic strip art used in the film was by an artist called Mel Keefer who penned various comic strips in US newspapers and comics. That reminds me of another social media post I sometimes use below.

So in a world of short sharp TikTok and Instagram videos, can a blog post still work? Are there still people out there who want to read, who want to invest more than ten seconds on a post, who actually have an attention span, who can spend five to ten minutes reading something like this very post?

The answer is hopefully yes. There are even still people who want to buy and read books, after all, I certainly do.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

Travelling and Writing in France

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Once again Liz and I are in France in our small motorhome. This week I thought I’d talk about our journey and also about my personal journey as a writer.

We came over on the ferry from Portsmouth to Caen after spending the night in a small pub called the Jolly Boatman somewhere in the south of England, actually Kidlington, I think. We have visited this pub once before back in May and it was nice to find that the staff remembered us even after just one visit. The trip over on the ferry was good. We paid a little extra for a top of the range cabin and it was well worth it. We had a little balcony, a tv, kettle and various cold drinks in the fridge. After a bit of a sleep and a shower, we awoke refreshed and ready to find a place to stop for the night in France.

The great thing about France is that motorhomes are welcomed with plenty of free overnight stopping places with toilet emptying facilities and fresh water. Some places require a jeton, a token that can be bought in local shops to obtain fresh water but otherwise most places are free. In England, many seaside places seem to just complain about motorhomes parking up for free but surely those motorhomers are using local shops, bars and restaurants and bringing trade into these local communities.

The Jolly Boatman

The weather wasn’t great at first so we ploughed on south towards Bordeaux in search of the sun. Liz is a great navigator and a real master of google maps and she found us some lovely stopping places, one in particular with a man made beach and a lovely swimming lake. We needed that lake to cool down as the weather became seriously hot.

When I’m away I like to have a couple of blog posts written in advance as travelling in our van I don’t always have time to write. Not only that sometimes it’s hard to get a good wifi signal to upload my posts. Recently I’ve been not only lazy but actually struggling a little  for blog post ideas. A few months ago I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen for a while and he seemed less than convinced that I could write a new post every week. I’ll bet you use ai to write them he joked. I wasn’t amused.

To be honest, I do use ai, not to write posts but to make the quirky memes and graphics that I use to promote my blogs. This is one over to the right. I had never even thought about using ai to actually write a post. Even so, I thought as I was a bit low on ideas it might be interesting to ask ai what I should write about. It came up with a plan for a post asking me to answer various questions about my work. Anyway, here are a few of them.

Share how you got started writing and what inspired your first book.

I can’t really remember what inspired me to write. I can only say that having been a great reader, I wanted to be on the other side of the coin, so to speak: Not just reading the thoughts and ideas of others but also sending my own thoughts and ideas out there too. I like the feeling of communicating not only to others but communicating over the years. I remember reading Homer’s Odyssey and thinking that here was this man, Homer, sending me his thoughts and ideas across the centuries that lie between us and that his ideas carried on after his death.

Talk about your creative routines (or lack of them) — do you write in bursts, or steadily each day? 

I’d like to tell you that I have a routine but actually I haven’t, although I do try to create a sort of routine. What I tend to do is think a lot about writing. I’ll think of a story or a blog, usually the time in a morning when I have woken up far too early and I’ll ‘write’ a blog or a story in my head. I’ll file that away in my head and then either go back to sleep or get up and after breakfast I’ll open up my laptop and write it all down. Sometimes I’ll spend weeks writing a story in my head and when I’ve got a lot of ‘copy’ I’ll start actually writing or typing it out. Years ago I used to use a technique by a self improvement guy called Jack Black who invented something he called Mindstore, a way of using positive thinking to improve your life.

It involved creating an entire imaginary house inside your head with various rooms, just like in a real house. In the bathroom for instance, you could take a breathtaking shower that energised and restored you ready for a big meeting or interview. One room I created was a room for storing my stories and when I’m not in front of my laptop that’s the room I use to write and save my work. My website and my one deadline of 10:00am on a Saturday morning gives me a focus to work at my stories and blog posts and get them ready for publishing. Writing this week has been difficult as Liz and I are working our way across France in our little motorhome although by the time you read this we will have arrived at the lovely gîte we rent in the village of Parçay-les-Pins.

Explore what you love (and what you struggle with) about being self-published.

I love writing and I love publishing my work. I write purely for myself and I write about things I like reading about but I do get a particular buzz every time someone hits that ‘like’ button. What do I dislike about it? Well, I did hope that I could actually make money from writing but so far, that’s just a dream although I do make a few pennies every time someone buys a copy of one of my books. Anyway, I enjoy writing and I’ll carry on writing my blog for as long as I continue to enjoy it. When I no longer enjoy it, I guess I’ll just have to find something else to do. What do I struggle with? Grammar and spelling mostly but luckily, Liz is pretty hot on both of those things and it is she who goes through my work and gives it a good checking over and she’ll correct all the bad tenses and spelling mistakes that appear frequently in my blogs.

A few days ago it was our anniversary. The day before we were parked in a really lovely place with picnic tables and a lake and I thought it would be a good idea to stay and move on the next day. Liz felt that she would rather have a good restaurant anniversary meal so we set off in search of a place to eat that night. Now, the thing about the Loire is that the French don’t seem to eat out much at night. There are plenty of restaurants but most only seem to open for lunch which is the main meal of the day for the French. We tried and tried to find a place but all seemed to be only open for lunch. We found one place, conveniently near a motorhome parking spot but the menu was not only very expensive but didn’t inspire either of us. It was getting later and later and eventually we decided to stop when we saw a kebab takeaway. Takeaways are few and far between in France so we bought a couple of kebabs, parked up for the night and poured us both a glass of vin rouge.

The wine was good but the kebab wasn’t but happily we had plenty of French cheese and bread to round off the meal!

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

Writing and Blog #1 of 2025

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Ok, here we go. It’s 2025 and it’s time to kick off with my first proper blog post of the New Year: I settle down in front of the fire, crank up my trusty old laptop. The blank page glares at me as usual; what to write about today?

I first started posting in 2014 and that year I managed to get 2341 views which I was pretty pleased about. If I had also managed to sell 2341 copies of any of my books, I would have been even more pleased but hey, that’s another story.

Last year in 2024 I managed to accumulate a total of 14,182 visits which is pretty fantastic although I’m sure there are plenty of blogs out there that have an even larger readership. My most read post has been Manipulating the Image, a look at various aspects of photo manipulation. I’ve tried a couple of follow up posts on the same subject but that post, actually from 2022, continues to boost my readership. Why is it so popular? I really don’t know despite looking at things like subject matter, keywords, search engine optimisation and so on, I still don’t understand its popularity.

A lot of blogs on the internet seem to focus on a particular subject. Things like cycling, classic films or canal boating for instance. Those blogs always know where the next post is coming from; another cycling trip, another classic film review or canal journey. As there is no actual focus on this blog it’s sometimes hard to hone in on a new subject although generally, I stick to books, films and my little old life. Plus the occasional plug for my three books.

I have tried to occasionally write one of those ‘how to’ blog posts and impart some of my blogging knowledge to my readers and fellow bloggers but I reckon those sort of posts might be of interest only to my fellow writers. One of my previous posts was about three ways to write a poem (click here for the video version) and when it comes down to it, I think those three ways could also be used to write a blog post.

The first way was the easy way, a flash of inspiration; a great idea comes to you out of the blue and hits you square in the face and you are off and running. That is probably the best way to write a post or a poem. The second way is when something happens to inspire you. In my poetry example I wrote about a time when I returned home and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While I was waiting for the kettle to boil I looked out of the window and watched the cat that belonged to the house opposite make its way across their lawn, take a good look around and then settle down under a small young tree and go to sleep in the afternoon sun.

Later subdued screams and cries were heard over the way and it turned out that the lady of the house had returned home to find her cat was sadly dead and it seemed to me that I had seen the cat resign itself to its fate, even taking a last look around before slipping away to start the next of its nine lives. Inspired by these events, shocked even, I went away and began a poem.

The third and final way of writing a poem or indeed any kind of creative work is an obvious way known to all professional writers everywhere and that is simply hard work. Unlike mere amateurs like me, the professional has no choice but to sit down and get on with things, firm in the knowledge that at a certain time their editor or publisher or Hollywood producer will be asking for that article, blog, book or screenplay.

I too have my deadline, that of 10:00am on a Saturday morning and sometimes even that is hard to work to. Sometimes I have finished a post on Friday afternoon and have passed it over to my proofreader for a quick final check, confident that all will be well for Saturday and then later find that I have forgotten to hit the schedule button or even worse, scheduled the post for the wrong day.

Coming up with a new blog post week after week just seems to get even harder and here I am on my 649th post. Six hundred and forty-nine posts! I suppose to those of you who have been writing for years, 649 may not be such a big milestone but for an amateur writer like me, it’s pretty special. The crazy thing is this, looking through my diary from a few years ago I see I was commenting on one of those online forums, praising WordPress and blogging and someone commented that if I hadn’t been blogging I might have finished my second book!

Looking back I now wonder whether that guy was actually right. 649 blog posts, times my average word count per post: That comes to over 700,000 words. I could have written another book and to be fair, that was part of the idea behind Timeline, to utilise all those old forgotten posts in a new collection of stories and blog posts. Perhaps I could have written another novel. But then again, it’s not just the words, it’s the idea behind the words, the creative thrust of a book that’s important. Get that and the book should just follow. Still, that fellow had a point. Should I give up my blog posts in favour of my book? Well, if that would guarantee me producing a book then yes, great! The thing is, it’s not a lack of words that have kept my sequel to Floating in Space in a constant state of abandonment. It’s really my own laziness.

Laziness, fear of the blank page, procrastination, they are all enemies of the writer. The only way to overcome them is just to keep on writing. If you are writing a blog post and it won’t come, switch to something else; that other post you had on the back burner or that script you had started a few years back. A great deal of my work is done like that, in small bursts of activity. A while back I had an idea for a film screenplay and worked away creating the first quarter of the work. Later I decided to turn it into a book and as I worked with the text, adding in all sorts of detail that wasn’t in the original script, the story came alive to me in a different way and I started to bring something new to the book version. Don’t hold your breath though, it’s still far from completion.

Oh well. Here’s another script story. Ages ago when I first met Liz and we began socialising in St Annes, we started frequenting Wetherspoons there. It’s a pretty friendly pub and we made friends with quite a few people. There was Big Steve who I wrote about in another post but we also met two guys, Craig and Danny (as usual, names have been changed to protect the innocent!) They were brothers in law who were married to twin sisters and they both owned and ran small hotels in St Annes. The hotels were on the same street opposite each other and the sisters were identical twins so their whole scenario seemed to scream ‘sitcom’ to me.

I used to ask them what funny things had happened to them in their work as hoteliers and being married to identical women. ‘Loads of things’ they would always say but I could never get any details. Anyway, when I had a quiet moment, I started off a pilot sitcom script using their situation, rival hoteliers married to identical sisters. It’s nothing brilliant but mildly amusing and it sat in my documents folder for a long time. Every now and again when I slipped into that blank page syndrome, I’d pull out the script and add a few more pages.

One day I noticed on one of my occasional visits to the BBC Writersroom page that a window of opportunity was coming up for a sitcom script. The BBC, rather than accepting ‘spec’ scripts all year round open a small ‘window’ of a few weeks where you can submit your work in certain areas, sometimes a film script or a play, sometimes drama, other times situation comedy. I went back to my sitcom script, pulled it quickly into some sort of shape, added an ending and bunged it off to the BBC. Then I sat down and waited, glued to my inbox, awaiting the BBC email that may or may not even arrive.

Of course, I do wonder what might happen if the BBC actually decided that my sitcom script is worth making into a pilot? Imagine if the BBC said “we’re going to make a twelve episode series!” Imagine me trying to write twelve episodes when it took me months to write one 25 minute episode! Even the great Spike Milligan had a nervous breakdown writing the numerous scripts of the radio show ‘The Goon Show’. Of course, someone at the BBC could be reading this very post. Did I say something about 12 episodes? Would I be able to write 12 episodes?

Of course! What’s 12 episodes to a top writer like me? I might even start episode 2 straight away. Well, straight away after a cup of tea. And maybe a sandwich. Better make it first thing tomorrow. Well, tomorrow afternoon might be better . .

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry collection.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

Click here to visit amazon and purchase Timeline, my new anthology.

Aliens, F1 and a Quiet Saturday

Posted on by Steve Higgins

7.44

My alarm goes off early on Saturday morning as a man from the council is coming to service my boiler. The council have given me an appointment ‘window’ which is from 08:00 to 15:00. Sometime during that window, the gas guy is coming to do the check.

08:00

I’m up and washed and wondering if the guy will actually turn up at 8am. I hang about expectantly in the lounge and by 08:10 I realise he isn’t coming this early, in fact he’s probably still asleep in his bed somewhere. I decide to make a quick breakfast, just a few rashers of bacon and an egg.

08:30

I’ve had my breakfast which was actually a little rushed so as I’m still hungry I think I’ll have a slice of toast and marmalade and another cup of tea.

08:45

I’ve had my tea and toast and I’m still checking the window for the gasman. No show so far. I take a quick look at the internet but I’m worried that I might see something about the qualifying results of the Australian Grand Prix. The qually took place early this morning but is not due on terrestrial UK TV until 11:15 so I don’t look at my notifications and quickly delete any emails that even faintly resemble F1 newsletters.

09:15

Time for another brew. I check the hall as the last time I waited in for the council I happened to pop into the hall and find a card slipped through the letter box which said we called today but you weren’t at home. This was after an entire day sat watching TV with the sound turned low so I wouldn’t miss a knock at the door. As you can imagine I was fuming and sent numerous threatening emails to the council and the next time the guy turned up on time.

Anyway, quick check and no card.

09:30

I decide to check the doorbell and I find that it is making no sound! I change the batteries and all is well, the bell is ringing again.

09:40

Time for another brew. There seems to be nothing on TV so I watch something I taped last night about Bob Lazar. You may have never heard of Bob but he is an American physicist whom claims he worked at Area 51 in the late 1980s to help reverse engineer captured flying saucers. He first appeared in the media with his face and voice disguised using the name ‘Dennis’. Later he went fully public and it was his claims that brought Area 51 into the public eye. Lazar says he worked at an Area 51 facility called S-4 and there were nine captured saucers there. These vehicles were powered by an antimatter reactor and the propulsion was anti-gravity based.

(I just realised I’ve written taped instead of recorded. Do people still say taped or is it just old guys like me?)

Bob says he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory but according to the documentary when staff at the lab were questioned, they said that no Bob Lazar ever worked there. However he appears in the lab’s own 1982 phone book as Robert Lazar and a clipping was found from the 1982 Los Alamos Monitor which profiles Bob and his interest in jet cars and mentions he works at the lab as a physicist. Are the authorities trying to discredit Bob or has he made up the whole thing? If he did make all this up, why would he do it?

10:00

I get a notification on my phone and I take a look without thinking. Luckily it’s from WordPress telling me my latest scheduled post has just been published. No more notifications now until I have seen the qualifying.

10:30

I need to use the toilet but I take a look outside and I can see a van arriving with ‘Gas’ on the side. No movement yet so maybe he is just sorting out his paperwork or something. Actually I fully expected him to arrive at five minutes to three. He was originally due last week but I was busy and so I asked my brother to let him in for me. My brother waited in all day only for me to get a call from the council late in the afternoon telling me the guy had called in sick!

10:40

The gasman has arrived!

10:57

Gas check all complete. I actually wanted to ask him something but he shot out of the house like a rocket. Well, it is Saturday, I suppose he was eager to get home and enjoy his weekend.

The documentary shows that Bob Lazar had a polygraph test which he passed with flying colours. His mission seems to be to tell the world there are extra terrestrial beings and the government in the USA is aware of them but for whatever reason is not telling the public. I do love these UFO documentaries. The next one was about people who claim to have been abducted by aliens and tested and probed like guinea pigs. When you come to think about it, the universe is big, really big. So vast it’s silly to think that life exists just on Earth and not elsewhere in the universe.

11:00

Kettle on. Now I can visit the toilet without worrying that the guy is going to knock on the door while I’m otherwise engaged.

11:15

Got myself a fresh cuppa and all set for the Australian Grand Prix qualifying.

The big problem with modern formula one is that a lot of the interviews that precede the big events as well as those that come afterwards are just full of modern PR talk. You know what I mean, the team did a great job, thanks to the guys back at the factory blah blah blah. No one seems to have anything that is actually interesting to say. In today’s broadcast there seems to be a lot of focus on Daniel Riccardo, the Australian driver, who thanks to his sacking is not actually driving this year. He now seems to be a sort of reserve driver for Red Bull but the other day I heard their team boss saying Daniel couldn’t expect a drive even if either of their main drivers were sick or incapacitated. So what is he then, just a test driver? Due to testing restrictions Daniel can’t do much testing except in the simulator. The McLaren he should have been driving isn’t looking that great so perhaps he’s glad not to be driving. I bet he wouldn’t mind a go in the Red Bull though.

11:35

I’m still hungry after this morning’s rushed breakfast. Should I go for a quick toast? Wait a minute, we’re seeing some actual action on TV. Better wait for the adverts.

13:02

Qually over and actually it was a pretty exciting session. These days I really think the qually is better than the race. Max in the Red Bull came out on top but his teammate skidded off at the first corner without even setting a time. He’ll be starting from the back tomorrow. Nico Hulkenberg was looking good in the Haas as was Alex Albon in the Williams. Great to see these drivers doing well in cars that are not really much good. Lewis Hamilton and his team mate George Russell were up at the top too so looks like a good race in the offing tomorrow.

13:04

Time for another brew. Time to do some writing so I can actually call myself a writer. I’ve finished some bits and pieces I’ve been working on as well as tweaking some other things. I had a look through some of my older blog posts looking for inspiration. Didn’t really find any but I took two posts about a similar subject, wove them together and published the result on my Medium page.

(I mentioned to Liz I have a Medium page. She said wouldn’t I be better with an XXL one? She can be a little cheeky.)

14:26

I started looking for a photo I took ages ago which I wanted to use on the Medium post and now realise I’ve spent over an hour trolling through my hard drive for it. Note to self: Start to label your pictures better Steve and add some keywords!

As I’m looking through some old pictures and graphics I thought I’d add some completely random pictures into this post. Here’s a self portrait I used to use on my Flickr page where I showcase my photography. I’ve always liked this picture, it was shot in a mirror and then reversed.

15:00

Time to crank up my microphone and record some audio for a couple of my latest poems. I publish them over on writeoutloud.net where fellow poets can offer their comments. Reading through some of the latest poetry blogs, I see there are some good poems there, well worth taking a look at. I’ve got the TV on in the background without the sound but I see Ancient Aliens is about to start so I think it’s time for another brew and a bit of TV watching. What about a ham sandwich too?

16:00

My brother is due round later on for some food and drink and a bit of a natter so I should start thinking of what to make. I’ve got some beef mince so I’m thinking chilli or spaghetti bolognese or even curried mince. I’m not a great cook by any means and I’m lost without my cookery books. Anyway, out comes the frying pan, in go the chopped onions and mince. I see I don’t have any garlic so I’ll have to do without. Next, throw in the spices including some fresh chillis, then come the tomatoes, a little stock and some tomato paste then I throw the whole lot into the slow cooker and leave it to simmer away. I have a little taste; yes, definitely one of my better ones.

16:26

My brother tells me he has a better offer for tonight but he’ll be round tomorrow. He’s obviously not forgotten about last week’s wasted wait for the gas man. Oh well, dinner for one then.

If you are interested, Max Verstappen won a chaotic Australian Grand Prix after various red flags and restarts. Lewis Hamilton took second place and Fernando Alonso was third.

What to do next: Here are a few options.

Share this post on your favourite social media!

Hit the Subscribe button. Never miss another post!

Listen to my podcast Click here.

Buy the book! Click here to purchase my new poetry anthology.

Click here to visit Amazon and download Floating in Space to your Kindle or order the paperback version.

A Writer’s Life

Posted on by Steve Higgins

I often wonder how I might have gone on had I achieved my schoolboy ambition to become a journalist. It’s hard enough writing a new blog post every week but what if I’d have had to have written something for a newspaper every day? That would have been a pretty tall order.

I’ve got nothing in the pipeline for today’s post so I decided to just start writing and see where it gets me. Ok, here we go.

Despite having nothing in the pipeline, I’ve actually done a great deal of writing this week. I always have lots of ideas floating around in my head about all sorts of things and I make mental notes about them but converting those ideas into a novel is a pretty big undertaking.  A better idea I thought would be to perhaps make those ideas into short stories. I could even put together a book of short stories and poems and maybe even some selected blog posts.

As it happens, I was watching a documentary programme the other day about Ernest Hemingway and one of his first publications was a short collection of his stories and poems called not very imaginatively, Three Short Stories and Ten Poems. I’m not sure if it did particularly well but as every writing help blog that I’ve ever read tells us, anything that gets you writing is important.

I also find it well worthwhile to look back at other things I have written. For instance, ages ago I wrote a short script for a script competition. It was about a police officer who has a nightmare about being in an army firing squad. They are about to execute a soldier for some unknown transgression but when the victim is revealed, he is a young boy. Later, the officer comes across the boy in real life as part of his police work. It wasn’t brilliant and disappointingly, it didn’t win me any prizes but later I remade it, rewrote it I should say, as a short story.

Another story I wrote recently was one that combined a lot of my knowledge of France into a story of a young man who meets an interesting lady while travelling in France. I thought it was rather good. I did a bit of research and thought I’d found the perfect magazine to send it to. I checked their website; yes they were in the market for short stories and yes, they were happy to receive submissions. They wanted the stories as a word document. OK. They wanted no headers or footers in the document. OK, remove the headers and footers and finally they wanted the word count in the title of the document. OK, change Isabelle, my short story title to 6348 Isabelle. Happy days. I sent off my short story and only a few days later got a message back saying thanks for your story but it’s too long!

I had another scan through their submission guidelines and yes, they want stories of 2000 to 3000 words! I must have missed that bit. Another search and I found another magazine, this time an online one. They were happy with 6000 plus words but they wanted a £4 submission fee! Oh well, what’s £4 these days. I coughed up and sent off my short story but then thought perhaps that’s how they make their money, waiting for mugs like me to send off their hard earned four pounds!

Another thing I’ve done recently when I’m short of ideas is to take a look at my older blog posts, dust them off, merge them with one with either similar ideas or even think of some new additions, sort out some nice new shiny graphics and pictures and repost the whole thing as a new blog post. I actually thought I’d hit upon a new and revolutionary blogging idea but then I noticed a blog post on another site about repurposing old content! Yes, there’s nothing new under the sun.

One of my most read blog posts lately is this one, it’s called Manipulating The Image and in it, I talk about photo manipulation from Instagram glamour models to Lee Harvey Oswald and what he claimed were fake backyard photos showing him holding his infamous Italian made rifle. I spend a lot of time on my analytics page, both on WordPress and on YouTube and to be honest, I’m not sure any of that helps. Why is Manipulating the Image so popular? It’s great that my readership is booming and that more and more readers are exposed to the availability of Floating in Space, not that many of those potential buyers take advantage of that.

How can I replicate the success of that post though? It’s the same over on YouTube. A video about Manchester I took months working on and perfecting gets few viewers and another in which I walk about Manchester yakking into my camera held in front of me on a selfie stick and spent thirty minutes editing, gets a shed load of views. I don’t get it. Then again, perhaps I don’t need to get it. Maybe I should make more videos of me yakking into a camera or more blog posts about manipulating images. Of course integrity as a writer is important. Do I really care about getting more readers and more likes and better and better stats? Shouldn’t I care more about doing justice to myself as a writer and being true to myself?

Actually, I kind of like getting more readers and more likes.

Images are important to blog posts as well as social media posts. It’s a statistical fact that social media posts perform better with images and better still with video content. I tried the face app that I found when researching the Manipulating Images post but naturally, being the tightwad that I am, I declined to pay for the version that does the best effects. I tried another app recently, one that creates avatars for use in your social media pages. An avatar is essentially a picture, a stylised image that people use on the web. Sadly I found that once again, this new app required me to pay money which naturally, I wasn’t happy about. However, rather than subscribe to the app it was possible to pay a one time fee of £2.99 for 50 avatars. This required me to upload a shedload of pictures of myself, the minimum required was 15 so the app could give the best results. The results weren’t instant, I had to wait most of the afternoon for them to appear and some were a bit naff, in fact there was even a feminine version of myself but there were a couple that made me look like the real tough hombre that I’m actually not.

Yes, I might just start using those ones on my social media. Perhaps I might scare up a few new readers.

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