Just for your future reference, Tash, it is not a good idea to decide to upgrade your Wordpress installation at 10 o’clock at night.  At that stage of the evening, you’re already tired and you can too easily get distracted by catch-up episodes of The Sarah Jane Chronicles, starring David Tennant.  And if you’re tired – even if you’ve done the same Wordpress upgrade before – you can easily stuff things up.

You might overwrite key files, for example, and then when you go to your admin screen to log on, you might get a blank white page – and when you go to your homepage, the same thing.  Trying to stay calm, you might then try to do a fresh install, knowing that you’ve exported all your blog entries to an .xml file earlier in the evening, only to find that the .xml file only contains the first and most recent entry.

By this time it’d be after midnight and you’d be coming to the realisation that you’d deleted your entire blog.  And while it didn’t contain the best literature ever, it did have a couple of entries on the excitement of first-time publication, which you would’ve preferred not to lose.  So you’ll find yourself searching the Way Back Machine for an archived copy of your entries which you can then bring into your ‘new’ blog.  And you’ll keep bringing in entries, one at a time, till about 1.30am, and then you’ll get up at 6.00am to finish the job (finish republishing those blog entries at least, though you’ll still need to deal with the sidebar, theme, plugins and comments).

Which means  by 11.30pm the next day, having just returned from Boffoonery, a comedy benefit for Bletchley Park aimed at the kind of people who work all day with computers and then enjoy going out in the evenings to hear jokes about code (so like you and your husband and your friends), you’ll be totally exhausted and reduced to amusing yourself by writing notes in the second person.

I’ve started a new blog.

It won’t take the place of this blog, though.

It’s about writing.  And the web.  It’s called webstuff4writers.com.

Inspired by ‘Booking Through Thursday’, I’m going to post weekly writing topics that can be used in blogs about writing (like this one).  These topics will usually be posted on a Sunday, unless there’s another day people prefer.

Anyway, here’s the first one, and my answer.

Writing about writing: Week one

Do you think keeping a journal or blog is a useful practice for writers?  Why or why not?

webstuff4writers.com is my new attempt to keep a regular journal.  I’m not good at keeping a regular journal.  This blog in itself is evidence of this.  There’s more evidence of it in a wardrobe of my parents’ place, where there’s a pile of notebooks, each about one quarter to a half full.  In both 2006 and 2007, my New Year’s resolution was to keep a journal every day.  This year, I made it to March.

That said, I do think that journaling is a useful practice for those who want to write.  A lot of my short stories have come from journal and blog entries – both from those entries where I’ve recorded something that’s happened to me, and those entries that I recorded something I’ve observed happening in the world at large.  Some of the scene-setting in Lessons to Learn was based on my travel journal from my time in Korea, and from the emails I sent home which became almost like a travel blog.

The other advantage that I’ve found is that keeping a journal is a good way to start writing each day, and that when I’ve written one piece – whether it’s non-fiction, stream-of-consciousness, or a poem –  it’s easier to write something else.  If I had all the time in the world for writing then, this process would be ideal.  However, most days there’s only half an hour before work, a couple of hours after it.  And then, if I spend too much time blogging or writing about my day, then no novel writing gets done at all.

Still, I’ll give webstuff4writers.com a go, and see how long it lasts.  Hopefully others will find it useful.  Hopefully I’ll managed to keep it out of that virtual wardrobe, where abandoned blogs go to die, for a couple of months at least.

Firstly, a huge thank you to Tom Chalmers from Legend Press for plugging this site and Lessons to Learn on their Myspace blog. And ah, yes, I also have a Myspace page. It’s not particularly decorative or indeed informative at this stage, but it does star the beautiful Lessons to Learn cover as an all-purpose profile image.

* Secondly, I miss L&P.

So, it’s the first of May, 2007, which I think is as good a day as any for a new blog hosted with a new company and at its own new domain. I’ve started with a WordPress installation and all the standard defaults in features and themes, but hopefully I’ll be able to play around with the code and plug-ins over the next month and try and make it a little bit more interesting and a little more personalised.

While doing a bit of web research (always a dangerous thing), I came across several articles on the hazards of ‘comment spam’. At the moment, I doubt it’s that easy to find this website, let alone spam it. But nonetheless, I’ve changed the settings so that everyone’s first comment needs to be moderated. Once that comment’s been approved that first time, you should be able to keep commenting, as long as you keep entering the same email address.

More soon…