Behind the Scenes

I’m feeling reflective this week because of our one-year anniversary here at Routines for Writers. I thought you might like to hear a little about what goes on behind the scenes.

The three of us met at a local writer’s group in Arizona years and years ago. We maintained contact even after Stephanie and then Kitty moved to other states, other countries. We have kept in touch, critiquing each other’s WIPs and encouraging one another. Spring/summer of ‘08 we had a number of conference calls and email discussions brainstorming what kind of a blog we would have, if we were to blog together.

We bought our domain name, thinking we might expand Routines For Writers into a full-blown website one day. Hosting your own blog adds a technical challenge. We are our own technical support. Speaking of which, we are due to upgrade some software which involves deleting files. (Eek! I dread accidentally deleting the wrong file. So, if we disappear for a little bit next week, you’ll know what happened—Stephanie is my back up. If I mess up, she is fearless about “trying things.”)

Next, we had to pick our blogging platform and our theme.

Our blog is powered by WordPress. We chose this platform because WordPress seemed to have the most flexibility and options including the ability to look more like a website when we were ready to expand Routines for Writers. WordPress offers a variety of free backgrounds and plug-ins created by everyday users. You can scroll down to the bottom to find out more about our lovely desktop theme. (I think the coffee cup won me over.)

We keep track of our visitor stats through a WordPress plug-in and through a free service called Sitemeter. We also have our RSS feed through Feedburner. I tell you all this in case you don’t have a blog of your own yet and are curious about how it all works.

At first I didn’t know how to get hold of free, professional-looking pictures. So, I often take my own pictures. Then I discovered the site called the stock.xchng where you can get free pics to use in your blogs (note the yummy chocolate cake above).

As far as content, we wanted to do something to help other writers. Something that wasn’t already being done. The three of us have all been published in magazines but our hearts generally lean towards novels, where we are unpublished. So, what could we talk about with authority?

How about the struggle to write—consistently, passionately, and profusely? (Abundantly? aargh, not the right word, but you get my meaning.) Our idea applies the Flylady housekeeping method to writing. (Flylady breaks housekeeping tasks into manageable routines so that your housework becomes automatic and not such a chore.)

Routines for Writers is all about finding ways to develop routines so we can do more writing.

Our first year set the course for our blog routines. We have a schedule: Monday (Stephanie), Wednesday (Kitty), and Friday (Shonna.) When we have guest bloggers we try to schedule them on Tuesdays. Somewhere we read that Tuesdays tend to be the highest traffic days for blogs so we like our guests to get good traffic on their days.

This summer we let loose and had no overriding theme. But, generally, we’ve got a list of topics, and will most likely follow the same pattern this next year. Here’s a sampling:

October last year was Preparing for NaNoWriMo month and we had a fantastic set of six guest blogs from Karen Wiesner, author of First Draft in 30 Days. Her guest blogs continue to draw traffic and are among our top-viewed blogs.

November was NaNoWriMo, so we talked a lot about getting words down on paper.

January was about revising the NaNoWriMo novel with our month-long guest Jordan Rosenfeld, author of Make a Scene.

And February was a fun month we called Author Crush Month when we had our favorite writers from children’s books to romances to screenplays tell us their writing routines. (Great excuse to contact my fav writers!)

And I must say that Kitty and Stephanie have been such fun to work with. Even though we are scattered around the world we are bound by our passion for writing. I enjoy reading their posts every week and learning from them. They are two fun, knowledgeable gals.

Over this first year we’ve had the opportunity to meet many other writers, both through the guest blog opportunities and through those of you who leave comments. We’ve enjoyed getting to know you all, hearing what you are working on, and visiting your blogs. Here is to another year of writing!