Blogging Tips

Recently, Sharon Hurley Hall posted about her addiction with Confessions of a Theme-a-Holic. I commented that I have the same addiction, and I mentioned using different themes as inspiration for novels I’m working on.

I recently changed webhosts and haven’t gotten everything up and ready. I threw two of these up real quick to give you a visual.

I have never released my private blogs to the public. I share the links with a few writing friends and that’s it; with the exception of my short stories which I share with family and friends when they ask what I do. I don’t get a lot of time to work on fiction writing because I do quite a bit of freelance writing. When I do get time for fiction, I often need some kind of inspiration and I love WordPress themes for that purpose.

If this sparks your interest, you will need a webhost that allows multiple installs of WordPress and numerous databases. A free WordPress account just doesn’t allow this much freedom. You will notice that all of these are hosted on my site, each with its own folder title—which happens to match the working title pretty well.

SHORT STORIES & FLASH FICTION

The majority of these were written several years ago. The only new work on this blog is writing prompts and some flash fiction I wrote for a lingerie website which discontinued the use of stories. The writing prompts are just free writing (aka unedited) straight out of my head to the keyboard. So, if you’re expecting masterpieces with any of the material I’m sharing today—this isn’t it. You will not find masterpieces on any of these links—these are simply works in progress.

I chose this theme because it looks like a woman’s journal. I set the blog up to show only one post on the main page. I also use the “More” feature found in the dashboard of the posting area. I do this to avoid a long entry. I wanted the whole page to be seen in one frame of the screen.

THE MISADVENTURES OF TOODLES MCDOUGAL

Toodles is a new character of mine. She popped in my head not too long ago, but she’s been very slow to reveal herself. I tried putting her in a mystery novel but she didn’t like that. It seems she’ll be the central character in a series of children’s stories. I find this shocking myself because I’ve never been interested in writing for children. But I adore Toodles, so we’ll she where she goes.

I chose this theme for her, because it just fits her. Imagine a little Scottish lady sitting at her desk with her afternoon tea and crumpets writing about her adventures.

KNIGHTS REALM

This one is a medieval tale; one I’ve had in my head for years—and the hardest one to work on. But, I absolutely love the theme for it. You’ll see why I chose this theme for a story of this nature.

SUMMER BREEZE

This one is a romance with a bit of mystery to it. I chose this theme because it’s light and airy. It doesn’t fully fit the theme of the story but I can live with it—and I do love this theme.

By using themes on my story or character blogs, it fulfils my theme addiction but also serves a purpose as visual stimulation. These are obviously not for professional type blogs—these are merely for personal use. But that would make a great sales platform for books that were published. It would just take a bit of editing and tweaking to turn these into future sales sites.

If you’re wondering about people stealing my material—I don’t worry about it too much. I don’t add much more information than what you see, other than writings from a characters POV—getting inside their head type stuff. It’s mostly notes, thoughts and character work. I don’t use them for the bulk of my writing, just for inspiration or if I want to share something with fellow writers.

As I was preparing this post and grabbing a link from the Blogging Tips site, I noticed Kevin has added a new WordPress theme that’s free to download if you’re a subscriber. Of course I will have to have it. I don’t have a clue where I’ll use it, but when one is addicted to themes—that’s irrelevant.