“You can come gripe about rejections, brag about word count, share your successes and frustrations and make friends. While that’s nice for you, it has little value to an agent or editor … who comes to visit. ”

I’d add, little value for ‘readers’ who come visit. I’m sure there is a place for the writer’s community to share war stories. Personal blogs don’t need to be that place. I’ve stumbled across writers’ blogs that talk about the publishing game/business as the content of their blog and wonder if people realize that THAT IS THE MESSAGE THE PUBLIC IS GETTING about theose writers. They may be the most brilliant philosopher, or the most research savvy historcal-novelist in the world. But I don’t see that if their blog posts are comprised of “Whew, another 1300 words down today. Gotta go put in those peony transplants now. G’night”.

I’m a writer who journals mostly, with a couple novels and short stories under my belt, and never thought blogging was worth anything becasue of so many vacant messages like this. The I found a few that I like to go back to, simply becasue the content is consistent, and the writing ABOUT that content is good. I read blogs about football, or beer, or politics, or business, or fashion, or poetry. The common theme is that they are all well written, and reveal honest storytelling, whatever the topic may be. (Good example is beeronmyshirt.blogspot.com) This is the test for new bloggers: find a theme that you can write about regularly that can also take your storytelling outside the realm of the mundane. I didn’t think I’d like blogging, but when I realized that blogging was just ‘writing’, but without the predictable canonical formats, I started to really enjoy it.

Today I’m going to take a break from talking about the technical, How To side of setting up a blog and focus instead on what goes into writing a good blog post. It may seem like pretty basic stuff, but you’d be surprised to learn how many p…